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John Affolter: Visual Artist

Place

    Informal training also led to the study of English Romantic Landscape Painters. The summer of 1979 was spent  earning room and board by working in a family owned London based African Art Gallery as an assistant. Traveling from East Putney to the Arcade Gallery on Old Bond St. weekdays on the "tube", he would get off  at the Tate Museum, spend  two hours going through the galleries and taking notes. Then walk to his job by noon. The Tate featured works from the 16th century through to the minimalists. One gallery was dedicated to the Romantic Landscape painters. He connected with a landscapes commanding the picture plane as narrative on the frailty of humanity. Most weekends were spent using the Japanese woodblock printing techniques to record urban landscapes pulling prints directly off streets like the print taken from the sidewalk in front of the National Gallery.  






   
 
 
In July he travelled to Paris for a week at the Louvre. It was a summer of extraordinary learning. For John it was a totally different education from books, magazines, and lectures to stand in front of internationally acclaimed works to investigating materials, processes, techniques, and artistic intents.  Returning from England in the fall, He began to explore the landscape and interpret it in real-time questioning how a landscape can say something from the now and avoid repeating a landscape form of a completely different time and mindset?  As John saw it in the 70's through the 90's,  "place" was an environmental issue, with the "land" being under siege from every imaginable form of human exploitation. At the completion of undergraduate work , he had reduced the environment/landscape into  grids and repetition as a visual phenomenon. At the subconscious level his narrative was about place as sliced and diced into neat packages identified as "real-estate" packaged as a commodity to be bought, sold, owned, exploited, and manipulated.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 


During his graduate program in City University, NYC, he attempted to portray the landscape as a kind of complex life form that was in extreme stress surrounded by the grid of mankind's hubris. These landscapes were about environmental awareness in the tradition of  a Romantic artist.







   
 
 
 
 



The main influence behind the look of his wavy contour lined landscapes came from early cave drawings were humans would place their hands on the cave wall and then blow a mouth full of pigment and water over the hand leaving a imprint of the hand on the cave wall.  Additional influences were images depicting extreme human stress with hands raised high facing forward with fingers splayed apart and pointing up (as in the top right corner of Picasso's "Guernica" painting) . He exploited wavy contour lines point up into the air as a kind of poetic statement that the land was stressed and pleading for help. Feeling comfortable with this image form, he began to incorporate sources of the stress. The second major attempt was the "Bookmark" exhibit. mounted as a community of humans in individual rectangular bunkers looking across the land through narrow viewing slots. He wanted  a detached indifference between the stressed land and human failure to integrate with the land. His choice to contrast the size of the human rectangle with the land through a viewing slot to symbolize how individualism had subjugated the land as insignificant and outside the power of personal needs.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

London Cityscape.webp

London Cityscape :

India ink on Torinoko paper. 22"x 28" 1980

Sectioned Landscape: Verso Recto oil on canvas on 1" mounts. 8' x 20'    1982

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Monetized: Extruded acrylic paint on canvas with coloraid paper. 72"x 156" 1985 (Wengraf collection-London)

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Security Pacific Bank collection NYC

Place & People

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Populated: Acrylic, shredded money cut and applied paper on paper. 90"x 168". 1985

After being priced out of his studio in NYC, He moved back to Washington and built a studio to continue working. While working began, there were two goals pursued. One was to continue making images of the stressed landscape with a human presence more highly present. The second goal was to work on a smaller scale to refine his color pallet and personal aesthetic. It involved the exploration of different types of paper and pigments. Casein was chosen for its properties, it ability to luminesce,  drying properties, and its flexibility. All of the works were a product of personal experiences. "Populated" was the last work completed in the NYC studio and is a good example of what experimentation was used to incorporate people onto the picture plane.  

The works below were typical of the small scale painting being explored. Being an outdoors person, he and his wife made frequent trips into the abundant natural environments Washington State offered. One outing involved going on class II whitewater canoeing trips deep in the mountains. Being an avid fly fisher in early years, he was saddened to find that the amazing brown trout had all but disappeared from the rivers of Washington. John also had wilderness property in the Washington Cascade mountains were many family hours were spent appreciating its pristine rawness. Eventually electricity and water came to his place becoming a subject for works . All productivity in this period was both personal as well as containing a narrative on the sources of stress upon the land. In many ways John felt this was a "landscape PTSD" issue.

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Canoeing on a harvest moon                    Were the Brown Trout swam

Casein on Indian rag. 15"x 23"                 Casein on Indian rag. 15"x 23"

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The line stopped here 

Casein on Indian rag. 15"x 23"

Human intrusion became more integrated into the image as his explorations color sense continued. As the 90's environmental movement revealed more data on how industrialization was doing damage to the land, John's images took on a more directed focus as well.

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Clearcut: Casein on Indian rag, 22"x 36"

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Defiled: Casein on Indian rag, 22"x 36"

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Polluted: 22"x 36", Casein on Indian rag

Having earned a place to exhibit with the Warwick Gallery in Seattle, John was given the space for a one person exhibit. By this time, the people part of the landscape was becoming more prominent on the canvas. As a result, he returned to a larger canvas format and more explorations using physical deconstruction in the image.  Some of the central ideas that were being considered were related to the age of the earth and its relationship with the universe and all of the connectedness. Time was the arbiter of existence in these works. Physical layers of "place and people" were being built up on the canvas as a narrative on the earth as a recycling machine millions of years old.

 

In his "Stardust" body of works, feminist influences were reaching a more broad acceptance and questioning of a male dominated narrative was finding its way onto his "place/people" story. Reclaimed #3 shows a pair of working class jeans on its side with the drawing of a fallen tree trunk sketched on one leg suggesting a reordering of gender roles. John was looking at the universe as a massive time machine and within the ticking of its endless and unperceivable motion, humans were busy trying their futile best to look meaningfully important to something that they only recently were beginning to glimpse.  The works were a result of both philosophical and physical deconstructions and reorganizations on the canvas.  

The Stardust Series

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Reclaimed Through Venetian Blinds #1: Acrylic/mixed media on canvas 50"x 96" 1991

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Reclaimed Chainsaw Man #2: Acrylic/mixed media on canvas 50"x 96"  1991

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Reclaimed Falling, Fell #3: Acrylic/mixed media on canvas. 48"x 96"  1992

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Stardust series: Tolstoy Deconstructed #3: mixed media on canvas 32"x 56"x 2"  1992






 This series began as a philosophical thought process in the late 70's and as time passed the curiosity over its meaning kept evolving and developing. It wasn't until the 80's after earning a MFA at City University in NYC that I had time to read more and explore some of the important thinking that was going on around the English speaking community of thinkers. While keeping a working studio on the Bowery, My reading collided into an argument between two intellectual camps known and the French School and the Yale School. They were involved in a deep argument over what each felt was the rudimentary sign of intelligent humanity. The French School claimed that it had to be LOGOS/the word since without it humanity couldn't communicate and cooperated effectively to survive. The Yale school claimed that the essential sign of intelligent humanity was PHONOS/the sound because sound and listening precluded language. 
The supporting argument of the French School made these claims. 1. LOGOS had its initial beginning as a scratch. The scratch referred to  a mark made on a surface. Their argument stated that the "scratch", in its nascent form was created by creatures on the surface of their environments as a way of getting from one beneficial place to the next. As time went on, and more scratches/trails were created around the various lands, it became clear that one had to learn the scratch/trails as a form of survival. Knowing which scratch led to drinking water and which led to the saber tooth den was a process that had to be learned. As such, the beginnings of human coordination was used as a tool for community. On the other hand, the Yale School countered with an equally valid proposition. They claimed that PHONOS was the beginning of human community because survival on any type of terrain in the beginning depended on human's ability to listen to the sounds of the environment and be able to distinguish what each sound ment and how to respond. Thus, each kind of sound carried a message that needed to be correctly responded to. According to the Yale School, It was through the process learning the sounds of the land, humanity developed an vocabulary that evolved into speaking. Therefore PHONOS was the beginning of us all.
This argument had a huge impact on how I looked at existence and I put a great deal of thought into it as well as struggled with the notion over quite a few cold beers. The question I had was, how does that effect me and my creative process or does it have any relevance? As a romantic, I felt the need to connect with a cause or "raison d'être". I chose LOGOS. As crazy as it sounds, I connected with the word scratch. As an artist or any artist that has claimed to be so, can easily identify "the scratch" as an essential and almost primal act of making art. To lay charcoal to paper and feel it interacting with the tooth of the paper with the intent of visually saying something to others feels like early humanity creating scratches in the earth that say, "This way to the swim hole and that way to the berry bushes. Just like my scratches on canvas intend to tell a story, those trails also told stories to those who took the time to read them. 
In this series I am interested in the idea that LOGOS transcends the written word because it is also a visual phenomena. Because a word, when printed, has both meaning and can be seen it has a dual purpose. This investigation is curious about adding a third possibility as a visual. I am asking my creative process to see if I can take simple words and create a visual plane that can be read as a word with specific meaning, use the word repetitively in such a way that its interactions cause intense design dynamics that render it for its visual appearance, and finally the words chosen, being void of sentence structure, actually tell a story for the viewer. 



  

MAGAZINE TITLE

Gnome Sequence:  series 2022

Portrait

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Acrylic on canvas 20" x 36"

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This was a work that was tied to the Democracy Project and was a transition away from a focus on the social chaos of American social disorder. While working out ideas for the base of the installation "Archeology of the Top 10%" I became fascinated with the visual power the word grid and its visual chaos. As the work on "Portrait" progressed, the word chaos worked its way into the composition and eventually overtook all other considerations that I had been thinking about. The work "MAGA Ghost Flag" began the "Democracy Project" series and it turned out that a flag ended the series. In the new sereies, the core creative element was how to focus on words, It became essential that the choice of words was crucial. The first three words chosen were: USA, Pledge (as in "I pledge allegiance"), and People (as in "We The People"). When the January 6th assault on the White House occurred and the investigation/testimony of Capitol Hill officers was broadcast, the words of officer Michael Fanone "Get his gun, and Kill him with his own gun" were blended into the composition. It expressed the intense contrast between a timeless ideal and the in the moment reality of American society. 

TRUTH #1

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Black impasto acrylic paint on upstretched cotton canvas, 56"x 26", 2023

Having transitioned away from the "Democracy Project", one word stuck with me and I decided to make an image using the word "Truth" in three different font sizes to create a visual texture with the interplay of the fonts competing for visual space. Once all of the lettering had been penciled onto the canvas, I began to understand where all of the visual chaos was coming from. There were two factors at play. First was the negative space behind all of the lettering and second factor were in the class of letters fighting for visual space. Because each font size was applied to the canvas in grid form there was uniformity to the font size. But when other fonts were applied in similar grid form a form of visual chaos appeared on the picture plane. The chaos appeared all over the canvas creating a kind of temporal confusion of the brain when looking at the work. That part of the brain that deals with visual interpretation was working overtime trying to make sense of the chaos. As cognitive beings, we aren't necessarily aware of that process as it is connected to the "fight or flight". Since there is no threat, the brain doesn't activate the limbic system. It might even be a pleasant experience for the brain to be in that state. I began to call these places in the image  where the letters fight for visual space "micro conflicts" and there were thousands of these places where the letters of one font partially obscured the letters of a different font  as the brain tries to order and "read" the words. 

   Evaldi

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Acrylic on canvas32" x 44" 2021-22

While completing "Truth", I was intrigued by the texture that was coming from all of the chaos and decided to make that more physical than visual. Relying upon works that were completed while working in my studio in Manhattan, I decided to use some of the texture techniques used then. As I was preparing the canvass, an incident happened in a small community in Texas called Evalde where a confused and angry young man senselessly entered an elementary school with a gun and killed 21 innocent children and adults. As the news played out over the next few days, it became clear that those individuals responsible for keeping the school grounds safe had massive failures in procedures which brought the citizens of Evalde Texas to go into the streets and protest. Their cry for justice to the politicians rushing to the scene to deliver their condolances, the news media fludding the community, the law enforcement officials, and the school administration was "Sorry Is Not Enough". Having to experience this kind of tragedy over and over in communities throughout the nation, I decided to tell this story using those words. I also decided to use only white paint as in White Wash of the pain.  

 Fence

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 Fence 30" x 37" 2022-23

While completing "Evalde", I began to think of other ways of looking at texture and text. The previous two works were in monochrome and I wanted to combine white and black paint to see how they would work. I also wanted to choose words that were broad and universal in their reading for meaning and settled on (you - me) (us - them) words as being open ended for meaning as well as relating to how difficult it is in today's world culture in managing pluralism in the masses. Additionally, I was curious about challenging a conventional technique of starting with the background and working forward. My question was, "what would happen if I started the with foreground and worked backward and approached this work with that process in mind. As I had worked all the way back to the field behind the words, I had reached the moment where a decision had to be made about what to do with it. The first thought was to paint it black and began to paint behind the letters starting at the top working my way through them to the bottom of the canvas. It was a slow and painstaking process that took a great deal of time. After about 3 days of filling in the background, I had completed just about the top half of the work with a slight diagonal running down to the right. I stopped painting and looked at the black diagonal for 3 or more days. Something was telling me to look at the canvas. Finally, I began to see two interesting possibilities in the work. One was that the black background began to look like the Silhouette of a mountain scape. The second was that the words began to appear as though it was a chain link fence. I went with that thought and began to make the changes that would bring out those possibilities. I accentuated the words and their diagonals to subtly suggest a fence and I made the mountain scape much more craggy. I was seeing  this work was an allegory for the possibility of a changing world order based upon multiethnic diversity being held back by their inability to understand and tolerate diversity from redefining the landscape 

More

More

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 More 47" x 59" 2023-24

As the background was being worked out on "Fence", a new canvas was being prepared. I was curious to see how would words and micro conflicts work at a larger scale? Would larger lettering actually have the same chaotic visual energy or would it have a different energy? Second was the continued interest in the idea that the purpose of words is having meaning and by extension, printed words as have visual authority to the reader and I wanted to expand on that. While going through the canvas prep process there was a horrific human crisis going on in the world. First was the invasion of Russia into the Ukraine and the second was the Israeli leadership laying siege on Palestine. It seemed that as each week pressed on, the atrocities in both confrontations became more and more tragic. After giving a great deal of thought to these events, it was decided to focus this canvas on these human crises.
To address the Russian situation I chose two words,  "Убийство", meaning to kill and the word, "Отбраковывать", meaning to cull. In my mind Putin's war goals were two fold. One was to take over Ukraine and make it Russian by using lethal force and the second was to empty his prisons, gather up Russian rabble, send them into the front lines and cull his population of deadbeats.
In choosing two works to represent what many around the world could identify as being an accurate appraisal of Israeli goals I chose the Yiddish words, "ויסמעקן", meaning to eradicate and the second word, "פאַרניכטן", meaning to exterminate. I also included the word "Kill". All of the words were individually arranged into grids with diagonal offsets and font sizes across the canvas. Then the offsets were treated with additional rhythm structures achieving additional visual chaos push pull in the picture plane. I was looking for a different visual chaos as the previous works done so far and to explore if different language structured words worked as micro conflicts and their ability to be read for meaning.

3 Degrees 

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Acrylic paint and charcoal on upstretched cotton canvas, 74"x 60", 2024

3-Degrees ( rectangle detail)

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While applying the fine tuning to "More", there was a flurry of emotionally cruel discussions happening in the media that seemed to be focused on the fact that America was being "invaded" by immigrant murders and rapists. Surrounding this issue was a handful of other issues like government spending, inappropriate  public education, and individual lifestyles. I decided to use this aggressive dialogue as subject matter for the next investigation. I also wanted to explore the lettering font even larger to see how it worked. Another goal was to present the layering of words in a different way by adding another repetitive element. While sizing and mounting the canvas, and getting ready to apply the rabbit skin glue and gesso I was curious about the standard process one goes through in order to prepare to apply an image which is to stretch the canvas, apply the glue, and then gesso the surface enough to get the kind of smoothness wanted the imaging process. I took a different route/process just to see if it would effect the final image. Therefore I began with the raw canvas and applied the pencil drawing of all the lettering first. Then the clear synthetic barrier was applied over the drawing. Then each individual area (background, lettering) gesso was applied which turned out to be a very laborious and slow process. 

    In applying the drawing, there were two technical goals. First was to take the  font grids and apply them in a 3 degree angle. The first grid to the left, and the second  grid 3 degrees to the right with the third grid being horizontal. The words chosen to be incorporated into the work were (Hate, Angry, Tolerance, Knowledge). In working out the design aspects, the story being told became the influence on how everything would be arranged. From years of teaching high school students with learning behavioral challenges, I had developed a philosophy that the humanity of any culture has to acknowledge that everyone has within them the capacity to be angry and be hateful. Through  generations, cultures pass on civility as being the social standard. The strength of a culture depends on how well everyone keeps hate and anger compartmentalized and controlled through having the ability to show tolerance over the those external forces that are not understood. The way  tolerance is sustained is through the passing on of core knowledge that prepares individuals to function with stern compassion for the good of the culture.
    As I arranged the words to be used supporting the notion suggesting something has gone terribly wrong with keeping hate and anger in check and it was making its way to the surface to alter the stability of the culture, I began to work out the positive/negative space dynamics. It was decided to put the word grid "hate" and "angry" into a 3:1 height/width rectangle to separate it from the other two words. Before working the canvas, I was thinking, "convention says that I start with a finished gessoed canvas, apply the drawing, and apply paint starting at the background and paint my way forward as an established process. Curiously I asked what would happen if I began  the front image and worked my way to the back image which I decided to do. First was to gesso the lettering on "Knowledge" in flat black gesso. Before that I took charcoal stick and traced over the words hate and angry inside the rectangles thinking they would be painted later. When I got to the  Tolerance grid there was a pause. While standing back to asses the how it was going visually, I began to like the idea that the raw canvas added an additional visual element to the work. I left the Tolerance grid bare and painted the background in black gesso. After completing that stage of the work, I began to see things in the canvass that stood out and needed to be resolved. First issue was that I have areas of blank canvass that hadn't been gessoed. There was the rectangle grid with the hate/angry grid inside it. I decided to paint the backgrounds of the rectangles in white gesso but thought it would be interesting to leave the charcoal lettering of the hate/angry grid alone.  By this time the idea of raw canvas being an integral element in the composition was a good decision. I felt it enhanced the overall visual and it would give viewers something to consider when looking up close at the work as part of the visual experience.
    With that stage completed, it was time to attend to how I could go beyond the micro conflicts and create texture to the work. It was decided to use the three states of paint (flat, satin, gloss) to see if manipulated, would create an kind of subtle texture that would be visually interesting. I also used layers of clear gloss acrylic in places to amplify the contrast. This took a great deal of effort and a number of layers were needed to reach a point that looked right. As this process was painstakingly being layered on, the presidential campaign was going full blast in the media and the dialogue coming from many sides was reaching extreme levels of vitriol and hate and accusation. I began to think that my original idea of compartmentalized antisocial behavior was beginning to break through civil rational idea exchange to the point that it was controlling the tone of social narrative pitting neighbor against neighbor. As a result I decided to take three of rectangles and pull them out of the background and physically extend them in space in front of the canvas as being symbolic of what was happening to the American story in real-time. The title for this artwork comes from a concept that was acquired as an education administrator. A presenter, at a training I attended, was introducing the idea how little changes can create massive change using the analogy that it only takes 1 degree Fahrenheit to convert hot water to the boiling point steam and how it relates to maintaining a positive learning environment. In this work, as each grid is tilted 3 degrees to the left and right, their actions tend to visually cancel each other and each grid looks horizontal. They balance each other out; but if something upsets that balance, like three small elements that are intended to challenge the balance, what will happen? That is the story of "3 Degrees".

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