9/24/2021
Brian Oschwald ART Ideas, Intentions, Means & Results
(scruffy, occasional notes, redundancies & subverted entitlements)
FIRST THINGS FIRST
Making Art: there is no central question and no useful answer. Just this: I get understanding without explanation. It’s enough.
’The Noirest of my Betes? ART IS NOT A SEDATIVE FOR THE THE RICH -although in history it may always have appeared to be just that. Art ! of every kind! ART!: the most targeted zone of entitled ownership for the nonce enthusiasms of “the 'smart' people”, with their momentary enthusiasms, their planet-sucking narcotic comforts, their upholstered soul-suffocating worlds. Yea, right, of course. however, I push on toward forgiving nearly anyone; Art encourages it.
If / when a painting is not some “illustration of an existing story” - resist inventing a story that the painting might serve as an “illustration” of. To do otherwise is more a way of looking away from the painting than of looking at the painting, boldly living with & into the work itself in all of its uncooperative mystery. Refrain from using the painting as a mere means to 'free-associate'. Welcome then to the tensions you are left to feel: the discomfiting, exhilarating, probing world of the maker, where Art & art-making mostly involves the process of making personal art, not dishing up some anxiously conceived, monetizable product. We know that most Art-in-the-world and personal art-making greatly entails questions above all, not immediate or even eventual answers, or consolations.
Compelling as TRUELY serious art encounters may be, it is existentially pointless for the wise to expect or demand enduring life-strengthening clarity, cultural certainty, or spiritual consolation from the art object itself. A personally experienced PAINTING cannot through you prevail over any dark force, except by way of inducing and nourishing your curiosity. Just this: offering an artwork & expecting IT to convey a specific meaning, or specific kinds of (presumptively sharable) meanings won’t happen. An art image, an art experience is just a doorway to a larger self —finally brought about only through an ever more WELL-DESERVED connection with other people. In each other -not in art-things- is the meaning we crave. Art of any kind -in a limited, gradual way. -can enable one to willingly migrate toward this wildly dimensional truth.
History & the Future
Father: the near-blind architect with zero emotion. The mother? - an unctuously aggressive co-dependant-ish bible chorister
I've always loved being read to, it’s bliss so primal: campfire and story!
every day I choose clothes for life now -in the world, I see inside myself. I choose music that dignifies the effort in the face of limitations. if I don't paint… I journal-think about materials, texture, color, and design to honor the day: wing of a moth, beak of bird, scale of fish, petal of flower ; there is no greater source of aesthetic wisdom apart from nature …than world ethnic fabric traditions.
my educational interests & exposure include history love, academic philosophy suspicion, industrial design passion, world-ethnic craft traditions, traditional music.
a [tendentiously] plausible future: impatient, searching color, reckless storms of gestation, finding strength well beyond all necessary 'breakdowns', up new pathways sometimes placid, sometimes ominous, to a reassembled heart, toward the better -though often quixotic- conditions of breakthrough and well-reckoned transformation.
against any presumptive omniscience about art— in myself;
I notice a vague dizziness that occurs when writing about art (especially here). this froggy feeling comes from suspicion about the risk of over-simplification or empurpled over-statement; this dogs any artist who is happy and proud, and overly bold.. Other callings, other sufferings and risk-taking is where art finds its community of truth-seeking.
Motivation, Audience
perhaps the committed art pilgrim hopes & murmurs "move me" move me deeper into myself, into what's worth living for...
the artist asks: can I engage the (wild asparagus) peripatetic viewer-collectors who scrutinize, think, study, and query the maker & others about what they notice in life, and qualify as art-worthy subjects of delectation, meditation, and debate?
perhaps a pathetic threshold - I long to 'place" what I make, not merely 'sell' it
shall I impatiently disturb/disrupt complacency with fresh astonishment, breathing the light of unique color toward a viewer's fascination with the image, offering- in essence- a magnetic, livable, unavoidable, and seriously rewarding experience -tingling the spine in anticipation of possession (and lonely meditative viewing)?
without overreach ( fighting the "artiste's" predictably defensive sense of self-importance) this art may & should exist to protect, enable, and champion the nearly measurable conditions of human-cultural flourishing
I am not afraid to contradict myself. I'm not afraid of things broken -then glued back together (after all, this is life for most people, isn't it?)
It is tremendously hard to overcome business-world illusions that benefit one personally. overcoming ego (that endless force ready to subvert civic & fellow-feeling) it’s a gigantic spiritual leap (always darkly spring-loaded to snap backward) the Ego: it is mountainous, it is totally exasperating. There are no other terrms for ego’s many-sided destructive consequences
what is my now-ness? here: every day standing open to sudden, often unwelcome insights, the exuberant play of insinuating nuances newly defining the 'remote' and the 'familiar'
capture ideas (prose) & feeling (poetry) emanating from long-standing curiosities, battles & daily diplomacies
dive a deeper sea of absorption in the work process itself, fighting free of any presumed destination or specific 'explainable' result
each artwork is an end in itself without reference to any external cultural project, standing solely on its capacity to garner notice, appreciation, returning the viewer to a self-illuminated by newly tenacious self-honesty
transcend life's daily MSG-marinated anarchies, the white noise of life, to notice, protect & expand single passing moments — when noticing becomes numinous by aesthetic absorption, thereby to capture in bloods’ warm longing and discernment, the great treasure in common experience seen large.
Influences & Appreciations
writers: Rumi, Pasternak, Rilke, Woolf, Walser, Nabokov, Stevens, Sebald, Hitchens, Sam Harris
music: most early & classical, no trivial amount of jazz, a bit of pop, all world, folk and ethnic musics, lute, viola da Gamba, the harp, woodwind, bagpipes
painters: Turner, Rothko, Olitski, Morandi, Diebenkorn, others
'wabi-sabi, Boro
architects: Mac Intosh, Wright, Kahn, Scarpa, others
architectural design vocabularies & themes in the paintings & sculpture recall spatial experience through plans, elevation, sections, and details. subtle & irregular perplexing geometries are explored. industrial environments and archeologies are referenced; rhythms & patterns of urban design, streets, neighborhoods, and mysterious passageways as strengths and decay. notice the walls, voids, articulated building materials, construction details & obscure connections, complex surface treatments of various densities and valencies.
architectural sculptors: David Smith, Chaleda, Schwitters, others
Theory (Theoria = Contemplation) what's the insight sought through painting 'theory'? understanding and action leap toward meaning when the 'what' (subject) & the 'how' (methods)) are breathing together
truly, immediately, directly, by allusion and implication, beauty is real and crucial everywhere now and in all of history. ugliness though? thoughtful viewers gradually intuit that ugliness is a severe existential gateway to 'soul composting, offering odd unexpected healing or mitigation of fear, anxiety about mortality, toward an emotional dis - illusioned renewal.
STRUCTURE enables meaning; my understanding recognizes this in all art matters. -- this is my personal, generative X/Y Framework: X is "Prospect" / Y is "Aspect":
1) Prospect (X):= IDEAS emerging from the artists own lived social-cultural experience and judgment - the artist's conscious, rational viewpoint as to his labors time-bound cultural sympathies, focus, depth, breadth, hindsight, and foresight
2) Aspect: (y) = all the visual, constructive style elements and evident effects of any kind whatever: derivative appropriation, accidental techniques & unique personal treatments: means, methods: color, support materials, composition, shapes, sizes, textures,
X & Y are the two basic interdependent structural realms of art, the matrix of self-creation and cultural contribution.
art accomplishments gradually earn their status as value-reckonings of plausible world-making i.e. when the work embodies a compelling personal aesthetic showing evidence over time and circumstance brilliantly clear for an inclusive variety of committed viewers.
an art experience involves tacit knowledge, pointing to ongoing investigations by the maker (and viewers) as to how meaning and value are credibly birthed from raw materials + passionate labor (in so many astonishing ways, across history (histories) & cultures).
offering an artwork & expecting to convey a specific meaning, or specific kinds of presumptively sharable meanings invites disappointment. is it possible to ignore this?
re-appropriate an alternative role for Art in our culture i.e. to mitigate suffocating consumerism, complacency and cynicism (at any degree of subtlety, with their pulpy muscles -dreary, timid & sad ] while declaiming any philosophically regressive assertions of Arts' vaunted agency as 'consolation & redemption' in just that conflicted cultural crucible is the uncomfortable place where we can deeply learn, and come to be more fully alive in both our aesthetic joys and our existential disappointments. Keats called that the place of ---(counter-intuitive term)--- 'Negative Capability' -- being decidedly suspended between opposing truth claims without anxious concession to either claim. Capacious.
intellectual probity with a soft touch
accident is as much a part of painting as anything else, symbolic of the Grace that, along with Will, conspires to place plaint on a surface for no reason more defensible than fleeting joy
Research & Development
notice notice notice attention leads to devotion and illumination of new habitable landscapes previously shrouded in lazy if not willful obscurity
not without at least some humor --- a promising art soil is a lonely mind at ease with all kinds of uncertainty conceding that sanitized post-facto, spring-loaded story-making is specious
art-making - a playfully serious way to hope, cope, contribute & honor imperfect individual subjectivity
each work begins with wayward record keeping / sleepwalking research into longings repetitive or never before encountered.
the flood of notions and possibilities requires management, not burning or over-salting what’s on the stove
references: garden composting, metallurgy, demolition, the hoped-for transmutation of mystery into recognition, thought into substance
making studies & models - rapid configuration of transient insight & fleeting entitlements, intimations well beyond reason and language
Subject matter: Evocations
beauty plus decay -layered, scumbled
beckoning, nearly inscrutable instances of subtlety overlooked
gusting veils that tempt or hide, mists, fogs & scrims that demure
new dimensions of useful affect beyond familiar emotions
archeology & civil engineering murmured
remoteness & familiarity revisited: the collective unconsciousness honored, the aboriginal gene pool, the dark and beckoning "UR"
geometry and the detail of free-spirited garden rooms
innocence and deep place-making in the threatened public space of our gloaming environmental present moment
sensing the city, the neighborhood of dubious self-knowledge & self-esteem beneath the 'urban thrall' of my surface self-mage
from landscapes to IN-scape toward the GEO-figuration of the self newly imagined beyond the body
Studio Process, Methods, and Materials
oblique intentionality: accidents, mistakes, and unforeseen discoveries greatly figure, that emerge from 'well planned' goings-astray, allowing spaces to exist where markings occur without hesitation or expectation
instrumental music practiced while viewing paintings s in progress
(recently, I've learned to use my carrot peeler swiping it in both directions !s. (wow, who knew)
oils, mixed media, cold wax on wood panel
being clear about competing virtues: view presumed certainties through lenses that distort or over-sharpen
sonic involvement: hearing the sound of my scraping palette knife / the brush wet or dry. allow the scratchy humble pencil stub to have its say
sculpture: material & constructs about architecture as reassurance -not pride, architecture - its brooding cycles of pride, origination and decay
Composition, form, and Pattern
pattern recognition of GEO forms & shapes warm, not cold, soft not hard, suggestive not defined, invitational not aggressive, insinuating not demanding, poetic not clinical, of music not of warning, intuitive not imposed
ordering devices (ideas: kits & cases that hold), measuring devices, storage & filing systems as memory banks
varieties of symmetry and the centripetal forces of anti-symmetry
horizontal fields and networks are earthy/human. vertical designs aspire
hand tools that reach, grasp, shape, sever or bind
rhythmic loops / visually connective sinews & tissue knitted together as a visual fabric: prospective worlds & local repair campaigns in small mental neighborhoods
Color, Texture
bright palette or dark. pastels or dusty jewel-tones, colors mixed directly on the surface: layered, excavated, scumbled rough /irresistibly suggestive
well broken color: zones & levels of consciousness about adventuring and absorption
visual and thematic translucence & transparency, squirmy over-lappings / ” like "crabs in a basket" - Justine / Durrell
Meaning: Resistance & Resilience
believe that what is necessary is possible, double down on being fully human. live large in a non-partitioned mind, despite fragrant sadness, and weariness.
aware of social fragmentation, the relentless trivialization of current social life, historical perspective, and emotional honesty, we turn away from mounting distractions we inwardly return home to our unique understanding of how value is birthed; where responsibility for value and meaning-creation in our lives resides in our ourselves. how? think Oikos (greek): assembling available raw materials -mixing those with passionate labor; that is the essence of life, self, & world-building
world repair happens through all processes similar to art-based self-making & re-making
at the greatest moments of tension & promise in creating or viewing an artwork [i.e. a precious 'canister' of useful darkness and dream ] the artwork ceases to be about its obvious characteristics but instead emerges as a magnetic invitation to feel and have an expanded self, ever more inclined to live large.
the collection of works here aspires to rise above its effects. to what? to be clear and present emblems of human flourishing
this artist works to be free of the need to explain anything, while the viewer -fully engaged and disinterested- “permits“ the artist this specific essential freedom. it's a shared grace in soul-making, flush with intimations of creaturely & trans-sensual- kinship.
opposing self overreach, and of a chastened optimism, I hope this work aggregates as a family of (country & urban) qualities of mind about the ultimate value of the arts -- in making and repairing the world-as-home.
Framing
gallery minimal, if
Collaboration
welcomed
artist-gallery agreement
Commissions
welcomed
Prices 2020-2022
$8.75 sq. In. (small works) adjusted ++ for large pieces
payment plans available
barter? perhaps
Will Deal Well.
END NOTE
my Team -
who can “best” Dante - “Love Awakens the Soul to Act"?
who may best Dante? perhaps Simon Schama: "Beauty is a Gateway to Love"
but I say -not the only gateway: managing well the primitive shadow-beast in oneself is the other gateway.
What all of this writing feels like -to me-here-and -now in any season —-?
"...late roses filled with early snow" - T.S. Elliot