My latest: the Deluge series
Dear friends,
Last night it rained as though the world were coming to an end, again. Summer is typically wet here in central Pennsylvania, but this year is noticeably different: wave after wave of violent storms, several centimeters of rain falling per hour, the nights sometimes punctuated by the deep, resounding crash of a huge tree giving up the ghost — a world no longer predictable. Even so, compared to events in the rest of the world, we’re the fortunate ones. Michael Mann recently pointed out that what we’re seeing is a “perfect storm of consequences” from the climate crisis, “supercharging” the weather.
In December 2021, slightly overlapping with “Dispersions,” my COVID-19 series of drawings, I began to feel that the world was presenting a different face. I could only characterize this sense indistinctly as liquid, and then awoke one morning to the vivid image of a “deluge.” I had seen cascading forms like this before, as they had appeared in some of my earliest graphite powder drawings (2011), and caused me to revisit Leonardo’s astonishing drawings on the subject (c. 1507–17). I immediately started exploring liquid media that could be poured across a surface, and began a new body of work: the Deluge series.
Most of these works were based, at least initially, on landscape structures and colors. But they were also shaped with a particular foreboding, the fore-knowledge that at a certain point the painting might alarmingly call for its own destruction — a deluge — a radical re-making that would wipe out most of what had been established, while preserving just enough of the prior state to be discernible, enough to mourn what had been lost.
I began this summer wondering whether the divergence between the large-scale, plein-air abstractions and the more fraught line of thought in the Dispersions and Deluge works might resolve. The answer seems to be that some works begin as one, and finish as the other: as destruction, or as a thoughtful friend suggested in an email, as “a completion or a necessary contrary of the thing destroyed?” I had imagined arriving at a synthesis of modes, but this process is utterly different: a first state that suddenly calls for a mad reversal, an intervention that is frequently fast, brutal and definitive, everything that the process I have cultivated — long, patient building and accumulation (think Cézanne) — is not.
I’m fascinated by the reappearance of the Cartesian grids in some of these works. Yet here, instead of constraining and organizing, they find themselves subsumed, overwhelmed, as liquid force bursts through, or as if the smoke of the Pyrocene were billowing out. (I needed a respirator to paint these works in Minnesota this summer, with Canadian wildfires burning 2000 km away.) Have we already entered the Age of Fire?
The Deluge series already numbers 15 paintings and 23 works on paper, and is ongoing. You can find my portfolio on my website (cbcampbell.com), and follow me on Instagram @studiocampbell for recent works and studio process.
If any of this speaks to you, I would be delighted to hear from you. Please feel free to forward this email to anyone who might be interested.
Thanks, Christopher Campbell