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George Woodman
 

 

 

NEW WORK: GEORGE WOODMAN.

ARTS MAGAZINE MAY, 1981. pp 26-7.

Geometric stylization as a means of expression occurs in art and craft as culturally diverse as Maori Taaniko, aboriginal bark painting, Greek ceramics, Islamic art, Constructivist painting and computer graphics. Suborders employing pattern repetition and transformation as exemplified by Escher's relativistic conundrums, Islamic art's harmonies, and George Woodman's unified philosophical vision, exhibit advanced forms of intellectual and communicative endeavor.

Woodman has been painting since 1952 at which time, while completing a B.A. degree with Honors in Philosophy at Harvard, he was attending the Boston Museum School; he received a Master of Arts degree from the University of Mexico in 1956. He adopts an Aristotelian view of art as an activity guided by reason directed toward rational ends. His painting, as it elucidates and transforms systems of abstract relations, presents an effective personal language even though, when speaking of his art, he eschews symbolic reference and disavows any interest in proving a logical point.

His career has followed a progression from an innate response to color and surface pattern, through careful studies of the interaction of color and shape, to the increasingly sophisticated interlocking of form and color with which-first as patterning from 1963 to 1978, then as tiling from 1978 to the present-he is now engaged.

His procedural sequence commences when shape and color are lifted into consciousness as inseparable aspects of a unified whole. Thereafter, intellectual and visual acuity activate a rare talent for surface pattern and orchestrate an idiosyncratic alphabet of color structure into multiple hierarchies of interlocking orders. The transformational syntax arising from the traversing of independent color sequences over a patterned surface presents a field wherein "wherever one looks is different but the same," where the tension between sameness and difference causes a hovering gestalt of comprehensional uncertainty. This tour-d-force off ordered complexity prompts reference to the manner in which Islamic art's patterned structural synthesis is said to be homologous to natural order, and mirrors the belief of mathematicians in pattern as a manifestation of order within the Universe. The impossible, infinite, and theoretical constructions of mathematician and puzzler Roger Penrose spring to mind. However, Woodman's asymmetrical accumulations are distinguished from Islamic art, and the models of Penrose and Escher, by the intimacy of color and composition and by the addition of extraneous layers of complexity. For instance, in A Screen with Balustrade, an easel painting in progress, a horizontal balustrade (within which curved posts ambiguously vibrate with vessels illusionistically formed by the negative space) straddles and is subsumed within a permuted, multi-floral motif playing counterpoint to coloristic transitions.

Such visual intellectual overload may have impelled the expressive, almost playful, quality of the recent installation at the Wright State University Gallery. For this project, begun in late December, Woodman devised the group of twelve tiles which now performs double-duty in A Screen with Balustrade. These square tiles are activated by an overlaid surface pattern for which a floral motif is the subject of unique internal linear variations that simultaneously observe and violate a regular tic-tac-toe grid. Except in two mutually canceling instances, on each tile eight linear termination points are equidistant from the corners, a topological constant allowing lines on the six paired asymmetric designs to join when the tiles abut. These variants, further expanded by four value levels of six colors and the erratic painting of students and gallery staff, present mind boggling numbers of compositional options, the determining permutative principles being both linear and cyclical. Control is maintained due to the topological constraints and the stylistic conventions observed by the fluid line.

One can speculate as to whether increasing structural comprehension triggers newly illuminated singularities or if an endless conceptual isomorph provokes an ultimate disjunction. This moment of catastrophe is so shattering that previous experience has relevance merely as the ground for circumstantially directed, untried, unskilled moves. This may be relevant in Woodman's case since, not withstanding a thorough command of the elemental units and substructures, the Wright State compositional strategies are experimental. Thus, in establishing the multiple parameters of the installation, key aspects of his procedural and structural crutches have been thrown into the melting pot. Carefully graded color has gone, time to "hallucinate" color relationships has gone, and the restrictions imposed by tessellated surface patterning have exploded into the endless combinational variants of the asymmetrically marked squares. The questions become: what is being said, how, why, and where is it going?

Signaled by knowledge of the articulate easel painting, this transitory and irresolute installation is seen to have the fascinating quality and unique aesthetics of work showing a mind-in-transition. And, to the extent that the work's meaning lies in the hiatus between the installation and the painting, it supports a thesis that the expression of disjunction is dependent upon the context of a developed language.

Perhaps the inherent limits of the language begin to obstruct expression. Perhaps an understandable dissatisfaction with critical response to the summative tiled paintings of the early '70's combined with tragic personal experience to jolt the artist out of a mode of accomplished art-craftsmanship in the raw space of renewed options. Or it may be that the artist's amalgam of poetics and sensitivity to life's options is precipitating an early transition to a late expressive style.

The general case holds more interesting grounds for speculation than the particulars of Woodman's new directions. Does the impressive artistic record of his sequence from innate response, through exploration and structural organization, to an expanded openness, document a developmental sequence of general import? If so, what are the biological and cultural links? Further could there by a structural form for the four-body-interactive system comprising the developmental sequence of an artist's oeuvre, stylistic transitions in the craft of art, cultural history, and the vicissitudes of in individual circumstance?

(Wright State University Gallery, February 18-March 6)

Betty Collings.

 

 

 

Home Writings George Woodman