Cal Lane Essay
#46 Robert Williams (Visiting Painting)
#47 Cal Lane (Response Piece)
The crate sat in my studio for a couple of days before I opened it. Wanting to be ready to work with the piece as soon as I saw it, I didn’t want to spend too much time over-analyzing it, muddying the way I interpreted it.Eventually I opened the crate. Inside was a painting,
a bright-colored scene of an outdoor dry climate. There were two figures in the foreground having a discussion, the narrative was not so much about them but the discussion they were having. The conversation appeared to be between a teacher and a student, the teacher was an odd, blue, blob, toy-like figure with a graduation cap and a pointer. It wore socks under Birkenstocks and pointed to a large canvas with an image of a gun on it.
The blue-blobbed teacher was talking to a young woman carrying books. She was looking unimpressed with whatever the blue thing was saying. The focus of the narrative in this piece seemed to be the gun on the canvas, although the setting is outside the environment, it seemed to be a classroom. Could it be about the guns in schools debate? Not sure. Then there is the image of the old ruins in the background which made me think of the relationship of past destruction, war, history.
In my visual interpretation I decided to lay two materials onto the canvas. I generally work with objects and materials and not paint on canvas so limiting myself to a space and form was a challenge.
I chose the background of an old toile fabric first. I liked this fabric for its imagery and its relationship to the past. In the fabric pattern are conversations – people living, working, playing outside and castles on hillsides. Over this fabric I drew and cut into steel the images of two guns pointing at each other with a map
of the world. Then using the lines of foolscap to hold the images together. For me placing the two materials of steel and fabric creates a tactile relationship of opposing elements, soft and warm, cold and hard. The fabric suggested a lot of the narrative that seemed to be happening in the painting that I received, while overlaying the steel brought in the focus of the conversation. The guns point at each other showing a useless conflict. The map and foolscap bring in visual suggestions of school and history.
In this piece I tried to represent specific images in not so specific ways to keep the conversation open, for I find things are more interesting in a dialog than in an answer. O