Transmutation: One Thing Becoming Another

• Main Author: Hall, Price
• Format: Others
• Published: CSUSB ScholarWorks 2015
• Subjects: visual art; text; poetry; corrugations; painting; Fine Arts; Interdisciplinary Arts and Media; Painting; Reading and Language
• Online Access: https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/etd/251; https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1278&context=etd

My art emerges from decades of the experience of building myself, sensitively aware of accumulated experience and the weight of accrued memory. Responding to this life I so deeply appreciate the longer I live, as sculptor, painter and poet, I merge these individual aesthetic observations into a layered work of many reads. Offering poetic observation as a visual sensation beyond the ears’ hearing carried on a field of color connects at some interior emotional level which is absent or very different in the uniformity of type. Time is present in my current work. “Corrugations”, not only in the poetic images emerging from three days in the embrace of nature but in the new task of the recycled cardboard of commerce as an agent of art. I share my observation of life as art objects of consideration, poetry embedded in the strong arms of bas relief sculpture, the abstract text of language make as visible as the emotional response to color. “Corrugations” becomes an environment where one can wander among the recycled attains a new nobility d offers sparse poems of human observation. Perhaps deceptively simple a certain richness exudes from the massed collection, two dozen glimpses into a state of mind at once impoverished and nourished by the vital power of wilderness. The machine of civilization has become almost a runaway train with a footprint greater than any natural cataclysmic act and we must create and foster a new state of balance within the biosphere. To value the promise of humanity is to seek to establish responsible civilization where the positive possibilities exist to cherish all forms of life. More important though is the nourishment of what human life could become as quality of all life becomes the most important and universal goal. To believe that growth is always a possible choice even in the midst of ancient negative behaviors which negate growth embracing positive change is perhaps less a luxury than a conscious personal choice and if my choice can inform consideration of choice in the viewer than my art has served well.