“I liked the idea of living in a city — any city, especially a strange one — liked the thought of traffic and crowds, of working in a bookstore, waiting tables in a coffee shop, who knew what kind of solitary life I might slip into? Meals alone, walking the dogs in the evenings; and nobody knowing who I was.”— Donna Tartt, The Secret History
(via lalocorleone)
Brett Scheifflee’s “Haiku” at Robert Lange Studios.
Currently on view at Robert Lange Studios in Charleston, South Carolina is artist Brett Scheifflee’s solo exhibition, “Haiku.”
“After a year where many of us dealt with anxiety, relative isolation, loss and too much screen time, I wanted to create a body of work that encourages the viewer to slow down and to feel a bit more connected to the beauty that is always around us. When learning oil painting, my favorite professor used to recite Haiku poetry in an effort to teach us how beautiful and emotive just a short, but very thoughtful work could be. The examples he gave were usually perfectly paused moments in nature and in hindsight, it’s almost surprising they stuck with the 18 year old version of me as much as they did. It wasn’t until a few years ago that I started to think of making paintings as potential visual counterparts to Haiku poetry and I consider it an ongoing challenge. What can make writing in general more powerful at times is that the text-derived images that arise in our minds are not frozen to examine, they bend and shift and seem to always have the potential to be greater. The “fleshed out” image on the other hand is frozen to examine and fully realized, so I learned to be careful to not illustrate too many aspects of a scene, but rather to set the stage so that memories and details would come to mind in the viewer and hopefully have a more lasting effect. For instance in “Pulling the Tide”, I was asked by another artist why I didn’t paint any fish jumping or ripples in the water? They said it seemed as if it was just about to happen, but I thought because her mind went there anyways and began plugging in future possibilities for the scene is what made it a successful image and one you might want to come back to and re-examine. Like a great Haiku, you are given only so much and if those three lines touch something in your heart and mind, it can go much further and change as your experiences grow. All of these paintings are executed with oil paint on either panel or canvas, and I attempt to work in whatever way allows the paint to feel like the subject. In painting landscapes, that usually means that your edges have to be as careful and delicate as the wispy clouds that streak across an evening sky, but sometimes, it calls for rich textures, fine lines and deep transparency.” - Brett Scheifflee.
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