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Richard Sturm was raised in Buffalo, New York, an ordinary, industrial city. But, for someone who wanted to become a painter, Sturm couldn't have chosen a better place, for Buffalo is the location of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery which has an extraordinary, strong collection of modern 20th century paintings and sculptures. As a child, Sturm took art classes there and at 19, he already occupied his own studio and associated with other painters, among them a student of Clifford Still. Large, color-field paintings by Still are well represented in the Albright-Knox Collection. To get an idea of what was available in this collection while Sturm lived in Buffalo, one needs only to look at the catalogue: Contemporary Art 1942-72, Collection of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. There are examples of Abstract Expressionism, Cubist and Abstract Sculpture, British and European Painting and Sculpture, Assemblage, Pop, New Realism, American Painting since 1960 and an impressive section on "Movement, Optical Phenomena and Light". With this background, it seems only natural that Sturm would select large canvases as his field of operation and paint with lots of rich color.
Sturm was very interested in the technical aspects of vision and learned about the mechanics of how our eyes function. By the time he pursued formal studies in 1965-67, much information was available on color theory. There was material by the pioneers like the 19th century French scientist, Eugene Chevreul whose theories had inspired the Post-Impressionist painters Georges Seurat and Paul Signac and there were the most recent explorations by Gyorgy Kepes, director of the renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology who used some of Sturm's paintings as illustrations in his travelling lectures. Op art was current and international in the 1960's as is shown in the work of the Hungarian born, French artist Victor Vasarely, the American, Larry Poons, or the British artist, Bridget Riley.
Sturm admires particularly the work of Julian Stanczak who initiated many explorations in optical painting and often surpassed the conventions of Op art. Many artists at the height of Op art worked with very calculated effects of optical vibrations which had the power to excite the retina, but leave the emotions cold. They tended to tighten their focus through a method of exclusion in a minimal sense until they achieved a very even, clean, hard surface.
Favoring a more inclusive approach, Sturm brings many inspirations into his work, ranging from the art and architecture of other cultures to philosophy and music. For instance, he admires the unifying patterns in mosaics of Islamic architecture and recognizes that they can be distinct and yet meld into the greater scheme of things. He reads Ludwig Wittgenstein's theories of perception and is particularly interested in Wittgentein's discussion of Newtonian mechanics and how they impose a unified form on the description of the world. In that theory there is the reference to achieving this vision of the world through the superimposition of a mesh or net which describes one system of mechanics. Sturm frequently uses a kind of mesh or chain-link fence pattern which is understated in the early work. The Great Wall of China, 1976, and more pronounced in a painting like Urthona's Bow, 1984. This unifying pattern gives the composition a structural framework across the picture plane. These 'nets' are not barriers but serve as a means of looking into the space like scrims on a stage where objects are brought in and out of focus by the manipulation of light. With a complex layering of paint strokes and an equally complex system of emphasizing or in turn, de-emphasizing of forms, Sturm achieves similar visual mysteries of illusion.
The recognition of forms in Sturm's paintings engages the viewer in a dialogue with space. Only through the physical activity of moving around in front of the painting, can the full effect be experienced. Avery similar optical phenomenon is well described by the artist Bridget Riley in regard to Georges Seurat's work. In the 1991 summer issue of Modern Painters, A Quarterly Journal of the Fine Arts, in the article "The Artist's Eye: Seurat". Riley writes about Seurat's painting. Forest and Poutaubent, "Close up, the painting seems to be quite flat, a little curtain of sparkles drawn across a dense formlessness. But, to one's surprise, from further away another dimension appears. Hidden depths open up, soft volumes emerge". She on the say about Seurat's work that "This elastic pictorial produced by the scrupulously organized color and the variable viewing distance is crucial. It facilitates a relationship between two extremes – the amorphous fabric and the monumental space it can generate. The Divisionist method breaks down and provides a conduit through which Seurat's particular and enigmatic sense of form and volume can be evoked".
To cover his large canvases with the small overlapping paint stroke technique, requires an obsessive dedication to the process of painting which Sturm still finds challenging and necessary. He has at times earned a living by painting backdrops for movies, an activity which has heightened his sensibilities for illusion and allusion. Although Sturm's paint application is always as meticulous and consistent as that of the Op artists of our time, he has far more in common with Seurat's methods of dealing with perception through the object in mind which he paints in a recognizable form on the blank canvas. But as soon as these forms are covered by layer upon layer of individual paint strokes, they temporarily recede and become the "ground" of the form, only emerge again when the viewer steps back and begins looking. In the 1960s, Op art and psychedelic paintings engaged our eye by performing optical and kinetic acrobatics before the viewer. Sturm's paintings in the 1990's still entice the viewer with optical vibrations, but rather than supplying one point of view, his visual probing invites a never ending set of questions about our perception of the very existence of things.
Illi-Maria Tamplin
Director, Art Gallery of Peterborough
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