This document vaguely describes what happened to me and my paintings during my time spent at VCU

Semtner, Alexis

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Virginia Commonwealth UniversityVCU Scholars CompassTheses and Dissertations Graduate School2008Magic, Mystery, Illusion and MagicAlexis SemtnerVirginia Commonwealth UniversityFollow this and additional works at: http://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/etdPart of the Art and Design Commons© The AuthorThis Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at VCU Scholars Compass. It has been accepted for inclusion in Thesesand Dissertations by an authorized administrator of VCU Scholars Compass. For more information, please contact libcompass@vcu.edu.Downloaded fromhttp://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/etd/1072© Alexis Semtner 2008All Rights ReservedMAGIC, MYSTERY, ILLUSION, AND MAGICA thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master ofFine Art at Virginia Commonwealth University.byALEXIS SEMTNERBachelor of Fine Arts, Kansas City Art Institute, 2006Director: RICHARD ROTHCHAIR OF PAINTING AND PRINTMAKINGVirginia Commonwealth UniversityRichmond, VirginiaMay 2008iiiiiAbstractBy Alexis Semtner, MFAA Thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master ofFine Arts at Virginia Commonwealth University.Virginia Commonwealth University, 2008Major Director:  Richard RothChair, Painting and PrintmakingThis document vaguely describes what happened to me and my paintings during my timespent at VCU.4BeingMy interests in illusion, figure-ground reversal, spatial contradictions, and inpainting itself are all cases of the cart before the horse.  I did not know why I was sointerested in them until I got to know them through painting, only then did I began tounderstand what I had been wanting to say.Though I begin at an intuitive point, every element within my work is intentionaland considered.  While individual decisions within a painting often come from a personalor obscure place the reasoning is always specific.  Though the starting point is often aspecific conception of an idea, a painting may shift emphatically by the time it reaches aconclusion.  I constantly negotiate and reevaluate my concepts throughout the process.  Itry to keep an open space around my concept so that it and I have the ability to change adirection or belief.  I am grateful for this shifting, as I don’t think I would make veryinteresting work without it.  The places I seem to start from are fundamentally mundane,predictable, and literal.  It is the materials, the process of painting, and the choices thathappen inside of this process that transcend the ordinary.I was a figurative painter until 8 months prior to coming to VirginiaCommonwealth University.  I realized on my last figurative piece that I could no longersay what I wanted to say through a figure- I was using it.  The figure had simply becomean armature on which to move paint around.  I was attempting to express through5application, color, etc. ideas concerning the human condition, and the figure itself had theleast to do with this expression.  Tension, redemption, failure, impossibilities, confusion,contradiction; this is where my search for form began.Initially, I sought out organic, odd, somewhat gnarled forms for which it was atleast difficult, at best impossible, to identify the context of their origin.  By removingpreconceived notions complicit within identifiable objects, I hoped to create a forum thatwould allow for materiality and form to solely carry the content.  It was here that I beganto walk a line between reality and abstraction. My work is most successful when itreferences reality and abstraction in equal measures.  It loses something when materialityand other essentially formal ideas do not transcend their formalities, just as much as itfalters from being too firmly planted in an identifiable reality.  I need references to theworld to be present, even if the only clue to that presence is abstract as a constructed spaceor light.One recurring form became the portal; I initially latched onto this form because itembodied many aspects that I saw as foundational in my search as an artist and person.The Portal was incredibly influential during my preliminary search for form.        Figure.1: Untitled, Oil on Canvas. 2OO6, 48”x48”.  Figure.2: Untitled, Oil on Canvas. 2OO6, 48”x48”6Figure.3: Average, Oil on Linen on Panel, 74”x96” (Detail)    Figure.4: Portal, 2OO7. Oil on Canvas, 96”x96” .   Figure .5: The Mean, 2OO6. Oil on Canvas, 96”x67” (Detail)My relationship with the portal has developed over the past few years and continues toshift and grow. I have come to think of it as a physical manifestation of a place between,specifically the space between internal and external.  It holds the question of separation orunification between these two places.  The portal represents the notion of a liminal spacewhich is defined a transitional or initial stage of a process, or occupying a position at or onboth sides of a threshold.  It embodies the unidentifiable nature of origination anddissimilation.  It is simultaneously the container and the contained.The ability of a form to emerge as something separate, while still maintaining itsoneness, is an idea functioning in nearly all of my work.  A battle that I continue to fight ismy inclination towards a literal illustration of an idea.  Though a painting may not seemliteral to a given viewer, they often are.  Below is a sampling of others forms I have7explored.  Each form was either chosen or constructed based on their ability to convey orcontain a concept.Clockwise from top left:  Figure.6: Box Flock, 2OO7. Oil on Linen, 72”x48”.  Figure.7: Slip, 2OO7. Oil on Canvas on Panel, 48”X48”.Figure.8: Stuck, 2OO7. Oil on Panel, 6O”x72”.  Figure.9: Average, Oil on Linen on Panel, 74”x96”8In my paintings forms are nearly always personified.  Box Flock is an extremeexample of this personification.  At the conception of the painting I plotted a community ofboxes, choosing them for nearly the same characteristics that are inherent to the portal.Each box was rendered at a unique angle, creating a parallel between the literal drawingperspective of the form and the metaphorical perspective, or perception, of the individual.Though each box occupies a unique space, they are being forced to exist on the same planein the same space.  The piece is essentially an exploration of how much is misunderstoodfrom being locked into a given perspective. Through the process the characters grew andformal decisions began to be based on the character of each box.  The lavender box is aliar.  He employs a traditional means of shading to imply the recession of space within hisinternal planes but to convey this illusion he uses a pungent red that refuses to recede.  Thelarge cerulean box is a suck-up.  Shifting and changing, a chameleon forced to continuallyreconstructed himself to any given situation.This group of paintings illustrates many aspects of my search during these pastyears.  Though at any given time I may have been latched onto a particular idea that I waswrestling with, lurking underneath was the fact my interests and ideas were still too broad,that my work and myself were confused.  I wanted to talk about life and everything in it;about past, present, future, and the simultaneity of their existence; about being human andsearching for more; about death, redemption and hope.  It was too big, but I didn’t knowhow to make it any smaller.  While I was attempting to get more specific, I wassimultaneously being told that few to none of these ideas were being communicated to the9viewer.  People seemed to be viewing the paintings on a purely formal level.  Formalism isvery important to me but by no means do I want the discussion to end there; I see it as abeginning rather than an end.I always look first for paintings to captivate me visually.  There are now limitlessart making possibilities, but I feel that if one chooses to make visual objects as a vessel tohouse one’s ideas, then great consideration should be taken of the fact that one is makingvisual objects. This is the place that I come from, not a rule I apply to art in general.  I findthat the art that interests me operates on this level.  First I am baited, be it by beauty, thegrotesque, the absurd, whatever- I am captured in a visual experience.  I stay there.  I thenbegin to look for more.  Actually, it is not such a one-two experience as it is asimultaneous one.  But if content and form are not equally powerful I find myself unable ormaybe just unwilling to listen.This said, it seemed obvious that I was failing to convey a concept that was toolarge for me to express.   In an attempt to diverge from such an illustrative path I beganthinking about specific formalities and their inherent concepts.  Figure-ground reversal is aconceptual and formal tool that kept rearing its head.  It alludes to the search forconsciousness and mimics the action of a spiritual practice.  The perpetual oscillationbetween emphasis on the figure or the ground stands to illustrate a part of the act ofperception, the gaining and subsequent loosing of grasps or understanding of theseconcepts.  This action of figure-ground reversal allows objects and spaces to convey theiruniqueness and oneness simultaneously.  I want a painting to operate in one way, then10another, and then dance between the two.  To be experienced as life is, moment to moment,shifting in between.Thinking isolates a situation or event and calls it good or bad, as if it had a separateexistence.  Through excessive reliance on thinking, reality becomes fragmented.  Thisfragmentation is an illusion, but it seems very real while you are trapped in it.  And yet theuniverse is an indivisible whole in which all things are interconnected, in which nothingexists in isolation.1Space was the first tool I began to utilize as a signifier for perception.  It began in a veryliteral manner, employing the viewer’s body.  Large-scale paintings housed kinetichappenings that were suspended in the work, they felt as though they could succumb togravity and at any moment, could fall upon the viewer.  Scale was imperative to envelopethe viewer’s body, joining the painting’s space with the individual’s.  Also within the workcertain spatial relationships were absolutely incompatible with one another, which cluedthe viewer into the fact that this seemingly realistic space could not actually exist and thuswas not depicting this physical world.  I became very interested in the seams of space thatcontradicted one another, hoping that the inconsistency of spatial planes would allude tothe notion of conflicting realities.My current endeavor concerning space confronts the actual image space.  Bycentralizing a form, or by not allowing the image to continue off the picture plane Ihighlight the fact that this is a composed image, a construct.  This is also emphasized byplacing the images upon a raw linen, not attempting to cover up the fact that I amconstructing a painted image, exposing the illusory nature of image making.  I feel that thisis the space where my interests in the history of painting and in perception frequentlyoverlap and exchange with one another.11One overt dialogue existing within my work is an art historical sampling,simultaneously exploiting and celebrating painting.  I want painting to laugh at itself.  Iexploit illusion for many conceptual reasons, but also just because I think it’s amazing.  Ipaint to aid in my understanding of this world, but I also paint because I love to do so.  Iam excited by the boundless and simultaneously limited possibilities of the medium.  Theability for a single medium to have such a polyphonic range of expression simply byvarying applications or colors still astounds me.  My work takes advantage of the fact thatpainting is an extremely mined territory.  The fact that painting has such an extensivehistory just about guarantees the unoriginality of a particular mark.  This relieves thepressure to have to make one and fosters a playfulness that leads to new territories.  Anyone of my paintings may contain a number of references to other artists, genres, or timeperiods.  At this level they are simply paintings that love to talk about painting and itshistory.12Optical IllusionI have recently become interested in optical illusion and Optical Art.  For the lastthree years I have been grappling with perspective and illusion, optical illusion and Op Artseem to be explicit means of expressing this exploration.  This is in part because the opticalillusions require perceptual activation from the viewer.  Physically, the language of Op Artis traditionally a very slick, smooth, essentially flawless finish that is extremely imagebased.    Figure.1O, 11, 12: Taken from coolopticalillusins.comThe contrast I set up to this slickness is another reason I enjoying utilizing theparameters of this language.  Materiality will always manifest itself within my work, it ismy inherent language.  Thus, for me to use op art is like forcing a square peg into a roundhole.  A tension is created in the process; the work begins to function optically but is thendeflated once attention is forced back to the surface.13     Figure.13: Cube, 2OO8. Oil on Canvas, 24”x24”.In The Cube (Fig.13), I wanted to overtly expose the artifice of illusion. When the viewerencounters the form straight away its impossibilities are revealed, but there is still thedesire to make sense of it.  It embodies the absurdity of our perception, and keeps theviewer in this moment for as long as possible.    Figure.14: FlipFlop, 2OO. Oil on Panel, 6O”x48”14The form in FlipFlop (Fig.14) was chosen for its ability to fluctuate between states.The switch from one form to another is activated by the viewer’s perception that danceswith the form in an attempt to reckon with its impossibility.During my 2nd year here, and specifically my last semester, I have drastically editedmy work.  I realized my paintings’ images had become so complicated that they emittedtoo much peripheral noise, formally and conceptually the images’ voices were muffled.This new body of work creates many parallels between Buddhism and framing deviseswithin art history, engaging both the precepts of Buddhism and self-referential painting.Now I am utilizing notions of perception and illusion as a metaphor that illustratesthe Buddhist concept of delusion.  Kadampa Buddhism, a Tibetan lineage of Buddhism,continually brings its practice back to the individual’s mind.  It teaches that a majority ofwhat one perceives as truth or reality is, in fact, a delusion.  A delusion is a false,conditioned belief pattern that exists in thought, but that one believes to be real. Kadampastates that reality itself is simply a projection of our mental state, that our minds are socontaminated with delusions that most of what we consider to be reality is in fact ahallucination.  Kadampa teaches that the way to find release from this affliction can befound in continual meditation and relentless selflessness.   Taking some of these preceptsEckhart Tolle writes,The greater part of most people’s thinking is involuntary, automatic, and repetitive.  It is nomore than a kind of mental static and fulfills no real purpose.  Strictly speaking, you don’tthink; Thinking happens to you.  The statement “I think” implies volition.  It implies thatyou have a say in the matter, that there is a choice involved on your part.  For most peoplethis is not the case.  “I think” is just a false a statement as “I digest” or “I circulate myblood.215Buddhism teaches that form is actually an illusion and that it is the mind that constructs theform.  It recognizes that how things appear has much more to do with how we filter realitythrough our delusions or mentally constructed framing devises. A large part of the functionof obtaining clarity is so that the individual can become conscious and free of the falseconstructs they have been participating in.  They believe that enlightenment can only beobtained by identifying the constructs for what they are and thus unsuturing themselvesfrom given ideologies.Choose an object close to you-a pen, a chair, a cup, a plant--and explore it visually, that isto say look at it with great interest, almost curiosity.  Avoid any objects with strongpersonal associations that remind you of the past, such as where you bought it, who gave itto you, and so on.  Also avoid anything that has writing on it such as a book or a bottle.  Itwould stimulate thought.  Without straining, relaxed but alert give your complete attentionto the object, every detail of it.  If thoughts arise, don’t get involved in them.  It is not thethoughts you are interested in, but the act of perception itself.  Can you take the thinkingout of the perceiving?  Can you look without the voice in your head commenting, drawingconclusions, comparing, or trying to figure something out?  After a couple of minutes or so,let your gaze wander around the room or wherever you are, your alert attention lighting upeach thing that it rests upon.3When speaking about my work I often find myself trapped within a barrier betweena verbal language and a visual one.  The concepts of these paintings are visually ingrainedwithin the work.  It is difficult to translate such a visual experience verbally.  I want theviewer to inform the painting as much as the painting informs the viewer.During my time here I have gained a much greater understanding of what I amsaying and how I could say it more explicitly.  I am grateful for all of the people here Ihave had the pleasure of getting to know, share ideas with, and be informed by.  I amgrateful to be concluding my time here at the beginning of an idea.16Citations1. Tolle p. 1962. Tolle p. 1293. Tolle p. 24017Literature Cited1. Tolle, Eckhart. A New Earth.  Penguin. London, 2OO6.2. Gyatso, Geshe Kelsang. Transform Your Life: A Blissful Journey. Tharpa. Cumbria,England 2OO1.3. Gyatso, Geshe Kelsang.  Eight Steps to Happiness; The Buddhist Way of LovingKindness. Tharpa. London, 2OOO.

Magic, Mystery, Illusion and Magic

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