Philip Smallwood: Personages

P H I L I P S M A L LW O O D: PERSONAGES Museum of Art - DeLand

Acknowledgments A work of art is apprehended only through the artist’s chosen medium. The act of structuring experience through plastic means – that is, through drawing, painting or sculpture – evolved from some basic expressive need not satisfied by literature or music or dance. The essential form of painting is silent and nonverbal. It is a denial of this form to impose other sensory means in an attempt at immediate understanding. At best such methods are irrelevant, at worst they have eroded the true nature of the visual experience.

A watercolor embodies its own significance and conveys this to the receptive viewer even before its matter is disclosed: the structure may be grasped on first encounter, while the complexity of relationships may continue to unfold with each repeated viewing. The time frame particular to the medium of painting is its unique character. Knowing a watercolor is as simple as looking but as complicated as any deeply felt emotion or profound thought. The primary experience should be solitary and contemplative – the very conditions present at creation.

Yet, receptivity to a work of art is an earned condition and not an inheritance. Were this not so, our sensibilities would not be altered by experience. As the artist eventually persuades us to his vision, a sympathetic context for new work can ally our prejudices and influence our judgment. Responsible and sensitive interpretation can effect such a change while it respects the internal nature of the art form. Exhibit-making is potentially the most pertinent means to such interpretation.

Ideally, the curator of a show seeks a proper context for the individual work, a presentation through which the artist’s intentions are better revealed. Selection and installation imply emphasis, and appropriate emphasis should engage an intrinsic quality. All supportive information – including the accompanying catalog – is second to how the works will be seen. The exhibition should first of all reflect this intelligence, and in proper order and proportion all else follow.

I realize that a thematic approach to exhibit-making hazards imposing a system upon the work through which some attribute is extracted to fit the rigors of a demanding idea. The present exhibition was conceived to celebrate a unique strength of perception and to support the integrity of watercolor as an independent, expressive form in the hands of a sensitive chronologist of our times.

To Philip Smallwood, whose art I have followed with interest and admiration, I would like to express my gratitude for his cooperation and assistance. I also would like to thank my colleague, John Surovek, for his valued advice and insight.

The following donors and businesses merit special appreciation for their support of this presentation and their commitment to this year’s exhibition schedule: Dennis Aylward, Dr. Bruce Bigman and Carolyn Bigman, Samuel and Donna Blatt, Bill and Terri Booth, Earl and Patti Colvard, Sal Cristofano and Laura Gosper, Manny De La Vega, Dr. Wayne Dickson and Jewel Dickson, Robert Dorian and Linda Colvard Dorian, Lee and Susan Downer, Betty Drees Johnson, Dr. Deborah and Lee Goldring, Christie G. Harris, John and Karen Horn, Ed Jackson and Pat Heller-Jackson, Ray and Betty Johnson, Barney and Linda Lane, Tim and Mary Jeanne Ludwig, Van and Frances Massey, Walter and Robin May, Beth and Greg Milliken, Linda Pinto, Dagny and Tommy Robertson, Stephen and Claudia Roth, Patricia Schwarze, Fred and Jeanne Staloff, Harry Sugarman, Judith Thompson, Dr. Ian Williams and Dr. Nancy Hutson, Dr. John Wilton and Nancy Wilton, Dorothy M. Gillespie Foundation, Daytona Auto Mall, DeLand Breakfast Rotary, DeLand Fall Festival of the Arts, DeLand Rotary Club, Inc., Boulevard Tire Center, Collaborative WEALTH, E.O. Painter Printing Company, Faith Hope & Charity, Krewe Nouveau, Fleishel Financial Associates, Lane Insurance, Inc., Lacey Family Charitable Trust, Mainstreet Community Bank, Massey Services, Inc., Museum Guild, Publix Supermarket Charities, United Parachute Technologies, West Volusia Beacon, W. W. Gay Mechanical Contractor, Inc., State of Florida Division of Cultural Affairs and the County of Volusia.

I would like to praise our institution’s Board of Trustees led by Judy Thompson, President, for enabling the Staff to realize its ambitious, diverse and internationally recognized exhibition program; and applaud my Staff whose daily contributions are a constant source of encouragement.

George S. Bolge, Chief Executive Officer Museum of Art - DeLand, Florida Tension, 2011, watercolor on paper, 28 ¾” X 21”

Philip Smallwood: Personages

A

rt is when one and one make three. Watercolor is when the magic begins – and sometimes ends. With a single brush stroke, light is separated from dark, and space and scale are evoked from a void. As line bends to follow form, the re-creation of nature can give the artist a god-like role, as if re-experiencing Genesis.

That sudden, miraculous moment when art becomes illusion is never more vividly experienced than in the act of painting.

Philip Smallwood’s watercolors are the bone and muscle of his art, the often fascinating and in themselves eloquent preparatory solutions that underlie his finished ideas.

His line can be playful, willful, or almost uncontrolled, as well as rigidly within his command and direction. The subjective intensity of Smallwood’s recent paintings recalls Montaigne’s speculation about whether he played with his cat, or she with him.

Smallwood’s paintings’ great strength lies in their inference of light through dark, his perception of his environment and his achievement verging on the transcendental.

Smallwood’s line has many lives. Enclosing form by continuous containment, it can assume the precise, fixed character of the die or cameo. As it is worked into the shape of its subject, his line becomes a pliable means, like wrought iron or twisted wire, non-forming to its object. His lines may dissolve like waves over a rock, to define form with extraordinary proficiency in shifting cascades. He transforms his imagery into a shimmering, almost impressionist linear stream of consciousness.

The manipulation of his brush strokes wriggles out his myriad, interlocking images in fluent magnetic currents or vectors. In other instances, he chooses a freer line that seems to define itself as it goes along, adding a unique spontaneity to the creative process.

Smallwood practices a personal script which gives his thoughts “maximum visibility,” Bold At Heart, 2011, watercolor on paper, 29 ¼” X 21 ¼” a stimulating freedom to evaluate the perceptual and aesthetic problems raised or solved. Like terse entries in a diary, his watercolors sometimes seem to be jottings from the artist’s “coloring book.” Such initial sketches may share the alphabet-like character of ideographs, as is often the case in Asian or expressionist art, where substance becomes graphic symbol.

Smallwood’s placement of the forms on the paper is a major, yet elusive, aspect of his composition in the complex relationship between what you see and what you don’t – a subtle way of defining and emanating the work of art.

Philip Smallwood is a striking master of the “art of intervals.” A possible acquaintance with Asian art may have contributed to his audacious exploitation of absence – of suggestive blank spaces – as well as presence for achieving linear and emotional resonance. In his sensitive, superbly controlled painting, a single line can capture a puzzled facial expression, vibrating like a stringed instrument.

For Smallwood, every aspect of his life and environment is studied in encyclopedic, Aristotelian fashion – explored through description and dissection, by physical and optical analysis. His brush is at once a surgeon’s scalpel and sculptor’s chisel, a mirror, a telescope, camera, computer, and laser beam. His paintings are the video tapes of a recording eye whose curiosity and ingenuity remain a marvel in the contemporary art world.

His portraits’ innate powers of suggestion and inference, their intriguing anticipation of elaborate presentations to come, provide, perhaps, the ideal medium for this most gifted of young artists. Master of his technique, Smallwood brings both new objectivity and new subjectivity to watercolor, as he presents his poignant impressions with the persuasiveness of a documentary. His light and shade seem to emanate from his subjects in a sort of metaphysical photography, as if a function of their very metabolism. Few contemporary artists possess such a reciprocity between painting and writing, with him the visual and the verbal are interchangeable, both equally oriented toward lasting discovery through description, keen analysis through observation.

Smallwood’s work has so much energy that some of it is always available to convey the painter’s own amazement at the willingness of formal qualities to turn into the flavors of emotion. His watercolors echo with a wide range of modernist experiment inspired by Henri Matisse and Pierre Bonnard.

This artist’s vision embeds each of his figures in a particular moment, a certain place. Time and space, body and gesture emerge from a dazzlingly specific play of color and line. The process is always a struggle, and the artist may never be able to subdue his painterly resources completely. In a documentary sense, Smallwood is in charge of the image, of course, yet he often takes the risk of letting it have its way with him. Such instances reflect the courage of an artist so much at one with his art that he can laugh at the occasionally difficult moments in the relationship, those times when painting dictates to him, rather than the other way around. This kind of confidence unleashes extraordinary powers. Gusts of euphoria sweep through Smallwood’s art, especially in the works that comprise this exhibition. One senses here the strength a painter’s gesture can have when he points without the least hesitation at the pleasures and terrors he has experienced during his life. He teaches us that, with courage, the pleasures win out.

G.S.B.

Catalogue Philip Smallwood: Personages (July 15 - October 2, 2016) 212° F, 2010, watercolor on paper, 29 ¼” X 21 ¾” Beach Play II, 2000, watercolor on paper, 29” X 21” Bold At Heart, 2011, watercolor on paper, 29 ¼” X 21 ¼” Desire, 1998, watercolor on paper, 21” X 29” on loan from Ms. Teresa A. Oakley (On the cover) Flats Fixed, 2009, watercolor on paper, 29” X 21” Flavas, 2012, watercolor on paper, 28 ½” X 21” Hopeful, 2011, watercolor on paper, 29” X 21” on loan from Mr. DW Smallwood Just Kick’n It, 2008, watercolor on paper, 21” X 29” on loan from Mr. and Mrs. Franklin Redd Lunch at the Lagoon, 2013, watercolor on paper, 13 ¾” X 9 ½” No Life Guard on Duty, 2010, watercolor on paper, 29” X 21” Redemption, 2010, watercolor on paper, 20 ½” X 21 ¾ on loan from Mr. and Mrs. Basil Browne Sea Smells, 1998, watercolor on paper, 30” X 20” on loan from Ms. Suzanne Douglas and Dr. Dr. Jonathan Cobb Sno-Cone, 1998, watercolor on paper, 22 ½” X 21 ¾” Southern Comfort, 2008, watercolor on paper, 29” X 21” Study for Adeline, 2015, watercolor on paper, 13 ¾” X 13 ¾” Summer In Sumter, 1998, watercolor on paper, 30” X 21” on loan from Mr. Anthony Neal, Esq. Tension, 2011, watercolor on paper, 28 ¾” X 21” The Kisers, 2014, watercolor on paper, 30¼” X 21 ¾” on loan from Mr. and Mrs. Allan Kiser Three Pillars, 2010, watercolor on paper, 29” X 21 ½” Waiting, 2012, watercolor on paper, 29 ¼” X 21 ¼” Wet Cement, 2012, watercolor on paper, 29” X 21 ½” Watercolor painter Philip Smallwood (b. 1957) is known for his signature watercolor paintings - Lifescapes - a powerful form of portraiture and visual narrative. His artistic vision is unique, specific and intentional, and he strives to create from that vision rather from any particular artistic school.

Smallwood portrays the subject within his or her natural environment, carefully manipulated to evoke an emotional connection with the viewer.

Smallwood’s watercolor paintings have been sought out for solo and group exhibitions from prestigious galleries and museums including The Parrish Art Museum in South Hampton and The Hammonds House Museum in Atlanta. P. Smallwood was also selected as one of top 30 African American artists from across the nation to be showcased in Black Romantic at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Reviewing that show, Michael Kimmelman of the New York Times wrote “Philip Smallwood represents the show’s prevailing strain of social pride, painting sun-drenched scenes of quaint humanity.”

Recently Philip’s work received Best in Show at the International Art Expo in Philadelphia and took first prize in a New Jersey Watercolor Society exhibition. In 2010, he was also awarded a Certificate of Special Congressional Recognition for his work related to the Art of Soul exhibition held by Bergen County, New Jersey. Later in the year, Philip unveiled his new Urban Series in a solo show at Carolina Galleries in Charleston, South Carolina. His work has been shown at Bryant Gallery in New Orleans and Carol Craven Gallery in Martha’s Vineyard. Earlier in his career, Smallwood was selected to create a commissioned work for the Duke Ellington Centennial Commission at the Charlin Jazz Society in Washington DC. Through watercolor, Smallwood found a medium that allowed him to blend his love of the human form with light, color and a fluid surface ideal for telling the human narrative that has become the heartbeat of his work. Today, his Lifescape watercolors are the culmination of his artistic relationships with structure, shape, volume, finish, light and color filtered through the eye of his life experiences and values. His approach to watercolor technique, from composition to form and surface, is intuitive and exploratory. His subjects are people most viewers would ignore or overlook as of little importance. Smallwood takes these subjects and puts them center stage. Smallwood is a graduate of the University of Miami.

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