Author: Dick Van der Wurst

Deadlines are great. They make me more productive than any creative itch possibly can. The trouble is that getting into a rush prevents me from stopping to really look at a piece as the idea is developed and guide it toward a more pleasing conclusion. The good news is that you now have a work that can be revisited and edited and made anew for the next show.

This is what I’m currently doing with “Our Lady of the Lawn” completed back in February 2013 for a show I had 3 weeks to prepare for.

This is the initial draft from which I was working.

Perhaps the saturation of colors and differences in tones makes the digital sketch hold up better, but the final product had no well defined focal point. The flamingos rather than being benign plastic static guardians of our holy mother in her bathtub shrine, are competing visually with her, the focal point. I believe they have a role in a more symmetrical composition, but with this asymmetrical set up, they just make the whole thing lopsided.

Then there is the argument for simplicity. I have been advised to distill my imagery even more, to stop slowing people down with arcane, personal symbolism and feature more the imagery that supports the intended emotional focus of the piece. I’m not sure if I agree with that completely but it is something to consider. Do I force the additional kitsch value of the flamingos to highlight the absurdity of decorating your hard with shrines to a virginal vessel of God’s seed? Or, do I allow the angel and devil to express their distaste, the pilgrim gnomes and the typography do so nearly as effectively without knocking the composition off kilter?

I guess not.

Last night I started sanding off the flamingos. Then I realized the orientation of the text will need to be adjusted and perhaps the rays of light accentuated.

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My “elevator speech.” for this series has been lacking, I recently realized. People see the food, they see the ubiquitous devil and angel, the distressed individual, and they ask, “What does it mean?” I’m not interested in applying secret meanings postmortem, but I have thought more about how this idea was hatched and what it was about it that I found compelling.

I, as the artist, try to avoid decoding exactly the associations my brain pieces together. I don’t want to hinder creativity, inhibit visual expression, and decrease my production by having to craft everything I do into a finely honed allegory. I want unconscious associations to live, grow and evolve into surprisingly complex and rich juxtapositions that “synergize” into deeper truths. In other words I don’t sweat it. If it amuses me, I paint it.

So of course, it really isn’t important for me for the viewer to be able to cast his eyes on my piece and immediately decider its “message”. I try to provide a sideways glance at reality, to unveil the secret power of symbolic meaning and to help myself and others to stop and think about why we do what we do and why we feel the way we feel. I’m not telling stories, and I’m not trying to just make pretty pictures.

People need hints from time to time and when their interest is piqued, they ask questions. I welcome that, but I don’t always have a good answer ready. The risk is always in making the mystical complexities of a slowly developed, living, breathing painting into a simple verbal decoding. People will assume there is nothing more to discover and move on.

I have long stood back and marveled at we humans’ need to find a cultural excuse to party en masse on almost a monthly basis. We are living from diversion to diversion, ignoring the painful, scary randomness of reality. These painting are simply an illustration of how we numb ourselves to existential angst with arbitrary celebrations, comfort foods, drugs and drinks.

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