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roc scssrs' blog
by roc scssrs, knowledge worker. The subject here is, as the Library of Congress puts it, "Conduct of Life." Also books, since this is on the college's dime. Writing and poetry. And religion-- Buddhism and Catholicism.
Saturday, April 24, 2010
More on the Trinity
Many artists are inarticulate, really. Emotionally raw. They can't explain very well what they do. They just do it, albeit sometimes magnificently.
We have a little revolving art gallery here, so I read a fair number of artists' statements. Most tend to be vague, vapid, or sententious. Some have only the most tenuous of connections to the objects on the wall, making the reader/viewer feel stupid for "not getting it." Some are so bizarre one fears for the poor fellow's sanity.
The artist's statement here at the current exhibit is perfectly balanced, I think, between specificity and abstraction, intellect and emotion. It actually helped me in looking at the paintings!
I'll let the artist, Vincent McLoughlin, tell you what he does in his own words: "The panels...deal with three. Red. Yellow. Blue. Applied opaquely, translucently, and transparently in layers of three." Then he starts to tickle me. The three colors make him think of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Plato's three-fold division of human psychology: the appetitive, the spirited, the rational. Darwin (variation, heredity, struggle for existence), Lincoln (government of, by, and for the people). A structured analysis, yet opening out to endless possibilities.
I found the paintings to look like kaleidoscope images. Crystals. No wait, they look like growing microorganisms. And look, there's an evolving eye! No, wait-- a city, a parliament, a cluster of berries! Love, growth, communion! And I liked thinking of the Trinity as the origin of it all.
In spite of the old adage to view from the distance, I found the paintings were even more intriguing close-up, once I understood the artist's technique.
Sometimes the artist is his own best critic. Certainly he should be his own best advocate.
5/10/2009
ART REVIEW: Exploring the truth of artistic abstraction
By Ron Schira
Reading Eagle Correspondent
Topton, PA - Whenever the topic of abstract painting arises in conversation or in print, the reverse topic of representation almost always comes into play and attempts to convince us that abstraction was a reaction to the primacy of realistic art.
Supposedly one can't exist without the other, and in most minds abstraction is continually compared to realism or read into, like gazing into clouds and picking out a familiar form. There must be something to which one can relate.
And to the select few, we are comparing apples to oranges, as true abstraction bears no resemblance to anything one sees except the art itself. One may look into it and see something, but it is only paint, just the same as a portrait or still life is a conglomeration of colored marks on a surface that only resembles a face or an object. The abstraction takes place in the mind of the viewer, as those marks are translated into recognition or narrative - the popular illusion of art.
Admittedly, certain images do lend themselves more readily to illusion than others, and that is unavoidable, being the creatures we are. However when viewing the works of an artist such as Vincent McLoughlin, who is showing a number of extravagantly colorful paintings at the newly opened Toad Creek Gallery in Topton through May 31, one needs to search hard for something recognizable.
The exhibit is titled "2inflation&oxygenation" and consists of acrylic paint on discarded wood panels, paper - and in one instance, foam board. Some of the paintings are jigsaw-cut and adapted to different shapes, mostly in rounded burst forms that utilize the shape as part of the composition.
The paintings are starkly nonfigurative and arbitrate a relationship between contrasting colors that relax upon each other in a variety of jarring but incredibly lively juxtapositions.
His titles contain the first letters of the colors he uses and the order of which they were applied, such as "YONBONR," which is yellow on blue on red. In this way, he brings the artwork to purely retinal terms, making them difficult to describe without exploiting the language they reject.
"My paintings come out of painting," McLoughlin explained, "my own connection to painting's history and a passion on my part to paint. I investigate spatial metaphors, technical processes and incoming information while remaining dedicated to hands-on, first-person execution. I set up limitations in which I am able to improvise and have a general notion of what direction the painting will take. I push or follow the painting to the point where it animates or takes on a meaning that gives it specificity. I am interested in how abstraction can be extended and distended, or inflated and oxygenated, to address something beyond the rhetoric. My intention is to make something new - to project into a new place."
Simply put, he paints to paint, not to represent, and what I enjoy about McLoughlin's work is his dogged adherence to a youthful and rebellious enthusiasm that typifies the spirit of art-for-art-sake and actually learned the lessons of what abstraction truly taught. In some ways, he is carrying the torch that was lit by his East Village forebears from the 1980s. His work is bold and energetic, not to mention lots of fun, and it exudes a presence long before you get within inches of it.
Contact Ron Schira: life@readingeagle.com.
Addison Parks. The Bow Street Gallery. 2006.
“Vincent keeps it pretty simple and paints in plain terms. Colors and shapes, geometric, organic, pop and electric, that form some sort of brand. Within these parameters he pushes the envelope, exploring his options, ALL his options, variations on a theme like a comedian running with a joke until he hits a wall or it hits him, which ever comes first. Maybe it’s a series, or maybe he’s just trying to nail one, or maybe he knows there isn’t one to nail, just a river of moments, each as good as the next. Who knows? Literally, You just paint. the results are startling. Flashes. Abstract street signs. The brand plants itself on your inner screen, and maybe, just maybe, animates it’s way onto the mind’s eye.”
ART REVIEW
EXCEPTS
At Tufts, rewards in improbable experiments
By Cate McQuaid, Globe Correspondent | July 15, 2005
MEDFORD -- Scientists ''discover" and artists ''create," but truly, is there a difference? Like a scientist, the artist comes up with a question: What will happen if I bring two unlikely scenarios together? What will happen if I change the viscosity of my paint? Applying those questions in an experiment, the artist discovers the answer . . . Vincent McLoughlin uses acrylic paints of varying viscosity and experiments with the way they interact on wood. Sticking to primary colors, he applies the paint with airbrush techniques. The result is eye-catching: a series of organic forms layered in bright tones. Set in triptychs, these pieces become totemic, with one section building on the next in a drumbeat of color and form . . .
Ken Delahunty Poet, English Professor
June 1, 2002
. . . a terrible beauty
When I first saw Vince McLoughlin’s paintings at New Arts last summer they carried generic names like Expansions and Oxygenations. I thought about the happy congruence of titanic artist ambition and a do-it-yourself physics. The names, like the paintings they described, were suitably “pop,” second- or third-generation.
Then the events of 9/11 and their great power over the mind. Like artists everywhere McLoughlin responded in the only language that made sense to him, his art. And now images of expansion and oxygenation took a new meaning; in Yeats’s phrase, “A terrible beauty [was] born.”
Since then the shock of 9/11 has worn off, been sublimated in ‘war on terrorism’ rhetoric. But these raw, un-moderated (except as art) images retain their power to shock and move us.
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