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Robert Linsley

Space, Time and the Painted Surface

Robert LinsleyWe live in an age of surfaces.”  Oscar Wilde’s character made this remark over a century ago, but for UW fine arts professor Robert Linsley, nothing could be truer of our own time--and nothing more compelling to study. Like other abstract painters, Linsley holds a long-standing fascination with both the limits and possibilities of surfaces, particularly the surface of the canvas.  How much information can a canvas bear? And can the two dimensional picture plane sometimes say as much as the three dimensional figures it is typically called upon to represent? 

Contemporary theoretical physicists are also absorbed by questions like this, says Linsley, who spends a lot of time in conversation with scientists at Waterloo’s Perimeter Institute of Theoretical Physics (PI).  There is a parallel pursuit here, and an opportunity for interdisciplinary dialogue.  “Physicists have found that the amount of information inside a black hole, that is to say the number of particles and their positions and speeds, is not proportional to its volume, but to its surface area,” he explains.  “This discovery, called the Bekenstein Bound, suggests that the surface of a black hole, the so-called ‘event horizon,’ is analogous to the picture plane, a surface that also carries limited information about the space behind it.  It has led to a number of theories in which two dimensional surfaces play a central role.” 

Linsley is one of the first to point out and, in a rigourous way, investigate this shared artistic and scientific concern with surfaces.  While drawing upon recent discoveries in theoretical physics, Linsley goes beyond simply illustrating scientific concepts in his work.  Instead, his aim is to initiate a fruitful dialogue between artists and physicists in order to “find a common conceptual ground between the two activities.” 

To this end, Linsley is in the process of establishing a collective of art theorists and practitioners who will work together to explore these “big picture” questions of space, time, and abstract art.  With funding from a SSHRC Research/Creation Grant in Fine Arts and a Premier’s Research Excellence Award (PREA) (the first ever awarded to a researcher in fine arts), Linsley has already put in place two postgraduate fellowships and is looking for a studio for both himself and the Fellows.  The idea is not only to pursue questions of science and art’s relevance to each

other, but also to bring art theory and practice together in innovative and productive ways.  “With artists working alongside theorists, in ongoing conversation and collaboration, there is the potential for a new way of doing fine arts research, one that can take the relation between art and science to a new level of sophistication,”  says Linsley.  

Painting, Along with his postgraduate colleagues, Linsley himself, through both creative and theoretical projects, is exploring the limits of the canvas’s surface, just as physicists are exploring the contours and limits of physical space. In a method and style that recalls that of abstract painter Jackson Pollock, Linsley takes buckets of commercial paint, creates not-quite-random collections of “puddles” on the canvas, and then shakes the canvas around—sometimes overhead—until the desired, ragged-edged, effect is achieved.  These intriguing paintings acquire a spatial and metaphoric dimension when Linsley gives them titles that suggest geography and a cartography of imaginary islands:  “Domains in the Sea of Milk,”  “Island Prospect,” and   “Easy Straits.”  Linsley’s two dimensional canvases playfully evoke other two dimensional surfaces—maps—which in turn carry diagrammatic information about unseen, three dimensional topographies.   Not unlike the Bekenstein Bound...

Robert Linsley is a professor in UW’s Department of Fine Arts.  He can be reached at rlinsley @ uwaterloo.ca.  For more information about the New Research in Abstraction group, see their website: http://www.finearts.uwaterloo.ca/abstraction.html    

Image above: "Easy Straits," enamel on canvas, 72" x 60"

September 2006
Angela Roorda