Chris Rywalt - Catalog essay
To prepare for writing this essay I sat down and read through everything Steven LaRose wrote for his Website over the last two years. This is a fantastic way to get your brain to leak out your ears. It is also a fantastic way to see Steve and his art as the two of them wander across the landscape of artmaking.
More than any artist I know Steve is about give and take: Give and take with his correspondents, give and take with his materials. Push and pull. Intent and accident. Doing and not doing. I see Steve with his arm slung over his art's shoulders as they wobble to and fro, two drunks holding each other up, bumping into, tripping over and occasionally weaving around the features of the shadowy world of creativity.
Steve struggles to stop struggling. He fights to stop fighting. He works to see how little effort he can exert. He spills ink on the paper; he drips; he spatters; he's an Abstract Expressionist trying out automatic writing. And when he's done, his works exude a sense of wholeness, completeness, and inscrutable mystery, like flowers do. They're complete in and of themselves, and no one knows where they come from or why they're here. Steve is the midwife to breathing organisms of art, sexy little creatures pulsing and leaping around his papers.
We can talk about his work as art, using art terms. We can say that, rather than exploring divisions of the picture plane (as in Cubism), or exploring the depth of the imagined box behind the painting (as in realism), Steve is developing the feeling of layers of thereness within the picture plane. His depth of field falls somewhere between the extreme shallowness of Cubism and the illusion of depth of realism; his is more a Photoshop-like layering with different levels of transparency.
We can talk about his work that way, but it doesn't make it any better. Really, ideally, his drawings should just be appreciated for what they are. What they are is beautiful manifestations of color and shape, guided by Steve's hand and breath and inspiration, but ultimately self-created, each unique though built of the same parts, each surprising though predictably formed. All of them together focus something unnameable, something greater than the sum of its parts, something beyond language and reason. All together they reach something unreachable with words.
Give and take, push and pull. The art leans one way, Steve leans the other, then they swap, and eventually they get somewhere, somewhere no one's ever been, somewhere no one's even intuited; somewhere wondrous.
To prepare for writing this essay I sat down and read through everything Steven LaRose wrote for his Website over the last two years. This is a fantastic way to get your brain to leak out your ears. It is also a fantastic way to see Steve and his art as the two of them wander across the landscape of artmaking.
More than any artist I know Steve is about give and take: Give and take with his correspondents, give and take with his materials. Push and pull. Intent and accident. Doing and not doing. I see Steve with his arm slung over his art's shoulders as they wobble to and fro, two drunks holding each other up, bumping into, tripping over and occasionally weaving around the features of the shadowy world of creativity.
Steve struggles to stop struggling. He fights to stop fighting. He works to see how little effort he can exert. He spills ink on the paper; he drips; he spatters; he's an Abstract Expressionist trying out automatic writing. And when he's done, his works exude a sense of wholeness, completeness, and inscrutable mystery, like flowers do. They're complete in and of themselves, and no one knows where they come from or why they're here. Steve is the midwife to breathing organisms of art, sexy little creatures pulsing and leaping around his papers.
We can talk about his work as art, using art terms. We can say that, rather than exploring divisions of the picture plane (as in Cubism), or exploring the depth of the imagined box behind the painting (as in realism), Steve is developing the feeling of layers of thereness within the picture plane. His depth of field falls somewhere between the extreme shallowness of Cubism and the illusion of depth of realism; his is more a Photoshop-like layering with different levels of transparency.
We can talk about his work that way, but it doesn't make it any better. Really, ideally, his drawings should just be appreciated for what they are. What they are is beautiful manifestations of color and shape, guided by Steve's hand and breath and inspiration, but ultimately self-created, each unique though built of the same parts, each surprising though predictably formed. All of them together focus something unnameable, something greater than the sum of its parts, something beyond language and reason. All together they reach something unreachable with words.
Give and take, push and pull. The art leans one way, Steve leans the other, then they swap, and eventually they get somewhere, somewhere no one's ever been, somewhere no one's even intuited; somewhere wondrous.
