Decamp changes medium
It's not that my friend Jerry DeCamp was a nationally recognized painter but he was a rising star in the world of expressionist landscape painting. He was blossoming. Prolific intense sessions of focused inspiration would lead to large saturated colored 'Matisse-influenced' Parisian and Mediterranean cityscapes on canvas. Paintings poured forth from this man as he renewed his love for studio art after years of dormancy.
He painted fast, bold, and intuitively. He painted from memory, he painted pleine aire, he painted all night in dinghy cheap hotel rooms along the Seine on his frequent travels to Paris. His brush work was loose and thick, leaving a directed passion of strokes and dashes, full of joy and swirling with colorful lightness. He squeezed his intense bouts with a brush amid the chaotic multi-faceted other parts of his life. That was the past five years...when my friend took up a brush seriously for the first time in a decade.
Then a few months ago he called and said to come check out the piece of marble he bought. But I didn't…his studio is out of town, I was rushing about…
Another short time later he told me about buying a second and third piece of marble, purchasing a used forklift and moving these 2000 pound chunks of white sparkling rock into his studio. Still I didn't make the journey out there.
Finally last week he told me he was nearing completion on a piece and that he had put probably 400 hours plus into sculpturing. This was the same artist that had been painting 4x6 foot canvases in 40 hours? This sounded so unlike him, but perhaps the marble called to him differently than the canvas. My interest was piqued.
In the countryside, in an overcrowded barn full of unsorted farm machinery and art debris, Jerry was busily using a small drill polishing wheel to refine the finish on his new work. He had carved and coaxed a figurative clean lined female torso out of a piece of Carrarra marble. It was at once familiar and at the same time surprisingly unique. Familiar, because in form it seemed stylistically art deco, and close to the cubist bathing models from Picasso painting ”Les Demoiselles d'Avignon”, with it's strong simple fully developed and softly rounded thigh, hip, leg and arms. The head on Jerry's female figure seemed to float above the body even though it also seemed like it belonged there.
Unique, because, almost like a fractured fault in the rock, his figure is abruptly bisected vertically. We only get one half of a figure. Is the dramatic cropping of his figure part of his plan, or natures; they seem to play off each other. In fact the suggestion of what is not there is as strong as what is there. There is actually a fight for dominance, a tension between the rock edge of the sculptured figure and what the viewer imagines or “sees into” the empty space where the rock has ended.
DeCamp lets you know this is rock. His figure is smooth and polished, but it is embedded and surrounded by the rough coarse crystalline texture of quarried marble. As one walks around the sculpture, there are other archeological trails that reveal DeCamp's method, chiseled notches, unfinished random moments when the finished muscular form peaks out from and submerges back into the surrounding rock. These are the strokes remeniscent of the brushwork in his paintings.
A confident intriguing work has been created here. Since it represents DeCamp's initiation into marble sculpture, there is anticipation to see where he goes from here. The evolution of his future creations should be worth noting. DeCamp is a force in nature, he has the shear will and focus needed to birth a seminal sculpture from a quarried hunk of marble. Photos of his work can be found at artpickle.com/jerrydecamp.
