Stuart Arends

Stuart Arends is an American artist steeped in the landscape tradition which resonated from work generated and inspired by the great Mid-West. Arend's work, although small in size, encapsulates the wide-open spaces that yielded minerals or gave rich farming land, as in Arends' native Iowa. It was pioneer country and had first been occupied, by white settlers, within the memories of a couple of previous generations. But Arends' first love was abstract expressionism, in particular De Kooning's early work and, though his first visit to Europe was injudicious, he obtained a great appreciation and understanding of early Renaissance work, the frescoes of Giotto and later for da Vinci's Last Supper. And yet the desert is his 'heimat', and he has a sense of belonging in the dry, arid land found in New Mexico where Arends has made his home since the 1980s. His love of this landscape and awe of the delicate infrastructure so necessary for life on the edge has concentrated his art practice. Economy of means and limited palette combine to create paintings with infinite views. Arends is used to a wide perspective (huge skies and a distant horizon), which he could only find in Guernsey when looking seawards

The following are extracts from a discussion between Stuart Arends and Joanna Littlejohns which took place on the 19th January 2005, just as the artist was beginning his month long residency attached to Art & Design at Grange House

I just feel very comfortable in the desert. I love being in isolation. I'm not sure how it relates to my work. Nothing conscious, but it does feed me. Our modern life is city based and influenced and there seems little awareness of the natural world. People are more used to the urban environment of chaos and confusion. But I just sit out on the deck and watch the light change. The influence is subtle and to do with peace of mind

I used just neutral colours for years. I denied myself the use of colour because I didn't understand it or its potential, its communicative power. I like the monochrome metal pieces, reductive pastels and with time, once they are out in the world, I can see them objectively. My lifestyle facilitates the opportunity for the nuances to speak, minute intuitive changes that make the work either successful or not. Hopefully they hold up. The later series of Saki Boxes work was about painting by getting everything else out of the way. Before this series the images and colours had always been dictated by the support; whether found wood, neutral steel box or cuboid canvas. The S.B. boxes are 3¼" (8.25cm) square and it was the first time that I could just make paintings, the first time I consistently worked with red and blues, the first body of work I treated like paintings. I was always re-defining. The work is (as near as possible) intuitive. I live with the work for a long time before I am determined it is finished. I do the thing, put it on the wall and it communicates what it needs. I do everything that the work suggests to me; some things work, and some don't. I have an incredibly high level of rejection and some works take years to resolve. When you do things this small they have got to be right or they make no sense. It's very difficult to do

I look on the paint I use like blood, the wax like flesh, the wood and steel like bone, and how these elements all function in the space of the structure. If you go down inside yourself, there is a level of concentration that means you are so in tune with what you are working on. The Art & Design students at Grange House need to identify where that energy is as, if you are concentrating and manipulating from that space, the materials will then become alive. And if you are not in that space the work can become decorative, and more like craft work. That’s the difficult part and is perhaps why I live in the desert. It requires a lot of work and only comes through working consistently and the discipline of taking a step at a time. The students need to know that they have to reach that point so that, through perseverance, they are communicating on a level that's important. I believe you can teach them to paint, draw but you can't teach them to make art. So you just have to make them aware that all the things they are learning are a means to an end. One can only inspire and inform. And being a good painter is not necessarily being an artist. But what better life is there? I'm not so much interested in how I do my work but more importantly what it is like to spend a lifetime being an artist. I think I have more to offer

Stuart Arends

Guernsey, January 2005