Friday, March 23, 2012

Whether An Abstraction is Created or Exists




Age, the patina of decay, the lifting paint scabs, the rusted spots, all revealed —but not as a reality. They exist in an artistic setting apart from what they might appear in the daylight.


A musty aroma pervades the hallway, but doesn't show up on any photograph, neither does the erratic heat which turns off and on without following a logical process. Indoor icicles form on window ledges in some rooms, while several rooms resemble furnaces belching red fire.

Once these rooms housed elementary students. Blackboards remain. The bathroom walls scrubbed clean of graffiti hide their past. No one giggles. No one tattles. No one races down the hallway late for a class. No spelling bees. No multiplication tests. No answers written on sleeves.

No fire drills. No ball point pens that leak. No best friend.

A conversion turned rooms filled with desks and chairs into art studios. The heat and cold remain, the bathroom walls remain, several toilets don't work— stall walls lay bare layers of paint.

In one room where the pipes knock in an erratic rhythm, adults paint abstractions —using acrylic paints. A few use palette knives to add texture to their paintings. The instructor had set up an arrangement of disparate objects, resembling a robotic figure in a state of disarray as a model. Arm wide canvases hang over easels. Artists hover over the canvases, poised and set to apply more paint. I am absorbed into these paintings.

One woman flings magenta paint into a corner of her painting, steps back and assesses the result.

"What do you think?" she asks. "Is it too much?" "Just enough." "Perhaps I should live with it for awhile."

I realize that the question is rhetorical and walk down the hall to revisit a plaster head. I've seen this head for six weeks and two weeks ago someone added a straw hat.

This week someone added a red feather.

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