Statement on My Artwork - 2014
I have been working on the Golden Section Series of paintings since 2004. Over this eleven year time span the compositions have become increasingly more complicated. As such, each painting takes a very long period of time to complete. I have never clocked a painting in my life and I doubt I ever will. However, based on the number of months these recent paintings take to complete, typically around four or five, and the number of hours I paint per day, usually around eight, I would estimate that I spend around 1000 hours per painting.
There are several factors that contribute to my lengthy time commitment to each painting. To the observer, perhaps the most obvious contributing factor might be my use of hard, clean and precise edges. A far less obvious factor could be the number of times a composition changes with my efforts to get the relationship of all the parts – just right. In this series, I paint with solid, opaquely applied colors and an intentional effort to show as little brushstrokes as possible. This manner of painting almost for certain prevents the viewer from peeking through the curtain to see earlier stages of these paintings. As such, the end product reveals very little if any of all of the time consuming changes that took place. In addition, painting opaquely requires several layers of paint and this too contributes to the lengthy time required to complete these paintings. Furthermore, these paintings have no obvious standard for measuring their success. Unlike representational images in which the standard for measuring quality is so often based on how closely the piece mimics visual reality, these paintings are much more about inventing a new way to see and think about relationships. As such, discerning their quality becomes an arguably more difficult and time consuming component of the painting process. That is, if these paintings are good, by what standards are they good? Not knowing of anyone else who is painting this way, I largely have to turn inward for these answers. Since I have remained dedicated to this series for eleven years, I am at least afforded the opportunity to look back upon earlier paintings from the series for some frame of reference when attempting to judge the success of each piece.
For the most part, over the years these paintings have evolved to a far more curvilinear state than when I first began this series in which you would find a greater distribution of vertical and horizontal rectilinear edges. There is an obvious exception to this in one of the five paintings in this exhibition. In the painting, Growth or a Growth I simply needed to give this curvilinear domination a rest and return, if only briefly, to an aesthetic where golden section rectangles and squares prevail. To be sure, this particular painting did not take as long to complete as the other four in this exhibition. If nothing else, my hope is that Growth or a Growth may serve as some sort of a springboard for new ideas in future paintings.
For me, painting is not at all about finding a relaxing or therapeutic activity to occupy some of the time in my life. Instead, painting is my life. It is a sensitive, stimulating and mind challenging activity in which I am continually being very self-critical in my search for new pictorial ideas. For example, will a newly introduced shape make the painting as a whole better or worse? Or, if I adjust the color in this particular shape toward a warmer, less intense hue, will that bring a greater sense of harmony to the overall color theme or will it bring more contrast? Questions such as these are seemingly endless. Changes have to be made for improvements to take place. What can complicate this even more is that a change made to fix one problematic area of the painting may inadvertently cause another problem or two in another area of the painting. In other words, everything within the painting effects everything else. Generally, if I am solving more problems than I am causing as I make changes, I feel as if I must be headed in the right direction. Since perfection can never be attained, the most I can ever hope to achieve in a painting is for any lingering questions to become very small, quiet and relatively insignificant.
There are also three burgundy colored sculptures in this exhibition. Although these pieces have occupied a very small percentage of my studio time compared to my paintings, they have certainly tempted me to want to sculpt more. The only drawback is the more I sculpt, the less I paint. Even so, I would very much like to continue sculpting and to eventually work considerably larger.
William Weidner
Associate Professor of Art
Lakeland University