Join me at Gallery 110, Seattle

Seattle’s Gallery 110 (110 Third Ave. S.) presents a show of 18 paintings in my series The Impossibility of Knowing, 5-28 October.

I’ve mentioned this series before – it seems to be a favorite of art jurors and curators. The gallery is open Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays from 12-5pm.

I’ll be there:

Thursday 10/5, 4-8pm for Pioneer Square’s First Thursday artwalk (see this site for a list of galleries and garages offering free parking -- including the Frye Garage across the street from Gallery 110)

Friday 10/6, 12-7pm – for the show’s opening reception!

Saturday 10/7, 12-5pm

Saturday 10/21, 12-5pm, including a special Q&A with Nick Riesland from 1-2pm

Saturday 10/28, 12-5pm.

Please come by, and recommend a visit to friends: what makes this worthwhile is seeing and talking with people about images, reactions, and interpretations. I titled the series The Impossibility for Knowing because it brings lots of questions to viewers (including to me, and I painted the pieces!).

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.