ARTIST STATEMENT

JOHN CAPUTO
As It Was In The Beginning

This body of work follows quickly on the heels of a series of small pieces that I called my Volkskunst (People’s Art).  Spurred on by an unexpected conversation with a German seamstress in a summer of distress, I made a group of paintings based upon elements of the lives and interests of individuals revealed in specific verbal exchanges.  Executed in the last half of 1999, these paintings of experience stimulated the group of works based on similar ‘conversations’ with myself that are exhibited here.
 

I have always been drawn to three different mediums-Painting, Photography, Printmaking.  Each has given me a distinctive way of utilizing my (admittedly) complex mental processing and image making strategies.  Now far removed from the defensive posture of young artists trying to make their way through the mine fields of art school and the art world, the ‘unholy’ hybrids this impulse creates not only no longer concern me, I coax them in purposeful and playful mayhem.        .

Many of these paintings have a single found image, or a series of images that came into my grasp through a trip (I’ve always loved that line from Vonnegut: “Unfamiliar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God”).  That image or journey sets up the reactions, which are physical, formal, and perhaps, transcendent.  Reflecting my own sense of wonder and doubt in a world of conflicting belief systems, I argue for none of them.  Yet, I find myself holding on to the notion that something matters. If it’s nothing more than sometimes reaching some small measure of a common humanity through works like these, well then, that is enough for me. 

``````````````````````````````````````````````````````````

An early key to my artistic orientation can be found in two key series of works that immediately caught my attention before I had reached the age of fifteen. These are Mauricio Lasanky’s Nazi Drawings and Emil Nolde’s Unpainted Pictures. I would finally see the Lasanky drawings in person, and they were even more powerful than I had imagined them to be.  It was their urgency of message and directness of technique that form the first core level of my artistic belief system.

For me, art should be about something, and that thing should be of import. In bringing it into being, sometimes the simplest of means can be more impacting than the most sophisticated of materials and manipulations.
 

I would go on to author a Master’s Thesis on the Unpainted Pictures of Nolde. At first, it was the mystery of their creation, especially the evocative method the artist employed that fascinated me, unleashing the possibilities for inventive creation that a child growing up in a non-artistic environment could not have guessed at until this odd and sincere artist from far away showed the way. He taught me that the ability to make art was locked inside the universe from the moment of its own creation, and that what was necessary was to align oneself with that initiating creative directive. When I would later read Paul Klee’s famous defense of the abstract in art, or hear Antonio Gaudi’s dictum “Originality is a return to the Origins”, the fundamental soundness of my attraction to Nolde’s ideas was further strengthened. Nolde often wrote of his desire to extend the urgency of the creative genesis of a painting throughout the entire time of its physical creation
 

Now, lest the reader misinterpret from these last comments that I am unaffected by or uninterested in more recent art they would be far from correct. Only those who loved art as much as Duchamp and the Dadaists could have launched the intellectual challenge to cultural complacency that resulted in their elevation of “non-art” art that echoes in the work of the present day. I’m a huge supporter of contemporary artists like Tony Oursler and Shirin Neshat, who demonstrate that it is still possible in this jaded age to astonish the viewer.
 

My painting mentor Hiram Williams once wrote something to the effect that he was constantly amazed how this “dumb show” of applying pigments (which had barely evolved from the craft of the cave dwellers) was still capable of moving the sophisticated and aware contemporary human being. As open as I am to the expansion of art making into any material medium that the artist can invent, I will go to my death convinced that there will always be a place for painting within that pantheon.