Stefan Lehmann

Let’s get the title of this series out of the way.  Jill thought they looked like the flags they use on boats, so that’s what they’re called.  They’re not a secret system of signs and signals.  They’re not any kind of semaphore at all, really.

What they really are is an abuse of art paper.  I got really interested in how folding, tearing, abrading, and otherwise abusing paper affected the absorptions rate of water and pigment.  I also hate blank paper.  It seems unnatural, and it’s terrifying to me.  Confronted with a blank sheet, I develop options paralysis and have no clue how to start.  ‘Preparing” the paper is a way for me to get past that barrier.

This was also my first use of a square format.  For whatever reason I’ve always avoided squares, and this was an easy way for me to just get over that.  In folding the paper, I explored some of the geometry of squares too, sometimes using hard symmetry, sometimes the rule of thirds. Diagonals and harlequins came next.

Besides the bright colours and high contrast of these pictures, one of the things I like about them is the flexibility in displaying them:  when framed, each them have 8 different ways to hang them.  Which brings up an interesting point: I get asked sometimes why I don’t sign my paintings.  At least part of the reason is so that anyone purchasing them is free to hang them any way they like.

Anyway, take a look at the “Strange Semphore” pictures and let me know what you think.

The word matrix means a lot of different things to different people. I know the expression from direct marketing to mean a simple x/y grid.  I also know it from print-making to mean whatever is used, with ink, to hold the image that makes up the print. To the biologist, matrices are the tissues in animal or plant cells, in which more specialized structures are embedded.  The nerd in me can’t see the word without thinking of the late 90s movie starring Keanu Reeves.

Most fascinating to me when I looked it up is that the word matrix comes from the latin root “Mater” meaning mother.

Having tired of stripes doing the “Quiet Insistence” paintings, I moved on to working with grids. It was an intuition, and I knew Agnes Martin had worked in grids too. That scientific, logical part of my brain seemed to think it was the right move, just adding one more coordinate/variable to the practice I’d already been enjoying.

What happened next was really interesting. Whereas with the stripe paintings I pretty much did my level best to “colour inside the lines”, as soon as I got working with a grid the game changed and I started consciously evading the lines. Or rather, I was sticking to the general rule of the grid, but nudging the paint to break the lines here and there. Layers of paint would overlap, not not quite completely, the better to emphasize the layering.  Looking back on them, the grid itself is still very apparent, but it’s like I used it as a lattice upon which to let the paintings grow along their own course.

It’s almost like the grid was there to nurture the process, saying in effect, “Don’t Panic!”. As with the strip paintings, the grid absolved me of the need to plan out a picture and let me just play, but this time it was with some pretty complex layering of colour, opacity, shade, and intensity.

The term “Spring Matrices” came from the fact that I was doing these paintings early in the West Coast spring and that a lot of the colours were inspired by the season. I’ve pulled together some of the Spring Matrices paintings here. Take a look and let me know what you think.

I can remember visiting the AGO (Art Gallery if Ontario) in my early twenties and  falling in love with Agnes Martin’s paintings.  Among all the big, bright, brash American art of the 60s and 70s in the contemporary galleries, one of Agnes Martin’s paintings stood out to me with a quiet insistence that still surprises me.

Sometimes incredibly subtle in her use of colour, or obsessive grids, I fell for her paintings in a way that’s pretty rare for me.  In some cases there’s so little actually there that I’m surprised I can spend so much time with them.  I still love her paintings, and in fact Jill gave me a catalogue of her paintings for my 46th birthday.

For anyone who’s ever struggled with mental illness or know someone who has, I encourage you to read her biography as well as look at her paintings.  She led a long and productive career in the visual arts despite her struggles.

When I started painting again, I painted in stripes and grids for purely pragmatic reasons, but always with those early experiences of Martin’s paintings in mind.  Freed from the need for a subject, I could focus on basic elements of design: line, colour, without worrying too much about form.   I also got to explore the physical elements of paint, water, and paper.  I tried folding, tearing and ripping the paper in preparation for the paint, noticed how these preparations affected the absorption rate of water and pigment.  I played with fairly thick layers as well as almost completely translucent washes.  

In the end, I suspect I found something of what Agnes Martin’s process must have been like.  It was very meditative, the mind getting quiet enough to contemplate little other than what colour, size, opacity and form the next line should take.

I’ve pulled together some of those early stripe paintings into a series I’ve called “Quiet Insistence”.  Take a look around and let me know what you think.

“Painting is just another way of keeping a diary” – Pablo Picasso

At some point, I realized that my new practice of painting every day looked a lot like what I was doing back in the late 1990s.  1998-2000 were amazing years for me.  I had a new job working at the Art Gallery of Ontario, where I was constantly spending time in the art galleries looking at really good art.  I had just gotten a little studio apartment in Cabbagetown and had returned to school to finish my degree. Under the guidance of Hugh Leroy, I had developed the discipline of drawing every day, usually without any particular direction in mind.  The goal was to find my personal drawing “vocabulary” through discipline and consistency in practice.

I ended up carrying those drawings around with me for twenty years. From apartment to apartment, relationship to relationship, even from Toronto to Victoria, I protected and cared for this massive body of work like it was my legacy.  The unspoken implication was that I would never draw or paint again and that I’d better cherish and hang on to these little drawings as best I could.  I even bought archival boxes for them to make sure they were well preserved.

I went back recently and looked through them all and fell down a rabbit hole.  It was wonderful to see what I was really capable of, even 20 years ago. More importantly was the realization that I was in fact capable of much, much more.

As a result, I decided to let go of some of them.  The past is the past.  I have a new faith that the future will take care of itself IF I take care of the real business of life today.  I think that’s the real art of life.

My memory of making these drawings is rather foggy, and they’re not documented well enough to say precisely when each of them were made, but I do know they came from that blissful couple of years.  I feel good about letting these go today.  It’s an act of faith.  I’ve found a new wellspring of  inspiration. I’m a lot less interested in the assurance of keeping them than I am excited about what comes next.

Some of the drawings are done on stable paper (ph-neutral, or even cotton paper), but many of them are on plain old copy paper, so I can’t make any promises about how long they’ll survive.  Nevertheless, they’re all mounted and matted using ph neutral paper and linen tape to make them last as long as possible.

Take a look around the “Echoes Series”, and let me know what you think.