The pieces in this collection share, in different ways, the notion of the Earth Alive, made visible in the form of a fire that animates the ground we stand on. The notion of Fire refers to the aliveness of our seeing as well as the fire that imbues the images of the collection. The collection is dedicated to artist and poet Nadine Boughton.

The Fire Below Us

Works in this collection are strongly influenced by my graphics work in black and white. They unite heterogenous visual components to create complexities that challenge abilities to discriminate. I think of these works as upgrading Paul Klee’s notion of elevating Construction to Expression, with an emphasis on Unification.

Complexities

This collection integrates black-white graphics into works in color, both taken from my own collections. The works explore different ways of marrying these two media, not only accepting but enhancing their opposition, to find for them new forms of balance in all their aspects. Merging two different media has an arresting effect that is hard to replicate in any other way.

Portraits

This collection comprises work done with vectorizer techniques in Studio Artist. Sometimes, the starting point of a work is a black & white contour taken from a previous work in the Laske collection (most often a painting) which is progressively vectorized and colorized. In most cases, the work is experimental from the start using pure intuition. Despite the large differences between individual pieces, the major criterion remains that of “good form”, including the avoidance of flatness.

Color Graphics III

The artist produced this collection in search of visual purity and starkness. For him, purity lies in avoiding fancy and frivolous colors in favor of focusing on the (sharp or fuzzy) outlines of neutral pictorial elements assembled in topologically intriguing configurations. All the works in the collection use ‘threshold filter’ techniques. Some of them are enhanced by “painting in black” for the sake of enhancing the work’s form.

2023 Black-White Graphics

Works in this collection all deviate from conventional expectations as to how balance should be achieved in a painting. The works are thoroughly experimental, intent on bringing together contrasting configurations, shapes, and colors that, while ‘disturbing’ each other, ultimately expand the scope of what can cohabit in a painting. Many of the works ‘explode’ with energies that are the result of the heterogeneity of placement, direction, motion, weighting, and color of the works’ components. In most cases, the notion of ‘dialectic’ applies to how these components interrelate. It is the density of their relationships that re-define ‘beauty’.

Deviations

In this collection, color is the dominant force, followed by shape and texture. Many of the works comprise large and lush color fields standing in contrast to each other, while others are composed of a multitude of small color fields that together form a particular shape. In my experience, these works do not reveal themselves at first sight; one must closely study the fine structure to discover how multifaceted they are.

Watercolors One

The start idea for these works was to make digital pencil and graphic sketches that, once made, would be ‘colored in’. Naturally, the proportion of sketch and color varies from work to work so that sometimes the sketch, sometimes color, dominates. In all cases, texture came to the fore as a major determinant, becoming a rival of color. To do justice to the emphasis on texture, individual work sizes differ.

Color Sketches

Works in this collection evolve around a black graphic extracted from work in earlier collections. The artist wanted to integrate graphics and painting in optimal and always different ways, depending on the graphic chosen. This enterprise led him to explore the color black more intensely. The collection shows the multiple ways in which the two media can combine and challenge each other in different ways.

Color Graphics II

This collection comprises work centered around the gift of lines to create new realities across conventional genres of painting.

Power Lines No. 2

Oppositions is based on the willful setting pictorial elements against each other, be it colors, shapes, rhythms, or entire configurations. As in any occurrence of opposition, one or the other of the elements standing against each other may dominate, and thus take control of a work as a whole. Opposition in a dialectical sense implies that two or more elements are distinct, and as distinct are intrinsically related to each other simultaneously, pointing to an overarching whole or common ground that emerges through their opposition. It is the dynamicism of oppositions that is in focus in this collection.

Oppositions

This collection comprises the outcome of experimentations using Studio Artist’s compositional evolve option which invites the artist to intermingle contrasting brushes, textures, and colors under various degrees of control. This approach to art making includes an opening for controlled random whose results fall, however, entirely within the esthetic jurisdiction of the artist. Studio Artist’s ‘evolve’ option, especially when used, as here, together with a two-dimensional canvas and selective work in different canvas partitions (‘selection’), requires a high degree of artistic inventiveness and critical judgment. It also encourages the liberty to follow idiosyncratic criteria of esthetic judgement.

Virtual Landscapes

The works in this collection combine graphics with painting so that at times the former, at other times the latter predominates.  The viewer will find a multitude of designs which together explore the many relationships that can be established between the two media, including pure black & white graphics and graphics subordinated to painting. Most of the works are inherently expressionistic; they make visible the ability of the eye to reflect.

New Graphics

The works in this collection emerged from unfettered experimentation with tools only digital work provides. In large part, they are painterly although work with lines is important in all of them. The works most often comprise 2 or more layers which accounts for their coloristic and textural multidimensionality. In creating them, the artist had recourse to more than 10 years of experience of digital painting and 45 years of musical composition.

New Work

The works in Condensations are “condensed” in the sense that they stem from segments of older works that were of considerable compositional interest to the artist. For this reason, the artist chose specific segments of an older work as a template for new work, by painting into them, performing image operations on them, and otherwise enhancing the chosen segment to the extent desired. He did not bypass any opportunity for bringing the segments chosen to life in a new form. In this way, entirely new work came into being that compacts as well as extends the meaning of an older work.

Condensations

This heterogeneous collection comprises works based on photographs that served as a source of inspiration and, technically, as material resource. The scope of variation of the original photograph is very broad. It reaches from including fragments of the photograph in the painting to deriving from it only the color palette for free painterly exploration. Thus, re-presentation is not the issue. Outside of my own photography I had the privilege of using photos taken by nature, bird and insect lover Martin Ray, Gloucester, MA, in particular for Photo-Paintings nos. 4-8, 10-11, 16-25, and 34-35.

Photopaintings

Works in this collection are based on a multiplicity of digital techniques for the sake of rendering musical flow, density, modulation, and spatial depth. In most cases, the initially emerging image was developed further by the strategic inclusion of segments taken from either related or starkly different images, for the sake of heightening interest. A work’s end state is thus a synthesis of diverse techniques serving initially different esthetic goals.

Visual Music

This heterogeneous collection gathers improvisational works from early 2021. The artist celebrates the deep potentials of Studio Artist software as well as his new-found ways, strengthened by an assiduously adventurous 10-year practice, to work ‘from scratch’, based on spur-of-the-moment intuitions, in an experimental way. 

Improvisations 2021

The works in this collection are based on animation stills deriving from the author’s Cinema work in 2010-12. The marriage of cinematography and painting preserves the stills’ architecture but decidedly alters their character.

Animation Stills Paintings

This collection originates in the intention to let go of painterly accuracy and top-down design to enable instantaneous inspiration to have a say. It pays homage to the sense of color and design of Richard Diebenkorn whose work inspired it. Working digitally, the artist felt released from self-imposed strictures, enough to forget about perfection such as clear separation of colors and lines. These compositions often embody free, childlike drawings, used either to enliven surfaces, create imaginary space, break regularity, compete with color values, create patterns, or tell a story. Some of works feature social commentary.

Homage to R. Diebenkorn

This collection comprises work done with large, multi-colored wet brushes. In the focus of attention is the structure of the brush itself that defines the work’s texture and the individual stroke that makes the brush speak. Here, brushes represent nothing but themselves. 

Streaming

This collection comprises works resulting not from a single but multiple ‘presets’ selected from the artist’s software task environment (Studio Artist). Each preset is associated with a specific type of brush (which can be changed) as well as color and texture parameters (which can also be changed). The artist has made use of those presets he felt were either complementary or contrasting, sometimes both. As a result, works in this collection are characterized by contrast and opposition which makes for an intriguing challenge to create a unified pictorial space.

Brush Variety

This collection comprises pieces deriving from a merger of different types of brushes within a single work. The challenge was to create a unified artwork by way of differently structured and textured brushes, whether these are complimentary to, or stand in contrast with, each other. The motto for working in this fashion might be said to be "out of many, one”.

Brush Merger

This collection comprises work resulting from designing (in software) large brushes quickly filling a frame with a small number of strokes rather than detailed brushwork. As the result, outcomes are, to various degrees, less painterly than architectural and veer into the domain of illustration or decoration. The esthetic goal becomes that of crafting a unity from heterogeneous brush output. The artist needs to work diligently to optimize image complexity without losing coherence, and to counter flatness for the sake of creating a vibrant pictorial space. To do so he needs to completely trusts his hand to carry quickly what can barely be planned.

Broadest Strokes

Works in this collection result from experimenting with broad brush strokes that significantly change the dynamics of the pictorial space. They showcase what happens to pictorial forces such as color, texture, shape, and line once they are no longer forced into serving goals of representation. They teach especially beginners a lesson about elements of painting that need to be mastered in order to bring their equilibrium or disequilibrium under conscious control.

Otto Laske