Itchikoo Park Paul Cvetich - 2

Paul Cvetich: ichikupark by Tor Lukasik-Foss  Cvetich has a tangential and infectious way of talking, and I’m writing fast just to list the topics he seems eager to connect together. He sketches the life that he and his wife Trish have spent, working here in the region, but mostly travelling (particularly the last eight years since Trish’s retirement). He talks of circumnavigating Lake Superior on his motorcycle, riding to every corner of this continent, bussing across Australia, walking the Great Wall of China, immersing himself in the delicate subversive details of Bernini’s sculpture in Rome. He talks about the years teaching in Japan, and touring Asia, not knowing the language but sucking it all in visually, his fascination with the pictographic alphabets of the East, how they can be so efficiently minimal and complex at the same time. Cvetich then cites the influence of artists such as Frank Stella, Elizabeth Murray, and Nancy Graves, three American artists with a frenetically colourful approach, who have created their own kinds of clustered sculptures of disparate shapes and forms. He notes them for their ability to be not just sculptural, but aggressively three dimensional, as if to allow no possibility of a flat facing surface to exist. Cvetich reminds me again that flat, two dimensional surfaces are for automobile drivers, not motorcyclists. And just when he starts to arc slowly back to his own work, he grows cautious. “Is this going to be published before the show? I really don’t want people to be influenced by what I’m saying. I’d rather they just come to the work with an open mind. So I don’t really want to say anything else.” But he adds one thing just as our brief conversation ends: “All these ideas, all these bits, they spin around, but you know, they all touch. All the bits have to be attached to form a whole, they may be tenuously connected, but they have to be attached, they have to be made whole. That’s all I’m saying, whoever you are, whatever your circumstance, whatever you’ve learned or done, however disparate the bits are, they are all part of some kind of beautiful whole.” Now enjoy a Portfolio of work by Paul Cvetich [Distillate © HA&L + Tor Lukasik-Foss  |  {from the Greek bios} - the course of a life.] [& a Portfolio by Paul Cvetich]