| Sculptor Tom Gottsleben works with stone, steel and glass. His art is informed by the geometries in nature, as well as a never-ending search for inner peace that is realized through an understanding that everything in the universe has a purpose. Stanford Kay is a painter, a thoughtful man who finds great solace in a world represented by knowledge, history, chance, chaos and culture. His works plays with perception, suggest order, embrace discovery and inspire thought. One sunny Sunday, these two artists met for the first time. It wasn’t long before they began to discuss their work, their processes and their beliefs with one another in order to perhaps find some common ground. | 
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Sculptor Tom Gottsleben works with stone, steel and glass. His art is informed by the geometries in nature, as well as a never-ending search for inner peace that is realized through an understanding that everything in the universe has a purpose. Stanford Kay is a painter, a thoughtful man who finds great solace in a world represented by knowledge, history, chance, chaos and culture. His works plays with perception, suggest order, embrace discovery and inspire thought.
One sunny Sunday, these two artists met for the first time. It wasn’t long before they began to discuss their work, their processes and their beliefs with one another in order to perhaps find some common ground. Here is a sampling of their conversation.
Stanford Kay: In an earlier series of mine there was this bifurcated format, which I used to try to make connections between iconic images in order to construct meaning. There was this persistent question of content that I think is better achieved in the newer work, which reveals itself more slowly but in a more direct, less didactic way.
Tom Gottsleben: Well, that is the question isn’t it? Where does meaning come from in a work of art? Is it from the image/content association, or is it from the structure or from the colors or how the materials are used? Or, does meaning derive from something deeper; something in the artist that is somehow infused into and throughout those elements, a sort of existential or metaphysical sense of self which passes through all of our personal experiences and actions, providing a continuity or continual unity relative to which they are made coherent and meaningful, much like a thread passes through individual beads informing them into a unified necklace.
SK: Yes, art very much contains the artist’s experiences.
TG: I think it must contain them in some way if the work is to have any depth or truthfulness. Art has always been about connecting the inner subjective world of personal meanings and emotions with the so-called outer, objective world of forms and forces. Your imagery of untitled book-like shapes arranged in various patterns and colors on repetitive horizontal lines or shelves in a horizontal frame, to me, reads like (no pun intended) a modulated time-frame or structure (the canvas shape and shelf lines) upon which our personal experiences of meaning (the books) are accumulated and ordered over time.
SK: The element of time is achieved in various ways. I set up a simple structure or armature, both conceptually and formally, on which I can hang my improvised brush strokes and do my painterly thing. The painting reveals itself to me over time. That gets us back to the experience, which happens in time. I work through layers; layers of color, layers of information you could say, or veils of meaning. In my most recent works, there is an actual vertical layering, in that I am stacking small canvases in a zigzag column.
TG: And that brings us back to structure—using the three-dimensional to order and frame the two-dimensional. It sounds like you are moving toward more of a painting/sculpture synthesis.
SK: That’s possible but, at the moment, I’m interested in a structure and process that is intrinsically locked into the "image." So, instead of numerous "books" standing on a multi-tiered shelf, in these newer paintings, the "books" are laid horizontally on smaller canvases. These smaller canvases are staggered like stacks of books. Stacking the "books" and stacking the canvases and thinking about…I think they started to feel like figures to me, of people and how we make ourselves through the books we choose, and what we take on from those books. Books represent vessels of experiences and the vertical stacking is like the measure of a man; his accumulated knowledge and experiences.
TG: Wow, I really like that reading! It sounds like the new pieces resolve the bifurcation of content and meaning that you spoke of earlier. They also more fully develop the relationship of the image/content structure of the book shapes and the physical limits of the canvas frame with the multi-layered accretive nature of personal experience which stacks up or evolves over time into increasingly unique yet unified expressions of meaning and identity. The uneven zigzag structure also gives each piece a more dynamic quality and is expressive of individuality and even personality.
SK: Sure, these works could have been one tall, skinny canvas. So the fact that they were staggered is a more realistic representation of the separate stages or chapters in one’s life. In these works (Stanford gestures to a large rectangular canvas from earlier in his bookcase series), I like the way the drips would go down from one level to the next and how that would form a space suggesting a division between the books. So the physicality of the paint really lent itself to the subject. I could just hint without rendering. I could nudge the painting toward an image as the strokes narrow down to the end of the process. The image goes right to the end of the canvas. The horizontal "shelves," which are really just raw canvas, extend outward beyond the edges, suggesting a much larger image. There is very little sense of a figure-ground relationship. It’s a Johnsian thing, where the Flag is the whole painting.
TG: Right. Since there is no border, there is no implied space within which the image is situated, so it is not a window. The image, therefore, exists somewhere between abstraction and representation, content and structure, and image and form. Your current work also reverses the orientation of the movement within the canvas frame of each piece compared to the earlier paintings in the series. Besides placing the books horizontally, their relationship to each other is now vertical, thereby emphasizing the sense of growth and evolutionary development.
SK: And that appeals to me as it presents other challenges. The gravity of the drip fights what I am doing, for one.
TG: I can relate to that. Gravity is a dominant factor and concern in sculpture. Working with or against gravity is a challenge with each piece. All vertical development or growth is a movement against gravity and horizontal inertia. Gravity is a universal part of the human condition. Having a developed sense of balance (gravity) is essential for all survival. Using that sense of gravity or balance is one of the things about sculpture that really fascinates me. I use stone in a lot of my sculpture. Stone is commonly associated with weight and inertia. Much of my work is concerned with overcoming these preconceptions. In order to do that, a stacked or layered structure is often the solution. In fact, I use bluestone in my sculpture, which is a type of sand stone. Sandstone has been formed by countless layers of silica or sand being compressed over countless eons of time. The sand itself is the end product of large stones (the mountains) broken down to their smallest parts or structures over countless eons of time. This is not unlike your current paintings and process.
