Chapters
by Daniel Stuelpnagel
Chapter One
untitled # 260 (2004)This painting, created in 2004, is the tantalizing fulcrum upon which this story pivots, a central point of beauty, learning and translation.
It is acrylic on canvas, 32 by 22 inches, hand-stretched medium-weight cotton canvas on wooden bars, stretched with copper tacks, painted with Golden acrylics, created in Baltimore a few months after I returned from living in San Francisco.If there is a compelling link and metaphor in the digital age for an artist, it is that we are represented by the very equipment we use in documentation and creative development, the same equipment now available to many people at steadily decreasing prices and with increasing levels of sophistication and functionality. The digital camera is my eye, somewhere in my mind and body are USB cables and processing power, software and hardware, and through my arms, hands and fingers into a paintbrush and through various media travel the translated, downloaded images, rendered through the tiny inkjet of that desktop printer.
What a change from the historical analogy I have been pursuing all this time!
I wanted to be like Mondrian, Severini, or Rauschenberg, living simply, using materials readily available, walking and living within a couple of square miles, communicating with a small circle of friends and colleagues, and being a prolific painter practicing what I love to do and doing good work as a result.
Instead I am a piece of office equipment adapted for creative use.
In any case, the metaphor arose with this painting because it represents a reasonably clear picture of Black Rock Desert, Nevada, the location of the Burning Man art festival where I visited in late summer of 2001 at the recommendation of my cousin Tim in Denver, while I was making my cross-country drive to Sacramento.
Having painted this picture in 2004, resulting from a visual record of experience in 2001, whatever the virtual file size of the image, it took about three years to download my memory through my hands and materials, from camera to printer output, and for the image to be rendered on canvas.
And that is something that, while Severini certainly implied it, and Rauschenberg foresaw every bit of it, most artists operating in the last millennium did not really have to try and understand. So, # 260 was my first “landscape”.
Well, not exactly.
untitled # 132 (2001)
collection of Karen Ray
(Dallas)This painting qualifies as a landscape, I guess, being a coastal seascape with a prominent pile of volcanic rocks tumbling into the Pacific.
No, it’s not Hawai’i (not there yet).
2001 was a year of beginnings. After quitting my eight-year financial services career in 1997, I lived in Washington, DC and worked a string of intermittent temp jobs, interspersed with summers during which I painted, launched and re-launched my art career and web site (www.409A.com), and repeatedly went broke.
But I sold paintings !
My first pieces sold were purchased in 1998 in my first exhibition at Blues Alley in Georgetown, by renowned collectors Keren Coxe and Alex Belinfante, who bought a geometric abstraction for a hundred dollars and came back two weeks later and purchased another one... I had my first ‘collector’!
And during that time I was fortunate to meet Bill Doonan, an underemployed neighbor with a PhD in Anthropology who was working on drafts of adventure novels, both of us somewhat jaded bachelors not quite fitting in with the Adams Morgan social scene.
Bill asked me to work on editing his book drafts, and eventually after sending out numerous applications and resumes, he got, not a publishing offer, but a job, a sought-after position as a professor of anthropology in Sacramento, California.
During the winter of 2000, my parents had gone on a cruise for a week in the Galápagos Islands of Ecuador, especially related to my mom’s long- standing interest in marine biology developed in her many years as a volunteer at the National Aquarium in Baltimore.
They put me in touch with an artist there who repeatedly invited me to come visit and paint seascapes, which was my most fully-developed style at that time, along with the geometric abstractions for which I was becoming known through exhibitions in Washington.
So, in early 2001, these threads became interwoven, Bill moving out to California, an invitation to travel to South America, and a general feeling of wanting to break out of the limitations of living in DC after three years of my beginning art career.
And, at that point, through my ongoing efforts, I had a preliminary agreement from an established dealer in Georgetown, after attending his openings and getting my work known, to do a solo show at some point in the future. And that was a lot.
So I quit my latest temp job, divested my flat of furniture, and packed all my belongings in my 1989 Acura, preparing to go west.
untitled # 79 (2000)
collection of Funk & Bolton, Attorneys (Baltimore)How does a geometric abstraction become a landscape ? Art is evolution.
Our efforts to portray nature evolve as our vision of the world around us and our participation in it grows.
My early body of work in squares, geometric abstractions closely dedicated to continuing the work of Mondrian (in my own particular tributary of grid-based metaphor and interpretation), carried me forward.
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