Painting the Seen and the Unseen

“I tend to conjure up an idea for a painting when I am doing something mundane
- riding a train, riding in a car, cleaning my house, trying to fall asleep.”
Anna Conway

For the American narrative painter Anna Conway her imagined reportage is concerned with depicting the world and our place in it at a particular point in time.

As she said in a statement to the 2014 New America Paintings exhibition “My paintings depict fragments of unfolding narratives in which ordinary people are suddenly confronted by forces greater than themselves. The viewer is privy only to the instant of disruption, not to its cause or effect.”

The invented figures we see in her paintings are derived from those she has met over the course of her life which evolve in her mind as real people with a past, present and future.

A process she explained to The Morning News’ Rosecrans Baldwin “I remember someone once referring to a woman, and when they said her name, they just referred to her as her husband’s name with a Mrs. in front. I recall thinking that the entire individual name her parents had given her was gone, and that seemed sad, like the girl she had once been had disappeared. I named a painting Mrs. Lance Cpl. Shane O’Toole and Mrs. Staff Sgt. Brandon Stevens (see below) after hearing that. When it came to titling that painting, I felt this empathy for the characters I had painted. I imagined them to be women who felt insignificant and weak, and identified themselves as someone attached to someone else, that someone else being more important and powerful.”

Conway is not a prolific artist having only made twenty-six paintings in last fifteen years, a tardiness that suggests invented epiphanies are not as easy as they seem.

For as she has said “My protagonists are placed in settings that are familiar but just slightly outside the everyday. Ambiguity is derived from our inability to know subjects’ internal epiphanies. Often, these are the quiet moments that change lives, the ones we try to express before coming to the embarrassed conclusion that they are indescribable in their simple profundity: “How was work?” “Well, I . . . it was . . . um, you know.””

Conway’s current exhibition Purpose is on show at Italy’s Collezione Maramotti until the 31^st of July.

A Sunday Painter’s Explanations

“I want my art to go with your brain, not with your couch.”
John Slaby

In the opening talk for his 2005 exhibition Crimes Against Art the painter John Slaby stated “In my art I have tried to combine the beauty of the decorative movement with the mental stimulation of the modernist movement without the pitfalls of each. I want my art to have beauty and to stimulate the mind. I want to avoid the trite forms of decorative art and the adolescent anger of modernist art. I want my art to be active in that it provokes thought rather than passive… I want my art to be infused with meaning and intention - to provoke thoughts and feelings by sharing my thoughts and feelings on a variety of topics from our shared human experience. This creates a connection between the viewer and myself. A connection based on our shared human experience. And it is this connection that provides the spirituality in art. I crave this spirituality and it is the reason I paint. I often wonder if I would paint if no one were to see the art. Perhaps not. I wonder if this is a good thing because so much of my happiness depends on the response of my audience. One of the hardest challenges for me is to remove myself from these expectations.”

With a PhD in engineering Slaby paints in his spare time and produces a variety of conceptually inspired realist narrative works in the landscape, figurative and still life genres.

About which he says “In a way I am very lucky because I have a good day job which I kind of like and only have to do part time. I think the composer Charles Ives is my prototype. He was successful in the insurance business and composed music in his free time. Knowing he didn’t have to make money from his music liberated him to compose as he wished – and he did some mighty strange things, some very groundbreaking things.”

A lapsed Catholic, Slaby has replaced his religion with his painting.

As he said at the opening of his 2008 exhibition Somethings to Think About “If anyone asks me if I go to church, I reply with the wonderful double entendre “I never miss church on Sunday”. I usually spend my Sunday’s painting. Painting is my spiritual experience. This comes from two aspects. The first is the creation of something from nothing. The blank canvas taking on form. Beauty ex nihilo. That’s what I get on my Sunday’s. The second is the showing, the connection with others. That’s what I am getting tonight and I hope that you can share in that. This is my spirituality. This place is my church.”

With subject matter that ranges across sex, violence, religion and death combined with the realization of his own mortality, Slaby’s latest works have shifted from the intellectual towards the emotional and to ensure that their points are not missed each comes with a wall plaque.

As he has said “Tonight I have all these paintings here and everyone has a description on it.”

Slaby’s current exhibition Death and Desire is on show at Houston’s Archway Gallery until the 7^th of January.