Listening to a Thread

Patrick Percy: Listening to a Thread
Paintings and Drawings

When:  Tues., June 10 – Sun., August 17, 2008
Where: Hallowell Gallery

Both the silence of the desert and my peregrinations have been major influences on my paintings. I feel, now, that I possess an outsider status at all times. A large part of the culture, which surrounds me in the United States, feels foreign as well as troubling.
                                        --- Patrick Percy

There is a quiet elegance and stark beauty in Patrick Percy’s exhibition of incongruent images of a mythic and endangered landscape. As disquieting as the silent spring Rachel Carson wrote of in 1962, Percy’s canvas panels present a world of dramatic ambiguity alluding to our endangered planet. The work can be seen as a cautionary ecological drama drawn from the kind of illogic found in man’s fragmented and fleeting dream life. These are enigmatic paintings of vast arid landscapes with vestiges of societal disasters – where dazed figures emerge from some kind of cataclysm, leaving man to wander on a destroyed and barren land. Percy has chosen imagery that is intentionally ambiguous and therefore provocative. Seemingly offering evidence, stories are suggested that pose questions about our selves, our society, our species and our world – these paintings challenge one to question what kind of survival we may hope for in the very civilization we have created upon the earth.

In Patrick Percy’s Artist’s Statement, Percy includes a brief quote from the Russian film director Andrei Tarkovsky – “Art is born and takes hold wherever there is a timeless and insatiable longing for the spiritual, for the ideal: that longing which draws people to art. Modern Art has taken a wrong turn in abandoning the search for the meaning of existence in order to affirm the value of the individual for its own sake.” Aware of the film Stalker adapted from the novel Roadside Picnic by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, Percy’s paintings and drawings convey his own existentialist modernist journey as an artist through a post-apocalyptic wilderness of known and unknown environmental disasters. Percy’s paintings serve as a visual philosophical metaphor and just as Tarkovsky has used a deserted hydro power plant, Percy’s images of isolated fragments of civilization portray a strong sense of compelling melancholy for what has been lost.

Percy prepares his canvases by stretching them on frames and soaking the sizing out with water in several washings thereby facilitating his technique of using water in building layers of paint. This method prevents the canvases from shrinking unevenly and ensures that they will not only be flexible but will lay flat. After the size has been removed the canvases are resized with solutions of diluted matte medium making the canvas more receptive to color when applied later. The canvas edges are turned over and grommets are put in so that the paintings may be hung and then rolled up and moved. Reticulated and mottled, the canvas surface takes on a layered density by using diluted acrylics sprayed from water bottles. Residues of pigments create shades and varying intensities of color in which Percy, by drawing, scratching, staining, or pressing dry pigments onto a wash of medium is able to build a vocabulary of marks. Percy’s diverse images are derived from photographs, dreams, and the things seen during his extensive travels. Combined with the natural processes of the elements on the landscape, these images are incorporated into the composition of each painting resulting in an elusively fragmented narrative.

Percy attended the University of California at Santa Cruz during the years when it was the acknowledged experimental campus of the University of California system. Here he studied drawing, oil painting, film and literature, earning his B.A. in Fine Arts in 1974. The intense experience of being a part of an intellectual community that fostered close faculty-student relationships prepared him for the nomadic lifestyle of work, travel and art that he continues today. As a wanderer, Percy’s life has been enriched by travel to Mexico, Cuba and Central America as well as through South East Asia, Europe and the United States. His work has been both enriched and informed by the years following completion of his formal education when he worked in a series of studios in remote Mojave Desert locations and by the extensive travels that followed the isolation of the desert. Even though this is Percy’s ninth solo exhibition, this distance from the outside “Art World” allowed for the kind of concentration needed for his unique evolution as an artist. Keenly aware of his own position as an outsider to this world, Percy’s use of marks, stains, and erasures of such subtlety and layered depth has resulted in paintings of quietude that seemingly exist on the very edge of perception.