Steven LaRose: portraits or landscapes from the uncanny mist

The paintings have a quiet Zen-like presence. They are not spectacular, radiant, theatrical, or lustful desirous objects, but instead possess a subtle and poetic beauty-one that would be easy to miss in the constantly moving image stream of todays artworld. Mostly they remind me of European art between the Wars..the short lived and nearly forgotten movement known as Tachisme, or l'art informel-perhaps as washy liquid acrylic minimal offspring of the work of Otto Wolfgang Schulze(a.k.a. Wols). But unlike Wols who propped his paintings against the Existentialist rhetoric of Sartre and died apocalyptically young from tainted horsemeat, Steven LaRose offers no theoretical polemic or tragic romantic persona for us to frame his activities. In fact he offers very little of the sort of knowing and affected context that has become de rigueur for entre into the elite pocket of what is considered "important" art 'round these parts.

What we get instead is something much more interesting and fresh, something that could've only come from a place outside of Los Angeles, outside of the grinding and ferocious tumult of professionalism that so quickly can turn the creative impulse into one more McProduct , replacing what was once candid and hopeful with the dour and cynical mannerisms of ironic nihilism. I've never been to Ashland Oregon, but a quick search on the internet filled my imagination with visions of a lush and verdant arcadia full of rolling hills, free-spirited hippie chicks, and old timers smoking pipes outside the General Store. I form a picture of a late summer evening in some sort of amphitheatre where crowds are happily lounging in the cool grass as live New Age sitar fusion music floats over the gathering while free-loving all natural nymphs surround me on a hemp picnic blanket. A winsome Castillian beauty with flowers in her hair leans towards me with a lump of sugar placed between her full lips...
Ashland, Oregon
nude protest in Ashland
So it might be that the Ashland that I have invented in my mind bears little or no resemblance to the actual, but what is important is that Ashland is NOT Los Angeles. Steven said that he started blogging to connect to a group of peers, a community that was larger than the very small handful of likeminded souls that have decamped in said mountain town. This is why I'm even writing this post, because it was through this serendipitous process that somehow we came to each others attention. But despite this connectedness, his work, or his motivations and reasons for making it remain pure of spirit-unsullied by the cold mechanistic forces that might've ripped his project to shreds if it had tried to emerge in this environment.


It is the genuine belief in the creative urge that one is left with after immersion in this world. The very simple act of dropping some paint on a panel and moving it around is in fact a truly exciting and revelatory process which we are in constant danger of forgetting. No marks are completely intentional or unintentional, no forms can be replicated. Out of this field of contingencies, the artist loosely orchestrates the emergence of a composition.- a taxonomy of coincidence. The Uncanny Mist is neither representational nor abstract, neither portrait nor landscape. It is open to all of these possibilities, a plenum of choices, a union of opposites. In the Mist the words "man" and "nature" dissolve into meaningless syntactical constructs and we begin to see the ground of being emerge unadorned by linguistic hallucinations.





Later as my class was reading reviews and eating pizza at a nearby restaurant we started to talk about Steven and how much he seemed to resemble his art-how it was impossible to separate one from the other, and how his enthusiasm and excitement were gleefully contagious leaving us all with a smile and feeling of discovery. One of them observed: "I really like that guy- he didn't seem like he was trying to impress us. He was just being himself."

"You know he's not from LA," I reminded them.

"Oh- no wonder."






Steven LaRose: portraits or landscapes from the uncanny mist