Blog
Posted on 2/28/2021 5:57:06 PM
By Donald Fox
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When I intently studied art history in the sixties and seventies while a student, there were lots of contemporary experimental works by American and European artists made during those years that set the tone for the remainder of the millennia. The traditional separation of sculpture and painting began to give way to increasing numbers of mixed-media works (Rauschenberg’s combine paintings, Nevelson’s painted sculptures, Cornell’s magical boxes, to mention a few). Some minimalist artists like Lucio Fontana, an Argentinian-born Italian, began with stretched canvas, but instead of painting on the surface or attaching materials to the surface, he cut into the surface. The canvas was typically colored with paint, but by carving slits in the surface, he created subtle ‘wounds’ that pulled away from the centers of each slit by varying amounts depending on the length of the slits and the tension of the stretched canvas. The canvas surface then made subtle graduated shadows and the paintings became, in effect, low-relief sculptures. This physical penetration of the canvas was a radical shift from the traditional illusionistic space artists created and explored for centuries on panels and canvases, which had functioned solely as the grounds for realistic portrayals of the natural world and imaginary mythological worlds. Fontana literally reached into and through the canvas surface to a space contained within it and on the other side of it.
As I boy I had many opportunities to fly with my pilot father. I loved gliding through the clouds to the open space beyond. It taught me that those dreary days of overcast and rain were themselves illusions of sorts. The clouds were simply a veil that hid the sky and sun and the infinite space beyond. Pilots referred to overcast days as having low ceiling, but that ceiling was a penetrable cover that eventually gave way to clarity and light. Even now as I look out the window at the sky obscured by gray rain clouds, I can sense the sun on the other side. I know what it is like to be way above the gray blanket as though the Earth were hiding its treasure, lost as it were in a fog of circumstance, but underneath that veil Earth’s green fields and blue oceans drink new moisture wherever those clouds are spread.
The mind can travel these distances with no regard for distance or time. Artists like Fontana may create theories and works that illustrate them (Fontana called his theory spatialism, an attempt to make a two-dimensional canvas into a three-dimensional space, but real space rather than illusionistic painted space). Other artists also express emotion and thought and energy in their works, but it is the audience, the viewer, the passive participant who picks up that energy, is enthused and infused by it and moves into and through the work to a space both personal and universal, virtual space that connects the present with the past and makes every moment a kaleidoscopic wonderland.
Posted on 2/17/2021
By Donald Fox
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Between Panes
Life in Texas is challenging but also interesting. I am well aware of how good things are in spite of outward appearances. Today is colder than normal. A polar vortex has reached its icy fingers this far south and that caught many people unprepared including government and those who regulate the power grid. Power outages, gas and food shortages abound amid a pandemic. People already stressed from a year of disruption, displacement, and reshuffling are at their limit.
We’ve been without power for the better part of two days in below freezing temperatures, sleeping in the den close to the constant fireplace, a load of firewood donated by a neighbor to whom we’re also connected by an extension umbilical to her generator that powers our occasional TV, wifi, rechargeable batteries for lanterns, phones, and laptops plus the single lamp by which I write this. A camp stove set up in my studio heats water, soup, and light meals. While waiting for water to boil, I page through old sketchbooks and journals where I find many interesting, jotted ideas never pursued along with a great number of bad sketches and unfinished doodles. Among these, drawings for unrealized sculptures and various designs are the most intriguing, like grand gestures hibernating till some propitious spring. I find myself filled with gratitude for friends, neighbors, errant ideas, my deceased parents who are frequently reevaluated with unspoken praise, for curiosity and a creative spirit that sustains even when not actively expressed. Feline friends are curled in tight balls throughout the house and rotate as if by schedule to a spot on the bed that has migrated from bedroom to den to keep us closer to warmth.
When I was a kid, our family spent many winter evenings at my dad’s parents’ house in rural South Carolina, one heated only by wood stove in the dining room and fireplace in the living room. Bedrooms and living room were closed off during the day. Multiple quilts, however, kept us warm at night. Early each morning my grandad would be first up, would light the wood stove before shuffling out to the woodshed for a load of fresh logs for the day. I still clearly hear the clacking sound of my grandparents’ dog Skipper as he danced his morning greeting to my grandad on the tile floor. I see him as a small black and white spotted beagle with an always in motion curled tail. Then it wasn’t until after the noon meal that the living room was opened and a fire lit there to warm the various relatives who might stop by to see us visitors. These usually included the two brothers who married two of my dad’s older sisters, my dad being the third youngest of eleven children.
People survived for millenia without central heat or air conditioning or running water or indoor toilets. Hygiene was quite different in the past. I feel fortunate to have had these childhood experiences for it feels like connection to an even more distant, primitive past. That, in turn, makes appreciation of cultural and scientific achievement more powerful.
The youngest of our ten cats, a seven- or eight-month-old youngster, is curiously poking a book of matches on the base of the fireplace. Every loose object is a toy for his hyper brain, and he has become quite adept at tossing toys across the room and quickly giving chase. His antics are well known to any cat lover as they are universal to this type of predator. Playful as they may appear to us, and entertaining, they do descend from a long line of predators, but then, so do we. Our predation, however, has much greater consequence to the planet we inhabit. We also frequently play, not as stewards of the garden as various legends tell, but as though there is nothing beyond the moment in which we are engaged. Even so, we manage to create magnificent works of thought and emotion that link us to our past and carry forward to the future. If only we were better at living outwardly with concern for the home that nurtures us, enriching the soil from which we have sprung.
