ARTICHOKE
Spring 2000

By Monique Westra

Monique Westra
is an Art Journalist
and Curator of Contemporary Art
at the Glenbow Museum, Calgary Alberta.

Review

Richard Halliday
Constellation Series
The Stride Callery, Calgary
January 7- 29, 2000

There is an independent, romantic spirit to Richard Halliday. He is, and always was, unabashedly a painter of abstractions, doggedly probing his inner self with restless energy in works of art that lend themselves not to deconstruction but to formal analysis. His paintings are not about class or race or gender. They do not address issues, nor are they ideologically driven. They deal in universal truths, not in contingencies. In short, Halliday is modernist in a time when even postmodernist art feels dated. Yet, although Halliday’s large paintings seem familiar, they are at the same time refreshingly vital and free.

Since the early 1970’s Halliday has worked in series, constructing his abstraction in terms of figure/ground relationships, constantly exploiting the tension that results from a creative process that is both directed and automatic. Characteristically, Halliday’s paintings - whether in pastel, charcoal, acrylic or oil, on canvas or paper, large or small- reveal the unmistakable presence of an artist who plays his lines like a fine instrument.

The art of Richard Halliday grows directly out of American Abstract Expressionism and Canadian Automatism where drips, pours, splatters, lines, and clusters of coloured pigment make tangible and visible that which is essentially intangible and invisible. What gives the work of abstract artists like Halliday its potency is the expression of a part of the self that goes beyond the vicissitudes of daily life to encompass something more elemental: a core of being that is more than the sum of its parts. The paintings are a result of vigorous and spontaneous application of paint to canvas, creating images that are drawn, in inexplicable ways, from a wellspring of life experience. The idea of Abstract Expressionism and, in particular, The gestural abstraction practiced by Halliday, is that broad movement of the body, especially the arm and the upper torso, is the physical outward conduit of inner feelings that find expression through a direct, instinctive, and unpremeditated process. The resulting work is as much the product of elements beyond the artist's control as it is of his conscious will.

Natural forces-gravity, the physical properties of paint, as well as chance- plays a significant part in the creation of such paintings. At the same time, the intent and measured input of the artist is a critical determinant in the process. This does not undermine the premise fundamental to Abstract Expressionism that an artistic creation generated and fueled by spontaneity and impulse reveals something essential about the artist who made it. As a projection of self, abstract art is essentially experiential, wherein the freedom and untrammeled release of the mark-making process creates a very intense and meaningful experience for the artist. The role of the viewer is one of reception, absorption, and transformation. Halliday says that his lines "direct you to read the space I create for you to experience."

In Halliday's art there is a tension between chance and purpose, chaos and order, randomness and design. This dynamic antithesis can be found in all of Halliday's work from the early 1970s to the present. In an untitled series done in 1987, control, measure, and balance are revealed in the uniform stabilizing background and in the straight lines that define geometrical shapes in the centre of the pictorial space. Yet this central image is ripped apart, invaded or overrun by an impulsive and urgent torrent of coloured lines that seem to express primal forces. In the current Constellation Series, the central image yields to an all-over configuration; a rhythmic, spiralling calligraphy of white lines on black ground. Here, the dichotomy between reason and passion is as evident as ever. The ground is firm, bold, and assertive; a solid wall of black pigment applied with a sure hand.

In many of the Constellation Series paintings there are two or more broad, parallel arcs that sweep across the surface in confident, continuous flow. In other works one finds straight lines laterally placed, spanning the full length of the canvas. These carefully structured lines seem to be elements of order, demarcating boundaries within the evolving and revolving matrix of lines and loops.In the Constellation Series there is no end and no beginning to the frenzied trajectory of line; only continuity, renewal, and space. Halliday's oil stick creates lines that are thick or thin, swirling up and around, in and out in elegant, overlapping corkscrew designs. Some of these lines skim lightly across, leaving transparent traces of their passage. Other lines are so opaque that they mark out bold patterns on the surface. The high contrast between black and white, and the spaces constructed by unfurling lines and whorls of varying sizes, create a dynamic spatial depth that is both centrifugal and centripetal. The sense of boundlessness and cosmic energy generated by perpetually moving white lines on a black void is central to their meaning. "It is a space that is completely invented in the process of drawing and therefore a sense of reality to the space I have felt and created before me," Halliday explains. His concept of space is nothing less than a metaphor for himself, "a mapping and positioning of self in relation to the rest of the universe."

Although there is a serious meta-physical and, indeed, heroic dimension to the Constellation Series, the works are also playful and daring. It is exhilarating to stand in the midst of Halliday's paintings and glory in their tumultuous energy.

RICHARD HALLIDAY From Constellation series 2004 White titanium oil stick on bone black acrylic 1.63 x 2.31m

RICHARD HALLIDAY
LEHMANN LESKIW Fine Art , Toronto

It’s so persistent. The personality of oil paint. There’s nothing quite like it, and the closer we get to a dematerialized digital realm, the more we’re going to need it .
This is what handling paint as a magical fetish object looks like-a diagram of seeing pictorial space as an extension of the painter’s mind. Each of the large black-and-white canvases in Richard Halliday’s series Constellation says one thing in a calm visual voice: this is how the mind of a painter works. Halliday’s works are gestures in the dark, obscure visual signals that seem to evoke one of Frank Stella’s favourite adages: what you see is what you see. Like all sophisticated exercises in seeing, they also invite us to forget the name of what we see.
At first glance, the paintings appear spontaneous, but craft and design have been applied to their random calligraphy. This is especially true of an optical party like Constellation #17, a boldly visceral playground where words like interior and exterior, subject and object, self and other cease to have meaning. Sometimes we visit galleries looking for we know not what, only to be stopped in our tracks by work that is about exactly what we don’t know we’re looking for. Halliday’s paintings are such works.
Naturally enough, no senior artist likes to be called a senior artist (Halliday graduated from the Emily Carr Institute back in 1963, when it was still called the Vancouver School of Art), but their survival is worth celebrating. Does Halliday make primeval painting or quantum painting, or both? Call it what you will, but look closely and carefully. Every so often, the art of painting gets renewed.