CHUCK OLSON: VISUAL HISTORIES

Director's Note

The Amarillo Museum of Art presents a show of remarkable paintings by contemporary artist Chuck Olson. Chuck Olson: Visual Histories introduces the artist’s large canvases to audiences of the Texas Panhandle, eastern New Mexico and western Oklahoma. In the words of John Caldwell, the late curator of painting and sculpture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art: Unlike his predecessors, Olson has no need of the sharp juxtapositions and harsh implications of surrealist dream imagery to stake out the incongruities of the imaginary. Instead he takes this territory, so hard-won in the art of the 1930s, as a given and makes it his natural home. Olson’s dreams are a little like Claes Oldenburg’s, but he refuses to engage in ironic discussions with the real world around him and concerns himself instead with the possibilities of exotic landscapes and perhaps of history. More than that, however, his work is about the possibilities of paint itself and the elegant and seductive play of a painter’s hand and eye.

This exhibition is particularly special for me. While working at the Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art, I had the privilege to work with Chuck. His canvases took hold of me the first time I surveyed them. A native and resident of Western Pennsylvania, he is a painter, sculptor, musician, and the Fine Arts Department Chairman and Associate Professor of Art at Saint Francis University. Olson draws inspiration from history, maps, books, ordinary objects, artifacts, and the landscapes of western Pennsylvania, Northern Italy, and France (the native country of his wife Marie). He writes: 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.

My deepest gratitude is extended to the Amarillo Museum of Art’s staff. Without their dedication and help this important project would not have been possible. My gratitude is also extended to the Museum’s Board of Trustees. Their unwavering support has been vital.

The Museum is especially grateful to Ann Crouch for her friendship and sponsorship of the exhibition and catalogue. We are blessed to receive such generous patronage. Last but not least, the Museum would like to express a heartfelt thank you and special recognition to the artist. His generosity and spirit have been truly wonderful. Welcome, dear friends, to the Amarillo Museum of Art’s Chuck Olson: Visual Histories.

Graziella Marchicelli, Ph.D.
Amarillo Museum of Art
Executive Director/Chief Curator

Artist’s Statement
Notes on Painting, Influence, and the Museum Opportunity

I have always looked at painting as response and invention—an end game to experience, reading, and observation that seeks to extend curiosity and possibilities. It is a reaction to the search for an evolving aesthetic within one’s life processed within the landscape of the working studio. Painting has assumed many roles throughout its long history and continues to be vital despite the cyclical announcements of its death. In our present culture, where the ever present TV/computer monitor disciplines one’s visual sense to ape the action of a scanner, painting offers relief in challenging the screen-anesthetized eye.

Paintings are built by decision and reaction--often finding character in the many traces of this deliberation left on the canvas. It has the capacity to contain all notions and respond to all influence. There remains great power in this.

The work exhibited within this exhibition represents my continued fascination with object, memory, history, and beauty. These forms are hybrids gleaned from discoveries taken from the museum, the flea market, the sky, the junkyard, and the ruin. Within these environments, the relationship between order and disorder influences me--a dynamic of mystery and fact. An image is formed to convey this with an emphasis on color, surface, and presence.

This exhibition’s title of “Visual Histories” is a response to my fascination with the past as it is wedded to its artifacts and to the landscape upon which events have played themselves out. Both the object/artifact and the landscape have been explored over the last 25 years as subjects for my work.

The “object” aspect represents the dynamic that one might have with an antique, a bone, a seashell, or anything that carries the presence of the past as it stimulates one’s curiosity. This talisman might address a new aesthetic, a fresh formal consideration of form and color, and/or a link to another time. These paintings are visual artifacts that collect this experience and endeavor to make it heroic.

The landscape emerged from its secondary role as background to the object to become the subject in and of itself. This coincided with a love of bicycling and the way in which one takes in the environment while pedaling. I began to see this as a way of seeing that was very different from the idea of a fixed, visual confrontation with the object. The composition evolves as one would journey through a landscape, collecting visuals between the physical challenges. History and memory are salted within any given landscape and it interests me to attempt to isolate them from what photographer William Eggleston calls “the democratic forest”.

The map as a visual theme emerged from this relationship between the object and the landscape. Maps have always addressed ideas of curiosity, ambition, power, and identity. Arguably abstract, they hold a sense of realism upon which countless dreams and perceptions have been based. The idea of developing a visual exchange between non-objective painting and the presumed “realism” inherent in any map fueled my thinking for a new, related series of work.

The opportunity of a full museum exhibition in order to collect these images for reflection is a community’s great gift to the artist. A pause within a career of design, deliberation, execution, transportation, and communication, the show allows for the studio to have its public moment. Although unlike the private gallery show, the museum exhibition affords the artist the wealth of expansive space as a visual laboratory for realizing new visual experiments.

This exhibition is structured with this in mind. It presents the three themes of my work--the object, the landscape, and the map as my longstanding trinity. However, it also contains three “experiments” here exhibited for the first time.

During my first visit to Amarillo in November 2007, I was struck by the size of the sky above the Texas plain and the relationship between the human experience and the land itself. This was the motivation for a series of 4 large landscapes centered on the ideas of exploitation, security, well being, and spirituality. They are shown here for the first time, executed with the idea of the Panhandle in mind.

The “Saddleback” series is a study of a specific, landmark form repeated within 3 large canvases to consider the effect of a constant within the experience of the day to day. Every place has its “constants” (a mountain, a river, a city clock, a big tree, a local store, or a Cadillac Ranch) that acts as a visual pivot point on which daily life turns. This series considers this relationship.

“Art and Science” is a result of images that come directly from an old chemistry textbook found abandon within the halls of academe. The relationship between arts and science fascinates me in so much as science rejects its past for the future and the arts accumulate all in defying progress. They have an awkward but essential partnership.

Collectively, the object/artifact, landscapes, maps, and experiments form the parameters of these “visual histories” within which intellectual curiosity as well as childlike wonder can potentially co-exist. Attempting to preserve that dual curiosity and underscore its critical importance is the primary function of my work.

Note: I would like to recognize the energy and generosity of Dr. Graziella Marchicelli and Ms. Ann Crouch in making all of this possible. They and their associates are truly driving the visual arts culture in Amarillo and this artist is grateful for their commitment and humbled in affording me this wonderful opportunity.

Chuck Olson

Link image: