Circles in the Web

The Abstract Art of Ken Voss

by Writer/Artist Neil Myers

(www.neilmyers.homestead.com)

It is said that Winston Churchill was once heard to remark, “painting is like a battle.” Most painters will feel this way from time to time, as the sting of the evasive realities that they are seeking duck and hide, preventing the art of discovery. Art is not, in fact, about one thing, it is about everything--just as philosophy encompasses the reflections of everything.

Abstractions in form and color are just another part of our media landscape these days. The gates of the most conceivable everything have been thrown open first by the French Impressionists, who reviled the stuffy realism of the Salons and explored brushwork through blurred and fancifully (but not always accurately) rendered images--then most powerfully by the Abstract Expressionists, men like Jackson Pollock, Willem De Kooning and Hans Hoffman. With the arrival of that movement, the walls had come down, and painting was truly a field where everything was possible.

Artist Ken Voss is one who has tamed the unruly beasts of Abstraction, and who has picked up the torch of Pollock and De Kooning, marching forward in his own series of well-placed, finely crafted abstract paintings. My initial discovery of his work was through one of those supremely lucky moments spent browsing the internet. His web page opened to a photograph of a lone blue couch with one of his swirling abstract paintings situated above. The piece was so exquisite that the eye immediately dropped any thought of the couch and went directly to the work--a fiery piece that ruled the room, rendered in aggressive swaths of red, black, blue--and bounded in its energy by one of Mr. Voss’ trademarks, the circle. Take it as a myth if you will, a piece of the Yin and Yang counterbalancing act, or a mystical reference to the native peoples worldwide who have seen themselves as part of a “circle of life.” It might remind you of your coffee table on fire. Either way, the circle is a surprisingly powerful image and a point of reflection when bounded with blazing color. Countless abstract paintings by Mr. Voss display this same refrain, coming back to the idea of circular motion of the eye, holding the painting in place visually. He is not content to allow his hand to merely drift, but neither is his work too contrived. That is the mark of a great artist, a hand of balance. Just as a painting rendered in perfect realism is pointless, especially in the age of digital photography, neither is uncontrolled madness an acceptable component of excellent art. The mark of distinction is the work of the hand of the artist, conveyed in a way you can recognize, but one that challenges your senses.

One particular work, titled “#34” bespoke of something primitive and beautiful. On a field of lightened yellow ochre was laid a net of large blue interlocking strokes. Upon the net were two colored circles, with white centers peering out like eyes, and loose drips of color and angled flow of pigment that bounded both the circles, as well as the net of color behind it. In subsequent abstract pieces that same basic format has been used to attack the surface of the canvas. Circles ride on top of fields of color.

Other such pieces explored more of the flow that one can get out of acrylic pigment, departing from the format of circles and understandable geometry. Just as oil has its innate tendencies to blend, one doubts that Mr. Voss could arrive at the kind of liquidity of color in any other medium than the acrylics that he uses. In some of his works you see what one might expect to see if brilliantly colored oil had been poured in water, then allowed to flow over rocks. The hues melt into one another without complete mixing, relying only on the true steadiness and sure reliance of the artist’s hand for primitive shape. When confronted with such and interesting technique, yet one with such vitality, it becomes a bit like watching the act of paint flowing down and around the canvas, as if some liquid force were shaping it and the viewer is a mere witness. Like a statement of movement that swells with rings and nets of geometric flowing paint, the visualization is incredible. When you look at Voss’ work, you understand the far-sighted aim that Jackson Pollock articulated so long ago--that his creations were “energy made visible.”