Clovis Blackwell
Pasadena, CA
Exploring suffering, perseverance, and transformation through multiple original artworks, serigraph prints, and cast sculptures.
MessageClovis Blackwell is an interdisciplinary artist with expertise in screenprinting. His work explores themes of suffering, perseverance, and transformation, and is regularly exhibited in Southern California and internationally. Juried competitions and group shows includes at the Kennedy Center Terrace Gallery in Washington, D.C. and the World Financial Center Gallery in New York City. He received his BFA from San Francisco Art Institute in 1999, MFA from Azusa Pacific University in 2009, and has taught printmaking for many years. Blackwell is a juried member of both the Los Angeles Art Association and the Los Angeles Printmaking Society. He owns and operates Fleur de Boom Editions, a publisher of limited edition fine art serigraph prints. Find out more at www.clovisblackwell.com.
A studio visit is available by appointment, please e-mail [email protected] to schedule.
Statement
Themes of suffering, perseverance, and transformation are central to my artistic identity. I investigate these themes through the interlaced images of mushroom clouds and flowers in my collections, Emanations: Come On, Heaven Awaits! (i.e., Sometimes You Have to Go in Even When It’s Scary), and Dissolutions: Where Do We Go from Here.
This examination of apocalyptic myths grows out of my childhood fascination with post-apocalyptic sci-fi. I see the apocalypse not as the end of all things, but as a central metaphor for the cycle of life, death, and rebirth. I’ve come to understand the significance of these myths as a means of reckoning the passage of one thing or state into another. Embracing change is a concept too often resisted by individuals who are reluctant to pay the often high emotional price for transformation. Images of cave entrances, flowers, and nuclear weapons tests layered in vibrant and colorful intersections aim to generate multiple associations, opening up the appealing possibilities of the transformative, the life in death, the creation in destruction.
As an interdisciplinary artist, I enjoy the thrill of mastering new media and discovering the unique context each brings to the themes I am exploring. Through screenprinting I explore pattern and repetition, facsimile and simulacra, and the order found in randomness and have found the transformative possibilities of these elements in the beaded curtains I have recently begun making as well.