Art is communication

Art of any discipline is communication:

• from the artist’s background, desires, and image-ination, filtered through

• the medium of words, notes, paint, clay – and the artist’s technical ability, to

• the reader, listener, or viewer – but filtered by their backgrounds, hopes, and knowledge.

Thus, arts of any sort are only completed when read, heard, or viewed. That’s one reason why galleries, museums, concerts, and readings are important: They help complete the communication for which art is produced.

However, the audience’s interpretation is aided by – but doesn’t require -- understanding the artist’s background, desires, and imagery. A poem, dance, composition, or painting must be able to speak for itself. But we usually get more of the communication if we understand the origins of the dance form, the conventions of the musical form, the methods, intent, and symbolism of the visual artist.

At a gallery reception or an artist’s talk, you have the opportunity to learn about artists’ background, desires, and imagery.

So please – in the midst of talking with each other, identify a work that captures you, find the artist, and learn more about their motivations. Take the time to come to an artist talk, or listen to a discussion about producing and presenting paintings, sculptures, plays, poems, novels, music.

On The Impossibility of Knowing (4 of 4)

I’ll wrap this up for now —

All paintings emphasize presence.  There’s something there — even if it’s a white sheet of paper.

But a thoughtful viewer also thinks about absence: 

• Who and what are not shown, but are relevant to the scene? 

• What spaces lack visible marks or activity? 

• What could have been going on in those spaces?

In The Impossibility of Knowing, I’m trying to draw attention to absence. (You could do that via a large, blank canvas, but that’s been done.)

Two other artists in this year’s juried show at the Leonor Fuller Gallery at South Puget Sound Community College – on view now – also draw the viewer’s attention to presence and absence:

Stephanie Broussard’s Moonrise (above) visualizes a female presence in a skyscape of mountain and moon – a presence that is perhaps spiritual, real but unseen.

Lynette Charters’s Zarraga’s Naked Dancer Muse (above) from her The Missing Parents Series removes the actual painting of the two women in the Angel Zarraga’s 1909 painting The Nude Ballerina (below).

o   By painting everything but exposed skin, and carefully using knotholes and grain in her wooden board surface, Charters substitutes and amplifies the missing paint. 

o   According to her artist’s statement,[1] she wants to emphasize “the lack of societal appreciation and wage equality for childbearing and stay-at-home parents.”

In sum, what’s impossible to know?  Just about everything.

[1] https://spscc.edu/art-gallery/2022-2023-Exhibition-Season/SWJ/Lynette-Charters

On The Impossibility of Knowing (3 of 4)

Let’s continue —

The majority of the paintings in this series (I’ve completed 39) feature one or more human figures.  Most viewers spend more time on those – because they can identify with the humans, and/or can easily create a narrative about the humans. I have heard wonderful, amazing narratives that viewers have created – some have awed me.

Take a look at The Impossibility of Knowing (10) , shown below. What narrative do you create when you see this?

I wanted to evoke

• embodiment and disembodiment,

• present and future,

• past and present,

• wondering which figures “see” which figures.

Well, I knew that much when I painted it. Recently, I’ve asked myself to think more deeply.

These paintings emphasize the fleeting nature of the moment and of the current setting, by showing the prospect of the figure(s) not being present. But then, all paintings, drawings, and photos emphasize the fleeting nature of the moment and of the current setting.

This is more obvious in figurative or representational renderings — we know that we’re looking at a streetscape, landscape, or mother and child, and we know that this scene existed at some point and place (at least in the artist’s mind), but don’t exist now.

I think that’s one of the reasons we love images of children.

• We are in awe of their child-ness, and

• we know that the people in the image are probably no longer children, certainly not children of the age we’re viewing.

• We’re wistful for their growing older and dying, and for our own growing older and dying.

On The Impossibility of Knowing (2 of 4)

More on this perhaps-enigmatic subject —

Let’s turn to this painting, The Impossibility of Knowing (34). Here’s what I generally write about this series:

'“‘The Impossibility of Knowing’ refers to the strength of memory and imagination, compared to what is ‘real’ or ‘observed.’ In these paintings, a solid shape, figure, or silhouette interacts with its mirrored outline, against a shadowed or textured background. Something that seems substantive is augmented with its mirror, shadow, future, or past. The interplay creates visual dynamism as each shape is pulled in its opposite direction, and interpretive dynamism as each object or figure interacts with its complement.”

Put less formally, I developed what is admittedly a simple compositional conceit: identifying the principal figure or figures, and mirroring them (right to left or vertically) in outline only. So I’ve got a figure and an echo of the figure. They often interact spatially, creating three sets of patterns:

• the principal figure,

• the outline, and

• the shapes formed by the intersection of figure and outline.

That’s what going on here, in The Impossibility of Knowing (34). To catch the viewer’s eye, I used texture and color in the figure and in the background. The texture base is acrylic gel medium with Ultramarine Blue paint; the other colors are oil paints.