Dylan Critchfield-Sales

Painting to me is about engaging with my surroundings through the act of observation. ‘Painting is a matter of impulse. It is a matter of getting out to nature and having some joy in registering it’ (Hawthorne). It is essentially a way of translating visual sensation through use of shape, color and value. In perceptual painting there is no need for predetermined concepts or formulaic systems. It is always an attempt to convey the truth of one’s visual experience.

Over the past several years I have developed a strong interest in the work of Edwin Dickinson and Giorgio Morandi and the connection between their work and the work of Corot. The idea of distilling the act of painting to the purely responsive single sitting painting is tremendously appealing to me. The limited approach facilitates work. This can only be achieved through an acceptance of failure and a release of all preconceived notions about what it is you are observing and how you think it should appear.

The philosophy of direct painting that is common to Dickinson, Morandi and Corot which was clarified by Charles Hawthorne is one that works under the assumption that people are interested in the expression of beauty and that, if they could, they would experience a form of expressionism that ‘makes them believe in the beauty and glory of human existence.’ In his book Hawthorne on Painting he wrote that ‘the vision of the artist is the vision to see and the ability to tell the world something that it unconsciously thinks about nature. He must show people more than they already see and he must show them so much human sympathy and understanding that they will recognize it as if they themselves had seen the beauty and the glory. It is our job to tell the world something about these things that it has not known before, some impression that we alone have received.’

Working from simplistic subject matter allows me to focus on color and tonal relationships as well as the particular way that forms fit together within the picture plane. I think that painting at its best is about the experience of painting itself and the nature of the artist’s perception. In certain instances I have also worked from fictional sources such as Alfred Hitchcock films in order to introduce a subtle psychological aspect and to achieve somewhat antiquated aesthetic.

The work in this show spans the past two to three years. The earliest work is from my final year of undergraduate at The Maryland Institute College of Art and the latest work was done within the past few months during my first year of graduate school at Indiana University, Bloomington.