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8/22/2021 0 Comments #7: 8/22/2021Remembering How to See (on the paintings of David Schell) by Benjamin Terrell My wife Claudia and I recently walked around a large pond near the house that has been empty long enough that grass now grows in its center. It was the end of the day, and the sun was going down glowing, filling the field that the pond was becoming. That evening in the center was something special and rarely seen- a herd of elk and calves grazing. The young ones were sleek and chestnut colored, and after adjusting our eyes to follow their awkward movements we noticed something else unusual and unexpected. A coyote pup had wandered out from the brush into the center of the dry bed, unaware of us on one side and the elk on the other. What was being revealed felt sacred and seemed to be dependent on our ability to patiently see and be shown something we couldn't have controlled. The grand, all-knowing elk, the rascally pup too new to understand, and us- humans that hunt for words, limited and often unsure of our place in all the unnamable beauty. That experience feels like the perfect metaphor for viewing art in person, especially if you can imagine a great painting as the pond.  Boundary (or The Joy of Uncertainty) 2021, oil, pumice and cold wax on panel approximately 24” in diameter A pink circle with a black square center. Pink, the color of intimacy, of infancy, rib and crib contained. Also, an inverted artery to and from the unknown. Some say the universe doesn't exist when we aren't looking and that the things we see may be manifesting as we see them. I have also read that we are an important part of a participatory cosmic loop where each decision we make can influence our future and our past. It may be tempting to think of ourselves as authors of the ever-changing unknown, but it’s more likely that we exist briefly between the instability of a great creative force and the movement of its ongoing dance. Our unique contribution is then the ability to interpret, envision and engage with the unknown. Artist James Turrell says, " the real mystery is how we give reality to things." Turrell uses light, color, and nature to recreate how we organize what we see, calling the process "behind the eye seeing."  Fuller Moon 2021, oil, pumice and cold wax on panel approximately 16” x 16” A full moon is complete illumination. A fuller moon is serene saturation of a sherbet green growing. The green of between a season. A satellite accustomed to longing and becoming wants to cover a white cube? This moon longs to be substantial and square, sick of seldom eclipsing the sun. The paintings of David Schell can feel like imagining energy initiating, can look like colorful electric outlets and inlets and are often like phosphenes- the colors and shapes seen sometimes when we close our eyes. A phosphene can feel like a visual origin story somewhere between a first impression and tangible information. Schell's work can inform and radiate like the first light leaked into an eyelid, or glow slowly outward like a luminous emerging light. Emily Noyes Vanderpoel describes color as, "an internal sensation... as fine or as poor as the eyes and the brain of the person who sees it." We may not all be seeing the same things the same way, but consensus is how we connect. Schell's command of color can feel like the crowd outside the club we are waiting to enter- a nameless, anticipatory nod at what's in store once we are acclimated from within.  Echo 2021, oil, pumice and cold wax on panel approximately 20 ½” in diameter A sienna circle with two warm glowing squares like a sun and its reflection. Two lights of knowledge that leak in and lead out of Plato's cave. In a constructed space by James Turrell, light and color can "saturate the room so that the audience's bodily presence will be neglected or reduced.. to create a sense of infinity." Similarly in Schell's work, saturated signals are both intimate and expansive, and when seen together result in an immensity beyond the image's ability to contain it. They are a room's own hued punctuation points, both negative and positive and both suggestive and summarizing. Schell also conjures one of his heroes, Stanley Whitney. Whitney paints color like a choir, all voices heard at once, and his color grid canvases can feel like “going off the air” messages from the color field movement of yesteryear. Whitney and Schell feel current, though, with both acknowledging the end of old conversations in favor of new ways of perceiving. Both paint electrically from a place where color is king and everything else is aura.  Away from the Rest of the World (Day) 2021, oil, pumice and cold wax on panel approximately 24" x 24" Like the artist's earlier images of lightning, but truncated. The center of the center of the storm where the ability to act marries the means to do so. Seen on two canvases (Day and Dusk), they are like a force of nature and its antidote. The center and the margins of a painting are of interchangeable importance for Schell. Peter Schjeldahl writes that the edges of a De Kooning and of a Dubuffet painting are like thresholds and that, "Like entrances to temples...[there is...] always a keen registration of physical, mental and moral energy." These meeting places manifest in Davis Schell's work, too, contained by irregular edges, rounded corners, and subtle shifts in space. Schell has said (in his last gallery statement) that, "both Arcadia and perfection are worthwhile goals and completely unattainable." As if to say, overly sacred structures and temples are ruins in reverse and a reminder that order, even in epochs, is always unstable and temporary.  Closer (1) 2021, oil, pumice and cold wax on panel approximately 15 ¾” x 17” A coral colored, upright rectangle almost occupies a larger, hazy pink rectangle (with a lazy lip) and creates an echo of same shape. Like a mirror that refuses to reflect, art lives outside of an algorithm, has a presence present past a reel, post, or story. Rumi dances around an object until the poetry flows out. We have been socially distant for so long, but we have also been unhealthily exposed to and left alone with our egoes, which amplifies a sense of separation. In an ego state we are like Schell's subjects, but are we the container or the contained? Can we begin to imagine ourselves outside our original packaging? Standing in front of one of the artist's paintings we may imagine a window with two sides. If we could only picture ourselves from the object’s other side, what unstable cameos we would be! This is the origin of Schell's humor- life is an awkward twister board for our eyes to act out the dance of impulse versus demand. How can we concentrate on just one thing when the mind is like a GPS without a satellite? Schell paints poetry from instability and his work is a bright light out of the cave called Covid and is a centering place for us to meet outside of what we thought of as ourselves.  Slowly Over Time (3) 2021, oil, pumice and cold wax on panel approximately 19” x 23” A pale pink vessel within a white rounded vase reminds us that a painting is also an object, just as we are creations living within a larger creation. Or, if seen as an interior staircase, a reminder that intimacy is not external. Rather, it is found first through a centered, singular ascent. When painting a picture there is a point when artist and image become strangers. Until that point they are kin and confidants, but what manifests on the wall and what was seen inside inevitably will separate. Life itself can feel like a friend becoming an acquaintance when offered the exchange of finite for the infinite. In a painting by Schell, texture is the train station where the two part ways. Pumice and paint can be transparent like veils to pass through or thick and luscious like confections to blindfold the eye into an inner journey. For the artist, the tactile is like the timbre and tone when a bell is struck and is also the place where his painting vibrates into existence. It is both bellows and bell tower where optimistic interiority first resonates into the expansive unknown. David Schell's painting reminds me of my first time seeing one of James Turrell’s "Sky Spaces.” Sky Spaces are Turrell's viewing chambers with apertures in the ceiling where controlled light meets an uncontrollable environment like daylight or dusk. What was once flat becomes form and what harmoniously glows grows beyond our ability to name it. Only through connection (intimacy) and creative suggestion (intimation) can we express worldliness without relying on the world. Stability and instability are different places on the same ceramic pot and our connectedness comes from our brief shared mortality. We are vessels that pour past our inherent flaws. Our brokenness, the common crack that makes us both fragile and unique, is the exact place where our life flows from. You can see more of David Schell's work: at Augen Gallery on his website on Instagram as schell_david You can read his interviews with artists at The Semi-Finalist. All photos in this column by Mario Gallucci
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6/8/2021 0 Comments #6: 6/8/2021Jovencio de la Paz by Benjamin Terrell  Installation view of Jovencio de la Paz's solo show, Cumulative Shadow, at Holding Contemporary in Portland, Oregon. (all photos by Mario Gallucci) Portland is a flag flown at half mast, a tent that sleeps six sitting on a slender sidewalk, a boarded-up business that used to offer views of the park. I have often wondered, is that city to the north of me one step closer to an edge or to a promised land? Or is Eugene itself edging out of the big picture, lost somewhere between forest and field. But Portland, Portland is a boxer given too much girth and gravity, pushed repeatedly to the ropes and then left alone on the canvas. Perhaps the decade itself is deciding whether it will recover or remain like the old man with a mask over mouth but not nose- partially protected and in dense denial. Maybe we are all still symbolically only one poke into a larger two shot solution. I.e., half healed.  Jovencio de la Paz, A languid meter, 2021 TC2 handwoven cotton, canvas, acrylic, 48" x 48" Unexpected events of the last few years can feel like cosmic commentary aimed at us, or maybe like nature's version of the imperfections added to traditional Islamic pattern. Author Amy Goldin describes the intentional addition of "flaws" to pattern as an Islamic artist's "demonstration of the irrelevance of perfect form." It is human to cling and to control, but if we are like "art that aims at perfection" then, like Goldin describes, we "cannot easily tolerate any addition, subtraction or displacement." Perhaps accepting and resisting aren't opposites- rather, signs of egoic inbreath and exhale illuminating us somewhere in the middle. Goldin also writes that pattern is determined not by the motif but by the spaces between. Which is to say, strength comes from an unknown, nameless place between structure and order.  Jovencio de la Paz, Bionumeric Organisms, 2020, TC2 handwoven cotton and canvas, 36" x 24" Creativity can connect and cure as long as it contains two parts. First, the ability to sit with the unknown, because transformation happens outside of what we know. We are nightguards to mystery, but if our unknowns are parceled out, we also give away our infinite possibility. Second, making a safe place for contradiction to exist, because growth happens outside the doorway of our avoidance. If certainty is the soil of necessity (accept what is right, deny what is wrong) we cut ourselves off from root and fruit. To acknowledge that we are containers of both is to ripen in humility. And if the skin is made thin the fruit is at its most flavorful. Portland’s art galleries are then the farm stand to Oregon’s creative orchard and the weavings of Jovencio De La Paz are certainly not fruit found on the lowest branches. De La Paz’s pieces, seen at Holding Contemporary until May 29th, require some reaching, the full sun of an optimistic mind and an eye for beauty abstracted. Textile art is often born from (or reacting against) necessity, involves pattern as pathway to and from its process and (consider the loom is much older than pen or brush) contains hallmarks of its own history. All are interests held in attentive hands- De La Paz is a professor and head of the fiber department at the University of Oregon. For De La Paz, tradition doesn’t appear as a concern, rather it is like cloud cover and costume to be admired and then shed in favor of wide-open unembellished truth.  Jovencio de la Paz, Shade 1.1, 2020, TC2 handwoven textiles, cotton and raffia, 42" x 28 1/2" De La Paz’s exhibition is entitled Cumulative Shadow, a reference to the inability of a computer- based loom to render shadow. For the artist, the digital incapacity is one piece of the poetry of instability and a short staircase to a sacred place for thinking about issues of heritage, history and “speculative futures.” Learning that the artist employs computer technology doesn’t disconnect any sincerity or set up a man versus machine spectator sport. Instead, it intrigues as an infinity of possibility, is reminiscent of a bowerbird built nest or is like Mort Garson making moog music strictly for plants to enjoy (sewn and shown organically to itself). Also, to imagine the digital world even briefly as incapable of anything might offer some sense of privacy or feel like putting tape over the lenses of everything that currently tracks us.  Jovencio de la Paz, Bionumeric Organisms 1.1 (The Lotus & the Rose), 2021, TC2 handwoven textiles, and canvas, cotton, wool, 64" x 71" Amy Goldin writes that artists who begin with the grid usually proceed to destroy it. When de la Paz dismantles pattern and places it next to another pattern, like with "The Lotus and the Rose" (above), he reveals an untapped potentiality. In the piece, two patterns appear edited and unaligned, separate faint mandalas that, if overlapped, might cancel each other out. Goldin also wrote that pattern confronted with other pattern "evokes the presence of hidden laws and an infinity of legitimate, unexpressed possibilities." Take a piece like Biometric Organisms 1.0 (see below)- a fragment of dissolving pattern sewn to a neutral canvas stretched and displayed like a painting. Appearing like part relic and part computation on colored cloth, it is as much a means of measurement as it designs itself in a process of being decoded. Picture a pinecone as a mystical map containing a code for understanding consciousness, or imagine the grand topography of a Mark Bradford painting infused with the intimate hatching lines of Vija Celmins. Like other works in the show, Biometric Organism employs a layout of a minority of image on a majority of blank space that, when stared at, creates an illusion of figure-ground flip. To also imagine what “isn’t” is to entertain the infinite and to articulate the unknown. Jovencio de la Paz, Bionumeric Organisms 1.0, 2021, TC2 handwoven textiles and canvas, cotton, wool, 54" x 54" Cumulative Shadow consists of five large textile pieces and three lithographs. The lithographs, found in the back of the gallery, at first may feel like cracking the code of De La Paz’s pondering. The optical designs expressed feel like dream boards to feed the digital for a payout of its inability to express like us. But that breakdown is only a beginning, an analog imagining of the infinite, an inherent opportunity to re-employ all the senses. It is an invitation to feel outside what language limits us to express. For us, in shadow as in light, vulnerability is the pearl of our humanity.  Jovencio de la Paz, Didderen 4.2, CSP 20-110 three-color lithograph on Somerset satin white, collaborating with master printer Judith Baumann, 30" x 22 1/4" paper, 22 7/16" x 16 5/16" image, edition of 12  Jovencio de la Paz, Didderen 4.1, CSP 20-109 Three-color lithograph on Somerset satin white, collaborating with master printer Judith Baumann, 29.5" x 22" paper, 21 5/16" x 16" image, edition of 12  Installation view of Cumulative Shadow and Holding Contemporary. You can see more of Jovencio de la Paz's work: at Holding Contemporary on his website on instagram All photos in this column by Mario Gallucci 3/10/2021 0 Comments #5: 3/10/2021Brian Scott Campbell by Benjamin Terrell  Brian Scott Campbell, For Robert, flashe on canvas, 20" x 16", 2020. Photo courtesy of Freight + Volume. Speaking about a particular work by the American modernist painter Marsden Hartley, the contemporary painter Tal R. said, "if you tell someone you want to paint ... the sea, perhaps a boat, maybe the sun... any art school teacher would say it is suicide. But in fact," he mused about the master artist's straightforward subject, "it is everything a painting is ever about." Hartley had been considered a Cubist, an Expressionist, had painted pointillistically and abstractly. He had lived in Paris and Berlin before returning late in life to the place he was born, declaring himself "The Painter from Maine." That doing or undoing of self reveals a reunion of the child heart in harmony with an old poet's head when unpacked effortlessly in Hartley's late landscapes.  Brian Scott Campbell, Cape, flashe on canvas, 20" x 16". Photo courtesy of Freight + Volume. As I approach my fiftieth birthday I think about homecoming and landscape a lot, especially living so close to the area damaged by last year's Holiday Farm wildfire in Eugene, Oregon. I now spend more time outside looking at what the fire took and what was left behind. Surviving and aging are like being in the presence of grandness, whether a masterwork of great art or a field full of birds, and both produce awe and awareness. Important in life and in a landscape painting, but sometimes unseen, is the force of nature itself. In art, it can be enhanced by the enormity of the elements depicted or implied by the harmony of the artist's hand and the heartstrings it plucks by what it portrays. For me, landscape painting itself is both spacious and contemplative and is what decorates the cosmic canopy of what connects us all.  Brian Scott Campbell, Little House, flashe on canvas, 20" x 16", 2019. Photo courtesy of Freight + Volume. The landscape paintings of Brian Scott Campbell found on Instagram (@brianscottcampbell) or seen in his new publication, Home and Garden, feel familiar and appear one house away from Hartley's heritage. Campbell paints boats as remote geometric shapes, houses like distant desired destinations, also images of blocky trees, forgotten fences and walls and bridges we can't access. Sometimes the latter divides, provides a nostalgic sense of "over here" and "over there" and asks, "have we come that far?" or "do we long to go back?" But, either/or aren't opposites in a Campbell painting, they are kin and cousins related to longing itself. Campbell, like Hartley, is a reductionist of form and feeling. Both artists are poets of the picturesque and each is a station master of his own emotional railway running from desire to something divine.  Brian Scott Campbell, Blue Mountain, flashe on canvas, 20" x 16", 2019. Photo courtesy of Freight + Volume. Campbell uses a vinyl-based paint called flashe, which is flat, matte, and opaque. Unlike oil, flashe dries quickly and allows easy layering. Campbell's thin monochromatic washes have the graphite grit of a grave rubbing. They remind me of the story of an anthropologist on a safari who is enamored by an opulent snake, only to have it presented to her by locals at the end of the trip as a belt. Seeing it grey, black, and unanimated, the anthropologist realized what had given the reptile its mystery and unique color was its life force. Not to say a work by Cambell is without life. Rather, he paints similar states of in between, like embers or boats that float in anticipation of being boarded. His landscapes are cocoons, vessels or Otis elevators where the viewer is taken elsewhere to emerge.  Brian Scott Campbell, Twin Flame, flashe on canvas, 20" x 16". Photo courtesy of Freight + Volume. The best trips are measured by enjoyment rather than distance. In Cambell's world of the familiar and the forgotten, both old and new have directionality and offer the viewer a slow stroll to come and go. His palette of grey, yellow, blue and sometimes red (as in a hot dot for a blazing sun) functions like traffic symbols for the eye. Campbell can cartoon in style, not out of informality but from urgency, as if to discard worldliness in favor of palms up surrender. His black lines and simple shapes are bones bereft of ego and boiled down nature is the broth we are immersed in. His is a land where information gives way to wisdom and where a winding path or the wind felt over a river tells you: you were greater in your nothingness than you are now in your somethingness.  Brian Scott Campbell, Blood Orange, flashe on canvas, 20" x 16". Photo courtesy of Freight + Volume. Look at the boat that floats center stage in the painting, "Dockers." It sets sail not in sea but cinema, suggesting the tension of the Roman Polanski film, Knife in the Water. In the film, three people are forced together by the magnetic push and pull of chance and fate. The friction aboard Campbell's vessel is the opposing forces of the old ways, the new ways versus us and each wants its way. In this painter's world, tossed overboard first is not a knife (like in the film) but the cell phone, a devise that connects and cuts, enables but confuses- an object offering us the unjust exchange of our real-life for the sinister shackle of screen time. You don't sense Cambell prefers the old over the new, but both are taken like necessary trains to the same place- one operating locally and the other an express.  Brian Scott Campbell, Dockers, flashe on canvas, 2020, 20"x 16", 2020. Photo courtesy of Freight + Volume.  Brian Scott Campbell, Guiding Light, flashe on canvas, 20" x 16", 2020. Photo courtesy of Freight + Volume. Campbell's work musters another master, being comparable to Philip Guston's late-career cartoon painting. Guston, like Hartley, had a change of style, inspired by his own homecoming and renewal. Roy Oxlade wrote of the iconic painter's final transformation of artistic alphabet, "If it is to live, language must constantly be renewed; the present depends on the past, but it is doomed to leave it.." Often appearing in Guston grey, Campbell canvases can keenly balance staying and leaving. They are postcards from the places where Guston's characters grew up, are animated ashes of rebirth, and are photo negatives of repatriation. A Brian Scott Campbell painting can feel like the last card dealt to the genre of landscape painting. Once dealt, much like a river card, it has the potential to change the way you see everything else in your hand.  Brian Scott Campbell, Jimmy's Hideaway, flashe on canvas, 20" x 16", 2019. Photo courtesy of Freight + Volume.  Brian Scott Campbell, Gone, flashe on canvas, 20" x 16". Photo courtesy of Freight + Volume. T.S Eliot wrote to passengers on a similar journey. "You who think you are voyaging" He warned, "you are not those who saw the harbor receding or those who will disembark." As if to say all binary thinking belittles the ones who always belonged. You can not return because you are not the one who left home and we are never really separate from the whole. This truth is the timelessness found in a work by Brian Scott Campbell. Also infused is the idea that once we fully appreciate this life, so starts the clock measuring the moments to the next. After we pass through that veil, on the blank canvas of the other side won't be a something, but everything.
Home and Garden: 100-page full-color exhibition artist book featuring works by Brian Scott Campbell. Published by Arts+Leisure in 2020. Edition of 100. Photo courtesy of Freight + Volume. Coda: Being an art book junkie, I was always frustrated by publications on amazing painters with only black and white reproductions. For a long time, the only way outside a museum to see work (before the internet) by artists like Soutine, Avery or Ryder was in books like that. Try making sense of a Milton Avery painting in only two tones, it's like eating soup with a knife. But compare a work by Campbell composed in black and white with an older Marsden Hartley reproduction, like seen below. The two get along like littermates, ask us to stare longer, work harder, stay late if necessary, to get at their bold italic truth. Like newspaper headlines, both also beckon with immediacy, gut and gravity. This is the first ripple in the artist's pond of secret source and the opening words of a candid conversation by the product of painting itself.  Campbell (left) and Hartley side by side: "the two get along like littermates." You can find more Brian Scott Campbell.... at http://brianscottcampbell.com/ on Instagram @brianscottcampbell at http://www.soniadutton.com/ at https://davidsheltongallery.com/artists/detail/brian_scott_campbell do a google search and you'll find even more  Brian Scott Campbell, Melon, flashe on canvas, 20" x 16".
Photo courtesy of Freight + Volume. 12/20/2020 0 Comments #4: 12/20/2020Finding Our Way Through the Landscapes of Joan Nelson by Benjamin Terrell  Joan Nelson, Untitled, 2019-20, spray enamel, acrylic ink and marker on acrylic sheet 24h x 24w in Photo courtesy of Adams and Ollman. All eyes on Portland protests has turned the city into an art gallery of commentary, and if the blocks and blocks of boarded windows are her newest creation, the city is a particularly prolific artist. Adams and Ollman gallery fear not, the serene smolder of the imaginary landscapes of Joan Nelson (on display there until Dec. 19) has become the city's sacred stained glass. Never has something so harmonious and holy begged to be plugged in like Nelson's electric plexiglass paintings. Having previously painted on wood, it's as if the artist shed surface for shimmer, perhaps next seen on foil as maps and manuscripts to faraway lands. Who among the locked-down and housebound hasn't evolved into an escapist or a would-be sailor of anywhere but home?  Joan Nelson, Untitled, 2020, spray enamel, acrylic ink, marker and burnt sugar on acrylic sheet 20h x 20w in Photo courtesy of Adams and Ollman. Our current digital home life is a life without landscape and is therefore a life without a place for our authentic selves to roam. In traditional landscape painting, self (most always male) is often at center. Joan Nelson's work is intriguing and opposite - she paints landscapes taking place before and after "us" and uses reverence to restore agency to her subjects. In doing so, the artist puts the "m" back into what IMAX reduced to "-other earth." If her work is feminist, it is because she sets landscape free from ownership and paints past a masculine need to conquer. Picture Casper David Friedrich forgetting figure or cross, only to focus solely on the steam off a rock formation or how an unanticipated pink light from an unnamable source suspends the urge to capture in exchange for jaw dropping awe.  "...an unanticipated pink light from an unnamable source suspends the urge to capture in exchange for jaw dropping awe." Joan Nelson, Untitled, 2018, spray enamel and acrylic ink on acrylic sheet 12h x 12w in Photo courtesy of Adams and Ollman.  Joan Nelson, Untitled, 2019-20, spray enamel and acrylic ink on acrylic sheet 24h x 24w in Photo courtesy of Adams and Ollman. Sometimes a work by Nelson borrows directly from art history, including details from famous paintings excluded from their original context. The artist even reuses her own imagery. The mystery is how she sews important and incidental parts into a seamless whole so well, like a poem or an ode made from only one word. In her work, volcanoes foam and glow, meteors swish and swoon, rainbows aren't reluctant and pure awareness lights up the resplendent unknown. For her show, the plexiglass paintings are placed on ledges, and if you are lucky enough to get to see their opulent other side, then there are further codes to be cracked. Painted, scraped, and drawn in with unusual materials like glitter, wax and sealant, expressive colors and shapes reveal a backside becoming a switchboard to the divine.  "In her work, volcanoes foam and glow, meteors swish and swoon, rainbows aren't reluctant and pure awareness lights up the resplendent unknown." Joan Nelson, Untitled, 2020, spray enamel, acrylic ink and marker on acrylic sheet 24h x 24w in Photo courtesy of Adams and Ollman. What I admire most about Nelson's work is the same thing that I find intriguing about classical Indian satellite radio. Rapturous meditations intimately heard from afar remain nameless (by language barrier over the airwaves) and therefore, ask for all your attention, like a divine secret spoken only once. Also, like radio sounds from a distant continent, details and passages emerge like finding a feather but not the bird. What is known and not known is made more mysterious and resplendent by the detail. Both audio and the artist's visual are symphonic palaces of the in-between. Both are the "thin places" of creativity, where the curtain that conceals us from everything eternal is at its most transparent.  Joan Nelson, Untitled, 2020, spray enamel and acrylic ink and marker on acrylic sheet 20h x 20w in Photo courtesy of Adams and Ollman. We are nostalgic for what cannot be named or can never be known, and for Nelson that quest is center stage. Her artistic visions are like biblical prequels or like discovering the planet's Lonely Planet guide or, imagine if you can, a Jules Verne book as a coy pond. To reimagine a landscape without us is to look away from what we think is the real world. To make great art from that expression is to gaze higher, discard everything not needed in prayer, empty ourselves out and find patterns in our transformation. If we choose to look at the world through Nelson's creative spiritual lens, past training and limitations, a coherent world is restored in which nature remains an ally and mystery is always greater than knowledge.  Joan Nelson, Untitled, 2020, spray enamel and acrylic ink and marker on acrylic sheet 24h x 24w in Photo courtesy of Adams and Ollman. New Works: Joan Nelson was on display at Adams and Ollman (December, 2020). Coda: Nelson told me about a trip she took from New York to Oregon to visit her parents on the coast. After flying into Portland, she began driving in the opposite direction of her destination because the GPS of the car had dropped and reset. It wasn't until reaching the gorge that separates Washington and Oregon that she realized the error and rerouted. But by then, Nelson explained, the mistake had led to discoveries of magnificent and unexpected new landscapes. Embracing the misstep and continuing on an unknown path, the artist was lead on a different journey around the state, that was both "perfect and beautiful." The road trip story is also a perfect analogy for how the artist approaches a new painting.
The Columbia River Gorge that divides Oregon and Washington.
Photos by David Schell 11/19/2020 0 Comments #3: 11/19/2020The Semi-Finalist is celebrating artist and writer Benjamin Terrell's first column under the heading "Notes of Persistent Awe." To kick things off he wrote about the poetic, understated work of Lois Dodd that was up at Adams and Ollman last month. Terrell will be the primary writer for "Notes of Persistent Awe" and will contribute to it on a monthly basis. You can also find his writing in the Eugene Register Guard (Eugene, Oregon). Lois Dodd By Benjamin Terrell  "There is artistic evidence of egoless allowance in the intimate paintings of Dodd." Lois Dodd, Tree + Flowers, 2009, oil on masonite, 12" x 19 1/2" Photo courtesy of Adams and Ollman. While viewing an exhibition of paintings by Lois Dodd at Adams and Ollman gallery in Portland, I was reminded of the 2016 Japanese film, Sweet Bean. In the film, director Naomi Kawase sums up existence as this, "We are born into this world to see and to listen to it. Since that is the case, we don't have to become someone. We have, each of us, meaning to our life." There is artistic evidence of egoless allowance in the intimate paintings of Dodd. The artist, now in her nineties, has quietly painted through many major artistic movements, content to observe and intuit the seasons surrounding her home in Maine. In her work, expansiveness is acceptance of life rather than the contraction of trying to control it. That idea absorbed into an unusual year full of uncontrollable events is as welcome as flowers seen blooming in a fire ravaged landscape.  Lois Dodd, Japanese Red Maple in October, 1986, oil on masonite, 20" x 13" Photo courtesy of Adams and Ollman. In a work by Dodd: The rich orange red of an October maple pictured through the four pains of a window appear geometric, shapes evenly exchange foreground for back like a living chapel's stained-glass, reluctant to solidify. (Japanese Red Maple in October, 1986)  Lois Dodd, Queen Anne's Lace, 2012, oil on panel, 11" x 11" Photo courtesy of Adams and Ollman. A wildflower often considered a weed, a plethora of Queen Anne's lace forms a symphonic spiral when seen from above. For that moment we have the vantage point of a butterfly or the sky. (Queen Anne's Lace, 2012)  Lois Dodd, Pink Geranium + Window Lock + Ochre Tree, 2011, oil on masonite, 15 3//4" x 10" Photo courtesy of Adams and Ollman. A small indoor bloom is partially seen, separated by a window through which we view a large tree, its branches abstracted and reaching out of the picture as if to say a cut flower in a vase speaks to our own perishability as an entire tree expands to a limitless sky. (Pink Geranium + Window Lock + Ochre Tree, 2011)  Sharif Farrag, Watermelon Warthog Jug (foreground), 2020, glazed porcelain, 13"h x 10"w x 11"d Photo courtesy of Adams and Ollman. Another show featuring Dodd at Parts and Labor in Beacon, New York pairs her work with the imaginary and fantastical landscapes of Shara Hughes. Both galleries pair Dodd with younger artists, in Portland with the animated and whimsical vessels of Sharif Farrag. The contemplative nature of Dodd's work becomes more evident in these pairings. Dodd's work is grounded and grounding. By abstracting line and shape we are kept from focusing on specifics; she reminds us that nature exists before our ability to name it. To paint landscapes en plein air as Dodd does is to look beyond limitation of self, is to bottle awe at its source and is the closest we can come to conversing with creation. Such direct perception is a privilege possible with heart, not head, and is a way to look past the contradictions of a world seemingly on hold. Mary Oliver describes the act and the landscape of gratitude in her poem, Mindful: "...to lose myself inside this soft world- to instruct myself over and over in joy, and acclamation."  Lois Dodd, Lily Buds, 2007, oil on masonite, 19 1/8" x 11" Photo courtesy of Adams and Ollman.  Sharif Farrag, Skarhead VCR Jug, 2020, 8 1/2"h x 6"w x 6"d Photo courtesy of Adams and Ollman. Lois Dodd's and Sharif Farrag's work at Adams and Ollman was on display from September 12- October 31, 2020 and can be seen at adamsandollman.com
10/9/2020 0 Comments #2: 10/09/2020Artist and writer Benjamin Terrell recently wrote a column that touches on fire, regeneration, and the works of John Dilg, Helen Mirra, and Harold Ancart. You can also find this and other columns by Terrell in the Eugene Register Guard. you can't be afraid to leave it all behind |
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Installation shots from The National Exemplar.
The Paintings of John Dilg and the textiles of Helen Mirra at the National Exemplar in Iowa City are an excellent example of two things made more mystical when seen together. Dilg's small canvases shimmer in a mist of threadlike brushstrokes and describe spare dream states with water, wolves, lone figures, and open skies. The subject of his work isn't the objects that occupy the paintings but the moment in time itself, always a symposium of stillness in soft grey greens and powder blue hues. Helen Mirra's similarly sized pieces in silk and linen aren't pictorial but appear painterly, like trees and reeds seen through smoke or rain. They are poetry to Dilg's prose.
Helen Mirra, Late May, early June, Trisha Brown Stanley Brouwn, 2017,
linen, silk, 21 3/8" x 8 5/8"
Photo courtesy of The National Exemplar
linen, silk, 21 3/8" x 8 5/8"
Photo courtesy of The National Exemplar
In Dilg's world a rock formation or the bark of a birch tree has an undisclosed order, is symmetrical and both grand and intimate. His leaving or letting go of detail is a reverent pairing down like the cautious steps of a hunter who respects what he sets out to capture. Similarly, traces of the human hand in Mirra's tapestries are like tracks in fresh snow and like footprints, point to tactile paths of process and place also indicated by titles like "Pale tying bale edging" and "Late May early June, Trisha Brown Stanley Brown 2017".
"...traces of the human hand in Mirra's tapestries are like tracks in fresh snow..."
Helen Mirra, Pale tying bale edging, 2016, linen, 11 1/4" x 12 1/8"
Photo courtesy of The National Exemplar
Helen Mirra, Pale tying bale edging, 2016, linen, 11 1/4" x 12 1/8"
Photo courtesy of The National Exemplar
Installation shots from The National Exemplar.
An advocate for the energy of the in-between, the art of Harold Ancart, at David Zwirner gallery in New York, is abundantly incendiary in style and subject. An Ancart painting is often an image of something hot or cold, like a giant iceberg or an oversized head of a match ready to be struck. Orange orbs, pale pink moons and rainbow hued leaves all are found flickering over black and white backgrounds. Color versus its vast black opposite, the picture plane as meeting place for old and new, a rest stop between tradition and its trajectory.
"Ancart often pick-pockets potentiality from the dormant and undisturbed."
Harold Ancart, Untitled, 2020.
© Harold Ancart / SABAM, Brussels
Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner
Harold Ancart, Untitled, 2020.
© Harold Ancart / SABAM, Brussels
Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner
For the current show the artist paints trees seen close up, often between branch or bloom or as neither trunk nor top but as origins of transformation. There is a similarity between his old and new paintings. A tree trunk is a matchstick to the flame of its fruit or imagined as a green mushroom cloud over a funnel of forest organically ignited. Ancart often pick-pockets potentiality from the dormant and undisturbed. The inclusion of a miniature flat square concrete pool sculpture ( like an empty canvas on its back, its "water" blue and blank) would seem to suggest stillness. For Ancart, it implies the unlimited capacity of art itself.
Harold Ancart, Untitled, 2020.
© Harold Ancart / SABAM, Brussels
Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner
© Harold Ancart / SABAM, Brussels
Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner
Harold Ancart, Untitled, 2020.
© Harold Ancart / SABAM, Brussels
Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner
© Harold Ancart / SABAM, Brussels
Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner
Not much more than a year ago, at 4:13pm (as the cell phone photo tells me) my wife and I sat outside the Cathedral of Notre Dame. Perhaps the act or action that started a fire that consumed much of the church was just then happening. We heard the sirens only hours later when napping back in our hotel a mile away. It occurred to me when walking back toward the billowing smoke, that the cloud (colored yellow and smelling of dense wood) was hundreds of years of history and art ignited and imbued by equal years of prayer. While the prayers for survival aren't always granted, the embers of imagination fanned by artistic intent always create something reassuring and new.
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Ben's wife Claudia at 4:13 and Notre Dame a few hours later.
Photos courtesy of Benjamin Terrell.
Photos courtesy of Benjamin Terrell.
In the wake of the recent Holiday Farm fire near Eugene, Oregon.
Photo courtesy of Benjamin Terrell.
Photo courtesy of Benjamin Terrell.
The art of John Dilg and Helen Mirra can be seen at the National Exemplar's website, thenationalexemplar.squarespace.com. The work of Harold Ancart is on display at David Zwirner gallery in New York city until October 17th.
Press release from the National Exemplar:
AUGUST 1 - SEPTEMBER 20, 2020
John Dilg has a sense of awe for the natural world, and Helen Mirra has no sense of separation with it. Their artworks resonate through literal and figurative means, choice of media, color and associative titling. Helen Mirra weaves abstract tapestries with linen and silk, material indications of physical activity, registering where she is and how it feels. John Dilg paints invented landscapes featuring what he calls essential forms, drawing on memory and tonality to emphasize stillness and the continuum of time.
Helen Mirra, b. 1970, Rochester, New York, lives in Muir Beach, California.
John Dilg, b. 1945, Evanston, Illinois, lives in Iowa City, Iowa.
AUGUST 1 - SEPTEMBER 20, 2020
John Dilg has a sense of awe for the natural world, and Helen Mirra has no sense of separation with it. Their artworks resonate through literal and figurative means, choice of media, color and associative titling. Helen Mirra weaves abstract tapestries with linen and silk, material indications of physical activity, registering where she is and how it feels. John Dilg paints invented landscapes featuring what he calls essential forms, drawing on memory and tonality to emphasize stillness and the continuum of time.
Helen Mirra, b. 1970, Rochester, New York, lives in Muir Beach, California.
John Dilg, b. 1945, Evanston, Illinois, lives in Iowa City, Iowa.
Benjamin Terrell's artwork can be found on his Instagram page @moseswaits and in The Semi-Finalist's post "Here and There, Mostly There." Terrell has also written about about Matthew Wong, Kwang Young Chun, and others for a column in the Register-Guard (Eugene, Oregon) called Cafe 541. Terrell lives up the McKenzie River, not far from Eugene, Oregon.
9/6/2020 0 Comments
#1: 9/6/2020
Artist and writer Benjamin Terrell recently wrote about the enigmatic work of Kevin Mcnamee-Tweed. He describes his piece as "...a COVID column written without a gallery visit, inspired by a new book and Instagram."
how to file the tiles of kevin mcnamee-tweed
by benjamin terrell
Walk, 2018, glazed ceramic, 6 x 6 inches (15.2 x 15.2 cm)
photo courtesy of Steven Turner Gallery
photo courtesy of Steven Turner Gallery
In art school I worked in the library and it was my job to put things away. I spent whole days cataloging art books big/small, old/new, all different styles and genres from antiquity to avant-garde. There was a room we all wanted to eventually work in where you could see and, in white gloves, could touch and turn the pages (for library patrons) of the actual sketchbooks of world-famous artists like Van Gogh or Cezanne.
We see so much imagery now on iPhones and computer screens without giving thought to how we catalog it or if and where in the brain we "digest" the information into fact or fiction. For me, the art of Kevin Mcnamee-Tweed is the perfect crossroads to stop and think about "thinking", to wash and hang dry memories big or small, or to take random fact, weigh and fillet it like the fish that could feed or be thrown back from the boat.
Turning the pages of KMT
1. I grew up thinking it was possible to talk to a friend if you each held an empty can attached by string. I remember thinking computers needed to be giant, even room size, like I saw them in the Hall Of Justice on the cartoon, "Super Friends." I also remember being told people died purposely sitting in their own bathtubs with plugged in radios. These days I stop short of believing everything I hear, comfortable in the middle ground between “maybe so" and "perhaps."
2. As a child (in the seventies), I often went with my father to the newspaper office where he worked. Every desk had a large ashtray and a giant typewriter. The latter looked to me like a sleek sewing machine for ideas. Years later, when my father called me to tell me he was dying, he borrowed a phrase from early Bugs Bunny to broach the subject. "It's curtains for me Rocky," he said.
2. As a child (in the seventies), I often went with my father to the newspaper office where he worked. Every desk had a large ashtray and a giant typewriter. The latter looked to me like a sleek sewing machine for ideas. Years later, when my father called me to tell me he was dying, he borrowed a phrase from early Bugs Bunny to broach the subject. "It's curtains for me Rocky," he said.
Wave Cloud, 2019 Glazed ceramic 6 x 4 3/4 inches (15.2 x 12.1 cm)
photo courtesy of Steven Turner Gallery
photo courtesy of Steven Turner Gallery
3. My pockets use to be full of post-it notes, often origins of creative ideas. But sometimes they were stressful reminders, like "pay bill" or information lost of context, details dictated from other people or inspirations unfollowed. Now I write ideas on the "notes" app of an iPhone. Funny thing, I have a drawer of forgotten things like little tools, light bulbs, keys, but also a collection of outdated phones full of notes, photos, and things of irretrievable purpose.
4. I lost the instructions to most early pc related gadgets but still have a box of miscellaneous parts and pieces. Technology moved so fast and the things I wanted to do had been slow, like put my albums on disc or record my own podcast of old country music I've collected. There was a gap or gasp between analog and digital, like a cleansing of everything earthly, (plus the boxes were huge and the content small).
5. I grew up in the era of record shops and stereo stores and remember when a new section appeared for "personal and portable." Music prior to then had required time, had weight and a tactile nature but then, suddenly it seemed possible to carry yourself around with yourself.
Just think, before then it was possible to walk around all alone.
4. I lost the instructions to most early pc related gadgets but still have a box of miscellaneous parts and pieces. Technology moved so fast and the things I wanted to do had been slow, like put my albums on disc or record my own podcast of old country music I've collected. There was a gap or gasp between analog and digital, like a cleansing of everything earthly, (plus the boxes were huge and the content small).
5. I grew up in the era of record shops and stereo stores and remember when a new section appeared for "personal and portable." Music prior to then had required time, had weight and a tactile nature but then, suddenly it seemed possible to carry yourself around with yourself.
Just think, before then it was possible to walk around all alone.
Walk, 2018 Glazed ceramic 10 1/4 x 9 1/4 inches (26 x 23.5 cm)
photo courtesy of Steven Turner Gallery
photo courtesy of Steven Turner Gallery
6. The first ceramic painting of Kevin Mcnamee-Tweed I saw was, "Walk", where a cartoon hand strolls ocean side, its two mid fingers as feet, outer two as arms behind the "back" of the hand and the pinkie pointing out. Pointing out as if to say, onward to the land where this is normal or out as if acknowledging another walking hand or perhaps a sign of pseudo culture covering up some other intent.
7. KMT's subjects on odd shaped slabs of clay (drawn into and painted with glazes) are weighty bygone bubbles of thoughts deep and light. The ideas are often occurrences, like people finding or losing themselves in states of repose, are also independent from the shapes they live on, feeling like significant but forgotten torn out newspaper articles or tops of cereal boxes.
8. KMT makes many references to candlelight. Candlelight, the precursor of the lightbulb, as the universal symbol of sudden epiphany or idea. Often new ideas are a patchwork of old problems on a sharp stick of truth. With wit as a wick, taking in a work by Mcnamee-Tweed can be a slow glow until the artists intent arrives like a sneeze during a punchline.
9. Like puzzle pieces to a mosaic of lost limericks, sometimes insightful clues come in the artist's groupings. 'Shrooms, keys, and butterflies painted together are all things capable of unlocking and becoming. Lamps, stars, and potion bottles collected, but scattered around a tabletop offer illumination and/or the opportunity "to level up", like in a video game.
7. KMT's subjects on odd shaped slabs of clay (drawn into and painted with glazes) are weighty bygone bubbles of thoughts deep and light. The ideas are often occurrences, like people finding or losing themselves in states of repose, are also independent from the shapes they live on, feeling like significant but forgotten torn out newspaper articles or tops of cereal boxes.
8. KMT makes many references to candlelight. Candlelight, the precursor of the lightbulb, as the universal symbol of sudden epiphany or idea. Often new ideas are a patchwork of old problems on a sharp stick of truth. With wit as a wick, taking in a work by Mcnamee-Tweed can be a slow glow until the artists intent arrives like a sneeze during a punchline.
9. Like puzzle pieces to a mosaic of lost limericks, sometimes insightful clues come in the artist's groupings. 'Shrooms, keys, and butterflies painted together are all things capable of unlocking and becoming. Lamps, stars, and potion bottles collected, but scattered around a tabletop offer illumination and/or the opportunity "to level up", like in a video game.
Selfing Unself, 2019 Glazed ceramic 8 3/4 x 6 3/4 inches (22.2 x 17.1 cm)
photo courtesy of Steven Turner Gallery
photo courtesy of Steven Turner Gallery
10. If there were a historical jump rope, with "dial up" on one end and scrolling, feeds and tweets on the other.. and one began to jump, eventually the sky would rain KMT tiles like loose change out a ripped pocket, down a trouser leg, and those totems would tell us everything subtle and missing in an age of thicker phone screens and thinner magazines.
11. Civilizations fall and artists are employed to write the history, to remind future us that the joke was always on us and there are a million ways to retell it, write it in stone, folded up and passed in class or drawn and painted in clay like those of KMT. To look away is to forget: a bubble blown is blown to pop, and everything else is water out the boutonniere.
11. Civilizations fall and artists are employed to write the history, to remind future us that the joke was always on us and there are a million ways to retell it, write it in stone, folded up and passed in class or drawn and painted in clay like those of KMT. To look away is to forget: a bubble blown is blown to pop, and everything else is water out the boutonniere.
Painter, 2019 Glazed ceramic 4 1/2 x 6 1/2 inches (11.4 x 16.5 cm)
photo courtesy of Steven Turner Gallery
photo courtesy of Steven Turner Gallery
12. Makers and tool portrayed by KMT: Artist with backward brush paints own beret, artist paints past hole in soul to confront canvas, man chops down tree with a frowny trunk, key, second key, scissors, broken scissors, twisted pencil, hammer hammers too close to the end of the board and nail and it reminds me I was once told....
Blame the hammer but bless the nail, art at last driven, sets the artist's dark passage sail.
Blame the hammer but bless the nail, art at last driven, sets the artist's dark passage sail.
The artwork of Kevin Mcnamee-Tweed is on display at the Steven Turner Gallery July 25-August 29th and can be seen on the artist's Instagram page @cottontweed. Steven Turner Gallery has recently released three books on Mcnamee-Tweed that can be purchased through their bookstore, www.steveturnerbookshop.com
Benjamin Terrell's artwork can be found on his Instagram page @moseswaits and in The Semi-Finalist's post "Here and There, Mostly There." Terrell has also written about Matthew Wong, Kwang Young Chun and others for Cafe 541, a column in the Register-Guard (Eugene, Oregon).
Benjamin Terrell's artwork can be found on his Instagram page @moseswaits and in The Semi-Finalist's post "Here and There, Mostly There." Terrell has also written about Matthew Wong, Kwang Young Chun and others for Cafe 541, a column in the Register-Guard (Eugene, Oregon).