Micrometamorphia

 

Micrometamorphia 

Before I Get Carried Away

The Lesson

Panic's Platter II

Bedlam's Bowl

Reducing Nature's Embrace to a Few Casual Comments

detail from Dystopian Fragments of an Abandoned Repertoire

detail from Reducing Nature's Embrace...

Dystopian Fragments of an Abandoned Repertoire

By Tom Wachunas 

“Drawing is still basically the same as it has been since prehistoric times. It brings together man and the world. It lives through magic.” - Keith Haring

“A drawing is simply a line going for a walk.”  - Paul Klee

“For the artist, drawing is discovery. And that is not just a slick phrase; it is quite literally true.”  - John Berger

“Drawing is rather like playing chess: your mind races ahead of the moves that you eventually make.”  -  David Hockney

 

EXHIBIT: John Thrasher Artwork: Graphics, Drawings, Ceramics / at Strauss Studios, THROUGH AUGUST 2, 2024 Studios – closing reception at 6pm on August 2 / 236 Walnut Avenue NE, Canton, OH / Viewing Hours: Mon-Fri 10am to 5pm, Sat. 12noon to 5pm 

https://www.johnthrasherfineart.com/

 

   Welcome to the gobsmacking art of John Thrasher. His visions have thoroughly awakened the brainy wordy word nerd in me, making my hippocampus go all cattywompus. Say…whaaat?

    Here are works comprised of more than simply lines going for a walk. The lines can be winding routes across whispers and shouts, crowded with higgeldy-piggeldy rambles through the brambled gambles of our world. Prickly and tickly visual essays, or even incantations, on the condition of our worldly condition, the happenstances of our circumstances, both random and reasoned. Dangled angles on the riddles and rhymes, wants and wishes of our wandering, wondering minds.

   Contemplating for a moment… dirty dishes. While Thrasher’s ceramic works such as Bedlam’s Bowl and Panic’s Platter II are referenced as “glazed earthenware,” we could just as well regard them as chunks of crazed earth. They’re not awash in shiny delicate pretty colors, but instead immersed in sharply delineated descriptions of explosions or chaos. These lines aren’t on a casual stroll into innocent ornamentation.

   We viewers shouldn’t be either. Thrasher’s complex monotype prints and ink-gouache drawings are truly entrancing, but only to the degree you’re willing to not just look at them. They command the necessary time, and intentional commitment to look inside them. To do that, maybe make like you want to get close enough to smell them, with your nose that close to their surface. Only then might your eyes focus enough to appreciate the astonishing clarity of seemingly microscopic details that inhabit these facile flows and fragments, these stratified streams (or screams?) of the artist’s consciousness, these giddy and gripping ventures into memory, mystery and mayem, fact and fiction, judgments and jokes. Mesmerizing minutiae.  

   With my amygdala agog, sufficiently bumfuzzled, dizzied and dumbfounded, I feel, uhm…Thrashed. Exhausted. Yet inexplicably enlivened. Art such as this will do that sometimes. Say… whaaat?