2021 New Editions: T.L. Solien, The Spanish Chair
T.L. Solien, The Spanish Chair, 2021. Click to view.
T.L. Solien’s new screen print represents a recent turn further into abstraction for the artist’s work. Although the still life image of a chair has appeared throughout art history, Solien breaks up the chair within its environment in The Spanish Chair with a fresh color palette. The composition largely gains a sense of space by the inclusion of a few select rounded shapes that stand out against a majority of rectangular shapes.
More about the artwork from T.L. Solien himself:
I developed The Spanish Chair as an extension of a series of works on paper I began in the spring of 2020. While teaching an advanced level drawing class, just prior to my retirement from a twenty-three-year career as a tenured professor in the Art Department of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I would set an example of persistent creativity for my drawing students by making small drawings while my students were engaged in their own drawing practice. Typically, I would make a direct graphite “figural” drawing and use gouache, colored pencils, and watercolor to develop the structural complexity of the image.
At that time, I became increasingly disinterested in the kind of figural “dominant” figure/ground relationships that had informed my work for many decades. Instead, I was interested in exploring a figure/ground relationship in which figural information was “embedded” in the ground rather than taking a more common “frontal” position in that relationship. I began to initiate the process of drawing by intuitively making a network of graphite lines on small sheets of paper, edge to edge. I then edited the linear structure to emphasize the presence of connected rectilinear forms of various sizes, perhaps similar in structure to a wall, pathway, or patio made of irregularly sized slabs of stone. Sometimes the resulting structure vaguely suggested the presence of an almost identifiable object, and sometimes the only result was a paper rectangle filled with vague rectangles of various proportions. It was an extreme leap of faith to accept these initial outcomes as having subjective “value” to me, given how foreign they were to the visual nature of my work as it had existed prior to this point in time. Still, I soon found it to be extremely challenging in a way that was very satisfying to me. The process seemed challenging in a way perhaps analogous to Donald Judd’s meditations on the cube or Gene Davis’s choice to limit his options to stripes of color.
When COVID-19 impacted society to the point of our living a quite isolated life, day to day, this drawing process intensified, encouraging me to explore as many variations as possible, including scale, and to consider source material not previously part of my studio practice.
My studio library contains many volumes of the work of artists who have inspired and continue to inspire me. For example, I had acquired a book of the sculptural work of Pablo Picasso, recently exhibited in Paris and New York, and had become fascinated by a Cubist era chair, which seemed to be crushed from three dimensions down to two dimensions. The resulting form seemed to both encourage and deny recognizability in a similar fashion to my interest in the interweaving of figure and ground in my own work. I soon began a large drawing. Using a graphite translation of Picasso’s chair sculpture as the central form, I built a rectilinear structure surrounding, overlapping, and intersecting the chair form until it became further obscured within the overall structure and concealed, somewhat, within the intensified color palette employed throughout the development of the resulting screen print.
I continue to be interested in the development of visual subjects within my studio practice that are “felt” to exist rather than “declared” as existing in a recognizable or identifiable form. To sense the forms instead of knowing them with certainty allows the question of “what is it, and how does it seem to exist” to be delightfully “unresolvable”… My favorite state of “being.”
T.L. Solien signing the completed prints of The Spanish Chair with assistance from Curator J Myszka Lewis
