Art & Letters
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by Matthew Plescher
Matt Plescher graduated from Calvin College with a degree in art history. After college, Plescher spent many years in Alaska, skiing and hiking the backcountry wilderness. He has since worked extensively in illustration, book design, calligraphy, and painting. His paintings are widely exhibited. Currently, he is exploring ideas of place and language and how these relate to the immanence and transcendence of God. When not making art he can be found spending time with family, running, or camping. My career as an artist was born out of disillusionment with art history. My undergraduate degree was in that field and I had planned further study. However, many of the art historical narratives had begun to seem suspect: the treatment of artists as heroes, the artificial elevation of fine art above craft, the theories |
meant to describe all of visual art, and the creation of art trends to support those theories.
So, instead of applying to graduate schools, I moved to Alaska. I was not just running away from academia; I have a great love for the outdoors and I spent many hours in the backcountry hiking and skiing. However, after a few years of not really thinking at all about art, I made a serious decision to pursue painting. I am not certain what exactly moved me in this direction—God’s quiet calling, perhaps? Landscape painting seemed an obvious choice given the location. Thus began my journey into making art.
My college studies served me well in that I had a firm foundation in the art that came before me. However, an unexpected consequence of beginning to practice art after serious art historical study was finding the need to look again at all the art I had studied, but with new eyes. This re-experiencing of art occurred in the stacks of the Anchorage library (this was before the days of the Google image search). I found that every time I experienced a painting epiphany, I wanted to go back and look at everything again. I also began to engage all the current work I could—everything from regional work in Alaska to what was happening in the larger art centers in Los Angeles, New York, and so on. With the internet, this became increasingly easy to do.
The stories I had learned about the art of the past, the stories being told about contemporary art, and my own nascent artistic vision began to combine in complex ways. I realized that my painting craft benefitted from knowing about the rich history of art that came before me, but it also ran the risk of being overly influenced by the past. Additionally, I began to notice how artists would sometimes blindly jump on current art trends, thinking they were innovating only because they had no idea what had come before. I also realized that artistic vision has its own accompanying risk: that of being so obtuse that the viewer cannot fathom what you are saying.
When I began to show my landscape paintings, I learned that there were some specific things viewers looked for, expected, and reacted to in landscape. There is a hunger for beauty and the sublime—concepts I knew the art world had moved away from, but that I would routinely encounter in talking to viewers. The plein air movement in landscape painting puts a premium on this response, emphasizing dramatic color and lighting effects. It is relatively easy to paint this way, and I have completed a few paintings along these lines, but I always find an emptiness about them. I began to realize that the reason I was drawn to landscape painting was not due to color or drama, but instead about how I respond to place.
A deeper exploration of my response to place came about after I had returned to Michigan and was painting very different motifs than those I had painted while in Alaska. These were the broad rural landscapes of my youth. In Michigan, the tamed and the untamed are often in close proximity, the forest bordering the field. I found that this contrast had a close correlation to ideas about place and placelessness I was encountering in geographers such as Yi-Fu Tuan and Edward Relph. I also discovered painting rural Michigan landscapes came with an increased danger of nostalgia. Many viewers have sentimental affection for certain places, often tied up with wistful memories of the past. Painters who focus on nostalgia are essentially fantasy painters, conjuring up visions of towns and farms of the past with the aim to validate the imagined memory of the viewer.
I wanted to find a way to paint landscapes that would avoid the superficial beauty of plein air and the fiction of nostalgia painting, but that would still show my response to place in a way that was understandable to viewers. Part of the solution came from changing the way I gathered reference material. I do not work outside; rather, I use photo references in the studio to create my paintings. Driving around the rural countryside, I found myself unwittingly falling into framing my photos in nostalgic ways. I discovered one way to prevent this was to stop composing the reference photos; instead, I started driving with the passenger window open and just held the camera up and took photos as I drove. As a result, I began to see shapes and patterns in the landscape that were not contrived. To combat the plein air look, I also stopped painting alla prima and started working with layers of transparent paint. This resulted in the production of paintings that felt like the places to which I was drawn, yet filtered through my own vision.
Another change that has occurred in my painting practice is the way I approach color and pigments—a result of a long journey through the thickets of color theory. Every book on painting has a section on color theory, and I eventually realized that for something that was being presented as factual, the suggestions for color mixing varied significantly and often did not pan out in the studio. Deeper digging revealed a progression of writers since the time of Newton trying to make color mixing fit into a tidy system of mixing charts and formulas. However, there always seemed to be groups of colors that were conveniently ignored, green-golds and ochres for example, which do not fit nicely into any color wheel. Also, colors placed geometrically on a wheel look nice but are terrible predictors of a mixing outcome. I finally realized that no mixing system was going to describe perfectly what was happening on my palette, mainly because the theories could not account for the way actual pigments interacted with each other. I decided instead to produce my own charts, and embarked on a grueling project of mixing all my pigments with each other and with white, producing hundreds of color cards. As a result of this exercise, I no longer think much about color wheels and systems. Instead, I lay out my paint randomly on my palette wherever there is space. As far as pigment choices go, most of my landscapes have employed traditional pigments—cadmiums, cerulean blue, viridian, etc. However, in the last few years, I have wanted cleaner, brighter color and I have and moved to modern pigments, such as naphthol and quinacridone red, azo yellow, and phthalo blues.
Before I began painting in Alaska, I held a number of jobs, one of which was as an apprentice sign painter. There, I was taught the traditional skills of hand lettering. I have recently begun to work with the lettering brush again. I initially began by lettering random quotes and phrases but eventually moved to scripture. I had become a Christian late in my college days, but had not really felt a connection between my faith and art. I never saw this as something lacking, considering myself a Christian artist, not an artist making Christian art. However, the lettering has provided a concrete way to link my faith with my art, and is interesting new artistic territory for me.
Initially, the lettering was just to be a brief break from painting after completing a series of landscape paintings. However, it has instead developed into a parallel path to my painting practice. I have taken the same approach I had learned in painting to develop it: looking to the past, looking at what is happening in contemporary calligraphy and lettering, and working to try to develop a unique voice.
I am left-handed, which is a bit of a handicap for a calligrapher. I can use traditional nib pens, but they feel clumsy. Besides using brushes, which are relatively forgiving to left-handers, I have also incorporated ruling pens, instruments initially used by draftsmen to make straight lines, but now used for creative potential by calligraphers.
When I felt drawn to paint again, a natural direction seemed to be to combine the two streams. Instead of going directly back to landscape painting, I decided to try to incorporate my lettering into paintings. This ultimately resulted in an artistic exploration into my relationship with scripture. First Gospel is the beginning of the Gospel of Matthew lettered with a brush in Syriac script. A fourth-century Syriac New Testament manuscript was used as the source. Layers of paint were then built up over the lettering, sometimes left as applied, other times scraped and sanded back. As areas of text became obliterated with paint, they were painstakingly lettered again with the brush, in some places multiple times. The painting is confessional. Scripture sometimes feels emotionally close to me; other times it can feel cold and distant. Modern translations can at times make scripture seem artificially close, masking the fact that the words come to us over great distances of time and through many translations. As I worked on these paintings, I felt a tension between the readily understandable and unknowable mystery. In Glyphs the text is from the Great Isaiah Scroll, part of the Dead Sea Scrolls. I broke apart the Hebrew letters from the first four verses of Isaiah 53 into separate glyphs and lettered them onto the canvas. As with First Gospel, the characters were lettered, then paint built up over them until they were almost obliterated, and then lettered again. Eventually, the process of lettering became nearly automatic and prayer-like. A glyph is the smallest particle of sorts in language, but this is a painting whose meaning I am not sure of.
When I paint, things happen on the canvas that just seem to work or resonate. Early in my painting career, I would recognize this in small aspects of my paintings, but I knew from the work of others that it was possible to make an entire work resonate. I now believe that what I think of as “resonance” is linked to what are essentially narratives: the way an understanding and interpretation of the past and present blend with individual vision. The reason an explanation eluded me for so long is that I was looking for an art-specific explanation. It turns out resonance is not limited to art. I have heard people who work in a trade describe coming upon the work of someone who had come before them, an electrician encountering a nested group of expertly bent conduit, for example, or a pipefitter finding a complex but functional array of pipes. They will marvel at the skill and craft of this unknown person who preceded them. There is, of course, a kind of beauty to masterful work like this, but it is more than beauty—it is deep appreciation of the creative achievement of that bent conduit, an appreciation that perhaps only a member of the electrical trade would have. This, to me, is resonance. The electrician looking at that installation of conduit recognizes the history of craft in his or her trade, the current state of the trade, and how those influence the vision of sorts of the person who carries on the work. Similarly, in poetry, dance, music, art, crafts, whatever, I believe the confluence of the past, the present, and individual vision are what make a work resonate. Resonance has in turn influenced my understanding of the different facets of my own spiritual life, intellectual pursuits, and art practice. Taking communion, reading an essay, and responding to the arts all combine to form the structure and set the course of my art.
CAPTIONS
Matthew Plescher
If You Want Justice, Work for Beauty
Matthew Plescher
detail, Glyphs
Oil on canvas
22” x 30”
Matthew Plescher
detail, First Gospel
Oil on panel
24” x 48”
Matthew Plescher
Transitions 4 (kindled)
Oil on canvas
40” x 40”
Matthew Plescher
Palette
Matthew Plescher
Sing to the Lord
Matthew Plescher
A Voice Says Cry Out
Matthew Plescher
Detail, Psalm 13
Oil on canvas
36” x 36”
So, instead of applying to graduate schools, I moved to Alaska. I was not just running away from academia; I have a great love for the outdoors and I spent many hours in the backcountry hiking and skiing. However, after a few years of not really thinking at all about art, I made a serious decision to pursue painting. I am not certain what exactly moved me in this direction—God’s quiet calling, perhaps? Landscape painting seemed an obvious choice given the location. Thus began my journey into making art.
My college studies served me well in that I had a firm foundation in the art that came before me. However, an unexpected consequence of beginning to practice art after serious art historical study was finding the need to look again at all the art I had studied, but with new eyes. This re-experiencing of art occurred in the stacks of the Anchorage library (this was before the days of the Google image search). I found that every time I experienced a painting epiphany, I wanted to go back and look at everything again. I also began to engage all the current work I could—everything from regional work in Alaska to what was happening in the larger art centers in Los Angeles, New York, and so on. With the internet, this became increasingly easy to do.
The stories I had learned about the art of the past, the stories being told about contemporary art, and my own nascent artistic vision began to combine in complex ways. I realized that my painting craft benefitted from knowing about the rich history of art that came before me, but it also ran the risk of being overly influenced by the past. Additionally, I began to notice how artists would sometimes blindly jump on current art trends, thinking they were innovating only because they had no idea what had come before. I also realized that artistic vision has its own accompanying risk: that of being so obtuse that the viewer cannot fathom what you are saying.
When I began to show my landscape paintings, I learned that there were some specific things viewers looked for, expected, and reacted to in landscape. There is a hunger for beauty and the sublime—concepts I knew the art world had moved away from, but that I would routinely encounter in talking to viewers. The plein air movement in landscape painting puts a premium on this response, emphasizing dramatic color and lighting effects. It is relatively easy to paint this way, and I have completed a few paintings along these lines, but I always find an emptiness about them. I began to realize that the reason I was drawn to landscape painting was not due to color or drama, but instead about how I respond to place.
A deeper exploration of my response to place came about after I had returned to Michigan and was painting very different motifs than those I had painted while in Alaska. These were the broad rural landscapes of my youth. In Michigan, the tamed and the untamed are often in close proximity, the forest bordering the field. I found that this contrast had a close correlation to ideas about place and placelessness I was encountering in geographers such as Yi-Fu Tuan and Edward Relph. I also discovered painting rural Michigan landscapes came with an increased danger of nostalgia. Many viewers have sentimental affection for certain places, often tied up with wistful memories of the past. Painters who focus on nostalgia are essentially fantasy painters, conjuring up visions of towns and farms of the past with the aim to validate the imagined memory of the viewer.
I wanted to find a way to paint landscapes that would avoid the superficial beauty of plein air and the fiction of nostalgia painting, but that would still show my response to place in a way that was understandable to viewers. Part of the solution came from changing the way I gathered reference material. I do not work outside; rather, I use photo references in the studio to create my paintings. Driving around the rural countryside, I found myself unwittingly falling into framing my photos in nostalgic ways. I discovered one way to prevent this was to stop composing the reference photos; instead, I started driving with the passenger window open and just held the camera up and took photos as I drove. As a result, I began to see shapes and patterns in the landscape that were not contrived. To combat the plein air look, I also stopped painting alla prima and started working with layers of transparent paint. This resulted in the production of paintings that felt like the places to which I was drawn, yet filtered through my own vision.
Another change that has occurred in my painting practice is the way I approach color and pigments—a result of a long journey through the thickets of color theory. Every book on painting has a section on color theory, and I eventually realized that for something that was being presented as factual, the suggestions for color mixing varied significantly and often did not pan out in the studio. Deeper digging revealed a progression of writers since the time of Newton trying to make color mixing fit into a tidy system of mixing charts and formulas. However, there always seemed to be groups of colors that were conveniently ignored, green-golds and ochres for example, which do not fit nicely into any color wheel. Also, colors placed geometrically on a wheel look nice but are terrible predictors of a mixing outcome. I finally realized that no mixing system was going to describe perfectly what was happening on my palette, mainly because the theories could not account for the way actual pigments interacted with each other. I decided instead to produce my own charts, and embarked on a grueling project of mixing all my pigments with each other and with white, producing hundreds of color cards. As a result of this exercise, I no longer think much about color wheels and systems. Instead, I lay out my paint randomly on my palette wherever there is space. As far as pigment choices go, most of my landscapes have employed traditional pigments—cadmiums, cerulean blue, viridian, etc. However, in the last few years, I have wanted cleaner, brighter color and I have and moved to modern pigments, such as naphthol and quinacridone red, azo yellow, and phthalo blues.
Before I began painting in Alaska, I held a number of jobs, one of which was as an apprentice sign painter. There, I was taught the traditional skills of hand lettering. I have recently begun to work with the lettering brush again. I initially began by lettering random quotes and phrases but eventually moved to scripture. I had become a Christian late in my college days, but had not really felt a connection between my faith and art. I never saw this as something lacking, considering myself a Christian artist, not an artist making Christian art. However, the lettering has provided a concrete way to link my faith with my art, and is interesting new artistic territory for me.
Initially, the lettering was just to be a brief break from painting after completing a series of landscape paintings. However, it has instead developed into a parallel path to my painting practice. I have taken the same approach I had learned in painting to develop it: looking to the past, looking at what is happening in contemporary calligraphy and lettering, and working to try to develop a unique voice.
I am left-handed, which is a bit of a handicap for a calligrapher. I can use traditional nib pens, but they feel clumsy. Besides using brushes, which are relatively forgiving to left-handers, I have also incorporated ruling pens, instruments initially used by draftsmen to make straight lines, but now used for creative potential by calligraphers.
When I felt drawn to paint again, a natural direction seemed to be to combine the two streams. Instead of going directly back to landscape painting, I decided to try to incorporate my lettering into paintings. This ultimately resulted in an artistic exploration into my relationship with scripture. First Gospel is the beginning of the Gospel of Matthew lettered with a brush in Syriac script. A fourth-century Syriac New Testament manuscript was used as the source. Layers of paint were then built up over the lettering, sometimes left as applied, other times scraped and sanded back. As areas of text became obliterated with paint, they were painstakingly lettered again with the brush, in some places multiple times. The painting is confessional. Scripture sometimes feels emotionally close to me; other times it can feel cold and distant. Modern translations can at times make scripture seem artificially close, masking the fact that the words come to us over great distances of time and through many translations. As I worked on these paintings, I felt a tension between the readily understandable and unknowable mystery. In Glyphs the text is from the Great Isaiah Scroll, part of the Dead Sea Scrolls. I broke apart the Hebrew letters from the first four verses of Isaiah 53 into separate glyphs and lettered them onto the canvas. As with First Gospel, the characters were lettered, then paint built up over them until they were almost obliterated, and then lettered again. Eventually, the process of lettering became nearly automatic and prayer-like. A glyph is the smallest particle of sorts in language, but this is a painting whose meaning I am not sure of.
When I paint, things happen on the canvas that just seem to work or resonate. Early in my painting career, I would recognize this in small aspects of my paintings, but I knew from the work of others that it was possible to make an entire work resonate. I now believe that what I think of as “resonance” is linked to what are essentially narratives: the way an understanding and interpretation of the past and present blend with individual vision. The reason an explanation eluded me for so long is that I was looking for an art-specific explanation. It turns out resonance is not limited to art. I have heard people who work in a trade describe coming upon the work of someone who had come before them, an electrician encountering a nested group of expertly bent conduit, for example, or a pipefitter finding a complex but functional array of pipes. They will marvel at the skill and craft of this unknown person who preceded them. There is, of course, a kind of beauty to masterful work like this, but it is more than beauty—it is deep appreciation of the creative achievement of that bent conduit, an appreciation that perhaps only a member of the electrical trade would have. This, to me, is resonance. The electrician looking at that installation of conduit recognizes the history of craft in his or her trade, the current state of the trade, and how those influence the vision of sorts of the person who carries on the work. Similarly, in poetry, dance, music, art, crafts, whatever, I believe the confluence of the past, the present, and individual vision are what make a work resonate. Resonance has in turn influenced my understanding of the different facets of my own spiritual life, intellectual pursuits, and art practice. Taking communion, reading an essay, and responding to the arts all combine to form the structure and set the course of my art.
CAPTIONS
Matthew Plescher
If You Want Justice, Work for Beauty
Matthew Plescher
detail, Glyphs
Oil on canvas
22” x 30”
Matthew Plescher
detail, First Gospel
Oil on panel
24” x 48”
Matthew Plescher
Transitions 4 (kindled)
Oil on canvas
40” x 40”
Matthew Plescher
Palette
Matthew Plescher
Sing to the Lord
Matthew Plescher
A Voice Says Cry Out
Matthew Plescher
Detail, Psalm 13
Oil on canvas
36” x 36”