September Lecture 1, James Hyde (11am School of Arts Bld.)

I attended the Lecture by James Hyde on the 27th at the School of Arts Building and found myself not very thrilled by his work. He is an abstract painter/installationist, but i for one am not necessarily a huge fan of abstract art to begin with, or at least total abstract art. He work a lot with fresco and acrylic. He decided what he wanted to do at the age of 15, which was an abstract painter, because he thought it would be easy...as he discovered it wasn't. He likes to define it (abstract painting) as a section of reality, and deals with the idea that anything that is important isn't physical. He also finds it important that he has "air moving through his pieces."
Some of the first work he showed us were big blocks of stirafoam, displayed on a wall, painted (frescoed) with different shades of one color. I found them to be dull and uneventful.
The one thing that he did that I found enjoyable was a big series of large painted pillows. By the end of his series the pillows displayed in a gallery were massive, taking up almost the whole gallery space. They were 'abstractly' painted on one side and had clear plastic on the other side, then blown up with air. The pillows were cool, but i mostly enjoyed how they took up the space and seemed to be so intrusive to the viewers.
Overall, I thought he was hard to understand and his work didn't do much for me.