Calendars: Dave Thomas and Pete Grady
March 11-April 29, 2011
Rosenthal Art Gallery, The College of Idaho
The works of Dave Thomas and Pete Grady may seem at first glance to have little in common. Thomas paints in a fluid gestural style on surfaces that have been built up with layer upon layer of spray paint. He favors latex house paints, occasionally uses roofing tar and likes to draw on polypropylene. His color range is simple—white, black, the primaries, plus occasional shades of green. The surface of his works is active and textured. Grady works are digitally composed photomontages that juxtapose and overlay images that he has either taken or found. The images are mounted on Alumacore sheets and their surfaces are perfectly smooth. Sometimes the images bleed into one another and the color range is wide. Thomas’ work is generally large, although he makes many small studies, and Grady’s works, while quite large from the perspective of a photographer or printmaker, are smaller than Thomas’.
Yet there are some important similarities. Both artists make works that have considerable visual presence. Both are concerned with painterly issues; although Grady’s work is photo-based he has produced multi-paneled acrylic paintings, drawing and mixed media work and maintains that he thinks like a painter. Both artists employ segmented compositions consisting of interlocking shapes that often interpenetrate one another (as in Grady’s) or are linked by the dynamic nature of the lines dividing the segments (as in Thomas’). There is also a common concern with overlaying—layers of paint and layers of imagery—which brings in the element of time. This is alluded to in Grady’s work through the inclusion of historical photos (the Hindenberg disaster, Raphael's drawings, family snapshots, etc) and in Thomas’ through the building up of paint layers to form a sort of painterly stratigraphy. He developed this practice when he discovered he liked the underlying textures that appeared when he recycled old canvases, also a process of covering the old with the new. The works in is large series, Timelines, are titled by the date on which they were completed.
It was this suggestion of time passing that prompted the show title, Calendars. On a superficial level, both bodies of work in this show are arranged somewhat like the calendar, on an actual or implied grid. It is significant that we tend to take calendars for granted, even as (or because) they dominate our lives. Of course, a calendar is more than just a tool for tracking time; it is also an ideological construct. It is an agenda. Both artists work in ways that seem to relate this idea: Grady through his witty, sometimes slyly subversive juxtaposition of historical images; Thomas through the way he sets shapes in tension with an implied pictorial grid (one of his series is called Grid Paintings) and blocks them out the way we might block out days or weeks in our planners—circling some dates, and scribbling out or highlighting others—prioritizing time according to our obligations, needs and desires. Each picture, titled by its date, seems a record of that day’s pictorial events and decisions, even if the actual time spent making the picture exceeded a single day.
Thomas and Grady are both well informed about, and engaged in a dialogue with the art historical traditions in which their works are rooted. Both are strongly marked by their artistic education in California, where Grady studied drawing and painting at the Pasadena City College before working as a photographer for NASA, and Thomas received his BFA and MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. One of Grady’s works not in the exhibition is titled Claude’s Most Excellent View, a reference to the Claude Glass—a viewing glass popular in the 18th century that allowed devotees of the picturesque to frame vistas in nature so that they would resemble works by the 17th-century landscapist, Claude Lorraine. The Claude Glass is a forbearer of the Kodak Instamatic and of the tradition of photo-based imagery that emerged very strongly since the 1960s in the works of artists like James Rosenquist, Dennis Oppenheim and John Baldessari. Thomas’s vigorous gestural style evokes the New York School abstractionists and the pictographic imagery of artists like Adolph Gottlieb. The way Thomas’ layers of paint are built up has some affinities with the abstractions of Franz Kline and the Process Art of the late 1960s and early 70s. His use of sign-like elements—x-shapes, squiggles and dots that sit on a stark white ground—suggests a familiarity with structuralist theories that were so interesting to many artists in the 1970s when he was completing his graduate work. At the very least, these signs convey a sense of conceptual rigor.
Both artists project a sense of immediacy, even playfulness, in the facture and composition of their works. This is striking in Grady’s work, because technically sophisticated photo-based works can sometimes seem labored, but his do not. Stumpteenth, for example, vibrates with energy despite the fact that its subject, a tree stump, is intrinsically squat and immovable. Thomas’s work brings to mind Paul Klee’s advice to his Bauhaus students that they should “take a line for a walk,” to find out where it might lead them. This is particularly noticeable in his small mixed-media studies on polypropylene. In Thomas’s case, the walk is a brisk one—sometimes a sprint. His racing lines contrast with the more leisurely lines formed by the dribbles of paint he allows to run down his canvas, their lengths determined by the volume of the loaded brush and the drying time of the paint. Some of these dribbles run horizontally or upwards because Thomas sometimes rotates his canvas as he works on it. He allows these controlled accidents to provide a subtle counterpoint to his vigorous compositions.
The advantages of a show of this sort is that it allows one to tease out affinities between two artists whose work does seem at first blush very different. Pleasurable as this is, it is important also to avoid reducing their work to a sum of commonalities. The visual drama of the show is in part a function of the contrasts between two strong bodies of work.
Garth Claassen
Assistant Professor of Art and Gallery Director
College of Idaho, Caldwell, ID
