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Posted on 11/22/2019 5:17:09 PM
By Donald Fox
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Time Passage
Sometimes art is political and/or topical and so primarily aimed at a specific time and audience. Much art, though, is beyond time, is universal, and is aimed far beyond the moment of its birth. Painting may depict an historical time and place or group of people, yet it can transcend those trappings (like much of Dutch Golden Age painting) to reflect universal beliefs and emotions. Family connection, the expression of love, introspection, integrity, strength, compassion – these and other universal concepts have been portrayed or expressed by different cultures during different periods of time. Abstract painting often deals with spiritual and psychological themes.
Any artwork, of course, is of its own time for there always are strong personal and cultural forces at work on the artist. It is often said that art is not created in a vacuum. Visionary art sees beyond the personal and the cultural. There are messages that reverberate through time like moral echoes revitalized whenever a work is experienced in any present moment.
Posted on 11/18/2019 6:23:01 PM
By Donald Fox
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Partial Shade
Yesterday while filling a jug with drinking water from the refrigerator water dispenser, I encountered what radio personnel call ‘dead air’ except my dead air was no water, only air coming through the line. The refrigerator is more than twelve years old, and the water line has become brittle with age. It cracks or breaks where the line connects to the small pump at the bottom of the unit. The line comes down from inside and has to curve up to attach to the pump. This curve stresses the line and makes it vulnerable to cracking. I’ve repaired this twice within the last three years. The first time I cut the tubing and reattached it to the pump with relatively little problem. The line has to slip inside a connector which has a compression seal to avoid leakage. The second repair after the original line again cracked required replacement with new tubing that had inside diameter just large enough to slip over the old tubing but wouldn’t create a proper seal at the pump. That problem I fixed with a waterproof epoxy putty that I knew would prevent any future repairs if there were a break at that juncture. Sure enough, the new break was right at the base of the epoxied joint leaving nothing to connect a new line to. The new choice was to replace the pump (hard to find for this model and expensive when available plus all tubing would need to be replaced – a challenge threading it through the inside paneling) or replace the refrigerator or do without the water dispenser and ice maker. For now, the later was the reasonable choice.
However, that choice meant shutting off the water line to the refrigerator and then capping it since it connected to the sink cold water valve. Like many household projects on an older house, this one grew in magnitude and ended only after having to replace a split extension nipple that was thoroughly corroded and broke in half, replacing the shut-off valve (the old one had the broken nipple embedded in it), and capping the refrigerator water connection that presented its own problems with persistent leaks that were eventually eliminated. Add in a trip to the hardware store, and the whole project took over three-and-a-half hours to complete. At least the sink water pressure greatly improved.
Art, too, has its challenges although most problems stem from subjective decisions, for example, that some stage of a painting isn’t working as it should. An area can be wiped out and repainted, the area can be painted over, or the whole can be scraped down and then the painting started over. Sometimes it takes long contemplation to find a solution and various experiments may be tried until a successful one is found. Time is not a factor here for the entire process is open-ended from the beginning, i.e. there is no specific time frame required. There is no charge by the hour. There are no trips to the hardware or art supply store. The main requirements are patience, the voice of experience, and trust in the process.
Posted on 11/9/2019 5:34:37 PM
By Donald Fox
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Places change as do people. A mature adult can easily reflect on changes in his or her life via memory. Even when specific details cannot be recalled, most people can remember various stages of life and how the world seemed at those times. It is also relatively easy to imagine differences between perceptions at ten years old and those when eighteen or twenty. What links these perceptions is the inner narrator, the consciousness of the individual who creates or experiences the context of events, thoughts, or feelings. A new, call it updated, narrative gives the experiences meaning.
Recently I visited the town where I grew up, where I attended school from first through twelfth grades, and then the first two years of college. During that time, I developed my lifelong interest in artistic expression and received some formal training in those two college years. There was a four to five-year gap, however, before I resumed intensive training in graduate school. During the interim, I completed college, taught school for a year, became socially and politically aware, got married, worked in a state hospital for two-and-a-half years, and explored painting and writing on my own while maintaining contact with one of my early painting teachers though he never saw my work from that time. Much of that work has been lost or forgotten. Some exists in sketches or notes.
On that trip I did find one painting from 1970 in my God son’s warehouse, one that came from his parents when they were living at Wrightsville Beach and collecting pieces of mine in partial payment for rent on a house where my wife and I lived near Chapel Hill. The painting is a hard-edge abstract oil on canvas roughly four by three feet that I don’t remember painting. I had signed and dated it, and I recognize its design as part of my interest at that time although I also did representational pieces during that period.
I see my early interest in overlapping planes, warm-cool color contrast, interrupted linear elements, ambiguous space, and a touch of whimsy. Shapes interconnect to create an architectonic design balanced between complexity and simplicity. This makes me very curious about other work from that period that may have survived somewhere. My study of the color theories espoused by Johannes Itten and Josef Albers (both teachers at the Bauhaus in 1930’s Germany) did not commence until several years later, but I see in that painting what led me to their work. I explored their principles in 1976 and ‘77 via small cut colored paper designs that were intended studies for large paintings that I never developed.
Personal challenges eventually took my work in new directions, so it is not only people and places that change. For artists, these challenges inevitably affect changes in the work expressed. Even so, there are threads that weave their way through the tapestry of one’s life, threads that appear or seem to disappear only to re-emerge in altered form and significance as the fabric grows in complexity and nuance. Today my work focuses primarily on variations on a theme, which for me includes the many choices, paths, directions, portals, openings, closings, encounters, and possibilities past, present, and future.
Abstraction 1970 Leftward Lean (2019)
oil on canvas oil on canvas
48" x 36" 50" x 40"
Posted on 11/5/2019 4:58:03 PM
By Donald Fox
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Window of Memory
Last weekend I attended a high school reunion, something that many have done or neglected to do for years. This was my third attended event in a number of numberless decades, so I and my classmates have experienced lifetimes of expectations and fulfillments since those early years of excitedly facing the world beyond hometown and friends who had to that point been the boundaries of mostly shared experience. Social media has, of course, changed how many of us relate to friends and family, but my generation did not have this tool when we were in school – in fact, we had no computers or cell phones. In our analog world, we had no expectation of such tools.
The weekend has prompted thinking about expectation, and I found a blog from roughly five years ago addressing that subject from an artist’s perspective. Here it is again with some alteration, for it seems to fit as an analogy to life as we imagine it and live it.
I suspect that when most artists begin a painting or other art project, they fully expect to complete it. The artist gives a kind of performance, which is the process of doing, and in the case of visual art, whatever work results is the record of that process. It is not intended as a chronicle per se, for with painting especially, many layers may be hidden beneath whatever is visible on the surface, and the subsequent tale is not a visible narrative.
For me, the expectation is a general goal that becomes increasingly specific as the painting develops. The journey toward completion is a kind of search for visual meaning in the drama that plays out on the stage of the canvas. The players are the marks, strokes, gestures, colors, shapes, and resultant forms that make the final image.
There are countless dramas in day to day life that are rarely noted except when energies collide in ways that manifest conflict and end up on the nightly news or in the following day’s headlines. Any busy street in a congested city is filled with these potential conflicts, but most never manifest because the hidden drama is contained and concealed with any individual’s purposeful movement through the space of that particular life. One gets lost in a crowd or another turns a corner and passes out of sight. Those potential dramas remain private and move on to other places.
This dynamic flow of human energy is part of the artist’s palette expressed as symbol or metaphor. First, the painter builds an underlying structure of generalized shapes and colors. These could represent any number of disparate elements that become connected by proximity within the picture space. The painter chooses with each succeeding layer of paint what to emphasize or what to diminish. This is a natural part of creating order from which meaning emerges. Characters are refined and given their roles as protagonists or supporting players according to the artist’s conceptualization.
The expectation is for completion. The expectation is for expression. The expectation is for discovery in the process of completing and expressing. The artist trusts the process, and that too is a kind of expectation. The completion, the result, more often than not is simply another beginning with a new set of expectations.
