Science Against Modern Crime

Science Against Modern Crime is a five-panel encaustic painting that celebrates the complexity of the natural world and addresses questions about the classification and categorization of information and identity.

The four panels on the left are drawn from an FBI procedural manual depicting the basic categories of fingerprints within the Henry system of classification: arches, loops, whorls, and composites. These anonymous, fundamental human marks are juxtaposed with a set of calligraphic gestures that arch, loop, whorl, and tumble in a way that echoes the structures of their ridge patterns.

Organic and charged with energy, the inevitable variation within the expressive linework hints at the possibility of further categories of classification which do in fact exist within the Henry system – categories that include variations of the basic patterns such as tented arches and central pocket loops.

Steeves is interested in painting that reveals something about our complicated relationship to reality. The gestural mark-making that dominates the panel on the right seems to speak to this in the way that it simultaneously reinforces the logic of the system while pointing towards the ambiguousness inherent in the task of classifying natural forms.

Enactment: Span, Human Heart and Problems in Fingerprinting the Dead

Notes From Randall Steeves' lecture Specificity, originally presented at the 2005 Comox Valley Visual Arts Conference:

The poet Charles Olson insisted that, “[art of value] does not seek to describe but to enact.”

Take Willem de Kooning's remark that "FLESH was the reason oil paint was invented." He's suggesting that oil paint is more like flesh than anything else, referring to the textural quality of it and to the build-up of the many thin translucent layers in the paintings of the old masters – that the painting is not just a representation but it’s actually a manifestation of flesh. Willem de Kooning made some very fleshy paintings.

Willem de Kooning, North Atlantic Light, 1977.

SPAN is a good example of what I mean by enactment.

Span, 2001. Encaustic on canvas, two panels, 36" x 96".

Each panel depicts a deformity: two fingers that are webbed or grown together. So each panel is a set of webbed fingers. The dark areas of the painting were there in the original source image. These are just spots where the ink gets clogged up in the irregularly shaped digits – but when I made it into a painting it became this aggressive gestural passage that joined or spanned the two panels of the diptych. The panels are joined together, physically, by the thick gestural paint in the same way that the webbed fingers that are depicted are joined together by flesh.

So the painting approaches this situation in which it becomes or IS AN ENACTMENT of what its depicting.

SPAN is from a few years ago, but this next one HUMAN HEART is very recent. 

Human Heart, 2005. Encaustic and coffee on canvas, eight panels, 24" x 174" installed.

HUMAN HEART is derived from two sources. The first image is an illustration from an FBI manual which depicts a sequence of several impressions taken from a single inked plate. So in the original image you can see the print fading as one impression after another is taken.

I reversed and repeated this sequence, creating a cycle that is very close to the second image I was working with - a sequential echocardiogram depicting one cardiac cycle of the human heart, or a single heartbeat.

Problems in Fingerprinting the Dead, 2002. Encaustic and coffee on canvas, three panels, 30" x 42" each panel.

PROBLEMS IN FINGERPRINTING THE DEAD is another set of sequential paintings and it’s an earlier one. This is also based on an illustration from an FBI technical manual. It has to do with recording a fingerprint over a period of time as the print becomes obscured due to the advancing stages of de-composition. In this case it’s the working of the surface (my brushwork) that’s coming to the surface and obscuring the fingerprint.

But what’s cool about this one for me is that the fingerprint is actually lifted from “The Dance to the Music of Time” by Nicolas Poussin. That’s Poussin’s fingerprint. The original is an unremarkable allegorical picture in which, remarkably, the entire surface is embedded with fingerprints, all made by the same digit, presumably the artist’s own.

1977 T-Bird

"The epitome of personal luxury and performance, the Ford Thunderbird reached its pinnacle with the 1977 model." – Ford Thunderbird's Online History

"The large powerful 1970’s era automobile in 1977 T-Bird can be read as a metaphor for contemporary gestural painting: it roars and spins and kicks up a cloud of dust, making some noise and demonstrating its potential, but it goes in circles and makes no progress." That's what I wrote to accompany the original version of 1977 T-Bird when it was first exhibited in Vancouver's final Artropolis exhibition.

That first installation was a series of twelve sequential encaustic paintings based on stills from a Super 8 film shot by Vancouver artist Scott McBride. It's short clip of my car doing donuts in California's Death Valley on the way back from a trip we took to Las Vegas. This is an animation loop based on stills from the film. 

The panels are aggressively painted, resulting in surfaces that are rough with drips and textural interference, manifesting a physicality reminiscent of the familiar character of old film. In both versions, the translation of the random blemishes (dust, hair, scratches and other visual noise) of the Super 8 film is just as important as the car’s gesture and the location (Death Valley) as subject matter.

I think that there is always a tension in painting, especially in work that’s informed by gestural modernist painting like mine, between the image being painted and the way the work is painted. It seems that there is always a separation between the actual marks that are made and the picture that an artist chooses to paint. This piece is perhaps more clearly about that than some of my more abstract work. This is why I find the Poussin painting interesting (see the previous blog entry) and I think this concern is there, to a certain degree, in everything I do.

The 2003 Artropolis exhibition, featuring 1977 T-Bird by Randall Steeves at the CBC building in Vancouver.

A Modern Dance to the Music of Time

Check this out…  I came across a Poussin painting called “The Dance to the Music of Time” in an old book on fingerprints written by the director of the Scotland Yard fingerprint department. It’s an unremarkable allegorical picture depicting four dancing figures in which, remarkably, the entire surface is embedded with fingerprints, presumably the artist’s own. For a time it was thought that the dancers represented the four seasons. They are now believed to represent work, leisure, riches and poverty–the central issues of human existence according to the man who commissioned the work.

The painting was restored in 1975. It was assumed that after it was cleaned and the outer layer of varnish was removed, that the fingerprints would disappear. But as the project proceeded, the museum officials instead discovered that the prints became more pronounced. It became obvious that the fingerprints were in fact in the primer, embedded in the gesso ground. Analysis showed that all of the fingerprints had been made by the same digit–probably the left thumb–repeatedly pressed into the primer while it was still wet. We can only assume that the print is Poussin’s but, considering the deliberation of the gesture and the fact that we know he used studio assistants less than any of his contemporaries, it seems likely.

“The Dance to the Music of Time” by Nicolas Poussin. One of three allegorical compositions devoted to the central issues of human existence which reflect the sophisticated and highly literary outlook of the man who commissioned them rather than Poussin’s own thinking at the time.

I was thrilled when I found this but I couldn’t find any other references to it in books about art, even books on Poussin.

Until a few years ago when I was alerted by a friend to a mention of it in Matthew Collings' book “Matt’s Old Masters” in which he writes, “We assume that in the past art was deeper: it had moral, psychological and aesthetic depth and was never merely arbitrary. But I can think of an example of the self in old master-art that really is arbitrary. Poussin’s patron, who was later to become Pope Clement IX, gave Poussin the subject for The Dance to the Music of Time. 

Poussin gave it something the Pope probably didn’t ask for: he carefully pressed his thumb into every inch of the ground when it was still wet, so its print can be clearly seen throughout the paint surface, unrelated to anything else that’s going on in the painting, either in the imagery or in the brushwork.

Poussin is considered the master of perfect order. Although we don’t know if he was particularly well educated, he’s come to stand for reason and intellect and a thoughtful sublimation of the impulsive, arbitrary, individual self. But here he is imposing something personal, his body’s own imprint in such an oddly literal way that someone ought to be braying out an explanation of it that they’ve read in a press release from the Turner Prize. It has today’s art-culture’s feeling of official pointlessness and unhinged values.”

A Detail from “The Dance to the Music of Time” showing an area around the legs of the central figure in yellow.

Matter and Energy at Elissa Cristall Gallery, Vancouver

“Matter and energy” refers to “Wave Particle Duality” which is the fact that every particle or quantic entity exhibits the properties of not only particles, but waves. It suggests that the classical concepts of “particle” and “wave” (matter and energy) are inadequate to describe the universe at the quantum level. This seems to mean that our concept of what constitutes reality is wrong, and that our experience of the world limits our capacity to understand the world. Put simply, things are not always what they seem to be. And we have to set aside our assumption that a thing has to be either one thing or another and accept the idea that context is everything, that a thing can be a different thing in a different physical setting.

The title suggests that the work is describing something that is possible (with some difficult) to imagine, but impossible to depict. In keeping with John Cage’s famous dictum that art should imitate nature not in her appearance but “in her manner of operations”, these paintings endeavour to manifest duality in their material presence. Charged with human energy, the surfaces exhibit the properties of the beeswax from which they are made, describing a situation that is at once fluid (molten) and static (solid). A painting is never more that a physical manipulation of the stuff of the world at human scale but I believe its value lies in its capacity to describe our relationship to the material universe at every scale, from the imperceptibly small to the unimaginably immense.

Elissa Cristall Gallery, Vancouver

Randall Steeves' "Matter and Energy" will be on display at Elissa Cristall Gallery in Vancouver from January 23rd to February 27th, 2016.

New work in the studio, summer 2015.