#1 Shane Guffogg

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Shane Guffogg Essay

The "Catalyst" for Circle of Truth Project

#1 Shane Guffogg (Response Painting)

I began a search for my idea of truth by reflecting on a long-time interest of mine. I have spent many years reading about ancient civilizations as a way of understanding who we were and how we got here. My elementary through high school education was never something I trusted, because I intuitively knew I was being told the story from the side that won, and there was another side to the story. Without knowing both sides, I could never know the truth. Another factor in all this history of the world stuff was the ancient stone structures, made with such precision that we still can't achieve the same results today. They were created from monolithic stones that were supposedly chiseled to an arithmetical perfection. It got me really wondering about how this was possible. I only bring this up because this self-imposed reading adventure led me to the Golden Mean, the mathematical ratio of 1:1.618, also known as the Golden Section, Golden Ratio, Divine Proportion, and the Greek Phi, symbolized as a circle with a capital “I” running through its center. This was the same symbol I based the Pharmaka logo on, but I replaced the “I” with a paintbrush, and painted it with sumi ink. Just one of the little coincidences life occasionally likes to serve up.

But the Golden Mean is the mathematical code of nature that gives the flower the instructions on how to grow its petals, or the ratio of the inner part versus the outer part of water as it goes down a drain. It is the same ratio up in the sky that we can see on a clear night—the way the solar systems revolve around the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. It is a mathematical truth of our visible universe, and the ancient peoples of the world knew this and considered this ratio sacred. The architectural designs of ancient stone structures all over the world are based on this number. And so are the proportions of the human body and face. The distance between the eyes, the length of the forehead, the nose, and how they all relate to all the other parts of the face are all proportioned by 1:1.618. Mathematicians say that math is truth and that the Golden Mean is the architectural truth of our universe. You can see where I am going with this by now. My idea of truth was the only “known” truth in the universe: the Golden Ratio. I found an image online of how the human face is divided up into squares and rectangles by this number

and used this as a template, painting the largest square white and the others the primary colors (red, yellow and blue). Where the squares or rectangles touched, those primary colors were blended to become secondary colors (green, orange and purple).

There it was—a simple, to-the-point, non-representational painting, using oil on linen, encoded with a number that has built empires, inspired artists throughout the ages, and created musical masterpieces. All of these have, in one way or another, enabled us to recognize what it means to be human. After all was said and done, that was my truth I kicked off this project with. 

Shane Guffogg web site

#2 Lisa Adams

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Lisa Adams Essay

#1 Shane Guffogg (The Visiting Painting)

#2 Lisa Adams (Responce Painting)

At first I felt lost in connecting to someone else’s painting as a touchstone. It felt very strange not doing another one of my own paintings and my response called up parts of me from the past that at times felt frustrating and uncertain. The experience of creating a work that was not exclusively about my terrain felt distressing at times. I followed suit with the idea of process painting which I felt coming directly from the given painting and therefore my piece felt mostly about the process.

By doing a process painting, I had gotten myself into territory that I had long ago left behind. I felt the struggle. I imposed a lot of will onto the work in an attempt to compensate for feeling uncomfortable. I used spray paint almost entirely on this work with some oil painting as a foundation along with paint pens and a layering technique. The layering technique was a response to the layering expressed in the given painting. The given painting is non-representational, a genre I hadn’t worked in for well over a decade. Gradually I started to melt and feel a transmission from the given abstraction. The transmitted sensibility was one of a season, summer to be exact, in an urban environment.

Once I felt I had a sense of the work, my response was to move in the opposite direction, that of winter and a natural environment. Automatically, I created delicate snowflake stencils cut out of paper reminiscent of a grade school art project which felt very freeing and exhilarating. In the given work there appeared to be a fuzzy veil over the abstract images. I saw this as a filter through which the viewer was asked to experience the images. My reaction was one of an interruption of the visual plane. By overlaying stripes across the entire surface of the painting I created a look much like the experience of rushing by a fence and seeing the

landscape beyond, like a Muybridge effect. Whereas the given painting feels soft in focus and attitude, I responded with a cold and hard-edged attitude. 

In wanting to stay within the guidelines of my agreement with the curators, I did not realize how difficult this project would be. It was a very interesting process in this way and I had to rely on trusting myself more than anything else. Trusting that I would not depend on my usual solutions, saying fuck it and just make a painting the way I usually make a painting. I resisted the impulses and, assuredly, they were strong. Ultimately the project was a gift in that it allowed me to explore solutions to questions I don’t usually ask. 

Lisa Adams web site

#3 Margaret Lazzari

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Margaret Lazzari Essay

#2 Lisa Adams (The Visiting Painting)

#3 Margaret Lazzari (Response Painting)

The painting that preceded mine contains an obvious duality. The blue bars seem rigid, forceful, flat, straight, linear, surface-bound, oppressive, and permanent. The underlying image is soft, diffused, ephemeral, circular, organic, and spacious.

Yet each suggests a kind of structure. I thought the bars represented the rational mind, our social structures, or even the geometry and rigid patterns we use to organize the cities and highways we build. The background suggested to me the microscopic world and the cosmic world, both of which contain empty spaces with small specks of matter animated by energy. The circles and spirals were the orbits of heavenly bodies, the orbits of electrons, or the meanderings of our unconscious minds.

Blue predominated, which made me think of winter-cold if the background was filled with snowflakes, or machine-cold if those shapes were gears.  I also tried to imagine the background shapes to be flowers, but never succeeded. Perhaps the blue was meant to bridge the duality, to unite the bars and the snowflakes. However, when I stared fixedly at the painting, pink afterimages appeared like dancing lines jumping around the blue bars, or pink clouds floating among the blue amorphous shapes. Rigidity, clarity, and definition dissolved, reappeared, and dissolved again.

When I started my painting, I totally covered the canvas with a pink wash that matched that afterimage. The pink morphed into brown, tan, and yellow. Stripes appeared almost immediately, and later I reintroduced blue again as well. The cat’s head emerges from and disintegrates into those colors. Nothing is really solid in this world, regardless of how we perceive it. Nothing is really solid in my

painting, either. The world contains not only matter, energy and structure, but also the consciousness of billions of sentient beings. I perceive the world with my own senses and my own limitations. I am surrounded by living things that experienced life in their own way, in their individual dimensions. 

#4 Jim Morphesis

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Jim Morphesis Essay

#3 Margaret Lazzari (Visiting Painting)

#4 Jim Morphesis (Response Painting)

The summer had just begun. I was in a new studio and still setting up my work area, when the painting that I was to work from arrived. I thought that creating an artwork for this project would be a good way to christen my new studio space. It was not until I had this mystery artist’s work hanging, with stark presence, on one of my pristine white walls did I feel the weight of the project’s title. In taking time to really look at this painting, a beautifully rendered work, I began to feel the need to find something quite specific. I wanted to come across an element in this painting that I could feel, with confidence, this artist wanted me to discover. Like most artists, I seek out and take inspiration from the work of artists that I know relate to my sensibilities and work process. Creating a relationship with this anonymous work would require some long discussions before beginning to paint my contribution to this project.

So much changes for the better once you start working. The visiting painting was a lyrical abstraction. Subtle representational elements, entering from the top of the picture plane suggested that something else was going on. I began to feel as though I was looking at the ghost of a destroyed organic structure. On the other hand, there is a point when, what appears to be a dissolving universe could, as well, be one taking form. I saw this uncertainty as a strength that I could relate to in this enigmatic work.

The question as to whether an image is falling into decay or emerging from it, is a concept that I deal with in my own work. I often bury figurative images in surfaces thick with paint, dry pigments and collage. In excavating these images and working with the new discoveries, I strive to move the work toward abstraction and something less defined and more inclusive. In my completed painting, an image of a human skull is both emerging and sinking into a crusty surface. The skull is a memento mori that I have used many times. In this painting, however, the use of the skull image was encouraged by passages in the artwork that I had been studying. In this work, I had come to see soft sienna shapes as once bone hard and now morphing into something else. Did I decide that this work must have something to do with the state of flux in which, I believe, we always exist? In every work that I do, I try to approach some truth and I do this while creating illusions. I think that it was Oscar Wilde who said, “Lying is the true aim of art.” For me, this has been a helpful quote. In the end, I think that the only truth that I found, the only one that I can stand behind, is the fact that any reason for getting another painting done is a good one. 

#5 Alison Van Pelt

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Alison Van Pelt Essay

#4 Jim Morphesis (Visiting Painting)

#5 Alison Van Pelt (Response Painting)

In this work I explored the idea of truth as it relates to the material world and other less tangible realms. The painting of the skull, to which I was responding, was fiery and dripping with color. It looked like it was laughing from the beyond at my attachment to this reality. My response was to paint a self-portrait. A doctor x-rayed my head and I worked from that image. The x-ray served as documentation of my underlying veracity, exactness, fact, (all synonyms for truth). While truth can be defined as the ideal or fundamental reality apart from and transcending perceived experience, the skull can be seen as the essential constant beneath the less permanent flesh; the authentic structure under the image presented of a persona.

Buddhists say the only constant is change. In this state of flux, is the fundamental reality spirit? In my predecessor's painting a light bulb is painted over the forehead; a symbolic illumination of the Ajna Chakra? Some kind of revelation? I placed a flower over the third eye, a symbol of truth and beauty. While a flower is ephemeral and fragile, relative to the substantial permanence of bones, here their roles are reversed. As I have painted it, the skull is translucent and ethereal, while the flowers, representing spirit, light, essence, are rendered as substantive and concrete. This reversal, suggesting an alternative perception of reality, perpetuates the question of absolute truth within an ever-changing existence. 

#6 Matthew Thomas

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Matthew Thomas Essay

#5 Alison Van Pelt (Visiting Painting)

#6 Matthew Thomas (Response Painting)

I would like to thank both the curators for the concept of the Circle of Truth and the opportunity for a group of diverse artists to make a collective statement.

The starting point was allowing the painting to exist as my quest. After a period of three days I was able to start painting. I began with a destination but a feeling of uncertainty on how I would arrive there. I abandoned the materials that I was comfortable with and tried new media. The revelation was the experience provided me an opportunity to challenge my preconceived views of doing and being and to extend my potential into the unknown... I feel the results were an act of sincerity and a willingness to make bridges. O

#7 John Scane

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John Scane Essay

#6 Matthew Thomas (Visiting Painting)

#7 John Scane (Response Painting)

When I unpacked the crate my first reaction was, what the hell do I make of this? I took my canvas out and closed the crate leaving the source painting inside for the next three days. During this time I primed my canvas with several coats of gesso and modeling paste trying to get rid of some of the tooth and also to start thinking about the project.

When the canvas was to my liking I cleared a spot on the wall and unpacked the painting, it was as I remembered it. At first it appeared to be just a colorful abstraction mostly in blue with a strong yellow squiggle in the center and some various solid circles of basic colors. It seemed dry and flat. After starring at the work for a while it started to reveal itself and offer me clues to decipher. I saw that the yellow squiggle was actually a line drawing of what looked like a rose and the colored spheres had orbits they resided in as well as an order.

As I lived with the painting over the next few days I felt like I had a mystery to solve to unlock its meaning. I kept coming back to the idea of birth and a flowering of life, the birth of the solar system or even the universe. The concentric rings with their color-coded spheres reminded me of a solar system and planets with orbits. The flower was encompassing and in full bloom with light. When I couldn’t escape this interpretation and resigned myself that I would never fully know what the painting meant I was able to start applying paint to my canvas. I started by making marks that were abstract just trying to find a rhythm. I painted with a brush and drew with an oil stick. I put layers of paint on and washed layers of paint off with thinner and turpentine. I worked this way for a few days applying layers and making marks until I found a direction that seemed in line with my

interpretation of the source painting. It was an uncomfortable place to be knowing that I had a limited time and already I was half way through it. The painting was on it’s way but wasn’t entirely resolved and I wasn’t sure if it would be but at a certain point I applied the light and almost instantly the painting made sense, it had become what I was thinking and was basically finished except for some touch up work and a final glaze. In the end I had to let it find itself. In the end light prevailed. 

#8 Michelle Weinstein

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Michelle Weinstein Essay

#7 John Scane (Visiting Painting)

#8 Michelle Weinstein (Response Painting)

The first impression I got from the seed painting, was a depiction of the birth of stars, the beginning of the universe when different types of matter became drawn to each other through their different densities, and magnetism. The center of the painting had both lightness and weight because of the semi-amorphous melting hot white form in the center of the painting. It took me a couple of days to decide whether to represent the work diagrammatically in terms of the relationship between the colors and sizes – a diagram of attractions and color of the newly born matter, or to bring elemental stew one step farther in its phase of development. I decided to give the different elements a new motion, as if the formation is part of a narrative and it is my place to show the next step in the process of the newly born universe.

After spending more time with the seed painting another striking factor was the color spectrum; each color of the spectrum was clearly represented. It now looked to me not as if it was a painting of the birth of the universe, but rather the birth of color. The honest reaction was to bring forward the idea of the color spectrum very clearly. I also thought it would be fun to bring the birth of universe and color to the next stage in its evolution, to integrate my first impressions of the seed painting. I wanted to create forms that were reminiscent of the first squirmings of life. I was conflicted at the thought of creating three dimensional forms on the canvas; mostly I was worried about structural problems. I knew I wanted the piece to hover between an analysis (all of the discoveries about the birth of the universe as we know them today were discovered in a laboratory, and I wanted this implied visually) while creating forms that were biomorphic, squiggly, wriggling with beginnings. After listing the possibilities and making some mock sketches I decided to make small clay cup like forms containing the spectrum in the form of dyed string. The clean graph paper ground implies an analysis. The clay cups painted white looked a bit like barnacles, or some other early life form, as well as being rough mortars (as in mortar and pestles, where painters used to grind their pigments).

#9 Vonn Sumner

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Vonn Sumner Essay

#8 Michelle Weinstein (Visiting Painting)

#9 Vonn Sumner (Response Painting)

This was tough. I have real reservations about the notion – or at least the word – Truth. The word for me represents something either so personal as to be almost incommunicable, or so huge and inconceivable as to also be outside of the realm of human communication. So I was starting from a place of ambivalence.

When I received the visiting painting, I had no idea what to make of it. I had expected a two-dimensional painting and when I saw this kind of assemblage/bas-relief sculpture/wall hanging, I drew a blank. I lived with it in my studio for several days while going about my business, then looking at it again.

Finally, I settled on a way to go and started. Then I got a sinking feeling. I was making one of my own paintings. I read back through the instructions and found what was nagging at me: “This is not a time for an artist to make another painting for which they are known.” Instead, we were to “convey” and “respond honestly” to what was presented to us. This realization should probably have been liberating, but I found it surprisingly frustrating. I started over. Staring again at the piece I was given, I tried to see the essence of what was there.

I decided that my painting should be like a non-objective Modernist painting since the elements here – grid, pure color, circles, Truth – are all things that I associate with high Modernism. I arrived at this floating shape that was a kind of hybrid between a Circle and a Pyramid, containing these pure colors, amidst a grey area. Certain measurements and geometric aspects are specific to the piece I was responding to, others are invented. I wanted a picture that could hover between representational and non-representational, cosmic and terrestrial.

At one stage I had just that shape, which is still basically visible. But after living with it for a few days I decided it was too static. What good is truth if it is boring? So I set about breaking up the shapes and spreading them over the composition to make it less predictable. I wanted to push the painting past what I knew it was going to be, into something I did not foresee. I made decisions that were less rational, and more visual and intuitive. I was trying to find a balance between revealing and concealing. I decided that I would try to pass on to the next artist some of the confusion that I was struck with.

It was a funny tightrope walk that I didn’t foresee, 

and I’m sure that in some way this experience will influence what I do in the future with my work.

#10 Ruth Weisberg

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Ruth Weisberg Essay

#9 Vonn Sumner (Visiting Painting)

#10 Ruth Weisberg (Response Painting)

This exhibition seems to have been conceived as a kind of exquisite corpse or what we called Rumor when I was growing up in Chicago. In pursuit of Truth, we are only allowed to see one link, one small part of the larger puzzle. The Surrealists who invented the game of Exquisite Corpse hoped that a mysterious and only partially revealed prompt would provide access to the unconscious and encourage great leaps of the imagination. I trust that on this occasion too the way we have been invited to discover our truth will have a similar effect.

My prompt was a painting, very geometric in its design and rigorous in execution, that suggested the deconstruction of the globe. My aesthetic is quite different. Where my unknown partner represented the globe as opaque and constructed from shifting tectonic plates, I have favored transparency and fluidity in combination with the expressive gesture of a pair of generous hands. The abstraction of the globe seen from afar suggested to me the fundamental presence which underpins our world. In my view the universe is both more shifting and ephemeral and at the same time more timeless and eternal. This is my paradoxical truth.

#11 Stanley Dorfman

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Stanley Dorfman Essay

#10 Ruth Weisberg (Visiting Painting)

#11 Stanley Dorfman (Response Painting)

The problem with writing about my painting is that after the original spark of a concept, I don’t really know, and don’t seem to be in control of where it goes – until it gets there! The motivating force is the effort to manipulate the space and to create movement – above all to achieve a state of equilibrium, between the emotion and the intellect.

The seeming concept of the work I received, of a peaceful world being gently caught by a pair of strong, caring and Godlike, hands is definitely not even remotely in my realm of believability. Perhaps the painting offers this as the solution to our problems?

My world is certainly not a remote and peaceful orb! It is filled with the horrors of mass killings and rape, torture, greed, political and religious dishonesty and racial intolerance. What I took from the work was – the circle – and my intention was, using the circle as a starting point, to somewhat express my feelings of my despair and concern for the future of our out-of-control lives! There are no comforting hands to catch our fall! 

#12 Kim Kimbro

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Kim Kimbro Essay

#11 Stanley Dorfman (Visiting Painting)

#12 Kim Kimbro (Response Painting)

When I received my visiting painting, I was excited by it (mostly because it was something so unlike my work) and yet found plenty of ways to procrastinate making my version of it. It sat in my studio for a week before I finally had an idea. And of course, once I put paint to canvas, my grand idea had more to do with the way I normally work and less to do with the source painting.

After letting my painting dry and refusing to look at the original for another week, I scrapped the notion of having an idea at all and just responded to the basics. I laid out some of the prominent colors from the visiting painting, chose a few of its compositional and linear features, and went to work.

The end result was a color palette that changed significantly as a result of working wet into wet. Some of the spherical and linear elements of the visiting painting remained, but many were burnished away in the process of making the piece my own. It was quite thrilling to start with the same DNA, so-to-speak, and to end up with completely different looking siblings.

#13 Charles Arnoldi

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Charles Arnoldi Essay

#12 kim Kimbro (Visiting Painting)

#13 Charles Arnoldi (Response Painting)

I have been working on multiple panel fractured arc paintings for some time now. They have an inherent circular momentum and I decided to paint one for this project. I found it a challenge to translate my multi-panel format onto a single square canvas. I bracketed the upper right and lower left corners of the canvas to break the logic of the square format. 

#14 Ron Griffin

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Ron Griffin Essay

#13 Charles Arnoldi (Visiting Painting)

#14 Ron Griffin (Response Painting)

To be truthful, it was the crate that caught my eye when Shane and Laura came to my studio. An impressive travel crate, clearly most important for this project. Inside the beautiful container, nestled in padding, a finished wood tray held two linen canvases of amazing quality, one surface with painting and one primed white with taped edges ready for my contribution. I noticed the Oz clips holding the stretchers to either side of the tray and commented that I hadn’t seen those in a while. Clearly, a class act.

It was an abstract painting that came to me in the crate. I was supposed to be in the dark concerning identity of the artist, but I knew who did it. I had seen enough of those, the Arc paintings and the sea of permutations. But, there was something out of the ordinary about this one – of course. There were two brackets of color, one warm in the upper right corner, one cool in the lower left. These elements, so completely foreign to the series, must have been part of his reaction to the painting he received in the crate. These things, then, would be part of my reaction.

My response to the abstract painting was realism, a kind of realism, anyway. I made the white surface of my canvas black. On the black I added the likeness of an airmail envelope, open side down with flap up and little red airliner exposed at the apex. This envelope is one of my favorite bits of ephemera, and perfect for this purpose as it has two diagonal stripes in the lower, right corner, one red and one blue. Seemingly contained in the likeness of the envelope, and veiled by what looks like the translucent paper of the envelope surface, I added a simulated photo with the image of one of my paintings from a series in 2000. I chose the image of this painting because shapes in it are similar to Arnoldi’s abstract ones, but my seemingly abstract, anthropomorphic shapes are actually an exact representation of a paper toilet seat cover folded in a complex situation. Like other things I have done, what looks like collage is not, like the envelope in my painting, but this time, like Arnoldi, I tossed something different into the mix, something I’ve never done, an actual stamp which I painted over and then applied the likeness of an appropriate bureaucrat. So the painting I sent off to the next participant had become a real collage. 

#15 Doro Hofmann

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Doro Hofmann Essay

#14 Ron Griffin (Visiting Painting)

#15 Doro Hofmann (Response Painting)

I was excited and curious about the canvases coming to my studio. It was only after they arrived that I started to feel pressure, and that I had welcomed an intruder into my studio, my private place. In front of me stood this matte black square, with an airmail envelope placed right in the middle, clearly transporting a piece of art, a postcard within the somewhat transparent envelope revealing something that looked like either a cubistic sculpture or painting. The previous artist had decided to display this envelope open, showing the side on which you write the address and put the stamp. The work felt very dark, matte black being its main color. I work in shades of bright, diverse colors and textures. I felt the urge to give my piece more freshness as a new start for the next artist, with a somewhat reduced color palette.

The painting implied movement to me, a forward drive of culture, art and poetry. As I am interested in Pop Art, I chose Roy Lichtenstein’s brush strokes to depict motion. I distorted the strokes in an exaggerated perspective. My background would be an open ocean and sky, tilted as we glide over it. Such a landscape and its underlying energy flow, portray that particular moment in artmaking – the flash of inspiration, the ecstatic, triggering a feeling of power, freedom, truth. To translate the power of poetry and the word, I chose the words of the German dramatist, poet, writer and director, Heiner Müller. The words were printed with silver pigment referring to the silver lining meaning of the same:

Das einzigste was ein Kunstwerk kann,

ist Sehnsucht zu wecken

nach einem anderen Zustand der Welt.

Und diese Sehnsucht ist revolutionär.

~ Heiner Müller, Gesammelte Irrtümer, 1983

Which translates in English to:

A work of art can do no more

than awaken a longing

for the world to be in a different state.

And that longing is revolutionary.

I’m not sure if these words are as powerful in English. In German they are highly meaningful, considering Müller’s enduring difficulties and censorship, living in the GDR. I find them apropos describing what art is capable of. But at the same time, these words are deprived of their meaning by adding them into a collection misunderstandings. I expect the outcome of the Circle of Truth will likely be this – a collection of misunderstandings along the process of their creation, nevertheless a collection of great artwork and the result of an exciting and curious experience.