Hurry Slowly: Finger Paintings by Joshua Korenblat
Join us Saturday, June 8 from 7-9pm for the Art Opening
For purchasing information, please contact Joshua directly: jkorenbl@gmail.com
Hurry Slowly:
Italo
Calvino, a contemporary Italian writer of novellas and short stories, once gave
a lecture about a seemingly paradoxical Latin saying that guided his writing, Festina Lente, or Hurry Slowly. Hurry Slowly
originated as an illustration in some of the first books printed with movable
type, published during the Italian Renaissance by Aldus Manutius, in Venice.
Aldus created a maritime logo for the title page of his scholarly books: a
fantastical dolphin intertwining with an anchor, symbolizing the working process
of printing text, and unwittingly leaving us with a profound motto for
idealism. The idealist closes perceived distances between ideas—such as the
dolphin, swimmingly swift, and the heavy anchor; the idealist has no problem
reconciling opposites. Hurry Slowly feels true to two creative spirits, Aldus
and Italo, no matter the centuries between them.
Hurry Slowly feels true to my
working process today, too. In my art, I connect opposites. When I hurry, I
seek the swiftness of gesture drawing, finding the essence of a form. In more
traditional mediums, I seek out the sumi brush and paper, which artists in
Japan used to connect haiku poems written in ink to visual art, rendered with
the same flourishing ease as written words, in a practice called haiga painting.
As a writer, the unifying swiftness of haiku poems and haiga paintings appeals
to me; after all, words can create a universe of designs in a reader’s mind
with just a few syllables.
In this show, I sought out an
unconventional medium to create art—the iPhone and the app Brushes. I
fingerpainted every image here on a credit card-sized screen, immediate and
direct observations of patrons at Politics & Prose and Modern Times
Coffeehouse (and one more coffee house that will remain unmentioned)—sipping
tea, reading books, lost in thoughts. I also created a few cityscape paintings,
rendered swiftly anew and simplified on the tiny reflective canvas. Ironically,
this smart phone, a miniature computer, allows us to return to a more tactile
realm, directing any digital reading experience with the touch of finger.
I fingerpaint from direct observation, simplifying our bustling
microcosmos, constrained within the limits of the canvas space but energized by
an unbounded palette of digital color. I’ve enlarged and printed each image
from my phone into formats typically reserved for traditional media. When I
paint a person, I stop painting when that person leaves, so you can see how
fleeting, or how lengthy, my communal experience was with the subject of each
fingerpainting. Often, we distract ourselves from our surroundings by delving
into smart phones. When I fingerpaint, most people do not realize that I am
creating a painting right before them, creating a dynamic between artist and
subject that seems impossible with more traditional media, which often raise
the self-consciousness of all parties.
Yet for all the swiftness of these fingerpaintings, they are
quite slow to make, compared to taking a photograph. Why paint a portrait or
landscape when a photograph can more deftly record an encounter? For me, the
answer goes back to the essential nature of sumi brush painting, and the art of
caricature, which seeks to characterize a subject through exaggeration and a
focus on an essential spirit. When I paint a patron of Politics & Prose, I
ask myself, what can we glimpse of this person’s interior world in public view?
What is the difference between characterizing by rendering a likeness, and the
true character of a subject, which most clearly reveals itself not in quotidian
moments, captured here, but in situations that require significant decisions? I
believe that you can read expression in the face, experience in weathered
features, and personality in style choices, such as clothes. Faces reveal
stories in a natural way, just as stories appear in eroded rocks and the rings
of a tree trunk. I am intrigued by the inferred tension of the moment: what
happened in this person’s life before our ordinary, even forgettable encounter,
and what might happen after? How does this tension inform the image? Six basic
expressions color our faces: sadness, anger, joy, fear, disgust, and surprise.
Yet only subtle mixtures of these emotions typically appear in public spaces.
The stifled smile seems most evident in everyday conversation, and you see a
few of these smiles on these walls.
Haiku poets seek immediacy. A sketch
conveys more life than a finished work of art. That’s why I call this work haiku fingerpainting. Though
each painting occurred in an urgent moment, slowness reveals itself in the big
picture, ever-changing, comprised of so many small attempts to tell essential
stories through pictures. The haiku poet Basho wrote a lyrical epic of life as
he knew it, in thousands of brief poems. Despite grim health, his last poem
suggests more on the horizon, “Sick on a journey/ my dreams wander/ the
withered fields.” Like life, art exists in the elusive moment, and every ending
invites the beginning of another story.
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