You can track Stephen Schirle’s fixations through his bodies of work. Though the figure has always been central, for a while he was preoccupied with hands, not only because of their subtlety of expression, but because he wanted to master a notoriously challenging part of human anatomy.
Go Slowly, oil on board, 10 x 10 in.
His latest series of paintings, on view at Arcadia Contemporary from March 7 through 29, emerged from a dark period when Schirle was painting still lifes of pomegranates. It evolved into the addition of blood-red orbs in various stages of crystallization, which he incorporates into his figurative works and paints as stand-alone still lifes.
“I got a little tired of the pomegranates themselves…I wanted to push the visual identity in a mysterious or strange way,” explains Schirle, whose background as a conceptual artist for Hollywood films and video games had groomed him to take a basic concept and take it as far as possible while keeping the original idea intact.
Ruby Tear #1, oil on board, 10 x 8 in.
Schirle was ruminating about his desire to have a family, and pomegranates’ association with fertility was not lost on the artist, but he says it wasn’t supposed to be explicitly related. “It did kind of spawn from that, but I don’t think I was thinking about it consciously…they just evolved just visually. I was trying to think of ways to explore that idea in my work, and now it’s taken on a different path.”
I’ve Been Waiting, oil on linen, 20 x 16 in.
Go Slowly was one of the first paintings in this series. In it, actual pomegranate seeds are scattered around a slick blossom. Then he had models pose as if they were holding something and filled the empty space with split-open pomegranates or orbs. While painting Amazonie, in which a classically rendered woman gazes into a red sphere in her palms, he started to see the forms as teardrops. In works like I’m Still Waiting, we see the teardrops on his model’s face. At the time, he was still exploring shapes and design, and his ideas, like the shapes themselves, hadn’t solidified yet.
Amazonie, oil on linen, 28 x 26 in.
Soon they began to resemble rubies, and he started painting them in various stages of crystallization. Then they became the sole subject of some pieces, as in his Ruby Tear series.
“My overall goal is to make beautiful art,” says Schirle. “That’s the singular thing. We grow up going to these museums and seeing all of this contemporary art that’s kind of slopped together and has nothing to do with beauty…then you go back to the 19th century and those paintings are so much more beautiful and inspiring. I want my work to be like that.” —
Arcadia Contemporary 421 W. Broadway • New York, NY 10012 • (646) 861-3941 • www.arcadiacontemporary.com
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