represent

Santelli’s inner visions

When Bill Santelli was seven years old, in 1960, he discovered Jackson Pollock in Life magazine, and it changed his life.  He walked up to his mother and said, “I’m going to France to become an artist.” On his way to France, he didn’t make it past his mother, nor did he get there to study art when he was older, though he flew to Paris during his honeymoon with his wife partly on a mission to see Pollock’s The Deep at the Pompidou Center. When he came of age, he went to live and work in L.A.

During his talk for his new solo exhibition’s opening at SUNY/Finger Lakes Community College, he said, “Along the way, it was necessary to earn money to keep painting, and so began shadow-careers in education and arts-related businesses. I forged an independent lifestyle that way. I’ve held positions as a high school art teacher; archival picture framer; manager of the largest antique print gallery on the west coast in LA; sales person and book buyer for an art supply company.” Eventually, in 1991, he was able to make a living as a painter without any side hustles partly by learning to market his work himself in an era when it was easier to work with agents to promote work. “In art, survival is success.”

He’s done far more than survive. As Barron Naegel, the gallery’s director, pointed out in his introduction to Santelli’s talk, he has combined his painting, his spirituality, and his life in general into one nearly seamless activity. When he was in L.A. he attended talks by Krishnamurti, in Ojai, and has continued to study the transcripts of those famous non-sectarian spiritual conversations all his life. He has always been captivated by Krishnamurti’s simple emphasis on being ceaselessly vigilant over the flow of one’s thoughts and the chattering of one’s interior voice as a way of disengaging from that flow of thoughts in order disengage from thinking by observing it rather than identifying with it. What arises is stillness and awareness: a vigilance about one’s own thinking and behavior. Much of Santelli’s studio time is passed in silence. He doesn’t listen to anything while painting. His approach to his abstractions involves a kind of silent contemplation and attentiveness to what’s happening as he improvises his way toward a sense of completion. When he travelled to the Corcoran a decade ago to see the Diebenkorn retrospective, he spent an entire week, eight hours per day, studying the Ocean Park paintings. When he works in his studio he paints and only paints: no podcasts, no background music, just a contemplative awareness of his own path on the canvas.

For his talk, he went through his files and found notes he’d put together a quarter century ago, with a quote from Robert Motherwell whose Greenwich studio like Santelli’s was located in his own suburban home: “Art is far less conditioned by crisis than it is by hunches and chances pursued in cycles of activity whose duration and productivity reveal the artist’s nature and will.  For anyone making anything over the long haul (or the short), getting from thought to thing is difficult and suspenseful enough. Decisiveness is character, and genuine creative drama unfolds in the order that artistic choices are made in the service of one’s intuitions and in the context of one’s opportunities.”

It’s hardly an epigrammatic quote, and it’s as abstract as Motherwell’s work itself, but it beautifully captures Santelli’s doggedly professional work schedule as well as his almost mystical probing of what paint can do, his long explorations as he hunts the moving target of whatever makes a painting whole. His show, at Williams-Insalaco Gallery 54, revolves around a wall with his latest numbered series: It’s There in the Humming Air. In the past he’s combined hard edges with febrile, organic movements of paint on the surface: shapes that suggest a cosmic order, both macro and micro. You can gaze at one of these canvases and see ghosts of dead galaxies but also networks of dendrites or plant roots. In one of the Humming Air paintings, Santelli intentionally or subconsciously creates, along the left side of the canvas, a stack of small surreal landscapes: on top a crescent moon over sea foam like a world out of Edgar Allen Poe’s poetry or Tolkien’s fiction; below it, a dreamlike tunnel or vortex with an illuminated chamber in the distance, what a surfer would see deep in a pipe; next down, what might be the inception of a tornado; and at the bottom, it’s almost as if he’s seeing a confrontation between two figures floating overhead in a storm. You have to move in and really examine these panels, divided by hard-edged strips of color created with masking tape, in order to see these possible scenes, the way someone recognizes shapes in a Rorschach blot. And you can study the entire painting, take it all in, and see none of this, noticing only how well the swirls of color move from left to right, emerging and then melting into one another, like the sound of various instruments in a concerto.

All of the work is essentially musical, as he pointed out in the talk: you are in a distinct imagined world, related to inner and outer human experience, but there’s no fixed meaning being conveyed, no predetermined end point that establishes when the painting is finished.

“I believe that when I’m painting, I’m just a conduit for…. a form of higher consciousness (divine or otherwise) . . . to express beauty,” he told the people who gathered for the nearly two-hour talk. “I often work in silence. It’s important to sit quietly with your work. There’s a lot of mystery involved.  A lot I don’t understand.  I wait for something to occur… and what happens is I end up with a situation where I’m in a dialogue with the work, and the work is talking back to me and information is coming back to me, and I see the possibilities.”

He cited his influences: surrealism, geometric abstraction, abstract expressionism and color field painting, all drawing on the what Santelli refers to as the heart/mind as the source of imagery. He cited his major influences as Jackson Pollock, Dali, Picasso, Ellsworth Kelly, Paul Jenkins, Kenneth Noland, Jasper Johns, and Agnes Martin. Pollock and Jenkins were seminal. His work takes all of these influences as a springboard and by finding a middle space between surrealism and color field, Santelli’s work emerges as distinctly his own. But his aims really are closest to color field and AbEx : “I want to place the viewer in an ambiguous realm, as music does. Imagery arises naturally from the heart/mind.”

His current work is mostly acrylic on canvas, though he also does amazingly precise Prismacolor drawings on paper. Some of the most interesting work at the exhibit can be found on one small wall, a collection of small works on paper that are closer to the work of Paul Jenkins than anything else on view. Each painting offers a veil of subtle color that works beautifully together, often suggesting panoramas of shifting, distant light and weather, but just as often—and at the same time—offering a melodic interplay of light and color. It would be wonderful to see him try this on a larger scale.

In his talk, he described a work process Chuck Close would have admired: “Abstract painting is the quiet space of the arts. It can enable the viewer to be quiet.  Abstract painting is not a story.  It resists the narrative.  It’s all at once. My creative process… is actually quite simple – I get up and go into the studio to paint pretty much every day.  Being inspired to work is not a problem for me. I don’t do preliminary drawings or designs, preferring instead to ‘enter the arena’, face the blank canvas, and start working spontaneously from inspiration and experience. I paint the abstract language of colors, forms, and shapes that my eye visualizes, using bold colors to provoke a feeling or sensation that engages the viewer in an emotional exchange with the work. Painting titles set a loose frame of reference but leave room for the viewer’s imagination to make connections, which may or may not be the same as my own.”

In the Humming Air series he applies masking tape and seals the edges to prevent seepage underneath the tape, creating a grid around and within which he plays with fluid acrylic applied to the canvas and then worked with brushes. In other paintings he achieves colors that look misted: “My paintings sometimes look airbrushed, but they are not. I achieve this effect with a unique brush technique. Personally, I create art to bring beauty and light into our world. There’s enough negativity already. Express beauty, some serenity, peace….  I hope that the world evolves in that direction, rather than toward darkness.”

A “Series of Moments,” at Gallery 34, is on the first floor of the main campus. It opened on Nov. 14 and will run through Jan. 17.