The 29 paintings and drawings of 2023
Hello friends,
Looking back at my work in 2023, I was surprised by the pattern of the 29 works done on linen and paper. Since about 2019, I’ve been trying to make pictures that give shape to the feeling of our moment, while still making use of the habits that have become integral over the course of my career. When the more arbitrary abstractions and interventions in the Dispersions (Covid-19) and Deluge series first appeared, I was a bit baffled — even distressed — by them. I am now learning to trust those forms and instincts. This year I brought those to a new scale, and a number of the drawings executed in powdered charcoal are quite large (187 cm, or just over 6 feet high).
Among the paintings on linen, it’s easy to see the dependence on nature in the ostensibly landscape-based works. In those canvases, primarily the large 3-meter diptychs done in Minnesota last June and October (and those are not necessarily finished yet), I was trying to immerse myself in nothing but painting for a month at a time, to turn away from a culture that feels ever more manipulated, fabricated, and now even AI-generated.
The question of how to get back to some sort of phenomenal bedrock is an old and fascinating one. One might think that a determination to privilege seeing, looking long and hard at sources and motifs, might suffice. But we’ve understood at least since Cézanne that it doesn’t. Vision is more brain-computational than optical, and colors don’t even exist out in the world, but are entirely internal calculations, at some level unique to each of us.
Peering at a lake through fluttering oak leaves, I never saw the same view twice, the sun’s angle changes constantly, along with the wind, and the disposition of my perceiving mechanism. Still, I find that to stand there, and look — really look! — while making marks and patches of paint is the most absorbing thing in the world. What ends up being represented isn’t so clear. The decisions about how the paint gets handled are so visible, so exposed to scrutiny, that I often feel that I’m making paintings that demonstrate how paintings are made.
You can see at various points an underlying grid slips in and out of prominence, and I still find it provocative as a representation of something like human organization, or city space; a stand-in for things we make, that which is not nature, something that nature overtakes. The works in the climate-emergency Deluge series appear to stand apart with their floods and paroxysms of pigment, as if those interventions were capricious additions. Yet the separation between the Deluge works and some imagined-to-be-purer landscape mode was quite blurred in practice by the stinging clouds of smoke drifting down from the huge Canadian wildfires, turning the sunsets dark red.
In 2023 these various currents connected more organically, and in those moments — often in the late stages of a work — when gray clouds rise up to obscure the forms of the red cedars, or a torrent of paint nearly obliterates the traces of a depicted world that was delicate, hard-won, and quite beautiful on its own, I have had to learn to say, “Yes, this is what is happening, this is what we have done, this is who we are.”
I've posted the 2023 highlights to my portfolio on cbcampbell.com, and you can 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
