Chuck Webster
Chuck Webster
Workspace Program Resident 2009
I have always made work with an awareness of how materials interact. Paint, paper, brushes, panels and pencils are forces that have a certain physical and emotional effect when they come into contact with each other. What is left is the evidence and acceptance of that experience.
When I began the residency at Dieu Donné, I had a strong interest in antique paper and watermarks, and a real appreciation of the material beauty of paper. I had planned to make watermarks and collages, and cut mylar for paper pulp stencils. Instead, I learned how paper pulp acted in a fundamental way, and am now able to use it with the familiarity and confidence that I would use paint or pencil.
I started working with paper pulp as a painter would, spooning it like jelly on sandwiches and watching how it behaved as I worked with it – dripping, brushing, and generally having fun. We made watermarks and started to manipulate the image with thin pulp applied with an eyedropper or brush. I was beginning to understand the cotton and linen as I would understand other media. I was able to apply that knowledge to the stenciled edition, as well as to the collage pieces.
Through experimentation and discussions with Steve Orlando, we refined an approach to collage. I would pour paper pulp directly on a wet base sheet that was tilted up on one side, and use the result as a stage set for collage. When thin white pulp would slide down a dark blue base sheet, it was like an electric charge – instantly I had a beautiful hill-waterfall-snowpile-mountain-moonscape. I realized that this mark had the exact amount of pressure, contact, transparency and gesture that I wanted. I would then glue down the collages, throw the piece in the press and not see it until days later, when I could discover it all over again. The surface and mark had become one, preserving the resonance of the poured pulp hitting the wet base sheet. The result was a perfect arrangement of material forces, evidence of my experience of making. It was a blessed thing.
I want to thank my marvelous collaborator Steve Orlando, along with Catherine Cox, Kat Savage, Paul Wong and Kathleen Flynn for their tireless efforts and energy over the course of this project, and for making Dieu Donné a wonderful place full of positive and creative energy.
— Chuck Webster, 2009
In the Studio
About the Artist
Chuck Webster (b. Binghamton, NY) received a BA from Oberlin College in 1992 and an MFA from American University in 1996. The artist’s work can be seen in numerous public collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; and The Archives of the Rothko Chapel in Houston, TX.
He has had numerous, critically acclaimed solo exhibitions worldwide. In 2012, the critic Roberta Smith wrote in a New York Times review that his paintings “are also very much, if not startlingly, little big paintings: they have a strange, irrepressible scale, a largeness that exceeds their size and creates a distinctive, slightly comedic sense of intimacy... each painting is very much its own pictorial being: vulnerable, rambunctious and fully inhabited.”
Webster has been the recipient of numerous awards and grants, including the 2018 National Academy Affiliated Fellow at the American Academy in Rome, The Milton Avery Fellowship at Yaddo, 2000 and 2010; the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, 2016; the MacDowell Fellowship, Peterborough, NH, 2004 and 2017; and the Winter Fellowship at the Fine Art Works Center in Provincetown MA, 2004. He lives in New York City. (Source: Rhode Island School of Design)
For more information, please visit their website: https://www.chuck-webster.com/