Fill in the blank: Once more, with ____
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| Drift in Harmony |
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| Calm Like A Bomb |
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| Whispers Underneath The Waves |
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| Falling Into Midnight's Shadow |
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| Snake Charmer |
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| Tangled In The Sun's Last Breath |
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| Flicker Of A Firefly's Lament |
By Tom Wachunas
“I want
to paint the feeling of a space. It might be an enclosed space, it might be a
vast space. It might be an object.… Feeling is something more: It’s
feeling your existence. Painting is a means of feeling ‘living.’”
- Joan
Mitchell
“I'm not interested in 'abstracting' or
taking things out or reducing painting to design, form, line, and color. I
paint this way because I can keep putting more things in it - drama, anger,
pain, love, a figure, a horse, my ideas about space. Through your eyes it again
becomes an emotion or idea.” - Willem
de Kooning
“Art is an experience, not an object.” - Robert Motherwell
Artist background/
interview: https://artsinstark.com/interview/joe-ostrowske/
EXHIBIT: HIGH
VELOCITY – Paintings by Joe Ostrowske / through January 10, 2025, at Cyrus Custom Framing
and Art Gallery, 2645 Cleveland Avenue NW, Canton, Ohio / Gallery Hours are
Mon.-Fri. 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., Sat. 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.
In an ArtsinStark “Self Portrait” interview
(link posted above - from August of this year), painter Joe Ostrowske was asked
to tell what inspired his creative process. He answered, “I find the blank
canvas is what inspires my process. I never know where it is going to lead me,
but I love the journey it takes me on with every new canvas.”
So
he’s about painting the journey rather than just replicating a pristine final
destination. Ostrowske’s gestural abstractitudes aren’t so safe and predictable
as that. They’re adventuresome explorations of colliding crossroads. They
boldly depart from well-beaten trails to familiar comfortable places. Instead,
they navigate more complex terrains articulated with all the loose and visceral expressivity
that acrylic paint can give him. His paintings are busy, sometimes explosive agglomerations
of stratified marks and scattered, amorphous shapes that seemingly burst and dance
to the rhythmic motions of sizzling bright colors. It’s as if he is
sojourning in the dense and diverse landscapes of a consciousness not always
his alone.
Who
else’s consciousness, then? As if,…what if. And here’s where I feel compelled
to admit (and encourage) a sort of ‘magical thinking’ born from my own
engagements with the process and methods of making a painting. Here’s an
enigmatic, inexplicable, unreasonable, absurd proposition, but… What if paintings
– ostensibly inanimate objects with lavishly decorated and marked-up surfaces –
are themselves conscious entities capable of actually speaking to and being
heard by the painter as they come into being? Granted, maybe only other painters
will fully apprehend this idea, but give it a try anyway: The painting wants
what the painting wants. It’s not just a static document of the painter’s
past decisions, not just a silent witness, not merely an eye-popping wall
adornment. It’s a continuing performance in the sense of performance
being the motivation for, or execution of, an action, or the behavior of
reacting to sensate stimuli, in real time.
At that moment when you decide to look at
that thing on the wall, the painter’s performance in real time has only paused,
not ceased altogether. It has simply flipped the script as it looks back at you,
now a fellow performer. The painting wants what the painting wants, which is to
give you your turn too, in real time, to act, to get into it. Intuit. Let the
painter’s performance lead or inspire you to make what you see continue to keep
playing out on the stage of your perceptions - to write a message, feeling, or
narrative on the blank canvas of your imagination.
You might even experience looking as if playing
a game of hide ‘n seek, or capture the flag. Better yet, let’s play tag. You’re
it.
