Abstract Art at ASK March 6 - 27 2010

I am excited to be participating in the upcoming ASK members show that will be focusing on Abstract Art. Abstraction and non-objective painting have been ideas (or processes) I have struggled with ever since I first picked up a brush.
The piece for John Ashbery is in response to the poet's poem Blue Sonata. I still remember reading the poem for the first time on a summer day in Woodstock with my daughter. We were looking for poems to study together, and I was grabbed by the line "we live in the sigh of our present". It made me think of Kandinsky's ideas on the spiritual in Art and the writings of Meyer Schapiro on Mondrian. The poem made me wonder if abstraction is capable of existing outside the present, or for that matter , can abstraction exist outside its making? Either way, abstraction cannot exist in some other place, or as I have written before (not) in some other place.

The piece Glide was painted before Ashbery. Glide was painted in response to Dave Hickey's Flatland as I tried to work away from the composition I had settled on while working through the Irish Airman Series. Hickey's text and A Theory of /Cloud/ by Hubert Damisch both encouraged me to challenge an idea of space in my work- an exploration that is exaggerated in a work like Ashbery.

Music as Muse at ASK

This past year my family and I moved to the Rondout area of Kingston, NY. As a Christmas Gift post the transition, my spouse, Hillary, gave me a membership to the Art Society of Kingston, which is located just down the block from us on Broadway.

This members show is my first participation with the organization. I submitted my piece Toward a History of Glam Rock (Iggy, Bowie, & Lou) for consideration in the upcoming Music as Muse show.

The piece is an extension on my exploration of W.B. Yeats' An Irish Airman Forsees His Death:

I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above...
...A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.

My first exploration of the theme was done with white, black, and silver in 3 parts. I think it was the silver that directed me to consider glam rock as an avenue of influence as well. It was a step away from the machine to expression.

The Airman and the Performer both need to live in the present, balancing between the corporeal and the ephemeral in their pursuit of release.