WHAT DO YOU SEE?
"Ron Padgett" (2015) by Trevor Winkfield. Acrylic on Canvas, 38 x 25 1/2 in. Image courtesy of the Fleisher/Ollman Gallery.
“Ron Padgett '' (2015) is an acrylic painting by Trevor Winkfield depicting an abstract portrait of the titular poet. What you might notice first is the amalgamation of unique shapes and figures within the upper and central portions of the canvas, some geometric and some not, that come to resemble a “sculpture” of a head, torso, and arms. These figures start with slanted rectangles of alternating
baton rouge and heirloom rose color, connected side by side, and connected at their tops by a brown, conic shape with mustard-colored rays coming from its upper vertex, resembling a folding fan hat.
This hat has garden green clockwork motors with a cold purple circle on the top. They are connected
to a jug-like shape from its bottom with distinct, black arcs making eyes and curves and bent lines sectioned within the shape to make a large nose and a wrinkled mouth and chin, creating a head and face of yellow color with a middle section of rose glory pink, suggesting old age. As we move down, a slanted three colored striped trapezoid with a legal pad in the middle and crescent shapes in the dark blue area make up the chest and abdomen area. As we move to the arms, we see that their configurations are made up of rectangle shoulders with multicolored square sections with
passionflower-colored rectangle-lined biceps, one a straight line, the other of three lines resembling a cartoonish, simple table. The arm with a simple straight line has a forearm of a xanthous, contorted medieval column-like figure, with a section of cubes and squares of the pattern of the shoulders that resemble an unfolded Rubik’s Cube, connected from the bottom of it, suggesting a playful nature. The arm of a cartoonish, simple table has a forearm of brass clubs, welded at their tips with blue handles. Present within everything is uniform texture and neat, many-hued coloring with pronounced outlines, only absent in certain areas like the biceps and the chest and abdomen formation.
“Ron Padgett '' (2015) is an acrylic painting by Trevor Winkfield depicting an abstract portrait of the titular poet. What you might notice first is the amalgamation of unique shapes and figures within the upper and central portions of the canvas, some geometric and some not, that come to resemble a “sculpture” of a head, torso, and arms. These figures start with slanted rectangles of alternating
baton rouge and heirloom rose color, connected side by side, and connected at their tops by a brown, conic shape with mustard-colored rays coming from its upper vertex, resembling a folding fan hat.
This hat has garden green clockwork motors with a cold purple circle on the top. They are connected
to a jug-like shape from its bottom with distinct, black arcs making eyes and curves and bent lines sectioned within the shape to make a large nose and a wrinkled mouth and chin, creating a head and face of yellow color with a middle section of rose glory pink, suggesting old age. As we move down, a slanted three colored striped trapezoid with a legal pad in the middle and crescent shapes in the dark blue area make up the chest and abdomen area. As we move to the arms, we see that their configurations are made up of rectangle shoulders with multicolored square sections with
passionflower-colored rectangle-lined biceps, one a straight line, the other of three lines resembling a cartoonish, simple table. The arm with a simple straight line has a forearm of a xanthous, contorted medieval column-like figure, with a section of cubes and squares of the pattern of the shoulders that resemble an unfolded Rubik’s Cube, connected from the bottom of it, suggesting a playful nature. The arm of a cartoonish, simple table has a forearm of brass clubs, welded at their tips with blue handles. Present within everything is uniform texture and neat, many-hued coloring with pronounced outlines, only absent in certain areas like the biceps and the chest and abdomen formation.
From the bottom, you can see three paintings of crazy yellow, brown-striped frames of the acrylic paint style, surrounded by a dark-colored rectangle background that takes up the deep lower section of the piece, with a lower semicircle of ake blood red. The paintings are of sharp outline within a section of desaturated dark violet, curved in a way representing medieval architecture. Looking further within these paintings, pronounced shapes of circles and curves of spring green and Minsk purple within a block-like structure of gray and orange are present within each, along with curved, light maroon red scales spread in sections differing within the adjacent paintings. In a close dive into how things are arranged within each individual painting, we can see that each painting seems to be capturing different shots of the same area. The sculpture-like figure representing Padgett seems to be extending its arm towards a painting, showing art within art. Even with this in mind, these paintings aren’t even the central figure of the entire piece, yet have so much going on with them.
WINKFIELD'S STYLE AND PROCESS
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Trevor Winkfield’s style is often described as esoteric, witty and playful in nature. They’re known for the various amounts of color, hard-edged design, inhuman, distinct figures, use of juxtaposition and reference to medieval architecture within modern movements. Indeed, we see many of these traits within “Ron Padgett.” The use of bright colors represent a frolicsome figure and the configurations of a clockwork motor on the head and an unfolded Rubik’s Cube figure as a hand resemble that of a toy, or a plaything, expressing fun. The folding fan represents a court jest from medieval times. Yet, as colorful as they look, they also look a bit unsettling or foreign. Despite somewhat resembling a human, no human elements are used to create the painting. It’s a collage of what seems to be unrelated, yet distinct figures. This is where juxtaposition plays within Winkfield’s work. While the elements composed may seem disorderly in nature, they combine to make something of greater meaning than what we initially see. A sort of orderly disorder. Using unorthodox methods to create something orthodox. What lies within this madcap combination of traits lies poetic metaphor and requires us to dig deeper into the piece in order to find its true identity. A masking of complexity by simple figures, or an illusion. By note, there are illusions within the piece, such as the illusion of shade within the brass club arm simply being two different color strokes, or the Scintillating Grid illusion on the top left. By no means is this coincidental. Winfield was against improvisation. As Winkfield says in a 2010 interview with Miles Champion from PN Review, “It's true that improvisation isn't my cup of tea, as anyone can tell from looking at my paintings - everything has to be plotted out in advance, like a scientific diagram.” Winkfield shows that his works are formed in a meticulous manner; configurations in both how a scientific diagram is formed, but also configurations of geometric and unorthodox shapes to create a meaning that we are made to search for. He always knew the subject of what he would paint before doing so, whether that be the use of art he most commonly studied in surrealism or dadaism, traits seen within this piece, in order to mesh medieval work with modern movements or in this case, a renowned poet he’s collaborated with numerous times. Winkfield, as a former writer, is able to implement secretive, poetic visions in his forms of art, and was attracted to those who shared similar visions. Winkfield purposefully wants us to explore the meaning behind his work through thoughts that aren’t readily with us. A way to exemplify the elements of abstract art to their greatest degree.
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Scintillating Grid Illusion located within the top left of the painting. Gray dots are perceived to fade in and out when looking through the intersections.
Closer inspection indicates that the "shading" of these welded clubs are simply two different color strokes.
Portrait of Trevor Winkfield
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"I BEGAN PAINTING THE WAY I DO BECAUSE...I HADN’T SEEN ANYBODY ELSE PAINT QUITE THE WAY I WANTED TO PAINT."
-TREVOR WINKFIELD
UNDERSTANDING RON PADGETT
Portrait of Ron Padgett from the Literary Hub.
The subject of this painting, Ron Padgett, is a poet. Padgett’s poetic style can be characterized as affable, silly, animated and childish, possessing wry humor that can cause laughter, yet invoke or talk about some sort of general concept. They are simplistic at first glance but almost always contain a message. Such messages could be dark and cryptic, or inspirational and touching. In a strange way, he seems quite wise, though he doesn’t try to be. But while Padgett’s work may seem modest and organic in nature, he gives you the illusion that he hasn’t taken inspiration from many works. Most notably, Padgett takes inspiration from French poets from an otherwise conversion of French work, like an alchemist trying to convert lead into gold. Perhaps what’s most interesting about Padgett is his style and origin in reading. Padgett originally learned to read via comic books and from here, we can see that this influence carries on within the style of the poems he writes and the ones he reads and provides some connection with Winkfield’s general style and portrait of him. A quote from Ron Padgett cited in the Chicago Review from 1997 says, “Having learned to read by looking at comic books, I'd guess that any whole sense of the connection between reading and writing originates from those wonderful pages filled with bright colors and with odd and interesting characters... At an early age I must have come to feel that reading should pull the reader into a beautiful little world, a world with a structure…Some were better than others, but all of them, despite their sometimes bizarre events and characters, were orderly.” This description gives a near-accurate portrayal of how Padgett is portrayed in Winkfield’s work in bright colors, bizarre elements yet have a sense of order within it.
WHAT DOES "ron padgett" convey?
Screenshot of Trevor Winkfield going through and describing his work process.
It simply conveys Ron Padgett’s likeness, something simple in concept and initially seen as simple, which we know has been expressed in a complex way. Essentially, it is a near representation of who Padgett is, and not in the conventional way we typically see a portrait. Without the title, we would not be able to ponder what this piece may evoke. With it, the details start forming together to make something that we can understand and see in reflection on how Winkfield makes his work. As aforementioned, this is done by design. In conjunction with what we know about Ron Padgett, Winkfield is able to masterfully craft Padgett’s style with his own to portray a message, with that message being who Ron Padgett is, and we have to look for it. He’s essentially transcribing writing, a poem of a man, into a portrait. Given Winkfield’s dabbling in writing, he likely saw painting as his strong suit and wanted to paint the things he couldn’t write, in opposition to his earlier sayings of writing things he couldn’t paint. This is where we see the meaning of that legal pad denoting literary substance, the folding fan that originates in wisdom. All these things that initially didn’t make sense to us in what Padgett is suddenly makes sense once we take a deeper dive. Through a friend, he could correlate his style with who Padgett is: a wizard-like, experienced translator and stylist who possesses/shares wisdom in his own zany manners.
A multimodal project by EJ MCLEAN for Dr. Sturm's ENGL 1102, Georgia State University Fall 2022
work citedChampion, Miles. "Why I Am Not a Fauvist: A Second Conversation with Trevor Winkfield." PN Review, vol. 37, no. 2, 2010, pp. 53-64,84. ProQuest, https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/why-i-am-not-fauvist-second-conversation-with/docview/767456116/se-2.
Eshleman, Clayton. “Padgett the Collaborator.” Chicago Review, vol. 43, no. 2, Mar. 1997, p. 8. EBSCOhost, https://doi.org/10.2307/25304155. |
