Welcome to my first blog post on PaulNagleArt.com. The purpose of this blog is to inform you about my work, allow you to navigate the work and learn about art and life.

Welcome to my first blog post on PaulNagleArt.com. The purpose of this blog is to inform you about my work, allow you to navigate the work and learn about art and life. Let’s be honest, I want my artwork to be out in the world and I am more than pleased to see my paintings go to new homes where they contribute to the quality of your life. I am particularly attached to the recent production and the path I am on. I am very optimistic about the work I will be doing. There are many reasons for this optimism, the origins of which I’ll discuss in this, my first blog post, “A Brief History”. 

In the meantime I hope you enjoy the series of works in the “Light, Space, and Air” gallery, the “Buildings and Land” gallery, and “Still Life and Objects” gallery on www.paulnagleart.com.  There is accompanying text to each image which requires a few more clicks for insight into each painting. 

I want to address where I’ve come from because you may have had a similar experience, you’re interested in knowing more about me the painter of these paintings, or you may be looking for another point of view, or like many of my students over the years, you may be considering connecting your life to art and that is an exhilarating idea yet daunting and full of mystery! 

I went to Flagler College in St. Augustine, Florida to play tennis. I didn’t have much focus on what to study but in my second year as a Business Administration major I started to study art, drawing and design. I met my drawing professor and he was a sculptor with a studio residence outside of town. I learned that he had studied at classical academies in Italy from an early age, and then he came to Canada for college and went on to Florida State University for his graduate work. He was a relatively young professor at the time. His sculpture is a modern take on classical elements. It is figurative, it is balanced, it is simple forms beset by elegant curves. He carves stone and with traditional techniques creates modernist works primarily focused on the female torso. I learned much from this mercurial talent who produces sculpture with various materials. I formed my early understanding of Art at this point and I was transfixed. 

My goal was to be technically proficient and reproduce what I saw, and to pursue competence with materials. I innately understood this with little training and education up to that time. So being the immature irreverent student I wanted to know more about the radical work of modern abstract art I had learned about in art history and saw in museums. What I learned was 20th century artists rejected that which came before and reacted in opposition to their teachers, in some cases, for a new freedom and way to define the modern world. This was my idea of the time, and I found it to be prevalent through college, universities and art schools and the Art world. 

I wanted to know how artists of the 20th century and contemporary artists came to their conclusions about what art is and could be. I read books, went to museums and traveled abroad to seek these answers. I pursued advanced degrees and continued my focus on contemporary art and artists. Then I became a public school teacher and maintained these interests hardening and maturing my point of view. After a long period of focus on the ideas of modern and contemporary art which informed and held my beliefs, guided my thinking about art and how to practice it, I have changed. I have done an about-face, a pivot!

I will discuss in the next blog post how this pivot happened and what I discovered. Back to this post….

To keep this brief and to the point, what I discovered is the idea of newness and novelty has a value in the contemporary art world  and it contributes to the perception people have of an art object and its significance. The reality is much of that significance is derived from the attributes of the artist and how they are positioned. I am not saying that these ideas of positioning are unique to the 20th century, but there is an attribute which is missing in much of 20th and 21st century art. My point is in my development as a practitioner of drawing, painting, sculpture, I focused on how to be more novel. I was missing an entire element of significance to art, and so was the rest of the art world, except for a few who dared to continue on through the desert which was the 20th century. It was a desert of abandoned methods and techniques of lost insights and battered structures of a once highly developed visual language. It had been stripped bare and carried across the threshold into a technological postwar age. As I mentioned before, a few artists carried on in obscurity with the whole of the visual language somewhat intact, ill positioned to be noticed. To just refer to the notion of a visual language is incomplete, requisite to communicate with that language fully are the drawing, painting, sculpting practices transcendent of each generation whose weight was buoyed by these practices. Those who were pushed aside as a new era fitting itself with new images and new forms of representation quietly practiced, taught, researched and persevered in continuing the old transcendent ways. 

Perhaps I am being vague, no I’m purposely being vague because this is a huge subject and it has taken me years to uncover it for myself. And I am by no means done. However for those of you who have known me throughout the period of time I am discussing here and you know of my work then and now, I am defining this as a point of departure. Perhaps that is really what this blog post is about. 

I will continue this story in the next blog “The Pivot” where I’d like to share why, and how I decided to change my long standing mindset about art. I think this story will serve two purposes, the very minor aspect is to explain where my new fascination with realism and fine art painting is coming from. The major aspect is for those who love to look at paintings, have responses to them but may not know exactly how to explain the differences. Also this is an attempt to have an aesthetic conversation that honors the gifts of the past and the innovations of the present. Both have their shortcomings, flaws, encumbrances, bad reputations, crimes and misdemeanors. Why? Because it is the tracings of humanity that’s why.