The Garden of Death

With less than two months away from the opening for House of Scratch presents: Mind Field 2009 Group Exhibition, it was time to sit down and work out which direction my work needed to take to fulfill my sense of joy in making art, explore the fundamental nature of Surrealism, and create artwork  in a more timely fashion.

The big joy depleter over the past couple of years has been the amount of time it takes to complete a painting.  The technique I developed relies on layering translucent and transparent acrylics to create deep rich colours, so the bigger the painting, the longer it takes. I can assure you, if the completion of a project outlasts my desire to work on it, the piece is doomed to be abandoned.

With a deadline looming ahead, I was forced to look very closely at what I gravitated toward in making art. Thinking back to highschool, formal studies, workshops and self-directed experimentation, I ended up returning to the iconographic, symbolic work I used to do almost five years ago.

This work involved simple line drawings (doodle-like) with symbols coloured with primary shades. The best part about this work was that the process involved drawing images and symbols as they arose in the mind, without connection or association applied to them. This meant I could do a symbol or cluster of symbols and then walk away, creating a bit at a time without the burden of thinking about their overall meaning.

This process is referred to as “automatic drawing”, something that is associated with the Surrealist artists which I discovered while reading The Diary of Frida Kahlo. As it turns out, no matter how disconnected images might appear, often meaning and associations can be made. Unfortunately, I felt what I was creating at the time needed to evolve a bit more.

During this introspection, my gravitation toward 3-d form could no longer be denied as well as a deep fondness for bricks–for their colour, texture, form and ability to incite memories of playing with Lego as a kid.  I still wanted to paint too. Then it occurred to me that if the forms of these symbols could be made in another medium, one that could be painted, that would be cool.

Having worked with wax sculpting a bit, I considered other sculpting materials, like Sculpey and Fimo, and they proved to be perfect for sculpting individual images in bas relief, whatever came to me at the time–a skull, a flower with teeth, a cracked tombstone. A few images could be made every night, baked in the oven, without having to work within the confines of composition. Once enough images were accumulated, I could then play with them, move them about into different configurations and develop a composition afterward.

It was an experiment for sure. It could have blown up in my face, but I’d worked with Sculpey before  and knew how well it absorbed acrylic paint. I’ve also painted on un-primed wood panels and know how well wood absorbs acrylic. So fixing the sculpted pieces to a wood panel would be a cinch. The aesthetic, however, would be questionable, but I figured as long as the piece had a monochromatic feel to it with some colour, it could work well. In the end, it came together and worked very well.

How do I know? Because creating “The Garden of Death” helped rekindle that joy and excitement in creating Art.

I’m not at all surprised by the final composition of  “The Garden of Death” with its reference to the culture surrounding death. I have a keen interest in the Day of the Dead Festival and am intrigued by how the living treat their dead around the world and throughout history.

“The Garden of Death” explores the varied responses people have to death, with some mourners being at peace with their deceased loved ones, their beliefs ensuring they live on in an afterworld; other mourners continue to grieve, believing the dead are nothing but bits of bone doomed to eternity in the earth. Below it all, the flowers become beasts, where mourners are angry at the nature of death yet nature consumes them anyway, and at the center of those strange flowers, the mother of all nature accepts a sacrficial offering made by people to keep the nature of death away.

This is just the gist of the compositon as I intended it. I’m sure there are other meanings that can be culled from the images. That’s the nature of artwork. “The Garden of Death” is an important piece for me. It marks the culmination of about two year’s worth of struggle and the beginning of a new path of exploration.