BIG PAPER

Each artistic generation finds anew in the hand to paper that “the human

imagination and an individual mind is more unique than an individual fingerprint.”

Peter Ligon, Shark on Roof, 2005, 38” x 50”, ink on paper

Alison KeoghMy work is a living dialogue with the natural world, which occurs through my body, breath, mindful aware-ness, and repetitive gestures using diverse mediums.

The desire to deepen my process, and the work of artist Lee Ufan, has inspired me to develop a practice that synthesizes the energy of repetition into a single gesture. I am currently realizing this new process with the “Clay Drawings”.

I am now working with hand-collected clays from Santa Fe and the surrounding area. A “slurry” of clay is applied to the paper and a single action gesture is made with different parts of my body. Drying and then washing with water produces the drawing, which is later selectively oiled.

This work has evolved from the Clay Room, a site-specific installation that proposes using clay in an untra-ditional two-dimensional presentation. The project pres-ents a new way to reconnect with the land using art as a vehicle that engages people in a way that will heighten their awareness of the earth.

far left: Exhalations, 2009, 27” x 33”, sumi ink on paperabove: Respirer, 2011, 27” x 33”, walnut ink on paperright: Drawing #07, 2011, 17” x 24”, clay, oil on paper

Shelby ShadwellI chose to draw the black plastic trash bags as much for aesthetic reasons as for the contents or connotations the materials may carry. Formally, there is a palpable tension between representation and abstraction in the work, as the folds in the plastic and the light and shadow shapes assume an almost portrait-like presence in each piece, invoking Rorschach. For me, the work is a continuation of a metaphysical dialogue about the vis-ible versus the hidden and the valuable versus the disposable in art and a broader cultural context. Observational drawing is the most direct and meditative way for me to have this conversation with the viewer.

far right: Elephant Man, 2010, 80” x 64”, charcoal on papermiddle right: #11, 2011, 40” x 30”, charcoal on paperright: Elephant Man in process

Wesley BergSocietal progress, historically, has included the settling of new lands, the building of cities and structures, the harvesting of natural resources, the production of material goods, and often the brazen disregard for natural environments and indigenous peoples and animals. During my stay at the Vermont Studio Center, I began to ex-plore bear hunting (common practice in Vermont) as a metaphor for this progress. Ursus Americanus (the American Black Bear) became the armature around which I began to construct this metaphor. Bear hunting seemed to represent a form of control and conquest similar to the notions of progress I was interested in critiquing. The hunted Bear became a symbol for a marginalized natural world. However, the Bear not only represented a wounded country and landscape; the Bear soon repre-sented me. I soon recognized myself in the Bear, known for his curiosity and solitary lifestyle in the forests and mountains. Spending much of my life in nature—I began not only to feel a kinship with the Bear, but further, I felt that acts committed against the Bear (natural world), for the sake of progress, were in fact acts against me.

left: Bear, 2010, charcoal on paper; middle images clockwise starting at the top left: Bears with I-70 at I-75, 2010, 9.5” x 8”, ink on paper; Trophies, 2009, 9.5” x 8”, ink on paper; Bear Skin with Map of Killington Peak Ski Resort, 2009, 9.5” x 8”, ink on paper; Bear with Trail of Tears, 2010, 9.5” x 8”, ink on paper; Five Bears on May 26, 1830, 2010, 9.5” x 8”, ink on paper; Hanging Bear with Purple Heart, 2010, 9.5” x 8”, ink on paper

Larry Bob PhillipsThe goal in my 2005-2008 work has been to create a form that has plasticity and transformation as its explicit focus, allow-ing the viewer to experience the paranoid formalism of the image where nothing is anything, but everything is something. Working on a wall sized scale and using a cartoon language that responds to psychedelic impulses. The more recognizable architectural and landscapes structures allow this undulating web to hang and grab at something shared in our remembered visual experience. The result is a complex trip that keeps the viewer in a suspicious state of investigation while providing just enough facts to keep them searching. What surfaces from the psychedelic sludge must not only be poignant and surprising, but have the force of the real, and happen at the right intervals.

The 2008 to present work is a little different, an attempt to create this slow-read, soft-yet-hard dissolving picture space with a high contrast, black ink calligraphic mark, and more recently a textural, atmospheric dry brush technique. Both bod-ies of work, the colored pencil and ink, could be described as an attempt to revisit some of the themes of French painting at the turn of the last century. Painters like Bonnard, Braque and Van Gogh were aware of a violent pregnancy within modern painting. They understood that the mark or brushstroke had a destructive agency that had to be grappled with, and that the resolution of painting problems lay in a very fine psychological balance.

My work also owes much of it’s grounding to much more recent shifts in thinking and looking, like the coy cartooning of every kind of hopeful modern abstraction in the 1990s. The mind numbing sensory overload that has been the hallmark of the new psychedelia in the 2000s and the explicit psychology of the graphic

Cartoon (study), 2011, 11” x 11” x 25”, wood, foam, plaster, paint

Lisa WederquistThese paintings are the expression of my interest in what is discarded, leftover and right in front of me. The wallpaper was abandoned -- a whole case of it. The house paint, leftover. Outside my studio are trees and fallen branches. This combination called out for meditative marks verging on the abstract.

I have worked as a painting contractor and decorative painter all my adult life. Simultaneously, I am an artist. I am drawn into the flow and movement of paint on a wall, the layers of old paint on a windowsill, the curve of a branch at my feet.

The scale of these paintings comes from my desire to move my whole body as I work -- to be physical, to step through the cerebral. I am inspired by the power and shape of a line, the pull of my brush against the paper, the paper reacting to the paint.

left: White Shape, 201038” x 77”, house paint on wallpaper right: Line/Stream, 201054” x 36”, acrylic on gessoed linen

Peter LigonFor the past several years I’ve been drawing the neighbor-hood around my studio in East Dallas. I work on loca-tion, with ink and ink wash on paper. I’m mostly interested in architectural subjects con-structed in the early to mid 20th century. Recently, I be-gan to notice that many of the

structures I had drawn were being demolished. I realized that I am living in a period of accelerated urban transition and my drawings had unwit-tingly become mementos of what were vernacular landmarks of the city. I am currently developing a body of work that celebrates the older built environment of the city, while it lasts.

left: Texas Theater, 2010, 50” x 36”, ink on paper above: Charcoal Broiler, 2005, 38” x 50”, ink on paper right: Longhorn, 2005, 38” x 50”, ink on paper

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