Duck Weed Glow 2021, Conversation of the Ripples 2021

Materials: chalk pastel, 20" x 26" and 20" x 25.5"

Location at Summa: Barberton Joint Center for Excellence, main hallway

About the art and the artist:

Joe Culley appears to work almost effortlessly to capture moments in northeastern Ohio's procession of the seasons. His medium, chalk pastel, is demanding: There is little room for "do-overs". The certainty with which he makes his marks on paper corresponds to the coordination of hand to eye, of what he sees and how he chooses to re-present it. Although Culley, like so many artists, uses reference photos for what he selects in nature (that is, he is not a "plein-air" painter, over and over he reminds us that the final image bears traces of its maker, its maker's decisions, in ways that a straight photograph would not necessarily.

For example, in Duck Weed Glow, we have no sun to reveal a specific time of day, 'though "glow" in the title would suggest evening. What does glow here is the duck-weed itself, an aquatic plant growing on the water's surface that is a source of protein to waterfowl and provides cover for bullfrogs and many fish species, as well as their fry. But it can also disrupt other species of plants and reduce sunlight and oxygen to the waters. Most of us first react to it with a sense of repulsion, as though something is wrong, and it often is.

Yet here, the artist turns that uncanny frosted green into the glow of his title. The drowned trees at left cast shadows further left, but in the foreground, we have to deal with the ambiguity of shadows cast forward -- so at right angles to the others -- into the water (or are those areas not yet covered with duckweed?)  The spindly tree that rises across the entire composition in the front pushes our attention further into the picture's middle ground, where, beyond the glowing duck weed, what look like cattails bloom.  It feels like late summer, a lambent moment under cumulus skies that stop us to register what we are seeing ...

In Conversation of the Ripples, the artist reproduces a vanishing moment of interplay among the ripples on the surface of a pond.  This image is all about water and the colors and lights that it produces in response to the natural world around it.   Nothing else is represented.  We see the reflections of trees, some kind of water plant, as well as some retreating sunlight above, but the medium is water.  The ebb and flow of surface waves on that water -- the ripples of the title -- meet peacefully somewhere in the horizontal middle of the paper and resolve in the leafy reflection on the right. 

Joe Culley here concentrates on things that change, that are ephemeral: Light, ripples, reflections. The "conversation" in the title may refer to the back-and-forth of form and shadow, light and dark, movement in one direction and then in the other...  His professional performances as a tabla-player may also resonate in this title, as one of the most important forms of this type of Indian music is the statement-response kind of interplay called to mind by the title of this chalk pastel.

Other works in the Summa Collection that relate to this one:

You may find it interesting to look at the following works of art in the Summa Collection which also focus on water: Hillary Gent, George Mauersburger, some works by Mary Deutschman, Michael Greenwald, Lori Kella, and some works by George Kozmon.

West Branch Winter, 2021 

Materials:  chalk pastel, 23.5”x 52.5”

Location at Summa:  Barberton Joint Center for Excellence, Family Lounge

About the art and artist:

Joe Culley, who is not only a visual artist but also a musician and teacher, often makes work that specifies particular northeastern Ohio locations that are literally in his own backyard and part of his daily life (see some of his other works in the Summa Collection, such as Possibilities.  In this, he offers a parallel to photographer Ian Adams, well-represented in the Summa Collection and whose titles identify both a definite location and often an exact date, month, or year for each photo.  By specifying, both artists suggest a "you are there" dimension for the image, and, in fact, only at such a moment and in such a place might we, too, experience something similar to what each tries to capture and convey.

Winter in our part of the state has potential for great beauty as well as drama, both on the land and in the skies. The early winter feeling of West Branch Winter comes from Culley's choice of colors and cloud forms in the sky, which all occupy the upper half of the composition.  This makes it visually and strategically equally important to whatever is in the lower.  In the latter, the water is calm, the leafless trees still, and our sense of settling in under cover is unconsciously reinforced by the detailed description of the thousands of stones along the reservoir's edge (the image's foreground).  The drama is all in the sky, with colors tending to slate-grey and bilious green and artist's gestures pretty much anything but placid horizontal. Note how, in contrast, Culley has emphasized horizontal gestures in the water and a cumulative weightiness in the rounded stones on shore.

So, while this image contains elements of foreboding, they are balanced by the calm in the lower half of the composition.  The artist may be telling us that the more turbulent forces of nature's winter have been prepared for by things on the ground, which here await calmly as the winter weather rolls in.  We get a bit of a shiver, a frisson, when we realize this, exactly what a late November afternoon might feel like.

Work title, date:  Possibilities 2021

Materials: oil on canvas, 54” x 72”

Location at Summa:  Juve Family Behavioral Health Pavilion, second floor waiting room.

About the art and the artist:

This large canvas elaborates on the artist’s initial responses, captured first in a sketch, to the time of day, light, and “subtle vibrational qualities” experienced while "immersed in nature".  Joe Culley emphasizes the sweep of sky by keeping the horizon line low and by contrasting the fleeting patterns in the cool colors of clouds with the tranquil, flat areas of fields below, with their warm organic tones.

One of the works that Culley created during the COVID-19 pandemic, this painting reflects his personal travails as a bipolar type-2 sufferer responding to the global scourge. He has always preferred to work with natural form, ‘though he alternates between more representational and then a more abstract and expressive style.  What here might seem a simple composition, almost a kind of 2-dimensional abstract, is in fact made up of a subtly undulating horizon line of dark verdure, a bright yellow-green expanse across which the orange-yellow diagonal of a ploughed field stretches the full length of the six-foot canvas, all below the busy sky.  His work is intended to be meditative, calming, similar in mood, he says, to the still-lifes of Italian surrealist Giorgio Morandi.

Joe Culley discovers the title of a work, in this case Possibilities, somewhere in the process of its creation. This title refers to his sense that landscape, like rhythms of the tabla, the Indian drums which he has played for decades now, provides a framework within which to improvise and explore.

As a teacher, an artist, and a musician, Culley shapes languages and creates meaning right where structure and chaos intersect. He chooses to focus on the mystery of improvisation and how it unlocks personal insight.  We might well enhance our appreciation of this skyscape-landscape with an accompanying track of Culley playing the tabla. 

Joe Culley earned a B.A. degree in Art Education at Kent State University, where he also studied environmental philosophy and jazz; he has taught art in elementary schools in the Nordonia Hills Public School District since 1990. His creative energies are directed to painting in a range of media and to film-making and performance art, especially as it relates to playing and teaching the tabla. While he began his musical career as a percussionist and has performed with many other musicians, more recently he has studied with tabla masters from around the world and focused on Music of northern India, having apprenticed with sitarist Hans Utter funded through a grant from the Ohio Arts Council.  As a tabla-player, Culley now performs extensively in the U.S. with sacred yogic kirtan chanting groups, as well as accompanist to vocalists and dancers, and with other musicians.  These interwoven visual, performance, and musical arts stem from “swimming in the language of art,” as he puts it, since he was born: His grandmother taught creative writing at Carnegie-Mellon in Pittsburgh and both his parents were visual artists, his father having taught at Kent State.

Where you can see more of this artist’s work

Many recent works in pen and ink, watercolor, and other media can be found on Joe Culley's FaceBookpage; and he has a blog with a number of original compositions and citations of sources for his music.  Culley has also exhibited work in Akron & Cleveland and has several other pieces in the Summa Health Collection.

Work title, date: (left) Trimurti, 2021

Materials:  chalk pastel, 20.5" x 31”.

Location at Summa: Juve Family Behavioral Health Pavilion, second floor, north waiting room.

About the artist and the art:

Trimurti
“Nature is my church,” asserts Joe Culley, whose landscapes in Summa’s Behavioral Health Pavilion (these plus an oil painting now on the second floor waiting room) were all created during the first years of the COVID-19 pandemic.  While Trimurti, at left, refers to the trinity of Hindu gods and so might be intended to have religious overtones, all three works also demonstrate the intensity of observation and discipline of mark-making that are the result of years-long dedication -- one might even say "devotion" -- to creating rich visual expression that raises other broad questions.

Here Culley uses dramatic color and angled shape to contrast with the relatively calm shoreline below; while in both Floating Clouds (centre) and Glow (right). he arranges forms around an explicit, if watery, sun that bounces color into smaller bodies of water, providing him with an opportunity to experiment with reflections.

In Trimurti, the sun is not represented directly: Culley shows us instead the paradox of clouds at sunset, where those higher up in the sky hang onto the sun’s last brilliant rays, while those closer to the horizon are already dark and less colorful.

Work title, date: (center): Floating Clouds, 2021

Materials:  chalk pastel, 20.5" x 31”.

Location at Summa: Juve Family Behavioral Health Pavilion, second floor, north waiting room

About the artist and the art:

Floating Clouds
In this central pastel, Floating Clouds, every form -- including that of the sun -- every color, every motion in the upper third of the composition finds a reflection in the water below.  And yet ... when we look at the water, we begin to notice reflections of things that the artist has not represented at all in the upper part of the composition: The tangled upper branches of a barren tree at right, for example.  This reflected detail is more than we might have expected since the artist decided to cut off the composition before depicting this part of the tree. And so, the fluffy forms in the lower left, we can recognize as the "floating" clouds of the title, known to us here only as reflections. The artist raises questions about where we look for what is real, or, even more profoundly, how we define "real"...

Work title, date: (right): Glow, 2021

Materials:  chalk pastel, 20.5 x 31”.

Location at Summa: Juve Family Behavioral Health Pavilion, second floor, north waiting room.

About the artist and the art:

Glow

Each of these works-on-paper holds a tension that makes it richer than we might assume at first glance: The throng of cattails in Glow, at right, would at first seem to block us from entering the main area of the image, the pond. But instead, they function as repoussoirs: That is, they almost push us in a visual jump beyond their elongated forms into the low sun mirrored on the water’s surface in the middle ground.  Executed in chalk pastel, these three intimately scaled works reveal the swift, certain marks of a keen observer of the natural world’s light, movement, and color.

Executed in the demanding medium of chalk pastel, these three intimately scaled works reveal the swift, certain marks of a keen observer of the natural world’s light, movement, and color, as well as his belief in their connection to questions of essence and human values.  Curator Meg Harris Stanton has grouped them to emphasize a certain mood and thoughtfulness in an area where contemplation is valued.

The artist reminisces about long walks and talks with his father Robert W. Culley in nearby Virginia Kendall Park and also what he learned from high-school art teacher Ken Gesford, both having shaped his art.  He also cites composer Phillip Glass, painters Mark Rothko, Yves Klein, and Agnes Martin, and Kent State University textile artist Janice Lessman-Moss as continuing influences on his own thinking about art and artmaking.  As one who has struggled with mental health issues, Joe Culley feels strongly that his task as an artist is to try to answer the question of how does art benefit others?