The following reviews survey the artist's recent body of work.
Huffington Post: Resonance and Memory: The Essence of Landscape
dArt International Magazine: Resonance and Memory: The Essence of Landscape
Artes Magazine: Elga Wimmer PCC
Ladyalicelux: Resonance and Memory: The Essence of Landscape
SCAD: Illusion and Immersion: Drawings by Rebeca Calderón Pittman
Aeqai Review: Embrace the Ambiguity by Shaun Daniell
NKU one person exhibition: Recombinant Drawings
MFA Thesis: Transcending Clutter by Layering a Fragmented Abstraction
News in America; Rebeca Calderón Pittman 35 años en el arte
PrensaLibre: Amartelamiento
Illusion and Immersion: Rebeca Calderon Pittman’s Recombinant Drawings
by Dominique Nahas
Rebeca Calderon Pittman’s Recombinant Drawings, her intimate, computer generated, unique prints, with their graceful, floating contour lines immersed in a seemingly endless ground of white dimensionality, fuse memory and movement seamlessly. These works, based on Pittman’s on-site sketches of her living and studio environments invite the mind and eye of the viewer to speculate about what it would be like to be in different places and spaces simultaneously and to be present in our world without being tied to natural laws like gravity. The Recombinant Drawings bring us into that woozy territory of the daydream and the reverie where the mind finds itself in a receptive preconscious state as it lets in all kinds of unforeseen free-floating associations to trigger other associations. The Recombinant Drawings appear as mental as well as retinal amalgamations, pointing to transitory phenomena that are joyfully, playfully phantasmagoric in effect. Emanating from the real the pictorial space in these artworks induces an imaginary system to take hold where simultaneity, reiteration and chance are key players. The pictorial clarity and compositional unpredictability of the work reinforces its expressive vibrancy and auratic presence.
Such vibrancy recalls the work of two early Modernists. Pittman has clear affinities with Raoul Dufy’s spontaneous, infectiously insouciant line-work that captured the energy of Parisian social life. Additionally, the artist’s clear line work echoes Henri Matisse’s authoritative, lithe drawings that define in marvelously ambiguous ways interior spaces in relation to exterior ones. His often quoted observations “…Exactitude is not truth…” in the search for the “…fleeting sensations …of charm, lightness, freshness…” are relevant in terms of Calderón Pittman’s intentions to create a new visual world that, as she writes in her notes, “…liberates things from themselves.”
To create the Recombinant Drawings Calderon Pittman scans her original hand-drawn renderings (all drawn from direct observation) to digitally encode them. These are subsequently altered through the computer, allowing an element of chance to intercede as discontinuous non-overlapping sections of renderings are layered one on top of another creating a multi-dimensional, panoptic visual universe. After selecting a completely “fitted” and “fitting” composition with all of the right elements in place, each section is printed out on acetate film that is then reassembled in the right spatial sequence, as if a pack of transparent playing cards were designed so as to allow all the information on each card to be perceived simultaneously and completely. Sections of the Recombinant Drawings are interleaved between sheets of vellum that serve as semi-transparent veils before the entire sandwich is sealed between plexiglas plates. Having parts of the entire composition staggered in such a way enhances a floating, see-through, three-dimensionalized perceptual condition called a palimpsest. Through it complexity and luminosity are at the service of compositional rigor and poetry.
The keys to the artist’s works are their apparitional quality and the revelatory effect they have on the viewer. These serve as reductivist dioramas whose primary sensation is that of the unfolding of time through different spaces. In each work visual information is released slowly over time thus allowing the eye of the beholder to explore each area and to make connections between each visual passage. In Intuitive Continuity, for example, the eye seems to be given sovereign control over spatial circumstances as places and spaces, nature and culture blend and fuse, mirage-like. We are given access both to the studio of the artist and we see one of her paintings in progress as well as all of the working materials of an artist’s life in Floating Things; simultaneously we are also enter the world of trees and of and bushes and flowers all abuzz with animated presence.
Pittman’s vision is an all embracing one that is joyful and poignant at its core. Surely we are mystified, enchanted and moved by an art whose essential purpose is to draw us closer to our own minute-by-minute experience of being alive and perceiving the presence of the world in which we are intimately immersed yet separate from. The artist’s Recombinant Drawings surely are giving us anecdotal details about Pittman’s life, yet these works are not about re-presenting her life to us as if it were merely diaristic commentary. Pittman’s drawings are essentially meditations on time, contingency, and ephemerality. As such, Rebeca Calderon Pittman’s vision invites us to an immersive moveable feast. Her Recombinant Drawings open us up. In seeing them, and through them, we become more aware of our own epiphenomenal worlds that brings us closer, through recognition, to the wonderment of being alive.
Dominique Nahas is an independent curator and critic based in Manhattan. The author of numerous articles and books, he teaches critical theory and art history at Pratt Institute and at the New York Studio Residency Program. His latest monograph The Worlds of Hunt Slonem ( Vendome Press) was released in November 2011.
©2012.All rights reserved.
Rebeca Calderon Pittman’s Recombinant Drawings, her intimate, computer generated, unique prints, with their graceful, floating contour lines immersed in a seemingly endless ground of white dimensionality, fuse memory and movement seamlessly. These works, based on Pittman’s on-site sketches of her living and studio environments invite the mind and eye of the viewer to speculate about what it would be like to be in different places and spaces simultaneously and to be present in our world without being tied to natural laws like gravity. The Recombinant Drawings bring us into that woozy territory of the daydream and the reverie where the mind finds itself in a receptive preconscious state as it lets in all kinds of unforeseen free-floating associations to trigger other associations. The Recombinant Drawings appear as mental as well as retinal amalgamations, pointing to transitory phenomena that are joyfully, playfully phantasmagoric in effect. Emanating from the real the pictorial space in these artworks induces an imaginary system to take hold where simultaneity, reiteration and chance are key players. The pictorial clarity and compositional unpredictability of the work reinforces its expressive vibrancy and auratic presence.
Such vibrancy recalls the work of two early Modernists. Pittman has clear affinities with Raoul Dufy’s spontaneous, infectiously insouciant line-work that captured the energy of Parisian social life. Additionally, the artist’s clear line work echoes Henri Matisse’s authoritative, lithe drawings that define in marvelously ambiguous ways interior spaces in relation to exterior ones. His often quoted observations “…Exactitude is not truth…” in the search for the “…fleeting sensations …of charm, lightness, freshness…” are relevant in terms of Calderón Pittman’s intentions to create a new visual world that, as she writes in her notes, “…liberates things from themselves.”
To create the Recombinant Drawings Calderon Pittman scans her original hand-drawn renderings (all drawn from direct observation) to digitally encode them. These are subsequently altered through the computer, allowing an element of chance to intercede as discontinuous non-overlapping sections of renderings are layered one on top of another creating a multi-dimensional, panoptic visual universe. After selecting a completely “fitted” and “fitting” composition with all of the right elements in place, each section is printed out on acetate film that is then reassembled in the right spatial sequence, as if a pack of transparent playing cards were designed so as to allow all the information on each card to be perceived simultaneously and completely. Sections of the Recombinant Drawings are interleaved between sheets of vellum that serve as semi-transparent veils before the entire sandwich is sealed between plexiglas plates. Having parts of the entire composition staggered in such a way enhances a floating, see-through, three-dimensionalized perceptual condition called a palimpsest. Through it complexity and luminosity are at the service of compositional rigor and poetry.
The keys to the artist’s works are their apparitional quality and the revelatory effect they have on the viewer. These serve as reductivist dioramas whose primary sensation is that of the unfolding of time through different spaces. In each work visual information is released slowly over time thus allowing the eye of the beholder to explore each area and to make connections between each visual passage. In Intuitive Continuity, for example, the eye seems to be given sovereign control over spatial circumstances as places and spaces, nature and culture blend and fuse, mirage-like. We are given access both to the studio of the artist and we see one of her paintings in progress as well as all of the working materials of an artist’s life in Floating Things; simultaneously we are also enter the world of trees and of and bushes and flowers all abuzz with animated presence.
Pittman’s vision is an all embracing one that is joyful and poignant at its core. Surely we are mystified, enchanted and moved by an art whose essential purpose is to draw us closer to our own minute-by-minute experience of being alive and perceiving the presence of the world in which we are intimately immersed yet separate from. The artist’s Recombinant Drawings surely are giving us anecdotal details about Pittman’s life, yet these works are not about re-presenting her life to us as if it were merely diaristic commentary. Pittman’s drawings are essentially meditations on time, contingency, and ephemerality. As such, Rebeca Calderon Pittman’s vision invites us to an immersive moveable feast. Her Recombinant Drawings open us up. In seeing them, and through them, we become more aware of our own epiphenomenal worlds that brings us closer, through recognition, to the wonderment of being alive.
Dominique Nahas is an independent curator and critic based in Manhattan. The author of numerous articles and books, he teaches critical theory and art history at Pratt Institute and at the New York Studio Residency Program. His latest monograph The Worlds of Hunt Slonem ( Vendome Press) was released in November 2011.
©2012.All rights reserved.
The act of drawing is an Immersion
By John Mendelsohn
The act of drawing is an immersion in reality. This process is not just the artist’s translating of form to page, but also subsuming herself in the world’s existence. Drawing enquires into the ultimate mystery of our engagement with the life that surrounds us.
In the drawings of Rebeca Calderón Pittman this immersion is palpable. She draws the world she lives in – her studio and paintings, other rooms and their furniture, buildings and growing things. The artist is intimately present in this work, especially in the delicate, descriptive ink lines which form a kind of tracing of the realm of objects – curtains, clouds, bannisters, chandeliers, the carved capitols of columns. There is an evident love of complexity and an affinity for early 20th century ornament and rich domestic design. We can sense in Calderón Pittman’s drawings echoes of the work of Matisse, Dufy, and Vuillard – all artists who found visual magic in the abstract qualities of the everyday and particularly in decorative motifs.
Notwithstanding these art historical connections, the artist’s Recombinant Drawings are distinctly contemporary and post-modern in their approach. As their title implies, Calderón Pittman combines sheets of drawings from different settings to create a new vision of reality. This radical layering, fragmentation, and displacement plunges the viewer into a matrix of sometimes contradictory temporal and spatial cues. At the same time, we are aware of how realities interpenetrate, with the ordinary hierarchy of a single viewpoint overtaken by a variety of perspectives.
An essential quality in Calderón Pittman’s drawings is a sense of openness and of space itself. With all their attention to detail, the drawings are often dominated by the emptiness that pervades them. Parts of an original scene are separated onto separate sheets and detached from their context – the real becomes abstract, and the abstract real. In the Recombinant Drawings, reality becomes transparent and places that are ordinarily distinct become part of a single, flowing image-space. At times the result is like a cinematic montage with shifts of focus; at others it is like a stage set that employs painted flats, scrims, and built architecture.
The originality of Calderón Pittman’s drawings is in the unique way that they unmoor reality while observing it closely and with evident affection. In this work is a simultaneous feeling of presence and of memory, of the pull of many places, and of an anarchic sense of freedom.
The act of drawing is an immersion in reality. This process is not just the artist’s translating of form to page, but also subsuming herself in the world’s existence. Drawing enquires into the ultimate mystery of our engagement with the life that surrounds us.
In the drawings of Rebeca Calderón Pittman this immersion is palpable. She draws the world she lives in – her studio and paintings, other rooms and their furniture, buildings and growing things. The artist is intimately present in this work, especially in the delicate, descriptive ink lines which form a kind of tracing of the realm of objects – curtains, clouds, bannisters, chandeliers, the carved capitols of columns. There is an evident love of complexity and an affinity for early 20th century ornament and rich domestic design. We can sense in Calderón Pittman’s drawings echoes of the work of Matisse, Dufy, and Vuillard – all artists who found visual magic in the abstract qualities of the everyday and particularly in decorative motifs.
Notwithstanding these art historical connections, the artist’s Recombinant Drawings are distinctly contemporary and post-modern in their approach. As their title implies, Calderón Pittman combines sheets of drawings from different settings to create a new vision of reality. This radical layering, fragmentation, and displacement plunges the viewer into a matrix of sometimes contradictory temporal and spatial cues. At the same time, we are aware of how realities interpenetrate, with the ordinary hierarchy of a single viewpoint overtaken by a variety of perspectives.
An essential quality in Calderón Pittman’s drawings is a sense of openness and of space itself. With all their attention to detail, the drawings are often dominated by the emptiness that pervades them. Parts of an original scene are separated onto separate sheets and detached from their context – the real becomes abstract, and the abstract real. In the Recombinant Drawings, reality becomes transparent and places that are ordinarily distinct become part of a single, flowing image-space. At times the result is like a cinematic montage with shifts of focus; at others it is like a stage set that employs painted flats, scrims, and built architecture.
The originality of Calderón Pittman’s drawings is in the unique way that they unmoor reality while observing it closely and with evident affection. In this work is a simultaneous feeling of presence and of memory, of the pull of many places, and of an anarchic sense of freedom.
Recombinant Drawings
By Robert Mahoney
Each work in this series consists of four or five drawings from life converted, by scanning and reorganizing, into complex constructions of overlaid line and shape, suggestive of the full range of cognitions in consciousness, reassembled under a single frame as a distinct “drawing.” In her mission and methodology, Calderón Pittman follows in the footsteps of a number of artists of her generation (Donald Bacheler, Jean Michel Basquiat) who sought to centralize drawing as a medium as distinct as, and not auxiliary to painting, as drawing was seen to be able to address issues related to postmodern consciousness in ways that painting could not.
All of Calderón Pittman’s drawings begin where one might expect them to: the artist sketching on paper situated on her lap in a real-world setting, picturing real-world things. In this manner, Calderón Pittman imitates the positivist intent of realist art in framing the impenetrable hereness of a scene experienced without attention to complex cognition. She very often draws en plein air, and some of her drawings still bear smudges from rain drops as if to watermark their authenticity. But then Calderón Pittman takes her drawings and scans them into Photoshop, at which point she submits them to a recombinatory exercise of free-flowing association of line and form, adding to or subtracting from each layer as the frisson of rhymes or juxtapositions between haphazardly superimposed forms propel her. In this process she also finds herself moving back and forth from one space to another, often dwelling on the mental space in between the drawings themselves. And then when this point-counterpart play of line and form is done to her liking, she reprints the results on transparencies, reassembles them with vellum sheets in between and mounts them under glass.
It is due to her complex process that the final product of Calderón Pittman’s once straightforward drawings are better described as constructed drawings, for in their use of vellum, and their adherence even in final form to the elegant, filmy transparency of vellum, her strange forays into the subtleties of consciousness sometimes feel more like a specimen of nature viewed under a microscope, or even an autumn leaf or the flower given one by a lover pressed between wax paper or between the pages of an old book (where vellum sheets often protected drawings from imprinting themselves on the facing page). With her repeated use of floral line and form as an impetus to association, and framed sometimes in dimensional frames, it is hard to not call Calderón Pittman’s constructions terrariums of nature, but in this case it is the nature of perception that is involved (New Beginnings, Escape from Realism, Intuitive Continuity, Floating Things).
In the positivist world of numbers and objects, what you see is what you get. An artist sits and paints or draws what he or she sees, and what they see is what their eyes alone see. But in cognitive psychology what goes on in the mind of the artist frames what is seen. The framework of cognition is a complex iris of point-of-view and distracted (collateral, metacognitive) assumptions and associations that often complicate our thoughts. While it is true that in life you do want to sometimes concentrate and get in the flow of your work and not be distracted by thoughts of other things (multitasking is, in fact, a myth; and driving while talking on a cell phone is not a good idea): but for the most part to concentrate does not mean blocking out cognition (which only increases anxiety), but establishing a balanced sense of mindfulness, a curious heightened awareness of the present moment as enriched by all the life one brings to it. Combined with phenomenology, cognitive psychology has found that the mind frames what the eye sees in many different ways. Though these insights have broken up long-held confidences of positivism, in many disciplines, including the accuracy of eyewitness accounts for criminal investigation, they have deeply enriched the possibilities of visual art.
It is clear that in her drawings Calderón Pittman has found a high state of mindfulness in which, grounded in one space - though deciding which is figure or ground in each drawing is a choice left to the viewer- spaces merge to create a new, high kind of world space. In time studies, the notion of propention entails the fact that as we live in the present we are also always thinking, from the point of view of that present, of all of our pasts, ten, twenty, thirty, fifty years ago, as well as worrying over our futures, and we live with persons of different ages who bring all these timeframes into our world too, and then when time moves on, we see all those pasts and futures differently all over again, from a new vantage point. Propentive awareness of time passing, the essence of modern art, is the opposite of nostalgia, reexperiencing or curmudgeonliness, various ways, some through shock, in which people get stuck in one time or another: it represents a flexibility and agility, a living in time. Thus, though we see our present circumstances for what they are we also see in the present echoes of the past, or hope for the future. Time also comes into Calderón Pittman’s constructs as it is evident that every drawing had to be done at a different time, and then the associations developed later as well: the repeated floral imagery may itself signify the concept of growth through time (and scenes might even double back to recapture remembered forms having developed further in a later drawing) (Painting without Borders seeming to play with the idea of unfinishedness to this end, for example).
The same holds true for being in a place: a place is always that place in relation to other places it makes us think of, or that we miss, or still other places we want to go back to, though not quite homesick. A place becomes not something in-itself but an extension of ourselves and our translations of other places onto it. It is this state of complex cognition that Calderón Pittman sought out by scanning her drawings into the computer and experimenting which is so in evidence in her drawings. Calderón Pittman has expressed the thought that having been born in Guatemala, educated abroad, lived in numerous places in her life, being, in fact, what today would be called a ‘third culture kid,” her global experience of life may account for the fact that space for her is always open-ended and transparent: she has a lot of experience to compare any new experience with, after all. Calderón Pittman expressed the delirious complexity of this state of mind by including in one recent construction street scenes apparently from Paris, but in fact drawn from an attempt by the city of Savannah to remind patrons of Paris by setting up sidewalk cafes and such, clearly a case of life imitating art (The Greatness of Little Things)!
Most of the time, the cognitions individual human beings have concern ourselves: they are our associations. When we make ourselves at home in the world, that means we come to associate a place with what we are used to. In her body of work, Calderón Pittman explores the personal nature of consciousness by focusing on two broad shifting planes of consciousness in her current life, one situated on sites in Savannah, Georgia, and the other in Cincinnati, Ohio. Some of her drawn elements derive from gardens, street scenes and other exterior views, while a good deal are from her studio, either in Savannah or Cincinnati, or her home, including her front porch (Harmonious Stages). By constantly moving from interior to exterior Calderón Pittman both opens up the former and makes more personal the latter (Waiting for Abstraction, Grasses of Freedom, and Empty Summer). Inside each plane, Calderón Pittman further subdivides space, finding parallel or juxtaposed wonders of consciousness (in associative patterns in keeping with the findings of recent neuroscience, it could be said sparks of association ‘light up’ passages of her drawings) (Erratic Consciousness, Painting without Borders, and Heaven in a Wildflower, for example). In this zone she is particularly keen on art-versus-life slices of consciousness and moves with etch-a-sketch delight from outlines of her own paintings in her studio to real-world forms that rhyme with them, and even plays with perceptual shifts between floral fabrics and real plants, and even blank canvases framing disconnected real and also other art scenes, as if painting themselves (Harmonious Stages, What was first? and Cosmic Rhythm). In this intimate sea of ambiguity the eye more properly can be said to swim than look, delighting in the existential accuracy of Calderón Pittman’s observations.
While the end result of her constructions is cognitive complexity, what gives Calderón Pittman’s drawings their crispness, a required element that clearly signals movement from plane to plane, and maintains the separation of one plane from another is her aesthetic formalism. Calderón Pittman is not Proust, she does not, mentally, while she works, engage in the poetic art of free association, but rather limits the terms of her associative practice to forms, lines, shapes, and art-and-life dualities, only letting her mind work computationally, seeking surprising ‘matches’ and ‘disconnections’ between comparable forms and lines. This sense of form also affords her a good sense of when too much of a good thing can cause the overlaid construction to breakdown into perceptual mush (the ‘fog of war’ as the fog of art), as she masterly arranges linear sinuosities like notes on sheet music staffs, leaving many a rest and breathing space between, so the viewer can clearly read the music of her mind (Liberating Breeze, Anatomy of Sharing, and The Greatness of Little Things being particularly parsimonious). In a more recent direction, Calderón Pittman has reactivated formalist principles even more forcefully, separating planes of reality more distinctly, each overlay endowed with more episodic fullness, to accentuate the ‘art’ of making formal association across planes of perception (What could have been… or Tiny Thoughts of Greatness).
Space, from the end of rococo art to the emergence of cubism, was taken for granted in two-dimensional art. The cubists, however, explored how the space we experience is interpenetrated by all of the space in the world around us, vectoring apart our confidence in things and places, depicting awareness as the bits and pieces of greater consciousness. From Gauguin to Matisse however, the goal of representing three-dimensional space on a two dimensional surface meant that space should be flattened out: foreground and background were merged to create a deep sense of presence, even intimacy in the living moment, in their art. Matisse especially accentuated intimate contact with his odalisques by folding them in the embrace of fabrics hung all about the room. Moving back and forth from an assumption of third-dimensional space to the surprising emotional touch of two-dimensional space one feels connected and alive in a Matisse. The spirit of Matisse’s art on Calderón Pittman’s discipline is evident in her repeated shifting from fabric to living floral and from canvas to life in scene after scene (Realm of Subjectivity and Unity Below the Surface).
But more surprising is that Calderón Pittman cites Raoul Dufy as an inspiration for her. Dufy, perhaps more than any other modern French painter, found a way to apply Matisse’s intimate approach to space to the wide open spaces of urban and modern life: with his delicate lines twisting through planes of color space dropped like theater curtains over this or that distance, Dufy captured with a breezy ease both the transcendence and immanence of experience, both irreplaceable to human joy. In works like Sunday (1943), one of Dufy’s own favorites, the interplay of line and color is uplifting, exemplifying Dufy’s phenomenological creed, “What I wish to show when I paint is the way I see things with my eyes and in my heart.” Dufy’s linearity in particular strikes a note of correspondence with the airy animation of Calderón Pittman’s tracery-like (but not traced) drawing, given that lightness by Dufyesque spacing (Solace in Redemption, Windows on the Infinite and Lightness of Living).
Each work in this series consists of four or five drawings from life converted, by scanning and reorganizing, into complex constructions of overlaid line and shape, suggestive of the full range of cognitions in consciousness, reassembled under a single frame as a distinct “drawing.” In her mission and methodology, Calderón Pittman follows in the footsteps of a number of artists of her generation (Donald Bacheler, Jean Michel Basquiat) who sought to centralize drawing as a medium as distinct as, and not auxiliary to painting, as drawing was seen to be able to address issues related to postmodern consciousness in ways that painting could not.
All of Calderón Pittman’s drawings begin where one might expect them to: the artist sketching on paper situated on her lap in a real-world setting, picturing real-world things. In this manner, Calderón Pittman imitates the positivist intent of realist art in framing the impenetrable hereness of a scene experienced without attention to complex cognition. She very often draws en plein air, and some of her drawings still bear smudges from rain drops as if to watermark their authenticity. But then Calderón Pittman takes her drawings and scans them into Photoshop, at which point she submits them to a recombinatory exercise of free-flowing association of line and form, adding to or subtracting from each layer as the frisson of rhymes or juxtapositions between haphazardly superimposed forms propel her. In this process she also finds herself moving back and forth from one space to another, often dwelling on the mental space in between the drawings themselves. And then when this point-counterpart play of line and form is done to her liking, she reprints the results on transparencies, reassembles them with vellum sheets in between and mounts them under glass.
It is due to her complex process that the final product of Calderón Pittman’s once straightforward drawings are better described as constructed drawings, for in their use of vellum, and their adherence even in final form to the elegant, filmy transparency of vellum, her strange forays into the subtleties of consciousness sometimes feel more like a specimen of nature viewed under a microscope, or even an autumn leaf or the flower given one by a lover pressed between wax paper or between the pages of an old book (where vellum sheets often protected drawings from imprinting themselves on the facing page). With her repeated use of floral line and form as an impetus to association, and framed sometimes in dimensional frames, it is hard to not call Calderón Pittman’s constructions terrariums of nature, but in this case it is the nature of perception that is involved (New Beginnings, Escape from Realism, Intuitive Continuity, Floating Things).
In the positivist world of numbers and objects, what you see is what you get. An artist sits and paints or draws what he or she sees, and what they see is what their eyes alone see. But in cognitive psychology what goes on in the mind of the artist frames what is seen. The framework of cognition is a complex iris of point-of-view and distracted (collateral, metacognitive) assumptions and associations that often complicate our thoughts. While it is true that in life you do want to sometimes concentrate and get in the flow of your work and not be distracted by thoughts of other things (multitasking is, in fact, a myth; and driving while talking on a cell phone is not a good idea): but for the most part to concentrate does not mean blocking out cognition (which only increases anxiety), but establishing a balanced sense of mindfulness, a curious heightened awareness of the present moment as enriched by all the life one brings to it. Combined with phenomenology, cognitive psychology has found that the mind frames what the eye sees in many different ways. Though these insights have broken up long-held confidences of positivism, in many disciplines, including the accuracy of eyewitness accounts for criminal investigation, they have deeply enriched the possibilities of visual art.
It is clear that in her drawings Calderón Pittman has found a high state of mindfulness in which, grounded in one space - though deciding which is figure or ground in each drawing is a choice left to the viewer- spaces merge to create a new, high kind of world space. In time studies, the notion of propention entails the fact that as we live in the present we are also always thinking, from the point of view of that present, of all of our pasts, ten, twenty, thirty, fifty years ago, as well as worrying over our futures, and we live with persons of different ages who bring all these timeframes into our world too, and then when time moves on, we see all those pasts and futures differently all over again, from a new vantage point. Propentive awareness of time passing, the essence of modern art, is the opposite of nostalgia, reexperiencing or curmudgeonliness, various ways, some through shock, in which people get stuck in one time or another: it represents a flexibility and agility, a living in time. Thus, though we see our present circumstances for what they are we also see in the present echoes of the past, or hope for the future. Time also comes into Calderón Pittman’s constructs as it is evident that every drawing had to be done at a different time, and then the associations developed later as well: the repeated floral imagery may itself signify the concept of growth through time (and scenes might even double back to recapture remembered forms having developed further in a later drawing) (Painting without Borders seeming to play with the idea of unfinishedness to this end, for example).
The same holds true for being in a place: a place is always that place in relation to other places it makes us think of, or that we miss, or still other places we want to go back to, though not quite homesick. A place becomes not something in-itself but an extension of ourselves and our translations of other places onto it. It is this state of complex cognition that Calderón Pittman sought out by scanning her drawings into the computer and experimenting which is so in evidence in her drawings. Calderón Pittman has expressed the thought that having been born in Guatemala, educated abroad, lived in numerous places in her life, being, in fact, what today would be called a ‘third culture kid,” her global experience of life may account for the fact that space for her is always open-ended and transparent: she has a lot of experience to compare any new experience with, after all. Calderón Pittman expressed the delirious complexity of this state of mind by including in one recent construction street scenes apparently from Paris, but in fact drawn from an attempt by the city of Savannah to remind patrons of Paris by setting up sidewalk cafes and such, clearly a case of life imitating art (The Greatness of Little Things)!
Most of the time, the cognitions individual human beings have concern ourselves: they are our associations. When we make ourselves at home in the world, that means we come to associate a place with what we are used to. In her body of work, Calderón Pittman explores the personal nature of consciousness by focusing on two broad shifting planes of consciousness in her current life, one situated on sites in Savannah, Georgia, and the other in Cincinnati, Ohio. Some of her drawn elements derive from gardens, street scenes and other exterior views, while a good deal are from her studio, either in Savannah or Cincinnati, or her home, including her front porch (Harmonious Stages). By constantly moving from interior to exterior Calderón Pittman both opens up the former and makes more personal the latter (Waiting for Abstraction, Grasses of Freedom, and Empty Summer). Inside each plane, Calderón Pittman further subdivides space, finding parallel or juxtaposed wonders of consciousness (in associative patterns in keeping with the findings of recent neuroscience, it could be said sparks of association ‘light up’ passages of her drawings) (Erratic Consciousness, Painting without Borders, and Heaven in a Wildflower, for example). In this zone she is particularly keen on art-versus-life slices of consciousness and moves with etch-a-sketch delight from outlines of her own paintings in her studio to real-world forms that rhyme with them, and even plays with perceptual shifts between floral fabrics and real plants, and even blank canvases framing disconnected real and also other art scenes, as if painting themselves (Harmonious Stages, What was first? and Cosmic Rhythm). In this intimate sea of ambiguity the eye more properly can be said to swim than look, delighting in the existential accuracy of Calderón Pittman’s observations.
While the end result of her constructions is cognitive complexity, what gives Calderón Pittman’s drawings their crispness, a required element that clearly signals movement from plane to plane, and maintains the separation of one plane from another is her aesthetic formalism. Calderón Pittman is not Proust, she does not, mentally, while she works, engage in the poetic art of free association, but rather limits the terms of her associative practice to forms, lines, shapes, and art-and-life dualities, only letting her mind work computationally, seeking surprising ‘matches’ and ‘disconnections’ between comparable forms and lines. This sense of form also affords her a good sense of when too much of a good thing can cause the overlaid construction to breakdown into perceptual mush (the ‘fog of war’ as the fog of art), as she masterly arranges linear sinuosities like notes on sheet music staffs, leaving many a rest and breathing space between, so the viewer can clearly read the music of her mind (Liberating Breeze, Anatomy of Sharing, and The Greatness of Little Things being particularly parsimonious). In a more recent direction, Calderón Pittman has reactivated formalist principles even more forcefully, separating planes of reality more distinctly, each overlay endowed with more episodic fullness, to accentuate the ‘art’ of making formal association across planes of perception (What could have been… or Tiny Thoughts of Greatness).
Space, from the end of rococo art to the emergence of cubism, was taken for granted in two-dimensional art. The cubists, however, explored how the space we experience is interpenetrated by all of the space in the world around us, vectoring apart our confidence in things and places, depicting awareness as the bits and pieces of greater consciousness. From Gauguin to Matisse however, the goal of representing three-dimensional space on a two dimensional surface meant that space should be flattened out: foreground and background were merged to create a deep sense of presence, even intimacy in the living moment, in their art. Matisse especially accentuated intimate contact with his odalisques by folding them in the embrace of fabrics hung all about the room. Moving back and forth from an assumption of third-dimensional space to the surprising emotional touch of two-dimensional space one feels connected and alive in a Matisse. The spirit of Matisse’s art on Calderón Pittman’s discipline is evident in her repeated shifting from fabric to living floral and from canvas to life in scene after scene (Realm of Subjectivity and Unity Below the Surface).
But more surprising is that Calderón Pittman cites Raoul Dufy as an inspiration for her. Dufy, perhaps more than any other modern French painter, found a way to apply Matisse’s intimate approach to space to the wide open spaces of urban and modern life: with his delicate lines twisting through planes of color space dropped like theater curtains over this or that distance, Dufy captured with a breezy ease both the transcendence and immanence of experience, both irreplaceable to human joy. In works like Sunday (1943), one of Dufy’s own favorites, the interplay of line and color is uplifting, exemplifying Dufy’s phenomenological creed, “What I wish to show when I paint is the way I see things with my eyes and in my heart.” Dufy’s linearity in particular strikes a note of correspondence with the airy animation of Calderón Pittman’s tracery-like (but not traced) drawing, given that lightness by Dufyesque spacing (Solace in Redemption, Windows on the Infinite and Lightness of Living).