Confusion.
It's one of the most common reasons people hesitate to view art. But in some cases when the art is so esoteric it keeps people away, pure aesthetics can elicit appreciation with no need for understanding. Nathaniel Quinn's exhibit, Trails of Cascading Underwater Forests, explores this dichotomy.
Every month, the Duke University Union Visual Arts Committee picks a new artist to feature in the Louise Jones Brown Gallery in the Bryan Center. Quinn was chosen because his art consists of a visually-stimulating body of work that invites viewers to let their minds delve into an alternate world, one dominated by bright color schemes, heavy layering of paint and intricate details.
Quinn's repertoire has been featured in New York and Los Angeles, and most recently has returned to the states from an exhibition in Barcelona. Additionally, the Durham and Chapel Hill native has taught painting and drawing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Shaw University and Durham Technical Community College when not working as a professional artist.
At first glance, the artists' pieces are part Jackson Pollock, part LSD trip, part neon explosion. The paintings, mostly acrylic on paper, are overwhelming to the senses-fluorescent colors swirled and scribbled within more colors, creating an almost psychedelic color field effect.
Yet, upon closer examination, viewers can pick up more subtle details that go unnoticed at first.
"My paintings are about disappearing spaces; real and imagined, concrete and abstract, and the pathways used to get there," Quinn said in a personal statement.
The contrast that he juxtaposes, between the intimate and the expansive, are evident in "River Bed Study in Pink." What first seems a massive scribbling of various shades of pink turns into a complex landscape, dotted with ice cream sundaes and playful drawings of turd-shaped silhouettes. Smaller elements weave through the chaotic mixture of lines, both wispy and defined.
Another piece entitled "Amber Sky Pelvis Chamber" can be read many different ways. The fish swimming around an intricate pink cave-like pelvis can be seen as a reference to sex, but the piece does not have to be interpreted as such.
Freshman Antwanette Ross found Quinn's artwork intriguing but also felt that the complexities of the works highlighted the artist's strengths and weaknesses.
"I felt like a lot of pieces are overwhelming," Ross said. "You have to focus on certain parts of the piece and see what's going on there."
In particular, "Cave Swirls Perpetuated in the Dark" really captivated Ross's attention-the unfocused scope of the painting allowed her imagination to run free.
"It's kind of dark and spoke to me because I could picture objects floating around," Ross said. "I imagined the Styx Rivers, with souls floating around, reaching out."
She also found the use of color to be especially unique and a strong point of Quinn's art. However, she did feel that most people would be turned off by how abstract the pieces were and that they might not take the scribbling effect seriously.
For the most part, viewers don't take in the layering effects as "a space that suggests tunnels the reaches of outer space" or the surface texture as "tension between restlessness and calm," as Quinn intended.
But at the very least, the paintings get viewers thinking.
Trails of Cascading Underwater Forests is currently in the Brown Gallery until March 8.
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