No touch, no brush
WESTPORT’S ERIC CHIANG PAINTS WITHOUT DIRECTLY TOUCHING THE CANVAS LIKE ‘JACKSON POLLOCK BUT DIFFERENT’
Eric Chiang’s landscape in the Golden Door exhibit at New Canaan’s Silvermine Art Center is so large and centrally located it’s easily seen from the gallery entrance. There’s no doubt about what is being depicted. It’s a mountain range with jagged peaks under a stormy sky. The steep mountainsides are black and shiny; bare rock washed perhaps by a freezing rain. Pale cataracts or glaciers flow down the mountainsides.
Closer up, details of color and shape sharpen. On the right, from what would be the east on a map, bands of gold promise a sunrise. In the center, vertical brown lines declare themselves as trees. Below, splashes of green, red and orange hint at a verdant undergrowth.
Soon enough, Chiang’s landscape reveals itself to be not one painting, but six. Each is a 3-foot-square canvas. Arranged in two rows of three, they
“I DID NOT USE A BRUSH. I DID NOT USE PAINT KNIVES. I DIDN’T USE FINGERS.”
form a single, monumental image 9-feet wide and 6-feet deep. The gallery label gives its title as “Ode To Earth I-VI” and says it’s done in oil. But that’s for simplicity’s sake.
As far as the Westport artist is concerned, he didn’t paint “Ode to Earth” at all, not in the usual sense anyway. “Ode to Earth” is one of the latest in a series of landscapes Chiang began about five years ago, deliberately distancing himself from the canvas.
“I always liked the mountains and it dawned on me to ask myself the question: What if our land were to write a story about itself? How would it express itself?” said Chiang. “And to answer this question visually, I started to emulate how the land developed. And the first thing I thought about was I cannot use a brush. I don’t want to leave any human touch.”
To solve this self-imposed conundrum, Chiang, who grew up in Taiwan and has studio on Bridgeport’s AmFab arts building, invented a method in which he uses paints of various viscosity and density to mimic natural phenomena — rock, erosion, storms, clouds, lightning — that he dripped or splashed onto the canvas.
“I did not use a brush. I did not use paint knives. I didn’t use fingers. I didn’t use anything that I directly touched the canvas with. It was like Jackson Pollock, but different,” he said.
For water imagery, he used various sprays. To capture wind, he used a blow dryer. Unlike Pollack, Chiang was striving to create a recognizable natural world. Stretching around the wall of his AmFab gallery are 12 panels from his recent “Land Scripts” series that answered the question, what if the land could talk.
They also form a mountain range. This one is 48-feet long, too large to ever have been exhibited as a whole. Instead, “Land Scripts” have been displayed two or three panels at a time in shows at Silvermine, the former Westport Arts Center, the Ridgefield Guild of Artists and New Canaan’s Carriage Barn Art Center.
The “Land Scripts” mountains are done in shades of black and white. From a distance, they look like they might have been done in charcoal and are just rough enough to make it possible to believe Chiang created them without artist’s tools. But how did he achieve the finer detail and vivid color in “Ode to Earth?”
To explain, Chiang retrieved a brand new canvas and laid it flat on the floor. Done in bright yellow and orange, it represents fire. He kneels to show how he tilts the canvas one way and then another to make his dripped and poured paints coalesce into an image, like the trees in “Ode to Earth.” One imagines him as an artist prospector panning his canvas for gold.
The Golden Door exhibit is themed around cultural diversity and immigration. It takes its title from the last line of Emma Lazarus’ poem engraved in the Statue of Liberty. Tightly curated, it has works by 10 artists, the majority born elsewhere.
Chiang, who has lived in Westport since 1993, came to the U.S. at age 24 for graduate school at New York University. He studied computer science and mathematics, in part because it was what his parents expected of him. But he had felt driven to be an artist, both a composer and painter, since age 13.
In an artist’s statement prepared last year for a collaborative exhibit between the Beechwood Art Center and the Westport Library, he wrote he had been “crazily inspired” after hearing Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. He also wrote that Beethoven’s example of overcoming deafness saved him from the despair he felt in high school, begging teachers to critique his music and artwork.
The Beechwood show, titled “Do or Die Artwork,” coincided with Beethoven’s 250th birthday. Chiang’s contributions were paintings that included some of his music manuscripts.
“I wanted to be both (composer and painter) because the creative thoughts in me always had a visual part and an auditory part. They always come together,” he said.
Chiang has done dozens of paintings, using a brush, that feature musical instruments, especially the cello. He launches his surreal cellos into deep space and sends them to tour earthly landscapes. Chiang considers them stand-ins for people. One painting in his studio shows a cello flying on spread wooden wings, symbolic of Christ’s cross.
“Their sound range is close to the human voice,” he said. “Their shape and size is almost the same as the human form.”
Chiang does not play the cello himself. He learned to play the piano for composition purposes. Remarkably, he often composed his cello paintings during his commute to his job as an IT specialist for Goldman Sachs in Manhattan. The Metro North train he took from Westport was always crowded.
“I didn’t need to sketch it down,” he said of his painting ideas. “To me it was a waste of time. It just stayed in my head. I couldn’t get a seat. So without a seat what could I do? I was daydreaming.”
His “Ode To Earth” landscape at Silvermine also had a musical inspiration, from Gustave Mahler. Chiang said he was listening to the fourth movement of Mahler’s First Symphony when he felt struck by lightning.
“I immediately visualized a stormy day and jagged mountains and rocks falling down,” he said.
He painted the first four panels in 2018, then added two more in 2019. On the right, lighter and more colorful, they are intended to show life weathering the storm.
Chiang said the curator, Robin Jaffe Frank, recognized the influence of Chinese landscape art in his paintings before he did.
“I never thought I wanted to paint in a Chinese way. That was not conscious at all,” he said. “However, just like when you look at ‘Ode to Earth,’ without knowing me, anyone would have said this is a Chinese painting.”
His attraction to mountains is more than aesthetic. Taiwan happens to be a volcanic island with mountains 10,000 feet high. He hiked them in his youth and has since hiked in the Sierras and the Alps. He said, however, that he does not use photograph references for his painted mountains. They arise elsewhere.
Chiang will exhibit a 12-foot tall vertical addition to his “Land Scripts” series in January at the First Street Gallery in Chelsea. The Golden Door exhibit at Silvermine continues through Jan. 16.