Solids and VeilsAuthor(s): Sam Gilliam and Annie GawlakSource: Art Journal, Vol. 50, No. 1, Constructed Painting (Spring, 1991), pp. 10-11Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/777075 .

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Solids and Veils SAM GILLIAM, WITH ANNIE GAWLAK

M / y work consists of solids and veils: the union of

solids, or metal forms, seen as volumes against a raked and grooved paint surface. It is constructed

painting, in that it crosses the void between object and

viewer, to be part of the space in front of the picture plane. It

represents an act of pure passage. The surface is no longer the final plane of the work. It is instead the beginning of an advance into the theater of life.

I have been holding court with all of painting. I saw that this notion of passage existed for Rembrandt as well as for Braque. I found lots of clues on how to go about work-

ing from Tatlin, Stella, Hofmann, Braque, Picasso, and Cezanne. Their work is an edict suggesting a system for

working in relief and, more specifically, for defining the

painting in terms of the result of constructed relationships or 10 as an object.

My painting is based on the fact that the framework of the painting is in real space. I am attracted to its power and the way it functions.

The first works to exploit this space were the gravity- formed or suspended paintings. They consisted of paint poured directly onto raw canvas and exhibited in a way consistent with the manner in which they were made. They were painted on the floor and in part suspended from the

ceiling. It became unnecessary to force the convoluted canvas back into the single plane and flat surface of the stretcher. The liquidity of the colors was reinforced by the

fluidity of the canvas. Paint and surface took on an added, third-dimensional reality. Now the canvas was not only the means to, but a primary part of, the object. The suspended

FIG. 1 Sam Gilliam, Autumn Surf, installation, 1973, acrylic and analine dye on polypropylene, 15 x 450 feet. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

SPRING 1991

paintings began by celebrating the working process and ended with the involvement of the wall, the floor, and the

ceiling. The year 1968 was one of revelation and

determination-something was in the air, and it was in that

spirit that I did the drape paintings. In retrospect, I can see that these canvases reflect

certain tendencies in the art of the time. Many artists were

searching for ways to shape a work so that its overall configu- ration was a result of the process.

In 1970 I wanted to return to painting on stretched canvas and did so with a textural and painterly pastiche that included virtually all methods of handling paint. During the mid-seventies this work took a more dimensional direction. I invented a beveled stretcher with the forward edges cham- fered, resulting in a frame made by canvas that extended

beyond the painting itself, increasing its dimensions. Subse-

quently, these stretchers gave the paintings a slablike con- creteness consistent with the heavier painting I was making then. The beveled stretchers enabled me to be as free within the confines of the object's geometry as I felt I had to be.

My work with suspended canvas has undoubtedly led to

my being chosen several times to work in the public forum, beginning in the late seventies and extending to the present. These works in turn have expanded my vocabulary of mate- rials to include those of sculpture. A piece for Art Park in the summer of 1977 moved far from the aesthetic of my indoor

paintings. In the earth, on top of the earth, through a gorge, constructions of fabric, wood shale, and pigment, cut in

simple sections, rose out of the ground. Custom Road Slide was a series of some fourteen "sculptural placements" on the side of a roadway along the Niagara River for some three hundred yards. The strong, luminous areas of uniform color contrasted starkly with the subtly modulated and muted earth tones of the surrounding landscape.

Sculpture with a D, a work installed inside the Davis

Square subway station in Sommerville, Massachusetts, was commissioned by the Boston Mass Transit Authority in 1981. It is an example of direct conversion of the ideas behind the

draped paintings into a more formal material-metal. This

piece, made entirely of aluminum, is reminiscent of Cubism and Constructivism, and with it came a new way of working. The piece projects out from the wall, from metal armatures attached to the back of each panel. The work is guided by the sense of painting on the surface.

The following year, 1982, marked the inauguration of

my work with constructed painting. In the Vertical D paint- ings, a metal D-shaped piece was added to a wedge-shaped niche in the lower right of each painting. The aluminum

shape was painted with enamel, and as I looked at it I noticed that the little D formed a diptych with the painting and called attention to the edge. I realized that this was an opportunity to construct the painting not only within the confines of the

canvas but, in apposition, farther along the plane of the wall.

Since 19681 had been involved in a workshop situation

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that included both sculpture and painting, sponsored by the

Washington Gallery of Modern Art. There, the other workshop members and I got in trouble when we repeated that, accord-

ing to David Smith, there was no essential difference between

painting and sculpture. In spite of the truth of the statement, there was a prevailing dictum to the contrary.

I was fortunate in 1985 to see a number of paintings by Murillo, and it struck me as curious that the sense of perspec- tive in them was reversed from that of most perspective schemes. The movement, rather than receding into the

depths, advances to the viewer. Through Murillo, I was able to discover the feel of volumes added to the surface of the

picture. I retained the use of metal pieces on the periphery of

subsequent paintings to make up one part of a diptych, or to relate as a frame. I explored variations on this apposition in

expressive ways in 1984, culminating in the State series of

ei * _, fa;

FIG. 3 Sam Gilliam, Waking Up, 1989, acrylic on canvas, acrylic and enamel on aluminum, 72 x 95 x 12/2 inches. Hallmark Card Corporation, Kansas City.

1985. These paintings are triptychs with a lot of movement at the edges, which suggests transparent interactions of shape. The pieces work in a circular manner. They work with an

explosion of moments as holistic object. Later paintings continued to use the metal elements,

placed in even, circular configurations, but always on the

edges, until 1988, when the metal pieces protruded from the surface of the painting. At this time I felt a need to compose from the center and not just from the edge, and I allowed the metal to move in front of the canvas.

More recently, in 1989, the use of color and the process of moving paint across the surface limited the movement into

space by creating a tension that drew the eye back into the canvas. All of the elements are tuned proportionally to com- mand the viewer's attention.

The use of the circle was a resolving element in the

paintings of the last year and a symbolic one as well, to some

degree, suggestive of a sphere. The paintings take their titles from the maturation rites practiced by the Masai: Waking Up is a metaphor for growth and development in the world.

The mystery is over; in the paintings of 1990, the works are in full relief and maintain high sculptural content. The work is presented as a sculpted or faceted object in space. They have been constructed to extend the feeling of the

draped paintings of 1969. They are objects that abstractly embrace the content of painting and sculpture through solids and veils. _

Note This article is based on interviews of Sam Gilliam by Annie Gawlak in the fall of 1989 and 1990 and on a catalogue essay by Jay Kloner, "Indoor Paintings," in Sam Gilliam: Indoor and Outdoor Painting 1967-1978, University Gallery, University of Massa- chusetts, Amherst, 1978.

FIG. 2 Sam Gilliam, Vertical D, 1982, acrylic on canvas and enamel on aluminum, 73 x 29 x 3 inches. Private collection. Courtesy the artist.

SAM GILLIAM is an artist living in Washington, D.C. Until

June 1989 he was professor of painting at Carnegie Mellon

University, Pittsburgh. ANNIE GAWLAK is director of Mclntosh/Drysdale Gallery, Washington, D.C.

ART JOURNAL

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