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Miscelànea-J.W. Stewart

Échanges de correspondences avec l'artiste

 

 

M. Stewart est un artiste fascinant avec qui j'ai eu des échanges par courriel.  À travers ces échanges, vous allez comprendre pourquoi je l'aime. En anglais. Son site, ici, lui, est bilingue.

 

 

 

Heidi

Here are my questions. Just answer the ones you feel like answering.

What techniques do you use today—how have they evolved-changed?

Why do you use these materials? What do they allow you to do?

Do you create the images you use?

Why did you begin by including words-text into your art?

What role does text-words play in the images you create?

How would you describe the worlds you create?

Are there some authors whose work resonate more with you?

What themes come back?

Tell me a bit about your book-is it about image, text, story or experience? How do you bring it together?

Your book-is there only one copy?

 

Anything else that you would like to tell me about your process?

 

 

Thank you,

 

 

Heidi

 

JW Stewart

Heidi,

I'm not sure I can answer them all. The thing is that, as in my work, everything is complicated and I tend toward an oblique approach to any question, one that calls on a lot of disparate elements. I could go on at length about any of these topics but to write it all out is, I'm sorry, a lot of work, a lot to ask. Each of the questions would need an essay to fully answer and I tend to abhor half-measures in certain things. I mean can I get course credit, too?

 

One way to begin would be to direct you to an essay/text/or whatever I wrote on of the use of text in one of my pieces that's on the writings/bio section of my site, "Painters are to be blamed"

http://www.jwstewart.net/painters/index.html

It recounts how I arrived at one of the texts in a piece, or a group of pieces, that particular piece is a very text oriented concept. It's just as much of a text piece as a visual art piece. Call it a hybrid. But this text doesn't directly address your questions about the use of text in my work. How it began and what role it plays.

 

As a matter of fact a lot of my work is, and aims to be, a hybrid of one sort or another. I hung out with poets and writers a lot when I was younger but it really began earlier than that. My father was the Chief of Bureau for Quebec of the Canadian Press and the head of Service in French. There were of discussions around the dinner table about words and a variety of topics. There was also a lot of getting down the dictionary or the encyclopedia to look up word meanings and origins, to explore the differences and similarities between english and french and generally about various tidbits of knowledge. One wall of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves handy in the dining room. We often had guests to dinner, particularly as it happens, foreign students (my mother worked at McGill and volunteered as a liaison to foreign students, offering a chance to spend some time with families and get out of the academic milieu and their dorms) many from far away places, and my father would ask them all about themselves and their countries. (listen, you asked for how it began and for me there's no simple  — it began on November 23rd, 1977 at 6:00 pm … it's all or nothing.) He would in essence interview them, gently. I think it started there.

When I was a art student, long before I settled on my style I used words and letters in my stuff. One early influence was Larry Rivers who was much more prominent in the 1960's than he is now remembered. He used words in his work. Rauschenberg and then Jasper Johns gradually supplanted him in my regard and they, especially Johns, used text. This tendency always resurfaces in my work.

As well when I began using early color photocopiers you couldn't flop or mirror-image images, so if you made a transfer of some text it transferred down backwards and it occurred to me that  that was like Leonardo Da Vinci's backward manuscripts and I thought that was a cool reference and exploited it. You could get around this but sometimes I didn't want to.

In some instances I wanted the viewer to read the text and in others I just wanted it to be a formal element, to say to the viewer 'this is text, just some text, right about here' so that I could have substituted gobbledygook or the word 'text' repeated over and over. In certain instances I used text copied directly from its source, in others I wrote and typeset the text myself. In other words there was no rule, there was no one way I did and do things. I know critics, curators and historians want to nail things down, figure it out, define it. So at times I'll just throw something in I liked, I'll include a text or quotation that I think is significant, either in the context of the piece or generally philosophically.

Sometimes I'll compose a text, sometimes I'll write a story. Sometimes the text I write will just be a thing I include that has nothing to do with the main thrust of the piece. I want the viewer to read it but it's not the point of the piece. Other times the text is a story that will be the point of the piece and the imagery is be subordinate to the text. At other times the images and text work together. Like a kids' book but for big kids, like, adult sized. At least it's intended to be.

Okay, I got carried away, does that answer any of your questions?

 

I've numbered the questions. The answer to #1 would be long, as above. #2 would be long or part of #1. #3 wouldn't be too, too long. I hope I answered #'s 4 & 5 above. I think I have a text around somewhere that deals with #6 pretty well. I'll see if I can find it.. The answer to #8 is: all of them and any that haven't are welcome to anytime. Answer to first part of #9 is: yup! And to second part is: somehow or other I seem to manage it. As to #10, If you're referring to 'A Story' it's not the only book I've made. I also have worked a lot on book cover illustration and design and I've made a number of what bare called 'artist's books'. Most are framed open and the viewer is intended to see only one spread. A piece consisting of a spread open book. A Story is the only book intended to be leafed through and read. However I have illustrated books for publishers, that is done multiple illustrations to accompany the text in a book.

 

 

 

Heidi

 

Wow!  Thank you.

It's interesting-my professor did not ask us to interview the artists for this project. He wanted us to simply look at images and figure out why we liked them. So an art critic I am not.  But after taking the initiative to contact some of the artists I am featuring-I am very happy. The artists have so much more to say, and it is way more interesting than anything I can say.This is all good. I am lucky that you took the time to answer some of my questions.Thank you again.Heidi

 

 

J.W. Stewart

Heidi,

 

When you say that what the artists have to say is more interesting than anything you would say I have to point out that most artists will tell you, and anyone else, that they don't necessarily want to direct the viewer toward any specific meaning but want the viewer to run with it and decide or dream up their own interpretations.

 

That's what I want. I want to conjure dreams, or at least daydreams. I want to arrest what was preoccupying a given viewer and distract them. You know the word muse, as a verb. Make up stories, wonder about this or that detail or colour, you know, musings. Just to stop them for even a moment and get them to change mental course. That's as much as I can expect, that's what I can contribute. A bit of free-range musing.

 

So I think probably all the artists you ask would also like to hear your thoughts as a viewer (not to put you on the spot.)

 

Heidi

Well-I remember seeing your art from the street through the window of a gallery I did not dare enter. That was probably 20 years ago. I remember standing there, staring. I had never seen anything like it. It was enchanting and troubling and moving all at once. And new for me (I knew and loved the classics like Van Gogh, and Rousseau, and Gauguin, and group of seven). Then I moved on with my day. But it had an impact on me subconsciously-because after that, I became drawn to images that integrate words and different materials. It's just recently, while doing this exercise, that your name popped back into my memory and the puzzle of my interests clicked into place. So your work, through its beauty and mystery and intelligence worked its magic on me for years, without my being aware of it.

What I think about your work--you're like a hybrid of Borges (the writer) and da Vinci, with a modern twist. So I love it.That's about what I will say in the text on your web page that will accompany your text.Heidi

 

J.W. Stewart

Well, Heidi,

 

If you'd like you could come to the studio for a visit and bring yourself up to date with the current state of my work.