The first time I visited Lance Olsen's
studio it was a very cold January evening, only about 7 o'clock but black like hell, even the
snow. This last time, I arrived in the
merry month of May and, like a film edit, the same little path from house to
studio dissolved from a bleak memory into warm spring, and to my surprised
delight, everywhere in thick profusion were buttercups tall as Lance's curly
haired little granddaughter buzzing along ahead of us. Although, over the course of two visits, we
spend several hours together talking, Lance begins each conversation by
expressing a definite reluctance about the idea of discussing his art. He says, "You don't expect architects to
tap dance to explain their buildings. We
really don't know [what art means]. It's
like the footprints through your life...what does it all mean?"
Inside, the studio is small. Much smaller than expected and very unlike
any I've visited before. His materials
are there but it's sparse. There are no
posters or trinkets or oddities on display to illustrate his worldly
experiences, of which he's had a few. He
grew up in boarding schools in England
and in South Africa;
he went to London's
Camberwell School of Arts, studying under men like Frank Auerbach, Howard Hodgkin
and R.B. Kitaj; he immigrated to Canada, settling in Victoria while in his
early 30's and he still travels extensively.
In this studio, experience is not confined to knick knacks and
souvenirs, experience is converted into art-making.
Other than several of his early oil paintings
and a thick stacks of paintings on paper, all of which is stored in a dark
corner or two, there are only a handful of finished acrylics on display. This is a work space and not at all
romantic. It looks more like a storage
room, filled with random objects. Black binders fill the shelves above a
freshly cleared work table. The
instruments he uses for his sound work are there too and include, in part, two
small tape recorders, pine cones, rocks, an old broken down guitar, and most
interesting, an LP wrapped round and round with a bicycle tube with one copper
and one plastic dish-scrubber tucked in under the tube, an object which can be
manipulated to make several delicate and unusual noises. There are no windows
but two sky lights in the angled ceiling.
Everything, but the new paintings, seems grey or some variation
thereof. It's entirely utilitarian, like
the office of a mildly eccentric mid-level manager in a warehouse
somewhere.
To the left, just as you enter the studio,
is his painting wall. On it are secured
several sheets of Arches 88 paper; paintings in various stages of progress. Leaning against the wall three of these
paintings, neatly framed, are ready to be shipped to a gallery in Vancouver. The wall is a painting in itself, stained
with running lines of thin black and purple paint, evidence of past
action. Higher up are thick wedges of
dull orange paint, strokes of a plaster knife moving in from beyond the edges
of a bygone sheet of paper. On the grey carpet below are scattered paint tubes
(acrylics only; they are arguably less hazardous and also less likely to
migrate into his electronics equipment only four or five feet away). He buys his brushes from hardware stores,
they stand on their bristles in tubs of water.
They're cheap. At 70 years old,
he has arthritis in his hands and so uses a fistful of brushes at a time,
scooping the paint up and onto the paper, allowing the paint itself to complete
the action.
When he built this studio and the house he
lives in, he threw 400 paintings on canvas into a dumpster. It seems unthinkable, but he says, "The
nice thing about paper is that it's paper--canvas is a storage
problem". This ability to let go, to
let the buttercups grow (and hardly anyone lets buttercups grow), to the let
the paint run, to let the work take it's own form, is part of an interesting
dynamic in his art that seems also to involve an unusually heightened sense of
awareness in regards to experiential phenomenon generally considered uninteresting. He exploits hidden potential, using those
qualities many of us take for granted as the building blocks to greatly
mysterious and poetic works of art.
My first introduction to Lance's work was
at an exhibition of his paintings called The Road to Esperance. The series was fairly typical of his current
painting practice which is strikingly balanced between expressionism and
minimalism, containing both wild complexity and profound serenity. From that first exposure I remember, vividly,
layers of pale washes and the blackest velvet blacks and runs and splashes and
great swaths of green and yellow and orange, with stuttering dry marks moving
through everything. I felt that I was in
the presence of a master, a rare experience, to be sure, and on further
inspection discovered, unsurprisingly that his practice itself is remarkably
diverse and rich, encompassing sound, experiments with scanners and cameras,
projections, video and lithography as well as painting.
While recently perusing, online, a single
edition book Lance published called American Paint Catalogue for a Non-Existent
Exhibition (consisting of 124 pages of drawings on discarded catalogue covers)
and listening to a free download of his 25 minute found sound piece called
Thief (an arrangement of crunching feet, breathing, chains, silence) my cell
phone starts to ring and at first I think it's a part of the piece. And later I think again, it was a part of the
piece. There is that near seamless blend
of art and life in Lance's work, an all encompassing production apparently free
of the self-edit, but free also of any stridently defined boundaries. Rather the process of observing and then
collecting and then arranging creates, or perhaps morphs into, an endless loop
of observing, collecting and arranging and not for only the artist, but for all
of us paying attention.
It's important to note that American Paint
Catalogue for a Non-Existent Exhibition was conceived in response to the
ongoing trend of publishing, and distributing far and wide, catalogues of
exhibition images that only a minority of people are actually able to see in
person. This raises fundamental (and
kind of funny) questions about what is actually of importance: the art and the
exhibition, or the need to make people worldwide understand that there was some
art in an exhibition somewhere. The point here, of course, is that Olsen has
re-created that dilemma quite elegantly while also presenting, rather
elaborately, and to a limited audience (after all there is only one edition) an
extensive collection of his powerful black lined, doodle-like drawings.
In the sound piece, Thief, there is, again,
the mirroring of circumstance, although of a more personal nature. His studio was burgled and he lost his
computer, hard drives and 10 years worth of digital recordings. Thief was created in the time immediately
after the break-in when Lance was left to begin building his collection of
sounds again, anew. Thief, I described
earlier as found sound, but in a sense it is a collection of sounds not found
but taken. He took to carrying a small
tape recorder in his pocket or on his person, moving through the world,
unbeknownst to those people or creatures or objects making recordable noise
that he was in fact taking this thing from them, the sounds they make.
Seen in this light, Lance Olsen is suddenly
much more than a simple conduit. There
is calculation in his movements as well, an almost sly repurposing of several
human characteristics of the kind mentioned above; the ambition of artists, the
criminality of the thief, and the unguarded innocence of those from whom the
thief takes. This seems perfectly in
keeping with the expressionism and minimalism I first noticed in his
paintings. In art, he is constantly
working in response to what has happened, whether it's a mark he's made with
paint or a careless act of thievery, and he uses a light, light touch. His responses are genuine but controlled,
never going too far, always leaving just enough room for the observer to find
space for themselves and their own thoughts.
Before we part, Lance remarks, rather
off-handedly, that he's been practising meditation for the last forty years,
sometimes joining week-long meditation retreats, which he says is harder than
anything, an extreme challenge for both body and mind. He's a Buddhist, and immediately it's
tempting to sum up his complex practice as a spiritual one, but it's almost too
glib a conclusion because Olsen was an artist long before he took up
meditating. Perhaps spirituality is
simply another tool, like art, to be used as a way forward, in a tenacious
response to the relentless onslaught that is life. About himself he says, very simply that
"I have no idea what I'm going to do.
I make a sound and it suggests something. I don't like being an art director in my own
work. I like flowing...being one with
what [I'm] doing."
Christine Clark
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