McGuffey October 2023 from Alan Kindler

Opening Statement - It’s a Question, really.

Artists work and grow in the realms of craft, content and connection.

Craft - Although I didn’t have the opportunity to make oil paintings until my late-fifties, I’ve always been fascinated by the skills needed to create the optical illusion of realism, by the ability to create images on a two-dimensional surface that appear to be in a three-dimensional space. So I’m learning the lessons of realism from studying the ‘tricks of the eye’ employed by painters from any era in which they appear, wherever I can find them.

Content - I’ve spent many years engaging with groups in Jungian-based projective dream work, a practice in which we cultivate our dreaming and explore the psyche’s development. Each of us has our own encyclopedia of symbols alongside the archetypes of our larger culture. In painting I let the imagery, composition and objects arise from the unconscious as when dreaming. Like a dream, the meaning resides as much in the relationship between the symbols as in those objects. Also, what’s most important in a dream is the emotional content, something that can be nuanced and changing within a dream. The story of a dream is often non-linear, non-rational and absurd. Sometimes it reveals parts of ourselves that we’re uncomfortable with. I let the paintings tell their own narrative, make visible my obscure inner landscape and so instruct me. A painting is an artifact of one moment in the artists existence and of the culture in which they're embedded. When we bring the inside to the outside as we do when making art there's an element of self awareness and an element of self-discovery.

Connection - To connect is the primary impulse in my urge to paint and occurs with every mentor, model, gallerist, supplier, sitter, collaborator, student, client or follower. The ‘viewer’, in whatever role, is invited to connect, to project into the painting their own symbol language and to feel in response to the work. In dream groups, when reflecting back to a dreamer about a shared dream, we say, “If that were my dream…” and relate our own experience of that dream. In this way we have ‘aha’ moments of insight. The most rewarding connection I have with a viewer is by inviting them to say, “If that were my painting…” and to talk about their emotional responses, to compare our sometimes very different inner landscapes. These connections find their way into the new work. So, more than making a statement, I’m asking: on seeing, what do you feel?

Viewer Advisory: This exhibition contains nudity, language, monsters, bright colors, dancing, molten lava, hummingbirds, whales, longing, classical architecture, blood, the Earth, insects, unresolved complexes, weightlessness, hermaphrodites, shadows, the Moon, bones, my baggage, your baggage, a covid mask, stairs, knowing looks, starfish, redheads, dismemberment, birds, peril, clouds, a red blanket, claws, turtles, infinity, electronic devices, melancholy, feces, painter’s tape, butterflies, ecstasy, microbes, cephalopods, coral, clouds, flowers, confusion, oceans, seahorses, baldness and possibly other elements that the viewer may find disturbing or delightful.