Steven Sheffield: An Ongoing “Essay on the Work and the Expressive Structuralist Qualities In Myriad Contexts.” Steven, your work represented at Loge has really piqued my interest to where your work merits what I intend to be an ongoing investigation. I keep scrolling past Fire and Ice and I keep feeling an emotional charge each time I see this piece in particular and it has something to do with an area of aesthetics I am delving into which I might call “aesthetic symbolic expressive structuralism,” which this work personifies magnificently. In your case, I would like to approach the qualifiers of your dynamics, which are so powerfully evident, within this same aesthetic symbolic expressive structuralist context, the expressive aspect being the driving force to your work. I can say this about all of your works of abstraction in your album, and the same with the semi-representational. The idea is that one has to begin with the fundamental element to all things, which is structure, and the path to significance finds its genesis there and only there. Structure allows for meanings or suggestion of meaning or absence of meaning or even emotion… any kind of significance. This occurs when we take the subsequent element to meaning, which is symbol. Think of this as every painterly choice you make on your canvas. Be it strength of a hue, be it relationships of hue… or tonality, be it the sudden interruption of a clean white line, be it an aggressiveness while there is a feeling that is reserved by the use of bright and vitalizing substance, an occurrence of a perfectly round but coarsely painted red circle, areas that are broad color zones and areas where myriad colors unite that are choppy but clean, the profuse and refreshing use of interdispersement of white, all of this is symbol. How it is used within the structure allows for relationships, compositions inside of compositions, contrasts, constructs harmonies, balance, imbalance, integration, exclusion, focus, singularity, arbitrary, comprehensibility, pattern, and ultimately, ultimately what the symbols within the structural composition lead to is understanding. This understanding employs all of the above and the result of last element, expressiveness, and you know very well how I feel about your work, that you are a master expressionist par excellence. With this compositional symbolic investigation, and I am coming from the point of responsiveness, mind you, and this is important to you, to understand how your work functions, how your work has utility upon its audience: my responsiveness i find is a unification of assertive and energetic impulses that are exciting and vibrant but at just the right dosage to stimulate but in no was over-assert themselves. The randomness that I see becomes familiar to me upon contemplation and not so random as the whites and the yellows are such a glorious accent to the boldness of the blues and the oranges. The composition is a frenzy of excitement and the viewer is roused by its invigoration, but the white line is so appropriately placed left of center to give it just the right hint of mellow. The circle, and now I see are two, are iconography that to me, personally, have set my mind adrift. To me, this painting reminds me of my early days on Malibu beach as a teenager in my youth and these circles, with this sea blues and the fiery oranges, have set my heart and mind to my days of 14-18 when I spent my summers in Malibu. Oh what happy days and how glad this painting makes me, to work so well for me cognitively, a composition of such intellectual interest and formal and expressive contemplative fascination, but to also relive the happiest days of my youth. What a pure pleasure. Continuing on my “Essay on the Work and the Expressive Structuralist Qualities In Myriad Contexts,” I find a painting that I find no title for but is as rich in expression as the complete abstraction described above, yet in its state of semi-representation, it must be read with more of a literality and less of my trance like state into my imagination to my youth or any such possibility, but this not meant that this painting is to the Nth degree any less profound. I would describe this not only abstracted landscape but Minimalist landscape, and as no such thing has been described theoretically in the canon, we can do this with authority and qualify it as such. It is qualified not only but the mere sense of the reduction of the detail of the abstraction to component parts, as I so lucidly described above, but the core element of Minimalism is that it is only pure form until human subjectivity recognizes its own relationships to it, such as described above, qualifying it as art, albeit Modern and abstract, and liberating it from a state of pure objectivity. The literal is so much more easily defined, so much more significance is presented by the artist, but the dichotomy is that with this increase of signifiers there is a decrease of viewer license for their own play of meaning, but again, this in no way decreases the expressive profundity of this painting. Let’s consider some relationships from viewer to the work of art that will demonstrate the innate profundity of meaning that easily compensates for the wealth that is for the viewer in the context of total abstraction. The dominance of one hue, pea green, suggests a relationship of unification and totality, a serenity and a subtlety with the overwhelming presence and balance of this hue and its variance of tone so natural, so organic, so easy on the human eye and consciousness. A further relationship is the recognition of the contrasts with this easy to digest pea green and the sudden, abrupt, aggressive burnt red walnut brown, a sophisticated hue in a deep, heavy tone, true to excellent minimization of structure expressively, is reduced to component shapes that bear an acute reaction against the reticent pea green upon which these shapes dominate. This resonates a struggle, a play of power, a survival of the fittest in this context most evocative with a representation of drama. One final relationship we might consider is the sky of peach with no gradation absolutely consistent and with no change. The relationship this creates transcends the natural in to state of semi-surrealism, something fantastical to the composition, an added sensibility of the abstract to add to the profundity of this relationship that is intensely one of a bucolic harmony, of a natural struggle of survival, while in a state that is fantastical transcending the literal to ultimately be realized a total abstraction we find conclusively with what was first thought to be semi-representational.
Posted on: Wed, 19 Mar 2014 20:02:37 +0000