2009 hosts Daniel Hodermarsky: Abstract Paintings, the last of three retrospective exhibitions at the Turtle Gallery in Deer Isle, Maine. In the previous exhibits of Hodermarsky’s figure and landscape paintings, we witnessed the artist’s exploration of his subjects: the isolation and despair of man, the revelatory and redemptive expressions of nature. Yet it is in this abstract work we witness the artist searching out most intently the numinous mysteries that had preoccupied him throughout his life.
The youngest of twelve children born to immigrant Slovak parents, Hodermarsky (1924-1999) lived in a crowded, loving, Eastern Orthodox household which provided ample subject matter for his first forays into drawing and painting. From Cleveland’s West Technical High School, where he had spent four hours of every school day drawing the human figure, Hodermarsky won a full scholarship to the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1942. World War II interrupted his professional education, drafting the nineteen-year-old artist into horrific landscapes and cruel human activity.
Here in the 2009 exhibit of Hodermarsky’s abstract paintings, we find the artist searching for his place in the infinite. While he had always meditated on Grace in the isolation of his human figures and in the dark silence of his landscapes, it is in his abstracts that we find the artist contemplating the ultimate questions of existence.
In the De Profundis paintings, showcased in this exhibition, a central form floats between sea and sky, a distant horizon line dividing the composition. Half below, half above water, these forms inhabit both worlds and we are left to wonder if they are vegetable, mineral, animal or, as Kate McNamara writes in her catalogue essay, “At times these forms resemble the ghost residue of a recently ignited firework at the perfect moment when everything becomes static and the colorful sparks separate, are held in air---some in the process of fading and others holding on...the psyche exposed in splendid textural imperfection.” It is a glorious explosion in which the outward is expressive of the inward; body and soul are indivisible in a brilliant embrace.
Again we find in the Ambergris series a form hovering between sea and sky. In these paintings, however, the title “Ambergris” references “the valuable fragrant...substance floating in oceans... (from) deep inside the stomach of whales.” (Kate McNamara) So it is that the mysterious essence of colors floating on the surface of these paintings has been created out of the stuff that eased passage of the hardest of objects out of an inner darkness into the light.
These abstract paintings have a reverential intensity that mirrors Hodermarsky’s life-long journey toward the celebration of life. As they reveal the paths and forms of his personal existential exploration, they travel the transitional spaces of his psyche and our shared human experience.