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Art Journal, Spring, I991, p. 10-11
Solids and Veils:
Sam Gilliam, with Annie Gawlak
My work consists of solids and veils: the union of solids, or metal forms, seen as volumes against a raked and grooved paint surface. It is constructed painting, in that it crosses the void between object and viewer, to be part of the space in front of the picture plane. It represents an act of pure passage. The surface is no longer the final plane of the work. It is instead the beginning of an advance into the theater of life.
I have been holding court with all of painting. I saw that this notion of passage existed for Rembrandt as well as for Braque. I found lots of clues on how to go about working from Tatlin, Stella, Hofmann, Braque, Picasso, and Cezanne. Their work is an edict suggesting a system for working in relief and, more specifically, for defining the painting in terms of the result of constructed relationships or as an object.
My painting is based on the fact that the framework of the painting is in real space. I am attracted to its power and the way it functions.
The first works to exploit this space were the gravity- formed or suspended paintings. They consisted of paint poured directly onto raw canvas and exhibited in a way consistent with the manner in which they were made. They were painted on the floor and in part suspended from the ceiling. It became unnecessary to force the convoluted canvas back into the single plane and flat surface of the stretcher. The liquidity of the colors was reinforced by the fluidity of the canvas. Paint and surface took on an added, third-dimensional reality. Now the canvas was not only the means to, but a primary part of, the object. The suspended paintings began by celebrating the working process and ended with the involvement of the wall, the floor, and the ceiling. The year 1968 was one of revelation and determination - something was in the air, and it was in that spirit that I did the drape paintings.
In retrospect, I can see that these canvases reflect certain tendencies in the art of the time. Many artists were searching for ways to shape a work so that its overall configuration was a result of the process.
In 1970 I wanted to return to painting on stretched canvas and did so with a textural and painterly pastiche that included virtually all methods of handling paint. During the mid-seventies this work took a more dimensional direction, I invented a beveled stretcher with the forward edges cham- fered, resulting in a frame made by canvas that extended beyond the painting itself, increasing its dimension. Subsequently, these stretchers gave the paintings a slablike concreteness consistent with the heavier painting I was making then. The beveled stretchers enabled me to be as free within the confines of the object's geometry as I felt I had to be
My work with suspended canvas has undoubtedly led to my being chosen several times to work in the public forum,
beginning in the late seventies and extending to the present. These works in turn have expanded my vocabulary materials to include those of sculpture. A piece for Art Park in the summer of 1977 moved far from the aesthetic of my indoor paintings. In the earth, on top of the earth, through a gorge, constructions of fabric, wood shale, and pigment, cut in simple sections, rose out of the ground. Custom Road Slide was a series of some fourteen "sculptural placements" on the side of a roadway along the Niagara River for some three hundred yards. The strong, luminous areas of uniform color contrasted starkly with the subtly modulated and muted earth tones of the surrounding landscape.
Sculpture with a D, a work installed inside the Davis Square subway station in Sommerville, Massachusetts, wam commissioned by the Boston Mass Transit Authority in 1981. It is an example of direct conversion of the ideas behind the draped paintings into a more formal material - metal. This piece, made entirely of aluminum, is reminiscent of Cubism and Constructivism, and with it came a new vary of working. The piece projects out from the wall, from metal armatures attached to the back of each panel. The work is guided by the sense of painting on the surface.
The following year, 1982, marked the inauguration of my work with constructed painting. In the Vertical D paintings, a metal D-shaped piece was added to a wedge-draped niche in the lower right of each painting. The aluminum shape was painted with enamel, and as I looked at it I noticed that the little D formed a diptych with the painting and called attention to the edge. I realized that this was an opportunity to construct the painting not only within the confines of the canvas but, in apposition, farther along the plane of the wall. Since 1968 I had been involved in a workshop situation that included both sculpture and painting, sponsored by the Washington Gallery of Modern Art. There, the other workshop members and I got in trouble will we repeated that, according to David Smith, there was no essential difference between paintings and sculpture. In spite of the truth of the statement, there was a prevailing dictum to the contrary.
I was fortunate in 1985 to see a number of paintings by Murillo, and it struck me as curious that the sense of perspective in them was reversed from that of most perspective schemes. The movement, rather than receding into the depths, advances to the viewer. Through Murillo, I was able to discover the feel of volumes added to the surface of the picture.
I retained the use of metal pieces on file periphery of subsequent paintings to make up one part of a diptych, or to relate as a frame. I explored variations on this proposition in expressive ways in 1984, culminating in the Slate series of 1985. These paintings are triptychs with a lot of movement at the edges, which suggests transparent interactions of shape. The pieces work in a circular manner. They work with an explosion of moments as holistic object.
Later paintings continued to use the metal elements, placed in even, circular configurations, but always on the edges, until 1988, when the metal pieces protruded from the surface of the painting. At this time I felt a need to compose from the center and not just from the edge, and I allowed the metal to move in front of tile canvas.
More recently, in 1989, the use of color and the process of moving paint across the surface limited the movement into space by creating a tension that drew the eye back into the canvas. All of the elements are tuned proportionally to commanding the viewer's attention.
The use of the circle was a resolving element in the paintings of the last year and a symbolic role as well, to some degree, suggestive of a sphere. The paintings take their titles from the maturation rites practiced by the Masai: Waking Up is a metaphor for growth and development in the world.
The mystery is over; in the paintings of 1990, the works are in full relief and maintain high sculptural content. The work is presented as a sculpted or faceted object in space. They have been constructed to extend the feelings of the draped paintings of 1969. They are objects that abstractly embrace the content of painting and sculpture through solids and veils.
Note
This article is based on interviews of Sam Gilliam by Annie Gawlak in the fall of 1989 and 1990 and on a catalogue essay by Jay Kloner, "Indoor Paintings," in Sam Gilliam: Indoor and Outdoor Painting 1967-1978, University Gallery, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1978.
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