Craig Stockwell

9-27-00 3, reworked 10-11,7-11-00 3, reworked and 7-11-01 1, reworked 1-12 oil on panel 24 x 24

Check out his website and stockroom at: http://www.mcgowanfineart.com/stockwell.html

A Brief Overview - This website is a great source to find out about Craig Stockwell, with writings about and by the artist. http://www.craigstockwell.com/about/articlesabout/

"Craig Stockwell follows his own formula when he paints. He always starts with circles layered as in a three-dimentional grid, like a box full of balls. Then he finds forms within, outlining groups of balls into bulbous, organic-looking forms.Abandoning meaning, Stockwell takes us on a freefall into color and form. He’s an abstract painter, building every work on a skeleton of circles drawn in careful order up and down the canvas. He heavily outlines shapes formed by clusters of circles, and these bump, overlap, and glide along the surface of his paintings and drawings. He shades them, colors them, gives them volume, or leaves them flat. They’re like atoms randomly colliding, sometimes grouping into molecules. By revealing preparatory grids (in pencil) and overlapping form upon form, the process becomes as exciting as the idea of the finished work."

The process of Stockwell's interests me as his work is determined by a grid that was his first layer applied. It is through the many layers that he applies that reference back to a grid; the line, depth and composition. 

The materiality of these works interest me as transparency and opaque pigments co - exist. The layering of form creates depth and also an optical shift as a viewer i become lost in the pattern of line. Shapes begin to fold over one another, through each other, around each other creating a sense of movement in colour and form. The way in which the lines intersect cause this static to become dynamic as the still image moves.The colours are muted yet forced to compete with the transparent pigments.

"painting has thus achieved the possibility of becoming more meaningful by being less important.”

I see this in reference to Italo Calvino's theory on 'Lightness' or the modernest approach - art for arts sake, these two theories both share similar notions of the quote above as lightness extracts weighted meaning by language through mythology and poetry and the book Art for Art Sake only considers the painting as it its - line, colour, form. I see connections between the two theories as they are both trying to make interpretation lighter.