Pratik : Pratik La Special : Caley O’Dwyer’s Art: Life as Revision

Caley O’Dwyer’s Art: Life as Revision

In my paintings, I’m interested in architectural forms both for their own sake and as analogues for, or signs of, interior experience. With lines and more fluid shapes, I explore the idea that the self is relational and plural along with the sense that persons are fluid and mercurial. I like the idea that people are both individual and multiple, that differences in context bring forth variations of self and that these changes happen across time. Gouache (on paper) and oil paint (on canvas) are favorable mediums for depicting change because they can be worked over and over again, heaps of solid opacity blocking out what was underneath it, or more transparent washes with less pigment inviting glimpses into the under layers. The cutting out and collaging of painted paper to reposition figures or painting over areas of oil painting speaks to my sense of life as revision, this process that happens in time and which never ends, but which still images can seem to “fix.” These paintings struggle against this sense of fixity, such that arguably beautiful passages are sometimes sacrificed in favor of painting over them or scratching them out. If painting is a kind of conversation wherein physical gestures merge ideas with materials, I’m increasingly interested in keeping the conversation going, with how to render “ongoing-ness” in a way that isn’t just a mess. But the process involves risking messiness because the paintings typically only feel “right” or finished when they’ve been worked up to an extent that seems almost irretrievable. When they work, some leap of faith into further conversation (more painting, more cutting, more pasting, more doing) eventually yields a new order I couldn’t have planned or known.

The Wanderers (2008)

from RUN (2015)

A Day Without Violence (cropped)

Conversion (2016)

Caley O’Dwyer is a visual artist, poet, and teacher living in Los Angeles. His painting practice is driven by postmodern psychology, humor, wonder and musicality, emphasizing uncertainty, process painting and surprise. Alongside his painting practice at the Brewery Arts Complex in downtown Los Angeles, Caley teaches creative writing and psychology at Antioch University and was previously an Associate Professor in University of Southern California’s Writing Program. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, Cream City Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Washington Square and other venues, including the Tate Modern Museum in London. He is a winner of an Academy of American Poets Prize, a three-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize, and a recipient of a Helene Wurlitzer grant for poetry. His first book, Full Nova, was published by Orchises Press, and his in-progress collection, Light, Earth and Blue, features poems written in response to the abstract expressionist paintings of Mark Rothko.

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