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React April 4 - 26, 2008

Denis Gaston , “Sister Moon”, Mixed Media on Paper, 2008.

Denis Gaston

Denis Gaston

1979 found me stuck fast in a corporate art cubicle in suburban Atlanta, my job for eight hours a day, to design bank logos that looked terrific shrunk to a quarter of an inch and printed on checks. An impossible task.

As the days dragged on, I often found myself staring out the hermetically sealed windows at traffic rolling silently by on I-20. My thoughts raced after big semis headed east to the Carolinas.

How in the world had I landed in this place? After four years of art school, and ten years of work, was this to be my fate; an indentured corp-rat slave chained to a drawing board?

Bank advertising managers routinely called me to inquire on the progress of their designs, or more often, complain about something. Listening to them drone on, I absent-mindedly sketched on a legal pad. Later, looking at pages and pages of faces and figures, I marveled at their raw unadorned energy. My gesture drawings from school never looked like those little gems.

Not knowing what to make of them, but sensing their importance, I carefully tucked away the drawings in a manila envelope, with no idea that years later their offspring would appear full blown in my art.

By the mid-1980s I had relocated to Florida and thrown everything into art making. For almost a year I labored in vain, trying to paint in the same logical problem solving way I used to design bank logos. Nothing worked. Once, in frustration, I ripped apart a piece I had worked on for a week.

About that time I re-discovered the envelope of drawings and desperate for any spark of inspiration, spread them out on my drawing board, row after row of cryptic faces staring out like Easter Island monoliths. Their power remained undiminished, and quite literally, in a flash, I knew what my art making focus would be.

I knew that my art making could only be realized by relying on intuition, through a process of not knowing; not knowing what to paint, in what direction it would go, or the final outcome. I had just to remain open to a vast wellspring of unconscious imagery, and assist in its showing up on the canvas. A teacher once said it best, “Stop thinking, get out of the way, and start painting.”

The pieces in the “React” exhibition continue that commitment.

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