Ward Shelley

Who Invented the Avant Garde?

Shelley's work is hard to categorize but it fits very neatly within our field of study. Instead of trying to explain it I will use his own words:

Shape of Understanding

My paintings/drawings are attempts to use real information to depict our understandings of how things evolve and relate to one another, and how this develops over time. More to the point, they are about how we form these understandings in our minds and if they can have, in our culture, some kind of shape.
Usually I choose topics from art or cultural history, such as the arc of an artist's career and its influences, or the effect of particular ideas in an aesthetic or political movement. They are "wide-screen", with all information available to the interacting eye at every moment.

Although his work covers many areas from installation and performance to sculpture and painting (and you can see some here) I want to focus on his mylar oil paintings obviously inspired by the work of Tufte and the Wall Chart of World History of Edward Hull (1890) .

Click on the image titles to see them in large size, they are a lot of fun and you can see more HERE.

Rock Genres

All historian's are editors. As such, they must face the problem of throwing the baby out with the bath-water. This is even more my problem. These diagrams are radical reductions of written history for which I have had to choose who and what to include, who not. Incredible amounts of information are jettisoned.* Even the people and works I use are reduced to symbols. But, in their coming together in this different form, new information is revealed, and nearly always a new insight for me.

Ward Shelley