Angus Vasili: Art, Poetry & Dream Catcher Magazine

Gallery co-director Greg McGee is HONOURED to have been Art Advisor for internationally well regarded poetry magazine, 'Dream Catcher' for the last 5 years.

Here below is his foreword for the latest issue. Angus Vasili is currently in our York city centre gallery. Come over and check! Here's a few online too:

https://accordingtomcgee.com/collections/angus-vasili

ANGUS VASILI AND THE EXPERIMENT OF ART

The process of creativity is often built on the building blocks of discipline. Angus Vasili's artwork has this as a primary aspect. It's like writing a poem. Eloquent access to agile, wriggling words is all well and good but without the eye for established rules, the ode may quickly dull into self indulgence. We all have our favourite rock bands. Ten minute guitar solos always benefit from a little pruning from producers who may have one foot firmly planted in the self expression camp and one even more so in the mindset of established rules, the building blocks of traditional innovation. It was discipline that moved Marianne Moore to distil her 30 line poem 'Poetry' to 3 lines. It is discipline that drives Vasili to strive for the perfect composition. 

It is here, however, that the analogy with Vasili and poets and guitar gods diverges. The rules Vasili is in thrall to are not the time honoured objectives, passed down by the patriarchs. Rather, the rule that guides Vasili's output is the concept of serendipity. On this level, his silkscreens become endowed with a radical edge, elevating them to collectibles of import as well as interrogating the modus operandi of creating them. What happens to art when it is the happy accident that harnesses the composition? When it is a project's process, and not the finished result, that helms the focus? Vasili's letting go of the steering wheel has enabled him to rip up the rule book and embrace the blessings of both happenstance and on the hoof intuition. Even within the seemingly precise confines of his chosen genre, primarily depictions of architecture, the curves and colour-schemes crackle. This isn't down to faithfully following the tenants of collage and silkscreen. There is a discipline at work here, to be sure. It is the rigour to spot the beginning of beauty, or a dancing line, or an arabesque, or a faint blush of pink beneath the layers of photography, patterns and architecture. 

Left in the hands of a lesser artist, Vasili's silkscreens would not sing so brightly. It takes the yearning eye of the true artist to spot where a mistake made is actually the best possible episode of a piece. From it, and the subsequent accidents re-tweaked and repeated, a typical Vasili has at its heart the care of a composer and the freedom of the experiment.

Greg McGee, Dream Catcher Magazine, January 2019