The Angle of No Repose – Connie Glore
January 17 – February 21
Schrage Gallery
The exhibit, Angle of No Repose, honors the open-ended incompleteness that can be the best part of life. The challenge for the painter is to let a painting reveal itself. These paintings are more of an experience of a place rather than an actual depiction. By not concluding in advance what the painting is to be about, the painter can observe in real time an experience of co-creation with the painting. Sometimes the painting will say, “Stop,” because it knows when it is done.
Artist’s Statement
“Everything seeks its own angle of repose, which is its own equilibrium, a place where it can rest without slipping.” I am interested in place and what happens due to the nature of impermanence.
Repose is transient. Slippage occurs, foundations shear, stones fracture. We are balancing, exploring adaptation. Everything moves and is sensible, aware, and in its way, alive. A constant state of physical change alerts our psyche. A painter can ride on that same energy.
In these paintings there is movement, suggestion of movement to come or preexisting. There is something here that defies repose and challenges the notion of stability in nature. The idea of a horizon shows itself to be the least descriptive element and barely necessary in many of the paintings.
The angle of no repose plays on the title of Wallace Stegner’s book, Angle of Repose, in which confronting and avoiding life’s challenges come to a point of acceptance, but stability remains elusive. As human beings, we feel this. Sometimes we seek safety. Sometimes we are swept away.
Moving one’s feet fast enough to keep from falling is a talent for survival. Regarding creativity, acceptance of a changing state becomes beneficial. Learning the skill of maintaining an angle of no repose becomes the feeling of floating in a moving stream. The trust between the painter and the painting is much like this.
The Angle of No Repose shows paintings leaning into the fracturing edge of instability wherein unsettled and agitated energy finds stillness fluttering in the heart of itself. It is that vibration that continues after the act of painting concludes.
These paintings are an experience of the state of being present, not determining in advance what the painting is to be about while simultaneously listening to the painting. Sometimes the painting will say, “Stop,” because it knows when it is done sooner than the painter. This is the reason I do not sign my work on the front of paintings. It is out of respect for the process of co-creation.