by Eva Dameron
Daily Lobo
When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail, painter Casey Greenling said.
He's uses this metaphor to describe his approach to painting. It is destructive to limit yourself to one tool, he said.
"Let's say you have a toolbox," he said. "If you only know one way of painting, then you have one tool - a hammer."
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Having a hammer, the artist can only make a limited type of mark.
"I want to expand my toolbox and have multiple tools," Greenling said.
His painted series, "The Journey of Being," combines loose painterly strokes with tight meticulously worked detail.
The room is divided into two parts. One wall shows a transition of self-portraits and some distorted heads, while the other wall shows larger figurative pieces based more in imagination.
One head painting, called "We Don't Talk About Politics," has a thick black streak over the eyes and an open bloody mouth with chipped, rotting teeth. The figure wears red and blue and grows stark white hair.
"It's about censorship, freedom of speech, the ugliness of war, the overplayed abundance of red, white and blue, and Uncle Sam," he said. "As much as I can talk about my own inner turmoil, I think sometimes it sort of leaks out that we have social commentaries."
Greenling focuses on the gray area of life, which he relates to subjectivity. He said objectivity is more black and white.
"For me duality means looking at the world in terms of right or wrong. And having a set basis of pain and pleasure, love and hate, joy and sadness," he said. "I'm trying to look beyond that, where it's somewhere in between. I want to focus on the gray."
One painting illustrates this concept perfectly. It's a woman standing on a black-and-white tile floor, and her feet are turning gray from soaking up the opposite colors. In one hand she holds a chain, in the other a feather.
"Those relate to two notions of being chained to this existence or being light as a feather," Greenling said.
"We're stuck in this yin-and-yang way of looking at things. I'm right, you're wrong. But it's all subjective. I'm right, you're right - we're both wrong."
When you first walk in the door of the Yale Art Center, you're met head-on with a canvas that reads "Freedom to Choose," and next to it is a white plaster head holding a paintbrush in its mouth.
"We all have a choice in life, and a lot of times I forget that," he said. "I sort of go along life and don't question, and I lose my freedom to choose because I'm letting others choose for me."
He said one has multiplicity by recognizing the freedom to choose. Duality is to be stuck in black-and-white thinking.
"You can even choose to not choose, to be stuck in some set way, but you can also choose to live in mystery," he said. "If there were no choices there wouldn't be any questions."
