When an exhibition contains over 70 pieces of artwork, along with multiple interdisciplinary pieces from four artist groups, one of the strongest challenges is how to order and arrange everything so that it flows, and is engaging to all who experience it.
In the case of LeRoi: Living in Color, Burchfield Penney exhibition curator, Tiffany Gaines, has spent hours studying all the artwork and developing a layout to best serve the various mediums that will be on display. She began by defining my artwork according to the periods in which I created them.
GeometricNot
My first is a Geometric Period which spanned the 1980’s-90’s, but had its foundation in my teenage years.
The only real art education I ever received was during a limited time in the 1960’s. That’s when I was enrolled in the Commercial Art and Industrial Design Program at Hutchinson Central Technical High School---Hutch Tech.
The purpose of the course was to focus the students on structure and form. The thing was, I hated structure. I want to be free to create my artwork, not follow a predetermined pattern. That’s why despite a straight “A” average, after one year at Hutch Tech I left the Commercial Art and Design Program and transferred to East High School.
That change challenged me to begin creating large scale unstructured art in the apartment where I was living at the time. I painted random shapes and forms on the walls of my living room, allowing the artwork to envelop the space.
In the bathroom, I splattered paint across the walls and ceiling and had my friends hold me sideways and upside down so I could stamp imprints of my feet up, above, and over. I have no idea how we ever got that done!
As I grew as a person and an artist, I continued to create in ways that I believed were leaving behind all forms of structured art. Looking back,, I now realize that what I was really doing was incorporating the principles of structure I had shunned as a teen into all of my early work.
I needed that foundation of structure, shapes and grids as a guiding force to advance and evolve my artwork, as I envisioned it at that time.
No matter how I tried NOT to focus on structured styles, my first artist’s period became all about geometric shapes and forms. This image of my artwork from that period is titled, GeometricNot.
LEROI: Living in Color Exhibition includes the work of students from Buffalo Center for Arts and Technology (BCAT,) Buffalo Public Schools (BPS,) Just Buffalo Literary Center (JBLC,) and Squeaky Wheel Film & Media Art Center. The exhibition will be on view at the Burchfield Penney Art Center through March 26, 2023, presented by M&T Bank, with additional support from organizations and individuals throughout the Western New York community.