Reprising the Past: Edward Cating

This is Not A Desk

When I was first approached to contribute to The Desk Project by Ven Voisey of the CAC, it occurred to me that Ven might have the wrong guy; I mean this is a three-dimensional project, right? Artists are asked to take late 19th Century school desks and make art from them. I am a 2D artist; I paint, make photographs and digital prints, and combine these media using techniques that any 17th Century painter might have been conversant with. I don't even do time-based work with video, film or performance...So what to do with the desk? 

It occurred to me to break pattern and produce an installation. I planned to fill a shallow tray inside the desk with black ink and to place a large speaker beneath this pool. I would record the classroom sounds of my daughters' second-grade environment, playing them back through my sub-ink woofer, allowing the ripples of sound to propagate out through the dark pool. Viewer might see their unspoiled reflections in the deep inky blackness momentarily, only to have them disturbed and broken into ripply visages by the laughter and mayhem of grammar school sound/memories. Cool.

But something wasn't right. It just wasn't about my work, although it was most assuredly related to my interests. Hmm, back to the drawing board.

That's it! I thought I’d construct a 19th century chalkboard – the small kind that children carried with them to practice writing and to take notes. It would rest upright on the surface of the desk, and on the top of the desk, in chalk, would rest a drawing of the ubiquitous computer keyboard; a mouse would be situated to the keyboard's right, its tail trailing off into the hole designed for the inkwell. The conflation of anachronism with elements destined to become anachronistic all too soon. Cool. 

But not me.

My work is about producing paintings and photographs and drawings that

I find beautiful while merging the often competing techniques and technologies of the post Renaissance. I paint on panels covered in gesso made from rabbit skin glue and chalk dust. I work slowly and deliberately in layers, attentive of craft. I may destroy this surface and/or adhere images based on satellite data, sand and scrape, pour on resins, and generally toy around and conflate the various tools and methods that painters have worked with over the last 500 years up until the post-modern merger of paint, photographic emulsion and pixels. And I work in 2D. So, my entry for The Desk Project is simply a digital photo of the desk I worked with, modified with digital tools and paint, printed on a state-of-the-art wide format photo printer using archival pigment ink on stretched canvas.

Because that's what I do.

Go to the Artist's website