Press

Douglas Sanderson Expands his Range with Exhibit at William Busta Gallery

December 23, 2009

BY DAN TRANBERG / SPECIAL TO THE PLAIN DEALER

From a distance, Douglas Sanderson’s newest paintings could be stained-glass windows for a state-of-the-art, postmodern cathedral. With their byzantine geometric networks of wavy lines and eye-popping patchworks of neon hues, they are as awe inspiring as they are optically electrifying.

Up close, the paintings — which are executed on large sheets of frosted Mylar in layers of oil and water-based paints — have significantly different connotations. Painted on both the front and back sides of the Mylar sheets, they are surprisingly tactile, rich with signs of Sanderson’s unique painterly process.

The result of two years of studio work, Sanderson’s current solo exhibition at the William Busta Gallery, “Arcane Image 2009,” is a true progression of his earlier “Arcane Images,” which were shown at Busta in a 2007 solo exhibition. Sanderson has expanded his range of paint surfaces, lending his otherwise graphical images a palpable sense of physicality.

Made without the use of masking tape, Sanderson’s wildly intricate linear patterns are painted with long, flowing brushstrokes. The artist uses only templates of his own creation to guide and steady his hand.

Some areas of color are done with watery paint that produces loose, organic surfaces. These areas at times resemble milky swirls of decorative glass — enhancing the reference to stained-glass windows but also strengthening the sense that Sanderson is pushing to expand the possible manifestations of his material within the confines of his format.

With 12 large-scale works hung on three walls, and one wall densely mounted with 18 small prints, the Busta Gallery appears a bit like a showroom for Oriental rugs — a reference that does little harm to Sanderson’s paintings. But it’s difficult not to imagine the experience of seeing the pieces surrounded by more abundant white space.

At the same time, a more modest display of Sanderson’s large paintings might not convey the importance of pattern and repetition in his work. In both his process and his imagery, he asserts a sense of meditative ritual — a connotation that evokes centuries of artistic practice in Asian and Islamic cultures.

In more recent terms, a clear point of reference is a lesser-known art movement born in the 1970s and ’80s called “Pattern and Decoration,” or “P&D,” in which artists in both New York and California drew freely on traditional crafts such as textiles and tile work, especially those of Eastern cultures. Artists Miriam Shapiro and Robert Kushner are among the movement’s most visible practitioners.

As a touchstone, the P&D movement lends Sanderson’s work a significant art-historical context in which aspects of traditional crafts that are commonly taken for granted can be reconsidered for their intellectual and psychological potential.

Removed as they are from any practical applications, Sanderson’s paintings do not function like rugs or windows. Instead, they tease the mind with these associations.

Similarly, the artist explains in a statement for the show that his imagery is derived in part from Indian, Chinese and tantric diagrammatic drawings and paintings from the 10th through the 15th centuries. Divorced from their original purpose, such images have far broader connotations.

For instance, the central form in all of Sanderson’s works references a diagram of the network of chakras along the human spine according to several Eastern belief systems.

As an abstract form, Sanderson’s vertical column of rounded shapes is vaguely human, recalling another source for the artist: Leonardo da Vinci’s famous drawing “The Vitruvian Man,” depicting a nude male figure with outstretched arms, centered within a circle and a square.

In Sanderson’s work, the reference translates abstractly to a scenario in which humanity is integrated into an environment from which it is sometimes only barely separable.

Considering the tremendous range of Sanderson’s influences — cultural, geographical and historical — his work seems to speak to a broad and inclusive spectrum of humanistic philosophies, making his title, “Arcane Image,” perhaps the only part of his remarkable project that needs revision.

Douglas Sanderson’s Arcane Image Series on view at William Busta Gallery

January 05, 2008

BY STEVEN LITT, THE PLAIN DEALER

I’t's time to readjust the hierarchy among Cleveland artists. Douglas Sanderson, a soft-spoken adjunct assistant professor at Kent State University, absolutely ranks as one of the very best painters in the region. His current one-person exhibition at Cleveland’s William Busta Gallery, his first in five years, shows why.

The exhibit consists of 15 large, brilliantly colored geometric abstractions that look like the result of a cross-breeding experiment between medieval Christian stained-glass windows and medieval Islamic textiles or decorative tiles.

Arrayed on the white walls of Busta’s galleries, the abstractions create a radiant atmosphere, as if the space had suddenly become charged by a sacred presence. All are part of the artist’s “Arcane Image Series,” and all are titled only by numbers, which focuses attention on what’s going on visually.

If anything is being worshipped here, it’s the ability of the eye to experience infinite gradations of color, especially when two or more hues are placed next to one another in ways that accentuate the intensity of each. Sanderson’s tangy, eye-jangling variations exploit the fact that when warm and cool tones rub up against one another, magic can result.

The paintings emit a luminosity that derives solely from the interaction of color. Acid greens smolder against spicy oranges. Icy, electric blues scintillate against sweet, juicy pinks and hot yellows. The mood is tropical, and at times even gaudy.

But while Sanderson’s colors evoke an optical ecstasy, they are always kept in check by elaborate geometries — and by the artist’s precise and meticulous handling of paint.

The paintings, all of which measure 67 inches high by 30 inches across, are organized with a regular framework of continuous S-curves, painted in thin bands of color, which overlap to create repeated diamond and leaf shapes. Sanderson uses one set of colors to define this linear framework and contrasting hues to fill the spaces between, which resemble panes of stained glass.

In the center of each rectangular field, Sanderson has further complicated his compositions by overlaying a series of overlapping leaf patterns inspired by Hindu or Buddhist concepts of the seven “chakras” or energy centers believed to exist in the human body.

Sanderson, who spoke about the paintings recently in an interview, said his use of symbolism associated with Asian religions comes from his interest in Theosophy, the belief system founded in the late 19th century by the Russian mystic Helena Blavatsky, which holds that all religions hold a portion of a greater truth.

But Sanderson also said he doesn’t intend for the paintings to be read in a religious context. What matters most about the chakra patterns is that they add a higher degree of complexity to the central portions of his paintings, where the additional linear patterns overlap with the field of leaf and diamond shapes.

At times, the chakra patterns float above the adjacent colors and patterns, and at times they merge into them. In all cases, however, the effect is like that of the central medallions or motifs found in elaborately woven Oriental rugs.

While it’s tempting to seek narrative meanings in the paintings, they ultimately resist such interpretation. The more you look, the more you realize they are purely visual abstractions that have grown out of their own internal logic.

Current exhibition a breakthrough
It’s surprising that Sanderson has opted to paint such complex geometric patterns, because this is not where he was, artistically speaking, when he resumed painting in Cleveland in the early 1990s after what might be described as a midlife crisis.

Born in Cleveland in 1942, Sanderson earned a bachelor of arts degree in 1964 at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh and a master of fine arts degree from the University of Texas at Austin in 1966. After teaching at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Sanderson moved to New York in 1970, where he enjoyed early success as a Minimalist painter associated with the leading artists Robert Ryman and Robert Mangold.

Showing his work regularly at important galleries in New York and Europe, Sanderson became known for paintings that juxtaposed luminous blocks of subtly toned color. In 1989, a warehouse fire in upstate New York destroyed much of his previous work. He returned to Cleveland a year later and took a teaching job at KSU. After a hiatus from the studio, he also resumed painting.

Since then, Sanderson has been a fairly quiet presence on Greater Cleveland’s artistic scene. He’s had shows three times since 1993, twice with Busta and once at the Firelands Association for the Visual Arts in Oberlin. Every show has been memorable, but the current exhibition, which expands on complex geometric patterns that first began to appear in the Oberlin show in 2002, is a breakthrough in a long and very distinguished career.

It should be said that while the paintings can seem flat and schematic in reproduction, they don’t seem at all that way in person.

Small variations in the thickness of the paint he uses show that Sanderson’s amazingly precise paintings are made by hand. Over the decades, he’s perfected ways of painting curved and sharp-edged stripes and blocks of color by using special tools of his own creation. The visible brushstrokes add to their impact by imparting a vitality and sense of touch that is essential to their overall impact.

The Busta gallery adds to the excellence of the occasion with a small companion exhibition of outstanding drawings in colored inks by Wendy Collin Sorin, in which thousands of tiny triangles of pure, bright color create abstract images that crackle with energy. At times, Sorin’s drawings resemble textiles. At other times, they seem to have emerged from some inscrutable scientific process, like readouts from scanning devices aimed at distant stars.

Sanderson, though, is the real star here. If his current show were held in New York’s Chelsea gallery district, he’d be getting more attention than he’s received so far locally.

A word to the wise: See the show at Busta before you start reading about Sanderson elsewhere. The exhibition is a major achievement and a new milestone for one of the most important artists in Greater Cleveland.