We walked down the path to the well-house, attracted by the fragrance of the honeysuckle with which it was covered. Some one was drawing water and my teacher placed my hand under the spout. As the cool stream gushed over one hand she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten–a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that "w-a-t-e-r" meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free! There were barriers still, it is true, but barriers that could in time be swept away.
For an artist, inspiration can be a convoluted process. Many influences can converge to determine the final work of art. There is often no direct path that leads to the final result in an artist’s practice. If an artist discovers something another artist has done which catches their imagination, be it a medium, a technique, a process or subject matter, which makes them consider other possibilities, and how those possibilities can be incorporated into their own work, it is not a form of plagiarism. It is a new opportunity asking to be explored by their creative process. The unsolicited inspiration will be filtered through their mind, their process, and their hand. It may arise and show itself in a way that is so foreign to the original idea, that it becomes completely their own.
The initial motivation for my Portal series of drawings came from viewing an exhibition of Richard Serra's drawings from his series Out of Round from 1999. I had not encountered any of Richard Serra’s drawings before. I was aware of him as a sculptor. He had a reputation as an arrogant artist whose work demanded to occupy space and consume one’s field of vision. The infamous incident of one of his balanced lead sculptures falling and killing a viewer always preceded a discussion of his work. I was not prepared for the visual experience I had when I saw the drawings that made up the series Out of Round. I was impressed not with the monumental presence I had come to expect with his sculptures, but with Serra’s expressive use of the medium of oil pastel. It was the impasto texture of the viscus black that attracted me. It communicated so much of the energy, strength, and substance of the works. The compositions were the simple geometric shape of a circle, but the visual interest came from the extreme textural quality inherent in the handling of the oil pastel.
Oil pastel was not a medium I had incorporated in my studio practice. I had dabbled a bit with dry pastel in my student years, but it had never attracted me into full time use. Oil pastel was too crude and unwieldly for my realist tastes. But, under Serra’s robust hand, it took on other possibilities. Possibilities that I wanted to explore in my own work. It became such a strong impetus that I began trying to make drawings that integrated this textural idea.
I had no visual language that would easily absorb this sort of textural commitment. And indeed, my first forays into trying oil stick and its expressive potential had me falling back on my realist hegemony. I was having difficulty transferring what I saw in my mind on to the page. I knew I wanted to do something abstract, not the simple geometry of Serra, but an abstraction that could hold up to the heavy texture I envisioned. I also had decided that there should be a variety of textures: the impasto of oil stick certainly; but also the dryness of charcoal; the sheen of pencil; the artificial, plastic quality of acrylic paint. This amorphous concept had to have a form and a structure. Since my past photorealist interests had provided me with ready source material, I turned to my vast photographic resources to find compositional inspiration. I began selecting images from my large photographic output that had geometric content. I found what I needed in my architectural compositions.
Even though I chose images with strong geometric foundations, I kept resorting to rendering the image realistically. Instead of exploring abstraction, I would fall back into my art training in objective representation. I wasn’t exploiting the textural qualities of the media as I had envisioned. The language of geometric abstraction was foreign to me. It took several attempts before I was able to learn this language and start to build what I saw in my mind onto the page.
It took 18 drawings, each based on a portion of various different photographs, before this new language coalesced into something of what I was envisioning. The photograph I was using as source material that occasioned my comprehension of this new media language contained no special qualities from the previous photographs. It was simply the next image in the sequence. The photograph, My Death Series – No. 13 – The Spirit of the House, just happened to be the one that became my charmed 18th attempt. The socio-economic and personal message of the My Death series had no immediate importance to this series of drawings. I was looking for shapes and parts of the photographic image that held the potential for visually interesting compositions. My initial excitement of Serra’s use of oil pastel was now only a vestige of what I had seen in his work. I had early on, after three or so drawings realized I should concentrate on parts of a photograph, to hold my tendency to render at bay. The entirety of the image was distracting me from realizing my idea of abstractness.
Out of this photograph, I created four separate drawings. The first was Portals – No.18 – Shard. This drawing was almost where I wanted it to be. It had a simpler composition. It approached abstraction. The black upper half employed the textural possibilities of the oil pastel. The white bottom half was less textually successful, but a good try. It was the transitional strip between the two halves that sabotaged the work. I did not successfully find a way to render the passage that held the two halves of the composition together. Even so, a synergy was happening.
What didn’t quite integrate in Portals – No.18 – Shard, would finally combine into a sensible language in the next drawing, Portals – No.19 – Transom. Everything I had been working toward for 18 drawings coalesced in Transom. Texture, shape, composition, and tonality finally balanced and became an abstract whole. Harmonizing these elements of the drawing had me understanding in a different way, what Serra had already known and wanted to teach me. As slow and unperceptive a student as I believed I was, the 19th drawing of Portals was my “water” moment. Transom opened up a new world as remarkable and profound as the feeling of water has been to Helen Keller. I could see and speak in this new way, using the texture that had set me on this path so many drawings before. Achieving the texture was not as simple as rubbing the oil pastel on the paper, the mark had to be considered. The medium had to be applied in a determinate way – not haphazard and random, but in a way that exploited its qualities. I should have known this from my prior studies, but often a new medium confuses your sensibilities, and its special qualities need to be learned.
Transom is a drawing of three rectangles of different tonalities and different textures. The darkest rectangle incorporates a triangle that imbues a visual interest in the unrelenting quadrilateral geometry. In between the central rectangle are two narrow white shapes that offer a break in direction from the dominate linearity of the composition. Within this composition of three shapes, I also wanted some subtle surprise to tease the eye as well.
Excited by the success of Transom, I next completed Portals – No.20 – Entrance. This drawing continued the trifold composition of Transom, but now there were three elongated arch shapes that I lifted from the windows of the door in the photograph. Each arch shape was a different tonality, texture, and a slightly different size. The size difference was to give a visual rhythm to the composition. The medium gray shape also included a black triangle in the bottom, right corner as a visual tease to keep the viewer’s attention.
The final drawing from this particular photograph was Portals – No. 21 – Sidelight. Deciding on this subject presented a new visual problem. I wanted to use the sidelight windows from the photograph in a drawing, but I did not want to include the door. The windows of the door had already been explored in the drawing Entrance. It seemed to me to be a radical concept to try and successfully compose a drawing that had a major void as its central element. I would need to solve what to do with the space that the door occupied. Instead of eliminating the space, I wanted to somehow activate it so that it would relate to the separated stacks of rectangles on either side. The width of the white space was important: too wide and the rows of rectangles would not relate. Too narrow, and there would be the question of why it was there at all.
The white space is not blank. It has a texture of white oil pastel over white acrylic paint. This relates texturally with the darker rectangles on either side. On the left, the rectangles are in a gradient from light at the bottom, to darker at the top. The right-side rectangles are in a gradient light at the top the darker at the bottom. This provides visual direction for the eyes – up the left stack, jump over the white space, then down the right side. The two anomalous shapes on the left and right further guide the eye in the correct directions. At this point in the Portals series, Sidelight is the most visually manipulative of my Portals drawings, but these visual cues are necessary for the viewer to retain interest in its simple composition.
The architectural source of these drawings may or may not be discernable at first view. I give voice to each source in the title of the work: Transom, Entrance, Sidelight, each a paean to the original structure that contributed to the final drawing. Shard is the lone drawing of this group that is not named after its major architectural element. I refrained from titling the drawing the descriptive, but mundane “window.” Instead, I focused on the triangular shape of the pane remnant in the window to identify it. This element had more narrative possibilities than the depictive word “window.”
It was not my intention that the architectural components that informed each drawing would have a strong informational connection with each finished drawing. It was my hope that each drawing would stand apart from its source. Conversely, I did not want to hide the source of the compositions either. One influenced the other, but they are not codependent. These are not faithful renderings of their particular building features, they are in the end, geometric shapes that allude to the source.
There may be some residual influence of the social and economic subtext of the original photographic series. The My Death series was conceived as the answer to a project lesson from my third-year college photography course in which the class was instructed to interpret through photography a major life transition. This series of photographs was my response to those instructions. But does the heavy social implications of gentrification and population displacement through urban renewal make an impact on these four Portals drawings? Perhaps. Perhaps the font of origin is too strong to quell, or is this a decision the viewer must make providing he has all of the pieces of the origin story?
Arthur Bruso © 2024
