From the Hydrangea

9" x 12", oil on panel

I took a break from the studio to go to the opening reception of "Scale: Experiencing Size, Surface, & Story" at the Attleboro Arts Museum in Massachusetts. The show features the work of three artists, Juan Jose Barboza-Gubo, Jodi Colella, and Richard Kattman.

From the museum's press release:

"Barboza-Gubo (painting and sculpture), Colella (mixed media sculpture) and Kattman (painting) deliver visual expressions that truly absorb the viewer thanks to either their strategically planned size, detailed texture, significant message – or all of the above.

“In some cases the highly appropriate grand scale of this artwork engulfs the viewer – yet, we also have the chance to rise above work that is extremely exaggerated – but doesn’t tower over gallery-goers,” comments Mim Brooks Fawcett, Executive Director of the Attleboro Arts Museum.” “Scale controls our relationship with these authentic expressions and we are compelled to explore,” she added.

Click here for the full article.

Barboza-Gubo's work struck me in a way that doesn't happen very often. His self-portraits with antlers remind me of Joseph Beuys' watercolors also because of the limited color and alchemical properties as the former's are done in blood, gouache, and graphite. In the show is an impressive carved wood sculpture with twisting forms like a Van Gogh cypress tree with a narrative. Large-scale paintings of Barboza-Gubo's are also on view, forms reminding me of the violent chaos of Gericault's Raft of the Medusa. Not in the show is his his Pieta Series 3 that blows me away. It has the mastery of Picasso's fragmented form and the layers of transparency and graphics combined with figuration as in Sigmar Polke. You can imagine that I'm jumping out of my skin even more to learn that he received his MFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design (my alma mater) and is a faculty member there.

"Scale: Experiencing Size, Surface, & Story" runs April 15 – May 7, 2011

On the home front, this is what I'm doing:

This painting comes out of the work I'm doing of Hydrangeas including an oil paintings, watercolors, and oil pastels. My oil painting, Blue Hydrangea, is focused on capturing the globes of petals while this new painting allows the globes to diffuse into layered colored points that go back and forth in space. They may be seen as part of the plant or as their own system. Painted in April during a series of cloudy days, I kept the edges of the circles soft. They are thinly glazed in contrast to the heavier applications in other paintings. I think they have a wet, earthy feel to them, the modulated brown ground reflects light like the dark backgrounds in old master paintings. Someone seeing the original asked if I use stencils. They are all freehand. Too much unnatural uniformity makes them too mechanical looking. I also draw the dots when using the iPad and don't use any of the tools that make automatic dots. I think there is an emotional tenderness that comes through in the hand no matter how perfect or imperfect the circles appear to be. Perfection isn't my goal. I'm involved in each moment. A dot is a moment but not an instant. I can't paint them in quick dabs. It's like patiently trying to catch rain drop by drop but not wanting the drops to combine. Maybe it's more like catching snowflakes on a mitten in order to look at each one.

Two Trees with Orange/Blue Trees with Orange

Two Trees with Orange, approx. 4" x 3" ceramic relief

Blue Trees with Orange, 20" x 16" oil on canvas

Here is another conversation between painting and relief, the relief coming first this time. The color and different textures (matte vs. shiny) in the relief create space when the black lines of the trees want to flatten this rather Gothic arch form. The trees are muscular, sinewy in their black and orange. I saw Body Worlds in Toronto a couple years ago and it completely changed the way I think about the body, not just in terms of anatomy but physicality. I drew the figure as a student and later taught life drawing with a live model as well as a skeleton. Seeing the muscles and nerves is different. There is tension, power in muscles while the nerves are about impulse and communication, speed, feeling. A body that is cared for is physically participating in balance.

Likewise these trees are balanced, active in their symmetry, united in direction, purpose, reach. They stretch and contract, tense muscles about to spring despite being rooted, blue-veined. The fluidity of life, time, and change are shown through the diagonal landscape. A tilt is the opposite of a horizontal, stasis. This isn't a Waiting For Godot set (where nothing ever changes) despite the minimalism and there are two trees, not the one presented by Beckett. The trees in the painting are going to go out fighting while the ceramic ones are nestled within the process. The human condition has a foot in each.