Chapters
by Daniel Stuelpnagel
Chapter Nineteen
untitled # 385 (2007)From the fifteen-year anniversary exhibitions at Parish Gallery, where Norman Parish convened more than seventy-five of his artists in a series of six consecutive group shows, to the transformative weekend of Open Studios, 2006 was bound to be a tough act to follow.
I started off 2007 with a trip to San Francisco to participate in a group exhibition at the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts, curated by multimedia artist Adrian Arias, a great experience of seeing artists and friends I had worked with three years earlier.
By spring of 2007, after having spent a total of almost three months on Maui, I returned to find waiting for me a package sent from Japan.
Back in October, 2006, Baltimore art dealer Ann Clark Priftis had invited two Japanese colleagues, Momo Takanashi and Kenji Mori, to visit my studio at LOAD OF FUN and conduct an interview and photo shoot for the Japanese art magazine BIFROST.
Momo and Kenji came down from New York and spent the day with me, and after such a wonderful experience I did not know exactly what to expect when the magazine was published in February of 2007.
Imagine my excitement at seeing a twelve-page cover story featuring more than twenty-five photographs, including numerous studio shots of my art works along with the interviews by Ann and Momo and a comprehensive article about my art career and recent work.
untitled # 387 (2007)In the following weeks, I made two trips to New York to attend events and visit Momo to see the exhibitions that she was curating and meet some of the other artists in her circle.
Then, in April, I was included in the Parish Gallery space at ArtDC, an extensive expo at the Washington Convention Center featuring more than seventy galleries from around the world.
Shortly thereafter, I also participated in the fifth ArtOMatic biennial outside of Washington, DC, my fourth experience with that remarkable group show including hundreds of area artists, and yet another opportunity to reconnect with many old friends and see the latest work of regional artists in a wide array of media.
untitled # 388 (2007)More than ever, I realized that the foundation I had built in years past provided recurring exhibition opportunities that were very valuable for me, and I felt a part of a broad network including the regional dynamic of spending time in Baltimore, Washington, Philadelphia and New York, as well as being welcomed each time I returned to points west.
untitled # 389 (2007)I continued my studio work, building on layered geometric compositions, with which I could develop and explore my continuing interest in the complex array of intervals, shapes and lines, and bringing these pieces to completion in a progressively richer series of abstract landscapes, many of which could still be interpreted simply as abstractions depending on whether the color palette was naturalistic or otherwise.
As I continued to experiment with reducing the surface through scraping (wet) and sanding (dry), these techniques lending a feeling of sculptural process, both Bart and I were working our way through a series of paintings that developed over many months, and we decided to plan a studio exhibition in June.
The curatorial vision of this show, entitled "Materializing The Story", and our paintings developed since the early part of the year, coalesced around the concept of iteration through process and materials, and the subtle narratives implied by our abstract landscapes, each group of paintings in their own way integrating an aesthetic influenced by digital technology.
This coincided with the completion of my four hundredth painting on canvas, and several other benchmarks; ten years as a professional artist, and more than forty exhibitions spanning that time.
án Cal (Baltimore)
untitled # 391 (2007)
collection of BayoThis was the painting I used for the postcard image, an intense confluence of several aspects, the saturated colors inspired by digital art, the layers of pentimenti and color variation implying a complex geological form, the ubiquitous veils of sea and sky, and a newly refined and heightened sense of focus and perspective made possible by restretching the finished canvas down to a slightly smaller size, effectively cropping the image like a photo to convey an enhanced sense of perspective.
untitled # 397 (2007)The series built up a transformative energy; I felt the progress to a new group of images built on ten years of ground work, found a place in the landscape for the geometry that felt like it had been there all along, and still continued to discover new relationships among the various elements through color and composition, while being fascinated with the imaginary, surrealistic representations of places I might have visited.
content Copyright © 2007 - Daniel Stuelpnagel - all rights reserved_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
