Spume

Frothy matter that forms on top of waves when the sea is rough

ePressBooks, San Francisco

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Š David Molesky, 2010 www.davidmolesky.com Essay: Anthony Torres artvalues@earthlink.net Design: Jennifer Waryas www.jenniferwaryas.com Printing: ePressBooks www.epressbooks.com

Cover image detail of Sliding Down Tongues

twenty-five dollars

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David Molesky working in his San Francisco studio

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Spume: The Work of David Molesky

by Anthony Torres

David Molesky’s recent paintings represent the Sea as our source of origin, as an affirmation that the human species depends on nature to sustain life, and as the foundation of our self-actualization and spiritual life.

The paintings of sea foam, or spume, and waves are immediately accessible and deceptively familiar. However, the images are highly complex, and can rightfully be characterized as visual emblems that speak to Molesky’s hope for qualitatively different economic and cultural priorities that are bound to a more ecologically sound dynamic between people and nature.

The paintings evidence Molesky’s self-reflexive artistic engagement with his subject, and serve as a means of discerning how he negotiates his artistic appropriation and utilization of historically distant formal grammars to voice his individual concerns.

The paintings are personal, in that they speak to Molesky’s involvement with a specific subject; and universal to the extent that they allude to the idea that our individual histories within specific locations condition who we are, based on practices, identifications, and memories derived from various experiences in particular environments.

This orientation situates and affirms Molesky’s Life of Tharmas, 2008 | oil on linen, 43 x 55 in.

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belief that humans have a “universal” affinity with each other, in that we have similar biological attributes and needs that characterize the species and, like other living creatures, we must sustain ourselves in nature.

The paintings function as a form of self-affirmation for Molesky, since he views his artistic practice as his “human” life activity, and the paintings as the “objectification” of his life.

Inspired by movements of the sea in various locations, Molesky’s paintings suggest that the specific environments in which artists operate form the physical and social contexts that condition the content of the work.

This perhaps accounts for the images of the land and sea in both Eastern and Western traditions that extend back well over a thousand years, from ancient Greece to ancient Rome; Chinese ink paintings; history painting that situated religious and mythological narratives; through the evolution of geometric perspective that informed landscape during the Italian Renaissance; to the Dutch Golden Age painting of the 17th century; to Romanticism, that formed a complex artistic counter-response to the Industrial Revolution with the advent of industrial capitalism. However, these traditions do not wholly explain or account for the artist’s current body of work.

Nonetheless, to a certain extent, Molesky’s work does share a certain affinity with Romanticism, and to a degree he can be considered a contemporary Romantic, since in responding to our current economic and ecological state of affairs, Molesky, like the Romantics, chooses to value emotional inspiration as a source of his aesthetic experience, venerates the power of nature, and in particular values the experiences associated with the metaphysical, aesthetic, and spiritual magnitude associated with nature.

This is evidenced in the painterly treatment of the Spume paintings, which reveal a curiosity, identification, and reverence for nature, and constitute a call for honoring our environment as a means of remembering and returning to something essential to our very existences.

Here, in the representation of sea froth and oceanic water movements — swells, waves crashing, smashing into each other, and spume studies, as symbols — Molesky creates images that speak to the shifting nature and precarious instability of our existence(s).

In his images of the sea, presented at times as abstracted water formations, we see the forms and structures he selects and registers on the canvas through the fluid mobility of the brushwork, and the depiction of the subject matter as a means of capturing the

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vitality of the water and its motion, particularly as it informs, and may be reflected in, the process of painting.

In the paintings, Molesky draws parallels between these oceanic movements and cloud formations, rock formations, tree trunks and branches, wisps of angel hair, smoke, and water vapor. Such elements may appear at times biomorphic or even architectonic, and they co-exist and are infused within a unity and struggle of what Molesky calls “counter-current” forces, used in the work to relate dynamic tensions in life and nature.

All of the Spume paintings can be said to mutually inform each other, and they function together as a means of unifying various aspects of the images and their influence on one another. This is accomplished through a process of translating and testing different elements, painterly interactions and their compositional inter-relationships.

While the smaller paintings stand as self-contained works, they also inform and enlighten the larger works. In some cases, they directly inform particular paintings by serving as guides for the construction and organization of the larger compositions, and as components that form parts of other works. Thus, they may serve as studies or building blocks for specific paintings, brought to life with a subtle palette of aquamarines, translucent varied shades of greens and blues, violets, lavenders, whites and grays.

In this light, the smaller paintings may be thought of as “micro-oceanic” elements in an ongoing “working out” process that functions as a means of forming ideas and absorbing the subject, in an ingestion process based in the interactive relationship between the artist, his chosen medium, and the subject matter.

Thus, the smaller works can serve as anchoring devices and as subtexts for the whole body of work. The interactions between forms, colors, and structures, and the interrelationships between individual paintings, serve to create a complementary tension and unity among the various works.

In the paintings, the marks reference both a site-specific encounter with the Sea and the acquisition and application of knowledge gained from Molesky’s painterly activity.

In a general sense, the paintings demonstrate the processes by which Molesky refines his ideas in an effort to integrate knowledge gained from previous observations and engagements.

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The paintings thus speak to the personal character of the artist, and the multi form ways in which the paintings serve as condensations of past observations, as painterly events, and as translations of an ideological orientation or position.

The paintings are also a general account of his reflections on canvas, and evidence a struggle for clarity in a quest to develop and expand his visual vocabulary.

The paintings are inteDosey Doe, 2008 | oil on linen, 18 x 21 in. grally related to a gestation of ideas, formal structures, and visual strategies aimed at engaging the viewer, within a dynamic painterly space, via devices designed to set up compositional flows to facilitate appreciation of an image. The manner in which Molesky pursues his artistic investigations references the way he seeks and negotiates interrelationships between himself and his subject(s) through an ongoing painterly process of reworking elements, and this strategy creates visual drama through dynamic tensions in representing a seemingly common and familiar subject.

The experiences and exposures that inform his most recent paintings create a constellation of personal iconographic water “stills,� realized through his ongoing investigations of organic figuration and formal interrelationships.

To a certain degree, the works could be accurately described as symbolic allegories in which the artist takes an ideological stance regarding what should ultimately be valued, and his aspiration for a greater social awareness of the significance of nature.

This is made visible through processes of exploring, reclaiming, and transforming flows and structures of the ocean in order to construct visual emblems that speak to self-determination, social redemption and responsibility. The images thus represent a

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Sliding Down Tongues oil on linen, 2010 50 x 85 in. / 127 x 216 cm

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Etheric Impulse oil on linen, 2010 41 x 53 in. / 105 x 135 cm

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Punch Bowl oil on linen, 2010 47 x 55 in. / 120 x 140 cm

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Passing Breakers oil on linen, 2009 39 x 43 in. / 100 x 110 cm

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Rogue oil on canvas, 2009 36 x 48 in. / 92 x 122 cm

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Spume Scape oil on canvas, 2009 36 x 48 in. / 92 x 122 cm

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Foam Scape oil on canvas, 2006 20 x 24 in. / 51 x 61 cm

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Cream Tops oil on canvas, 2009 20 x 24 in. / 51 x 61 cm

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Rupture oil on panel, 2010 16 x 20 in. / 41 x 51 cm

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Bubble Gum Pop oil on panel, 2010 18 x 24 in. / 46 x 62 cm

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Spilling into the Void oil on canvas, 2010 30 x 48 in. / 76 x 122 cm

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Micro Study in Blue oil on board, 2010 24 in. / 61 cm in diameter

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Micro Study in Magenta oil on board, 2010 24 in. / 61 cm in diameter

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Harvest the Excess oil on canvas, 2010 40 in. / 102 cm in diameter

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Sea Spume #3 oil on panel, 2009 30 x 40 in. / 76 x 102 cm

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Sea Spume #2 oil on panel, 2009 30 x 40 in. / 76 x 102 cm

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Cetus oil on canvas, 2010 26 x 32 in. / 66 x 81 cm

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Glasstops oil on linen, 2008 20 x 28 in. / 51 x 71 cm

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Foamscape Study #2 oil on board, 2008 9 x 12 in. / 24 x 32 cm

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Splash #5 oil on panel, 2009 16 x 18 in. / 41 x 46 cm

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Sleeper oil on canvas, 2009 32 x 43 in. / 81 x 109 cm

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personal social statement and an ethical position that functions as a form of veneration, which articulates that nothing can be created without nature, and only through nature are our existences possible.

This identification situates Molesky’s work within a legacy of concern with landscape,environment, and place. This tradition, with which Molesky’s work can be associated, serves as a visual reservoir for the artist, and forms an enduring and integral part of contemporary artistic engagement.

Whether one chooses to historically view the tradition(s) of landscape painting and images of the Sea as subjective responses to human existence within particular landscapes at given times, or as concerned with the development of a landed bourgeoisie and a glorification of nature as private property, or the landscape tradition as reflecting a colonial mentality based on the construction of theological or nationalist Foamscape Study, 2008 | oil on board, 9 x 12 in sentiment, or a romanticized tool of frontier expansion, or a nostalgic longing for a lost state of innocence in the face of industrialized urbanization — here, it functions as a means of projecting a call for the human species to live in greater harmony with the universe, represented through the practice of consuming influences and lessons from diverse historical and aesthetic exposures in a process of (re)articulation in the work.

The paintings should thus be thought of as position statements that speak of a desire for homeostasis, in which the species is more integrally connected to nature and each

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other. In other words, the paintings speak to a projection for a relatedness that is both personal and universal, via images that are both familiar and accessible.

In our present context, the Spume paintings should be viewed as concerned with a fundamental relationship between the body and its environment, and with the specificity of the micro environments in which bodies are located, in relation to a complex macro environment that is increasingly defined and overwhelmed by a metaculture of post-industrial capitalism that consolidates, disseminates, and extols the cultural values of commodity production and consumption.

Indeed, it should not be surprising that in a social context defined by alienation, reification, and environmental exploitation, which creates landscapes filled with poverty and despair, that we find an artist concerned with the environment and our place in it, and a romantic exaltation of nature through images of the sea.

In fact, it seems only natural that a contemporary painter might return to images from nature, since many of the terms that form an integral part of the vocabulary of contemporary aesthetic discourse are concerned with a sense of “place” and location within various landscapes. Terms such as mapping, dislocation, marginalization, periphery displacement, border art, outsider art, are all related to “space” within various internal (subjectively experienced) or external landscapes, real or imagined, domestic or geographical.

Given that the world currently faces unprecedented environmental degradation that threatens everything and everyone, it is perhaps symptomatic of the times that a contemporary painter would re-evaluate and construct images of the Sea as contemporary social statements, as a means of questioning the demands of unbridled capitalist accumulation and its potential for mass human detriment through ecological disaster.

In so doing, David Molesky’s work affirms a desire for a connectedness to nature through a humanizing artistic labor practice, and a sensuous demand that nature be resituated at the forefront of thinking, by means of his “iconic” socially conscious emblems that prioritize honoring and respecting nature, and serve as a form of cultural agency for the defense of the planet.

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David Molesky Born 1977 in Washington, D.C. Moved to the West Coast in 1995 Lives and Works in San Francisco Solo Exhibitions: 2010

Turbulent Mirror, Rae Douglass Gallery, Berkeley, CA ODD, Malonga Casquelourd Arts Center, Oakland, CA Splash, Serpentine, San Francisco, CA Spume, Canessa Gallery, San Francisco, CA 2007 Equinox, Terrence Rogers Fine Art, Santa Monica, CA Radhus, Tønsberg, Norway 2005 Recent Landscapes, Las Fuentes Villa, Carmel Valley, CA State of Being, Municipal Building, Raleigh, NC 2004 Pan in Arcadia, Lisa Coscino Gallery, Pacific Grove, CA 2002 Recent Painting, Faculty Club, Berkeley, CA 2001 Poetics of Dream, Karpeles Museum, Charleston, SC Psychologic Paint, Gamil Gallery, Raleigh, NC 2000 Seven Years, Gallery A, Raleigh, NC Group Exhibitions: 2011 2010

2009

2008 2007 2006 2005

Suggestivism, Grand Central Art Center, California State Fullerton, Santa Ana, CA Aqua: Art on Water, Artzone 461, San Francisco, CA A History of Flight, Terrence Rogers Fine Art, Santa Monica, CA Empty Time, the fridge Gallery, Washington, D.C. 100 Artists See Satan, Grand Central Art Center, Cal State Fullerton, Santa Ana, CA Delicious, Studio Gallery, San Francisco, CA The Genesis of Bay Area Figurative Art Now, Art Space 712, San Francisco, CA Kitsch mer enn kunst, Telemarksgaleriet, Nottoden, Norway On the Bay in Monterey, Monterey Peninsula Yacht Club, Monterey, CA Point Lobos Project, Fine Art Base, Sand City, CA 400 Meter Kunst, Voss, Norway Kitsch Biennale, Pasinger Fabrik, Munich, Germany Kitsch, Galleri KS, Tønsberg, Norway Intimate Landscape, Sesnon Gallery, University of California, Santa Cruz All Wet, Lisa Coscino Gallery, Pacific Grove, CA Auto Show, Charles Campbell Gallery, San Francisco, CA My California, National Steinbeck Center, Salinas, CA

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2004

2002 2001

Art of the Mediterranean Games, Italian Institute of Culture, San Francisco, CA Objects of Obsession, Lisa Coscino Gallery, Pacific Grove, CA Context, Lisa Coscino Gallery, Pacific Grove, CA Recent Paintings, Faculty Club, UC Berkeley Campus, Berkeley, CA Winners’ Circle, Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD

Education: 2006 - 2008 1995 - 1999

Apprentice to Odd Nerdrum, Norway in Iceland and France University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, California Bachelor of Arts, Dept. of Art Practice & Premed with an emphasis in Neurobiology 1992 – 1995 Studied with Plein Air painter, Walter Bartman Selected Travel And Residencies: 2009-2010 Honorary Artist in Residence Award at Monterey Peninsula Yacht Club, Monterey, CA 2009 May Artist in Residence, Fine Art Base, Sand City, CA 2008 Summer-Winter Studio in Vienna, Austria Late Spring Artist in Residence, Fundacia Nakjelska, Naklo Palace, Poland Spring Artist Retreat, Jackowo Dolne, Poland 2008/2007 Winter Studio, Maison Lafitte, France 2006-2007 Resident Artist/Assistant, Odd Nerdrum Studio Reykjavik, Iceland and Stavern, Norway 2006 Studio in Silverlake, Los Angeles California 2003-2005 Studio in Carmel, California 2002-2004 Studio in Seattle, Washington 1999 Summer Studio Rome, Italy and visits to London Selected Press: New Amercian Paintings: Pacific Coast Edition, #91. 2011 Surf Story Vol 2. Robb Havassy. 2011 Kitsch Mer Unn Kunst. Odd Nerdrum. 2010 Spoor, Nathan. “David Molesky.” Juxtapoz Magazine Website. November 2, 2009 Juxtapoz Magazine Website. Link to my video “Making Foam” May 7, 2009 Spoor, Nathan. “Master & Apprentice Part I & Part II.” ISM Magazine. Spring 2008/issue 14, p. 12-15 Fauntleroy, Gussie. 21 Under 31. Southwest Art Magazine. September 2007, p.135 Galuska, Frank. Intimate Landscape. October 2006, p.29 Watson, Lisa Crawford. “WaterWorks.”Go! The Monterey County Herald, March 30-April 5, 2006 Gangelhoff, Bonnie. Artists to Watch. Southwest Art Magazine. September 2005, p.30 Deragon, Rick. “Be Still My Heart.” Monterey County Weekly. February 2004, p.4 Bible, Adam. Gallery. Spectator, September 6-12, 2000

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