From the Studio I: David Aylsworth, Tommy Fitzpatrick, and Emily Joyce

From the Studio I explores the work of David Aylsworth, Tommy Fitzpatrick, and Emily Joyce, and it seeks to illuminate their ever evolving studio practices, how those practices have changed during the last year, and how these three artists navigate creating space within the compositions of their paintings. 

Wanting to further unmoor any logical reading of his digital constructions, Fitzpatrick embarked on his second innovation, his textural, troweled-on use of paint. The result is that the viewer reads the work as an object-painting first, a conglomeration of three-dimensional blocks of color, and that he or she secondly begins to dissect the three-dimensional space articulated by the image. Always, however, our reading comes back to pure paint, surface, and color relationships. 

The abiding compositional device in Emily Joyce's recent work is symmetry, and the three works on paper on view in From the Studio I offer clues about that choice. The three works are titled, respectively, Marjorie Rice, Joan Taylor, and Amateur Starfish. While the descriptor 'amateur' is only applied to one of these figures, the starfish, it could just as easily be applied to Rice and Taylor, two amateur yet distinguished mathematicians. Both women made breakthroughs in the field of geometry, specifically the problem of mathematical tiling. Joyce describes these women as "kitchen table" mathematicians, and she is quick to point out the etymology of the word amateur, which comes from the French amateur, "one who loves."

Order and logic, however, provide limited explanations of Joyce's work. What to make of an amateur starfish? Of this work, Joyce offers that she "found it to be a funny and evocative word combination. I was thinking of amateur geometricians and also about pentagons. Five-armed starfish are by design "accidental" or "natural" pentagons, so I thought….maybe they have an innate understanding of geometry like these amateur mathematicians did." Joyce's absurdist logic speaks of joy and suggests she too belongs among the ranks of those who love. 

While her works on paper are undergirded by logic, her paintings in From the Studio I are more freewheeling. She offers this recount of the making of Ocular Reflection:

I started with a very simple, general geometric shape. In this case an oval, centered and proportional to the scale of the panel. I chose the panel sizes by what would fit nested in each other in my suitcase-a kind of practical geometry (en route to Denman Island). I let the rest of the compositional details reveal themselves in an improvisatory way. With Ocular Reflection, I had an idea to do a first layer of thin washy khaki green, lavender and bright yellow overlapping, masking off the central oval so it could be painted in a different manner. Then I began bisecting and carving […] and the whole painting got too chopped up. So, it's a reaction of one move to the next. I started to see things, references, etc. - like oh maybe it's a portal of energy so how can I emphasize that? The painting stayed like it was at Denman for a year or so and then I finished it at the Claremont studio. Originally, when I started Ocular Reflection, I thought it would be all washy colors and painterly treatment contained in geometric shapes, but in the end, it was better to contrast flat and washy, line and color. And it landed where it is now.

The crispness of If You Want It Blue can be said to be more classically David Aylsworth in execution, but he describes some unexpected moments during its making:

Something I kind of liked was the different colors of red. The linear shape feels like it does have space to it, with just a shaped outline. It crosses over the red pod-like shape in the background. And then I remember the painting of the white. Where there's a break in the horizon, the white south of the horizon line is painted with horizontal strokes and north of the horizon is painted with vertical strokes, and just that difference in application made a totally different space to me. These forms intersect and overlap, and it feels like the blue shape is tugging on the red shape the way a shepherd's crook would. But other people have read it in other ways, and that is exciting to me.

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