2016 Best Of Show:
Wayne Claypatch, Out of the Frying Pan
OLEAN PUBLIC LIBRARY GALLERY | September 22- October 28, 2016
In 2015, Wayne CLaypatch was named Best of Show winner of the Southern Tier Biennial. Sixty-two artists entered more than 165 pieces of work for the juried competition. Claypatch's work was chosen from the 16 accepted artists by two prestigious members of the Western New York art community: John Massier the Visual Arts Curator at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center in Buffalo, NY, and Bleu Cease the Executive Director and Curator of the Rochester Contemporary Art Center in Rochester, NY.
Wayne Claypatch, Out of the Frying Pan
OLEAN PUBLIC LIBRARY GALLERY | September 22- October 28, 2016
In 2015, Wayne CLaypatch was named Best of Show winner of the Southern Tier Biennial. Sixty-two artists entered more than 165 pieces of work for the juried competition. Claypatch's work was chosen from the 16 accepted artists by two prestigious members of the Western New York art community: John Massier the Visual Arts Curator at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center in Buffalo, NY, and Bleu Cease the Executive Director and Curator of the Rochester Contemporary Art Center in Rochester, NY.
Statement from Wayne Claypatch
I enjoy creating situations in my work by merging people, unique settings, toys, games, cartoons and old movies, all with my love for nostalgia. But beneath the whimsy on the surface, I am telling stories that have meaning for me. Even the title of this show, "Out of the Frying Pan," is a nostalgic adage that refers to getting deeper into trouble, but for me, refers to getting out of my Studio my "Frying Pan", and jumping into the "Fire" of the Show itself, which is always uncertain ground. The thing I enjoy the most about exhibiting my work is hearing how people see themselves in certain pieces and find their own meanings. Oftentimes, people tell me what a painting or drawing of mine is about, and I'll appreciate their interpretation more than the one I had intended.
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Exhibition Introduction by the Jurors
I can’t speak for my colleague, Bleu, but I don’t think either of us walked into selecting the winning pieces—a couple months after jurying the show—with solid notions of who we might choose. The fact that we added additional honorable mentions should indicate that there were many works we were enthused about for different reasons. It’s perhaps an object lesson in viewing—how artwork looks reproduced vs how it really looks when you stand before it—that we agreed upon Wayne Claypatch. I’m willing to bet that we may have selected him even if Winter Wonderland was the only painting he submitted. In digital form, it’s a cheeky pop culture portrait, unabashed about its high octane hokum. Almost aggressively cheeky. But in person, all the hand-wrought painterly aspects leap out at you. There’s a delirious and beautiful lunacy to Claypatch’s precise and acute paint strokes. Not all apparent at a distance or in reproduction, up close, the entire surface of the work turns hallucinogenic in the best possible way. There’s a wild sense of abstraction hiding in plain view among the pictorial and figurative, but it’s an abstraction that suggests an obsessive level of control. It would have been a fine painting if done with a flat technique and would have looked like what we thought it looked like when we originally juried it. It’s compositionally astute, it’s strange and funny, but it’s the hyperactive, stylized manner in which it’s painted that elevates it into another space.
John Massier |
It is my pleasure to introduce the exhibition Wayne Claypatch, Out of the Frying Pan by Wayne Claypatch at the Olean Public Library and corresponding publication. Learning about Wayne's work was one of the pleasures of jurying the Southern Tier Biennial with John Massier, Visual Arts Curator at Hallwalls in Buffalo. John and I have somewhat different tastes but I think it is safe to say we are both attracted to idiosyncratic and surprising artworks. We were immediately drawn to Claypatch's entries, especially Winter Wonderland. Overall we were impressed by all of the works entered in the exhibition, and struggled with the final decisions. We felt that Claypatch's works showed a diversity of imagery and subject matter, executed with remarkable and consistent skill. After rounds of discussion we returned several times to Wayne's striking and strange paintings, leading us to select him for this larger exhibition and catalog.
The scenes he chooses to paint, the situations he freezes in time reveal a little bit about his odd vision of the world, yet somehow all seems so resolved. Wayne's work unites a nimble and playful imagination with a careful and attentive hand. The possibility for tension or even collapse as these modes of thinking and creating show themselves, is an interesting aspect of many artist's work. For Wayne I think this is especially so, and the struggle is just below the surface. How Did We End up here, Wherever here is, manifests both a giddy pairing of characters and the tight, painstaking attention given to Popeye's keen eye and protruding chin. The artist holds it together and the result is just right. I find it hard to now envision The Sailor Man with any other partner in crime. Terry McDonald has written that Wayne Claypatch's work is "FUN" and "(his) outright skills are incomparable". To this I have to add WEIRD. Claypatch's paintings are SO weird and wonderful and well-painted, all in balance. After the skill and the chuckles, beyond the pure visual pleasure and the quirkiness, the stories and thinking behind these works keep me coming back for more. That slightly crazed look on the girl's face in Winter Wonderland. Is that kid going to give away or smoke those Chesterfields? What does Wayne Claypatch know about reindeer that we don't? With a grin on my face I can't get enough of these strange trippy tableaus. I hope you enjoy delving into Wayne's worlds as much as I did. Bleu Cease |