Donald Traver - Recent Work
An unquiet grave is filled with glittering bones dug up out of sparkling
mulch or the rich loam of the unconscious. In a cheerful take on inevitable
mortality, cut- out skeletal figures are attached to the paintings’ surface and
emerge from a dark field that from a distance appears almost monochrome. But
upon closer examination Travers’ anthropological field teems with humorous
detail, with small flowers and sequins embedded in the paint.
Another series of works features the painterly theme of the studio as
background; a stacked profusion of paintings becomes both pattern and motif.
Travers' choice of salon style hanging reinforces the conceptual content of his
work. These are paintings about the practice of painting, so that the
presentation, the canvas support and the history of modernism are all fodder.
A characteristic composition is the cluster, a ramshackle pile of canvases
or wobbly rectangles stacked in the center, an accumulation of frames built up
and balanced in a precarious heap. The stack seems to refer to the body, to the
shambling mess that man becomes. The figure is present in several guises, in
frameworks of bones or wood and in the still life groupings of anthropomorphic
vessels.
An animated parade of framed canvases advancing forward about to
topple over the edge of a cliff- speaks to his preoccupation with art making, with
perpetuating more canvases, with filling more empty frames. Painting is the
subject of these paintings.
My favorite image and a signature one for Traver shows a grouping of
bent canvases whose sides are studded with tacks like the bottoms of Gustons
shoes. The shapes have both a weighted and floating quality.
There’s a painting on Travers’ studio wall, dating from when he was
eighteen, that contains all the elements of his later style. The same rich dark
browns surround a central cluster of small irregular bright blocks, overlaid with a
framework of cage like lines, a net of 1950’s metalwork. A precocious
sophisticate, Traver began collecting folk art at age twelve. He first exhibited in
the East Village at twenty-four and has been protean in his practice ever since.
Comfortably moving between media, he also makes prints, photography,
sculpture, ceramics and work on paper.
Elsewhere Traver weaves Miro like forms into frameworks of brambly
lines like barbed wire or crowns of thorns, or the floating pair of glasses- that
loom over a valley of ashes in The Great Gatsby. The eye is one of his consistent
motifs; eye shapes, eyeglasses, and a series of cyclop eyed octopuses.
Traver’s facility with freehand drawing is most evident in his still life
paintings. An overlay of white paint drawn freehand with a brush emits internal
light against a patterned ground. When he works on the floor, he is adept at
controlling the pooling of paint to modulate transparency and opacity. He uses a
classic modernist palette of umbers, greens and, golds - dark rich colors that
recall American folk art combined with mid century textiles he grew up amongst.
And if you look closely you can always find a face hidden in the noise.