Part 1: Peer review/Common thread

Sarah Gerard recently wrote about Kirk Palmer, my colleague at Eckerd College and showmate for our upcoming exhibit at the Morean Arts Center. In her article, entitled Local artist Kirk Palmer paints himself into the homeless image, Gerard, a blogger for Creative Loafing, *tbt, et el., portrays Kirk as a transnational citizen, military servicemen, and visual artist, who takes his local environment and transforms its components, variables, and symptoms into subject matter to explore

Nowadays a painter, Palmer is producing work that confronts our common reality and explores situations of identity. To paraphrase Gerard’s closing: Palmer’s work resolves a visual essay of hope and compassion for his city’s homeless, the Other, or the humanist by looking at despair and the grieving process as a common thread among human experiences. He consolidates appropriated materials--both found and personal--into recognizable imagery for painting.

I thank Ways of Seeing, by John Berger, for using materials borrowed from Walter Benjamin. Berger says, by way of Benjamin’s work, that when we view a painting, we are aware that we're seeing the product of the artist’s skill and creativity. To see is to touch, but not necessarily with your hands. When I visually reach for a subject, I situate my self in relation to it. A painting is that kind of encounter. Through these means, we are also aware of our role of looking. Alan Watts would call this the, “echo of existence.”

Kirk understands the historical tradition of the portrait painting and its metaphorical context as mirror. His style is draftsmen-like, representative, and uses a straightforward approach in its depiction of imagery. Indeed, Kirk places himself in the paintings by depicting his own visage. While the interchangeable historical counterpart of the portrait is the landscape, both formats are indelibly linked. Allow me to clarify this phenomenon: take for example the world of biology and natural sciences. In this world orientation for an organism is gained in relation to the place in which it is located. So, in order to understand the behavior of an organism you must study its environment. Likewise, Kirk’s collection viscerally marks the artist’s environment -- Saint Petersburg -- by mapping a cognitive spectrum of feelings about his localized landscape. Kirk paints himself in so we can identify with the Other -- the Other in Kirk’s works being ourselves.

Palmer also resolves his internal issues by confronting ideas like homelessness; the nuclear family versus individualism; and the American concept of ‘Freedom’. Palmer’s canvases carve out the despair in the causality of issues pertaining to the breakdown the American family and, by extension, the sense of community.

“There’s a lot of tension”, says Palmer. “I’ve never quite encountered these problems (in other countries) the way I have here, locally, in my own community.”

But Kirk is not an advocate, or an activist, and his work is not aimed at fixing the homeless problem. Kirk does, however, discern larger issues in a highly aesthetic and political way. This subject matter, for Kirk, is highly personal. Ms. Gerard captures Kirk’s feelings in the article; especially his reluctant trespass, crossing the line into voyeurism. Like many artists, he uses photographs as visual aids to construct paintings. But the fieldwork involved in capturing the homeless resting, curled in the nook of a downtown building, can be dangerous. If one asks for permission, there is understandably less tension, but consequently the role’s dynamic changes.

Gerard portrays a Palmer as an artist whose usage of regional mise en scène and social dynamic, as inspiration, cultivates ideas that return to where they’re made. The art retains a kind of hometown flavor when locally exhibited. This method provides the dramatic impact on hot-topic issues, such as homelessness, symptomatic of a class system which champions individuality, over-specialization, and aggressive competition as standard human values worth exploring. It’s clear from Gerard’s article that we’re asked to question everything we see, especially what it’s like in another’s position.