The Magical landscapes of Steve Cieslawski
Winter is the witching season, the time when, as John Dyer once wrote, a stray sunbeam "Is all the proud and mighty have/ Between the cradle and the grave." Yet while poets such as Tennyson have celebrated "the level lake and the long glories of the winter moon," few painters since Bruegel have evoked the season as convincingly as Steve Cieslawski, whose new oils on canvas can be seen at CFM Gallery from November 4 through December 4.
Cieslawski's recent wintry scenes are among the most evocative paintings in his new solo show. Tellingly; the exhibition is entitled "Landscapes of the Mind," since only Steve Cieslawski could imbue a scene presumably inspired by a desolate site in contemporary Pennsylvania with the enchanted atmosphere of a Victonan fairy tale, as seen in his oil "Solace."
One can only assume this to be one of the pictures that caused Teresa del Conde, director of Museum de Art Contemporaneo, in Mexico City, to make glowing comparisons to Caspar David Friedrich after visiting Cieslawski's studio while he was preparing the present exhibition. "Solace" depicts a solitary skater; clad all in black, gliding on one blade on a frozen lake. The tips of her long veil blowing behind her in the wind, rhyme visually with the tips of the bare black trees in the surrounding woods, mirrored in the lake's icy surface. Mirrored, too, are one larger, nearer tree, in which a rustic cabin rests like a giant bird's nest, and a glowing orange orb that could either be an early evening sun or a mutating morning moon. Either way,. "Solace" is well named, since like many of Cieslawski's best pictures, it provokes an epiphany that illuminates the special beauty and value of melancholy as a soulful reminder of life's ineffable mystery.
In the oil called "Vernal Equinox," the seasons seem to overlap. While the title and the thawing lake suggest that spring has sprung (as does a lone duck sailing by in the unflappable way of its species), a fine snow is falling on the landscape. However, these natural anomalies are as nothing compared to the more fantastic incongruity of three doll-like children, dressed in pastel silks harking back to medieval times, ensconced like baby chicks in a halved egg-shell balanced on the central ice-floe.
Mouths agape, poised as opera stars or professional carolers, perhaps they are singing madrigals to beckon in the tardy season. It is one of those magical moments that Cieslawslci seems to conjure up so effortlessly, in that way he alone has of creating exquisite visual metaphors for elusive feelings and memories. For while it is highly doubtful that anyone else has ever imagined anything like the scene he depicts here, the picture seems to awaken memories of indefinable yet definite emotions one has felt near a lake in intemperate weather- or at very least in some comparable circumstance which produced an atmospheric epiphany one would be at pains to put into words.
Indeed it is just this ability to create visual equivalents for our most subtle feelings that makes Cieslawski such a remarkable artist. His imagery differs from that of other post- modern surrealists in that he never rummages in the movement's dusty attic for shopworn props or indulges in tiresome Freudian cliches. Rather, Cieslawski appears to arrive intuitively at his startlingly fresh imagery, which is at its subtlest in the new oil entitled "Incarnation of Young Byron."
This painting is conceived as a formal portrait, rendered in rich Renaissance gravies in the flawless technique of layered glazes that Cieslawsld has mastered, which invariably prompts comparisons to the old masters. Byron is seen as a fresh-faced adolescent in a head and shoulders pose recalling certain portraits of the English Court by Hans Holbein the Younger. However, what differentiates this sitter from those distinguished fellow countrymen with their cool, detached airs (which Holbein depicted as a visiting German fascinated with the icy reserve of the British nobility), is an undercurrent of sensuality more reminiscent of Caravaggio. This comes across in the unnerving frankness of the youthful Byron's gaze and the almost smugly bemused set of his full, femininely rosy lips.
But if these clues are not sufficient to inform the viewer that this brash youth is already aware of his poetic destiny as English literature's greatest decadent, that the hairs at the top of his head and the tips of his white lace collar morph into shapes respectively suggesting stark winter trees and sharply defined snowflakes, tips one off as to the wild nature lurking just beneath the formal veneer of this brilliant imaginary portrait.
Still within the realm of possibility (if not probability) is the situation we encounter in "Fragile Symbols," wherein a man and a little girl, both clad in the graceful long garments of no specific period that Cieslawski favors to lend his scenes a sense of timelessness, stand before a gnarled tree from which framed paintings of butterflies dangle by strings. One could speculate endlessly on the presumed meanings of such a picture, but perhaps it refers to the perilous position of a painter who endeavors to create magic in an age generally more hospitable to the obvious and the mundane.
In this exhibition, his most impressive to date, Steve Cieslawski reveals himself to be a painter who has perfected his mode of expression to match the seemingly limitless scope of his imagination..
-Ed McCormack, Gallery and Studio Magazine 2005
Winter is the witching season, the time when, as John Dyer once wrote, a stray sunbeam "Is all the proud and mighty have/ Between the cradle and the grave." Yet while poets such as Tennyson have celebrated "the level lake and the long glories of the winter moon," few painters since Bruegel have evoked the season as convincingly as Steve Cieslawski, whose new oils on canvas can be seen at CFM Gallery from November 4 through December 4.
Cieslawski's recent wintry scenes are among the most evocative paintings in his new solo show. Tellingly; the exhibition is entitled "Landscapes of the Mind," since only Steve Cieslawski could imbue a scene presumably inspired by a desolate site in contemporary Pennsylvania with the enchanted atmosphere of a Victonan fairy tale, as seen in his oil "Solace."
One can only assume this to be one of the pictures that caused Teresa del Conde, director of Museum de Art Contemporaneo, in Mexico City, to make glowing comparisons to Caspar David Friedrich after visiting Cieslawski's studio while he was preparing the present exhibition. "Solace" depicts a solitary skater; clad all in black, gliding on one blade on a frozen lake. The tips of her long veil blowing behind her in the wind, rhyme visually with the tips of the bare black trees in the surrounding woods, mirrored in the lake's icy surface. Mirrored, too, are one larger, nearer tree, in which a rustic cabin rests like a giant bird's nest, and a glowing orange orb that could either be an early evening sun or a mutating morning moon. Either way,. "Solace" is well named, since like many of Cieslawski's best pictures, it provokes an epiphany that illuminates the special beauty and value of melancholy as a soulful reminder of life's ineffable mystery.
In the oil called "Vernal Equinox," the seasons seem to overlap. While the title and the thawing lake suggest that spring has sprung (as does a lone duck sailing by in the unflappable way of its species), a fine snow is falling on the landscape. However, these natural anomalies are as nothing compared to the more fantastic incongruity of three doll-like children, dressed in pastel silks harking back to medieval times, ensconced like baby chicks in a halved egg-shell balanced on the central ice-floe.
Mouths agape, poised as opera stars or professional carolers, perhaps they are singing madrigals to beckon in the tardy season. It is one of those magical moments that Cieslawslci seems to conjure up so effortlessly, in that way he alone has of creating exquisite visual metaphors for elusive feelings and memories. For while it is highly doubtful that anyone else has ever imagined anything like the scene he depicts here, the picture seems to awaken memories of indefinable yet definite emotions one has felt near a lake in intemperate weather- or at very least in some comparable circumstance which produced an atmospheric epiphany one would be at pains to put into words.
Indeed it is just this ability to create visual equivalents for our most subtle feelings that makes Cieslawski such a remarkable artist. His imagery differs from that of other post- modern surrealists in that he never rummages in the movement's dusty attic for shopworn props or indulges in tiresome Freudian cliches. Rather, Cieslawski appears to arrive intuitively at his startlingly fresh imagery, which is at its subtlest in the new oil entitled "Incarnation of Young Byron."
This painting is conceived as a formal portrait, rendered in rich Renaissance gravies in the flawless technique of layered glazes that Cieslawsld has mastered, which invariably prompts comparisons to the old masters. Byron is seen as a fresh-faced adolescent in a head and shoulders pose recalling certain portraits of the English Court by Hans Holbein the Younger. However, what differentiates this sitter from those distinguished fellow countrymen with their cool, detached airs (which Holbein depicted as a visiting German fascinated with the icy reserve of the British nobility), is an undercurrent of sensuality more reminiscent of Caravaggio. This comes across in the unnerving frankness of the youthful Byron's gaze and the almost smugly bemused set of his full, femininely rosy lips.
But if these clues are not sufficient to inform the viewer that this brash youth is already aware of his poetic destiny as English literature's greatest decadent, that the hairs at the top of his head and the tips of his white lace collar morph into shapes respectively suggesting stark winter trees and sharply defined snowflakes, tips one off as to the wild nature lurking just beneath the formal veneer of this brilliant imaginary portrait.
Still within the realm of possibility (if not probability) is the situation we encounter in "Fragile Symbols," wherein a man and a little girl, both clad in the graceful long garments of no specific period that Cieslawski favors to lend his scenes a sense of timelessness, stand before a gnarled tree from which framed paintings of butterflies dangle by strings. One could speculate endlessly on the presumed meanings of such a picture, but perhaps it refers to the perilous position of a painter who endeavors to create magic in an age generally more hospitable to the obvious and the mundane.
In this exhibition, his most impressive to date, Steve Cieslawski reveals himself to be a painter who has perfected his mode of expression to match the seemingly limitless scope of his imagination..
-Ed McCormack, Gallery and Studio Magazine 2005