Douglas Witmer
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Thursday, October 05, 2006
ripped from my margins, on open image
Bungalow, 2005. Acrylic on canvas. 20 x 16 inches.
One of the terrific things about the weblog format for me personally is the ability to quickly link to past thoughts and writing. Sometimes it's stuff I forgot about, other times, as in this case, it's something I've been ruminating on. I decided to bring this (lightly edited) exchange between myself and my friend Tim Gierschick out of the comments and give it a full-fledged post of it's own.
Tim said, "I've been thinking about your paintings influenced by natural (i.e., of the natural world), and was wondering...is Cardinal based on a certain experience with a cardinal (I suppose "Mockingbird" is similar in that way)? Or is it more of a fascination with the possibilities of mixing the elements of the colors you experienced; the ones you mix; the title; and the viewer's response?"
This question gets back to the idea of a personal narrative or anecdote behind the painting. It's something Jonathan Walz brought up over a year ago, related to a piece I made for friends of ours who lost twin babies. [link here to post] I've always been meaning to write about this more. I haven't partly because, believe it or not, I've simply been pondering all this time. And I'm reticent.
For Nina and Teresa, 2005. Acrylic on canvas on board. Two panels. 16 x 24 inches overall
I formed part of an answer in the interview with Chris Ashley on Minus Space late last year. If I may quote myself:
"To a degree, I have always been an observational painter in that things I see or fragments from things I see undergo a process of distillation in the studio. "
This is is still true, but it only describes my activity going in one direction...from something observed into the painting process. More and more I realize it also works the other way around. That is, I paint, and in the process see that I have found my way to something that has been there for me all along.
It's funny to bring this up in relationship to the images I posted a few days ago, because two of the works shown represent both ways. So here I'm going to share some simple anecdotes.
"Cardinal"...it's just from the colors of cardinals. From being beautifully awakened by the call of a cardinal one morning in March. Observing cardinals in the cold light of winter. Wanting to mark that experience for myself.
"Himmelein"...I painted for a few weeks until this image began to solidify. And, talking to myself as I do while painting, I talked about a little slice of the sky. (By the way, I'm about to have a little slice of pizza, but likely not make a painting about it.) And then the German word came to mind. The father of the family I lived with in Germany in 1993 was an astronomer. He took me for long drives and taught me all the words in German that I know for things pertaining to the heavens.
But, of course, these are my stories. And telling them to anyone runs the risk of me cutting off a potential way toward meaning for someone else. I've just risked that with these two examples.
I like to title my work whenever possible. And I like to choose a word that may add to the framework of the feeling I feel for the painting, and to suggest that it does have a personal story behind it, something that makes it matter in the world. But sometimes this isn't possible. The painting comes about because of painting. More recently, I've begun to work in series and I can give an over-arching title to the series whereby individual works within it do not need individual titles.
But after the words that make up a title, I prefer to "stop talking", and hope that a person looking at the painting and considering its title (or not) brings their experience to bear, and that their own unique meaning is achieved.
I was in Oakland, California a few weeks ago and met the artist George Lawson. In an interview he gave in 1992 with artist R. Lance Laughlin, I think he speaks so clearly to this issue, using the term "Open Image." What follows is an excerpt from the interview that I'm posting with George's permission. Any typos are mine.
George Lawson, Jizo 8, oil on linen, 2002. (I saw this painting in George's studio, size is around 48 x 40 inches.)
R. Lance Laughlin: You use the term "Open Image" in reference to your work. Would you explain what you mean by that?
George Lawson: I mean an image that is structured to remain open to the fullest range of possible content that each individual viewer might bring to it. By that I don't mean just anything goes. I don't mean a license to trivialize the work. I mean deep content. Stirrings each viewer brings to the surface which are so unpredictable, and collectively so rich.
RLL: How can such a wide range of possible views of the work be reconciled with your original intentions in painting it? How does it fit in?
GL: My intentions are not negated by the viewer, but rather extended. The whole concept of the open image dredges up issues of control and intent, the degree to which the artists purpose may be circumscribed, how much he or she is able to let go after putting the work out there in the world. Images are open or closed on a sliding scale depending on how much they dictate terms to the viewer. On one end of the scale a really closed image might be verbal communication, signage or language. More open but still relatively closed would be a pictorial depiction of a scene or something, and an extremely open image might be a simple single color, something causing the viewer to fall back on themselves.
RLL: The simpler you get in terms of the image though, that wouldn't necessarily make it more open, would it? I'm finding in your work, it's much more complicated now in terms of the image than it used to be and yet it's perhaps more open than before. Are you striving for a more open image?
GL: Well, it's not exactly just a mater of simpler, though simpler usually helps. When I say simple monochrome, I'm visualizing a solution which is perfect in many ways but it's also an over focused one and once you've adopted an open frame of reference, the question presents itself of just how much of an image, how rich of one, you can produce and still keep it from shutting down, what the possibilities are for open images with the emphasis on image...
5.10.06 
1 Comments:
lovin' "Bungalow", bro.
By 
daryl, at
10/12/2006