Opening Reception Sunday September 17th, 1-3 PM
Mike
show, "Recent Constructions by Steve Greenquist... Some Assembly
Required" this Sunday, September 17th from 1 - 3 PM at the Gallery,
located at 111 Court Ave (entrance at the corner of 2nd and Walnut).
Additional information about the Gallery is available at
www.heritagegallery.org
The reception and gallery is free to the public, refreshments will be
served.
ARTIST STATEMENT
As a freshman (39 years and 8 colleges ago), art history seemed like a
punishment, taking me from time better spent in the art studios. As a
teacher of art history, I sought to learn and then teach the
connections between one group of artists and the next group of artists
and ideas. To teach I needed to understand those connections, but a
byproduct has been my personal search to discover my own connections
with that past.
Not until I had to teach the past did I discover how much the past was
speaking to me. In 1863 the French painter, Edouard Manet spoke to me
(although I was late in getting the message) when he announced that
"Painting should be nothing more than the arrangement of line,
colors, and shape on a flat surface." This was his challenge to
classicism.
About 10 years ago I stopped making art, stopped exhibiting. I had
realized that I had stopped listening or maybe even hearing. I had
become disconnected. I read, taught, and listened. I'm not sure if
I was purging or percolating.
Then in 2001 I found the answer when I "rediscovered" the Mona
Lisa. It was not knowing but the unknowing. Leonardo's "Mona
Lisa" will be 500 years old next year (give or take ten years); I
decided to celebrate. I "monopolized" on the moment. I
reconnected.
The summer of 2001 I spent 8 weeks retracing the trail of Leonardo from
the Louvre where his "estate" is hung, to Amboise where he died and
is buried and then back through Milan, Venice, Florence, Fiesole and
Rome. I reconnected to a heritage of classical convention restructured
by experimentation and individual freedom. Leonardo's life as is
expressed in all his venues was an attempt to connect: form and
content, science and alchemy, math and physical forces. His work
celebrates the cerebrate. I returned to Europe this summer to see the
cave paintings at Lascaux, a shared connective for all artists.
In many of the works on which I am now working, Leonardo's (and his
contemporary's) artworks and experimentation are recelebrated.
For me:
Each work is a celebration of creative principle or freedom.
Each work both questions and announces its validity; Questions what
can be and
announces creative freedom.
Each work is consciously focused on connections with Leonardo to
increase familiarity
within the creative process; This familiarity of content decreases
inhibitions that
might otherwise restrict choice.
For the viewer:
Each work is to be a celebration.
Each work is to invite a cerebration and announcement.
Each work is to seem alien and yet to become familiar.
Henri Mattisse (another French painter) said he dreamed of an art
"devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter, an art...like a
mental soother, something like a good armchair in which to rest from
physical fatigue." I too wish the viewer to find rest-but envision
"rest" not as a "worker/viewer" asleep in an armchair but as
one soothed by the rhythmic rebounding of a rocking chair: The give
and take, the question that seems familiar, the familiar that is put to
question.
Steven L. Greenquist
2006