Paintings from 正在的秋天 | autumn, presencing. 诗:梁慧春 poems by Liang Huichun | paintings by Steven Schroeder 画:施罗德. 梁慧春和施罗德 English translations by Liang Huichun and Steven Schroeder. Chicago: Strawberry Hedgehog, 2020.
The series title is from Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. I began with the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve north of Strong City, Kansas, in mind. But the series has evolved into a more expansive meditation on grass, which, at first glance, appears simple but (as Whitman was aware) is anything but. As I continue to create pieces for this series, I find myself looking at the "leaves" but also at the vast living system that is the prairie, focusing on lines moving in response to a variety of factors (wind speed, wind direction, season, time of day, water and its absence) that function as chance operations and on color fields that overlap and blend (with each other and with the lines) in fascinating ways. The spectrum of little blue stem, for example, ranges from greens and blues through yellows and ochres and rusts and reds and browns and tufts of white. On the National Park Service website, the preserve is described as "the last stand of the tallgrass prairie." A remnant, perhaps, but I like to think of it as a living resistance, still standing – and that is what I celebrate in these works.
Each of the pieces in this series begins with color fields roughly corresponding to the colors (yellow, green/blue, red, black, white) associated with the wuxing ("five phases") of Chinese philosophy. I say "roughly" because the colors themselves are fluid and the "phases" (xing) are active. My focus in this series is process, and I approach wuxing in much the same way William James approached consciousness – as the flight of a bird that perches from time to time along its way. The perch (or the bird perching) may catch our eye, but it is only a moment in the flight, which is the heart of the matter. These pieces use water soluble media on a variety of surfaces that encourage colors to flow in ways that take them from the brush, out of the painter's hands. But I do also use a variety of tools to move the color in collaboration with the vehicle and the surface, and I do sometimes tilt surfaces to encourage collisions that create new fields and new forms. One of the ways I invite meditation on process is by playing with those five colors, exploring their intersections and being mindful of the surprises they bring.
I begin with three pigments (blue, red, and yellow). The wuxing color categories intersect in interesting ways with these "primaries." Yellow is the color of earth, and red is the color of fire. Blue is part of the category "qing" (青) that is often translated into English as "green," but it can range from green through blue to black. It is sometimes described as "the color of nature," so I find it intriguing that it includes all the colors of the rainbow. The pieces in this series begin with fields of blue, red, and yellow in close proximity on the surface. When blue and yellow meet, they create a field of green (the color of wood). When that field meets red, they create a field that is brown shading to black as more red and even more blue are added. That accounts for four of the five colors of wuxing (yellow for earth, green for wood, red for fire, and black for water) – but these are not sharply separated. They swirl together as water carries pigment across the page, "imitating Nature," as John Cage said,"in her manner of operation." It is a kind of dance, full of surprises. Because the media are water soluble, they retain the potential to surprise, moving when water moves on the surface. The fifth color of wuxing, white (the color of metal), is an absence appearing where the surface shows through and/or in the mat (and perhaps the frame) that surrounds (but never contains) the painting.
