Drawing is both the most elementary thing an artist can do and one of the most elevated. Artists draw as dancers stretch. A drawing can be part of a preliminary planning stage to a larger work in sculpture, installation, painting or performance. Or, like an attenuated arabesque, it can exist as a form of art in its own right. "
The artists chosen for Drawn to the Wall-Mary O'Day and Dan Spalding-are
Farrell, Melissa Lang, Mel McCuddin, Tom
all working artists who reside in Spokane, but their art is widely
divergent. Farrell has an established national reputation as a printmaker. Lang is known for her wonderfully loose abstract paintings. O'Day has received respect (and notoriety) for his decade-long conceptual project The World's First Art Disposal Service. McCuddin and Spalding both do rich and richly different figurative painting and drawing. While it is somewhat true that every art community is small, it is especially true in Spokane. As different as these artists are in working methods, they share a rather tight proximity.
A
number of them consistently exhibit in galleries and museums around the country and abroad, but the daily praxis of making art in this city is one of continual contact. As a celebration of community, exhibiting these five working artists together makes sense. But curator Scott Patnode added an aspect of near gamesmanship to Drawn to the Wall. Referencing
Jim Dine's heroic eight-day
marathon,
when he covered the walls of the
Ludwigsburg Kunstverein near Stuttgart, Germany with his charcoal drawings, Patnode asked these five artists to participate in this exhibition within the set time of two weeks.
He also
stated that they were each to work on identically sized, portable walls of 8 by 12 feet. In order to avoid any conflicts, he further stated that he would then arrange the walls based on his own curatorial decision. These parameters, along with the fact that the works are temporary, since
the walls will be repainted after the duration of the exhibit, add an exciting irisson to the project. What might have been an exhibition based on locale, now becomes an exhibition about process, time, and the artlstsreactlon
to the site-as
well as their reaction to one another.
Dine is not alone in doing on-site drawings.
In relatively recent times artists Francesco
Clemente, Jean Michel Basquiat, and GRONK have all covered gallery walls with marks. But the pre-modern tradition of wall paintings might be a more relevant reference for this drawing show. Like ancient cave paintings, Drawn to the Wall will not only offer viewers works that were made on site, but it will be works made by a community of artists who know one another. Recipient of the Artists Trust Fellowship as well as numerous other grants, Mary Farrell's exhibition record spans several continents.
Currently represented by Seattle's Davidson
Galleries, Farrell moved to Spokane from Cincinnati six years ago. Her work is figurative in a manner that feels far from traditional. She lets the material and technique dominate as if she is letting the viewer into a contemporary paradox. Today we admire the handmade print not for its reproducibility, but for the sheer beauty of the "impact" image. As a printmaker she lets the medium determine her quality of line. For example in her Nest series, tight lines run into and over one another, their softened mezzotint turning each nest into a compact weaving of marks. By the time Farrell embarked on her Floating World Series and her series on hands, she was utilizing the delicate lyrical lines found in the Ukiyo-E print tradition, although the former was done in western intaglio style, and the latter is being done in woodblock.
Like
most printmakers, Farrell remains close to the drawing process, Upon being invited to work on this project, she says that her first thought was to welcome the challenge, "the risk" of
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responding to a specified time and the large scale. Over the next year, her work will be touring the U.K. in an exhibition titled Relativities and the U.S. in Ten Women Printmakers. Melissa Lang is a Spokane native represented by the Gail Severn Gallery in Sun Valley and the Lorinda Knight Gallery in Spokane. She returned here to live after receiving her MFA from the University of New Orleans. She is also a recipient of the Artists Trust Fellowship, and she has received attention for her lush, biomorphic abstractions.
She is a painter's
painter in the sense that her abstractions intimate real space while never quite delving into representation.
Her ability to vest her painted and drawn forms with light gives her work a
dense, almost psychological presence.
Her paintings, such as Green Ring: Vortex and
Circulation, while loaded with color, are dominated by forms which are as close to drawn as "painted" forms can get. Lang sees her drawing and painting as interconnected.
"I try to
draw with paint and paint with charcoal. I start all my paintings with drawings because my drawings are a way for me to tap into the source-a
way of navigating my feelings." Lang's
work can be seen in the Eloquent Flower exhibition at the Gail Severn Gallery. Like Lang, Mel McCuddin is a Spokane native. His work is in a number of museum collections, and he too received an Artists Trust award-all
the more remarkable because McCuddin
didn't come down the well-worn path of the MFA. Now in his late 60's, McCuddin was a truck driver less than a decade ago. He admits to working intuitively, and the flattened picture plane of his paintings, populated by loosely rendered people and animals, recalls early Expressionism. He doesn't see his success as remarkable. " I have taken some classes, but in a sense all of us are self-taught."
He continues, "Like everyone, every time I make a
painting I learn something new." There is genuine warmth, even gentleness to his work, yet oddly enough it was one of McCuddin's works that prompted a public controversy still referred
to today. In the late 1980's, McCuddin's painting of a man hoisting an upside down US flag was displayed at Eastern Washington University and was immediately declared "unpatriotic" by members of a Veterans group. The artist's intent was to make a work about farmers' economic distress, and the ensuing public debate surprised McCuddin.
He claims that
while not all of his paintings have a social statement, he doesn't shy away from controversy, claiming that he is simply "trying to make work that can't easily be forgotten." Tom O'Day moved here from Los Angeles, initially in search of reasonable rent. He has had solo exhibitions at Los Angeles' Space Gallery, at the UC Northridge Gallery, as well as numerous group shows around the country. A recipient of the Artists Trust Fellowship among other grants, for the past ten years 0' Day has been making installations and performances about the art making process. He has received national attention for his longest performance work, the War/d's First Art Disposal Service. For this project he has buried, burned, submerged in water, and otherwise abridged existing artworks.
As an integral part of these 'anti-art'
performances, O'Day has always taken the remnants of these acts and used them as material for new art. His central idea is one of transition. He reminds us that new work comes from the old and that art, like all other matter, is constantly in a state of flux. Such activities have drawn some critics and collectors to compare his work to the earlier 1960's FLUXUS movement, yet these same critics are often surprised by O'Day's resolutely cool and beautiful aesthetics. He will be having a solo exhibition of his work at the Washington State University Gallery in fall, 2002, a~d will be included in a group exhibition entitled A Tribute to Space & its Artists in New York City this December. Dan Spalding, like McCuddin, comes to art making by a circuitous route. The youngest of these five artists, he received a bachelor's degree in business in 1989, and a few years ago
he bought two buildings primarily to "find adequate studio space" for himself. The two buildings represent the better, more bohemian part of Spokane's downtown revitalization, also housing a coffeehouse on the eastern end of the city's center. Spalding's work, like McCuddin's, is also figurative and expressionistic, but rather than working with an abstracted picture plane, Spalding vests each 'of his portraits or paintings of flowers with deeply colored chiaroscuro and impasto painting style. Although he returned to Spokane after studying at the Art Students League in New York City, he claims his eight years of working with Gonzaga professor Bob Gilmore were pivotal in his decision to paint. He has taught at both the Spokane Art School and Gonzaga University, but wishes to devote himself to painting full time.
His work is
represented by Art at Work Gallery in Spokane, and he will be having a solo exhibition at the Omni Gallery in Portland in the fall of 2001. When you read this, the Jundt Galleries will be filled with five drawings on five portable walls. Yet as I write this, I have no idea of the outcome and can only speculate on the strength of these five individuals' work. There is a performance aspect here that makes this more than an exhibition.
That the work will differ greatly should be understood from the abbreviated
information in the biographies above. That the selected, identical drawing surfaces lend a kind of loose continuity to the exhibit will be obvious to the serious art lover. But the intangible gift to all of us viewers is that we will get to see the results-not
only of five specific artworks
but of five specific artworks made.at the same time, in the same space, by five members of our community. It is an opportunity. Frances DeVuono Frances De Vuono is an artist, art writer and contributing editor for Artweek. , , ----------------------
This publication was funded by the Jundt Art Museum's Annual Campaign 2000-2001. Š Jundt Art Museum, Gonzaga University, Spokane, Washington 99258-0001.