Journey of an Artwork
“[David Cass’] visual language has consistency but no inviolable boundaries. Meditative for both maker and viewer, it distills light into line, not in any attempt to render an idea of perfection, but to harmonize art and science into an abstract vision of balance between two entities that are not opposites, like water and sky.”
The pool that is my art practice is fed by two definite streams: my paintings of sea in oil, onto metal surfaces; and my paintings of sea in watercolour onto wooden surfaces. Journey of an Artwork focusses on the latter. Photography, film and design are additional aspects of my practice, used to chart process and progress, and have been included to illustrate the stages from flea-marketing, to surface preparation, painting, and onward.
From the outset of this presentation, an awareness that my paintings resist accurate photography has been fundamental. The warmth of wood, the patina of surfaces, the texture of paint and how it absorbs or reflects light, the edges of artworks… these essential elements of my completed works are so easily lost on screen and in print.
In order to better depict the process of production I’ve selected a set of analogue photographs, for the tone of film photography better explains the materials I work with. This digital presentation is a summary of how I build my artworks, where both the physical materials and the subject matter comes from, drawn together by a new text from art historian Patricia Emison. It can be taken as a kind of model of an exhibition, a surrogate while we wait for full-scale encounters to return.
“[Cass] continually explores line both as border and as connection, and searches for grounds, for surfaces that can provide palimpsests, reminding us of the limits of the present. In achieving a new relationship between paint and ground, he has made a visual analogue for the common human experience of seeking to place the mercurial present upon the substructure of the past, to have at least a semblance of being able to exert ourselves upon what came before, rather than seeing ourselves as passive inheritors.”