Lars Swan

" Lawrence Swan tends to work on a small scale and with a kind of low-tech modesty. There is a casual intensity to many of the pieces. He uses tin cans, found wood, cut up canvas board, torn and folded paper, ink, and gouache to make simple masks, word games, optical illusions and geometric figures. He likes to work with primary colors arranged in complex rhythms, and with elementary forms of representation. "
" Lawrence Swan is a Brooklyn-based painter who emerged in the Bushwick/Ridgewood scene of the past few years. He is also a writer who makes graphic texts on-line and in self-published chapbooks and pamphlets. He has a BFA in painting from the Cleveland Institute of Art, where he primarily studied with Julian Stanczak and Edwin Mieczkowski, and an MA in philosophy from Cleveland State University. From 2009 through 2010 his studio blog (newcleanblog.blogspot.com) was the site of Art Bum Comics, and miscellaneous texts, drawings, sculpture, and works in progress appear there more or less weekly. "

Jeff Hogue

As I poured over the images below and visited some of your comic works I found myself struck by the humble matter-of-factness of using notebook paper and other dime store materials just as Lori often does.

Can you tell me more about your obsession with the "persona" and "mask?" You mentioned that the mask image that emerged from your comic strip is a "pronoun." Again, I think of Lori (wife- artist Lori Ellison) and her aphorisms. It's clear that you're both highly literate, yet in Lori's visual work, there are no words whatsoever whereas often in your work, the word itself is a stepping off point and often the physical and conceptual armature of the final piece.

You've succeeded in compressing so much information in recent entries that I've been tempted to triple space it and to punch in commentary between each line. There's the reference to the geometry of "approximate measurements" and how these figures become symbols and metaphors. Can you elaborate on this point and on some of the meanings you derive from your work as well as various Tibetan and Native American cosmograms?

I visited your newcleanblog and love seeing images as large as possible---perhaps it's to fend off some of the frustration I fight in terms of not getting to see much in NY in person.
Tell me about the Etudes...I love the title concept. I was also moved by their unapologetic ephermerality.

Lars Swan

Your suggestion that we talk about the Lars and Lori show derailed me for a while. I found these five images of the work in the show.* This is a fairly good sample, though. This is a selection of work done in the previous year, when I was doing three dimensional drawings with folded paper. The paper folding began with the first paper mask I made using folded notebook paper. I was on a caffeine high and had suddenly thought of a way to make a certain pictorial sign I am obsessed with -- a persona, a mask. The graphic mask, which I used in my comic strip, stands for a pronoun. Anyway, from that I went to exploring simple geometry through approximate measurements. I was also thinking about how basic geometric figures become symbols and metaphors. that carry complex meanings, such as the Tibetan cosmograms or Native American medicine wheels.

My palette is mostly limited to black, white, red, blue. Sometimes orange, violet, green. This is largely because I like looking at the primary colors, because of the physiological stimulation on my optic nerves, but also because these colors are easily used to carry messages, such as in traffic lights and propaganda posters. When I started doing folded paper drawings I couldn't believe I never did it before, and that more people weren't doing it. It is a way of canceling the dichotomy of "support" and image, or image and material. Geometrical doodling is a pleasant pastime, dividing a figure and finding an organic growth of a visual form. Ornamentation is a primal human game. Word games and optical illusions are also parts of semiotic messing around.

Jeff

I cut and pasted the below from Facebook because as I reread it today I realized how much there really is here and that I've not done all this any justice at all.

Lars Swan

The persona symbol is an element in an "alphabet" I was trying to manufacture a long time ago. I wanted to have a set of symbols and signs I could draw from to make pictures/texts. When I say "long time ago" I mean early to mid-80s, when Keith Haring was becoming well-known and A.R. Penck was making pictographic paintings that seemed to have complex meanings. I wanted to make a composite language of pictograms, ideograms, borrowed words and letters, and "indexical" markings, traces, etc. I imagined a kind of postmodern William Blake with the distinction between written text and illumination disappearing. Seemed like a good idea.
Anyway, "approximate geometry" means geometry in practice (since our measurements are limited by the accuracy of our instruments, whatever they are), as opposed to idealized, Platonic, geometry, which became a model for Truth in western philosophy. All measurements are approximate to some degree. They only to need to be accurate enough for whatever we are doing with them. My arrangements of geometrical figures are improvisations. "Etude" might be pretentious, but I want you to think of them as akin to musical studies. I want the meanings of the figures to be fluid. You might not think of the Chinese symbol for heaven when you see a circle, but it is hard not to see a stop sign in an eight-sided figure or a Star of David in a six-pointed figure. I might think of such conventional meanings when I draw a shape, until I find something else I can do with it. When you look at a Muslim prayer niche in which abstract patterns are combined with Arabic calligraphy is the literal meaning of the prayer lost, or is it superseded, by the visual organization?
Cosmologies come and go. We need to find or impose an order, a pattern, so we can map our world, so we can find our way from the bed to the refrigerator, so we don't starve to death. We expect a degree of continuity in the environment, but there comes a day when we open the door to the kitchen and find a world we never imagined. This is something like what we look for in improvisation.

Thanks, Jeff. This is something like what playing chess by mail must be like.

James Kalm's Video of Lars and Lori's show at VALENTINE Gallery (Bushwick) in NY

Kalm writes, "If you’ve got nothing to say, say it loud. If it’s not very interesting, make it big. If it looks lousy, shine it up. This is the formula for a lot of what is dished out today as “important.” Big budgets, overhype, and extravagance fit the media’s template for catching the eye of those with severely impaired attention spans. A two-person show titled “Lars and Lori,” by artist couple Lori Ellison and Lawrence Swan at Valentine, veers in the opposite direction, riveting the observer’s attention and drawing them close by whispering."
October 2011 The Brooklyn Rail