Summer to Fall
35.5" x 17" x 4.5"
acrylic on birch plywood construction
2001
TRUE LIES’
Objects have great power for me. Natural or made, the surfaces of objects
bear witness to their silent lives and histories. They show growth
and decay, use
and wear, weather and entropy, love and neglect; and they accumulate as symbols
of memory, of loss, and of beauty in both my life and my work.
Seemingly self-evident and self-contained, objects grow linkages and set
off chain reactions in our minds, evoking whole environments and entire periods
of
time. They are evidence of who and where we are; they help ensure the continued
life of the past in the present. We are all time travelers, with objects serving
as our souvenirs, triggering memories of the voyages.
I believe it was Claes Oldenburg who declared that the harder he looked at
a thing the more mysterious it became. It has also been that way for me. Yet,
at
the same time, the opposite seems just as true: The harder I look, the less
arbitrary reality seems to become. The way a particular paint flakes, the way
an arc was
scratched by a dangling screen door hook, the way a paring knife was worn by
handling and sharpening, the way that carelessly basted hem puckers, the way
a shirt holds its creases from being folded long ago…it begins to make
sense and seems right.
I seem to have a life-long need to make things as well as to look at them.
Using real objects to make assemblages, installations or relief collages doesn’t
seem enough; I need to recreate the chosen objects out of raw materials, those
being (by my choice) limited to Finnish birch plywood and acrylic paint.
My basic technique of building elaborate relief constructions and painting
them in trompe l’oeil fashion has both its own deep satisfactions of process
and problem-solving. I find this process - now a given in my work - worthwhile
not just for its own sake but as a means of understanding the objects. It’s
also a way of creating the images I choose to deal with. Trompe l’oeil
has often been a means to show off an artist’s technical skills, a fairly
shallow if entertaining enterprise. However, for me, that device serves as an
appropriate response to my love of the visual and physical world. My hope is
that whatever technical skill I have is used in the service of that personal
vision.
My three recurring subjects are clothing, found objects and plant materials.
Clothing evokes a human presence — sometimes a very specific one. Its wonderful
shapes, colors, textures and structure fascinate me; and as one does with clothing,
I also build my work to "hang on a wall". Found objects, especially
ones that have the patina of wear and age, are a rich source of design and association.
Plant materials in the form of leaves, sticks and flowers seem to work their
way into nearly every piece. A dress is as dress, a stick is a stick… but
what happens when you put sticks on a dress, or a flower with a tool?
Additionally, the human figure is beginning to make re-appearances in the work,
sometimes as an image in a "photograph" — that is actually a
painting on plywood - sometimes as a cutout; these figures often give another
level of content and scale, since my trompe l’oeil imagery is always actual
size. Occasional landscape images also add the context of scale and space.
At some point, the alert viewer becomes aware that they are not looking at "real" objects,
but at my re-creations of them; this usually sets off a much more active and
detailed scrutiny of the work, and a different set of attitudes than would be
produced by looking at an assemblage/collage of actual materials. This is good.
Questions about perception, representation, the nature of reality, and my mental
health come into play. How much of our perception of reality is tied up with
surface appearances? How much of the light and shadow on a piece is painted,
how much is real? Should this work be considered the "truth", or an
enormous lie? (Picasso, though undoubtedly not thinking of trompe l’oeil
painting, once defined art as a lie that helps us to see the truth). One role
of artists is to show people things they already knew, then invite them to look
at those things from another point of view.
I was trained as a painter. These works grew gradually, evolving out of solving
problems in my paintings. They became a hybrid, somewhere between painting
and sculpture. (I had to "invent" the woodworking skills I needed as I
went along, and in effect blundered into sculpture through the back door). The
building of a piece usually requires about half the work, and the painting the
other half.
The works are constructed, not carved; the only subtractive part of the process
is the machine and hand-sanding that rounds some of the scroll-sawed plywood
edges. Several hundred pieces of wood may be required to construct one work.
My strategy is to build as much of the detail of the surface as I can without
making myself crazy, then to rely on paint to carry the rest of the illusion.
My advantage over the old trompe l’oeil painters like William Harnett,
of course, is that I am painting on three-dimensional surfaces -not flat canvas-
so I can exploit the fusion (and confusion) of actual and painted forms. The
painting itself is deadpan, confined to local color, and virtually without style,
hiding itself in a series of illusionary surfaces of "fabric". "wood", "rusty
metal", "paper" and "foliage". The works are highly
detailed, but many other artists are willing to go much further into minutiae
than I; I am patient but not fanatical or obsessed.
I am not involved with wood as wood - as some sort of friendly mystery hiding
secrets within its grain; it is a surface for me to hang paint on. Finnish
birch plywood comes in very flat, very manufactured sheets, and I somewhat
perversely
enjoy its very inappropriateness for what I do. I find ways to work within
its limitations, to make its flat planes flow like draped cloth or curled leaves.
It is also amusing to turn new birch plywood into, say, old fir plywood — or,
better yet, birch sticks, taking it back to nature.
The original impetus for putting things together is primarily visual and formal,
as I react to shapes and lines, colors and textures, figure and ground. Things
are laid out together, often by familiar principles of composition, until I
am convinced the combination has a strong design and format, a good image,
and a
chance of a happy marriage. This may happen by sudden inspiration or serendipitous
accidents of stacking or proximity, but more likely by long trial and error.
But then these objects, each with its own story and associations, take resonance
from each other and form new possible meanings and readings from their juxtaposition.
I try to leave the pieces open in their content so that a willing viewer can
do much (most?) of this work. The pieces often reveal new aspects to me years
after completion, and viewers (and reviewers) frequently amaze me with the
connections and metaphors they see in them. Sometimes these "actor" objects re-appear
in other works like players in a repertory company, and take on new possibilities.
(What does a glove or a ladder "mean"? A lot depends on the context).
So, each object in my work has a triple role: As a design element in a composition;
as "itself"- a thing with a past, a function and multiplicity of possible
meanings; and as a re-created new thing, made by an artist, and understood as
such by the viewer.
If the combination of elements is successful, a simple still life becomes an
evocative and wordless poem, with multiple possibilities for open content supplied
by the viewer …with my encouragement. The risk of this sort of work is
that a piece may fall into simple-minded mimesis and nostalgia.
But the work remains largely about the joys of making and of seeing. I am still
fascinated by the old uncomplicated idea of resemblance, the very first idea
of art after tool making: That an object fashioned out of one material can
take on the outward appearance and therefore some of the "reality" of another.
(It is little wonder that art quickly became allied with magic). In this increasingly
intellectualized, issue-oriented and concept-driven art world, I hope that old
idea can still find welcome; it often seems almost enough for me.
