The images in this directory are displayed at ftp.sunet.se FOR VIEWING ONLY
with permission from the artist.
Eric Jordan
Education:
University of Victoria BFA honours to be completed April 1993
Work:
Fine Arts Computer Lab Manager, University of Victoria
Physical Address:
3966 Blenkinsop Rd.
Victoria
B.C.
Canada
V8P 3P9
Email address:
ejordan@nero.uvic.ca
Five works posted:
S1.gif
mixed media
9" x 12"
S2.gif
mixed media
9" x 12"
S3.gif
mixed media
9" x 12"
S4.gif
mixed media
9" x 12"
S5.gif
mixed media
9" x 12"
Notes:
Artist Statement - Eric Jordan - Dec 91
These paintings are a response to concerns that become
so pressing I virtually stopped painting. These anxieties fell
primarily into two groups. The first centers on the nature of meaning
and the second on my approach to painting.
Through looking and discussing the work of David Salle,
I had become increasingly interested in the philosophical questions
surrounding the nature of meaning. This arose from a simple disagree-
ment. I felt Salle's paintings were meaningful. Someone else disagreed.
In pursing a solution, I found it was first necessary to address the
question of what exactly meanings is. Central to this question is another
question: how can meaning be destroyed? If meaning can not be
destroyed then nothing can be meaningless and everything must possess
meaning, on some level. If meaning can be destroyed, then it is possible
to have meaningless items, but what process achieves this result?
Obviously, from this question arises the question: how is meaning
formed?
Realizing I was not in a position to find answers to these
questions without considerable work, I went to ask some advice. Having
seen a commonality between James Joyce's Ulysseus and David Salle's
paintings I went to see the University of Victoria's expert on Joyce,
Dr. Trevor Williams. I felt that stylistically Salle and Joyce's were very
similar. They both use imagery in a disjunctive and unconventional manner. Yet,
I had thought, critics saw Joyce as maintaining meaning within his work
while critics of Salle saw his work as embracing meaninglessness. This
assumption was demonstrated to be false in my conversation with Dr.
Williams. He informed me that while Ulysseus is generally held to
possess meaning, Joyce's later work, Finnegans Wake, is held to embrace
a form of meaninglessness. And, from the examples I could show him, he
felt Salle's work was very similar to Finnegans Wake, much more so than
to Ulysseus. Yet there is still a distinction between critical writings on
Salle and Joyce. Salle's work is held to be meaningless in a cynical
way, whereas Joyce's meaninglessness is described as indulgent and
pleasurable.
Since I found Salle's and Joyce's styles to be similar I felt it was important to ask myself how they created these different interpretations of meaning (or, as the case may be, meaninglessness). I was also faced with another dilemma. I had to begin another painting in which I wanted, in someway, to address these ideas. This gives rise to my second concern.
From about 1990 until 1991 I had become increasingly
involved with the notion that the meaning and belief in a work is
instilled into a painting through the amount of time and paint applied to
the painting's surface. My paintings began to take more and more
time, even though each time I set out upon a new painting I attempted
to, "do it real quick this time."
Torn between attempting to represent my concerns for
meaning (which had become intimately concerned with subject matter)
and my desire for a more spontaneous realization of paintings, I felt
unable to work. I found a solution in my drawings of the previous
summer.
Over the summer of 1991 I undertook the challenge that each of my
drawing instructors had issued, "You should all be drawing every day."
I set out to complete a drawing a day. What I produced were drawings
that were free and spontaneous with no concern for subject matter or
eventual meaning. I drew everything. In reviewing these works I was
intrigued by some studies of small toy soldiers. I have always liked toy
soldiers. Thus I set out, in the manner of my summer work, to avoid all
of the questions that had been plaguing me and break my cycle of
spending more and more time on each painting, by continuing these
studies.
I intentionally constructed the elements of these works
without thinking about their meaning. I chose to work with a black
marker because I liked how it felt in my hand. I enjoyed the instantly
definite and expressive line that it was capable of producing. I chose to
draw on magazine pages because there was a magazine sitting next to
me. I have always been interested in placing one image on top of
another, so the magazine seemed like a natural "canvas". My choice of
pages to work on was based on whim. In applying the white paint and
arranging the individual works my only concern was to explore formal
qualities of composition and its relation to different kinds of pictorial
space.
The success of these drawings, for me, lies in their ability to address my concerns. They are spontaneous and I have found doing them to be very freeing from my previous conceptions about the process of painting. As I have intentionally thought as little as I can about the meaning of these pieces, I leave their interpretation up to the viewer.
Eric.
{The following information came with the other set of drawings
Five paintings posted:
Untitled1
1990
Acrylic, oil and pastel on board
approx. 2" x 4"
Untitled2
1990
Acrylic and oil on board
4" x 8"
Untitled3
1991
Acrylic on board
4" x 8"
Untitled4
1991
Acyrlic on board
over all 8" x 15"
Untitled5
1991
Acrylic on board
8" x 8"
Notes:
These are a selection of paintings that I executed over an eight month
period. They deal with my own growing awareness of women's issues.
Simultaneously they address my feelings of rejection and confusion that this
awareness brought. Rejection from what I had thought I had always been
supportive of. Confusion upon understanding that my own naive vews ("everyone
just had to accept each other as equal and everything would be equal") did not
even begin to address issues of gender bias inherient in our culture and
language.
Another aspect of these paintings is my attempt to present a vision that
was no longer captured in one image, but fractured into many. I still believe
that the presentation of several seperate images into one larger painting comes
