It’s all about emotional honesty. It is the one thing that I have that is truly unique. There is a need to create something that comes from the heart and soul through the filter of the intellectual. It is where a lifetime adds up. Something of the times, of the world through an intensely personal way. I am interested in that place at the intersection of the intellectual and the emotional. The intellectual aspect has to do with conscious choices in composition, scale, figures or symbols and color theory, the classical problems of art. The emotional aspect comes from the subconscious, pure emotion, things that perhaps cannot be logically understood. There may be the element of apparent accident. But it is not accident at all, it comes a personal history, from the subconscious with only the appearance of possible accident. It is the appearance of new or unusual juxtapositions of elements. I reach for a kind of meditative state when I’m working. It is a time of introspection. It is when I’m in this state of creative non-thinking that the subconscious is allowed to flow. Here the work starts to react to itself, each movement is a response to the previous movement. Color reacts to color, and line. The painting begins to respond to itself, a self contained idea. The making of the work happens in time, but the reading is one of being confronted with the whole at once. Movement of composition in line and color lead the eye. It is a nonlinear experience, to be sorted out by the eye’s movement and address.
In each piece there are essentially two types of composition that work both for and against each other. There is the linear composition and the color composition. They work in harmony and discord with each other. The linear is the framework from which I work and the color is an emotional element, meant to push and pull the eye through the piece. There is an aim to throw the viewer off balance, to experience the use of figures and symbols in a new and unique way. It is a search for truth in the complete honesty of my emotional self utilizing a personal history.
E. Charles Rolwing III 