Creator Record
Metadata
Name |
Saltzman, Marvin |
Dates & places of birth and death |
B. 1931, Chicago, IL |
Nationality |
American |
Notes |
In landscape painting, Marvin Saltszman is trying to get the maximum amount of energy using composition, color, and mark making as ingredients. Nature is a vulgar, organic entity, says Saltzman. Editing and notating, he filters the experience of landscape through his coloring, his intellect, and his record keeping. Many of Saltzman's series since 1987 have used site-specific drawings as an abstract way of recording the experience of looking. He also uses a Hofmannesque nonobjective system of marking squares, circles, arrows, X's- done with yellow ochre on the canvas. These markings are developed in the drawings to move the eye of the viewer away from the constant linear and rectangular divisions of the space of the canvas that the viewer's eye would normally anticipate. Unancticipated placements are selected to give the canvas the maximum amount of energy with regard to color and mark making. The next stage of the process is to make sure that the painting is completely covered with color. The eye and the mind plot the placing of the color all over the canvas. This adhesion of color and composition is what Saltzman refers to as "the total painting system." The next stage is literally to "scribble it up." The scribbles placed over the painting establish its basic color sensibility at this particular stage. This is what might normally be anticipated as the background, but as Saltzman says: "It's not background. It's the surface...part of the surface of the painting." All of Saltzman's color decisions and markings are made from a distance of forty feet from his canvases. |
Places of residence |
Long Beach, California |
Role |
Artist |
Titles & Honors |
Professor and Chair of Studio Art at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1967 to 1996 |
Education |
University of Chicago and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 1954 to 1956, and received a B.F.A. and M.F.A. from the University of Southern California in 1959 |
