Art Sync | The Surrounding Illusion: Conversation with Peter Van Dyck

Elizabeth Johnson: Here’s a sentence from your interview The Way I See It in Trebuchet Magazine:

"In contemporary art there is a tendency to try to pull threads of narrative significance from the creative choices made by the artist.

Why this window? Why this time of day? How do these choices work together to construct a discourse that we can read and read against? All the while we wonder what the work is trying to say, when the wider, often more rewarding question is, what is the work trying to do and is it working?"

What are the markers or qualities that tell you a painting is starting to "work"?

Peter Van Dyck: There are two levels of a painting “working,” for me. The first is getting from the blank canvas to a legible depiction of the subject that has a sense of space and light. That happens quickly for me, and it’s fairly obvious when it is or is not there.

However, that is a very low bar for success. The next level of “working” is looking at the painting and being convinced that I’ve made something wonderful.

That feeling is hard to define and there’s no concrete indicator of it.

PVD: The measured angles and proportions of the subject as projected onto the picture plane change depending on how it is oriented relative to the subject; hence, each movement of the artist’s attention creates a different set of angle measurements.

Taken together and laid onto the canvas, these multiple picture planes add up to a curve. That is a simple technical fact about the geometry of light and rendering three dimensions into two dimensions on a flat plane.

However, since there’s no objective order or sequence in which a person attends to or absorbs a space or subject, there can be no single, correct set of picture planes to describe that experience.

So, when the artist adjusts their body, moves their head or directs their attention to various elements in the space, they are effectively moving and resizing their picture plane along with their attention.

They must imagine these different picture planes, what size and proportions each might be as well as how they might overlap, merge or otherwise interact with one another. Hence, there is no “objective” way of interpreting this because it is contingent on the very particular and vastly differing ways that an individual might experience a space. 

EJ: Does creating a curved spatial continuity organize your painting, and then you vary emphasis and focus on smaller areas?

How do you know when you're done?

EJ: You state your purpose clearly in the interview when you say,

"I’m not interested in the photographic logic of representation, and what I do is not photorealistic, but it is what I see. That’s the misunderstanding about what photography is. People think it’s what you see, but it’s not quite that. It’s easy to understand how visual culture pushed illusionism as realism and it became that way via a language of forms, a vocabulary of light hitting a form. Whereas, what I want in painting and drawing, is to convey ideas which have a different expressive language. For me, those ideas have a radical relationship to certain forms, while they have only a tangential relationship to the optics that make up photography."

Your pieces curve forms like the warp created by Photoshop, cameras, and computers. Cézanne broke his subjects into geometric forms to make space.

How does your work relate to or differ from his? Does working in continuous curving space like digital images made of billions of bits of information link you to the digital age?

PVD: It is never my intention to leave areas unfinished or to intentionally preserve evidence of the process.

These things just happen when I try to honestly engage the problem of making a painting. It’s like if I’m trying to make something in my workshop and I’m busy trying to get it to work and that has me reaching for different tools or materials and discarding them and not putting them away since I’m really focused on making something and the state of workshop itself starts to have a character to it that is totally unintentional.

The viewer is like someone who comes in and instead of seeing what I’m working on, they see the workshop and for them it has a certain poetic quality. The irony is the viewer gets both my process and what I’m trying to make.

EJ: Perhaps more removed from the drawing process, the lines on the surface of Martin Street, especially curved lines over the sidewalk planters, make me feel distant from the image, like scratches on a photograph.

They could also indicate physical presence such as energy, or quantum particles. Do the lines indicate that your paintings eternally link personal objects with the empty spaces they occupy?

PVD: Perhaps they are the beginning of an attempt to introduce the plants that were in the planter.

I was probably trying to capture some sense of their gesture before starting to paint them in...

EJ: Is the rectangle of blue stapled to the sky in Martin Street perhaps a foray into collage and sculptural effect?

Is this device related to red and pink paper scraps taped to the window in Still Life with Deck and Globe?

PVD: The pieces of paper were intended to be removed, and I think I have taken them off.

I like what I call “clean color” in painting, meaning color that strikes a decisive, unmodulated note and is unsullied by demands for it to merge with the surrounding illusion.

My paintings tend to start with decisive color but as the painting becomes more naturalistic, that clarity gets lost in creating a seamless illusion––and I don’t like that.

By adding a completely uniform piece of color with absolute boundaries (in the form of a piece of colored paper) I feel like I’m restating that intention for myself, and it clarifies the painting as a whole.

About the Artist

Peter Van Dyck was born in Philadelphia in 1978. He studied painting and drawing at the Florence Academy of Art in Florence, Italy from 1998-2002. While studying he also taught in the program from 2000-2002. He returned to Philadelphia in 2002 to paint in his own studio and began exhibiting his work in numerous group shows in Philadelphia, New York and San Francisco.

He has had solo shows at John Pence Gallery, San Francisco; Eleanor Ettinger Gallery, New York; John Pence Gallery, and The Grenning Gallery, Sag Harbor, and Gross McCleaf Gallery, Philadelphia. In 2003 he began teaching at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts where, in 2011 he became an Assistant Professor in the Certificate/BFA program.

In 2012 he was named one of 25 Important Artists of Tomorrow by American Artist Magazine. In 2013 his work was included in the book Painted Landscapes, Contemporary Views by Lauren P. della Monica. His work has also been reproduced in periodicals including, American Artist Magazine, American Arts Quarterly, Art News, American Art Collector, International Artist Magazine and Art and Antiques (Courtesy of PAFA).