Sunday, November 7, 2004, Johnson City Press, Johnson City, Tennessee

King Center Offers 'Dialogue in Paint'

By Allison Alfonso
Press Staff Writer mailto:aalfonso@johnsoncitypress.com

ABINGDON, Va. - Emory and Henry College Associate Professor and Art Department Chairman Charles Goolsby continually finds inspiration in the landscape. He has worked with a variety of media and subjects, but oil on canvas has proved the most rewarding medium, and the landscape has come to be the most fruitful subject.

"Robert Stuart and Charles Goolsby: A Dialogue in Paint" is on display at William King Regional Arts Center through Feb. 6. It features eight of Goolsby's landscape paintings from the past year, and nonobjective paintings by Stuart, of Lexington. Though working in different genres,
both artists are inspired by abstract and nonobjective painting.

Goolsby's scenes come from Tuscany, Italy, to Texas. They were captured in a photograph and recorded with his own unique brushwork. "I am always looking for something that seems to be more than your average landscape," he said. His new works are brushier and more painterly than his older works, with a textural and more active surface. He works with palette knives and brushes. The finished product arrives after much give, take and searching. "It does arrive out of process," Goolsby said. His imagery varies from a train station,a car being towed, a house in Tuscany and a swimming pool.

His works are expressionistic because Goolsby feels in the age of photography it is a waste of time to paint realistically. The oil paintings, he said, are meant to display the physical work of painting. "All great painters can be identified by their brushwork," Goolsby said. The landscape allows him to explore something bigger than man and separate from him. He is inspired by the brushwork of Willem DeKooning, Rembrandt's use of darks and lights, the extreme contrast of Caravaggio and the underlying and spare geometry in the paintings of Edward Hopper. "It kind of delivers the formal punch that delivers the narrative," Goolsby said.

Stuart is one of the most interesting painters Goolsby has seen, he said, because Stuart's works combine an illusion of depth and physically flat objects. "There is just still incredible beauty," Goolsby said. Stuart said he has been working nonobjectively for six years. Previously, he had painted landscapes and still lifes. Those were vaguely abstract and indicated the path his paintings would take.

He was drawn to nonobjective work and found himself increasingly at odds with the landscapes and still lifes he was painting. Following a trip to Kyoto, Japan, with his wife, during which he took note of the "paired-down" aesthetic, the decision to pursue painting nonobjectively was reinforced. "I had a very clear dream of an abstract painting," Stuart said.

His oil and wax on canvas paintings were created over four years. They began with sketches that approximated proportions, and they often evolved from a memory of something he liked. They can resemble light coming through crevices, he said "I just feel freer and less constrained," Stuart said, referring to them as meditative and transcendental. He gets inspiration from the work of non-objective painter Agnes Martin. "They seem to refer to infinity," Stuart said. He also gives significance to the words of German artist Gerhard Richter, who once wrote that painting's spiritual impact had replaced that of the church.

For those who don't understand abstraction and nonobjective painting, he tells this story: When he was a student at Boston University in the 1970s, the famous artist Philip Guston was artist in residence. Stuartdidn't understand or like his work. "Everything just looked gross," he said, referring to what he called nauseating colors. He attended the artist's lectures and through that exposure to Guston's thinking, became a fan. "I just sort of held on," Stuart said.

Matthew Mangold, curator of fine art at William King, wants viewers to pay attention to how the artists have made their marks. "These two artists have very attuned mark making," he said. Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein took great pains to camouflage the artist's hand, Mangold said, contrasting that with painter Jackson Pollock, whose movements determined his nonobjective compositions.
With Goolsby's work, the viewer penetrates the surface, but with Stuart's, the image vibrates and hovers above the surface as if it were a mist. "It blows my mind," Mangold said.

Admission to the exhibit is free. Gallery hours are 10 a.m.-9 p.m.
Tuesday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, and 1-5 p.m.
Saturday and Sunday. For more information, call (276) 628-5005.
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