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Clark Walding: Evanescence

May 13 - June 13, 2022

Clark Walding: Evanescence

May 13 - June 13, 2022

Opening Reception for the Artist: Friday, May 13th, 5 - 7 PM

Clark Walding’s paintings glow. The aching, haunting, mystic blues that he achieves seem to pierce a clean path through the retinal nerve, project like a luminous, Buddhist “Blue Sky Mind” onto the back wall of the skull and then melt down the brain stem to finally collect and pool somewhere behind the sternum.

Look, for instance, at the 50 x 40 alkyd, oil, and wax piece, breathe: its deep mineral aquamarine lit by yellow, coursing with undercurrents of green, dappled with bits of icy cyan, and marked by a mysterious dark blue-black form which bleeds a bit of red. Can you feel it? That ice-edged ache, so alive within the painting, slowly takes up residence in the body as you look. As you sink into these paintings – they, in turn, sink into you.

It doesn’t take long for the viewer to see that the works included in Evanescence are palimpsests, a chronicle written in color and texture that adds more than just depth, but history. This matches with Walding’s process – not only does he work using a painstaking process of applying paint, removing it, reapplying, removing, on and on, layer by layer – but these paintings are often created over the course of multiple years. What is not there, what has vanished or been erased, somehow becomes in the final viewing, almost as important as what remains. Walding’s act of using a knife to etch into the layers of paint, making geometric shapes that reveal contrasts and striking juxtapositions of color, confirms for us something we instinctively know – that there is “more going on here” than can be gleaned from a quick glance.

Perhaps it is partly that persistence of absence in these pieces that contributes to the sense of mystery and loss that seems to haunt them. Evanescence is more than just the name of the series – it quite aptly hints at the deeper resonance these pieces emit. While in modern advertising language evanescence may be used to talk about bubbly drinks (from its tangential connection to vapor) – at its core, the noun is about the process of gradually disappearing: to vanish, to disappear, to be forgotten. Add to this the understanding that Walding was quite directly inspired in these works by images of melting Antarctic ice and the picture begins to clear.

This isn’t to say that these are paintings of ice. They’re not. A piece like evanescent or breach with their pale blues frosted by white, edged by pale algae-bloom green, or lined sharply by reds or oranges is not depiction but gesture – they feel more like memory and strike deeper. They owe at least as much to the delicate and mysterious paintings of 13th century Chan Buddhist monk, Muqi Fachang as they do to drone images of glaciers.

Ultimately, what strikes the viewer so acutely, is that the works of Evanescence are beautiful. This isn’t the beauty of advertisements or easy expectations but of vastness, of awe in its oldest sense (a reverence mixed with fear). It is the feeling that comes with acknowledging the transience of life, of things, of the planet itself. This kind of beauty reminds us that life is fragile and staggeringly complex. These paintings are beautiful because of the way that that blue pool of reflected light polling under the breastbone tickles and troubles us. The paintings of Evanescence have a gravity that supports, allowing us to look, see, and to remember.

-Michaela Kahn, PhD

#Clark Walding #Evanescence #Press Release

Art in Review: Clark Walding: Flux, by Douglas Fairfield, from Pasatiempo, the Santa Fe New Mexican, May 17, 2013

Read the article online here: http://www.santafenewmexican.com/pasatiempo/art/art_reviews/art-in-review-clark-walding-flux/article_fcda9252-be5f-11e2-95e9-0019bb30f31a.html

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Clark Walding: Flux

May 3 - 31, 2013

Opening reception with the artist: Friday, May 3, 5 - 7 PM

Black murmurs, a molten seep-line of red. Smoke. Blue sea ice. The seam of gold that runs through a dark cave. The solid faces of these paintings, predominantly dark-hued, gleaming like black ice, hide fathomless depths. Step forward and the small details, minute shifts, color flux, begin to come into focus. What seemed to be a solid plane of black is complexified by currents, an undertow of colors changing monochrome into myriad.

The plane of the canvas is interrupted (in some cases erupted) by geometry: a line, a square, the etched outline of a rectangle, a quarter circle. The intersection of these shapes and color planes is volatile. Colors seep up from deep below the surface. Contrasts tug at the eye and mind. Some of the geometric shapes suggest architecture, scaffolding—but in a way that bypasses the literal and runs straight to metaphor. The seeming architecture of a piece like Dark Intervals speaks to the essence of what architecture is and does, how it gives shape not only to the world, but to the mind. In the paintings in Flux the viewer is confronted by form and forced to see it, to recognize its imposition against the undifferentiated ground of being (the color plane).

What rises up from the depths of these paintings by Clark Walding is the evidence of time and of process. Color is not an end result but the record of a history rising up through layers to reveal itself, finally, just below the surface of the canvas. This physical effect is mirrored by the methods that Walding uses to create the pieces, each of which is the result of months (if not years) of work. Walding uses Japanese knifes to put down a layer of oil paint and wax (in some of the earlier pieces he also used alkyd). Each layer varies—some nearly transparent while others are nearly opaque. The lines and geometric shapes are made with graphite sticks or pencil. As Walding builds the layers up, he also revises and strips away—going back to scrape the canvases or apply chemical wipes which remove layers and alter surface texture. He calls this method of revision “repentances.” Repentance is an apt word as it points toward not only the physical process which becomes so apparent in the final pieces, but toward the visceral effect of the works on the viewer. Walding is always looking again, changing, altering. The paintings are always in flux. The viewer has this same experience, seeing first the ice-face of these pieces, then revising their view on closer inspection, revising again as detail and depths inspire an emotional response. It is a paradox of these pieces that they can present such an elemental and solid presence, and yet simultaneously an inherent mutability.

But meaning cannot be imposed. Just like the color in these pieces is itself emergent, rather than superimposed, the stirring of emotion and meaning within the viewer while looking at one of these paintings does not come from the top down. It bubbles slowly up in layers. It is not, as one reviewer has said, so much that these paintings get “under your skin.” Rather the experience is more like the discovery that these paintings have always been there, just under the skin, all along, only the viewer didn’t realize it before. This is how close these paintings, repentance after repentance, come to the viewer. There is recognition, a sense of familiarity and yet of challenge. And of change.

Clark Walding is always asking a question: of the painting, of the world, of the viewer. The paintings in the exhibition, Flux, will challenge the viewer to engage in this process of questioning and recognition.

#Clark Walding #Flux #Press Release #2013