By Alaina Rook:
Student, Intern, Overall Life Enthusiast
A few weeks ago, I
had the opportunity to attend the premier of the gallery's Mel Strawn
exhibition. Mel Strawn is fifty shades of awesome. He looks like he
could be your kindly, white-haired grandfather, but bets are that
your grandfather is not nearly as cool as this guy—an artist
creating masterful works for more than half a century.
Strawn is ever an
innovator--and it evident in his almost experimental pieces of
art—which play with lines, with shapes and colors, and with light
and darkness. Paintings like “Genie”, “Negentropy” and
“Series Last”
were
part of a fourteen year artistic odyssey of investigation and
invention—using only four shapes he created perfectly chaotic yet
contained and restrained structure compositions. Strawn explained
the process of painting these complex canvases to me as “made by
probability and chance”-- highlighting the mathematical
intentionality of his shape experiments, but moreover, that these
pieces are a reflection of the nature of experiments in and of
themselves—delving into the unknown and unpredictable, unsure of
all possible outcomes.
While
his work is intricate, daring, and beautiful, I am drawn to the
essential simplicity behind Strawn's works, breaking the way we
perceive our space into it's essential pieces. Four shapes are the
building blocks of the world he creates on a canvas, like a scientist
breaking down every known substance of the universe into a periodic
table of elements.
His more recent works use prints and solar exposure (in the vein of
old fashioned photography) to create tangled webs of illusions (and
allusions as in “Vulcan's Forge”).
My
personal favorite in the exhibition is Strawn's “Tree Stump”,
drawn to the romantic notions surrounding its creation. Noticing
that I was particularly drawn to this piece, Strawn told me the
paintings story: In 1966, Stawn and his wife were living in an
ancient manor house in the French countryside. While it was a
beautiful, esoteric place to inhabit, it also lacked certain
seemingly basic amenities—such as heat. Seeing as it was winter
and the cold was pressing down upon them in the drafty old house,
Strawn was constantly collecting wood to fuel the simple stone
fireplace. He started making sketches of the wood pieces he
encountered, this stump being one of the many that filled their
hearth that winter. Perhaps the most aesthetically diverse from the
rest of the collection, it is also the earliest of his works
represented in the gallery.
And
while I may have been quick to identify a favorite, Strawn is more
reluctant. His philosophy on his works? “They're like kids. I
have to love them all...Or hate them all given the day.”
