December 2010

Krystyna Laycraft’s photographs are currently part of a group show at Artpoint Gallery. There are forty-nine of them, some 20.3 cm square and others 25.5 cm square. There are also two larger mother-and-child portraits.
Along with the work of ceramicist Connie Pike, the photos are in one of three show rooms, and they fall under the title Celebration of Art and Life.
Krystyna’s show is the family album writ large. Winsome children, one of them recovering from an illness, are shown in the snapshots. They represent life.
They are all well presented pictures. But lurking behind the charm of the youngsters was a question - can such personal mementos become art when shown in a gallery?
Yes. To be presented as art in an art setting makes them so. They will be judged as such. The problem is they might not be assigned a high degree of “artiness,” except, perhaps, for a few. The mother and child portraits in particular did seem to be firmly within the art category. And why? Because they seemed to symbolize the universal Mother and Child. The pictures were not just snapshots of Lisa and Timmy (or whomever) caught in unrehearsed activity.

And yet so much of recent art has been of that kind - the artist in effect saying, watch me I am doing so and so; now I will do so and so; watch me —-. In short, “I myself am really the work of art and anything I do is of vast significance.”
So why does it not quite work when the family album is pulled out? Especially when kids are involved? I am not sure but I think it is because for all of us, OUR kids are at the top of the totem pole. The fierce biological need to “privilege”, or protect, our own children or grandchildren might make it a wee bit difficult for some of us to see the general in the particular when represented by your young’uns.
That would not be the case if ten or so unrelated children had been photographed. It would then have sidestepped the personal. The thing is —- oh, oh —- I am about to get myself into deep doo doo here —- the problem, as I see it, is that it takes courage, or a towering ego, to assign universal significance to every fleeting emotion expressed by one’s own children or grandchildren.

Actually, come to think of it, maybe the above musings do not really apply. Ah well. Maybe it is simply about the radiant space Krystyna Laycraft inhabits.
We are all in that same space to some degree, aren’t we? A bit like Coconut Joe - a legend in his own mind - and what’s wrong with that?
Anyway, what I have said is probably a minority view. A minority of one.

Respectfully submitted,
Vernon Aquart

* There is more of a general nature about Kristyna’s past shows at Artpoint...

The first time I saw Krystyna’s work, some years ago, I was puzzled. Superficially it appeared to show a fascination with contorted, “romantic”, images of nature, and with broad themes such as love, pleasure, power, expressed within a personal symbology.
As well, some of the paintings incorporated I Ching symbols. The I Ching, as I understand it, is a system for diagnosing a person’s strengths or weaknesses, thus allowing them to deflect the trajectory of their lives into the most manageable pathways and thereby reach a desired goal. It is based on the 64 possible permutations of a hexagram consisting of solid or broken lines, to which meaning has been assigned.

Here are a few of them, copied from the net -

HEXAGRAM:        MODERN INTERPRETATIONS:
||||||     Possessing Creative Power & Skill. Strength. 

¦¦¦¦¦¦     Needing Knowledge & Skill; Do not force matters and go with the flow.     Receptive.

|¦¦¦|¦     Sprouting. Initial Difficulties.

¦|¦¦¦|     Detained, Enveloped and Inexperienced. Youthful Inexperience.


On some of Krystyna’s otherwise representational paintings, there were also spiraling or sinuous lines or patterns of dots the significance of which I hadn’t the foggiest idea.

So what was Mrs. Laycraft saying? Was there a certain mysticism there?
So I looked up her website on the net.
I discovered that Krystyna is a theoretical physicist hailing from Poland, who also studied art in Calgary, and that her scientific focus is on Chaos Theory.
What the hell is that I wondered.
So I looked it up on the net.
Below, from my limited understanding, are the basics of Chaos Theory - a few key terms which, of necessity, I have described in simplistic, non scientific terms -

Attractors
A tennis ball rolling over a lawn rolls into a depression (the basin of attraction). It will continue to roll until it comes to rest at the lowest point. The lowest point is the attractor.
(The ball might corkscrew around the basin rather than follow a straight line).
In some cases, the lowest point might not be fixed, as it is for eddies in a stream.
Such a basin of attraction is called a strange attractor.

Bifurcation Points
Using the same analogy, as in the first example above, if the ball approaches an uneven field of pebbles before reaching the depression, it will “hesitate” before bumping one and be deflected. This small change in its trajectory might result in a huge change in its path until it enters a different basin of attraction.
(note: the analogy of a basin is somewhat misleading because the ball needs to somehow emerge from it, after a while, and continue its constantly bifurcated progress towards ever more complex basins of attraction, where the weave and fabric of the ball itself will be more and more elegantly defined (as with fractals)).
 
Fractals
A fractal is a geometric shape that can be split into increasingly smaller parts, each of which is, more or less, a reduced-size copy of the whole.

                        
 
Wikipedia: “Describing the attractors of chaotic dynamical systems has been one of the achievements of chaos theory.”
But WHOA!
                     WHOA! WHOA! WHOA.
What does all this have to do with art?
In a way, a great deal. This kind of thing - this vaster dimension - in a painting (or other art form) reduces the discomfort many artists feel towards their “practice”.
How can someone with a masters degree in fine art devote him/herself to what might be considered craft?
No way. The physical object, if any, has to be a mere signifier or vehicle for the relentlessly reexamined and provisional idea. The art is the concept “Art”, or the historical, philosophical etc. musings it engenders. That is the postmodern way.

In a New Yorker cartoon of some years ago (I don’t remember it exactly), two men are looking at a squiggle on a gallery wall. One is a bit nonplussed. The other tells him that the object on the wall is merely a trigger for a pondering process about art. Perhaps about the human condition. Therefore, whatever either one thinks is equally valid even if quite different.
And “Art”, like poetry, became a special interest affair. Or a fiesta as at the biennials now sprouting up everywhere.

However, in those byways where art thrives, the 21st century has seen a resurgence of figuration along with art as a primarily conceptual affair. There is more representational painting being produced today than ever before, even if there is little chance of any of it achieving genuine celebrity status in this age of the Blackberry and Face Book.

Which is fine. Post-postmodern multiplicity still reigns.
I mention all this because, in the west, painting today retains two 20th century characteristics - a penchant for “expressive”, cursory brushstrokes (or pencil lines or whatever) and, at the same time, an anxiety to imbue the work with intellectual significance.

Which brings me back to Krystyna Laycraft. Can the exploration in paint of a mathematical/scientific/philosophical system be art?  Why not? Art very often has such non aesthetic underpinnings.  Krystyna said (among other things): 

“I opened myself to a variety of experiences by revisiting familiar places and new (countries) and by attending scientific conferences. Some events, exhibitions, talks and images caught my attention and become the bifurcation points of my creation. In my art work, I examine people’s actions which usually draw towards the six chaotic attractors: freedom, love, pleasure, power, knowledge and longevity.” (My italics).

It seems to me that art allowed Krystyna to illustrate the quality (for want of a better word) of chaotic activity about which she is most passionate. Not activity in the human psyche so much as in the more unfettered human spirit: how to use its bifurcation points and its attractors to achieve what Gerard Manley Hopkins called “… the rise, the roll, the carol, the creation…” (even if those words were written in a far more pessimistic frame of mind).

Krystyna Laycraft’s art is not about art. It is a symbolic language about self empowerment….. Birds in soaring flight. Resistant gnarled trees. Children as a human future assured. Representations of the pull of attractors.
A moral agenda.
Or so it seems to me.
So is Krystyna walking a fine line between inspiring homilies and art?
I don’t know.
I will not try to criticize in depth. I am not equipped to do so.
But if what I have said is way off the mark, I urge you to correct me.

Respectfully submitted,
Vernon Aquart