by Carl Belz,
Director Emeritus, Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University
Exhibition catalogue, Genovese/Sullivan, June 2002

In an essay on recent abstract painting published in Art New England about a year ago, Craig Stockwell pointed to an unintended but salient effect of the current art discourse’s focus on installation work and multimedia: “With painting pushed to the margins of artistic discussion and presumed dead, it is actually able to work as a medium less concerned with the meaning of art. In our current culture, effective expression comes mostly from the margins; in a curious way, painting has thus achieved the possibility of becoming more meaningful by being less important.”

I find myself very much in agreement with Stockwell’s remarks, the significance of which I see as follows: (1) painting indeed dominated twentieth century art discourse because of its relentless investigations and prodigious achievements in the realm of formal invention; (2) so ongoing and radical were those inventions that they generated a model whereby painting was necessarily expected to constantly break new ground, to establish the “cutting edge,” and thereby to shoulder the burden of art’s meaning. What sometimes got lost in the shuffle but has become increasingly clear was the fact that the painting in question, the best of it anyway, was conservative as well as radical with respect to formal invention and, because its formal invention was invariably bound to deep feeling, was likewise both radical and conservative with respect to the probing of human consciousness.

And what has all this to do with Stockwell’s own recent pictures? Well, maybe with painting off center-stage, he feels free to personalize the inventions by way of exploring the feelings – not by way of pitting one against the other, of establishing a tension between them, but by way of accommodating them in a mutual embrace, of allowing between them what might be called a dètente.

Foremost among the formal inventions I have in mind is the overall cubist grid, the twentieth century’s equivalent of Renaissance perspective in terms of organizing space and incident in abstract painting. In Stockwell’s case, two or more grids may overlap in any painting or drawing, but every one is comprised of circles whose axes, contrary to conventional practice that would have them aligned with the picture’s framing edges, are plotted diagonally across their surfaces. But they are never literally diagonal, they never run from corner to corner, they conform to no calculated pattern.

The decisions regarding the greater or lesser degree to which they veer from the strictly vertical axis of the format are, in other words, personal, even arbitrary. And seemingly insignificant, merely refinements within an otherwise long-standing tradition of pictorial organization. But the dynamic asymmetry that results is hardly insignificant, for it enables the completed images to float weightlessly and effortlessly, as if unrestrained by the physicality associated with gravity’s plumb line. The accompanying feeling is of liberation, like a dream of flying.

The completed images I refer to are developed by drawing – at times with graphite, at times with charcoal – or painting – with green, say, or red-selected sections of the perimeters of the circular grid units, editing, as it were, the overlapping grids to produce outlined and overlapping figures that hover in close proximity to one another, sharing comfortably the same hazy space and expansive scale, and occasionally sharing boundaries as well. The figures themselves are essentially abstract, buoyant permutations and combinations of the circle motif – a visual equivalent of a musical theme and variations – even while they at times bear resemblance to schematic clouds, or amoeba-like organisms, or humans, or snow angels.

Given these allusions to the visible world, Stockwell doesn’t appear overly anxious about “purity” in his abstractionist enterprise, but that’s not to say hešs disinterested when formal invention is at stake, for he knows it inevitably is. In that regard, what strikes me about his pictures is the way they turn the grid inside out. Normally, we think of the grid as a system within which an artist works, operating inside its confines by filling in and/or stretching their construct, which is usually felt as a constraint that must be wrestled with.

In contrast, Stockwell sees the grid not as a constraint, but as a springboard for expression. In his hands, accordingly, it’s experienced as airy and expansive, lightened and inspired by feeling – and so it becomes one with his figures and accounts for their lyrical character. And we begin to see what he means when he talks about “the possibility of painting becoming more meaningful by being less important.”