Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, January 11, 1994 TAG: 9401110080
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By Seth Williamson SPECIAL TO THE ROANOKE TIMES & WORLD-NEWS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
The Elliston artist, whose show "Images of the Winged Earth" is currently on display at the Art Museum of Western Virginia at Roanoke's Center in the Square, says he's always surprised by people who think he's "trapped" in rural Virginia.
"I've had to confront that all the time," said the 49-year-old Virginia Tech art professor, whose reputation reached national proportion some years ago. "It's amazing, the things people would say to me. I understand the Li'l Abner thing personally."
As a matter of fact, Kass once lived across the street from Al Capp, Li'l Abner's creator, in Cambridge, Mass., which he calls "the citadel of self-endorsement."
"When I first moved down here [in 1977] I loved it right away, but I found for some reason that the area, instead of priding itself on this amazing natural beauty, seemed to suffer from some kind of low self-esteem, and I was very surprised. What's great about this society is that we're still dealing with creating the foundations of a self-possessed culture."
Viewers of "Images of the Winged Earth" quickly discover that an acute sense of place may be Ray Kass's most conspicuous attribute. His big watercolors - some six feet by eight feet and larger - bear titles familiar to Southwest Virginians: "Mountain Lake Overlook with Sleeping Lady in View," "Cascades," the series of "Ripplemead Polyptychs," the series of "Yellow Sulphur Springs Polyptychs."
Blacksburg architect Gibson Worsham has followed Kass's work for nearly two decades and now lives in a house on the grounds of the old Yellow Sulphur Springs resort once occupied by Kass. Worsham's first impression of Kass was the artist's intense focus on his surroundings.
"When I lived out here 20 years ago Ray would come out here and sit by the hour, day after day after day - he would sit under a tree for hours, just absorbing the scene. He's not a dilettante about place; he makes them his own," said Worsham.
Kass's current show, which opened in November and will run through Feb. 20, was curated by the art museum's director of education Mark Scala.
"Among the general public there is a resistance to abstraction - they think it's too intellectual or not appealing on an emotional level - but not Ray's work," Scala said of Kass's big, colorful abstract pieces do not intimidate local audiences. .
"We had a group of kids from TAP in. Mostly they'd had very little exposure to art, and people think that to understand abstraction you have to go to school, but for the most part these kids really got into it," said Scala.
The influential art critic Donald Kuspit wrote the catalog essay for "Images of the Winged Earth," calling attention to Kass's fascination with nature and natural processes. Kass, says Kuspit, is "an American transcendentalist painter."
"I understand what Donald Kuspit means by that," said the artist, "but I don't feel preoccupied by any particular form of transcendence or meditation. I understand the tradition he's trying to relate me to, an ideal of what we'd call Emersonian transcendentalism, and I don't disagree with that.
"But I'm not trying to have an out-of-body experience. I'm really a pass-the-potatoes kind of person -my emphasis is, let's have an experience NOW."
Asked to describe in the simplest language what he's aiming at, Kass said, "I'm trying to paint world-class art with a real stylistic competence. I'm trying to work out images that develop my life-long interest in watercolor media that also distill my sense of place. I'm trying to imitate nature in its manner of operation, rather than in a representation of simple pictorial qualities."
"Images of the Winged Earth" manages to be stylistically diverse yet unified by a single sensibility. The two decades' worth of pieces include landscapes, abstract multipanel works with a delicate oriental calligraphic quality, and cityscapes.
Many of the polyptychs scatter light in an elusive fashion, and have a deceptively deep look. Kass says the illusion of depth is created by multiple layers of watercolor - sometimes as many as a hundred layers - covered by polished beeswax.
"The beeswax opens the surface up without darkening it, and when we scrape the wax we can polish it to varying degrees. This helps the pictures work at several levels, from eight or nine inches away or from 15 feet," said Kass.
Kass's cityscapes have a startlingly "natural" look as well, as brilliant skyscrapers seem to grow from the ground and riverside warehouses resemble mud huts.
The artist has also experimented with chance operations and multi-artist works. Both are the result of his collaboration with the avant-garde composer and painter John Cage at the Mountain Lake Symposia and Art Workshops. In some of the polyptychs, Kass allowed a computer randomly to choose six or seven points, which he then connected and elaborated.
Mark Scala sees Kass's relationship with John Cage as crucial to his recent work. "Ray used a lot of the same ideas that Cage used in his New River watercolor series. It's an exciting break from the idea of the artist as some kind of isolated master. He's surrendering a little of his control to the operations of chance."
Kass believes that middle age has given him a new perspective on what it means to be an artist. "As a young person, you're pushing to be original. But the irony is that originality is kind of a dubious quality in art. Art is conventional in many ways. It's a very measured kind of originality that people expect.
"When you're 50 years old, you understand what convention means. You spend 30 years making it as idiosyncratic as you can, but the real problem is when you bring all that home to roost.
"I see visual form as a kind of language. The old myth was that you had to find out what you have to say as an artist. But I believe everybody has things to say - it just needs to be brought into a language of form that people can understand."
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