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Parkland College
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Watercolor
International Biennial Watercolor Invitational
State of the Art 2003
Illuminating the Ordinary:
Light and Enlightenment in Contemporary Watercolor
March 3 - April 11, 2003
Statement by guest curator Barbara Cervenka, O.P.
Among the countless effects of the events of the past year, we’ve
experienced a deepened sense of the fragility of life. The disintegration
of the seeming sturdiness of our reality, visited from a clear and seamless
sky, shook our expectations and sense of what was possible. The twin towers
stand in our minds as a national memento mori, a reminder at once of evil
and destruction, and of relationship, heroism, and hope. As gray dust
silenced the colors of the landscape, survivors (which include us all)
touched with numb appreciation family and friends, the fragile surroundings
of everyday life. We celebrate what once we accepted unquestioningly as
our own.
Sobered, stunned, we have walked into a new millennium, remembering what
we lost, and holding tightly to what was rediscovered.
This exhibition, “Illuminating the Ordinary: Light and Enlightenment
in Contemporary Watercolor,” is the eighth in a series of biennial
exhibitions sponsored by Parkland College exploring the content and direction
of contemporary watercolor. Previous exhibitions have reviewed the wide
range of concerns and questions that characterize the diversity and energy
of today’s watercolor scene, both in the United States and abroad.
Essays and statements in this series of exhibitions have contributed to
a thoughtful dialogue on contemporary practice and painting. This exhibition
focuses more narrowly as its title suggests, offering instead in the words
of Kirk Varnedoe, “a vision of what might be nearest to you, the
poetry the world possesses, a pleasure in daily small things, which transmutes
into a form of spirituality,” the steady illumination that arises
from the effort to see and take nothing for granted.
Watercolor, an unpretentious medium, has at times been underestimated
because of its simplicity and accessibility. Since the 18th century its
ease of use made it attractive to enthusiastic amateurs, a ready traveling
companion for artists from the time of Dürer to the present-day ecological
journeys of Tony Foster. Yet it has been a quiet counterpoint to every
art movement of the 19th and 20th centuries, restating themes and elaborating
ideas, and at times revealing the artist more authentically and directly
than in more complex and better-known work.
It is this transparency and directness, this surprising propensity to
state with clarity and distill from complexity, that catches by surprise
in the best work. The artists in this show have arrived at a sort of wisdom,
all of them painters for many years, most working in a way that has not
always been considered fashionable or on the cutting edge. Their resulting
work has the power of sustained observation, of focused attention to the
world around them, now understood as more fragile and more concrete than
we had ever imagined. They show us that world in a more ample and generous
light.
Fairfield Porter, painter and art critic, wrote in 1964, that “there
is an artistic theory of knowledge different from a scientific or philosophical
one. The artist can direct his attention to what he is sure of. This is
not an idea, not an eternal object, it is actual, and it has immediacy.
The artist can profitably forego the scientific or philosophical attempt
at grandeur and keep to what he knows, which is what everyone knows and
does not dare accept.” This is the world of our daily experience,
so obvious it scarcely seems to bear repeating, and thus often falls beneath
the screen of our consciousness.
This exhibition celebrates a visual world of value, color and tone, light
and shadow, the quiet revelation of light on water, the turn of a cabbage
leaf, the mandala of a manhole cover. Their work is characterized by honesty
and immediacy, a simplicity that forgoes technical bravura for its own
sake and subordinates it in the service of what is to be stated. In reflecting
on the process of painting Fairfield Porter says, “Painters are
concerned with things. The most prominent things in the painter’s
experience are right in front of him, like the paint on the canvas. It
is better if he does not achieve a plan, and that the painting eludes
him, with a life of its own. The painting unfolds, gradually and with
difficulty, and he doesn’t know what it is even for quite a while
after he stops painting it.”
These artists depict with economy and grace a world fleetingly illuminated
and carefully observed, astutely transcribed and transformed. They show
us the richness and complexity that surrounds us at every turn, a powerful
reminder of all that art can give us in a broken and fragmented world.
Copyright Notice: All images and photos on these pages
are copyright of the artists or gallery and may not be used for any purpose
without written permission.
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