A Small Radius of Light maps the territory artist G. Daniel Massad
has explored for almost four decades. After earning degrees in
English at Princeton and the University of Chicago and working for
a time as a psychotherapist, Massad made the decision to pursue
graduate work in painting in 1979. Two years later, while working
on his MFA at the University of Kansas, Massad made an unexpected
shift from abstraction to still life, and from oil to pastel as a
painting medium. His abandonment of painterly gesture for
knife-edge precisionism led him in the late 1980s to the
painstaking reenactment of minute detail in order to express, as he
puts it, “the way I encounter the world.†Since 1990, still
life’s traditional tabletop and its implied interior space have
given way in his work to less easily definable architectural
fragments of brick or stone; the darkness surrounding these broken
walls and cairns is deep, immeasurable, and richly potent. Over the
last two decades, Massad has moved past description and metaphor,
layering into his images other kinds of data—maps, words,
numbers, constellations, personal symbols—all of which suggest
readings of his remarkable still lifes as aniconic portraiture,
implied narrative, and visual autobiography. This book accompanies
an exhibition of the same name organized by the Palmer Museum of
Art and features a comprehensive essay by curator Joyce Henri
Robinson and forty-three “backstories†by the artist. These
memoir-like reflections invite us to peer into Massad’s artistic,
emotional, and mental process as he moves from making the
intangible tangible, revealing along the way sources and
associations that precede the final reenactment of the world around
him—a world brought into focus by a small radius of light.
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