Hi Everyone. I’m Catherine Scala.

I am an alumnus of the visual arts program

here at AIB and am delighted to have the chance to come back and take part in
this discussion. I’m going to show some images of my work as I talk. The
paintings are small to medium sized and most are acrylic, but there are a
couple done in oil. And most of the drawings range between 12 to 18 inches
square and are charcoal and graphite on paper. I’ll also address the work of
three other abstract painters and include examples of their work.

It is a wonderful opportunity for me, as an emerging artist, to revisit and take

stock of the established mindset behind my work. And it is especially
interesting for me to think about the role of the personal within my practice
because it is true that as I work in my studio each day, I am attuned to a kind of
counterbalance that comes from the intimacy of the specific project, and the
sense of a general contribution to something larger, something to do with
humanity in general, or the nature of being human. I hope to give you an idea
of how the personal can impact even artwork that fall under the category of
formalism—meaning that it is determined simply by its form, the way it is
made, its purely visual aspects, and its medium.

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All artists have some sort of personal connection to the artwork they create.
And although there are some artists who use explicitly subjective methods and
subject-matter, most of us can locate the “personal” in the impetus behind our
work. I imagine many of us in this room might find it difficult to deconstruct
that “I-do-it-because-I-have-to”, because it feels so intrinsic to our being—or
our selves. Although we would all like to defer solely to the communicative
powers of our visual mediums, as graduate students we have contractually
agreed to investigate our work in more conventional ways, and cultivate an
ability to articulate its meaning and role within the vast cultural landscape.

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Today, as we negotiate the ever-changing digital environment of a postmodern
world, our individual identities are challenged by extreme conditions of
contemporary capitalist culture. We are drowning in a flood of pop-up ads,
web page ad-banners, text messages, email messages, and cell phone alerts. As
technology advances, we face an increase in the quantity of mediated
information that passes before us in various forms of advertising. We are
forced to adapt to the endless commercial obstacles we must now navigate
around when looking for the substance hidden behind the seductive electronic
sheen.

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It’s things like this that feel dehumanizing and add to a sense of powerlessness,
and it’s these times when we look toward art to simultaneously return us to the
self and speak to the lot. So for me, making abstract paintings and drawings
allows me to remain grounded to meaning, to be reminded of meaning, and to
create meaning.

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It’s a way of distancing myself from the trappings of consumerism, and a way
of dealing with the hectic family life that comes out of our jam-packed
lifestyles and our competitive attitudes. Ironically, these conditions that leave
me physically, mentally, and emotionally depleted, are the same ones that feed
my urge to walk up the steps to my studio every morning and tackle whatever
project I’ve got going.

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If we find significance in something that develops over time, and goes through
multiple transitions, and evolves, develops a history, but has no market value,
then it could be deemed worthless in our culture. But in my case, there’s a lot
of value to be found inside these edges of canvas or paper, it’s like the world’s
body double, a proto-type for life, a place for the mind to express and
relationships play out. I seriously get surprised by things that happen in the
paintings and drawings, and it translates to other areas of my life and are like
metaphors that help me manage structure, develop priorities, appreciate the
poetry in things. Unlike the abstract expressionists, I’m not trying to find or
leave my “self” on the canvas, but rather through the elements of painting and
drawing, by exploring color….

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…form, and composition, I can find answers to many questions. Some are
metaphysical, and some are practical and quotidian. The images you’ve been
looking at are examples of this process, and in a way are records of my
attempts at setting things right:

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…of managing chaos—

by organizing compositions, playing with scale

and studying the resulting comparative dynamics

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Of controlling the uncontrollable—

by mixing color, and manipulating paint and charcoal

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Of reconciling the rational with the emotional—

through defined form and expressive handwork.

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In addition to the mechanisms of the interior world, those of the corporeal are
equally engaged--the physicality of the object, the physical requirements of
working with my hands, building supports, stretching canvases, and
manipulating materials all contribute to that feeling of satisfaction you get after
a long hard day of work. I have found the materiality of my work to provide
strength and power to the visual experience. This piece is done on wood, but
I’ve begun tearing and pulling at my canvases a bit, so their structure breaks
down, and its object-hood fully revealed.

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My drawings are rubbings, and also magnify the essence of material. These
elemental qualities of the art-making provide sustenance on a poetic and
sensual level. Qualities that more and more are stripped from our
contemporary lives but are integral to my selfhood. I find the way that I work
and the medium I use challenging, fulfilling, and essential to who I am and
how I think.

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Often I think of paintings and drawings as visual poetry, and I think this is
achieved through the impact of the personal on the art making.

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In my artist statement I have a section that frames and legitimizes the personal
aspects of my process, while being careful to avoid suggesting sentimentality
or self-aggrandizement.

Here’s part of it:

I sometimes work in a series format, an approach that allows me the

psychological freedom of trial and error, and helps me understand and
compare visual techniques. The titles come from personal experiences
that take place during the time of production, and may be chosen at any
point in the process. Although these pieces evolve from formal and
conceptual explorations, the titles acknowledge the inescapable
influences of and to my physical and emotional state, and serve as
markers for those times.

Because it requires so much to stay in the game, because it’s such a struggle to
keep painting in between the demands of work and family life, because the
work is so densely woven into the fabric of my daily life, it became necessary
to connect them to those experiences of my reality.

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In both the paintings and drawings, I address the modernist logic of
figure/ground, where form, composition, and texture function like
characters in a play that explores the nuances of abstraction. In our
present-day environment of digital and commercial imagery, I hope to
re-engage the viewer, in an imaginative conversation that appeals to
the senses and intellect, by way of these basic pictorial elements.

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To the public, it might seem weird that those pictorial elements --color, form,
scale, composition, speak to some others directly, and it can sound hokey and
sentimental when you try to explain it. Critics may see it as a perspective that
coincides with antiquated modernist notions of universal form and ideologies
that came out of the sociopolitical discord and philosophical frustration after
two World Wars.

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So today’s abstract painters must find a way to stand by their personally
motivating principles without excluding themselves from the contemporary
cultural discourse. It’s a difficult task, but for any artist, if you believe in your
work, becomes an informative tool for discovery.

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In an interview with the writer and painter David Ryan, abstract painter Gary
Stephan talks about the “self” in relation to his work.

…it’s a search for a sense of self and the object facilitates this process, in the
making and the looking. If paintings fail, it’s when they become simply
therapy…Or on the other hand, they become propaganda. One is too outer-
directed, and one is too inner-directed. It’s a situation whereby something that
might have intensely private roots gets transposed to the level of the social, in
that this thing doesn’t remain at the private level, it becomes shared, enjoyed,
definitely a condition of making a satisfying object, whereby this has to be
something that the artist has to go through, as a process of self-integration.

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I need this ‘surrogate universe’ to ply the disorder, order, the beauty and even
failure that occurs in my life. As my life gets more complex, the work is
richer; it’s more optimistic, it’s more dense. It’s clear to me that I’m building a
compensatory, and also a contestatory, world.

Here Stephan shows us another instance of art-making where the personal can
serve the society. He goes on to say “If a painting is really good, then it’s like
living. What life is like, is consciousness, both self-reflecting and negotiating
the world—it’s a dialogue.”

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In the December Issue of Artforum, the paintings of Jessica Dickinson were
contextualized into contemporary art culture in part for their insistent material
presence and side-stepping of art historical references. Critics were happy to
find a cultural narrative, but the work is informed by the artist’s day-to-day
experiences and beliefs.

In his review, James Fuentes writes:

The complexity of Dickinson’s work is built up through a six to twelve-month-

long process of layering and erasure: Each is repeatedly scrubbed down,
sanded, repainted, and modified in various ways. This procedure reflects the
phenomenological basis of her practice.

He ends the article talking about the artist’s book of rubbings taken from her
paintings. He says” they offer further evidence of the programmatic integrity
of Dickinson’s visually nuanced explorations of the interdependence of
temporal processes and physical matter.”

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And Dickinson explains her paintings like this:

“Each piece is rooted in an exchange between a passing everyday perceptual

experience and a psychological/cognitive experience over time—a silent,
unfolding ‘event’…(T)he paintings are a materialization of this event, and
become an event in themselves.”

So here we are in the 21st century talking about the material of a painting, and
the novelty of such an existence. Of course this isn’t the first time a painter
has sculpted her surfaces, but because of Dickinson’s authentic incentive to
create these labored paintings, they’ve hit perfect timing in terms of the critical
artworld, and she can feel good about their origins, and marvel at the many
ways they can be interpreted and re-plotted within various critical discourse.

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There are also those committed artists who, in the name of artistic integrity,
refuse to allow the celebrity-obsessed public to impose the personal upon the
work. Tomma Abts won Britain’s prestigious Turner Prize for her small
geometric abstract paintings, but she holds her position on intuitive creativity.
According to an interview in the UK’s newspaper The Guardian she says
“They require no external stimuli, no subject matter and no obvious end point.
Starting a new painting is, says Abts, "the easiest part for me, because I have so
many visual ideas. Colours, or starting to make shapes or thinking about where
things go, that's easy. Then just trying to make it more concrete and trying to
make some kind of meaning.”

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She offers very little personal information to the inquiring public, yet the way
she works seems very unique, and reflective of her very private nature.

Reportedly she is a very private person, and insists her paintings are about
painting and nothing more. But I see them as very intimate and personal
pieces. I can almost picture her painting them when I’m looking at them—
she’s seated, and the paintings are the size they are because they fit the arc of
her arm, and when she’s done, she chooses their title from a book of German
first names. So each painting has the name of a person.

Abts paints sitting down, sizes them to fit the arc of her arm, and when they’re
done, gets their titles from a book of German first names. So each painting has
the name of a person.

It’s almost like naming one’s children when they enter the world. But that
comparison would introduce issues of gender bias, and would probably get a
big laugh from Abts herself if she caught wind of it.

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But I guess my point is, that this goes back to what I said earlier about the
“personal” coming from the drive to create, whatever the reason. For Abts it is
the ideas about color and shapes, and creating a painting “that represents
itself.” For me it’s also the larger understanding that comes from the many
components of the discipline.

Just like our brain’s natural tendency to see a face in any random imagery
we’re looking at, the public looks for something personal in our artwork--
something to relate to, or criticize, or reject.

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Often they’ll find it one way or the other, without any obvious prodding or
didactic display—but it requires an understanding of our place in the cultural
discourse, so that we’re prepared and equipped to participate in the
conversation that we’ve started.

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