Artwork
Guffogg’s series “The Counting of Days” is inspired by the count of Gregorian Calendar and
the amount of days the artist has been alive.
Thoughts become words – words have meanings that define thought; a brushstroke is a thought. It takes countless brushstrokes to make an image that can potentially be read like a word. I am forever dancing with the invisible, trying to entice it into manifesting into my/our world. Thoughts and words can be guides for how the invisible is to enter into our dimension of time and space. The words of T. S. Eliot's poem, "The Four Quartets" set the stage for my hand and mind to become one, entering into a hypnotic rhythm that pulsates between the background, middle-ground, and foreground – the past, present, and future...
Amid this age of disinformation and the weaponization of social media, I started thinking about the word Truth. Is it a concept? Is it tangible? Is it objective or subjective? All relevant questions that are worth asking, because if they are not asked then we are destined to repeat the worst parts of history – stuck in a loop of recurring wars, famines, plagues, overpopulation, etc.
Guffogg’s series is partly inspired by Gertrude Stein’s sentence, A rose is a rose is a rose a rose in the 1913 poem, “Sacred Emily”. It is also inspired by his orchard located on the property of his Strathmore art studio in Central California. It has been said that, Guffogg starts his morning, Going and visiting his fruit trees, watering and weeding … and being completely inspired by the new leaves and the blossoming fruit for which they are harvesting per season...
In the late 1980s I was looking for a way to make figurative paintings without telling a story. I was also interested in the idea of spirituality and how that applied to art. Rothko was one artist whose work was, in my mind, steeped in the unspoken realm of spirituality. How could I combine both?...
The paintings of Los Angeles-based artist Shane Guffogg first appear to us as pure color shimmering and streaking across canvas. But look a little longer and nearly figurative shapes slowly reveal themselves. Look a little closer and intricate details and layering become clear. The shapes and patterns hover somewhere between writing and design...
The connection established by Leonardo between science and painting, disciplines that are complementary in the cognitive process, has induced some researchers to interpret his painting as a mere scientific investigation of nature, disregarding the interior spirituality that permeates it.
Soon after paintings like Untitled #2 from 1990, where combining his ideas of a conceptual space with a signature ribbon motif punctuated by jetting particles of light forming patterns as if they were some form of measurement of time and space. This was followed by Untitled #10, with a dense black background that is seemingly freezing time with the stop-motion of the two-glowing cream colored ribbons...
The origins for the glass sculptures started as drawings in 1997, though at that time I wasn't aware of it. I was making drawings of the shapes that were formed in the space around the ribbon-esques images I was painting. The idea of turning a negative space or shape into a three-dimensional object was in line with making the invisible visible, which is something I often think about.
When I first started making self-portraits, I was literally sitting in front of a mirror and documenting what I saw. I tried on different artistic styles like a person trying on new clothes to see what fits. As I entered early adulthood, the idea of earning a living by making art was looming over the horizon. The self-portraits shifted from visual observation to an emotional investigation using neo expressionism as my landscape.
The Memory series began when I moved to NY in 1985 for an internship with an artist set up through CalArts. Once I was away from where I grew up, the golden state of California, it was only then I realized where I was from. The landscape of NY, with its tall skyscrapers, blocked out any chance of seeing a familiar horizon line...
The beginning of my journey as a painter started with Rembrandt. His work was my teacher and taught me how to see with my mind and through my eyes. The simple of act of sitting in front of a canvas and painting what was before me was a way to be submerged in the moment. Dancing with parts of art history became the next phase as I read Kandinsky’s The Spiritual in Art and began seeing color as a vehicle for communication; a way to inform what I was seeing but more importantly, what I was feeling. The late 19th and early 20th century artists picked up where Rembrandt left off. It would be another decade plus before I began to fuse these two elements of thought into a new visual language.