By Tom Wachunas
“Painting is by nature a luminous
language.” - Robert Delaunay
Here’s a brief
hiatus from writing about other people and their art. Now that I look at what I
just wrote, I’m thinking that whenever I write about other people and their
art, I’m basically saying as much about myself as I am about them. I am he as
you are he as you are me and we are all together… and thank you John Lennon and
Paul McCartney. But I digress…
I want to report an
epiphany. A sort of resurrection. I’ve been infected by a polychromatic
palette. Who knows…it may be terminal. Kindly let me explain.
With the notable
exception of my annual 8 ½” x 11” Christmas
paintings on heavy cardboard (reproduced as limited-edition, signed digital prints serving
as Christmas cards), the vast majority
of my studio output over the past seven or eight years has been either monochromatic in nature, or
built largely on a black-and-white dynamic. During much of 2017, I experienced
increasingly debilitating fits of dissatisfaction with the trajectory of my work.
I had only a terribly nagging feeling that it was time to somehow alter my
aesthetic. Analysis paralysis was beginning to set in. While a big decision
seemed to loom ever closer in the cluttered corners of my mind, I remained for
the most part frustrated, lethargic, uninspired.
Flashback. The last
time I was haunted by such an impasse was in 1999 or so. By that point, though
I had been writing reviews for a few regional magazines, I hadn’t made a single
visual artwork for about eight years. Exasperated, I remember purchasing, of
all things, and inexplicably enough, a
plastic model of a dinosaur skeleton at a hobby shop, which I assembled,
painted in muddy enamel earth tones, and mounted on a raggedy-edged, pockmarked foamcore panel. Maybe it was the
textures, the smell of the paint, the act of gluing little 3D forms on to a
surface…but that eerie relief image of a floating dinosaur skeleton was just
the spark I needed to begin making new original work in earnest.
Several months ago,
in preparation for an upcoming exhibit of my work slated for this July at The
Little Art Gallery (which will be something of a mini-retrospective combined
with some new works), I rummaged through the layered contents a large trunk I
hadn’t opened since 1992 (the year I returned to Ohio after living in NYC for
14 years). Therein was a series of small (9” x 11”) unframed gouaches from around
1982 (two of them posted here in the top photo). They took hold of me the moment I saw them. They haven’t
let go since. These were originally studies for larger oil paintings that no
longer exist. So now I gazed at modest remnants, almost totally forgotten
memories, abstracted and translated into gouache, of traveling and camping in
the enchanting landscapes of the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York. Yet the structural simplicity of my painted picture
planes, the implied narrative of the imagery, and those dreamlike
colors…resonated, intrigued, spoke.
I heard. Something
- dormant too long, nearly extinct - woke up and beckoned me. So call it a nod, an affirmation,
an homage, this new bas-relief mixed media painting, 18” x 18”, finished
yesterday, and which I’m calling “Homecoming” (bottom photo). A bright inroad
through the belly of the beast (I incorporated that hobby shop Tyrannosaurus
Rex from 1999) to…where?
Destination
undetermined. Only, let there be color. More to come.
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