Tag: Art

Abstraction as a political choice

Once you understand the history of this country–whole shelves of American fiction, and great collections of American painting, become unbearable.
I think about this when I try to understand my almost exclusive turn to abstraction, and my resistance to representative art–even though that’s what my education prepared me to do.
It’s not my call to portray the lives of black people, or “first nations’ ( I like the Canadian term), and I don’t see any crying need to paint white people! Abstraction for me embodies a voice of resistance, of protest. Both a choice, and an act of self denial: a rejection of the world I see around me. A turn to landscape, or nature painting is no better–simply another kind of denial… unless I painted toxic dumps, industrial wastelands. I lean in that direction with my Recyclations (trash assemblages).

#692

60.9 x 60.9cm  Acrylic on canvas. With abstract work, I think more in terms of structure, than composition. Ask–where are the bones? The interior scaffolding? Hearkens back to the pleasure I found when I was a boy–from around 7 to 10 years old, playing with a set of building blocks. They were the architectural wood blocks, large blocks of different sizes and shapes: pillars and arches and cubes.  I would build odd configurations, cantilevered extensions balancing asymmetrical columns that grew like crystals or organisms. When I thought about, “structure,” this is what came to mind (cont below).

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Much of what I do is like that–extensions of how I would play when I was alone: building structures with stones and sticks and rusted cans, watching water running down the curbs and imagining the patterns as rivers as though seen from a great height–imaginary landscapes. I felt no connection between making art, and how I had played as a child, until I began making assemblages in the Ox.
A new insight… how it happened, that it all came bubbling out of me at that moment when it became for me, again…  pure play… and what had stopped by progress so many years ago. It wasn’t, as I’ve explained to myself, that I was afraid I didn’t have the talent, or the ability; it was because there was a disconnect between what I thought of as, ‘art,’ and what I would do–how I would play when I was a child.
A realization that brings tears to my eyes. Like Proust… recovering lost time.