Albion Arts

Stan Chraminski

I have spent most of my life creating art. My formal training at Arts High School in Newark, New Jersey, was followed by an Art History concentration at Rutgers - the State University of New Jersey, as well as studio art courses at several colleges and numerous classes at the extension level. Living in Europe for five years gave me the opportunity to visit many museums and see the work of my favorite artists such as Monet and Pisarro at first hand. Since settling in Seattle, I have studied various techniques and media.

What is painting? Painting means marks on canvas. These marks can convey images of what we see around us, such as landscapes, people, still lifes, animals, or whatever we choose for a subject. The subjects can be tranquil, lively, harsh, or convey whatever emotion we want. They can also convey political statements. We can use art for many purposes and in the 21st century, anything goes. If I call it art, and have a good enough story around it, it becomes art. Painting is just one small portion of what art is today.

I save my politics for the ballot box. Over the past century, very little "political" or "social" art has survived its time. Picasso's Guernica is one of the few political works that has stood the test of time. When we try to convey a message, we most often lose the art. It's like writing a novel. If we put the moral of the story first, the work suffers and we lose interest. We first need to create the beauty of the art. In this age of instant communications and news photographs coming at us from all sides, art, even theater passed off as performance art, does not have much to add to the political dialogue, in my opinion. I therefore strive to recreate human emotions through the elements of a painting. Since I am generally an optimist, my work tends to lean toward creating positive emotions - although, my night scenes and darker abstracts can convey the negative side of life too. I believe what we see and have is all there is to life so we should treat each other with love and charity and help each other during our short time on this earth. There is too little time allotted to each of us to allow room for hate.

Painting can also be about the marks themselves. This is non-objective work or if based on what we see, abstract work. Each of us has a tendency to enjoy one type of work over another, either to create it or appreciate it. The emotions created by abstract work come through the colors, shapes, lines, movement, textures and other elements.

I am often asked why an artist, in this age of many modes of reproduction of scenes of the world around us, chooses to paint landscapes. My answer - I love the challenge of it! Just look at the variety of the earth’s dome around and above us. An artist must carefully select just a single slice of this ever changing reality, then combine the elements of composition, color, line, and texture to create the desired emotional impact. Each stroke is a separate decision of color, size, shape, direction, thickness, and texture which can go well or wrong and it is the sum of these strokes which creates the work. It is this process which continually drives me to pick up my brushes.

No matter the type of work, the emotional impact I hope to achieve in the viewer is my main goal. I want the viewer to stand where I stood, either in front of a landscape, or just in front of the painting, and feel the same flow of feelings I did. Sometimes this impact is a scene of serenity to help deal us with our modern chaos, an island amid the storm. In other works I seek to show the darker side of nature, captured under the artificial lights we live our nights by.

Willem de Kooning once said, "One idea in art is as good as another; execution is all." It is this perfection of execution that I seek.

Stan Chraminski