The Deluge

It is Spring, finally. The rains are here, and they do much to wash away the pollen that inundates the air and makes my nose feel like it is filled with tiny little goblins with tiny little feather dusters tickling the walls of my sinus cavities. I am hard at work finalizing touches on the last paintings for my show at Guardino Gallery, but the painting goes slowly and I am afraid I won't get all the work done in time, or the work won't be well received, or simply no one will show up at the opening. I am showing with two artists I like quite a bit, so it will be an interesting exhibition...but I am always attracted to the old stories, and I see no reason why I shouldn't do those stories as plainly and brilliantly as possible...I like things simply stated...The story of the Deluge, and the reek of promise...who knows if the final version will even work, but that is the stink of it, our need for hope. I was recently offered representation with a gallery in Memphis, a place I fled in 2008 to move to Portland where I thought rains and Doug Firs and hipsters would be kinder to my work...but what happened was that I planted a seed in Memphis and that seed bore fruit...you just never know who or how your art will make a connection with someone. I grew up there, and it is a lovely feeling to know that I still have something there calling me back.

The Great Pumpkin

A friend of mine asked me what I thought of the great pumpkin...He lives in the Netherlands, my friend, not the pumpkin currently on parade here in America...I did these ink drawings a couple weeks ago stemming from titles that came to me, things like "10 hastily reassembled heads chewing a pencil", "one hastily reassembled head with a crown of tongues"...I liked the idea of working from words laid down like a quick sketch, and seeing if the process toward realization would be the same, and if the character of the grotesque would change at all, would it be more direct, would it change, would it lose something in the telling...I am always struggling between the need of the work to speak on its own terms and how much I should interfere to tweak the results...This week I had been feeling the need to explore them in paint, but the paintings got stuck in orange and the orange completely took over...like the orange in these paintings became this bleeding gushing wound sucking in any attempt at rationalization, understanding...it's raw and ugly, and I am afraid that in order to explore this place of terror, the paintings have to fail. But the funny thing is I have been doing this kind of grotesque for years because I have seen the American experience for what it is, and this shift towards fascist expression doesn't surprise me one bit. We have been living it much longer than people like to admit, people are quick to forget the Bush years, and I don't think folks overseas should be surprised either...This isn't a nice place, not if you are poor...and who should the poor turn to if they won't organize to raise their voices? The big heads, the heads with a crown of tongues. The drawings were not well received by my friends in France, or by other people for that matter...they felt they were too forceful, and they ARE ugly and forceful, but that is the point of them...which got me thinking about the work that art is meant to do...whether it is flattery or something else...Of course we recognize beauty and love the feeling of opening up to that world...we are built for it...But there's another kind of work that art should do, like what Otto Dix did, which should draw out the ugly, bring it out to see...sometimes my work veers into that ugly place, that place of suffering and terror, but it isn't a place I'm drawn to...I just feel it bubbling in the background and I know I have to respond to it like I do anything else and ask, hey this is going on, what do you think of this?

PLAYING AT VAN GOGH DRESS-UP

Artists are notoriously sensitive and fickle and just prickly creatures...I recently had a falling out with an artist I admire because I decided I was going to play Van Gogh to his Gauguin...the whole thing is a case of obsession gone awry... I thought he had been trolling my work with the work he had been making, and I called him out for doing so...stupid, apparently I was very wrong, and got the part of asshole quite right...I was seeing connections in our work, but if you followed the thread of our respective postings you would see the connections, too. Sadly, sometimes my more manic phases get the best of me...always up and down. I feel sad that I lost a friend, a painter I admired, but I can see the humor in it, and hopefully Mr Paulus forgives me at some point. Alex is awesome, you can see his work here, they are quite good:
Alex Paulus' Terrific Paintings

Got some great news from the Gallery@the Jupiter this past week. I was given a two month show in October of this year. I have been sharing the newest paintings with the curator, and he has decided to accept my challenge to have my work taken more seriously. Along with the paintings I am working on for this Guardino Gallery show in April, the newest abstracts, and the dogs barking in the shadows, this is going to be a great show, but I have a lot of work ahead.

This thing on Twitter continues to evolve, these titles and notes read more like poetry...sometimes I want to make the drawings that fit them, like I did here with the 10 Hastily Reassembled Heads Chewing A Screwdriver, but mostly I think they work alone in your brain, which is kind of fascinating. If you Twitter, you can follow me here:
follow me on Twitter!

Some notes

One of the things I have struggled with is trying to figure out how to use my iPhone in a way that supports my creative process, and not be a huge time suck on my eyeballs. I had never really played with notes before, but the last few weeks i have been keeping daily notes on my phone, mostly painting titles...the results have been fascinating to me, it reads more like poetry, not what I intended. I have been posting these painting titles on my Twitter feed as a kind of thought experiment...sometimes the titles refer to actual pieces, but the titles themselves have been evocative enough to do the work that one of my pieces might do alone...but the fun of this, besides the shameless promotion, is that they work.

Christopher St. John's Twitter!

carnal acrobatics and death squares 
red and white triangles 
candy corn scattered in blood
yesterday was heavy tomorrow was better-
cultivation restart-spam 
mesh implant-spam 
dogstar inside the breath of trees
stars and clouds
dogstar
we love inside the breath of trees
we live inside the breath of trees
laniakea
shinein yoku-forest bathing

the great attractor
the garden of virtual delights
covered in black
there are no werewolves, its just owls
cape disappointment
cape lookout
gravitational waves detected
saying less saying more is really fucking confusing in this world
give me back my black david bowie
soul sick dogs
collective loving commence
i said the wrong thing 
i looked in the wrong place
the ocean is our home
walking hand in hand with all of our dead ones
saló
excuse-make
it seems to have seasons
theres a lot of things i didnt take serious
none of your fucking business dad stroller toddler
the union of a broad field of vision with a flat picture plane
gleizes writes that we can only know our sensations...what a lonely world
is a spaceship a work of art? is a computer a work of art...etc...adapted from abstraction création pamphlet question "is a locomotive a work of art?"
soft islam...
"life is a puzzling puff of wind" aerial energy jean arp
the perfect work of art gives beauty and bread
carnal musings twitter duck feed thought poems
burn pit dogs
fine art is a good tag for etsy seo
bull cuckold threesome masculine pinata
one soulsick dog in the laundry room
frail forms carried in pink
raisin bran short hair wind in the fir
old pink volcano, two furry pennies, thanks universe
superblaster kisses
bread and butter art
2 soulsick dogs stuck in a laundry room
still life with sex toy and mushrooms
still life with sex toy and marshmallows
i think the thing i have wanted with this body of work is to present a life as in a vision, as a succession of visionary states, or visions seen in a trance. id like to think these images offer a glimpse into a softer unknown, closer to us than strange, a soft alienation, there is something of the eternal in these paintings, or clumsy attempts at it anyway...art that is completely at the service of a vision of reality-it should be noted i am very interested in representing reality in my work, but one that leaves the door wide open...by the moon  and the sun i shall know you
vertigo birds
3 soulsick dogs by a burn pit
seated figure with black cat
seated form w black cat
when the moon wears a sweater
2 soulsick dogs walking along a lake of grease
orange vase green leaves thin mints bouquet
the raccoons are not what they seem
giant woman masturbating in an empty office
one soulsick dog staring directly into your eyes
economic dogpile
two soulsick dogs feeding at the hand of a prickly prophet
2 soulsick dogs discussing the image of god
snowwhite faith dwarves
2 soulsick dogs surrounded by the visually deaf
twin of eyeless toy (gene talk)
come on moon you can do better than that
in the dream house...
one spork red shadow distant earth
by the mouth of all that is pure
two soulsick dogs trending on youtube
10 soulsick dogs staring directly at you
2 soulsick dogs staring at 2 men gently electrocuting a tree
weird buy my art video bunny mask my ugly grey shirt julian claire louis operating little puppets of yellow soulsick dog heads with red borders, making mewly monster noises, much gnashing of teeth-operating them on a tree branch-cuts to doug firs-kids dancing-the word tree in green, tree spoken, image of soulsick dog piece, ommmming in the background, rabbit, buy my art info etc
3 soulsick dogs stuck in a tree
one soulsick dog shitting on a rainbow
one soulsick dog studying a bottle of nutritional supplements
one hungry soulsick dog-bones
red blonde with hungry bones

Some News!

heres an update from looking glass and myself, whats going on in the world of looking glass and christopher st john

looking glass is taking a hiatus…i was happy with the essay i wrote about steve storzs work and have been happy to let that simmer while i focus on my own work. the feedback i got from some people lets me know that folks were happy to read something that was more personal and more in depth about art…regretably that might limit my audience, but i have some other essays planned on some of the other looking glass artists we showed. 

my work has been taking quite an interesting turn…essentially i have three bodies of ideas that overlap in a weird vin diagram fashion…beauty:suffering:something else

the something else and where that overlaps with beauty and suffering is my oil painting, and it has been nice to liberate my painting in general from obsessive drawing and the suffering of my figurative work. i have marked that map very well, and i know what i need to pull from there to make the oils resonate…suffering should be there, we live in a frenetic and troubled world, but we need to skip along to the next chapter as is our want…or is it the next berry we are after? jean arp writes, “life is a puzzling puff of wind”, and it seems more puzzling every year. is there room for artists who still take a stand on the notion of quiet?

i have begun a series of small paintings focused on animals, dogs actually, soulsick dogs…the pieces are funny to me, i enjoy using animals to talk about the difficulties of living in this world, animal bodies, hungry bodies, all the masses of teeth and elbows shoving each other aside in the economic dog pile of american society. 

i have taken to twitter again…writing has always been an important part of my process and titles and pieces of things come to me regularly…sometimes these chunks are better as imagined things, and that has been fun to play with..im also canvasing out into social media again…pinterest, twitter, facebook, instagram, tumblr (which is personally my favorite because of the ease it allows in viewing images and finding blogs which dovetail with my interests)
Christopher St. John's Twitter feed

i am also on pinterest :) its mostly a place to recycle old pieces that folks don't have to find on the website...updated as i feel like it, but mostly kept up to date

Christopher St. John's Pinterest Board

i have a show coming up in april at guardino gallery here in portland…very excited about this body of work…i have been unpacking since coming back from my residency in detroit and i like where i am at in my work.. landscapes, flowers, nudes, still lifes, glitter, death…


Guardino Gallery in PDX

On Frailty...

                                                  On Frailty: The Marks of Steve Storz

                                                              NTRODUCTION

I met Steve Storz in the spring of 2008. I was still married, and my wife had decided she wanted to move back to Taos where she grew up to reconnect with her father. Even though I had never lived there,Taos was already familiar to me. I knew about the town’s historical importance. As an artist, I felt living in Taos was an important stop along the road of the American artistic pilgrimage. Marsden Hartley and D.H. Lawerence had always been important to me. Living there, I felt like I had a real connection to Taos’s part in the history of Modernism after only reading about it years ago. Taos is a very unique place, mythical and real all at once. I was eager to meet the interesting artists who were supposed to be living there.  And eventually I did…I met Steve after prowling around the galleries in town and stepping into the Parks Gallery where he worked. My wife’s father’s concha belts were on display, and we struck up a conversation about Taos and Modernism and what it was to be an artist in 2009, and I felt an instant liking for him. I saw that he had vision, and I figured his work had to be compelling. When I visited his studio, I was more than surprised, I was floored. Here was a man who had built his house into what looked like a bunker assembled from bits and pieces of cold-war era military-industrial ephemera. It wasn’t a hoard so much as a complete and total place of outsider art weirdness. And in terms of its style, I hadn’t seen or met another artist plumbing the same military-industrial depths as American artist Lee Bontecou…but with such different and intriguing results. I hadn’t even considered it a possibility. I knew then that it would be interesting to write about his work. But it took me seven years and another couple of moves to finally grasp just what was so compelling about his work. It also helped that I recently plunked some cash down for a decent laptop. There is a style to this piece. I believe that writing about art demands a kind of poetry, and I knew in writing this piece about Steve’s work, I wanted the freedom of that approach. Because above all else, that is what Steve Storz’s art demands: to do what the hell it wants to do.

 

Steve Storz’s art leaves a Mark. The Mark is the driving force behind his obsessively rendered abstract drawings and his mechanized sculptures, and the Mark is the thing that haunts him. His Mark bears witness to the vagaries of sensation and touch. It scurries across surfaces and builds impossible organisms from its searching density. In his Mark we see splays of rich blacks driven across paper. We see white Marks skim and shift around those black Marks like the light of a lantern creating unexpected illuminations of shape in the dark. Traces of this Mark stubbornly gets on the sides of fingers and the edges of hands, fleshy in tone and fading. When you unknowingly wipe your eye, there it is tracing the passage across the eye, from brown to white to flesh, his inadvertent Mark. Looking at Steve’s work, you imagine his Mark getting into your lungs, sitting silently and unseen in subterranean pink, pulsing rhythmically. You imagine it staring out at you from the white of a bandage, dry as a bone. You sense it living in the blood as an imagined red of unrealized corporeality. This is the life of Steve’s Mark, at once visible and absent. Its visibility leaves a graphite trail, a charcoal flourish, a grey, dusty abrasion, a drip of yellow ochre, a veneer of red oil, a milky spatter of come. Its absence traces its furtive touch around the retina and down into the depths of the nervous system. This work is uncanny.

By digesting this Mark, an exchange has been made between you and the work. You have the feeling that it remembers you. Even after you have covered the memory of that exchange with the dross of living, the ghost of it remains, gently insistent like the ghost of a scar. Occasionally this Mark is wet, sloppy, sexual, and seductive. Sometimes this Mark is agitated, excited, and nervous. Sometimes the black Mark shakes in terror creating violent forms and the visual impact of his Mark’s passage through a form is at times unsettling. In looking at this Mark there is something of the experience of a thorn pricking the skin because of the way his Mark inserts the memory of sensation so insidiously. This Mark touches you from the inside.

This experience of sensation is key to untangling the mystery of Steve’s masterful mixed media paintings, drawings, installations, and mechanized sculptures. The work defies you, and as a viewer you recognize in that defiance an urge to turn away, and so the work pushes and pulls you, building a world of abrasive textures around isolation and intimacy. It is a compelling feeling, and one of the strongest aspects of Steve’s work. The Marks that we leave, the traces of our lives, can’t be reassembled to create a new life or recreate the old one that birthed it. The stubborn melancholy inherent in this art arises from its insistence that we are just incomplete traces. We are never downloaded to something directly, not in any real sense. We are endlessly translated into sheaves of partially understood information, bits, and ephemera. The decay of that Mark, evident throughout Steve’s copious use of non-archival practices, is an important aspect of this work. As an artist, he constantly struggles with the knowledge that the Marks of a life do not translate into the fully lived experience that is the marvel of being alive. We process through traces and pass through and this passing terrifies the artist. This terror seems to speak out of a cavity, and out of a desire to unfurl that cavity’s ghost onto the picture plane through a constantly evolving exploration and exorcism of the Mark.

Paper is Steve’s preferred receptor for translating this unwieldy process. For him, it is the perfect trap to catch the dry remainders of wet interior spaces, and for this reason Steve often favors mixed media approaches over any sole medium. For Steve, the dry, receptiveness of paper offers its own internal counter to the way that Mark translates touch, and the surface of paper echoes the drive of his Mark making with its silent landscape of ridges, waves, whorls, and hexes. Where the Mark lives pointedly fixed within its material limits, the white of paper receives endlessly. For Steve, white is an infinitely permissive space, across which his lines loop and scrawl, shifting in mid-passage from the sensually descriptive language of calligraphy to the aggressively raw vocabulary of expressionism. These lines tangle together to create dense forms that simultaneously inject themselves into paper’s sacred spaces and expel themselves forcefully into the void. The Mark transmits and telegraphs across this space, and it does so with all the agony of a bundle of nerves suddenly set loose from its physical housing. The artist recognizes that this silent complement of white absorbs the Mark perfectly and thereby gains a life terrifyingly unimaginable that is doomed to fail every time it touches the surface. It is a magical moment that gives the work its otherworldly grace. Its perfect beauty and its sense of infinite potential makes the artist waiver uncertainly, again and again, each time the Mark meets paper. Because of this union, there is nearly always a frenetic quality to his touch. It is as if the artist is afraid of bearing so much possibility. 

There is real pleasure in the way Steve insists on combining materials that resist union. His drawings freely mix oil pastel and acrylic with graphite, charcoal, dirt and floor dust and lint, urine and sweat and come, combinations of excretive materials that create surfaces that are sticky, slick, pilly, watery, stained, dry, dusty, and crumbly. For Steve it is as if this Mark’s contact with paper is such an infinitely ecstatic experience that only the sensual vocabulary of sexuality can begin to describe it, thus, there is a peculiarly sexual bent to all of his artwork, simultaneously uplifting and degrading. Colors often accumulate in layered and sludgy shelves that threaten to crumble as they race across the picture plane. There are raids of color, skirmishes of color, dashes of color, but never enveloping blankets of color. This experience of the Mark is always a decidedly pointed and particular experience. These are materials that seem to tie themselves to the deserts of New Mexico where Steve Storz makes his home, to the frailty of being alive, and the processes associated with erosion, the water cycle, and the dissolution of the body. There is a wonderful demonstration of strength asserted in the way his forms are bound in knots and lines, skeins and twists, like a desire to take an idea of a body and give it material resistance to its inevitable slide into entropy and eventual decay. You begin to realize looking at Steve’s work that there is a great deal of love and tenderness for those around him. This isn’t the kind of touch that is self-limited. The particular of the individual is lost, but the spirit remains, and the constant presence of tentacles in his work seems to suggest that he is constantly searching for a nearness to this greater spirit of humanity.

The work rejects the deceptive simplicity of flattery, ennoblement, and the enshrining of vanity that is the beautiful. Steve recognizes that the artist must contend with the history of power and violence and the role it has played in the grossness of our fates. All of the potentially ugly harm inherent in this kind of pursuit Steve has taken upon himself rather than direct at the viewer in an excoriating rage favored by the younger artist. These are not polemics. The work, especially the more figurative of his explorations, seems to act as a memory marker for the effects of a lifetime of internal struggle searching and violence.  At times it feels like Steve is creating avatars and markers that stand at the edge of some wild, blasted field…their foreboding nature acting as a warning to those who would venture beyond this space into the unknown. Steve does not renounce the terror of oblivion. He asks the viewer to make the long look with him. Steve tells the viewer over and over with the frantically spreading Mark that he has made this bitter journey along with every other artist like him and nothing good will come of us if we insist on paths that ignore our frailty.

This exploration of our physical frailty takes logical extension in his sculptures. Steve sees our bodies as an imperfect physical housing and his sculpture translates across electronic and mechanized mediums, shells essentially. He sees these physical manifestations as defenses against history, against decay, and perversely, as perpetrators of decay. They encase as much as they defend. One marvel of his sculptures is their relationship to his drawings: they exist as shadow parts to the material forms, another kind of shell, and playing with forms in this way allows the artist to insert and withdraw representation as it suits him. Seen in this light, the drawings in relation to his sculptural work seem more like blue prints. You could read the drawing and interpret directions for the construction of his material forms. Those drawing instructions, because of the limits of the body, ensure that the physical forms of his sculptures replicate in the same world of changing and degrading possibilities. Cables, tentacles, sutures, spines, threads, ropes, wires: for Steve, these forms are the language of linking and binding, and by extension language itself is explored as a binder of human form and life…language as a sling, as an unfathomable script, as an absurd play, drawing some people in and rejecting others…

Where all of this leads is to an invented organism, invented across the realm of the paper, invented to contend with the distortions of history, the cruelties of age, the discontent of our condition, but especially the accelerated and tremendous scope of war and its remnants and fallout. (there are angles that continually manifest in his drawings that echo the feel of military industrial hardware, to the psyche of that machine mentality) He is keenly interested in interpreting visually its weirdly disfiguring impact on our collective psyches. For the artist, a blindly groping invented biology is preferable and more honest than the vanity of a blind society’s well-proportioned self regard. This kind of work calls out human life for its vanity and asks the viewer if this mess of goo and dust is worth the trouble.

Another Older Piece of Criticism

I wrote this piece when I was living in Memphis and saw Tim Crowder's lovely paintings at David Lusk Gallery. I still think the work was terrific, and the writing seems to have done okay, too.




When I was young there was a certain children's book about dinosaurs that I treasured for its ability to take me to an alien place. The illustrations featured moody blue skies and murky green plant growth, and the pictures would never fail to transport me to this strange land, even if I was an unwilling traveller. I knew it was a dangerous place. The illustrations had an atmospheric quality that deepened their mystery and the sense that you were in an alien world ruled by animals, a place you did not belong. This memory came back to me as I looked at Tim Crowder's exhibition at David Lusk Gallery. The paintings depict commonplace animals in a shorn, verdantly lush world, and are done in a style reminiscent of old 1960's animal book illustrations. It is a lonely place devoid of people. The exhibition features paintings on paper with oils on black enamel. Each piece is well presented in hand-built frames. ( The open frames are inventive solutions to the cost of framing and work really well, better than the pieces in glass, which do less to show off the unpainted edges of the paper.) The animals displayed in Crowder's work betray an uncomfortable awareness of their situation and the viewer. The animals are deftly and skillfully rendered, and occupy a gloomy, atmospheric place of green pasture land over topped by troubled skies. The skies add to the mystery of the work because they bloom into nebulous cloud forms that darken and tower over the horizons. The animals occupy the foreground in most of the works, some staring at the viewer, all of them in relation to some man-made element.

Part of the mystery of the work comes from Crowder's use of text, ambiguous phrases which are sewn into the upper left or right hand portions of the pieces. The phrases sit askew to the implied narrative of the animals in the paintings, and seem to serve both as title and foil for the artist's intent. This most often suggests that language and reality are at cross purposes. This device creates a kind of dissonance that disallows the viewer the comfort that the cuteness factor with the critters can arouse. But this masks a desire to be taken seriously, I think, and it is used in all of the paintings. At times, I found it to be a little tiresome since it served to balance all of the compositions in the same way. But most importantly, it identifies the art as more conceptual in its leanings. 

The show is titled "Building a Proper Wall", and walls are featured in nearly all of the works, whether as ruins, stages, or steps. There are other man-made structures in some of the paintings as well, a house, arks, and towers of babel. All of these have an intrusive quality in the landscapes. This sense is heightened in the painting "Playful Nature" where a giant shrub in the shape of a rabbit leans menacingly over the brick house in the center of the composition. The tower of babel suggests a failure of language to correctly gauge the sense of the world. This idea is especially keen in the painting "Sensible Improvements", where the tower has been playfully substituted with the trunk of a tree. Four different birds occupy four branches that move up the trunk , and the topmost bird utters one white, blank speech balloon. The ark suggests human selfishness and self-serving behaviors acting in conflict with the natural world. The ark also hints at disaster, and the sense that nature blithely waits to resume its work after humans have done with it, without God's covenant as symbolized by the rainbow in the Genesis story. The animals themselves are at the mercy of these chaotic forces in some of the works, with this chaos represented by falling red circles in two very dark paintings. (Those of you who have read Delillo's "White Noise" will be reminded of the airborne toxic event that is the backdrop of the novel.) Whether depicting the threat of disease or the limits of biology in terms of survival, these red circles are the most acute representation of ill omens in all of the paintings. 

Many of the animals in these paintings brought to my mind Edward Hicks' painting "The Peaceable Kingdom", but in Crowder's work spiritual communion has been replaced by isolating dread and foreboding. No one has any useful answers. I love Crowder's recognition that behind animal consciousness is the symbol of something unknowable and chaotic, something akin to death. Crowder knows that when we are in the animal world we are at the limit of our consciousness and in deep water. Thus the walls in many of the paintings seem to represent walls put up to shore up the threat to our own psyche. What is a house if not a structure to keep out the chaos of the world? What is a wall if not a boundary line marking what can be known? In many of the works a distrust of people and language is evident, and the dread that is hinted at with the clouds in the backgrounds serves to give the work its quiet sense of unease. In one of the paintings a cow is stepping through the broken place of a wall and looking back over its shoulder at the viewer while a yellow ballooon floats in the sky above, taken away on the breeze. Has there been a catastrope? Have we interrupted the cow at some work? Is the cow makng some kind of pronouncement about culture, or is it just being a cow? At times the artist's coyness in explicitly stating a narrative seems more like a screen, and works not as well when there are fewer elements in the composition to drive it. (This is evident in the painting of the snowman and another one of a single deer.) There is a kind of fill in the blank that Crowder uses against the viewer and the viewer's anthropomorphizing tendencies. We can't help but to put a human face on these scenes, and Crowder reinforces that tendency with his text and empty speech balloons. 

Crowder's use of thread in several pieces is delightfully inventive, especially in the painting "Transmit Receive". A radio tower of red and white radiating orange lines is rendered in thread, which jars with the juicy greens, greys, blues, blacks, and browns in the oils of his Americana-like landscape. He plays with scale in this work in an inventive way, balancing the shrinking of the radio tower with the unrealistic enlargement of the bird's nest to the right of it (it towers atop the tree...get it?) In another piece Crowder uses loops of thread for bees and the eye immediately sees them as such. It's a brilliant touch and works wonderfully well. It's one of the most striking pieces in the show.

Note should be made here of the sculptures, which unfortunately seem incidental to the exhibition as a whole. The sculptures carry many of the same ideas explored in the paintings, notably the story of the flood. However, he plays with scale in a way that makes the work tend toward self-deprecation, presenting everything in the same size as their depictions in the paintings. There is a more playful quality to the sculptures (the shrub rabbit with the root coming out of its ass is wickedly funny), but they lack the sense of foreboding that makes the paintings so arresting. The exhibition would have been stronger without them. Not all of the paintings hit the mark either. The painting "Sacrifice" ends up being clumsy because of the stiffness of the rabbit's ears, but the way the head stares at the viewer in sad accusation is troubling in its emotional intensity. (You get the sense that Crowder is a kind person, and getting an actual severed rabbit's head to work from would have been against the artist's nature. He can bare witness to inexplicable human cruelty in his paintings, but to use it in the service of art makes him complicit in that cruelty.) The main criticism I had with Crowder's paintings was the similarity of values across all the compositions. Because Crowder uses black as a ground, the values and colors in all of the paintings have a very similar range. The skies are all rendered in the same murky greys or greens. Since the skies and landscapes are very similar across all of the paintings, collectively not all of the paintings stand apart from one another and depend on their proximity to the other works to sustain interest. However, individually, the cloud charged backgrounds in many of the works fairly sizzle in a misty, gloaming light that threatens to engulf everything. In one sense, I felt this was a missed opportunity on Crowder's part, because the skies have a suggestion of light which is not entirely echoed in the depiction of light on the animals or landscapes. I felt perhaps if he relied less on the text as a conceptual element to anchor the compositions, the paintings could present more of that total pictorial mystery that is the world presented to the human eye, naked, quiet, disconcerting, sublime, and chaotic. Ultimately, this is the mystery that Crowder draws us into. It is a great show and should not be missed.

Tim Crowder-"Building a Proper Wall"
David Lusk Gallery
4540 Poplar Ave
Memphis TN 38117

http://www.davidluskgallery.com/exhibitions/2010.07/crowder/index.html

Thanks to Tim Crowder for kindly allowing me to use his images.