ARTIST STATEMENT
Marsden Hartley dubbed it “mountain madness.” I do have mountain madness like Paul (Cezanne) and Georgia (O’Keefe). Painting mountains means climbing mountains for one reason—because they are there! Because one is never finished, there are always new angles and vistas, different horizons and planes and a different light. And the mountain is also a metaphor … Painting mountains is related to calligraphy which is simultaneously sign and symbol. How much can I reduce the composition without loosing the message? Clouds and rain are neither decoration nor representation. I use silhouettes and pencil zig and zag to get movement. There is therefore no good reason for the illusion of a three-dimensional space on a flat piece of paper---the space is in between the marks.
Norbert Voelkel
Bareiss Gallery | 15 State Rd 150 | PO Box 3366 Taos NM 87571 | 575-776-2284
Norbert Voelkel
2016 Exhibit
CUBED & unCUBED
Larry Bell — Norbert Voelkel
Measure what can be measured. — Galileo Galilei
Make visible what can be made visible. The job of the artist is to make visible.
This requires
SEEING AS IF FOR THE FIRST TIME.
Larry Bell told me how he discovered the cube one day in his Venice studio: a covered up sky light—when uncovered—was the jolt that soon lead to the glass cubes. He was seeing the cube for the first time.
Larry and I have a few things in common: we are in a similar age group and we are both alchemists, we like to make things.
In alchemy ,the philosopher’s stone was said to transmute base metals into gold—and hold the key to eternal life.
And then there are differences.
Larry is famous—I am not.
He is a stickler for details, he is a perfectionist—
I am rather sloppy, my art teacher took my ruler away, and in my research work it was better if a hypothesis did not stand or fall with the strict adherence to nasty little details—and when the experiments were not tightly controlled.
The more controlled the experiments the less the data were representative and generalizable.
I had arrived at the ‘cube’ stage after the work on ‘stripes’ and ‘squares’.
The cube was the logical next step. The problem to solve is how to work with three-dimensional structures on canvas or paper.
When JS Bach wrote the cello suites, he was unemployed. For sometime he did not have to write church music. He wanted to figure out what the cello can do—this exploration covers the first three suites—and then in the suites four, five and six, Bach started to apply alchemy, he started to experiment with sounds and tone sequences; he wanted to show what the cello cannot do, but what in his mind ,it should be able to do.
CUBED and unCUBED demonstrates some of the things the cube can do, for example;
‘A tilted cube can blow bubbles—of course, everybody knows this’.
— Norbert Voelkel
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Norbert Voelkel
40 Years of Landscapes
OPENING RECEPTION
Saturday, September 4, 2021
4:00 - 7:00 p.m.
Showing September 4 - 21, 2021
575-776-2284
Larry Bell’s Deconstructed Cube BGRSS (Spa/Peacock)
CUBED & unCUBED
Norbert Voelkel — Larry Bell
September 3-20, 2022
Opening Reception
Saturday, September 3
5:00 - 7:00 pm
Norbert Voelkel
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