Process makes perfect
By Sofi Thanhauser - August 23, 2007
Pale and slightly mystical in appearance, a painted figure of a young girl stands in a field facing a second shadowy figure that has been given form and features. The image suggests sisterhood, friends greeting each other.
Mitch Gordon, who believes the first brush stroke is as important as the last, says, "a painting is never finished." Photo by Sara Piazza
Typical of her creative process, the well-known Island artist Rose Abrahamson brought the painting back to her studio to rework after it had already been exhibited in galleries. Initially it depicted only a solitary figure. Unsatisfied with it, the artist created the second figure out of a shadowy portion of the canvas, as if the image itself was dictating to her.
Works of art seldom reveal their various stages of completion - the layers of paint and materials that have been added on, the sections that have been rubbed out or torn off to satisfy the artist. The process is often obscured in the final product, leaving some to wonder about the significance of the initial stages; whether the process by which art arrives at its completion is as important as the final result.
Deborah T. Colter applies finishing touches. Photo courtesy of Deborah T. Colter
In the 1960s, a group of post-minimalist artists began to experiment with the idea that product was less important than process. One of sculpture Richard Serra's pieces involved throwing lead against the walls of his studio, creating casts from the shear impact of lead hitting wall. The aggressive, physical act of throwing lead, and the way in which the lead took shape were more important to Serra than any predetermined design.
In his 1968 essay and exhibition, artist Robert Lee Morris coined the term "anti-form," using it to describe art whose value did not lie in the object, but in the process through which it was created.
It is much the same for Islander Deborah Colter, who explains that the process by which her pieces are produced is essential to their symbolic import and emotional impact.
Ms. Colter places layer upon layer of paper and liquid acrylic on her canvases, scratches through them, selectively exposing sections once buried. In a textural sense, none of the layers are ever truly lost.
"In order to sort through all we see we need to bury stuff," Ms. Colter says. "What do we keep hidden? How much do we let show through? How much can we take? We make those choices every day." She adds, "Sometimes a piece starts to find its own balance, then I throw that balance off and start again. I like to push the limits and see where it can go."
Rose Abrahamson, guided by spirits and intuition. Photo by Alan Brigish
Similarly, Cindy Kane's artistic process involves the shift between unsettled and settled. The artist creates "psychic spaces," large canvases mapping imaginary zones that deal with issues she explains as, "belonging and not belonging. It is about creating tumultuous, frenetic line drawings in the maps and then looking for a soothing place in the chaos that I can create."
Ms. Kane prefers the underlying process of a piece to remain mysterious. "I like eating food, and not knowing how they made it," she says. "I like the mystery of not knowing how someone did something."
Even if the process through which an individual piece is not discernable in a single work, over time or viewed in a series, it can provide insight to the creative procedure.
In 2003, after a long career as a realist landscape painter, Kib Bramhall briefly tried abstract painting. His most recent work reveals the artistic trajectory he describes as "a little schizophrenic." The continuities and disconnects will be exhibited in his August retrospective at the Craven Gallery. "It will show a process of going from one frame of mind to another," he says.
Artwork becomes the result of choice and risk. Ironically, the invisible parts of a work are often those for which the artist might have initially had the most feeling. "The parts that you love are probably the parts that have to go," says Rose Abrahamson, who often finds that she has to destroy the part of a painting to which she is most attached because it is blocking the development of the whole.
Always willing to take her paintings off the studio walls for reworking, Abrahamson questions the notion that a finished product exists at all, at least in the traditional sense.
"A painting is never finished," landscape painter Mitch Gordon says. "Painting is an exploration. In some ways it is as finished at the first brush stroke as it is at the last." Through the use of large, foggy spaces that give the viewer "room to breathe," his landscape paintings evoke the fragmentary quality of an Italian fresco from which large chunks of plaster have fallen away. He believes that the crumbling frescos he has witnessed in Italy are more beautiful now than when they were "complete," imbued as they are with "poetry between the empty spaces" that he finds so compelling.
For Mrs. Abrahamson, the most important thing is to never stand still, to never become complacent. "I have to step in the deep water over my head," she says. "Otherwise I don't learn."
Island native Sofi Thanhauser is a freelance writer who lives in Brooklyn, New York.
