Kapaa 101803
Saturday, October 18, 2003
Kapaa
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 George Lawson has digital photos of six new paintings on his site. All of the paintings are called Sancai, a "Chinese name meaning "three glazes" of a low fired lead glaze based style of decorating earthenware pottery regardless of the actual number of colors of the item (source)."
The paintings, in oil, have a dense interweaving of marks made with a spatula, and use the same three colors, a red, green, and cream, that are drawn from classic San C'ai glazes.
In a new statement George writes: "Painting is anthropomorphic, corporeal aspect is endlessly fascinating to me, so I try to find ways to highlight the dependencies between painted images and the physical supports that generate those images... This focus on the concrete sounds complicated but in a way it's as simple as what a potter does glazing bisque ware. Take a thing, an object, and put physical color on it and two things happen to the object. First the perception of the thing itself changes, whether it's a clay pot or a shallow rectangular box of stretched linen. Now it looks different. Secondly, the function changes. The object now supports an image. Actually they support each other. In a kind of symbiosis with the image, the object, this thing the painting, becomes a vessel for containing all the associative content viewers bring to or pull out of the work.
"What is so interesting to me about viewers' associations is that they are largely unpredictable, uncontrollable, and, assuming at least a modest sympathy for the work, completely valid. This realization has led me to try and anticipate or at least accommodate in principle the open array of different takes on my painting (or painting in general), by generating images that are open as well, open to the myriad ways viewers have of crafting their own experience in front of a painting. Color is open in this way and has always been important in my work. Lately I've been revisiting the open gestalt or figure/ground type drawing generated by gesture, as in classic abstract expressionism. I would differentiate my drawing approach from abstract expressionism though, stemming as it does from a conscious consideration for the type of symbiosis I've described above, between the painted mark and the physical fact of its support."
 The two figures at right are a pair of lokapala, or heavenly guardians, Tang Dynasty, c. 700-750, from the Dallas Museum of Art that George directed me to. These figures strike dramatic poses and have the three-colored glazing. Several things occur to me as worth keeping in mind when looking at George's painting: the density and alloverness of the glazes; the figure's posture of turning and strength; the sharp angles and fierceness; the ornamentation and wings on their helmets. The drawing in George's paintings share these characteristics, and allows a reading of several figures, or the extreme close-up of a single figure, that are reminescent of the lokapala figures. The raw linen is akin to the unglazed area of the ceramics. It's interesting that he talks in his statement about how the colored surface of an object changes the object, and that the object itself is a carrier of the color. The color and the carrier effect each other. With a little prompting from the idea of san c'ai glazes and the lokapala figures one can begin to find several and varied ways of experiencing the images in and on George's paintings.
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Observant viewers may notice a structural similarity between today's drawing for Kapaa, Kauai, Hawaii, and the drawing on October 15 for Belfast, Northern Ireland. The connection? Islands, water, wind, cultural insides and outsides.
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 Wow, the National Palace Museum of Taiwan web site is terrific: well designed, full of features, lots of great content.
Say...
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