Re: Vision

Ravenna Taylor, "Flamenco," 2012, painted collage, 28 x 33-3/4 inches

This piece is part of a series I call "Re: Vision." You can see 12 others - oil paintings on canvas, linen, and/or wood, and more painted collages - in my online exhibition; open the link here: Galerie Cerulean, at Abstract Art Online. Click on the image of the collage at the home page to open to the first of three pages, featuring four images on each page. Click on individual images for better views and titles, size, etc. Find the arrow key under the images at the right, to scroll to each of the next pages. I am pleased to share my new work, and with thanks to Joe Walentini.
This photo and those in the online exhibition, credit to Greg Benson and Fernando Gaglianese.


“Re:Vision”

Visual sensation stirs my attention to perception and thought; as emotion and thought impact senses and perceptions, my curiosity engages. My imagery derives from such observations, the dovetails and overlaps of lived experience. 

My paintings chronicle my choices; to choose is to begin, to be alive, to be human. Several of these pieces began as other works I’d thought were finished, but which I turned back into beginnings. I’m calling this assembly of work “re: Vision,” to disclose the revisiting, and refer to my preoccupations with our powers of perception and thought.

I compose my pictorial abstractions to excite associations. While nature’s phenomena inform the paintings, our human nature provides the long warp on which I weave. I have some favored subjects and allusions to arrange, like Morandi’s bottles. Among them figure time, games, measures, maps, fleet reflections and shadows. Artistic influences range widely, from Mughal miniatures to Modernism. I delight in color, harmony, patterns, and ambiguities. I construct and destroy, obscure and clarify; I celebrate choice.

February, 2012

What Is A Drawing?

Thursday of this week I went into Manhattan to visit a number of galleries in Chelsea. One of my first stops was at Matthew Marks Gallery to see a survey of "drawings" by Anne Truitt. If you follow the link, you will see the works, and perhaps understand why I questioned that designation. The person at the desk explained that Anne Truitt calls any work on paper a drawing, although the gallery press release does simply call them "works on paper," as I would do.

One wall at Matthew Marks Gallery installation of Anne Truitt's "drawings."

The other side of the gallery surveying Anne Truitt's work at Matthew Marks Gallery

I can remember a time when I would call any work on paper a drawing. The piece below, for example, was part of a series I made in 1997, growing from a fascination with Indian miniatures (which were being exhibited a lot at that time, for the 50th anniversary of independence). I called it a drawing then, but I would call it a painting now:

Ravenna Taylor, "Polyphony," 1997, watercolor and gouache, 22 x 20 inches

You can see more from that series, some of them I might call drawings, in the section of my website for "Work On Paper," here.

Now my thinking is that to be called a drawing, the work is not necessarily a dry medium, or one which exposes the paper, but one in which the paper is something more than a surface or substrate for the work. I still have some doubts about some of the work Anne Truitt calls drawings, because although the paper may be unprepared, and might be exposed at the edge, it doesn't contribute to the aesthetic or conceptual experience of the painted image; it is there for the acrylic paint, not for my eye.

Here are a couple drawings I made, on a beautiful handmade paper which is decidedly functioning as a part of the image and the viewer's experience:

Ravenna Taylor, "Susurrus 2," 2010, sumi ink, 11 x 14 inches

Ravenna Taylor, "Susurrus," 2010, sumi ink, 11 x 14 inches

I also do a lot of work in collage, using fragments of my own discarded work on paper, along with other materials, including photos I've taken and objects I find. Years ago I was more purist about them, but over the years I've used the collages as surfaces upon which to draw or paint; these I call "collaged drawings," or "painted collage," accordingly. The piece below I would call a collaged drawing. There a quite a few things in this category to be seen on my website.

Ravenna Taylor, "Parantrophic 1," 2000, watercolor and charcoal, 17 x 15 inches

Here is another, more recent collage (2011), which incorporates drawing, but I wouldn't call it a drawing; the piece also employs a photograph, stitching, fabric, an old postcard from the flea market, some monotyped paper from artist friend Pam Farrell - whatever I could find to make it work! This is one of those cases where one can only say "mixed media," as unhelpful as that is. (The photo fragment, incidentally, is of the surface of the sea from a water taxi in Venice: fond thoughts inserted here.) The lace fragments came from another artist friend, Francesca Pastine. The bit of red paper was another gift, from my friend, artist Nancy White.

Ravenna Taylor, "PM," 2011, collage/assemblage, 15 x 12 inches

(detail)

Below, a piece I made in 2010, one in a series of work on paper in watercolor and gouache, like the earlier series, this time using the history of game boards as a source for the imagery; you can see a dozen of these in my "Game Change" album, if you are a F.a.c.e.b.o.o.k user, HERE. I don't think of these as drawings, but as paintings, even though the paper is visible and figures strongly in the impact of the piece.

Ravenna Taylor, "Reward of Merit," 2010, watercolor, 11 x 11 inches

I once saw some text on a gallery wall, from a typewriter, framed and presented as a drawing; I was not persuaded. This is the statement I wrote in 2009 for my Game Change series, which employed shapes derived from study of hourglasses and a preoccupation with time. I composed the text of my statement in the form of a concrete poem, so each stanza would ebb and flow like time, like the shape of an hourglass. Yet I would not call this a drawing. The first quality of a drawing, in my mind, has to involve a hand. If I'd written the poem/statement out on paper, in this form, that might stand on the threshold of a drawing, to my way of thinking; but I still wouldn't call it a drawing.

2009 Statement written to give each stanza a shape like an hourglass

And these pieces in embroidery thread on fabric, of which I made about 10 back in the 1990's -- I would argue that these are more like drawings than some of the work on paper I have made, and more than some of the work on paper in the Matthew Marks gallery, which are being presented as drawings. The exhibition is, as always is the case with Matthew Marks Gallery, perfectly installed, and Anne Truitt's pieces are perfectly beautiful, whatever they might be called. The show remains on view into April.

I might carry on with this unfolding thought about what a drawing is in my next post, with work by other artists. It's not that it matters at all; but since we can suppose that the activity of drawing might be the earliest form of artistic expression in our history as a species, it's interesting, to me, to think about what is a drawing.

Ravenna Taylor, Embroidery, 199?, thread, fabric, about 6 x 7 inches

Ravenna Taylor, Embroidery, 199?, thread, fabric, about 7 inches square

More "painted collages" are included, along with 7 new oil paintings, in my online-only exhibition, "Re:Vision," commencing February 27, 2012, at Galerie Cerulean Currently, the Galerie website has an archive of my show of last year, "Song Cycle," a series of photo collages.

Instrumental Dwellings

"Limbo," 2012, oil on panel, 6 x 4 inches

I'll begin with a denial -- I'm not a slow reader; but I can be distracted and slow to settle into my reading. I'm doing too many things at once, and as a friend observed today, I invest myself entirely in whatever is currently at hand, whether my music, art, writing, or just being with a friend, attending to another's need. So I don't actually read slowly, but intermittently, and ambitiously; I frequently find myself, when sitting down to read, going back to reread what I finished in my last sitting. I'm like a wide slow stream with eddies, bends and loops; or maybe like Penelope, weaving, unweaving, beginning again to weave.

I'm taking this kind of long time with a book I found last month. Here's a photo of its beautiful cover, the image is by Ann Hamilton. The book is "The Poet's Freedom: A Notebook On Making," by Susan Stewart, poet and professor at Princeton University. The book was published by The University of Chicago Press, 2011. The cover and title caught my eye in the bookstore, and the chapter headings stirred my interest.

I am still in the first chapter, headed Beginning - (I wryly confess I am beginning it over and over). Coincidentally, as I was opening the book, I was also writing my new statement for the work that will soon be exhibited online and in my studio. I'm titling my show "re:Vision," also the title of a blog post in January when I was formulating these thoughts. Here's the text of my statement, which doesn't describe the objects I've made, but my objectives in making them - (these have become rather consistent, however much their expression changes):

 * * * * *

Visual sensation stirs my attention to perception and thought; as emotion and thought impact senses and perceptions, my curiosity engages. My imagery derives from such observations, the dovetails and overlaps of lived experience.

My paintings chronicle my choices; to choose is to begin, to be alive, to be human. Several of these pieces began as other works I’d thought were finished, but which I turned back into beginnings. I’m calling this assembly of work “re: Vision,” to disclose the revisiting, and refer to my preoccupations with our powers of perception and thought.

I compose my pictorial abstractions to excite associations. While nature’s phenomena inform the paintings, our human nature provides the long warp on which I weave. I have some favored subjects and allusions to arrange, like Morandi’s bottles. Among them figure time, games, measures, maps, reflections and shadows. Artistic influences range widely, from Mughal miniatures to Modernism. I delight in color, harmony, patterns, and ambiguities. I construct and destroy, obscure and clarify; I celebrate choice, and our humanity.

February, 2012

* * * * *

My inner ear perked up today with my reading, as I came to the following passage, in which Stewart is quoting Aristotle in his Nichomachean Ethics:

"All art is concerned with the realm of coming-to-be, i.e., with contriving and studying how something that is capable both of being and not being may come into existence, a thing whose starting point or source is in the producer and not in the thing produced." 

That last, about the starting point, speaks also to the reason that I feel that I am a painter first and everything else I do falls into place behind that. In painting, the effort isn't only to execute the work with skill and expression, but to initiate the concept and determine the content. As Stewart says earlier in the chapter (p.12),

"It is difficult, certainly, to argue for making more things. If we have an environmentalist's conscience, restraint and even withdrawal seem the most moral responses to the natural world. At the same time, we constantly feel the pressure of the need to make new art... Indeed, every generation seems to have an obligation to the future not only to represent its thinking in created forms but also to use created forms as a means of thought itself. The necessity of starting out, of new beginnings, is as central to our existence as life itself - the very nature of our vitality."

I am privileged by this drive to compose. My chronicle is my exercise of choice. To choose, to begin, is to be alive, and human. 


Susan Stewart chose this poem by Emily Dickinson as the epigraph for her beautifully composed and realized book, which I've just begun, and begun again, several times. The next chapter is headed Praising.

PRETEND

I've been pressing forth with new work in the studio, and I'm excited by what has been unfolding. The work was photographed yesterday, and today I labored over my 150 word statement to present with the work. I have seven paintings and five collages which I look forward to displaying in the online-only gallery, Galerie Cerulean, at Abstract Art Online, beginning February 27, 2012. The Galerie is a project conceived by Joe Walentini, who is also an abstract painter; he began his website writing reviews of gallery shows in New York in the 1990's. A few years ago he changed his mission to showing the work of a selection of artists, keeping a schedule like any other gallery, but always online-only. He was a pioneer; now there are many more online venues for artists, and people are more accustomed to viewing work this way. The internet has opened up minds and entire worlds for artists, especially for those of us who are unrepresented and/or located a little off the beaten track. As I like to say, a deadline can be a lifeline.

My studio in Lambertville, New Jersey is in an old stone building, and the back room in which I work has (other than skylights and a back door) only one narrow window, where I sometimes stand to rest my eyes on something more distant than my work. There are trees and buildings, and my line of sight is pretty narrow, landing on a sign that reads "DEAD END." The sign is old, bent, and a bit of graffiti has been attempted on its fading paint. It is set rather high, maybe to be at the eye level of truck drivers. Otherwise I might have gone out there to deface it myself! I often looked at those words, "DEAD END," and imagined how I could transform them into a more uplifting image for my fatigued vision.

The intersection is on my walk to the cafe or the natural foods store, and I imagined myself dressed as a public works employee, dragging a ladder over with a small can of black paint, to carefully change the text so that maybe no one would even notice that instead of DEAD END it might read:

PRET

END

Here is a small painting I recently completed which I will not be exhibiting with the others:

PRETEND, 2012, oil on canvas, 4 x 6 inches

Well instead of carrying out this plot, I made my small painting, a sunny diamond in an elliptical sky. Or maybe this is just a sketch for my future career as street vandal? Nah. I am ever grateful for the opportunity to picture my world, and change it in my imagination, or by making with my hands a new image of what seemed immutable.

"Textsignia"

This week I've had occasion to recall my first summer in San Francisco, when I moved there from the Arkansas Ozarks to complete my BFA, at what was then the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland (now called the California College of the Arts). It was a tough move, and I dealt with the challenge of extreme culture shock by diving right into my purpose, taking my first courses during the summer session. In a color class taught through the medium of chalk pastel, by Linda K. Smith, at the end of our final project, the instructor told me "You have ideas. I can teach techniques and materials, but I can't teach ideas." It was an encouraging beginning for me, a quiet but daring-to-return student who'd spent 9 years doing the back-to-the-land/subsistence-living thing in two remote places.

I do have a lot of ideas, and I don't try to be "consistent" in my work. If I want to photograph, make photocollages, paint in sumi ink, gouache, oils -- or pick up a needle and thread, or some yarn and knitting needles -- or study classical music and voice, write poetry -- this is my life as an artist. After a few decades of not getting far in the career development, one artist might decide to settle into one medium, make it a "product," and market herself. But I'm stubborn, and as far as I know, although I do have a lot of ideas, I'm only getting one life to realize them. If an artist can't be stubborn and ignite the sparks of creativity, who will? My professors in art school all said, have a different plan for getting by. That was in a different time in the art world; now aspiring painters get advanced degrees and expect, or hope, to make the money they've invested in their education from sales of their work. The art world is more like every other aspect of society now, comprised of every kind of artist and human being -- and I'm one of them. I take an ecological view of it all, and I trust I have my place in it.

I find ideas everywhere; being awake to those revelations in small moments of my day is what I'm all about. That's why I love to wander the flea market, look at stuff, take note of what catches my attention and ask myself "why does this touch me?" I sing to myself and talk to the vendors, and leave, sometimes with some small thing, but always in love with my life.

Here is a series I call "Textsignia," made by combining some things I found at the flea market; they are all about the size of a handkerchief: fascinating insigniae for purposes I don't know, and beautiful small textiles, the specialty of a lovely woman who regularly sets up at the Golden Nugget in Lambertville, New Jersey, a few miles from where I live and work. I told her I would send some photos of what I do with the things I get from her, hence today's blog post: ten pieces (all 2011), and a detail at the end.


Just as when building my abstract collages in torn paper, photos and fabric, I enjoy finding the tangent points in my diverse materials; the consistency might not be in what my output looks like, but in the ways I approach and develop it.

*****