The Last Freezing Months of Spring

The beginnings of Spring in New York City are often felt like the last great gasp of winter’s icy expanse, and its overwhelming spread of bone chilling grey cold that can only come from the likes of an addict trying to gobble up all of their mind numbing wants for the fear that they are disappearing. Winter in March is a tyrant of frigid dictatorship. It comes without warning when a few warm days in February or even the beginning of March delude us into thinking that dressing a little less armored is the way to go. It comes like a great breath of immobility, and while it has moments of pain, it re-awakes us the reality that we must strive to survive and be awake to life before we are awarded the perfect beauty of the fertile spring in its warm breezes and tingling temperateness. We need these months to prepare us for the fact that we have stay moving, and they also give us serious gratitude for that moment when spring finally gently puts its hand on winter’s cold shoulder and tells it it’s all going to be alright. That winter can take a knee, and everyone will quietly be excited for its brisk and inspiring return next year.

Assemblage work in progress, untitled, 5’x7’, mixed media, 2023

Before I had returned to New York to embrace this last throw of Winter’s bones, or it’s final fucking sigh of exhaustion, I was in Winchester VA for a residency at the Peter Bullough Foundation . The work I made was steeped in ideas of transition and creating spaces that try to articulate points on the timelines of life that have melded together in a moment of visualized shift. Some portraits of my mom in her memory care home, some abstract works that are the process of building upon representational imagery from old WWII photos of my grandfather, to Queer porn and erotica, to images from classic supernatural films, to landscapes, dance movement abstractions, to just pure atmospheric painting and spacial processing. I experienced both warmth and cold, closeness and isolation, beauty and strangely deranged chaos, deep moments of acceptance and empowerment in community and moments of fear and ignorance in perception. It was a whole world of vibes. I feel like the work that came out is a good chunk of moments in a journey forward with my practice and life, awarding, a sense of bookmarking in a process toward work that I am moving towards. Art in the full catalogue of one’s life, one’s contribution to the grand we of the art gods, to the fabric of society’s creative energy and perception, is a life long process. I have learned this more and more as I have aged, as looking at works that clearly had no sense of my own perception of duration or continuity, as well as those that flowed from a place of the spirit and the longevity of artistic purpose, have all showed me that the birth of art happens in waves and in long slow periods of development towards those days where we suddenly see the thing we have hoped for, whether we knew it or not, materialize after we have both consciously and unconsciously pushed toward it for unforeseen periods of time. This was one of those experiences where I felt that. Where what was created was thus a part of this longer process and not me as an artist trying to show that I know I am creating the work that I shall be matched with in moments of history, and yet maybe I will, it’s yet to be seen. The impermanence and the liminalness of it all it is quite comforting sometimes.

What’s Lays in the Distance, 24”x18”, painting on linen, 2023

Transfixation, 15”x11”, painting on paper, 2023

Back in NYC, working my way through the cold last gasps of winter, there is much to do in the studio, there are some very major new pieces of news to share, and there is a time now to hone in some things I am very excited to work on. While I give winter a bad rap here, I actually love Winter so very much. I love it’s affirmation of life in the absence of warmth. I love the deep cold breathes in the morning that open the senses and the energy deep inside of me, connecting me to the cosmos and also, as I have found in time, to my own ancestors in Norse and Celtic mythologies. I make it a duty now in winter, since thinking about this over the last few years, to love that icy breath of Odin and the hidden Green Man that continues to walk alive through the snow slowly bringing shift. I look at the failed notions of my ancestors in their shaping of the world, at the resentments and misguided energies they perhaps harnessed, as well as the beautiful and deeply spiritual aspects, and I continue to try and reimagine myth and possibility moving forward in my work and life.

I have some humor on deck for another day, but I guess I’ll leave this all here as I hear cars drive by on Graham Ave. imagining everyone walking by staring at their phones wrapped in entire arctic cold suits on the weird frigid loins of spring.

New Work with Byron Tittle and Michelle Dorrance, commissioned by Duke University coming to the Nasher Museum June 22nd.

One of the largest undertakings of my life as an artist is on the horizon. This is a preliminary announcement that a project I have been quietly working on for over two years is finally coming to light at the Nasher Museum. At the very beginning of 2020, after a year or so of thinking about it this project idea, I created a piece with Michelle Dorrance of Dorrance Dance. It is a collaborative multi disciplinary intersection of sculpture, movement research/dance, and experimental drawing, with deep rooted philosophical, historical, and even spiritual contextual elements. The new work at the Nasher Museum, which is commissioned and supported by Duke University’s Duke Arts, with a co-sponsorship with ADF, and supported by Cassilhaus with whom I will be in residence this summer, will be in fact created live with a performance by Byron Tittle and Michelle Dorrance on a new art object that I will be constructing out of found materials from both North Carolina and New York City. The geographies of the materials coincide with the geographies of all three collaborators, as well as speak to the (so often misunderstood) history of tap dance, thus creating a large and layered contextual conversation with history, space, and the energies therein. It will happen on June 22nd at the Nasher, and I will be posting more in depth links and information about it next week. A full statement and consideration will be release as the performance nears, regarding the piece itself, the collaborators, its place in history, its intention, and context about the involvement of each entity that has come together to help make it happen.

Photo by Mark Murphy for Dorrance Dance

Michelle Dorrance, Byron Tittle, John Felix Arnold, in New York City.

Shifting Energy, collaborative work by John Felix Arnold, Michelle Dorrance, and Byron Tittle, dance movements on reclaimed wood assemblage panel, 2021

The series, titled Echos, has now seen the creation of 3 pieces thus far, one with, one with both fellow Dorrance Dance dancer Byron Tittle and Michelle, and then one with Carol Parker formerly of Pilobolus Dance Company and the White Oak Dance Project. Here is the statement regarding the larger series.

Echos is an evolving body of work that visualizes the temporal languages of dancers’ movements through experimental modes of drawing. At the core of these movements, dancers channel their personal narratives with the lineages and histories of their disciplines, remaining in conversation with the materials they move upon and the spaces they move within. As a visual artist whose foundation is the language of drawing and whose practice exists in context to a lineage and history of drawing, Echos honors and communicates the relationship between visual art and dance. The work offers an enshrined representation of dancers’ energies, movements, and lifetimes in indelibly visualized moments connected to the larger histories from which they have evolved. It is a conversation honoring genres of dance through new, hybrid forms of image making, incorporating live performance and multidisciplinary works which share the process and intimate reality therein. Echos seeks to honor and offer space to the interwoven threads imbued in the work for current and future generations to experience in a way active performance alone cannot. The work exists as a space for the essence and energy of bodies in motion which transcend our two- and three-dimensional perspectives into a fourth dimension of resonance. Echos is foundationally connected to Duke, ADF, and the history of arts and culture.

I am beyond words that this is all happening, and I am so grateful to everyone that has given this project the love, care, energy, and support needed to see it come to life. More info coming soon! Contact me directly for information or press inquiries. Thank you!

-John Felix Arnold

May 19th, 2022