Still Life Room II: Order of the Silver Spoon, 2006.
Art
Melting beauty
by Elizabeth Smither
Clay Bodvin’s adventures in still life.
A little green chair writhes in what looks like the last gesture from a sickbed, a kind of sheet-plucking, alongside a round mirror that shares its affliction. A bowl of oranges, more orange than they have any right to be, is observed the way Monet drew his dying wife’s face. Or a large jug falls in an endlessly preserved moment, full of heaviness, from a stand. The objects that surround us have a secret life and a secret death, endlessly developed by processes that resemble, in their slicing-through of layers, a CAT scan.
There is probably not a person alive, owner of at least one possession, who has not experienced what we call “still life”. The setter of a table, the arranger of a vase of flowers, even – and most particularly – the random arrangements and juxtapositions of our daily lives that can be astounding.
For Clay Bodvin, the formal part of this fascination began at Green River College and continued at the University of Washington, Seattle. “The drawing instructor would bring in a pile of rubble from his garage: a pot, a cow’s skull, a bicycle handle, cigar box, bunch of plastic flowers. Sometimes the pile covered a large table. The students were expected to isolate something that interested them.”
Writing in Tate, Neil Cox has used the term “melting beauty” to describe the work of Matisse where “the pheno-menal world is reformed in sensuous matter”. This recognition, predating our scientific advances, seems always to have been present in still life: the skull, fainting flower, crawling and ominous fly, poultry with an unhealthy sheen. This unsteadiness, even in the fresh and glowing, causes the space between objects to take on an added significance.
“I don’t paint things. I only paint the difference between things,” Matisse declared. Thus a vase with an ornate silverbeet pattern and a lid like a Kaiser’s helmet can be seen in stages of solidity, then reacting to the colour of objects in its range, finally heading towards a collapse that possesses a strange beauty.
Bodvin’s remarkable photomedia work, which he describes as “photomedia painting”, combines sumptuous figurative, representational and object-orientated art experiences with a particular focus on the still-life genre.
But the method contains traditional steps. “The whole process,” says Bodvin, “relates exactly to what happens in a painter’s studio.”
First comes photography with a 30-year-old Canon FTQL, bought in Vietnam in 1969. Over the years, an extensive library of images has been built up, including recurring subjects: mirrors, tables, chandeliers, a significant anchoring little black triangular table. At this stage there is no concern about colour-correctness since everything is about to undergo extensive revision.
Once the prints have been scanned into the computer and converted to access-ible digital files, traditional collage and montage techniques are applied to what is the computer “canvas area”, equivalent to a stretched canvas. Painting, a choice of “brush” size, the building up of layers continue the resemblances. The chair becomes green or yellow, the backdrop – there is a Matisse-like fascination with collecting fabric samples – is scanned in. A bunch of objects is dropped on top of the fabric surfaces, one or two of which may be enlarged disproportionately.
In earlier works, multiple perspectives were played with; more recently, the depth has been flattened so the objects occupy the same plane. Overdrawing in charcoal and grease pencil continues the artist’s involvement. “What happens at any one stage is unpredictable but the end result is completely controllable.”
Once the final version is reached, specialist digital printers can produce the work on fine art paper, canvas, vinyl, acetate or even aluminium sheets, ready for exhibiting. Banner drops, artist screens (suitable for a living-room), A4 pin-ups are among the possibilities.
In New Zealand maybe a dozen or so artists are using photomedia as their primary mode. Although a secure tradition has been established in Europe and North America, based on early innovators such as Nam June Paik, here Bodvin suggests new media are refighting the battles for acceptance that once applied to photography and printmaking. Before the Vodafone Digital Art Awards (2005), there were no formal awards to speak of for photomedia art.
Significantly, the Wallace Awards accept original photography but exclude digital prints. One problem is establishing protocols. “We have to embrace the conditions of limited-edition art works, so it is incumbent on the artist to be honest,” Bodvin says. He cites the old etching masters who destroyed or gouged their plates after 100 uses and thinks this expected honesty should be transferable to digital fine art today without any difficulty.
If the processes of digital art seem simpler to some, the hours spent may be roughly similar. The same aesthetics are required: the search for lightness, brightness, freshness.
Series of works with names like Floating-Room, Aqua-Room (on show at Lopdell House Gallery in Titirangi earlier this year), Redux and Gridded-Room each represent a different painterly style.
And then there is the question of the socks that caused such disapproving salon-generated looks in Paris. In 1996, Bodvin found a product line called “Director’s Socks” at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. He now chooses his foot colours as carefully as he manipulates a screen: lime on the left foot partners orange on the right, fuchsia escorts cyan blue, green walks with yellow. An elegant jacket and standout socks.
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