April 4, 2016
E. Charles Rolwing
Statement
Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.
Franz Kafka
The making of art is for me a journey of construction and destruction. Each brush stroke comes out of my very soul, a place deep in my subconscious. I paint with my heart on my sleeve. The most I can offer that is unique is honesty to my emotions, to lay out that which makes me human. My imagery comes from working in my sketchbooks. That is where I work out the intellectual aspects, symbols and the problems of composition and color theory. There is a place between the intellectual (classic problems of composition and content), and the ethereal (subconscious) where true meaning emerges. It is here that new ideas emerge. I work an idea in dozens of studies before I begin a he painting. Then, when I begin the painting I have a library of ideas and a basic idea of where to start. From that point the painting becomes an idea in itself. It is a reaction to a self contained idea of itself. Each movement follows another, each a reaction to the previous stroke. It is here that the image begins to emerge. I am careful to allow the subconscious to breathe freely, to be open and honest to what is happening, to be in the moment. It happens sometimes to destroy the painting in the process. I wipe out, scrape, repaint, and over paint the image. No painting in my studio is safe. The finished painting is that idea in itself, something to be experienced as a self-contained entity. The viewing of a painting physically changes the chemistry of the brain, and it lives with the viewer in memory. It is the private language of the artist and the viewer. We share that time together.
E. Charles Rolwing III 