Field Dreaming Yellow Incursion by Carl E Hazlewood, Acrylic Polymer Emulsion, 10 x 46 inches, 2000 (Photo: Courtesy of the artist – From Demerara Dreaming Triptych Paintings: 1996 – 2003)
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Pinkskin Blackhead Archer by Carl E Hazlewood, Pigment ink, polyester, acrylic, pastel map pins, colour pencil, Hahnemuhle, and other papers, 51 x 34 inches, 2022. (Photo: Courtesy of the artist – From BlackHead Lyricism)
Although figuration and landscapes do not define the work of Carl E Hazlewood (b 1951) they do, at times, inform it. Nearly two years ago, Hazlewood debuted a series of paintings that until then had never been presented together, even for the artist’s solitary viewing. The show, Demerara Dreaming: Triptych Paintings: 1996 – 2003, ran from February 15 to March 25, 2022 at the David Richard Gallery in New York City. (The gallery would later host shows by Guyana-born artists Arlington Weithers and Carl F Anderson.) Hazlewood’s paintings were astonishing to anyone who had been following his work over the last ten years, or so. The paintings were very small – a result of being ends or cutouts from larger canvases completed during the 1970s and early 1980s, when he says he was “hard at it”.
About the earlier paintings Hazlewood is recorded as saying,
“I was born in the Demerara region of Guyana. There is a great river, ‘Demerara’ and a county named after it. Without sounding overly dramatic or romantic, my paintings are, at least in the conventions of naming, an acknowledgment of the persistence of cultural and personal memory encoded in the way I see colour—that is, landscape colour, skin colour, pure prismatic colour.” (welancoragallery.com)
In addition to a professed preoccupation with colour, in being horizontally oriented the paintings in Demerara Dreaming echoed landscapes. More precisely, they echoed the abstract painterly effects of JMW Turner’s landscapes and others that he studied as a child. These small format paintings were also punctuated with appearances of bold and vibrant colour, characteristic of his Guyana environs of childhood – a symptom of personal memory.
Each of the 14 paintings on show was ten inches high but varied in length. Hazlewood, in an online conversation with the gallerist, said that he intended to maintain this narrow horizontal format as each painting was better regarded as a stanza within a poem. Each of the paintings is also a triptych, usually with longer panels juxtaposed with two smaller panels. The dynamism of the paintings is further reinforced by the variation of the formal qualities in each of the three panels. Speaking about his process which helps to yield the variation in the paintings’ surfaces, Hazlewood explained,
“I usually work flat and stretched, and I work by pouring stuff onto the paint and adding things to it […], powders and so on – whether it’s metallic or gold or whatever and mixing these things in […]. I discovered a way to use viscosity as a method […]. So these splotches and so on, aren’t painted on; it’s rather they’re floated onto the surface […]. Viscosity means you know some things are thicker than others so they don’t mix into the paint, so when I pour it on, there are some unmixed parts that stay on the canvas and when you pour it off, the liquid parts move across and leave a residue and this is the thicker parts. And they dry that way […]. So that’s the way I proceeded [..].”
Thus, as a consequence of Hazlewood’s techniques in the early paintings that form the basis of the small paintings, the paintings of Demerara Dreaming have surprising visual qualities that are only possible when the artist possesses immense knowledge of the medium and how it behaves under varied circumstances, and is willing to yield to the unexpected.
In sharp contrast to the works in Demerara Dreaming, Hazlewood’s show BlackHead Lyricism at the Welancora Gallery in Brooklyn, New York, featured 14 works that defy categorising as painting, drawing, or sculpture while embodying aspects of each. These works, which were mostly 20 inches by 20 inches, were done between 2020 and 2022. All but two were from 2022. A large site-specific work was also installed. This work, the gallery’s press release said, was “inspired in part by the 19th century architectural features in the gallery space.” BlackHead Lyricism ran from March 12 to May 7, 2022.
According to Hazlewood, BlackHead Lyricism “denotes the presence of an element of Black joy and creativity that persists, even during uncertain political and social times. The word BlackHead appears in many titles of works I’ve done over the past several years. He is mostly me – and others like me. It’s a non-figurative (signifying) way of animating my abstract art with references to a Black diasporic identity. It also allows generally, for a more nuanced and complex visual expression within contemporary art; a creative form and poetic counter to all the negativity and despair usually associated with historic Black life and experience – particularly in the last few years.”
Hazlewood’s work in Blackhead Lyricism disrupts the boundaries of disciplines and plays with the materiality of the art object. Polyester, plastic mesh, oil pastel acrylic on canvas, and the ubiquitous push pins are some of the materials used in his compositions.
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Hazlewood’s address of his new approaches in a 2016 Boston College publication is apt in thinking about the works in Blackhead Lyricism:
“To make art, for me, is a basic urge. And after more than 20 years of supporting other artists, I came to a place where I needed to refocus on my own work. I also needed to find a new way— a fresh direction. Finally, without a studio and desperate to get going again, I made myself a few simple rules. Use what I have where I can, in the space that is available to me.[…] Another of my self-made rules is to use the materials that are available to me. What I had lying around the most were various good quality papers. Should I draw or paint on them? No, I needed to do something that was a little more radical. I pinned a plain sheet of heavyweight paper to the wall and made myself yet another rule. . . an old one: keep it simple. And direct. Just do something: fold, cut, bend, pin. Thus my new constructions made mostly of paper, twine, and canvas, are assembled directly on the wall using only push pins and map pins. […]”
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Rounding out a very good year for Hazlewood, Welancora Gallery presented Racing Thoughts-Fever Dreaming: New Paintings by Carl E Hazlewood at Art Basel Miami Beach, from November 29 to December 3, 2022.
(To be continued)
