Gary Panter Essay
#30 Alex Gross (Visiting Painting)
#31 Gary Panter (Response Painting)
The painting I received was of two girls, realistically rendered, one appearing to be a nurse from the 1940s administering something to a woman in a neck-brace attired of a more contemporary moment. The color scheme was in earth tones and grays and peppered with dots of pastel colors almost like early Larry Poons confetti.
In looking for the truth in the piece, I ignored the girls, because though the nurse on the left was much more appealing to me, that seemed very arbitrary.
The truth in people would lie in their personality and not their superficial appearance. Maybe the appealing nurse was a psychopath – I couldn’t know, from the painting, of her character. I ignored the slogans and words, which did not speak to me as containing a truth I could latch onto.
I chose to pursue a more formal course, echoing the basic formatting devices, the color palette and the placement of the dots. I made a stencil of the dot locations and size and applied the same color scheme, but flipped the stencil to start with, producing a mirror image of the original dots, which is only so truthful – more a reflection, and then repeated that process, by turning the canvas (or stencil, as you like) four times to see what configuration of dots would emerge relative to their initial placement on the plane of the canvas. There is often cold truth in formal pursuits, but in this case pretty. I didn’t try to make the work slick. Questions and observation are more true than facility to me in this case.