Arn Strasser

Arn began actively working in his studio in the early 1990’s and had his first significant show in 1996. This show, Spatial Gestures, featured large wood panels, painted in bold gestures and colors. DK Row of the Oregonian wrote that Strasser’s paintings “suggest a training steeped high in architecture with a natural feel for gestural generosity.”

Strasser received a Masters in Architecture from the University of Oregon in 1998. His training in architecture influenced not only his painting, but his approach to art and his work methods.

Strasser has had a series of one person shows, usually once yearly, since 1996. His work is prized by collectors across the US and in Europe.  “Arrival” a large painting on wood is in the permanent collection of the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, South Carolina.

“My main philosophy in doing art,” says Strasser, ” is to try to be true to my own intuitive process. I have always had the luxury to paint what I wanted to paint. I never had to think of painting for a certain audience. I never had to maintain a certain style. Only with this freedom, I think, can you hope to produce authentic work”.

A  PASSION FOR ART

ARTISTS TALK:  FIELD WORK  

SPRING 2010

MURDOCH COLLECTIONS, PORTLAND, OREGON

” Today I’d like to introduce you to a new series of work, and to share with you some of the processes that went into making it, and some of the inspiration behind it, and to give you an idea my personal approach to art.

FIELD WORK

The title of this group of work is Field Work.  While “Field work” can have a number of different associations, the most immediate that comes to mind is an archaeological one.

The archaeologist goes out into the “field”, some square patch of earth, perhaps literally a field or perhaps in the city under some old urban brownstone.  The goal is to dig down into the earth to uncover artifacts of past cultures.

So when we think of fieldwork, we imagine a archeological dugout site, bounded by rope barriers,with archeology students, armed with brushes, painstakingly cleaning layers of earth to reveal shrouds, tools, even art, long buried.  And from these artifacts, archeology tries to extrapolate and build a picture of what is perhaps an otherwise lost culture.

So too this artwork is intended to be about discovery, not literally, of course, like an archeological artifact, but something of that sort.  It is almost as if you have come upon some document of a past discovery, some mystery, and this work is asking your imagination to find meaning in it, to find a reference in your own imagination that will interpret something long buried.  But more likely not a literal object; instead even a buried emotion or Proust-like association.

IMAGINATION AND WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS

I used the word “ imagination” and this is primary to art, and to my artistic process.  I am influenced by William Carlos Williams and his emphasis on the imagination:  that art had to be grounded in the REAL, but then transformed by the IMAGINATION.

Two examples of the force of imagination in making art:  William’s “Oh Asphodel that Greeny flower” and Pablo Neruda’s “Homage to Federico Garcia Lorca”. ( read excerpt from each poem and discussed).

Good work draws from the stuff of real life, the experiences, spaces, objects, relationships…everything material and everything in the mind–and the artist transforms this raw data through the imagination. And what is produced is TRUE because of this relationship between real life and the imagination.  How this process works, how artists produce what they do, is the MYSTERY of art.  It’s also true that art of the imagination demands the ATTENTION of the viewer, the active imagination of the viewer, to see in the work not as a “picture of something”, but as THING UNTO ITSELF. And that’s what I’m aiming for, in all my work, to produce a work that is an object, a thing unto itself.

Even a work on paper has materiality, it is not just a flat image.  In my work there is paper, inks, pencil and paint, and, if its successful work, there will be sense of the artists hand directly applying the materials and creating the images.

PROCESS

I want to emphasize that I experience this making of art as a process, or a path, maybe a path of obstacles.  And I feel for myself that I have to be careful, and I can’t get too far ahead of my self.  This is the struggle of art, often the pain of art, but also its gift to the artist because you are always hoping for a work that will be true. If  it’s forced, it usually won’t work.

You can’t usually take shortcuts in making art.  You hope for sudden inspiration, but its not usual (and when this sudden inspiration does come to artist,  it has the danger of creating stagnation because of its power, as it did, for instance, for Jackson Pollack).  I like working in series because each new series is working through the process of learning.

I think you do art because you have to, it’s an inborn drive, and if you have the artistic urge, you have to do art, or you won’t be happy, or healthy.  Works of the imagination need to be expressed.

Who leads, the artist or the art? Well, the art really to a great degree, but the artist must provide the editorial touch.  The artist as editor is constant and crucial.

When I finish a piece of art I am no longer a part of it.  I am looking at it just as you are.  But, of course, it is a little more than that for an artist; the work leaves the artist, but all works you produce are like your children.

I think there are hundreds-or thousands, millions- of valid artistic approaches. The question is, is the work GENUINE, does it come from a TRUE PROCESS for the appropriate STAGE of the artists life, does it come from the IMAGINATION?

For me, I am not as interested in the “concept” behind a piece of art as I am in the art itself. What am I seeing, what do I feel, what is the process and what are the materials?  It’s the evidence of a direct interaction of the artist with the work that attracts me as opposed to deliberately making art as a concept or a set of ideas.

I hope my work encourages a relationship.  It is successful if the experience of living with it involves creates associations and insights,  maybe different ones on different days, and over time.

Thanks for coming to the show.”

Arn Strasser