CHUCK OLSON
Object and Memory
November 6, 2021 – January 9, 2022
Opening and Artist Reception – Saturday, November 6, 5-7pm
Artist Talk – Sunday, November 7, 5pm
Work available online
Chuck Olson, Walking Alone, acrylic on paper, 2016
Throughout my entire life as a painter, I have been fascinated with the power of an object related to an experience and its subsequent hold on one’s memory. As individuals, our memory is, of course, selective and not unlike that of the choices before a painter in front of a palette. The object is a path to that memory, sometimes specific and direct but often taking the form of a perfume that is varied in concentration and shape.
I so enjoy confronting them. Compositionally, this leads to a direct approach to the “center of interest” as if the image was a shell picked up from the beach and examined. Within this fixed and contemplative interaction, one experiences a unique moment. The power of history, found within the artifact or the landscape, provides the setting in the majority of my work. This is perhaps contrary to the classic idea of Modernism that long rejected the past as a source. For me, it is my great well.
In attempting to paint this, I rely on strong contrast in color, texture, and shape in order to create a dialogue between the orbits and the subject—seductive color for attention and mystery, flat, rational brushstroke next to expressionistic whim, and shape that provides edges to the visual conversation.
In this exhibition, “Object and Memory”, all of the elements of my visual explorations are represented. We move through our lives and gather these elements forming hybrid compositions that serve our collective memories. The contrast between childlike wonder and the adult’s intellectual curiosity is the dynamic that I seek in my work for it is an attempt to preserve that dual curiosity that reinforces the importance of seeking an engaged, enriching life.
~Chuck Olson
LITHOGRAPHS
In May of 2015, I began a working relationship with one of America’s foremost lithographic printmakers, Michael Raburn, of Amarillo, Texas and we completed three series of edition prints. I have an annual commitment to lithography, with the intention of realizing two to three new prints every year with a series of images related to themes of objects, artifacts, landscape, and maps.
These images maintain the 40” x 32” format of my works on paper while profiting from lithography’s capacity to render striking overlays of color, translating beautifully the bold, painterly expectations. Each image in the series is built via a succession of 28 to 32 individual, hand made, color separations and executed in a traditional 19th/20th century process.
PAINTINGS
As an American painter educated within the last quarter of the 20th century, the powerful example of Abstract Expressionism, which marked the self defining American break with European modernism, pulled me into its energy and provided me with a way of seeing with which to respond to my experience. This restlessness, caused by cultural collision, allows me the potential, I believe, to constantly reflect on how one sees, constructs life, and then proceeds to take it all in.
SMALL WORKS
This is a series of small acrylic paintings on collaged material, on mounted panels and ready for display. Over the course of the past 5 years, images were painted in studios in the USA, Italy, and France. Two exhibitions of these works were also staged in Parma, Italy and Ambialet, France.
“My painting has long been a response to my fascination with history as it is wedded to its artifacts and to the landscape upon which events have played themselves out… History and memory are salted within any given landscape.”
~Chuck Olson, Visual Histories, 2007