Words to the CosmosPersonal & Professional blog of China Krys Darrington

Dustin Grella paints on large pieces of slate given to him by a fellow artist who salvaged them from an old Cleveland schoolhouse she has converted to studios.

The blackboard-size pieces are so heavy, he must call on friends to help him lift them into place, usually about waist-high, so he can reach them from his wheelchair.

He uses dry and oil pastels to paint on the slates, sometimes creating permanent images, sometimes using their inherently erasable surfaces to create stop-action animations.

Two of these animations are in his current show, Dustin Arthur Grella, as are several large paintings on slate, a long wall of letters he’s written to himself, and two vitrines that hold boxes he’s built to contain journals. All are on view at Summit Artspace through March 3.

It’s the first one-man show the gallery has ever had, and it certainly sets a high standard for shows to follow.

His works are expressive, intense and obsessive, but then an artist whose current hero is Willem de Kooning could hardly be anything else.

One of the hallmarks of this exhibit is Grella’s obsessions: He writes a letter to himself every day and mails it, and he can go to his wall of letters, point to one and tell you what happened on that date, even though his letter still sits, sealed, inside the envelope.

He gives a stack of 365 cards to selected friends and family members and asks them to write on one card every day for a year, then give them back to him. These are displayed on top of vitrines, sitting in slotted wooden boxes with beautifully handcrafted copper and brass covers to keep the personal musings of his journal keepers private.

His paintings consist of layers upon layers of oil pastels over dry pastels, which he has sprayed down, causing them to run and expose the layers underneath, creating beautiful juxtapositions that pulse and shimmer unremittingly as we get closer to the surface of the works.

He’s also created straightforward drawings of cityscapes and landscapes, portraits and lyrical abstractions that owe much of their palette (if not their style) to de Kooning.

In a side gallery are two looping digital presentations that show images being created, changed, erased and replaced, once again demonstrating the inherent painterly quality of the digital medium when used with sensitivity.

One of these presentations features a portrait of Grella’s brother, Devin, who was killed in Iraq in 2004.

The work begins with a swirling vortex surrounding a red apple, with the portrait of Devin quickly forming over the apple, resulting in the apple appearing as a vivid image on Devin’s forehead.

The story of William Tell comes quickly to mind: a father successfully shooting an apple from his child’s head and then killing the tyrant who forced him to do it.

However, this apple isn’t on Devin’s head, it’s behind it, and his portrait collapses on itself and is replaced by a dark heart shape, followed by a radiant star and other exploding shapes.

“I wanted to do something for my brother,” Grella said. “He was 21 when he died. He was driving a diesel tanker from Baghdad to Fallujah and his truck was blown up by an IED.

“He went to work at Sterling right out of high school, and the recruiters talked to him and he went into the reserves. Then within six months, he had gone over there. He was killed after he had been over there three or four months. He went in June or July and he died on Sept. 6.

“I’m not bitter. I had 20 great years with him. I’m glad that I got the time that I did. He was 21 when he died.”

Devin took Grella 12 hours to complete. It comprises four of the 11 tests that he did using time-lapse photography. The second presentation, which Grella calls Glimpse, is the culmination of the rest of the tests he completed using the time-lapse procedure.

“A lot of this is a personal narrative,” he said, “what I saw that day or that night.” Glimpse shows quickly developed and erased images, one replacing another in a fluid, painterly continuum.

“I had been a computer programmer before and I wanted to get into animation. I wanted to know what happened between point A and point B. The computer actually carries out the animation for me, but I wanted to know what happens, and the first four tests helped me figure that out.”

Grella set up his camera to take a photograph every 60 seconds, and he would move in and add or erase on the image and try to get out of the frame before the camera clicked off another image. Sometimes he didn’t quite make it, and the viewer can see an occasional flash of his image as he moves quickly off to the side.

He borrowed music for the Glimpse presentation from a friend who lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.

“He gave me about 15 pieces of music, but none of it sounded right until I got to this one,” Grella said. “This one worked right off the bat. I could see a rainstorm, a subway scene, and as you can see, I cut it to change with the bells.”

The two drip paintings in the main gallery begin his series of works on original schoolhouse blackboard slate. These have a vibrancy and excitement not seen in the other works, and they constitute a discovery Grella made when he was frustrated with the course a work was taking and began to erase it with a spray bottle of water.

“I had started to wipe it off, and I saw what was happening at the bottom of the work, the way the pigments were dripping and streaking. I got really excited and continued it all the way up to the top. Of course, there was a pile of stuff down at the bottom that I scraped off, but in places it looks like those oil eggs that you did for Easter when you were a kid.”

Factory is an image that he sees from his studio window in B.F. Goodrich Building No. 4.

“I was solely going to do it as a test to see if I could animate factory smoke, but it ended up being something different, a factory scene,” he said. “The original concept was to be a statement on consumerism.

“The B.F. Goodrich company at one point was a productive mecca, but there’s only one light in the window now. For me, it’s been everything I’ve needed.”

Many of his paintings are directly related to his discovery of de Kooning, the Dutch artist who became one of the bulwarks of the Abstract Expressionist Movement.

De Kooning nearly always worked in abstract and figurative modes simultaneously and played them off each other. He often stopped at a point where the viewer can still sense the ongoing struggle for resolution, often through the intensification of colors and fragmentation of the figure.

De Kooning often talked of the “frozen glimpse” that would come to him as he worked, and his work often contained separately identified anatomical parts treated as abstract forms.

With the exception of the digital presentations, the balance of Grella’s work seems, in comparison to works by de Kooning, more finished, with little of the pentimenti (evidence of changes during the painting process) one would expect to see in work inspired by the AE master.

Grella might argue that his Drip paintings are similar in a way to de Kooning’s famous Excavation, and
in the fact that the dripping pigments gouge out and reveal earlier layers, this is so. However taken in toto, and looked at from a distance, the Drip paintings seem closer to late paintings by Van Gogh than de Kooning. There’s nothing too terrible about that; we’re still talking famous Dutch artists here.

It’s in the wall of letters that we see Grella’s obsessive nature in all its force. The sheer numbers of the letters, and the attention paid to them: matching the stamps to the colors of the envelopes; having a friend draw on their surfaces; finally abandoning envelopes in favor of the older form — a large sheet of paper folded in upon itself to form its own enclosure.

Grella buys older stamps and adds them together to get the current total mailing price. This has led to cross words with the post office on occasion because sometimes the symmetry of the stamps doesn’t quite add up to the proper amount, so Grella turns his envelope over and continues adding stamps on the back until he reaches the correct total.

One post office clerk became so frustrated with this practice that she dug into postal regulations and the next time Grella showed up with one of his special envelopes, she slapped the rules down on the counter, proving to him he could no longer bring her any envelopes with stamps on the back.

Some of the most colorful envelopes come from Central America, where he drove in a van by himself after he finished rehabilitation for a crushed cervical vertebra that left him paralyzed from about the middle of his chest down. Grella’s paralysis is the result of a platform collapsing and its roof falling on top of his head while he was attending a Grateful Dead concert 11 years ago.

“There were over 100 people injured when that happened,” Grella recalled. “It was in St. Louis, the second to last show that Jerry Garcia played in. It was the Fourth of July weekend, a big party.”

In rehab, he said, the therapists spent a lot of time making him want to be independent when he got out on his own, and that’s why he took off.

“Three months after my brother died, I left to go to Central America,” he said indicating the rows upon rows of stamps from various countries.

“Nicaragua has by far the most beautiful stamps, and Nicaragua has outstanding art. Costa Rica was terrible.”

Then one night at a hostel, he was talking to his roommate, whom he had only recently met, and he said, “You know something? I’m really lonely.”

“And that guy said, `Dude, you’ve got to get over the independent thing. You have to let people help you, get close to you.’

“So the whole way home, I had people in the car with me –14 kids and seven wheelchairs. It was a full house.”

The last long panel begins with Dec. 1, 2006, and Grella has lined it up so that it will run through the end of the exhibit.

He’s installed a portable typewriter in the gallery so visitors can write notes to him. Gallery sitters will put the notes in the envelopes and mail them to him each day of the show.