A Walk Through the Gallery
“Bob Camblin: The “Yes Retrospective” at the Museum
Sometime in the early 21st Century, Bob Camblin’s the “Yes Retrospective,” became a traveling show that gathered 130 of the artist’s paper and canvas works — the largest and most extensive presentation of these works ever assembled. The exhibition begins in the 1950s, covering work Camblin started producing in art school and carries forward toward the end of his life in 2010. Didn’t get to see the retrospective in person? Here is the 130-piece experience.
I might as well level with you straight off. It is not my desire to offer incomprehensible art-babble – the peculiar language of critics. I just don’t see it as being useful to the job at hand. I would rather use this space to describe this abridgment of drawings brought together from literally thousands of oils, acrylics, watercolors, drawings, prints and painted paper gathered from the four corners of our world. Many of the intimate drawings and musings represented here and shown for this retrospective were never intended for the public eye. They are unmediated, spontaneous expressions of joy in free hand.
It is my intention to help the reader realize that appreciating art requires no special aptitude, or training, or lessons in art history. That’s what makes art so fun to discover. It has the unique ability to transfer the artist’s joy across time and space directly to you in ways unimaginable. There is no other emotion quite like it. I hope something leaps off the canvas and puts a smile on your face. My job is to help make that happen.
The questions come up even from seasoned museum goers: what makes art good or bad? Does good art always create an emotion? Likewise, why do I get excited by bad art? Why does Picasso do absolutely nothing for me and the balloon dog does? Reactions range from “I don’t understand art,” and “I’m not educated enough,” to “I must be an idiot,” echo clearly enough when faced with walls and walls of framed mystery.
But remember, appreciating art is and should be different from the critical analysis of art. Appreciating art is about you and your emotions and your reaction. Do you like it? If so, great; you can ask yourself why if you are feeling a little introspective and research it further if you are so inclined. I’m writing this essay as a fellow appreciator and not as an experienced critic. I have no deep understanding of art or its history or degree to back up what I’m saying. I just like looking at pictures hanging on walls. So you are not alone if you are a fellow patron along for looking at pictures on walls like me.
What I do have is a great appreciation for many of the pieces in this retrospective and a desire to share my take on them. But first, I would like to digress and discuss some of my presumptions about art in general. First, I have no way of distinguishing what is worthy of attention and what is not.
The drawings of this retrospective are not a duplication of reality; rather they are an imitation of reality by way of an extra layer added by the artist. This extra layer is where Camblin shows us his apparent skill and mischievousness. Each of these drawings has hidden images intricately buried within. Sometimes they are easy to find; most often they reveal themselves after hanging on the walls for years. The fun is trying to find them and discern their meaning.
Another presumption I have in evaluating art is that it should be emotional to me. My most favorite pieces will tug a heartstring. Often I won’t have the slightest reason why a painting is really pulling at me in this way. Is it the artist’s intention? Is it something about the subject matter that reminds me of something or someone or an event in my history? For example, each of these paintings moves me in a different way. There is no better way of describing it. These paintings seem to come alive with motion and sweep me into the narrative.
If beauty and emotion are two of my presumptions, how do I feel toward Descent from The Cross? This drawing’s subject matter is of Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus taking Christ down from the cross after his crucifixion. Undoubtable, the emotional factor is way up there; for beauty, it is a relative thing. I consider it a beautiful drawing – one of my favorite pen and inks. Consider another two evocative pieces, Redstick and A Collection of Fragments. These pictures inspire revulsion in others. I like them. I think they are outstanding examples of beauty in their own odd way. And Redstick would make an awesome pirate-ship flag, if nothing else.
No simple definition or even set of definitions will ever be sufficient to describe everything that comes under the heading of art. Just when the Renaissance painters began to figure out their trade, along came neoclassicism and its new theories. This in turn was upended by Romanticism which was eventually eclipsed by the introduction of Modern art. It didn’t take long for Modern Art art to give way to Contemporary art. It is within this milieu that we find this retrospective – 117 pieces that cover almost all the movements from Dada to Post-Impressionism.
A majority of Camblin’s oeuvre could be described as magic realism or post-expressionism. Indeed, as Dr. Lois Parkinson Zamora of the University of Houston writes of art critic Franz Roh, “Roh, in his 1925 essay, described a group of painters whom we now categorize generally as Post-Expressionists.”
“Roh used this term to describe painting that signaled a return to realism after expressionism’s extravagances, which sought to redesign objects to reveal the spirits of those objects. Magical realism, according to Roh, instead faithfully portrays the exterior of an object, and in doing so the spirit, or magic, of the object reveals itself. One could relate this exterior magic all the way back to the 15th century. Flemish painter Van Eyck (1395–1441) highlights the complexity of a natural landscape by creating illusions of continuous and unseen areas that recede into the background, leaving it to the viewer’s imagination to fill in those gaps in the image: for instance, in a rolling landscape with river and hills. The magic is contained in the viewer’s interpretation of those mysterious unseen or hidden parts of the image.”
Another style Camblin engaged in wholeheartedly was the Happening, a performance, event, or situation meant to be considered art. “Collaboration is a natural extension of Camblin’s artistic/human beliefs,” said Patricia C. Johnson of the Houston Chronicle, “His art tells of his physical world and his friends as much as his experiences, past or present. Camblin soon became involved with activities at the Moody Gallery and when William T. Wiley came to visit, he brought the concept of collaboration as a method of increasing opportunities for chance occurrences to open up new directions in one’s art.
He and Houston artist Earl Staley began planning ‘events’: outings to the beach where groups of artists destroyed huge junk sculptures (1969, 1971, 1972); a tattoo show (1970) and document show (1971) at David Gallery; three exhibitions at the University of St. Thomas; countless collaborative drawings; and a three-story sculpture outside their studio entitled, An Imaginary Scaffolding for the Renovation of the Statue of Liberty, to be Completed by the Bicentennial in 1776. The focus of these activities was on the process itself, and this point was central to their activity. The object was viewed as merely the by-product that engaged in artistic activity. In this regard, they resemble their Dada forefathers and the more anti-materialistic movements of the 1960s.”
The piece, Bob Bag, is a grocery store paper shopping bag printed with a lithograph of his likeness. He wore the bag at one of his art shows at Moody Gallery in Houston, Texas. This occurred at a point in his career when he became “anonymous.” He claimed he would no longer sign his paintings with “Camblin” in an effort to become just another anonymous painter in the Late 20th Century. He belief was that by becoming “anonymous” and signing the work “anonymous” his work would sell based on the value off the piece rather than the value of the name Camblin.
Many people feel they need an education to evaluate art. And to some degree this is true. If you were educated on the absolute standards of classical realism, it became second nature to instantly recognize what was good art was. Things got a little hazy when modern art and its assorted movements came into being. Even sophisticated art talkers needed “painted words” by other more sophisticated art talkers to help them decide whether a painting or sculpture was good or bad. Ultimately, if you are just out to have fun at the museum, it still remains a matter of personal judgement. Yes, critical reviews – as well as the deeper understanding gained from reading those reviews – can provide knowledge of the art. Sometimes this just twists things around even more.
I suggest looking at the drawings in this retrospective as a graphic representation of phenomena. The selection of objects as phenomena; the group of objects as phenomena; the transformation as phenomena; the free association as phenomenon; and yet the drawing is the focus. The hands by which the phenomenon is experienced changes the object as with glasses of red, yellow, and blue filters. Each person reacts to the object in a different way – some verbal, some visual, some tactile. Since anything can turn into phenomenon, have you focused and stopped seeing? With phenomena, try looking again and again, this time with humor. Humor is a key to unlocking the mystery in many of the drawings in this retrospective.
My definition of art is the transformation of here and now into a picture. Artists of various times and places had looked around, took in what they saw around them, and with the basic elements – line, form, space, texture, light, and color – created an alternate representation of the world as they saw it at that point in time and at that place in space. This body of work is no different. It captures space and time.
The line is one of Camblin’s most powerful tools. As a draftsman he used it to convey an impression of movement. Lines and the forms they create can be drawn in such a way that it seems as if the drawing is pulling your eyes around. In Bob, the viewer’s attention is pulled from the eyes to the beard almost as if by a powerful magnetic force. The same is true with Bonnie, but in the opposite way. Here the eyes draw us back even after we wander out to see the neck or lips or hair. In Alterpiece of St.Bambola, the antlers form a bold, looping curve which leads us to the child’s head and cloth shroud. That same curve flows downward through the legs to the faces at the lower outside of the frame. Camblin knew these visual pathways would be used as stepping stones and pathways by anyone viewing his paintings and would often place hidden imagery along these pathways for the viewer to discover. Camblin was an excellent draftsman and lines were his secret weapon in doing so.
Darkness in a Camblin drawing means more than the absence of light. It’s usually there to conjure up feelings of danger or foreboding, mystery, and concealment. I would not want to be walking alone at night in any of these paintings: Algier’s Landing, New Orleans Mask #28, or Red Stick’s X. In Algier’s Landing the painting’s tension is highlighted by bright light in a dark surrounding. In Red Stick’s X, Camblin has given us a gloomy bottle clearly marked as dangerous. A light source shines from the left with the unfolding background projecting a low-key mystery. The contrasts between light and dark areas make for an ominous impact. In New Orleans Mask, the lighting creates luminous phantoms on horseback. The blood red wings give the creatures an otherworldly appearance.
Many of Camblin’s paintings are in the middle-grey area. He painted this way because the representation of miniscule detail is more easily accomplished in these lower registers. Take for example the Elements, a suite of four hand printed lithographs pulled in a lighter than middle grey or high key style (Fire, Earth, Air, Water). They contain a certain amount of detail. Compare those to the following painting done in tones below middle grey or low key style: Safe Passage, A Tree With Door Knobs, Coast Study, and an untitled watercolor on paper from 1989. All have the conditions necessary for rendering of meticulous detail. The ability to vary the contrast between the lightest light and the darkest dark allows the artist to create details that amplify the texture and the three dimensionality of the work. Likewise, the lighter than middle grey style of the Elements allows the subject matter to wistfully float above and below the picture plane.
Another example of high key versus low key can be seen in Kris and USAII. The low key USAII is better at defining texture and three-dimensionality than the more concerted effort at depth in Kris.
In 1980 Camblin began collaborating with Houston artist Nancy Giordano Echegoyen. Their first series together, Rock And Roll Palm Trees, exemplified the working process of their newly-formed pseudonym “Anonymous Artists.” In order to downplay individual styles, the two artists agreed to limit their brush strokes to dots and dashes. This new style of rendering continued to develop over time and was defined by technical virtuosity, vivid imagination, and compositional daring. It eventually became known as the “mouches volantes” style of painting. Mouches volantes is a French term that translates into “flying flies” and was the perfect technique for harmonizing artistic differences between collaborators. Mouches volantes was the discovery that allowed the random juxtaposition of contrasting ideas to produce resonant images. This mouches volante style is used extensively in several of his 1980s works such as #957-96960, Big Al-April Proof and Big Al – Electric Age.
Camblin discovered optical color the same way everyone has for centuries. Everyone that has stared at a bright light then looks away only to see the inverse color image had experienced the “mouches volantes” of optical color. Historically it was the optical color of a figment image rather than the local or true color of the real object that interested the original pointillists. When Camblin chose to add optical color over local color he was providing his paintings a depiction of what he saw in his mind’s eye. He remained very faithful to what he believed his senses were seeing. This technique uses deliberate perceptual organization to create meaning out of what appears to be random brushstroke-stimuli in the same way one creates meaningful images out of a sky full of clouds. The viewer weaves together a jigsaw-puzzle explanation based on their own historical and optical experiences – essentially formulating that which doesn’t exist into something which does.
There are two paths a painter can follow when looking upon a blank canvas. One path presumes that art is an imitation of reality – specifically that art was like looking through a window and seeing a realistic landscape for example. This path offers a three-dimensional aspect highlighted by the sheer illusion of depth as in Bull Forgotten #1 and Bull Forgotten #2. Even paintings that drift away from Realism and move toward Abstract Expressionism can still maintain their illusion of depth. The other path generally credited to the Cubists and early Modernists was that a painting was merely a flat surface with paint on it. There’s was a style in which lines, forms, space, and color did their thing on the flat plane of the canvas. In the same way the nineteenth-century Realists sought to perfect how accurately their paintings portrayed the illusion of depth, the twentieth-century some Abstract Expressionists worked on perfecting the flat picture plane. Some went as far as to perfect “the not-painted-on” canvas. Those didn’t sell well so it really didn’t catch on as an art movement.
In Hold Tight #2, Camblin combines both flat-plane and depth-of-field art theories. The painting’s subject matter is of a weathered wall of slatted, nailed, and cobbled together deck boards, which give the appearance of a two-dimensional surface plane. What’s interesting is that within that plane a beach scene draws us toward a vanishing point to the middle left area of the painting. I believe the juxtaposition of two competing theories makes this an intriguing painting.
His drawings of gloves, scarecrows, machined objects, fish heads, bottles, and the St. Bambola series are safely two dimensional, although there are elements of perspective when he suggests a landscape. These drawings are never defined by a light source, but rather, by movement with cross hatching across the two-dimensional surface of the paper. These movements and descriptions sometimes create a guide on how to proceed with the consumption of the drawing. His aim here is to get you involved in exploring the artwork. Each is a puzzle that wants to be solved. Some are easy, some more difficult.
Camblin’s, Find the Missing Peace looks, at first glance, like a jumbled mess of Japanese characters or perhaps wooden sticks of varying size and shape. The subject matter doesn’t make much sense at all. The title, however, indicated there is something for us to find. In fact, it’s not a very decorative piece in terms of color – its pen and ink on paper, but it does have the intrigue of searching for the missing peace. I have spent considerable time trying to find the obscured message and it always eludes me. Sometimes it is a rigidly two-dimensional picture-plane drawing and other times it looks like a stop-motion shot of Japanese haikai falling down a well.
What interests me about Glass Bird Cage is that the mystery held within is not dependent on the viewer’s level of art education or any other art sensibility. I’ve had twelve-year old kids discover the glass bird that had eluded me for years. I suppose young minds are more willing to change their assumptions about where in space the elements are. With different spatial assumptions comes a different rendering of the edges, forms, and masses. How remarkable it was to watch a twelve year old just walk up and say, “I get it. The glass of the frame makes the cage for the bird – hence, Glass Bird Cage.” Kids these days have no respect for showing off in front of their elders.
I could have come back and said how form and content are two different things, but I was too impressed to say much. When we speak of form we are talking about what a painting looks like. We note the structural elements such as line, shape, and color. When we speak of content we are referring to the subject matter or what a painting is about. Our young genius used the negative space created by lines and forms to visualize the bird (probably as the artist intended), but then one step further and created the glass cage metaphor out of the pictures frame (maybe not intended by the artist). But who knows?
Drawings and symbols and images (like the glass bird) are the tuning-forks of the unconscious. It all relates to you by how many types of order you can find and what your perceptions are telling you. Cuidado Bayou depicts a waterway lined with trees and shadowy figures standing on the left. This painting uses figure-ground organization similar to Glass Bird Cage (size, object shapes, color, and edges) to hide the prize. Can you find the skull? How many more narratives did you find while looking for this one? When you search through this painting, remember that art is the ordering process made visible. Art makes the order visible for a moment. (If you don’t see what appears to be a skull, look at the image from a greater distance. Hint: The white brush strokes make up the skull’s teeth).
Gestalt undoubtedly factors in many of Camblin’s paintings. This school of psychology concerns itself with the modern study of perception that in part, emphasizes that the whole of anything is greater than its parts. His paintings provide a fertile ground for discovery; whether they are psychologically induced, or a product of a fervent imagination, or due to influence and suggestion, or merely the written word taken as the key – it is up to the viewer to decode and decide. Are you seeing these symbolisms as Camblin thought you should or are you just imagining that you are seeing them? He would never tell.
What Not seems to have a very straightforward content – a bottle on a shelf. That and the few odd items surrounding the bottle and some text seem to make up the inventory of this drawings content. As it happens, the content has subtext. And I mean that literally and figuratively. That is, the subtext contains the drawings meaning; the drawing raison for being, and the explanation for the subject matter being what it is at all. The viewer might assume the words WHAT NOT to be the drawing’s title. Yes…but even this can be understood in a multitude of ways. First, a whatnot is a light, open shelf for bric-a-brac. Second, a whatnot can also be a nondescript person or thing. So is this drawing named for a whatnot shelf or named whatnot for the bric-a-brac bottle on the shelf? Finally, I believe the artist intended the bottle to be an abstract impression of the artist’s mind; so the “WHAT NOT” in the drawing is actually referring to a nondescript person.
At times he felt smothered and labeled; he felt he had sat at the easel so long barnacles were growing; tubes and stiches and lead and screws were all that held the machine together; more prophetically, he felt life figuratively picked him up and swirled him around until his thinking was cloudy as muddy water and solutions opaque. He would often have to wait for his mind’s water to clear before he could return to painting.
In another piece of water iconography, When We First Moved to Houston, each bottle seems have its own life vignette especially pronounced when the text is included. The form of this drawing is a loosely done watercolor wash with a slight perspective and a light source to the lower left. The content is the bottles and the script. To me, the bottles took on individual personalities as was the case in what not where the bottle ended up representing the artist’s clouded mind (however, in the drawing the “mind” looked fairly clear as the sediment was clearly resting on the bottom). The “personalities” in When We First Moved to Houston seem to grow from the ability to create impressions given the looseness of the watercolor wash. I began to see hats and other human characteristics on the bottles. I can’t shake the impression that these bottles are telling me a little bit of their history as a source of pride. This is one of my favorite water iconography pieces.
The majority of paintings are about what you first think they are about: a landscape is generally a landscape. The more realistic the depiction the better the artist. That is precisely what the Cubists and other Modernists wanted to change. The drawing, Step Back, embraced that change. This is not a typical landscape, far from it. It seems to cover some of the same ground as Hieronymus Bosch or Salvadore Dali. One might, of course, be interested in knowing what the two naked, bisected human figures with their legs dangling in the stream and their torsos sunk with hasps and ropes attached means. If that wasn’t enough there are fallen trees that begin to resemble body parts and partially hidden iconography adding to the mystery. Given the subject matter, what is the focus of the drawing? What is the artist trying to tell us? We see the text “STEP BACK” printed in block letters. Title or command? If we haven’t discovered the hidden skull STEP BACK is not only the title but also a command to back up and look at the drawing from a distance. The skull becomes very pronounced now. Was this the point of the drawing; to discover the skull? Who knows? The artist wouldn’t say.
One thing to notice is the strangeness that many of Camblin’s pieces represent, especially when the surprises and mysteries within them are not discovered. Step Back makes a little more sense when you see the drawing may have an exercise in hide and seek. Without discovering the skull, you may have been left to wonder about the bisected naked bodies that looked like fishing floats.
His paintings reflect an intention to question popular expectations of reality as much as – if not more than – the surrealist movement of the early 1920s. No longer satisfied with the structure of the existing world and the agony of the dullness of reality, his paintings do more than explore the relationship between the objective experience and dreams. They feature the elements of surprise, unexpected juxtapositions and non sequitur which require the viewer to step back and use their imagination. These actions unlock private, subconscious emotions, with the recalled event giving the painting shape and meaning. The casein on paper Step Back is a perfect introduction to this thought process.
What these drawings are about and the story they are trying to tell is the content. The way they are painted to convey that story is the form they use. It’s interesting to see how form is used to influence content. For me, once I learned what not was an expression of the artist’s mind, I couldn’t help but see the bottles in When We First Moved to Houston as personalities too. The loose wash allowed me to visualize bottles as persons. In Step Back, the detailed draftsmanship pulls the eye toward the bisected forms and away from the skull, so it can be discovered later in an ah-ha moment.
Just as there is a branch of art history which studies the identification, description, and interpretation of the subject matter of paintings called iconography, there is a subset concerned with personal iconography, where drawings and paintings appear to have significant meanings only accessible by the artist.
While painting in Italy in his late 20s, he was heavily influenced by what he saw at The Uffizi Gallery, a distinguished Florence art museum and at The Catacombe dei Cappuccini, the burial catacombs in Palermo. The imagery at both venues provided him with abstract figurative forms that burrowed and remained in his memory. He often called those images mummies for they were so well maintained in his imagination. He sometimes felt he might never be able to escape them, and indeed, his life’s work shows that he truly may not have. Starting with New Orleans Mask #30 and working through Curios, Mask #29, and Faux Pause, shows us his memory of Cappuccini was indeed in full throttle late in his career. As a distributor of metamorphosis and mortality, it should come as no surprise that the evolution of that subject matter would lead him into minimalism as it did with so many other Modernists. The reasoning behind creating Red Skull, White Skull, and Blue Skull, will perhaps, remain unknown.
The Birth of Venus by Botticelli also captured Camblin’s imagination. Botticelli’s painting represents the Neoplatonic idea of love being the driving force of life. The iconography in Camblin’s The Birth of Venus pays homage to the KPFT Radio 90.1 playlist. To its loyal listeners, Camblin’s painting was indeed the Neoplatonic idea of love, especially love of rock & roll, it seems, for the painting consists of hundreds of textual mementos to beloved musicians everywhere.
Another example of Camblin’s iconography can be witnessed in a series called Bestiary. The Bestiary was a six-print, dry-point compendium of beasts – an anteater, a lion, a seal, an eagle, an alligator, and a bat. Camblin along with fellow artists Earl Staley and Joe Tate created the working plates by rotating them in a circle as they sat around a table; each artist working a section of the plate before handing it off to the next.
Camblin sometimes helps the viewer understand his personal iconography by providing a legend. In Proposal for the Future, the artist’s thoughts and conscious reactions to events are recorded to paper at his Sul Ross studio in Houston, Texas. Here we can see the sparks of creation that went on just prior to making the Round-Up series, Wiley Cats, Victor Hugo, the Holding Firm, Senza Dudio, Que Scais je, the Path of Least Resistance, and Leave Only A Trace. In Seve Dollars, the iconography literally tells us that you are watching the artist make a living – by drawing money.
Camblin’s also uses the postcard icon quite often, and sometime an actual postcard (found art) becomes part of the drawing Postcards, YGWYD, and A Most Interesting Year. He enjoyed the idea that a small printed card would carry a picture and a message and would appear inside a drawing that was also carrying a picture with a message.
The iconography can range from the staid metamorphosis in The Raven, and Walpurgis Night, to more energetic picture-planes in Canto III: Metamorphosis, and Birth of Venus #2. An example of a more complicated and low-key version of death and mortality resides in the boxed-landscape, Spavinah #5. Philosophically related iconography can be found in Cosmic, with quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson; and whimsical iconography in bad dog good dog mad dog guard dog top dog under dog, representing a child-hood memory of a dog sticking his head through a fence in which children has drawn a suit and tie out of chalk.
Camblin’s scarecrows probably represented a loosely Germanic hastening of spring or renewal of life. As these scarecrow paintings progressed, the evolutionary themes expanded into another series of myths and legends, with elements of the lobster shell and puppets and especially the empty dried larva shell, further emphasizing metamorphosis, Scarecrow In A Boxed Landscape and Two Funky Hands. In his later scarecrow drawings, he wrote descriptions of them as sculptures. It would seem the words describe exactly what the viewer sees. This, however, is not always the case. Rather, the words become a disguise helping to hide the drawing’s true meaning. Camblin believed most words have always hidden the experience of the art (i.e., in The Painted Word by Tom Wolfe the author explains how Modern Art has become completely literary; that somehow what is said about art is more important than the art itself). The text in his paintings may or may not relate to the drawing and may or may not be clues to its mystery. They are really, he believed, just shapes on the surface; shapes that should be enjoyed for what they mean to you and nothing more. Camblin would agree with Wolfe in that seeing is believing.
Much of Camblin’s iconography is about the life cycle; about birth, death, and regeneration in infinite regression. His paintings probe metamorphosis from the evolutionary point of view. The hidden meanings and secrets are often decoded through Freud, Giorgio de Chirico, and Matthias Grünewald. There are recurring puppets, scarecrows, skulls, and glass reliquaries with murky water. This imagery might begin to make more sense if one has read Nikos Kazantzakis or Günter Wilhelm Grass. Camblin suggests that the viewer should use his or her own Gestalt psychologist and fill in the blanks according to their own dictates. Jokingly he says, “I don’t consider art as heavy. However, if you think it’s funny, I’ll get serious. And if you think it’s serious, I’ll make a joke of it.”
Artistic style can sometimes be explained as being what iconography is not. Style is not concerned with content or quality or personal iconography, rather, it has very much to do with form and objective description.
Camblin devoted his genius to the preparation of medium-size drawings large enough in scale and monumental enough in subject matter to compete favorably with large-scale paintings. These early masterpieces have ‘corrections’ built into them – white gouache and white paper pasted over amended areas – a style that was used in The Descent from the Cross, a truly remarkable piece.
The work from the 1960s was an effort to combine the poetic suggestions of Hugo van der Goes with the emotional overtones of Francisco José de Goya. Whether by design or sheer luck, the applied paper’s tones have turned into subtle gradations of beige a half a century later as the works aged. The even more enigmatic A Series of Masks is another fine example of Camblin adding shadings and pen strokes to emphasize the bits of applied paper. He did not paint color relationships for its aesthetic value alone, but rather, muted his palette in order to bring his paintings into closer harmony with his drawings.
Camblin’s style, put bluntly, is esoteric at best; that it is likely to be understood by only a small number of people with a specialized knowledge or interest is probably a fair statement. He once said that it had taken him twenty-five years to figure out what it was he was doing. Even having been to dozens of his openings and spent countless hours discussing the work, it still remains puzzling.
He felt painters and sculptors should reject words as dangerous to the perception of their art. Although being human, artists and critics like to talk their two cents worth and much of it is meaningless. And yet, communication continues to grow, as well as the sophistry in explaining art. The end result would be that to see an image of the Sistine ceiling and discuss the aesthetic, social, and philosophical content of it would be deemed adequate enough to experience it in its own terms. This kind of experience creates a verbal awareness overlapping a century of wariness. Eventually it no longer becomes important to do more than recognize a potential for something to be art. The object disappears and the idea remains.
He didn’t consider art as heavy lift. However, if you thought a piece funny, he would get serious about it. And if you thought it serious, he would make a joke of it. Camblin’s style emanates as much from his feelings toward the subject matter as it does towards the subject matter’s material reality. In each of following self-portraits the subject matter is obvious, but the style is influenced by the artist’s emotions: The Artist, Reclining Nude , and Baton Rouge Exporter are decades apart in years and in style, yet each holds an emotional quotient that adds up to more than just the sum of its parts. Other portraits such as Nun, Glorm, and New Orleans Mask #4, ask us to determine if we are viewing material reality or the presentation of a story or myth by the artist.
Camblin’s work style didn’t fit neatly into any single movement or composite of movements, although someone trained in art history would be able to take individual pieces and say this one or that one is a perfect example of Cubism or abstract Surrealism.
Fine artists use different media, which is the plural form of medium. Camblin’s primary medium was water-based casein on a heavy, deckled edge Arches watercolor paper. Casein is a milk-product based paint which he applied multiple ways, from impasto to thin watercolor washes. Being water soluble but become insoluble with time and exposure allowed him to work with differing levels of transparency. In New Orleans Mask and New Orleans Mask #31, the colors are vibrant with the wash adding a sense of motion and intrigue. Landscapes were a great vehicle for his Expressionist talents. Whether a loose wash Untitled, c. 1990, to a more detailed, layered piece Mailbox #1, to a quick study Waterfalling Hawaii, or to pieces more time-intensive May Day and Untitled, no date, Casein allows Camblin to play with the formal elements in and of themselves, in descending layers. For him, there was never only one picture plane, but an infinite number. And having an infinite number of picture planes was a good thing for playing tricks.
He also hid stratagems during printmaking. He etched them into the copperplate as was done with the Scrapbook series. They are a multitude of Camblin’s hijinks to be found. The same goes for High Tide, and Mid Summer’s Night Dream. High Tide shows a beach loaded with iconography.
Consider the following random group of work – all undated, probably spanning sixty years, and consisting of pen and ink, colored pencil, casein, oil, and acrylic: I Ching, Joes Backyard, View of Studio Torre Argentina Rome, Mushroom, La Familia, and A Road Turns and Disappears. Each of these surfaces will began to give way to hints of stratagems beyond definite perception. Conjunction of surface treatments and visible subject matter has allowed Camblin to camouflage images just beyond a casual viewer’s focus of interest. The secret to discovering the hidden meaning was to always look past the obvious (this was always a trap) and look for the sensitive draftsmanship.