FINDING MY ARTISTIC VOICE
When I began painting, my work was figurative. I painted people mostly. I did not really understand or appreciate abstract art. As a young art student at Syracuse University, I was taught to draw and paint through direct observation, otherwise known as looking at real things and depicting space from a classical Renaissance approach. I made a few abstract pieces as experiments, but all my “serious” work was figurative. A few of my classmates toyed with abstraction, but the majority aspired to paint like Paul Cézanne or our revered professor, Jerome Witkin.
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| Sailng the Acheron (2008) oil, rope on canvas, 36 x 27 in |
But something had to change. I put down the paintbrush and picked up the palette knife. I had never made a whole painting with just a palette knife. I decided to try. I made a small 20 x 16 inch painting, completely abstract, over top one of my older paintings. I called it Phillyscape. I painted like this, with just a palette knife, covering up my older paintings, for almost two years. Because I found it nearly impossible to do fine detail with a palette knife, my work became entirely nonobjective.
I first began experimenting with using a palette knife instead of a brush in the summer of 2008 in the painting, Sailing the Acheron. My full-time grad studies were about to begin, and I knew I would have to bid adieu to painting. That same summer, I inherited a few palette knife paintings made by a friend of my grandmother’s. I hung the paintings, by a woman named Jan Meekins, next to mine. The surfaces of these paintings were so lustrous. I loved how their textural surfaces would catch the light and flicker as I walked by. My grandfather told me that Jan made all her paintings in one day, using only a palette knife. That was her gig. It had to be quick. Her paintings inspired me to try the palette knife for the first time. Only a few strokes of the palette knife made it into Sailing the Acheron. They are barely visible, but they're there.
For two years, the palette knife became my primary painting tool. Since Phillyscape (2011), I have created thirteen "new" paintings in this manner. Without a brush, I relinquished my ability to draw with paint; I was literally forced to develop a new mark-making language. When I applied the paint, I felt like I was spackling a wall or decorating a cake. The paint was thick like icing. I scraped the paint on, building up the surface in a series of layers. Textural and dimensional qualities emerged in my paintings, qualities that are difficult to see when you view one of these paintings on a computer screen. However, if you see the art in person, you will notice that the actual paint on the canvas is not pretty. The colors might be appealing, but the actual gobs of paint could easily be described as gritty, sloppy, crusty, creviced, pock-mocked, essentially the opposite of smooth, pristine, and pretty.
I was searching for a new way to approach my work, and ultimately, painting this way reinvigorated my studio practice. My paintings were always colorful, but now the surfaces were becoming deeply textured and almost sculptural, like Jan's paintings.
I tell viewers, “You can do a 180 degree walk around any one of these paintings and it will look interesting from every angle. You don’t have to stand dead in front of it to enjoy.”
Currently, seven paintings hang on my studio wall, in process, some dangerously close to being finished. One of them might be finished. It still needs a few days to sit while I decide. I work on several paintings simultaneously out of necessity. The switch to a palette knife means that the paint lays down thick and I must wait, for three days or more, until the paint is dry enough to add a new layer. If I do not wait, and the paint is still wet, I end up destroying the previous layer. Since I have no patience to wait, I solved this problem by working on multiple paintings at a time.
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| Inside the studio (April 14, 2013) |
However, I have veered from complete abstraction on two occasions. Some paintings that I have chosen to paint over were previously figurative, and I decided to retain some of these figurative elements. For example, in Awakening (2012), a realistic hand emerges from the abstract composition, a hand from the original painting, Corrie's Peace (2004).
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| Corrie's Peace (2002) changed into Awakening (2012), oil on canvas, 30 x 24 inches |
In one painting that I am currently working on (one that I have been referring to as The Mermaid), I decided to keep the face of the original painting. But as the months rolled by, I completely obliterated what was underneath - Afghani Girl (2002). The face is still in the same spot. It's now just a very different face.
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| Afghani Girl (2002) turned into The Mermaid (still in process, photo taken April 28, 2013) oil on canvas, 35 x 24 inches |
This painting, a portrait essentially, has been vexing me to no end. Ultimately, I found I needed a brush to paint the small details of the face. Using a brush allowed me to paint "realistic eyes" and a "realistic mouth" on the woman’s face. The rest of the painting was essentially a color field of palette knife strokes. After I added brushwork, I felt I had created an imbalance. I kept trying to make the painting "work," but to no avail. The technique I used on the face did not mesh with rest of the painting. I came to a halt. I did not know what to do, so I stopped working on it. I hung it out of the way, high on the wall, while I worked on my other six paintings.
A few days ago, after a two-month hiatus from The Mermaid, I took her down for another try. I had an idea - bring more brushwork into the rest of the piece to create a balance between the palette knife marks and the brush marks. So far, this idea seems promising. Time will tell.
This juxtaposition of realism and abstraction in one piece is intriguing, but the idea is hardly new. It is a concept I have been exploring, here and there, since I began painting in the early 90s. If you have been following contemporary illustration and painting, the concept of blending realism with abstraction seems very much alive. The question for me, as a painter, is "What will I do with this concept?"
April 28th, 2013
K. Cicalese
