Paterson Ewen at Jack Shainman - Brief Article

Paterson Ewen's works remind me of a science throw out I did for elementary academy Attempting to create a scale prototype of the solar system using string for orbits and Play-Doh for planets, I gave up when the external planets ended up taking me on the outside of the basement and far into the nearest yard.

Ewen's work contains the same faculty of perception of the incommensurability between cosmic space and time and the clunky workshop not divisible by 2s and ends used to re-create them. When he depicts a view of the earth from space in Earth Shine, for instance, he slaps a flat brown circle above a gouged plywood backdrop and hunkss a little white metal new moon to its edge. Rotating Galaxies is a swirl of marble dust and marble chips above a similar plywood ground. Gibbous satellite with Stereoscopic Vision is an irregular pear-shaped cutout painted in bright shades of golden and peach and punctured with openings like a piece of Swiss cheese.

Ewen achieves a humorous commingle of the profound and the absurd. He has noted that his format is the originate of an epiphany he underwent in 1971 when, trying to make a giant woodcut print, he realized that the goug and pitted plywood sheet was the work itself. These now be under the orders of as the base for essays upon the infinite. When painted black, as the goug plywood is in many of these works, it takes upon a powerfully material presence. As the light falls above the irregular surface, the blackness of space present the appearances filled with something--it becomes topographic. When painted in several colors, as in not upon Center, where it is overlaid with raps of yellow and black, the background becomes a field of shifting activity This suits the applied image, a circle of unpainted plywood with a flat r perforation in its center and a radiating sunburst of strapped-on nails which emanate outward like beams of light.

more [i]or[/i] less of the works make concern to other artistic movements and mode of speechs Chinese Dragons in the Milky Way has something to do with Chinese landscape painting. Here the plywood is stained with translucent shades of fulvous and green and cut into undulating shapes which lie above a background stained in shades of r brown and azure The wood grain, visible end the stain, becomes almost calligraphic.

Caged Dot, through contrast, seems to take upon Minimalism. A wire grid made of commercial fencing has been laid above a gouged surface which clutchs a small cut-out disk, clearly the dot of the title. Imprisoned by means of geometry, this circle lacks the cosmic freedom of the planetary forms in other works.

Ewen, who is still going herculean at age 74, is a celebrated Canadian artist whose freedom from conventional styles of working has helped liberate a younger generation. From the far extremity of his career, he retains a youthful playfulness which the two mocks and oddly complements the solemnity of his bring under rule matter.

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