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Friday, February 14, 2014

Guest Star #132…Richard Tuttle

Boys, Let's be Bad Boys

I first heard of Richard Tuttle when I was a resident at Penland. I had a critique with Christina Shmigel and she referenced his work while talking about mine. I looked him up right away and he went to the top of my favorite artists list immediately. I got a big coffee table book of his work for Christmas that same year and have poured over its pages time and again.

Tuttle's work is minimalist, abstract and poetic. It includes a variety of everyday and non-traditional materials, many of which are ephemeral in nature. From small objects and structures to large, room encompassing wire drawings, his work presents ideas and process at once. With a focus on scale, Tuttle is able to create intimacy in every piece, and intimacy between the work and the viewer and the work and the space it occupies. He treats the space itself as a material, as well, using it to add to the depth of the work while giving it an identity of its own. His use of space further causes the viewer to reconsider it because it has equal weight as the objects. I am fascinated by how seemingly simple Tuttle's work is as it continues to confound me; I know it's much more complicated than it looks.

8th Paper Octagonal

The following is a quote I read last night when preparing this post. I absolutely love it and will keep in the back of my mind from now on:

"If you’re going to be a visual artist, then there has to be something in the work that accounts for the possibility of the invisible, the opposite of the visual experience. That’s why it’s not like a table or a car or something. I think that that might even be hard for people because most of our visual experiences are of tables. It has no business being anything else but a table. But a painting or a sculpture really exists somewhere between itself, what it is, and what it is not-you know, the very thing. And how the artist engineers or manages that is the question."

3rd Rope Piece

44th Wire Piece

Pressure and Pace

Light and Color

Please visit my Pinterest to see more of my favorite Richard Tuttle pieces.

Thanks for reading.

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