SCORPION

Painting in the third dimension

Author: onur79

Some forms of creative expression can be categorized as neither painting nor sculpture exactly, although they contain elements of both.

Not every artist wishes to create illusory effects on canvas–on a surface that is, by nature, flat and not easily adaptable to three-dimensional additions or attachments. Those who refuse to confine their artistic expression to a two-dimensional plane find other ways of conceptualizing their world visually. One such way can be categorized as neither sculpture nor painting exactly, although it contains elements of both. Tom Duncan and Reginald Case practice this form of expression utilizing contemporary images. Their method is to paint, sculpt, and construct environments that not only depict visual references but, through their very existence, reflect the creative process itself. By building from scratch or piecing together sculptural dioramas that describe or illuminate experiences and thoughts, these artists produce works that are, on one hand, poetically elusive and, on the other, weighed down by their own physical substance, tied to reality by sheer structural force.

You might argue that Renaissance workers in parquet were doing something similar by piecing together delicate slivers of wood in order to create an illusion in space. But the most obvious parallel to this form of creation might be the theater, where human experience is shaped within a kind of box, framed by a stage and flanked with sets. Inside this framework, a story is told by actors, providing the audience with a condensed human experience.

Probably the first of the constructed-image artists was the German Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948), who was aware of the Dada movement, which, with its antiart-establishment tenets, exploded onto the scene in Europe in the 1920s. Schwitters improvised in the Dadaistic style, founding a movement of his own known as Merz, and created artworks through which ordinary objects, trash, and assorted odds and ends were taken out of a real-world context and incorporated into collages and relief sculpture where they assumed a life of their own. In one of his most well-known works, Merzbau (not shown), and in subsequent variations, the artist transformed his entire house–arranging bits of collage and construction between rooms, up walls, and out windows–creating a two-dimensional work on a three-dimensional plane. Schwitters’s collages are tenuously bound to the painterly tradition, but in terms of the constructed image this artist was a bellwether; his original experiments provided an impetus for others who sought something more than the flat picture plane could provide.

Enter Louise Nevelson, Joseph Cornell, Pop Art, and, more recently, a whole generation of artists who work exclusively in the third dimension–although these artists are not sculptors per se and their art form is not always referred to in such terms.

At a time when painting dominated the contemporary scene, the work of Louise Nevelson (1900-1988) was not initially appreciated and was often dismissed out-of-hand. In her case, persistence–and her quirky aesthetic–won out, although she did not achieve professional recognition until she was in her early sixties. Far from rejecting a two-dimensional approach, Nevelson added to it, foregoing an illusory “picture” in favor of sculptural bas relief.

Her constructions, characterized by their stacked compartments and contrasting smooth and rough wooden forms, are less in the Dadaist tradition–which exalted randomness–than in a cooler, more classical vein. She hit upon a unifying technique for her sculpture similar to the one her Minimalist counterparts in painting used: monochromatic composition. When the assembly process was over, the artist painted her constructions solid black, white, or gold–endowing their disparate shapes and elements with a harmonious and graceful anonymity.

If Nevelson was a kind of classicist of the assembled picture plane, Joseph Cornell (1903-1972) was its romantic visionary. Cornell’s motif became the box–a place in which private worlds take shape. Viewing a work by Nevelson, you might seem to hear a faint, fluid note sounded from a distance; by contrast, Cornell’s boxes emit rolling and tumbling sonorities. His box constructions are not merely interesting physical environments but also private viewings of an artists’s inner life.

Although Cornell carried the Schwitters tradition to a newer, freer realm, his work is literally more contained and, therefore, more disciplined in its expression. The artist selected objects painstakingly and was enamored of curious juxtapositions of the mundane and the lyrical, which he orchestrated in delicate arrangements as if they were precious time capsules. The physical details of his constructions are easily described, yet their emotional impact defies analysis. The viewer determines how each boxed world is interpreted, and, consequently, every time a Cornell work is seen, it is reinvented.

New York City artist Tom Duncan brings these various traditions together in works that are, at once, both hauntingly ambiguous and quite personal and specific. Born in Scotland in 1939 and brought to America at the age of eight, Duncan makes use of vivid (and sometimes imaginary) experiences of a childhood lived in the shadow of the Second World War, expressing hope, fear, terror, and sometimes childlike security in his work. His constructions are created not only from his own memories but from stories told to him in later years by members of his family. As he writes in the notes to a 1992 solo show of his work at his Manhattan gallery, G.W. Einstein Company, “[My family members] were great storytellers. Whether [the stories were about] something tragic or something humorous, it was a steady flow that never seemed to end. I loved listening to these stories as a small child. Even now, I love to listen to them. The experience explains why I enjoy telling stories in my sculpture.”

Duncan’s recent mixed-media piece The Brandy Strafing can almost be “read” as a narrative. It represents an amalgam of what the artist knew and felt about a childhood incident–retold to him in adulthood by an aunt–in which he and his mother were threatened with gunfire from German aircraft. Like Cornell, he sets his imagination free inside a box, while, in this work, Duncan adds to the box, constructing an elaborate pedestal for it that makes the completed piece vaguely reminiscent of the kind of radio found in almost every home during the Second World War. Within the diorama, the artist has invested the landscape with symbolic imagery.

“In the middle of the piece,” he writes, “there is a small shrine for my father [a soldier in the British Army]. On top of that is the environment with my mother and me and the German planes. Flying above us are our guardian angels–even the German pilots have guardian angels. In this work, I wanted to show how beautiful the Scottish landscape is and contrast it with the horror of war. The outside of the sculpture has [simulated] dragon teeth applied all over–these were tank deterrents–and I have covered the entire piece with earth. The sides of the piece have two gas-mask shrines. One symbolizes war, depicting my father and me with our war equipment and me with my toy machine gun. The other shrine is of my mother and me with one of my dolls, symbolizing peace.” In this work, Duncan manages a rare feat: He is both a storyteller–taking liberties, boiling down, distilling–and a kind of historian, interested in presenting specific details of his own life.

Duncan’s most ambitious work in terms of size is the 7?-X-8?-X-7-1/2? construction Dedicated to Coney Island. In it, he has liberated his imagery from the suggestive frame of a box, making the theme park a place without borders. Coney Island itself is adoringly recreated through the filter of the artist’s imagination–from the elevated boardwalk along the seashore to the carnival rides, which Duncan depicts as constructed environments, inhabited by ghouls, monsters, and grotesques. The artist has created a kind of civic monument with this work; it is also an apotheosis of his own experience. (He spent the latter part of his childhood in and around Coney Island–during the years following his family’s move to Brooklyn, New York.) The piece is engaging on many levels, from the viewer-interactive knobs that can be pressed to make the mechanical trains go and the rides run to the multitudes of bathers on the sandy beach, which were fabricated and hand painted by the artist himself. Through his autobiographical constructions, Duncan pursues and achieves the magical quality of something that, as he says, “has been created out of nothing.”

New York artist Reginald Case is to Tom Duncan what Toulouse-Lautrec was to Degas–spiritual kinsman. Although they developed independently from one another, there is a finely controlled lyricism in both artists’ work.

Case was born in Watertown, New York, upstate from his present home in Peekskill. He studied first at the State University of New York at Buffalo, then in Massachusetts at Boston University, where the traditional curriculum was balanced by a visiting faculty of inspirational artists such as Walter Murch and Robert Gwathmey. After receiving an M.A. degree there in 1968, he joined the faculty at Virginia’s Norfolk State University. As the artist recalls, “All through the period in Norfolk, I was painting and doing sculpture and experimenting with making large, three-dimensional ‘realizations’ of my paintings. These were very literal translations of my paintings into three dimensions; they measured five to six feet high. I created them by combining wood lathing with stretched muslin to build the forms, which I then plastered over and painted.

“Painting,” he continues, “always implied and meant that you were creating three dimensions realistically through the illusion of a two-dimensional work of art. I never felt convinced that the three-dimensional illusion was as strong as I wanted, so I made sculptures.”

Case eventually became interested in surrealistic imagery, which led him to create collage-type models using projected photographs; he then translated these into oil paintings. What he learned in the process, however, was that he was most interested in the collages themselves. “The collages opened up whole areas I hadn’t thought of in terms of painting, or didn’t think were possible,” he says, “such as appropriating materials other than the photographic image in my work–materials like Mylar, metallic paper, trims, buttons, beads, fringe, glass–literally, anything and everything.” The variety and quantity of materials he requires are obtained with the help of his wife, Bonnie, a fashion designer.

Case’s work has always reflected his fascination with American culture, from his earlier mixed-media pieces inspired by folk art to his eventual use of imagery from the wild West and the circus. His recent pieces, shown through New York City dealer Allan Stone, are collaged, mixed-media assemblages that he says “give expression to the fascination of youth with movies, vaudeville, theater, radio, and popular magazines.” Using popular cultural icons, the artist has taken the recognizable imagery of mass media and transformed it into works of art. “Having gotten a traditional education in art, grounded in a sense of art history, I had never attached a legitimacy to my interest in popular culture or show business as subject matter,” Case says. “I could never find a way to imagine those subjects as part of my artwork until I began making collages.”

An early mixed-media piece, a tribute to Duke Ellington and the bandleader-dominated jazz age, embodies the whole nightclub milieu of the 1920s and early ’30s with its gewgaw and glitter. In Top Hat (not shown), a more sophisticated work, you can almost hear a Gershwin tune as Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers electrify the dance floor. These pieces and other recent works featuring stars such as Valentino, Betty Grable, and Marilyn Monroe are summations, not only of Case’s personal responses to those celebrities but of Hollywood’s Golden Age–the 1920s through the 1950s.

In addition, Case has developed a more austere vein of sculptures, taking his inspiration from identifiable architectural subjects such the facade of New York City’s Grand Central terminal building and the Empire State building. These constructions also include anonymous “houses” such as Temple, made of semiprecious stone, delicately shaped and accented with ornamental touches of patinated copper.

With its shine and sparkle, Case’s work demands your attention, yet it does not require interpretation. Like the title of his recent show at the Reading Public Museum and Art Gallery in Reading, Pennsylvania, “Hollywood Without Politics,” the artist’s collages and constructions are offered with no strings attached. Ultimately, Case is like Schwitters, Duncan, Nevelson, and Cornell–a seeker, interested first and foremost in the purer world of creation.

http://articlesupport.com