Look, See

California Sun

 

 

 

 

 

 

Prime

 

 

 

Prime, 20061229, HTML, 240 x 180 pixels

 

 

 

 

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AtB

 

 

Douglas is showing marvellous invention in completing simple pieces I sent him with real economy, wit, and insight. This piece for me sort of encapsulates the idea of "across the borderline." I made it as a vertical, the ragged edge at the top. He rotated it to horizontal, and with a single white arc bridged a gap and made a unified image.

 

 

 

 

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across the borderline

 

 

Douglas Witmer posted this announcement at his place, and I'm reusing it here, as what Douglas says pretty much speaks for me, too.

 

We're doing simple back-and-forth exchanges of work. We're working on a variety of non-precious surfaces...cheap papers particularly. We're doing different things with size, and format. We're both experimenting a lot, allowing ourselves to go outside the "boundaries" we have each set for our individual work. For me, the working mindset is close to child-like. That said, it's not easy. Opening yourself and your processes up like this can bring out exciting possibilities, but it also has a way of revealing your basic visual assumptions to yourself. This can represent a real challenge.

The gallery at the University of Dayton is on the small side, essentially a U shape, but with shorter walls on each end and a long wall in the middle. At this point we're envisioning exhibiting a selection of our individual works on each end with the larger wall being hung in a free-form way, likely a hundred or more pieces, to be determined collaboratively on-site. Stay tuned! In the meantime here are the facts:

Across the Borderline--collaborative works by Chris Ashley and Douglas Witmer
January 10 - February 10, 2007
Rike Center Gallery
University of Dayton, Ohio

 

 

 

 

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Morandi's "Bottiglie e fruttiera"

 

 

Originally published at Rudolf's Diner, December 2006

 

Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964, Italy), "Bottles and Fruit-Bowl" (Bottiglie e fruttiera), 1916, Oil on canvas, 60 x 54 cm, Gianni Mattioli Collection, Mattioli Collection

It is amazing to think that Giorgio Morandi painted the still life Bottles and Fruit-Bowl in 1916 at age 26, and for forty more years continued painting, besides landscapes, arrangements of bottles and bowls and containers on tabletops with a fairly muted palette of whites, browns, and various grays hinting at red, yellow, and blue. He established his vocabulary early and stuck with it. Who else has used and repeatedly looked so closely at the same table?

Surveying Morandi's oeuvre, one sees the same shapes used over and over in different configurations. In addition, there are typically two horizontal lines in each compostion- the front and rear edges of the table; the sides are never shown. The objects are typically arranged in tight clusters. The light is soft, so shadows are minimal and form is barely modeled. These paintings feel silent, almost airtight, as if the depicted objects have been sitting like this for ages, slowly accumulating a film of dust in a closed room that is off-limits to all but the painter.

In Bottles and Fruit-Bowl the two shapes on the left and right twist and spin. They are unlike any glass or ceramic objects I've ever seen: distorted, pulled, warped, bent. They appear to have been changed by age and use, as if showing signs of a lifetime of being of service. But going a little further, it isn't difficult to see the bottle on the right as male, and the bowl on the right as female. Is it necessary to spell it out? The bottle, round and full at the bottom, long and vertical at the top, seems full and ready to spew. The bowl, arrayed like an open fan, reaches towards the bottle, ready to receive. One you notice this, it's hard not to look at this painting and see sex.

Between the bottle and bowl rises a white bottle or vase that narrows at the top. It is evenly painted and virtually flat, subtly yet formally and solidly standing at the center of the painting between the two other objects. The reason for its presence may be supervision or observation; is it a chaperone, a priest, the law, society? It's not clear if the white vase is there to validate or interrupt the potential act between the the bottle and vase. Whatever may be about to happen is on the verge, suspended, incomplete, potential and future tense.

Seventeenth century Dutch still lives employed elaborate systems whereby specific fruit, flowers, and other shapes symbolically referenced and reinforced certain morals and ideals. In particular, Vanitas paintings used symbolic reminders of life's impermanence: skulls, burning candles, books with turning pages. As an admirer of Cezanne, Morandi would have been familiar with the French painter's still lives in which peaked fabrics and fruit stacked on a tabletop hint at the mountains and skulls Cezanne repeatedly painted. During the same period Morandi painted Bottiglie e fruttiera the Italian art movement Pittura Metafisica ("Metaphysical Painting") was being formed by Carlo Carrà and Giorgio de Chirico; these artists, precursors to Surrealism, painted familiar objects in unexpected ways to engage the unconscious in an alternative reality. Freud's ideas were already well known in the early 1900's, and were soon represented in art and literature. Morandi was associated with Pittura Metafisica during its brief existence, so it's not a stretch to imagine what kind of pictorial energy a twenty six year old bachelor might be fantasizing about and tinkering with during those times.

This tabletop seems vast, deep and endless on the sides. It's also possible to see it as a desert floor or an open flat field, rather than a table. Try seeing this scene as a landscape, and the blue background in the top third becomes more sky-like and intense. The three shapes become grand architecture: the bottle a Baroque church; the vase a factory smokestack; the bowl a fountain or statue. By shifting what we see from table to cityscape, scale changes entirely, from a slice of interior setting to an enormous openness. We are presented with the opportunity to see this painting in several ways- from handheld vessels on a table, to the secretly intimate and erotic, to vast public and civic space, and back again to the humble shapes Morandi used repeatedly during his life. A still life is not merely a still life. A painting's meaning is more than what meets the eye, but it's in what meets the eye that the meaning begins to be found, and in looking, thinking, feeling, and associating, that possible meanings are experienced.

Chris Ashley lives in Oakland, and draws in his weblog "LookSee" everyday.

 

 

 

 

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Ladybugs

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Charline von Heyl: Happy End

 

 

 

Charline von Heyl, Happy End, 2005, Acrylic and oil on canvas, 82 x 78 inches, 208.3 x 198.1 cm, Collection San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (image used without permission: Friedrich Petzel Gallery, NY)