First Fridays: Feb '09

It’s my first “First Fridays” in Richmond and I can’t quite put a finger on the way I feel. Can one love and loathe at the same time? I feel that I belong here, that it should be my work on the sanitary walls of these galleries, yet I feel out of place, as if the masses of people have already sucked all the meaning away from anything I might desire to contemplate. Bands play music that I don’t connect with (even if I like it); artist statements are nonsensical paragraphs that I read without taking to heart or memory. And it’s not because I don’t care to feel or know or comprehend–for that is why I view art and that is why I live… to feel and know and comprehend. It’s the humming of the crowd and the constant pressing notion that someone is looking over my shoulder, waiting for me to move on so that they can take a gander at any given work. “I must move forward, I must keep with the pace of the masses!” It’s unnerving, although I know it is probably more of a self-imposed hast than actual people tapping their feet impatiently behind me. Either way, I am somewhat of a “slow” person. I value quality over everything else, (sometimes to a fault, but I’m working on it). I like to take my time, especially when viewing art. I want to soak it in so that I remember, so that it makes an impact on me, so that it makes an impact on my art. Thankfully, my little digital Elph came to the rescue the next day, reminding me what I had found intriguing the night before but hadn’t had the time to properly consider.



















It was the paintings of Christopher Quirk at the 1708 Gallery that I truly found most interesting that night. They were like nothing I’d ever seen before. Paint used almost in a sculptural fashion. And not in the way that I’ve seen “sculpted paint” or defined brush or knife strokes before. This was paint as sculpture. Tiny orange buttons, green worms, scarlet-red nipples, multi-colored mountains, craters revealing layers beneath. I loved it at the time, snapping pictures of different paintings, close-up and farther away, and a quick snap of the artist statement as I was out the door. It wasn’t until later inspection of the pictures and a rereading of the artist statement that I realized I may appreciate the work more that I do what the artist has to say about it. I found the statement profoundly assuming and higher-than-thou. I feel as if all work is a proposed look at someone or something. As an artist, I can only say what I feel my work represents or what it represents to me and what I would hope others would glean from it. Quirk’s statements are so definitive, as if he is telling the viewer what he did and how they should feel because of it. A particular sentence of dislike is, “I use the language of painting in counterintuitive ways to further suspend resolution.” Nice lingo but let me decide for myself what your “language of painting” does.