For the CATALOGUE ESSAY for this exhibition,
scroll down.
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Watching The Outer Limits, 2016,
mixed media on panel, 28 1/2 x 42 in., $3,000 |
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The Commute, 2016, mixed media on panel,
39 x 125 in., $9,500 |
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The Day Job, 2016, mixed media on panel,
33 1/2 x 53 1/2 in., $4,500 |
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The History of Paint, 2016,
mixed media on panel, 12 x 25 in., $750/SOLD |
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The Landscape Painter, 2016, mixed media on panel,
32 x 55 1/2 in., $4,500 |
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The Liberty of Art, 2016, mixed media on panel,
20 3/4 x 55 3/4 in., $3,000 |
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The Residency, 2016,
mixed media on panel, 10 x 46 in., $1,150 |
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The Caregiver, 2016, mixed media on panel,
16 x 22 1/2 in., $900/SOLD |
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Tapas, 2016, mixed media on panel,
10 x 41 1/2 in., $1,050 |
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Remembering Barcelona, 2016, mixed media on panel,
11 1/4 x 43 1/4 in., $1,250 |
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Relocation, 2016, mixed media on panel,
36 x 32 in., $2,800 |
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Formal Relationships, 2016, mixed media on panel,
27 1/2 x 24 in., $1,650 |
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| Corey, 2016, mixed media on panel, 12 x 25 in., $750 |
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Barcelona #2, 2016, mixed media on panel,
10 x 17 in., $500/SOLD |
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Barcelona #3, 2016, mixed media on panel,
10 1/2 x 16 in., $500/SOLD |
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Barcelona #4, 2016, mixed media on panel,
10 x 22 3/4 in., $550/SOLD |
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Barcelona #5, 2016, mixed media on panel,
9 3/4 x 16 1/4 in., $500 |
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Barcelona #6, 2016, mixed media on panel,
9 3/4 x 15 3/4 in., $500 |
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Between Form and Illusion, 2016, mixed media on panel,
16 x 22 1/2 in., $1,950 |
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After The Nap, 2016,
mixed media on panel,
23 x 15 in., $850/SOLD |
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Albany Flight, 2016, mixed media on panel,
21 x 60 in., $3,150 SOLD |
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Barcelona #1, 2016, mixed media on panel,
10 x 19 in., $500 /SOLD |
MARK FLOWERS’ VISUAL POETRY By
Wim Roefs
During a nine-day trip to Barcelona in March
2016, Mark Flowers had the time to observe and explore an entirely new
environment without having to rush. That heightened his senses. The combination
of old and contemporary struck him, as when a man parked his Vespa, took off a
wheel and in its place hooked up a contraption that he powered with his ride.
The contraption was to sharpen knives, it turned out, and that’s what the man
did, old-world style with new-world resources, right there on the side of the
city street. Barcelona was fertile soil for Flowers, as the Barcelona paintings
in the current exhibition show, although the Vespa didn’t make it into a work. “Not
sure why,” Flower says. “It was a good memory, just not good enough for a
painting memory.”
Flowers applies to visual art what writers often
are told to do: write about what they know. Certainly in his case that also
includes “see.” His mixed media works with irregular shapes and two- and three-dimensional
elements are typically steeped in literal experiences though not literal in
their narration. Flowers thinks of the work as “visual poetry,” and he likes
the Picasso quote that “the
purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.”
“They are shaped works that are
objects and images at the same time,” Flowers says. “I often use visual
elements in a sequence, not unlike how a filmmaker creates a narrative. The
separate images come together to make a whole. They are brief observations of
my life in a static form.” While the totality of his oeuvre might not amount to
a visual-arts memoir per se, it does provide a glossary of experiences hinted
at, associated with, departed from, played off, played with, mused about.
“But the work is not a pictorial
observation as much as maybe a metaphorical one. They are little observations
about life that become sparks for other things you create. I am hopefully
ambiguous enough that I invite the viewers to participate and perhaps find
common ground. I find it interesting to see what they read into it.”
The Landscape Painter relates to
Flowers being the son of a painter, Upstate South Carolina mainstay Tom
Flowers, known for his landscapes. Elements of being that son come together in
a single work as Flowers the younger, whose landscapes are seldom obviously
landscapes, ponders his place in the bigger scheme of things. “I am at that age
now,” he says. “Maybe they are mental landscapes, maybe poetic landscapes,
maybe a synthesis of landscapes.”
The immediate
impetus for The Landscape Painter was
Flowers’ stint this summer at the Golden Artist Residency program in the rolling
hills of central New York. “The lush greens and cultured landscapes couldn’t
help but sneak into at least one work,” Flowers says. The availability of any color
of acrylic paint he could imagine facilitated the process, and so he reached
for green, a color he rarely uses.
Albany Flight recalls the memorable
flight from Albany, N.Y., back from the Golden residency. Painted arrows on the
tarmac, a passenger with a service monkey. “The newness of it,” Flowers says.
“I had never seen a service monkey. It was probably someone trying to get a
monkey on board instead of in a box. Flying allows me to be the ultimate voyeur
as humanity crosses itself. And this day did not disappoint.”
The residency also triggered The History Of Paint. Each individual
paint swatch at Golden Paints is created by hand, with residue ending up on
protective mats, creating a literal paint history. Flowers asked for and
received some of the mats and used them in several pieces, including some about
workers at Golden. The Residency
addresses the sacrifices it took for Flowers and his wife, book art pioneer and
filmmaker Kristy Higby, as he spent four weeks away from home. After the
summer, Higby’s recovery from knee replacement had a bigger emotional component
than Flowers had anticipated. The
Caregiver is about that.
For
his exhibitions, Flowers puts together a binder that includes images of the
work in the exhibition along with short write-ups. After The Nap, he wrote, is about the beauty of a nap to resolve a
painting he is stuck on. The Commute is
about the 75-mile trip to his part-time job at Spartanburg’s University of
South Carolina Upstate, a drastic change from teaching for 23 years at a
boarding school where the job was across the street. The Day Job is about the dream, forever deferred, of not having one.
There is a painting about the “snow” created by the poor reception on the
family’s TV when Flowers was a child that made the faces in the sci-fi show Outer Limits especially creepy. Relocation is about the emotional
experience of moving his 88-year-old dad from his beloved home in the
Dacusville, S.C., foothills to nearby Greenville.
Some works are
about art and making art. Between Form
and Illusion is about physical shape and illusion being in the same place,
which has intrigued Flowers since his student days at the University of South
Carolina, and the influence of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. Formal Relationships addresses a more
general experience of the artist trying to resolve exactly those in his
work.
Flowers’ work truly is mixed media.
On wood panels, he paints, attaches pieces of wood, painted or not, as well as
other objects. He applies transfers of his own or found photos, often painting
on them, like those in the Barcelona paintings
of skateboarders, photographed through a window at MACBA, the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona. The
shapes of his works are typically irregular, with different-sized, flat planes
attached to each other, creating negative spaces between, above or underneath
them that give the work an object-like, sculptural feel. Borders adorned with
straight or not so straight, even wave-like pieces of wood enhance the
sculptural element and add tension between the works’ playful and formal
qualities.
The grid formation has been evident
in Flowers’ work for a long time. “When I was a student, everyone was doing
grid paintings,” he says. “Those are primal influences, and I am still hanging
in there. That’s our educational DNA.” In recent years, the grid might have
become more pronounced as Flowers increasingly has been working in modules.
Rather than putting together one work at a time with different planes and such,
he has been creating large amounts of individual sections, not knowing which
ones he’ll put together in which order for which work of art. What triggered
this method in part was seeing the visual storyboards at the bottom of his
wife’s desktop computer when she is creating a digital video. The approach really
took flight during his residency at Golden, where logistics, i.e. plenty of
space, allowed Flowers to spread out large numbers of panels from which to pick
and choose as he constructed the individual works of art. This approach also
allows Flowers to concentrate on the surface of each module, thinking in parts
rather than about the end result, the whole. “Gestalt, perhaps,” he says.
“What is true for all of these is
that I am trying to find that place that makes visual sense,” Flowers says.
“There is a poetic coming together of images that appeals to me, like sentences
for a poem. It’s like finding a place where chaos and order make sense, not by
neutralizing each other but by working with each other.”
Even when he doesn’t work in modules
and knows what the painting will look like, Flowers likes “the surprises that
happen along the way. That’s my privilege, my joy. When they hang on the wall,
they become their own thing. But I also like not knowing the ending, the mystery
of putting together the individual parts. You create the journey by making the
parts, but then I get to create the ending. That’s the privilege for me as an
artist, creating the ending, and that’s the difference between the artist and
the viewer.”
Viewers creating their own endings through
interpretation doesn’t change that, Flowers says. “The viewer will not be in
the studio, won’t get to the point where each artist wants to get to: ‘Oh, this
works?’ Some artists think the final part of art is that it has to be seen, but
to me the viewing is another, internal action by the viewer. I would still make
the work if no one would see it. I get more out of making it than from putting
it on the wall. The check from a sale cannot duplicate the experience of making
the work.” The Liberty of Art is about the freedom Flowers feels
when he makes art. “Drifting in a boat,” he wrote, “and trusting where it takes
me.”
Wim Roefs is the owner of if ART Gallery
