Being an artist means looking beyond prescription as far as problem solving. It is a method of inquiry and discovery that draws from whatever is available to create what its objective or directive is – a creative process. I don’t really see it as an end in itself.  In the attempts to categorize that – art, painting, theatre – it becomes very limiting to me. Art has to be seen as a way of looking at the world – a perception, like religion, and an inquiry, like science.

Some Avatars of Mine

Theatre is very interesting to me as a medium – one that is in its essence a very human encounter. Pulling from my experience as a visual artist to create the world of that encounter is very appealing to me.

More Thoughts on Portraiture

Willington Hill and Mystic

Willington Hill and Mystic

     These photos are from a recent series taken from two cemeteries in Connecticut. They are carvings on headstones made by regional craftsmen about three hundred years ago. The images are not necessarily representative of the people they stand for but they were carved for people my ancestors knew and lived amongst and they have become like old friends.

Thoughts on Portraiture

     Any work of art is in a sense autobiographical. It is an expression of a worldview held by the artist that will always be the ultimate subject. Portraiture, or more specifically, portrait painting, must be seen in the same way. As I pour through the work of a particular artist, I am struck by evidence of a continuum of sensibility – a continuum that makes each work significant to the individual. Though the object or sitter may change throughout a body of work, the subject is clearly that of the artist and could not be otherwise.

     Every artist will have a different response to a work and, ideally, every viewer will have a different interpretation of a work based on his or her own sensibilities. That is to the success of the work. To the determent of the work is the approach that attempts to nail down one view over another. The quickest way to kill a work of art, religion, or any such transcendental phenomenon is to say, “This is the way it is.” A work of art must always only be a vehicle for individual experience or intuition.

Some works by Alberto Giacometti come to mind where the facture of the work becomes more true to the subject than does the object of the sitter. In these works, what is expressed, I think, is an active space in and around the figure that only hints at a likeness, in order to strip down the object to the essence of representation. The figure is clearly the central focus of the works but the head and its features are scaled down in such a way as to give a sense of being lost amidst its greater surroundings. His process leaves evidence of both addition and subtraction of material and so doing implies an active search for form that is Giacometti’s alone. The tension that is created between these elements of form and content does, however, open wider opportunities for intuition of the viewer. The work is less an attempt at the descriptive likeness of the sitter but more a stand in for the artist’s existential worldview.

 

Thoughts on Light

John Currier Glazier, Studio, Oil on Canvas, 2005

      The meaning of light as a subject, specifically natural light in a painting, implies both a sense of something that is still as well as something that changes all the time. It becomes in its conception a juxtaposition of opposites that attempts at religiosity – an intuition of the infinite in the finite and vice versa. We are familiar with visual qualities of common elements like wood, stone and water. Each treats light differently. When one perceives reflected light, that is, any light other than its source, it reveals through color much about the texture and material of what is casting the reflection. Most of what we see is reflected light. Just as it will influence our vision so will it influence other objects in it’s surroundings. Atmosphere, present mostly in landscape, can have a unifying effect on color as it scatters light from a greater surrounding. Tree branches can do the same – and water. I find interesting the tension that is created when something as material as paint attempts to imply things as immaterial as space, time, and light.

Observation

Light on Paper

The pages, laid haphazardly on their perch, form rectangular planes of light framed by triangle shards revealing of the ones beneath. Gravity pulls them arching to the floor diminishing the glow to grey as they bend away from the source. The overlaps, barely apparent through the transparency of the leaf, lend reflection up through the ceiling to the ones above. The light is pale and diffused. It is a gray day dawning into the darkness of the room. Dim forms remind me of shelves and chairs where I left them. The white pages – a floating vision revealing words – unrecognizable text, are the brightest reflection of a dark morning.