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I was originally going to
call this show "Edges," because my work seems never
to be settled but always on the edge of something, always edging
toward something I don't understand, toward some brink. I never
quite know what I'm doing in a professional sense, but seem to
be a pawn of my emotions and of images that jump out of the dark
at me.
Recently, when the muse deserted
me, I went to New York in search of myself. I wasn't there but
Rubens and Kentridge were. There were two exhibitions of drawings
at the Metropolitan, one of Rubens' drawings and one of William
Kentridge's, also featuring one of his animations. Somehow those
two shows got conflated in my mind, and I became obsessed with
bringing my own drawings to life. So my new brink suddenly became
movement.
In the statement for my
last exhibition here I wrote about "The Ten Moments," those perfect
images that must be frozen
in time by a painting. But now, in my first stumbling attempts
at animation, I'm cast adrift from those moments. Each of those
"perfect" moments is preceded and followed by another
moment, each nested in a past and a future that must be discovered-or
chosen. I found it necessary to slow down my creative metabolism
in order to crawl through those moments-24 of them per second!-and
follow wherever they led.
Music has always been an integral
but implicit part of my images, but it can be explicit in animation,
and this capability to link sound with sight opens up a new world
of possibilities for a painter. So in my naïve desire to
add the temporal dimension to my images, I seem to have crossed
over an edge I never knew existed but toward which my work may
have been moving all along.
Warren Criswell
September 2005
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