SAN FRANCISCO, CALIF.- Jack Fischer Gallery is presenting meditations, a group show of work by 5 artists whose work slips and slides easily with each others’ in a conversation I hope to facilitate. I have always said that, for me, one of the most important aspects of an artist’s work is the hand. I want to see the hand as it travels over the medium-- marking, erasing, forcing decisions. Nothing is solid ….all is mutable and transient.
The work varies from the verisimilitude apparent in Ian Everard’s watercolors of found book covers that remind me of a cover band, with every scratch and skip perfectly rendered, to the incredibly poignant watercolors of stamps commemorating nuclear bombs by Timothy Wells. The vibrating, meditative pen and ink line work of Chris Whitefield, the work of Peter Gutkin where it’s all about the pencil or the crayon singing the surface of the paper, and Cecilia Lusven’s work, which uses humble discarded materials such as leather and bicycle inner tube to take us on a texture-and-surface journey of light and shadows.
Ian Everard:
…the process involves inquiry, close observation and pattern recognition.
Peter Gutkin:
The ethereal and elegant drawings are done with traditional materials and techniques, and are a meditative process in their execution.
Cecilia Lusven:
Exploring the relationship between art and craftsmanship, I hand-weave discarded materials to express resilience and renewal. My work is methodical and highly repetitive which led me towards a meditative approach of my practice.
Timothy Wells:
Imagine if our government acknowledged in a transparent and mundane way all the
uncomfortable facts that haunt our existence. The cold war dread of annihilation still lingers, but has been complicated by new threats of unknown origin, and these are the sources I have mined for the blandly straightforward celebration of the incredible and horrible.
Chris Whitefield:
A single line or multiple lines can be a seismographic record of how we are always in motion; breathing, heartbeat, mood, and overall state of mind create unavoidable fluctuations in hand drawn lines.
