Content, Form, and Subject Matter
Over twenty years ago I had the great honor to work with a great teacher, the late sculptor, Dennis Leon. Squeak Carnwath, a friend was in graduate school at what was then known as California College of Arts and Crafts, now California College of the Arts, was working closely with Dennis and she thought that I would like working with him too. I started by taking a class that he and the poet Steve Ajay were teaching called “Form and Languarge.” Then I took a class with the sculptor, Paul Harris. From there I applied to graduate school in sculptor, was accepted and enrolled. For the next two years I worked primarily with Dennis and Steve as my mentors and it was from working with them that I began to understand that the content of a work was not necessarily the same thing as it’s subject matter.
Yesterday, the 4th of July, I went on a long hike that wound up interrupting my plans to visit with friends in the East Bay, so by the end of the day after watching some more Michael Jackson on TV I went over to the studio.
I’ve been working on several paintings all at once-with the starting points, an apect of landscape. For the several years I have found myself fascinated with all apects of water; reflections, flow, waterfall, patterns. The painting that I was working on yesterday was one whose impetus came from looking at the layering of reflections in water, what you could see below the surface, what was partially above and partially below the surface, what lay on the surface and what was reflected on the surface.
As I was working, I realized with more clarity than usual that these aspects of the image that I was working on as represented by leaves, flowers, rocks, branches, clouds and water, layered one upon the other was like the layering of life with the past the present and glimmers of the future one upon the other, a felt visual history that lays ensconced in the brain. I was using the things of nature as my subject matter and the formal aspects of space, light, composition, pattern, layering, etc. to describe the elusive content of history, memory and the experience of the present.