Chapters
by Daniel Stuelpnagel
Chapter Thirteen
untitled # 317 (2005)
collection of Funk & Bolton, Attorneys (Baltimore)The Cinque Terre coast in February was tranquil, beautiful and inspiring. The silhouettes of the hills and mountains of Italy stayed with me, interspersed with vivid memories of deserts and oceans and mountains previously seen.
The architecture inspired dozens of sketches and watercolor studies, and in some way these visions became conceptually amalgamated, the uppermost layers of the work I had done bringing me to an integrated vision and experience of land, sea and sky.
untitled # 319 (2005)
collection of Funk & Bolton, Attorneys (Baltimore)The relentless seascapes began to make sense, as I realized I had so much to explore in developing different and original techniques of rendering the mountains, land forms and textures, it was essential that I had the expertise to paint the sky and the water as I had been doing for years, so I could continue moving forward with the newly integrated elements of rock and earth, bounded by the elements with which I was most familiar.
untitled # 325 (2005)I was painting geometric abstractions at the same time, along with gestural, palette-knife landscapes, and the techniques overlapped and coalesced into finished pieces that integrated the elements.
Intricate geometric abstractions were covered with more layers of paint, scraped away to reveal subtle and miniscule details of the colorful compositions as details within the rock and stratified land forms. With the use of straight and torn edges of masking tape, I covered the essential passages and applied over top of them sky and sea, preserving a fractal silhouette of almost representational horizons.
As the tension of earlier pieces had straddled the boundary between abstraction and photo-realism, these more complex compositions brought an enhancement to the subtle interplay of elements, and each piece, though entirely unique, fit into the unfolding narrative of exploration and visions of distant lands, some more real than imaginary. The techniques reveal a collage-like effect partly derived from studying the work of Romare Bearden. Even considering the highly saturated
The point of view was that from a ship, or perhaps a bird flying over the water, miles out to sea, but always focused on peaks and valleys, vanishing points and features of the landscape, rendered in increasingly vivid and saturated colors.
No longer did the shape of a stretched canvas prefigure the painting I would apply to it. I continued to do geometric abstractions, seascapes and landscapes, and each could happen in a vertical, horizontal or square, depending on intuition and evolution. There are no rules except those we choose to apply or accept.
untitled # 332 (2005)
collection of Funk & Bolton, Attorneys (Baltimore)With the techniques I had assimilated and developed over the years, through working in the studio and by observing the work of other artists in museums and galleries, I was gaining not only technical expertise but the capability to go beyond my experience and develop visionary paintings.
I allowed the inherent tension of the landscape as both surrealistic representation and pure abstraction to guide me, along with my profound love of the nuances of color and texture, to create some remarkable pieces that made me wonder where I was going to travel next.
untitled # 333 (2005)
collection of Funk & Bolton, Attorneys (Baltimore)In the autumn of 2005, I exhibited the new landscapes in a solo show at Pennsylvania State University’s Mont Alto Library, and Funk & Bolton acquired two of the new pieces for their Baltimore collection. They also gave me the word that they would make an investment sufficient to commission another fourteen paintings.
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