By Eric Hiller
David Hawley, both as an artist and a personality, is worthy of prolonged consideration. It has been fascinating to follow the serious pathway he has chosen. His work shows a commitment to ‘process’, far deeper than most of his contemporaries, whose main concern can be to court public favour often by the choice of non-threatening subject matter which often has interior design acceptability.
It is not the role of the critic/ commentator/ historian to interpret the work of any ‘artist’ for the public. Each viewer is entitled to their own elucidation free from taint.
With Hawley’s work, the discerning viewer needs to delve deeper than just relate to mere aesthetic concerns and obvious meaning. As with all serious work in any realm, a facile glimpse is not enough. If in the delving deeper we find nothing beneath the surface but mere artifice we quite rightly move on.
Hawley’s images have always been about ‘surface’. Like the artist himself, even though many of his images seem to have a lightness of touch, they are the result of a deep brooding sensitivity. The cacophony of sketchbooks, notebooks and jottings are testament to the philosophical and psychological roots and experiments that lay behind the resolved work seen on the gallery wall. Each work begat the next work and so on, way back to his first mumbled scribbling.
In many cases marks made by a machine become the source of subsequent marks. They develop and merge into an army of subtleties. Works are conceived in relation to time constraints, surface integrity and from a carefully constructed scenario that allows chance a major/minor role.
The simpleton believes that “knowing is better” yet the things that endure are the things that remain a mystery.
Is it the artwork we admire or is it the maker? It is impossible to separate the two. The artist seeks something he is unsure of, knowing he is unlikely to find it. The good spectator can admire the purposefulness (or purposelessness) of such a quest and if the artist is to take himself seriously, the quest will continue until death intervenes – the works are the by-product of that search.
It is the curious spectator who will see something worthwhile and will spend time either contemplating the work (even to the extent of acquiring it) or in dialogue with the artist. Neither will be certain of what they have achieved. Good art, literature or music is never easy, rarely understood and will remain enigmatic (hence it’s timeless quality).
"True greatness, even in works of art... appears only where we sense behind the work...a being that remains greater and more mysterious, because the work itself points to a person whose essence can neither be exhausted nor fully revealed by whatever he or she may have the power to do." Hannah Arendt
Eric Hiller Lower Mt. Hicks, Jan 2010