Of Chance and Choice – A Scenario of Decisions
By Tom Wachunas
“…An artist is often the last to know what
his or her real strengths are; doing and knowing what one has done are two
different things. Which of us really knows what we’ve made? Where is the point
from which one can achieve that objective viewpoint?” - David Salle, from his 2016 book, “How to
See”
I’m feeling a bit apprehensive about my
upcoming exhibit at The Little Art Gallery, which opens on July 19, and will
include a talk I’ll be giving about my work, at the gallery, on August 9. The
difficulty I’ve always had with formulating any kind of “artist statement” no
doubt springs from my ambivalent faith in words to sufficiently address what
I’ve made or why I made it.
You see the irony
in this, right? While I have a passion – maybe even a mission – for using words
to elucidate the non-verbal art of others, my own works can often render me
dumb. I will happily plunder my vocabulary in search of an engaging way to tell
you about someone else’s art, yet be confounded in attempting the same with my
own. That’s much the case with my newest
piece, Demise, a painted wood carving
currently on view in the annual May Show exhibit at The Little Art Gallery.
Still more irony.
You might recall a January ARTWACH post wherein I spoke of a color epiphany in
my work. Here’s a link should you wish to refresh your memory:
Considering my
determination to “let there be color,” this new work came about just a few weeks after that enthusiastic declaration, quickly
and seemingly out of nowhere. This impetuous return to a monochromatic palette
was apparently a deliberate reversal, or indeed “demise” of my resolve.
But the story of
this particular work, which in fact evolved neither quickly nor from “nowhere,”
is a complex one. The truth of the matter is that the piece is a collaborative
project roughly 15 years in the making. My collaborators were Serendipity,
Nature, and Patience.
A strange-looking wooden table, heavily
painted in green enamel, was left outdoors by the previous owner of the
property where I’ve lived since 2002. The round tabletop rested on a massive
cylindrical block carved to look like an ancient totem – suggesting to me a
figure from the Olmec culture of pre-Columbian Mexico, perhaps. I chose to
leave the table exactly where I found it, and for several seasons it held a
large planter for extra flowers to accent the garden I had made where the back
yard meets a woods. Eventually the table top rotted through, the base toppled
over, and I left it where it fell.
So there it was, to
my eye something…artful. A readymade
relic of changeability. At first I never regarded it as something to be removed.
With each passing season I could still
see that remnant totem peeking through its foliate surrounds, like some sort of
fallen guardian at the border of tamed lawn and wild woods. Year in, year out,
I watched it slowly morphed by the elements. The green paint was peeling away,
cracks were getting deeper, the grain became increasingly pronounced as
deepening ridges in the wood inscribed new shapes and textures. I kept wondering
how or if I should cease the process to preserve a mysterious ornament.
One day in March,
trudging through my snow-covered back yard, I decided to put an end to my
wondering (wandering?) and resurrect this curious object from the accumulated
detritus of natural entropy. After it was dried out, I enhanced, or assisted,
the readymade. I sanded a few areas, here breaking off some chunks, there
chiseling only a few new shapes. Then I gave it an acrylic faux marble finish.
Mind you, my trompe l’oeil technique
is less than masterful. I used it here simply to suggest a memorial quality. In
your act of looking at it, my past becomes your present.
So what do all these
words about my piece really mean to you, the viewer, in the end? You choose.
You decide. I can tell you one thing with certainty: Demise is itself a record of choices, a tangible history of
decisions. And isn’t that the essence of any
work of art?
No comments:
Post a Comment