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 The
Art of Douglas Gorsline invites us to participate in
a process that was essential to his own creativity,
that of questioning and reassessing reality. This quest
was already being pursued in his early work but in the
essentially realist style of the 4O’s in the United
States.
In the early 50’s, however, in the midst of his
success and while working on his costume book, he came
to seriously question the basic tenets of his art and
the direction he had taken as an artist. He ceased exhibiting
and briefly even ceased painting altogether. He felt
compelled to pause for a complete reappraisal of his
artistic aims and a strong obligation to contribute
toward a new way of seeing reality better. This endeavor
involved a thorough investigation of both contemporary
artistic insights and those of the recent past. The
inquiry became focussed on the work and ideas of the
Cubists, Marcel Duchamp, who had grafted motion onto
cubism and two early photographers involved with photographing
motion, who by coincidence had inspired Duchamp as well
as himself: Eadweard Muybridge and Etienne Jules Marey.
Given that he respected that which his contemporaries
- to begin with the Abstract Expressionists and later
the Pop Artists - were doing in terms of instituting
a revolution against the use of established images of
objects in their work; he nevertheless decided that
their stylistic methods and their aesthetic aims, being
avowedly destructive and devaluing of the ”real”
image, did not constitute the means by which one could
achieve what he wanted to achieve concerning reality.
He hoped for and was working toward the rediscovery
of what could be designated as a reality of «
objective appearances, » to be seen newly in creative
and inventive ways. |
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