T A R
Artist Statement
Walking into the predawn twilight of early morning on streets covered with abstract forms, I became aware of the shapes filling the cracks and voids with TAR. Using my iPhone, I took several individual photographs of different shapes and configurations.
Being a multi-disciplined artist working with abstraction forms I was overwhelmed with the end results of the images. Using the digital imaginary in Photoshop I was able to create these images, taking the viewer into another realm of reality.
This body of work incorporates 40 plus images.
-Walter W. Nelson
Douglas Preston on the T. A. R. series
“I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn’t photograph them.”
— Diane Arbus
The greatest photographs force us to look at the world in a new way. They encourage us to discover fresh and surprising ways of seeing ordinary things. They discover beauty in ugliness, originality in the mundane, and luminous truth beneath the dull surface of reality.
These photographs by Walter W. Nelson deliver a powerful aesthetic koan. These images astonish us in their disturbing beauty and unnerving geometry. At first we ask—What are they? Police murder scenes? The calligraphy of a madman? Stormscapes on a distant planet?
And then we recognize them: the decaying and broken surfaces of asphalt and tar. We have seen these images everywhere, every day, in parking lots, streets, and sidewalks. But did we really see them? No, we did not—until Walter W. Nelson showed us, through his remarkable vision, the aesthetic revelation hiding in the most commonplace of surfaces.
--Douglas Preston
T A R
When I first saw the T A R photos by Walter W. Nelson I was taken by their graphic strength. These photos echo the bold graphics of early asymmetric Rorschach images: they give us a way of listening to our mind and of creating meaning. Recent advances in neuroscience show that we shape meaning in a two-stage process: from perception and from our life experiences. First, in what’s called “bottom-up” processing the brain analyzes the raw physical information of perception: light intensity, color, visual texture, shape, size, etc. Then, in the second stage, “top-down” processing occurs. This is where our brain subconsciously makes associations of the perceptual inputs with our life experiences, and this leads to meaning: verbal or non-verbal. Works of art have no single meaning because we each have had different life experiences. Part of art’s beauty, like language, lies in this ambiguity.
Walter carefully makes slight, but significant, changes in the photos that strengthens their visual impact. The photos communicate on an emotional non-verbal level. Though the photos are in black-and-white, they relate well to the color field paintings of Helen Frankenthaler or Mark Rothko. Rothko felt that those who only analyzed his paintings in terms of color relationships and the like were missing the point. He wanted the viewer to experience something like the emotions he felt when he painted them. The T A R photos also have some of the bold qualities of post-painterly abstraction, where edges tend to be sharp, and the tar, the “paint”, soaks into the concrete, the “canvas”, leaving a rich generally flat finish without brushstrokes. If you compare Walter’s photos to some of the paintings of Ellsworth Kelly or John Ferren you’ll see a connection. These photos by Walter W. Nelson are powerful, where mystery and clarity are intertwined. They give us a chance to listen to our mind and see wonder in the mundane.
Joseph Hall
November 2019
Marfa, Texas