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water soluble oil, gesso and acrylic on panels, birthday candles
approximately 32" x 25"
Paintings
How to make a butter sculpture from Adrian Stucker on Vimeo.
My eyes are like magpies swirling and dipping as they take in the world. They alight on various fancies: a phrase, an object, a pattern. In turn, I feel the need to recognize these small delights. This acquisitive impulse is the underpinning of this series of drawings.
Keeping my responses open to what my visual reality provides; I make a decision through indecision. These drawings are done with no boundaries in style and subject matter beyond size and media: sheets of 9” x 12” watercolor paper, gouache, colored pencil and gesso. Light and immediate materials allow for an unlabored response.
These small, quick works teach me about what my eyes seek out: the end credits of a John Carpenter film, elements of atmospheric perspective and relative scale that I’m teaching my students, snowflakes and cloud forms reflecting my non-native’s fascination with Ohio’s winter weather, all the romantic facets of my everyday landscape. Here, through drawing, I allow myself to reflect on the bright churning pleasures of a full world.
3/7/10 4:08 PM
Bridgette Bogle
Eyeglasses, snowflakes, chopstick wrappers, couch patterns, and overpasses - hardly the stuff of visual delight and wondrous attention, snowflakes excepted. And yet, in her drawings of these everyday subjects, Bridgette Bogle manages to make many of them unexpectedly sparkly and light, playful and pleasing. How she does this has something to do with a casual isolation of subject matter and a pairing of it with simple, decorative painterliness. More than anything, however, there's Bogle's choice of day-glo gouache as a colorful accent, throwing hot pink and chartreuse where none occur naturally. (As if they ever occur naturally!) Thus a heart-shaped box of chocolates which should read as cheap and common doesn't. Instead it's a jazzy, jubilant thing bursting with strange tastes and sparkling centers. The flowery pattern of a couch comes across not as an unfortunate decorative afterthought, better left in the 1980s, but rather as a quirky play of exotic and unnatural silhouettes colored by a decidedly vanguard mother nature. In some cases Bogle's light, quirky touch fails to defamiliarize the familiar enough to make it interesting - witness a pair of chunky, clunky spectacles and a bouquet of not-so-fresh roses. Rather than fail, though, these exceptions seem to testify to the artistic effort it takes to render the stuff of daily life as if it were in fact the stuff of some magical existence, a Midas touch not to be taken for granted.
-Lori Waxman