Formality and material….

I’m drawn to art with a formal presence.  But when the works are made with non-traditional materials, I’m even more captivated….its something about ingenuity – the artist’s ability to see the possibility in the material and then make it work as their own, unique language.

Take this Chris Duncan for example…beautifully made, reminiscent of a night time seascape. Chris started making this work using strapping tape over magazine or text book pages when an injury kept him from other more labor-intensive dot-patterned works.  

Artist influences come from suprising and not so surprising places…a coincidence that Chris has worked as an art handler by day?

                                                                                                                                            source:  Baer Ridgeway Gallery

And castaneda/reiman…who’s work has often been taken for traditional landscape painting.  Upon closer inspection, there is something about the material and its application that is different. 

Appearing like multilayered canvas paintings of beautiful scenes rich with glazes and grounded in painting tradition, they are actually plywood and sheetrock layered in drywall mud. The mud is pigmented with commercial tints and applied with a trowel more in the tradition of house building than conventional landscape painting.  Influence?  Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that the team worked in construction – and that they collect California landscapes.  

                                                                                                                             source:  Baer Ridgeway Gallery

source:  DCKT Contemporary

The work of  Leonardo Drew…scrap material such as found wood is arranged in formal compositions.   Where some might initially view the materials as chaotic scraps, Drew envisions and creates order through patterned and rhythmic placement.    This is a thoughtful video about Leonardo and where his influences and materials come from – his name alone is a hint. 

                                                                                                                                           source:  Sikkema Jenkins

                                                                                                                                      source:  Weatherspoon Art Museum

                                                                                                                            source:  Eleanor Harwood Gallery

– JBK