When you first observe the works of local artist Williams Slinkard, you notice a mixture of paintings with vibrant colors, while working a variant of more subtle. The Murfreesboro, Tn. artist is one of the featured artists at Friday night’s ‘Boro Art Crawl.
In His Own Words:
Here are some thoughts we found on Mr. Slinkard’s website concerning his work.
Color Field painting is a subset of Abstract Expressionism that evolved in post war America of the late 1940’s and came to maturation in the 1950’s. This style treats the painting as a field of vision devoid of central focus, emphasizing the flatness of surface and paint, as well as, the tension created by the juxtaposition and interaction of color areas. Classic Color Field painting is meant to be viewed so as to fill the viewer’s entire field of vision with color. This experience floods the eyes with color, saturating the mind, and allowing the resonating energy and power produced by color to be sensed by the viewer.
A philosophical underpinning for this movement is the concept of The Sublime, and its associated qualities as established by the Anglo-Irish philosopher Burke. These qualities include openness of dimension, emptiness, vastness, oneness, and a lack of boundaries. Use of this concept freed the artist from the idea of subject. This idea, finally eliminated the need for an identifiable subject, as had always previously existed in formal painting. Large loose blocks of color and their interaction with themselves, become the essence of the work. This paradigm shift allowed color and its interactions with light to become the object.
My works flow from these streams of thought. A painting’s colors are optical and don’t exist without the interactions of light. These works have multiple layers of paint, glazes and varnishes to attempt to provide richness and depth of color that is often missing from earlier and more “classic” Color Field work. The numerous layers of pigment and medium allow light penetration past the surface and into the painting, providing a more complex reflection for decoding into an image by our visual center. This deeper depth of color provides an additional opportunity for the color tension aspect, of color field theory, to be developed in all three dimensions, in contrast to the standard planar concept of the original Color Field artists.
Slinkard’s works can be seen at the Murfreesboro City Hall.
