Birthdays
Steven Elliott paints with a wood burning device. Barely bent over, just enough to seem comfortable, his hand is as steady as his gaze. His workspace is simple. Absent are the cans filled with brushes and squeezed tubes of paint. Instead, a handful of bullet-like scorched metal tips lay on the tabletop beside his current project. On the wall behind him, a duet of images that must have been born on the road from this artist’s heart to his memory. I was hypnotized by his concentration and apprehensive about my trespass into his mental images.
He burned emotion into his work. Work that is void of the colors that bleed on conventional palettes. While it is difficult to articulate the feeling of watching him use hot and destructive material to create beauty and fragility, it is easy to feel the life in his work.
He worked. He burned each line as if he were creating a person, vein by vein. Emotion by emotion. While invited, I felt intrusive and oddly vulnerable. I turned to the wall, to the images, with a cautious tilt of my head, feeling guilty as if I had stumbled across a close friend’s open journal.
There is a time when art touches your own palette. There is a time when an artist’s work is a minefield for your own emotions. And there is a time when art goes into quiet places. The place inside your own soul. An ageless place. One that has traveled your existence. The place found in old attic trunks and dusty boxes. A place that people record into diaries. One place that has not been photographed. Steven’s work takes me to these places. He records the delicate lyrics of time’s song. As if a precious memory was being branded into a piece of stretched canvas. A tattoo inked into skin.
I asked Steven to explain his work. More as a formality or, perhaps, to fill the vulnerable silence. I learned about his images, his process and the mechanics. The basics you learn during a first meeting with an artist. When you’re still strangers. And while he spoke of his focus, his method and his craft, I heard the depths of his passion and emotion. I watched guarded joy grin in his eyes.
I am drawn to the lone passenger in “Dreaming of Home.” It brings me to thinking about how many times I have felt away from home as I sat on the doorstep. It reminds me of the dark times when I believed there was another place shimmering with pearls. It brings on an unexpected shiver. I thought of the homes I have lived in. The ones I rowed to. And, the ones I ultimately found. I felt the lonely waters that lay between them and the tides that seemed to be running on batteries almost drained.
Steven’s work contains a simple painted color. A base layer of uncomplicated blue, subtle as a morning vacation sky. A fragile blue. Like tissue paper in a gift box that protects the pearls he uses on his choice of canvas. Glistening “pops” that seem to percolate in faces, like the ones children stare at in the moon. Fractured pellets of lights in hollow windows. Translucent angels nodding their heads in rays of light..
I am also drawn to the image drawn from the Boy Scout Handbook chapter on “How to Save a Struggling Body.” Two figures glide uneasily above the surface of dark water surrounded by a cascade of pearls that acts not so much as a frame but as an aura. I see a saving hero and a struggling body. I think about one person being born out of another person within himself. Drowning infused with metaphor and physical manifestation.
I am brought back to one summer day in my childhood. Maybe the same time the books that Steven uses for inspiration were illustrated. My mom was engaged in a pool-side game that four women play around a square plastic table while their husbands fill up their forty-hour time-cards. The sky was the same blue as in Steven’s image. I remember running around the rectangular pool, laughing and careless, an illustration in a 1950’s first-grade reader. I never felt the concrete floor disappear. I noticed the big number 7’s painted on the tiled walls around me rise quickly above my head. The sunlight diffused, breaking into drops and colors like the pearls in Steven’s image before me. My arms stretched to the sky more as if I was in a dance than in a struggle. I do not remember fear. I remember peace and comfort as if I was being wrapped up in an overstuffed blanket. And then a giant arm snaked around my seven-year old chest and took me on a torpedo ride to the surface. Decades later and far from the Catskills, I find myself in Stevens’s studio thinking of my nameless giant and the glistening pearls.
I believe that the pearls of life shine a dim light around dark corners and give direction. They are the buoys to grab onto atop the surface of deep oceans. They are the eyes of the one who reaches out and leads you to safety in the darkness. Steven’s work frames moments in life. His tender hand guides heat and metal to scorch characters onto a stage made from a block of wood. He sprinkles them with the subtle vibrancy and glow found in the tenderness of carefully selected pearls and beads that come from places and people with their own stories.
One of Steven’s reference books – a tattered grade school science textbook from 1954 – reminds me of the book my grandfather read to me every day as I tried to learn the words. I remember the joy I felt when I finished “Fun With Dick and Jane” for the first time by myself. The book still sits on my shelf.
Steven Elliott has managed to burn a handful of memories into wood as they have been burned into my memory. But it is more than this. He managed to capture everything since that day by the pool and those days on my grandfather’s lap. A stranger to my life, his few works spoke in detail of my journey from dreaming of home to coming home.
There is an abundance of art in our world. I have many responses to exhibitions, installations and pieces of work. But Steven’s work invokes a new response. It is work that I trust. Like trusting that someone will come wrap their arms around me in a dark place. Art that I feel with an absence of words.
MARK SANFORD GROSS 2007
No comments:
Post a Comment