Chapters
by Daniel Stuelpnagel
Chapter Three
untitled # 128 (2001)
collection of Jenny and Joe Hovermill (Baltimore)My journal entries from late 2001 reveal how unconcerned I was with anything other than day-to-day activities such as going to the hardware store to get paint, finding my way around San Francisco and driving back and forth from Sacramento; I was immersed in my work without a fixed plan and with no more than a few hundred dollars in the bank.
The nature of being in the flow of art is that we can transcend all else and discover the timeless nature of human fascination with visual experience.
Through more than fifty thousand years of art history, our capability to make our mark and interpret our own existence through crafting artifacts and pictures continues to inhabit the heart of our creative consciousness. Yet it is through transcendence of the self, and entering in to our surrounding world, that we connect most deeply with this energy.
And on the verge of any new experience, especially an impending exhibition, or a departure for parts unknown, we can release some of our most fully-developed paintings.
While packing for the islands, attending to the details of getting settled in Sacramento and preparing portfolio materials for the gallery, I was painting out in the hot sun on Bill’s back porch, and developed a series of five geometric abstractions, including # 128, above, and several companion pieces.
With the grid-based composition purposely constrained to architectonic forty-five and ninety-degree angles, growing from the foundation of my first hundred paintings, I was experimenting with different techniques, including a swirling, circular brush stroke, and developing a more nuanced capability to narrow my color palette.
While working with geometric squares and horizontal seascapes, within those confines my work was developing in subtle ways. Of course, at the time, I was thinking about none of that. I was just painting in the hot sun.
untitled # 108 (2001)
collection of Funk & Bolton, Attorneys (Baltimore)Take a look at this piece, done just six months earlier on the east coast, and the previous one. I was beginning to develop some new approaches to surface texture, and the circular brush strokes along with some palette knife work are a part of that. The east coast version, # 108, looks slick, more stylized, and more closely orchestrated, more tightly composed.
In California, twenty paintings later, I was beginning to soften, narrow and refine my palette, and there were devious earth tones preparing to break through the grid, the colors of the desert seeping into my consciousness.
There was chaos struggling with control, and through it all I was becoming more capable of expressing my voice within the set of rules I had chosen. Building within the grid or matrix, I was working within my self-imposed limitations more joyfully than ever, creating the building blocks for the future.
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