“I
find inspiration in the doing.”
John DiPaolo
John DiPaolo
The
San Francisco based abstract expressionist artist John
DiPaolo is never too sure what his efforts at the easel will eventually
produce. For his work is a struggle to find the balance between his inner and
outer worlds, the resolution of the effects of intention and chance, the
relationship between the personal and the universal.
“I begin with an idea, usually about space,” Dipaolo told Cottages
& Gardens’ Robyn Wise. “But as the painting unfolds, something enters
in and changes the direction. This continues until the anchors I originally
embedded have disappeared, and I’m doing something I never expected to do. It
amazes me every time.”
Born in New York, DiPaolo moved to
America’s West Coast in his mid-twenties to study at San Francisco Art
Institute followed by a stint at the San Francisco State University to
get his MFA. And whilst there his style changed from a pop art inspired realism
to embrace the tenants of the earlier Abstract Expressionist movement.
Working with a richly layered applications
of paint on canvas DiPaolo dances with his works in a convoluted conversation in
which the artist’s control is mediated by the work itself.
As he has explained “even when you think you know what you want, it tells you what
it wants. The work takes over.”
And that can take time, as he told the Wall Street International
Magazine “Sometimes even the ones I love in the very beginning
end up getting covered over, but with something that is even better. So I say
to myself, ‘You’ve got to surrender. All you are is some in-between force
that’s making this thing happen.’ It’s not about doing it so forcibly. It’s
about getting the organic-ness of the material and of my experience with that
to come out.”
Although
DiPaolo has been making his paintings for many years it hasn’t got any easier.
As
he says in the press release for his current exhibition “I’ve been doing this for 40 years and it’s still a confront
every time you’ve got to start putting paint on. You’re exposed. There it is.
You can’t say, ‘Oh, I didn’t mean that.’
Dipaolo’s current exhibition
is on show at San Francisco’s Dolby
Chadwick Gallery until the 27th
of February.
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