An Artist Exposed: The Many Lives of Langley Spurlock
By Keith Skillman
Spend only a little time with the Washington, D.C., collagist,
painter, and sculptor Langley Spurlock, and you will sense the similarities
between the artist and his art. He is meticulously arranged and
comfortably inviting, singularly focused and widely multidimensional,
deeply reflective and wittily whimsical. On a calm, crystal summer
day, he spikes a deliberate, detailed conversation about art and
its impetus and influences with wry realizations, delivered deadpan,
his sparkling eyes dancing and the trace of a smile marking recognition
of the humor in the moment.
The 30-year Washington resident’s creative output is like
that, too, composed as it is of disparate natural and industrial
materials—simple forms in paper, wood, aluminum, copper, glass,
acrylics, and ink—that coalesce in intuitive abstract arrangements
that are mindful of haiku, only in color. “In creating my
artworks, I live for the ‘Aha!’ moment, when the structure
suddenly completes itself, and all that’s left is refining
the piece,” says Spurlock. “Reaching that moment is
the great joy of art making for me.”
Indeed, an element of experimentation exists in all of Spurlock’s
work, informed as it is by a flash of intuition and executed with
a scientist’s precision. There’s little surprise in
the latter, as Spurlock holds a doctorate in organic chemistry and
built a career around science before pursuing art full time. Yet
the spirit of an artist paralleled, coexisted, and even complemented
his nearly 35-year career in science. His artistic underpinnings
extend from instruction in zoological and botanical drawing as an
undergraduate to his participation in an advanced group of artists
exploring expressiveness and technique with William Christenberry
at the Corcoran College of Art in Washington, D.C. And, as Spurlock
points out, science itself is full of “ambiguities, frustrations,
even poetry”—it is not all solid truths and unequivocal
facts. There is no denying, he adds, that his training in scientific
thought underpins all that he does in art, particularly its execution.
Typically, Spurlock works on the floor, arranging into appealing
forms a selection of shapes that might not seem to belong together
yet in their final execution do. A set of ten collages that he calls
his “Borrowed Fortunes” series, for example, was made
by combining shapes clipped and modified from MOMA magazines with
surreal, faux fortune cookie fortunes. Overlays of forms cut from
glass imbue each of the beautiful, colorful pieces with a three-dimensional
quality. The collages, once arranged to the artist’s liking,
are pressed between sheets of clear acrylic. Of his process, Spurlock
says, “I usually start with one image that I find attractive,
and then I build something around that. The process of experimenting
with this and that translates from my background in chemical research.
That’s what you do in science, too—you arrange and rearrange
until it either rings true or it doesn’t.”
Truth resounded in Spurlock’s recent solo show, “Exposing
Other Lives,” which ran September 4-29, 2002, at the Studio
Gallery in Washington, D.C. Like the “Borrowed Fortunes”
series, the show’s other images emerged from varied materials
as new incarnations formed by the artist’s intuition and technique.
The exhibit title, Spurlock explains, as much reflected the many
lives of the images that occur in his art as it did his own varied
experiences—as chemist, association manager, academician,
and artist. And then, he smiles, there’s the conclusion of
a seer who told him he had an “old soul,” having lived
many lives. “Many of them were East Asian,” adds Spurlock,
“and perhaps that shows in the work too.”
In addition to the solo show and other exhibitions at Studio Gallery,
the West Virginia native’s work has appeared in the Provincetown
(MA) Art Museum, the Corcoran College of Art, the Eklektikos Gallery
of Contemporary Art, the American Chemical Society Headquarters,
and other locations. Collectors in Washington, New York, Cleveland,
Detroit, Houston, Providence, Los Angeles, San Francisco, London,
and Rome own his works. His creative output ranges from paintings
and various works on paper, through etchings and monotypes, to collages,
assemblages, and sculpture. Recently he has added digital prints
to his array of work.
Keith Skillman is a Washington, D.C., writer and the
editor in chief of ASSOCIATION MANAGEMENT magazine.
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