DOUGLAS WIRLS WOOD AUGUST 17- SEPTEMBER 29, 2013
In the opening sequence of Kurosawa’s film Yojimbo a lone swordsman walks along a desolate road that cuts across a sea of long, windblown grass. Approaching a crossroads, he finds laying in the intersection a dry stick, which he tosses into the air. Descending with a clatter, the stick hits the ground. The warrior sets one foot along the edge of the stick, and then the other, then stepping off as chance points him toward an unknown destination.
At age sixteen Douglas Wirls started hiking the Appalachian Trail. Over the next five years he trod roughly two-thirds of it length. Whenever time allowed Wirls would resume his trek one stretch at a time. He sometimes traveled alone, and sometimes with others. Despairing of company, days on the trail were filled with intense loneliness, passing thousands of watching trees. Forms seemed to materialize in the shade of dark woodlands. Above a sylvan canopy, clouds piled up into faces, figures and beasts as hikers look up from the trail. Such journeys become pilgrimages, vision quests and Walkabouts; ways to organize space, construct and create landscapes out of a personal experience of moving across terrain. Quoting Mircea Eliade, the late J.B. Jackson observed that landscapes are created in an attempt to speed up or slow down the process of nature, and thus take on the role of time.
In his recent work, Douglas Wirls draws on memory more than observation, guided by an uncertain process rather than by desired results.
“It has been a while since I just wanted to sit down and work from observation. Perhaps the last time I worked directly from a motif was forty years ago, when I was a student at Skowhegan”.
He describes his process as pareidolia, a form of apophenia, observations based on nonsense or suggestion, such as seeing a man in the moon, or salamanders living in the flames of a fire. Meditating on plastered walls Leonardo beheld tempests, floods and battles drawn by his imagination in its stains, cracks and decay.
“One might characterize it as consciously using and building on powers of suggestion. I do not regard it as particularly noteworthy, given that it is a fairly common way to engage in visualization, except that it seems to allow me to evoke a feeling of natural order, invention and a degree of recognition while avoiding the allure of a more literal interpretation; to begin with no clear direction and discover a feeling along the way, perhaps something more allusive and suggestive.”
Historical precedent for Wirls’s pictures can be found in diverse traditions from German Romanticism to Japanese screen painting. His process might be described as intuitive, or compared to methods used by Mark Tobey or Cy Twombly as writing in an unknown language.
Deer-beds pressed into undine fields of feral grass, or the menacing darkness of a forest floor appear to Wirls, who treads a path through ambuscades, chance and confusion until something is revealed. Scorning danger on the Trail, Wirls has no fear of it in the studio. Recovering animal bones from the forest, he reassembled them into fully articulated skeletons. If Wirls did not prefer alchemy to science, he might have become a naturalist. Years ago he cut willow-branches into divining rods and went dowsing for water.
“It took me a while to figure out why I've ended up working for so long on these forests, fields and bogs. Hiking the trail had a lot to do with it, as did sitting in duck blinds, tramping through tall grass, fly fishing and just being in nature. Solitude can be disconcerting at times, but without the distraction and comfort of companionship, one is connected to aliveness that would not be there otherwise. The weird thing is that I cannot recall when I was alone in the wild, ever thinking that I should do something with these feelings. It has just sort of happened by default in the studio. When a subject got my imagination going, I would have something to say about it, if only to myself.”
Wirls’s pictures blur the distinctions between painting and drawing. As a student he was less drawn to those contemporary artists most of his peers sought to emulate than to individualists like James Ensor, Albert Pinkham Ryder, Gustave Moreau, Odilon Redon and Pierre Bonnard. Mature works followed leitmotifs; pigeons, monuments and landscapes led by curiosity, described to a point shy of certainty.
Health reasons compelled him to abandon oil painting, which led him to explore a more graphic, drawing-based approach to painting.
Wirls’s artworks today invite us to backtrack through his process to their genesis in pareidolic wonders, back into the chaos from which worlds are born.
Reenacting the moment of Creation is not playing God.
It is what artists do.
Essay by James Lancel McElhinney © 2013. New York, NY
In the opening sequence of Kurosawa’s film Yojimbo a lone swordsman walks along a desolate road that cuts across a sea of long, windblown grass. Approaching a crossroads, he finds laying in the intersection a dry stick, which he tosses into the air. Descending with a clatter, the stick hits the ground. The warrior sets one foot along the edge of the stick, and then the other, then stepping off as chance points him toward an unknown destination.
At age sixteen Douglas Wirls started hiking the Appalachian Trail. Over the next five years he trod roughly two-thirds of it length. Whenever time allowed Wirls would resume his trek one stretch at a time. He sometimes traveled alone, and sometimes with others. Despairing of company, days on the trail were filled with intense loneliness, passing thousands of watching trees. Forms seemed to materialize in the shade of dark woodlands. Above a sylvan canopy, clouds piled up into faces, figures and beasts as hikers look up from the trail. Such journeys become pilgrimages, vision quests and Walkabouts; ways to organize space, construct and create landscapes out of a personal experience of moving across terrain. Quoting Mircea Eliade, the late J.B. Jackson observed that landscapes are created in an attempt to speed up or slow down the process of nature, and thus take on the role of time.
In his recent work, Douglas Wirls draws on memory more than observation, guided by an uncertain process rather than by desired results.
“It has been a while since I just wanted to sit down and work from observation. Perhaps the last time I worked directly from a motif was forty years ago, when I was a student at Skowhegan”.
He describes his process as pareidolia, a form of apophenia, observations based on nonsense or suggestion, such as seeing a man in the moon, or salamanders living in the flames of a fire. Meditating on plastered walls Leonardo beheld tempests, floods and battles drawn by his imagination in its stains, cracks and decay.
“One might characterize it as consciously using and building on powers of suggestion. I do not regard it as particularly noteworthy, given that it is a fairly common way to engage in visualization, except that it seems to allow me to evoke a feeling of natural order, invention and a degree of recognition while avoiding the allure of a more literal interpretation; to begin with no clear direction and discover a feeling along the way, perhaps something more allusive and suggestive.”
Historical precedent for Wirls’s pictures can be found in diverse traditions from German Romanticism to Japanese screen painting. His process might be described as intuitive, or compared to methods used by Mark Tobey or Cy Twombly as writing in an unknown language.
Deer-beds pressed into undine fields of feral grass, or the menacing darkness of a forest floor appear to Wirls, who treads a path through ambuscades, chance and confusion until something is revealed. Scorning danger on the Trail, Wirls has no fear of it in the studio. Recovering animal bones from the forest, he reassembled them into fully articulated skeletons. If Wirls did not prefer alchemy to science, he might have become a naturalist. Years ago he cut willow-branches into divining rods and went dowsing for water.
“It took me a while to figure out why I've ended up working for so long on these forests, fields and bogs. Hiking the trail had a lot to do with it, as did sitting in duck blinds, tramping through tall grass, fly fishing and just being in nature. Solitude can be disconcerting at times, but without the distraction and comfort of companionship, one is connected to aliveness that would not be there otherwise. The weird thing is that I cannot recall when I was alone in the wild, ever thinking that I should do something with these feelings. It has just sort of happened by default in the studio. When a subject got my imagination going, I would have something to say about it, if only to myself.”
Wirls’s pictures blur the distinctions between painting and drawing. As a student he was less drawn to those contemporary artists most of his peers sought to emulate than to individualists like James Ensor, Albert Pinkham Ryder, Gustave Moreau, Odilon Redon and Pierre Bonnard. Mature works followed leitmotifs; pigeons, monuments and landscapes led by curiosity, described to a point shy of certainty.
Health reasons compelled him to abandon oil painting, which led him to explore a more graphic, drawing-based approach to painting.
Wirls’s artworks today invite us to backtrack through his process to their genesis in pareidolic wonders, back into the chaos from which worlds are born.
Reenacting the moment of Creation is not playing God.
It is what artists do.
Essay by James Lancel McElhinney © 2013. New York, NY