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7/7/2022 0 Comments #12: 7/7/2022My Foolish Boat Leaning- on the Work of Brian Scott Campbell by Benjamin Terrell This column was originally published in When the Trees Touch the Clouds, the catalog for Brian Scott Campbell's show by the same name at Galleria Richter in Rome, Italy (May 24 -July 29, 2022).  Stone Bridge 2020, flashe on canvas, 20" x 16" I recently read about a decommissioned lighthouse for sale off the coast of Oregon. Inactive since the fifties, the building and grounds, built on basalt rock a mile from shore, had been repurposed as a columbarium until it was found the ocean air ate away at the metal urns. The business, long since defunct, only ended up interring the ashes of thirty people. Thirty strangers never knowing, their urns like paintings inverted, both ashes and earth articulated and offered to eternity as its audience. Great art, too, is exhumed and expressed from a place between description and dissolution. Art is the closest thing to continual resurrection, temporarily suspending and recycling everything that will eventually slip away. People also are culminations of everything that came before, we are complex soil for future blooms we will not live to see.  Mellon 2021, flashe on canvas, 20" x 16" Painter Marsden Hartley incorporated figures into his work only in the last six years of his life. Hartley's later years were spent on the coast in Maine where the sea air eroded his previous artistic alphabet, out of which emerged herculean men and drowned sailors. Painted figures brawny as oversized beach rock, blocks of flesh and color so similar to the local landscape even when omitted their presence is felt. A mountain seen again is a mighty being and a stack of beached logs are bodies or even imagine the multiple limbs of an Indian deity expressing its omnipotence. It was important to Hartley that he reimagine his environment on canvas coarsely, to emulate how the ocean reshapes the shore or is meant to feel like the momentum of a lover overtaking the beloved in the act of its expression. Perhaps the artist wished to finally release everything in his lifetime that he could not consume.  Oar 2022, flashe on canvas, 20" x 16" T.S. Eliott described a river as, "a strong brown god," but also imagined, "the river within us" as emptying into a sea that measures time outside of the ability to control it. "The future futureless (where) time stops and time is never ending," seen as a vast open space where shores and separate sides are only of the minds making. In these waters we are great but insignificant buoys swayed only by effort and emotion, not by the sea but self. To view things exclusively from the perspective of the self is to be in, "a drifting boat with slow leakage," far away from the acknowledgement that we are separate from nothing. Ego is our broken oar that makes only small circles in a vast oceanless ocean. Reconciliation comes from recognition of mortal limitation and an equal untapped other side, as imagined in a "hint half guessed, the gift half understood, (that) is incarnation."  Guiding Light 2019, flashe on canvas, 20" x 16" At the center of any important means of expression, like painting, is a creative contradiction. The act of depicting is achieved through essential simplification to make things more relatable. What appears to be the artist orchestrating choices is only one part of a polarity being established, the other half propelled by everything that cannot be expressed or known. Together these opposing forces are a dialogue seen in the most successful works of art, just as similar contrary energies converse between life and death. We call our existence life because of our ability to articulate and document its act while we are in it, but an unknown other side is equally interwoven in every beginning and ending. Through creating and recreating every artist is reenacting one of mortality's greatest acknowledgements- our existence is equal parts life and death and best imagined as the magnetic momentum between both.  Hot Dam 2021, flashe on canvas, 20" x 16" Karl Ove Knausgaard writes about an inevitable literary distance that is present in a painter's process and in the writing process. "All language casts a shadow, and that shadow can more or less be apprehended, but never quite controlled." That shadow is a space both writer and artist must pour themselves into in order to blend to one that takes action. But with every action something else is unshackled and all our disparate voices like urns undone, open to a creative chasm and greater dialogue. That expansive place is similar to the side of the cliff described in the Buddhist Koan about the tiger and the strawberry. In the anecdote a man chased off a cliff by one tiger, faced with another tiger beneath him, chooses to pick and eat a strawberry from a branch that he barely holds. The outcome of his life is inevitable but the opportunities for expression and expansion are the greatest choices exercised.  Garden View 2020, flashe on canvas, 20" x 16" A painting drained of color like imagery reduced to its most basic shapes, as seen in the work of Brian Scott Campbell, is scenery seen one step closer to disappearing. Black and white (and grey or other limited palates) can feel past tense but also suggest other dualities like life and death and endings and beginnings. A painting can also be (to paraphrase a Sufi poem about stories) "like the water you heat for your bath that takes messages between the fire and your skin." It is a middle ground for consuming and concealing forces. The bones of a landscape- branches, a boat's mast and sail, a fence and everything beyond it, is the self further undressed and a realization that the part of us that observes is only the driver of a vehicle from which we must eventually disembark. When we cease to identify with, over interpret and project ourselves through a transient lens, we begin to merge and aid in our own disappearance.  Untitled 1 2020, graphite on found paper, 10h" x 8" Most of my days begin or end with dog walks near the house at a large pond that is mostly drained. You can walk around what was the full pond or explore paths of overgrown vegetation and follow tracks of deer, elk and coyote in the pond's still soft bed. The reeds, trees and grasses are thin, tall and hard to see through and when walking there lately, I search for signs of a coyote cub I believe was recently abandoned by its pack. It occurs to me, the cub was left alone to assert its independence, where as we end our lives reminded of our own dependence. A landscape is always there to encourage us toward embodiment rather than estrangement. It looks back lovingly at us like we look at a painting. With all our strength and limitation, we are the field's favorite flower. We are the only unique bloom that thinks its self separate from the ground from which it grows.  Untitled 1 2021, graphite on found paper, 10" x 8"  Above and below: Installation views of When the Trees Touch the Clouds, Campbell's show at Galleria Richter Fine Art. 24 May – 29 July 2022Rome, Italy   The artist's studio.  Above: Benjamin Terrell (left) visiting Brian Scott Campbell at his home and studio in Denton, Texas. Below: you can order a copy of the catalog for Campbell's show at: info@galleriarichter.com 
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6/12/2022 0 Comments #11: 6/12/2022The Painting is a Sad Song- on the Work of Ben Walker By Benjamin Terrell  Goodbye goodbye it won't be long till we meet again 2021, oil on linen 14" × 18" (35.56 × 45.72 cm) Sad songs are brief, ubiquitous out-breaths lamenting the ephemeral nature of this existence. A good sad song is catchy, cathartic and can stay with you, burrowed into your belief structure, for your whole life. Most memorable are often the ones heard in youth, when we don't yet have the words for complex new emotions and are felt as a witness or wing to lift you from life's first darkness. As you age, the relationship you have with your favorite sad songs both changes- from adult insight- and stays the same- from stored memory and youth's buried yearnings. These brief laments become mirrors and mile markers, both confronting our inevitable adult contradictions and occasionally delivering us to places otherwise unreachable. Often our first truths and initial longings of this existence, sad songs (and the events they were inspired by) are as much about us becoming us as they are about "us before us."  Timekeepers 2022, oil on linen, 16" × 16" (40.64 × 40.64 cm) If it is true, that we are uninterrupted energy having existed before and capable of continuing past the forms where we now find ourselves, then sad songs and first longings are moments when our mortality is first tested. These often powerless and humble places are where we are made aware of the uniqueness of our expressive abilities as well as the limited capacities of our temporality. In adulthood we reach stages of unlearning, where we refute much of the foundation of our earliest beliefs. This too, is an opportunity and acknowledgement, a helpful echo that reminds us- before we created "ourselves", we were created, and those same authors aligned and coaxed us energetically from elsewhere. This life is a brief vantage point where everything monumental and unnamed admires us in our finite and frail placement. Us, the odd ones out amongst all of the mystery and invisibility.  I don't love me anymore 2022, oil on linen, 14" × 18" (35.56 × 45.72 cm) Sometimes a painting is a sad song. Great paintings have been made from joy, triumph and connectedness. But these are our natural (not human) states, whereas sorrow is uniquely of this form. What makes us human is the ability to feel and store physical and psychological pain. Pain can be egoic and grasping, but clean pain is the birth cry of this existence and the articulation of having and losing, letting go. Paintings expressing sadness are attempts at documenting and describing but also the artist mimicking creation itself, to show creation to creation. Poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote about how to explain this world to something not of or beyond this plane, "Tell (it) about the world, not the indescribable; the universe feels with far greater feeling, you're just a beginner. Show (it) some simple thing, something that's really ours, and lives near our hand."  A landscape small 2021, oil on linen, 10" × 12" (25.4 × 30 cm) Rilke writes, "even the groan of sorrow (sometimes) decides to become pure form." Earthly unguarded emotions amaze and impress even the angels as they are expressed ecstatic and transformed from the instrument of our making, be it violin, pen or brush. These hidden places in us are heard and seen when we are able to turn sorrow and praise into a mutual destination. Our early emotional index is our trailhead to wonder because it was forged in a time when what we were prior was equal distance from who we will become. At that time in life, before we were formed by our choices, we have more in common with angels (the unknown) and everything that came before us, than we do with our adult selves or everyone else who will walk with us through our lives.  The columns are all men 2022, oil on linen, 14" × 18" (35.56 × 45.72 cm) These first fields and fertile grounds for initial emergence are locations and destinations of the paintings of Kent (England) artist, Ben Walker. The painter paints a landscape that is equal parts interior emotional space and exterior distant world. Walker depicts it with "...the weight and care of great sadness" (paraphrasing Rilke's Elegies) and is always able to imbue a "...sense that what we're striving for.. was once much nearer.. and knew us in ways that were infinitely tender." Using hazy greens, primary blues and oranges applied so thin and soft that paint appears scrubbed into coarse canvas, Walker's world isn't so much out of focus as it is a reminder of our inability to focus on the world (as it is) in front of us. The artist's most recent work is reduced even further into shapes and spare horizons. These newest rural geometries are both forgotten and familiar, they are lush emptying kingdoms devoid of rulers or reign.  Mother 2021, oil on linen, 14" × 18" (35.56 x 45.72 cm) Walker's painting "Mother" is a dueling foreground- background flip completed in only four colors and about four shapes. Dusty dark blue forms are trees for a minute, then recede behind a rusty orange that goes from background sky to foreground smoke cloud. The image otherwise reads as conventional space from a green bottom ground and the soft floating circle of the moon. Two muted slightly outlined forms sit closest to us as fellow observers, their outlined shapes echoed by a background blue stack setting up a distant longing. A mother is a moon, in her creativity and intuition, and she forever illuminates our darkest places with even in her palest glow.  Playtime (2) 2021, oil on paper In "Playtime (2)," two young inquisitive figures look out from a framed and centered foreground. A half circle, half square shape holds the interest of the closest figure and keeps us blocked from both. Walker uses basic shapes as building blocks or symbols of our earliest ambiguities, like codes created as children make their first associations. The artist's figures are almost always distant, even when central subjects, but are these the first friends you meet or the last people that will see you off? Perhaps they are the subjects of both sides, like author Annie Dillard describes in For The Time Being: "They look about slowly, moving their eyes. They do not speak as trees do not speak. They do seem wise, as though they understood that this is their new world, however strange, was only another shade in a streaming marvel they had known from the beginning."  A castle strong 2021, oil on linen 14" × 18" (35.56 × 45.72 cm) In, "A Castle Strong," a crenellated castle wall confines and keeps the viewer removed from a dark kingdom of hills and horizon. The yellow green of the bottom barrier's hue is similar to the top distant sky so that we are pushed to ponder the olive unknown middle. Are we fortified or forested and left alone in nameless darkness? In this landscape both things are true, safety is undermined by the ambiguity of everything we cannot know. In our lives the small walls we construct around ourselves keep out nothing but take a lifetime to build. In Walker's castle, defensive spaces of the wall are few and off center as if to imply, even our best armor is never enough, we are ruins in reverse destined to surrender to this life's overwhelming nameless campaign. Earlier this year, figures seemed to vacate Walker's work, replaced by long dividing hedges, castle walls and fences. Maybe fences and other things that divide are ladders left on their side and perhaps the population of Walker's world had temporarily ascended out of the frame. In the book Ladder of Monks, written by a Carthusian monk named Guigo 2, contemplation and meditation are rungs of a ladder that "...rests upon the earth, but its top pierces the clouds and touches heavenly secrets." Perhaps the painter himself now reaches meditative ascension by emptying his stage of its actors, leaving a landscape flat and colored primary like the background of a children's show that sits unlit and unused. Painter Chris Orr has also painted figures similarly lost in a landscape, but where an Orr image is dubious science and the folly of earthly exploration, Walker work is transcendent, doubtful and sincere at the same time even as he strays off his own pathways. Now, when Walker occasionally allows figures back in, he catches them in the misty morning of their first arrival or immediately before an emptying out of their deepest departure.  The animal orchestra 2021, oil on linen 10" × 12" (25.4 × 30.48 cm) This life isn't a path but a performance. At the bottom of my hill, there is a new bird that sings a nightly song. Its call begins light, loping and circular in sound but between first and second songs it does something unusual. It fills its belly with air and as the bird inhales it makes a throaty inventory of all the notes of the first song performed at once. Like the bellows of an accordion pulled apart, as if the bird must swallow and digest the entire first part of its call to finish the full song. I have read that birds left in a stable environment will perform the same song for thousands of years. Even though we are rarely prepared to hear it, everything in this existence is always singing at its own loudest awe inducing volume. Life is an unfathomable infinite choir and even in our resistance, life plays us like an instrument and is always pleased by the addition of our reply.  The report 2021, oil on linen 14" × 18" (35.56 × 45.72 cm) coda "The report" We catalog and can remember the first feelings of youth because our brain instinctively builds a mausoleum for memories of our childhood. The beginner's brain with its billions of receptors seeks circuits to create a self to connect to and finds them from stimulation of the senses interpreting the outside world. A future ruler's tomb buried with the treasures of our initial impressions and early exposure to everything. And so the sand and self swells and swaggers and thickens a lens that we will use to look out at the world for the rest of our days. The entire time underneath all the shallow knowing and the scrubby tangled roots of our weighted uncertainty is "the report"- our innermost dossier. To find it, one must excavate in equal parts sorrow and rapture and be prepared to sacrifice something serpentine and worldly. Only then are we granted the lyrics to our most intimate song. You can see more of Ben Walker's work: - on instagram @benwalkerpainter - on instagram @one.wall.gallery - at www.benwalkerart.co.uk/ - on the Sto Lat Gallery website  Above and below: images from Lonely Kings, Ben Walker's solo show at Sto Lat Gallery in Brooklyn, NY.    4/3/2022 0 Comments #10: 04/03/2022Long Afloat on Shipless Oceans- the Paintings of Spencer Shakespeare by Benjamin Terrell Spencer Shakespeare's paintings always feel like the edges of two great things meeting- like monumental cliffs, endless oceans and the wind that whistles between both. Imagine edges as places of origin where something ceases to be one thing and becomes something else and his work opens to other interpretations. Picture energetic fluxes flattening to in-betweens at their thinnest; think of grace first given gravity; visualize earth's final fissure unraveling us into irreversible instability. Shakespeare's subjects are the maritime of possibility and about everything that yearns beyond the limits of its own shore.  Amongst Friends 2021, acrylic on canvas, 9" x 12" “Amongst Friends”- Clouds painted pink are like tall mountains of precipitation. Ochre edges round the entire ocean to a white vessel shape of mostly unpainted canvas. Likewise, to stand and stare at the ocean can be blinding, similar to a bright white page emptying to wordless potential. Spare cobalt lines suggest the harmony and balance of blue and white Chinese porcelain. A pencil line faintly trails between the painting’s bottom and top like an equator incapable of dividing a harmonious whole into halves.  Guardian 2022, acrylic on canvas, 9" x 12" Shakespeare’s thick and thin paint sits on and soaks into the surface of bare canvas like the breath and pause of a poet. Each extreme confronts yet confirms the rhythm of the other for the benefit of a whole, like sea solidifies sand. Author Heiner Bastian compares poetry to the act of painting while paraphrasing the poet Stéphane Mallarmé: “Verse should not be comprised of words, but of intentions, and should destroy all words for the sake of sensation.” Bastian was comparing Mallarmé to the painter Cy Twombly and implies that both could “...detach (a subject) from its direct context...” and in empty white space more freely speak of unwritten possibility. Shakespeare, like Twombly, favors deconstruction over description. Both let language dissolve and break like a wave.  Storm Bird 2022, acrylic on canvas, 9" x 12" “Storm Bird”- What could be ground can also be seen as the gold prongs of a crown, everything important existing above its kingdom where clouds of equal pink and white rise tall like ethereal ship and sail. The white pointed center shape seen in proximity to pink suggests the cloaked identity of a Philip Guston figure. Or perhaps a plank of a white washed picket fence from where Shakespeare's Tom Sawyer coaxes and convinces us there is something simple or easy about painting a seascape. At its most literal, clouds can be monumental dark birds forewarning of future storms. Cy Twombly’s “Poems to the sea,” is a series of 24 sheets of paper covered in markings of pencil, paint and crayon. The modest size paintings, completed at and inspired by the Italian coast, are waves of graphite scribbles, dribbles of white house paint and etched edits of gritty dark gray wax. Twombly’s “poems” are lines, letters and numbers both visible and indecipherable and are neither completely poems nor descriptions of the sea. Rather, they are the making and undoing of both things at once. Spencer Shakespeare is an author of similar verse and both artists can convince us that borders and boundaries are illusions of the ego and are made up mysteries of the sea and self.  Warrior Falconer 2022, acrylic on canvas, 9" x 12" In the paintings “Warrior Falconer” and “Guardian” the sea and shore are rendered confidently chaotic, as if to say balance is death but imbalance is evolution. Extremely textured half shapes and loosely stippled brushstrokes both squeeze and release imagery and energy with the momentum of a maelstrom. The artist wrings out any extra content, as if suggesting that to truly understand the sea one must move beyond mere observation. When standing on a beach at low tide and full sun there are moments when senses fail and you can feel like you are moving when standing still, distances become hard to discern and even sound loses its context. The coast is a theater of illusion and is an ample stage for the ocean’s biggest secret- we are minor interruptions in vastness beyond our comprehension. Taken further, the spirit self is similar to the ocean and land is like the body vessel we over identify with. Spencer Shakespeare’s paintings are divisions dissolving, gateways, as author James Finley describes, “where we assume the stance of least resistance to being overtaken by oneness.” These places are where we momentarily hold the fleeting and things not easily reducible, places where we realize we are the mariners of both sides.  Above: Shakespeare in his studio (Cornwall, UK). Below: Spring Comes Early 2022, acrylic on canvas  Spring Comes Early 2022, acrylic on canvas, 9" x 12" You can see more of Spencer Shakespeare's work...
- on his website - At numerous galleries: Kers Gallery - Amsterdam - NLD Livingstone St Ives - Bristol & St Ives - GBR NBB Gallery - Berlin - DEU One Wall Gallery - Eugene - USA (currently showing with Benjamin Terrell) Jumbled Online - Orange, NSW - AUS -On Instagram @spencershakespeare "Long Afloat on Shipless Oceans" is from "Song to the Siren" by Tim Buckley. 3/7/2022 0 Comments #9: 03/08/2022Cleaning Coins With Ashes Benjamin Terrell on Dan Gluibizzi  Forty-eight Kisses 2019, watercolor, acrylic and colored pencil on paper, 50" x 42" Dan Gluibizzi's group portraits are often the expressions of two of the greatest themes in art- the nude body and the kiss. Flowers, one of art histories other most familiar themes, are somewhat present, too; Dan's colorful figurative arrangements can feel like human bouquets in various forms of spiraling and blossoming. But these are people that bloom in a digital landscape, and for every group they suggest they could be considered a part of three others. Bodies shown radiant and repeated seem to imply infinity, but are these figures engaged in expansive expression or are they depictions of us erasing us? Technology has a way of reducing the participant to a vapor trail of its participation. And there is something beautiful yet sad about imagining us wiping ourselves off of our own chalkboard.  Together We Follow watercolor, acrylic and colored pencil on paper, 45" x 112" Archetypes acting out the earliest stages of choice and expression, honeycombs of initial impulse: We all wore headphones, they were our headshots, I too touched my face. We were naked, they all sat the same, I was both exposed and embraced. The composer Arvo Part said, "Coronavirus has shown us in a painful way that humanity is a single organism and human existence is possible only in relation to other human beings." The humans that inhabit the work of Gluibizzi appear to be separately searching and self-aware, but also seem to consistently relate and reunite like a socially structured mandala. And like a mandala, Dan's unspoken order can give way to disintegration, reintegration and ultimately reflect a radiant viewpoint of many into one to one into many. Imagine a mandala as an iPhone app or even as the cinematic square perspective typically seen in an Edward Hopper painting. In Hopper's world people are lost and longing in a rapidly expanding world. In Dan's work there is similar searching, but in an opposite, connected yet constricted digital world devoid of any landscape.  Perhaps an artist is always painting the same picture, not necessarily repeating but increasing and always adding occupants to an incomplete other world. To imagine all of Dan's groupings existing all at once could be like rushing on the field after an epic football game. To be center field in this life is to fully appreciate the unlimited choice and consequence of an unending conversation. As an artist's audience we are also inevitable participants and objects of interaction exercising infinite options between urge and instinct. To see yourself in a particular person in a painting by Dan is to let a domino fall to identify with every figure he has painted.
The people in Dan's paintings have round Tintin eyes, but unlike the cartoon character these are inkless empty orbs that belong not to explorers, but to inland inhabitants echoing the animated movie Fantastic Planet. Are they then the oppressors or the heroes of the 1973 film (called Oms) who were oppressed? Perhaps like us, living on a planet we detach from yet depend on, they are both. Charles de Gaulle said that we, like Tintin, 'are the little ones who don't let themselves be fooled by the big ones." In an era where we are simultaneously victim and captor, it's fitting and refreshing to see that Dan's work never really divides us into an "other." Dan Gluibizzi eyes are coins cleaned with ashes and to look out from them is to watch a world wither through a digital device.  Fifteen at Nine-thirty 2021, watercolor, acrylic and colored pencil on paper, 40" x 34" Even the titles of Gluibizzi's works read like poems, separate and searching and relating and reuniting: "Couple at night," "Couple and shadow," "Three at night," "Couple circle," "Screen shot," "Six in the sun," "Eight couples kissing,""Kissing tree," "Saturn kisses," "Saturated April," "Swipe style," "Together we follow," "Thirty-four heads," "Twelve in line," "Eleven futures," "Out of phase," "Opened jar," "In orbit." The Gestalt Theory of perception says that we make sense of our world by seeing separate and distinct elements and viewing them as a unified whole. Dan's figures are anonymous and are seen without room to roam, and those simplifications lead the viewer to quickly assume their similarities, stories, and identities. Social media too, is a countless series of figure-ground flips. What appears central and important one moment recedes and dissolves in the next, pulsing and pulling us between real time and screen time. But blankness between Dan's figures can also feel literary, like the necessary bareness of a book's margins or the empty page after a short poem. An online equivalent is the uninhabitable empty space where ego erases and auto populates.  Citrine 2021, watercolor, acrylic and colored pencil on paper, 24" x 20" A sheet of stamps is actually twenty different destinations, a portrait of ourselves can be comprised of our last twenty-five "likes," the twelve closest cars to you in traffic may imply a common direction but actually are all random, unknown destinations. Picture the invisible path of a virus spreading, imagine online consensus as a mysterious single snowflake's pattern. All are visualizations of random expansions and contractions of group multiplicity. Singularity by definition is one but also the point at which something becomes infinite. In addition, it refers to dramatic shifts in thinking, the great gaps between what can be understood from within the momentum of our finite participation. Are we the liberators of our own unlimited imagination or are we the hand that pulls the technological string of our own inevitable unraveling? Dan Gluibizzi catches us in the mirror of our contemplation, in the places we vulnerably first appear and decide. He paints the places where we are first named, the awkward unknown areas where we identify as together and alone.  The author (left) and the artist. I visited Dan's studio and noticed immediately that he was playing the music of Steve Reich. The composer's music is known for its use of "repetitive figures" and swirling compositions that open and flow as they are created in a process called "phrase shifting." I owned a cassette of Reich's "Different Trains" as a teenager. In that work, speech is used as a source and origin for melody, mirrored by instruments and sounds of trains as they travel in the US and in Europe during the second world war. Reich, using the voices of Holocaust survivors and historians as a musical narrative, imagines our destinies as potentially interchangeable. "Different Trains" is a perfect counterpoint to the painting of Gluibizzi. Both employ people as repeating vehicles that deliver us -sometimes forcefully and other times gracefully- to our unknown fates.
10/21/2021 0 Comments #8: 10/21/2021Mark Beldan by Benjamin Terrell Lately it seems that just as something we lit stops smoking, the planet scratches an itch and sends us something dark, different and in need of figuring out. One day it's a new viral strain, the next another symptom of our neglect. The sun, red in the morning, means the sky will be orange in the afternoon. There is a kind of music made from us acting like the center of everything and the universe reminding us we are not. We are like the world's worst opening act who refuse to leave the stage gracefully. But humans keep being born because we remember liking it here. Increasingly, our lives are lived mostly in our heads and in front of home screens. The "outside" has become like a twice a year time share that we visit only when everything is exactly to our liking. Our skill, the ability to store memories and to be limited or liberated by them, is a human's eternal awkward dance move and I suspect is the source of at least half of the greatest art ever made.  Strand Street 2021, gouache on paper, 14 x 17 cm (about 5 1/2" x 6 3/4") photo courtesy of the artist The mind is a house to our identities and preferences, just like our homes are where we grow, make memories, and first emerge to meet the world. Both are places where something fixed meets something fluid and in what feels like an increasingly unstable world, we grow more reliant on the stability of what we call home. Sometime a house is a head. Imagine- windows look out like eyes, the door centered is a nose, and picture a mouth below the earth as a kind of countenance and grounding. Humans, however, romanticize being less grounded, disconnecting and taking flight. Most birds don't romanticize flight like we do- for them it is a way of being. Rather, they are fascinated by walking, many only able to do small amounts of it at a time. In their nests at night, they dream of what it would be like to be more firmly planted on the ground. For those birds, the earth is intriguing and is, like poet Robert Creely writes, "..the bottom of the sky."  Factory Lane 2021, gouache on paper, 14 x 17 cm (about 5 1/2" x 6 3/4") photo courtesy of the artist Walking into a room of artist Mark Beldan's paintings of houses could feel like a partially transformed butterfly looking back too soon at its cocoon. But his images, opulent and abstracted of detail, are necessary repeating mantras and modest reminders of how thin the veil is that separates us from everything we can't control. Mark's houses and buildings are painted on paper, are cropped center stage and although essentially anonymous, both blur and balance mystery with something familiar and universal. These are habitats that will house body and mind long after the viewer's brief existence between space and what we call self. Once confronted with our own shell we may discover we belong to neither surf nor sand.  Laurel Street, Haggerston 2021, gouache on paper, 14 x 16 cm (about 5.5" x 6 1/4") photo courtesy of the artist I have read that after twenty-six years of painting countless variations of colorful squares within squares, Josef Albers thought the last image of his series, "Homage to the Square" was "...reminiscent of terrestrial reality and its place in the cosmos." Mark Beldan's houses are natural neighbors to Albers's homages, but where the color climates of the latter creates movement, in the former they distill stillness. For Albers, shapes are actors and color combinations create performances; for Beldan, color conceals and shapes like doors and windows keep out action or availability. Albers' incantations invoke the external universe while Beldan's buildings vibrate and evoke something deep within. Beldan's houses are like hard drives holding the past, present and all the potential parallels between.
Josef Albers: Homage to the Square Author Kenya Hara, writing about the color white, notes that the color contains both temporal and spatial principals and is "all color" and "no color" at the same time. Beldan pairs bright harmonic hues that exist in a comparable dissolving space. Like the author's version of white, Beldan's color combinations contain a "latent possibility of transformation." Hara also writes, "the role that paper plays in our life is being transformed by the growth of electronic media." Beldan's houses are painted on handmade paper the colors of a vibrant fall. His choice of material feels like the last leaves on the tree that is the “Gutenberg galaxy” signifying cycles of ending and beginning.  The doorway to Papeterie Saint-Armand in Montréal, Québec, where Beldan sources his paper: http://www.st-armand.com/index.php Poet Davis Whyte writes that, "memory makes the now fully inhabitable.' According to Whyte, "all epochs live and breathe in parallels" as if to say, time is a brick and memory a porous mortar to the house of our shared histories and potentials. In Beldan's Laurel Street Haggerston, a building of orange red recedes into a vibrant pink background blurring the threshold of then and now. Looking closer, connecting houses repeated -but only partially seen- seem to imply infinity, especially if you imagine every face that ever looked out of each of the building's seven windows. Mountain Road depicts a spring green house of some age glowing in the middle of a gold green surrounding. A modest house with a chimney on either end speaks to how we have historically inhabited spaces. Seeing Beldan's paintings here in Oregon reminds me, after last year's devastating fires, of seeing chimneys without houses and, most currently, cities of tents under overpasses and along sidewalks.  Initial phases of Beldan's process. An interesting addition to the houses of Beldan's show, "Brick and mortar," is the painting Radio Tower. In the picture, an odd, orange, two toned turret both blends into a crimson background and casts a shadow from its second story balcony. The structure retreats and floats in both form and function, radio being the antiquated connective precursor to the internet. The tower, monument and marker to its own obsolescence, brings to mind every forgotten and outdated devise once relied on for our connection. Technology, too, is an ephemeral shell we always grow out of. Paintings of houses can be like the sounds of that shell; both are containers of the bandwidth of our humanity and both are reminders that we were here.  Radio Tower 2021, gouache on paper, 19 x 14 cm (about 7 1/2" x 5 1/2") photo courtesy of the artist  Mount Pleasant 2021, gouache on paper, 14 x 16 cm (about 5 1/2" x 6 3/8") photo courtesy of the artist  Acer Road 2021, gouache on paper, 14 x 16 cm (about 5 1/2" x 6 3/8") photo courtesy of the artist You can see more of Mark Beldan's work:
on his website on instagram as @markbeldan and his current show, Brick and Mortar, is up at One Wall Gallery in Eugene, Oregon (USA). The gallery resides inside of Epic Seconds. 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 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
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