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Artist's Statement
The three major pieces featured in this concert
are the culmination of a year-long project studying
color, shape and camouflage. With the Iraqi War
hitting its stride in early 2004, I wanted to
explore war in an abstract painting. There are
different ways of visualizing war, but camouflage,
as an integral part of modern warfare's aesthetic,
was the perfect source of inspiration for me.
In researching the origins of camouflage, I encountered
the 1950's work of the minimalist Ellsworth Kelly.
Kelly had been trained as a camouflage artist by the
American military during the second World War. His
training in camouflage seemed to influence his work
with minimalism. He used line to break up simple
shapes into more complex ones, and used color and
value to confuse the relationships between
foreground and background elements.
The original
camouflage artists are the animals, to whom French
researchers turned to decipher how camouflage works,
and what makes it successful. Animals like the Silk
Moth are designed to look like dead leaves to some
predators, but can reveal large frightening eyes to
others. Many animals contain double messages in
their color patterns. Similarly, the latest
military camouflage clothing contains a double code.
On one level, their uniforms disguise them, but they
also contain reflective bar codes that can be read
at a distance to identify one group of soldiers from
another.
I too wanted my work to encode a double
message. At first glance, I wanted the viewer to
receive the more obvious message: this is an
abstract painting. The second message was hidden,
more insidious. It was three letters, the acronym:
IOU. The message emerged from a vocabulary of
tilted, curved and straight lines, and seemed to be
the potent message I had been searching for.
IOU
was a message to the people in war who are
personally affected: The civilians, the soldiers,
the war photographers and journalists. IOU was for
the debt of money incurred in fighting a war. IOU
was the apology to the victims that follows modern
warfare a generation behind the atrocities.
As I worked through the different interpretations, I
attempted to conceal them all. IOU was an exercise
in hiding, where the goal was to be lost instead of
found, and the pictures became their colors, no
longer their meanings. Although war, camouflage and
coded messages were the origins of these works, the
issues of color, line and value took over in the
studio and had to be resolved on their own terms. My
hope is that this trio of paintings escape their
violent origins. My hope is that they precipitate
war's dark side into something lighter, something
uplifting and even beautiful.
-- Jonathan Sandmel
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