Robert Sumner

There are a number of threads I pull when building visual images including the non-verbal communicative power that the visual arts share with music and dance; historical, theoretical, and critical ideas that intersect with contemporary experience; and the characteristics of the media I use as they can become a concrete artifact of thinking over time.

Music and dance have clear analogs in the visual arts: rhythm, repetition, improvisation, melody and harmony, and even syncopation. Beyond those formal elements, these artistic disciplines are able to communicate at a pre- and non-discursive level that is simultaneously more fundamental and more expansive than verbal communication. The music of innovators like Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, Fela Kuti, and Poncho Sánchez helped me reach a mental state that allows ideas, colors, and new visual relationships to surface.

The writings of critics, theoreticians, and historians can provide an essential conceptual context for engaging in contemporary life. Three of note are Gianni Vattimo, Diana Coole, and the work of the 20th-century biomorphic/anthropomorphic abstractionists. Vattimo’s treatise End of Modernity explores the philosophical and historical underpinnings of modernity and its trajectory and how postmodernity responds to its shortcomings. Coole’s response to Habermas’ essay on the project of modernity makes a compelling case for the value of the postmodern response and provides potential paths for postmodern thought to act as a ballast and even complement the tenets of modernity.

I work primarily in oil paint, acrylic, casein, and printmaking, each of which has unique characteristics. Working across these media creates a symbiotic conversation between the media that helps me bring to the surface the strengths of one medium while informing the use of the others, for example, trying to bring out the fluidity of painting in the printmaking process. As these images are built up over time they become a physical manifestation of that thinking and record of ‘captured’ time, echoing the thinking of Henri Bergson.

One final note in light of the coordinated rise of fascist tendencies within certain groups in the world’s oldest and strongest liberal democracies over the past several years: abstract art – particularly abstract art that draws upon forward-thinking ideas, that aspires to provide an opening to the understanding and appreciation of beauty and a richer life experience, that engages the viewer in a way that allows them to think about and respond to art in new and unique ways – is inherently anti-fascist. History has repeatedly shown us that fascist actors extinguish intellectual endeavors, exile or eliminate those at the forefront of cultural and intellectual movements, and destroy art objects that do not conform to the propagandistic dictates of fascist power centers. As such, creating abstract art becomes an affirmation of the values that are fundamental to the full human experience.