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I often think of poet Clayton Eshelman when I look at my intaglio print A Clear Space. Sometimes a sensitive stranger to the work of art can approach it from an obtuse view and find a depth of meaning in it that the artist didn't know he intended. Whether this is speculation or the result of a sort of focused demon inside some viewers that is able to dig out and scoop up a kind of archetypal history to which the artist is oblivious, is anybody's guess.
While its certainly true that I happen to work in" of tones and colors - overlapping planes that normally begin, in the formal sense, from the back and work their way forward, I rarely end up with the result I intended as the work develops to completion. The element of surprise is not only the art experience, it is part and parcel of the process we call "creation." For me, the point at which there is no surprise (or problem) in the creative act, is the point at which (at least in my mind) the artist either becomes an artisan, a carrier-out-of-plans, or a "finisher." The multitude of varied paths attainable at any juncture in the act of creating new imagery, would surely boggle the mind of a layman unused to untethered improvisation and trust in ones feelings on the unchartered road of imagination and fantasy.
Through his astute analysis, Clayton Eshelman was able to lead me to an understanding of the diabolical Orpheus-like worlds that A Clear Space makes reference to. He says, "....what I originally made out as a landscape was also an accordion of chromatics, a kind of bellows being worked by an underworld on each side. The way that colors exchange batons suggest that Secunda is at play in the fields of Hades." Clayton's essays on my work of this period remain, to this day, the most poetic studies of this midnight side of my nature.
No doubt, the black and red blends, torn and shredded from pre-silkscreened papers (printed by Wasserman under my direction), and the structural simplicity of the composition in the collage, assured the basis for the strong colors and vivid mood in the final version of the print itself. For some mysterious reason, however, possibly due to rolling up ink on such large plates, a strange "golding" took place above the bottom black shapes weeks after the print was dry and ready for curating - a ghost-like testimonial to the work's otherworldliness. The carefully positioned blend in the sky leads one's eye towards the picture plane instead of away from it, and tends to solidify each shape into a sort of roll as if squashed through the wringer of an old washing machine. This "tightness" or "clarity of form" is why I named the piece A Clear Space, and signifies, for me, its hidden meaning.