The Stylistics

A Paul Wonner painting

The thoughts have been coming fast and furious, old thoughts, new thoughts, all jumbled up tonight, all though they seemed pretty untangled earlier today, so what is up? I guess the largest thought of the day was the dipping into the tradition of making art, painting in particular.

  If there is anything that seems to be prevalent in painting now, It would seem to me to be that we are free to do anything we want to do. Ones style is what ever one wants as we beg, borrow, appropriate, inform, excavate, the past.

  There use to be a number of reasons to stay with one horse to develop a style and focus down hard......Commercial galleries and your collectors could bank on your evenness and product being a brand. There are probably lesser reasons like craftsmanship and gestural or muscular memory as you honed your edge. I am sure that one could find a number of other reasons as well, many exploring a terrain and finding that they are satisfied with exactly where they are at.

  I have of course forgotten the main reason that schools and the MFA factory would have, that of presenting your argument in a zip locked and starched fashion, that again can be honed and handled like a smart chisel slicing past arguments into fine shavings. Your place in time will be recorded for future use and measured and reported on like a weather report.

  Yet in the world of everything that can be presented, omeleted criss-crossed, socialized and shared, is there any real need for long term argument as to what art should be about or what should be left out or what is relevant and who it might be for and how long it should hang around?

  I am not complaining here. In fact I like the state of the union and where we are at in the tradition of art. It leaves one free of all the bombast. I can search on my own for beauty and slice the sublime for my drink of choice and hope that there are some sharees like myself who will take a minute and notice some of what I notice and that it is not a matter of argument or sensory ego, just a craft that is as old as the hills that have shaped the human drama and watched as we raised our arms to the sky, reaching out to the stars and then tried to scratch an association into the sand or upon the walls.

  So now All Aboard the art train, we can explore the human zoo. I am sure that there will be a lot of the same old clubiness and politics but there really should not be any complaints from any quarter from now on as to who can make and disseminate the medium or the message. We have gone global and bubblely and anyone in the crowd might be one of yours or they may not.

"Red Dress" Oil on primed paper  14X17 inches

The hand and the chair were what caught my eye about four years ago. This is a B&W photo from some forgotten magazine. I tore out the ad as I often will and put it in acetate where it floats around the studio, getting lost for periods of time and then refound. The drawings from it have morphed and the red dress came from my collages named "His Magnificent Ego" and "Her Majestic Ego" More photos to come.

I started on this one and I realize that I am telling or maybe showing the story backwards that is alright as you will be able to start seeing the progress as I bring this project to resolution, or the alternative ....drag it all out to the skeet range PULL!

So none of these were making my day so I going to take them apart and have fun.

The above photo is one of the five or so canvasses that were going nowhere.

So after two years of messing with the five that did not make it, I decided that I needed to finish this whole thing up as I was moving beyond where the old drawngs were, so I dragged all five of the canvasses outside and started a sort of deconstruction or a freeing up.

Working gesturally is hard to do larger than 1. you can see with your eye and 2. you can reach with your arm (and hand). This is where painting and dance collide. Making smaller work seems to be easier and I think that trying to make exspansive gestural work has always had inherent problems. Remember that a gesture is the conveyence of an emotion using a part of your body.

The Red Dress

The Red Dress started as a drawing of a seated figure from a chair or clothing advertisement. It was a black and white photo but I liked the pose and used it for a lot of drawings. I did a series of charcoals and then using the the same pose did some small gestural works 8X10 inches in guache using the same pose. One of the works was chosen as a commissioned painting 48X42 and I started five or six canvases because to make a larger work of a smaller gestural work is just asking for trouble.

Above is one of the smaller drawing/paintings on rag board and on top is the finished commission

Art from New Guinea


I have always intuitively known that other cultures also dealt with abstraction in their art and art making. I was pleased to find such a blatant example of it in this exhibit in San Francisco at the De Young Museum across from the Legion DE Honor...two beautiful art museums that I always enjoy visiting.

I liked finding that anthropomorphizing sticks and stones seems to be central to living amongst them but to do it in an abstract manner seems to give room for an inner life and a place for, or ground for the idea of sympathy with all things.

This has always been a theme that is central in my artwork. There is the narrative and I feel that that is important but I want my artwork to lift the narrative as a thin veil and simultaneously link one to their geography and their sympathetic ground. This is never a sure shot when it comes to making artwork.

Working with the body (Gestures) and with the materials of art, this can be a tentative affair.

Chapel Hill/Carrboro 1-2012

The Resplendant Torso

The Art Of Steven Silverleaf

Yee Haw

I don't know what to say

Tonight I am listening to the Jefferson Airplane and I have been listening to them for forty years.

Thinking about collage and the layering and the fact that like the Chinese concept of "face" there is always an element of that which is turned away, from view and that is hidden and the chance, the possibilities inherent in what might have been.

The analogy might be that all music I listen to now is heard against a collage of what I heard many years ago and what I heard twenty minutes ago and what I never listened to, what I never heard or even heard of.

I am not speaking of regret here. Sometimes when I am putting collages together and I go to adhere the glue to the side that is going to be turned away, there is regret, a beautiful passage of paint to be laid down, never to be seen.

No I am not speaking of regret. There are always new possibilities to be shown to the senses, that come to light, that tease the airwaves anew.

They start as a trickle, down the mountain and become a rushing torrent. You decide.

collage happens the same way.