CONCEPTIONS & PERCEPTIONS?...

"What can this possibly mean?"


  I probably should have just gone with "Criswell at HAM"--or, as Sammy Peters suggested, "Criswell is HAM," as in "Bruce Willis is Unbreakable." Because most people probably aren't used to thinking of paintings in terms of these categories--conceptions and perceptions. Like all categories, they are ultimately artificial and overlapping. But what I mean by a "conception" is an image which refers to some idea beyond the figures or objects depicted--a narrative painting, for instance, like my Rachel Stealing the Gods or The Seer. By "perception" I mean an image that seems to refer to nothing beyond the visual properties of the figures or objects depicted, like my Still Life with Keys or A Cold and Rainy Day. In that case I want only to investigate with paint what makes surfaces look the way they do-in dim light or through rain for instance. I seem to have moved back and forth between these two categories several times over the years, and since this show includes examples from both, from 1979 to the present, the title seemed appropriate.
..........But as I said, these categories are not pure. They seep into each other. For instance, I thought at first that my recent still lifes marked a major departure for me--not just because they were still lifes but because of their lack of narrative. Instead of an implied narrative there was only the existential presence of these objects--that was what inspired me. I felt the same way about landscapes. I thought of this way of painting as a sort of artistic phenomenology, a visual search for "the things themselves," as Husserl phrased it. I consciously tried to keep narrative from contaminating my pictures and found it hard to do: if I added a single figure to a landscape, like West Pathway Road, for instance, the whole thing suddenly became a story!
............But that was a naïve way of looking at it. In the first place, there are no "things themselves." Things are always imbedded in some context, always defined relative to other things and conditions (like light) and to the observer. If you look too closely their boundaries become fuzzy and they fade away like ghosts. In the second place, even if I succeeded in painting a straight "perception," stripped of all references to ideas beyond the objects depicted (if that were possible), I found myself ambushed by still another narrative--the very one I've been writing here! We humans are story-telling animals and there's no getting around it.
..........We are the stories we tell ourselves. What are science, philosophy and religion if not stories? In this particular story the main characters, Perception and Conception, start out in stark oppostion to each other and end up in some kind of confused reunion. It's the old drama of appearance vs. meaning, existence vs. essence, body vs. soul, etc. So in the case of my still lifes and landscapes, what at first looked like the absence of a story turns out to be the story!
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Still Life with Keys I, 2000, oil on hardwood, 14 x 11¾ inches

 

 

 


Rachel Stealing the Gods, 1997, oil on wood, 48 x 36 inches
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Review in Arkansas Times,
July 13, 2001,by Leslie Peakock. Click below to read the article.


Copyright Arkansas Times 2001

 


 Review in Benton Courier,
July 15, 2001, by Lynda Hollenbeck.


Copyright Benton Courier 2001


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All images and text Copyright © 2001 by Warren Criswell