FLOATING WORLD - About the work by Duston Spear

"Ah, Duston, this is a whole new body of work." This is usually the first response folks have when they visit my studio.

Not from painters, though. Painters know that it's always the same painting that we're working on, just one long scroll. 'Series' is the right word. An exhibition is an artificial timeline that enables the work to gel into something coherent, it guides the viewer on this magical journey. I sign off the paintings when they go from my barn to Sara's gallery. And I appreciate Sara's belief in my work, enough to show three of these series, Read (2005), Delivered (2007) and now Floating World.

I have always been more comfortable painting on large stretchers - a bigger site for the battle that needs space to take place. I have more room for tributes, painterly 'shout outs' to artists I need to keep finding in my work: Joan Mitchell for the battle scenes, Lee Krasner for re-invention, Nancy Spero for the frantic yet stilled movement, Leon Golub for the paint as cinder blocks, John Walker and Joan Synder for paint as thick and seductive as meringue. And the anonymous artists, the street writers who use shadow as form and type the moment onto the wall with a fast reading - the opposite of a slow, gallery gaze.

The system I've usurped for these paintings came from a book on Japanese art. From the introduction, "(.) The flash of inspiration after arduous preparation", perfect. That nails the time it took to cut out rows of armies, foot soldiers, horsemen, bulls, horses, and carts - the pedantic preparation after ripping up my older paintings. In the bigger paintings, the tornado in the center is made of my collaged paint clothes, this directs the viewer to stand in the middle, "you are here" - the war is on both sides, and it slips off the canvas because the scroll is not left to right but down from up and on and on and on...

The smaller paintings are short poems, "a tantalizingly brief setting expressing pain, melancholy or joy". Yes, a flash of memory that keeps returning, a permanent loss of equilibrium, history as a discourse in repeating - one long narrative in paint.




Bradley Smith, Japan- A History in Art (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co. Inc. 1964), 10.