AND IF I HAD A BOAT

In his earliest years, Orwig had little time to set down deep roots, as his family moved continually throughout the Pacific Northwest and Northern California. Perhaps the adaptability that he developed then explains his career-long, fearless, and expansive approach to subject matter. Darrell Orwig’s artwork is a multi-media, many-faceted travelogue of his grand tour through a changing world over the course of an extraordinary life. It chronicles his experience but not always literally. It is often nostalgic but never sentimental. Whether he takes up themes of travel, aviation, animals, men at war, streetscapes, or landscapes, his work is infused with his insistence on authentic odes to visual experience. And make no mistake; the transience of his childhood is no metaphor for his lasting impact on hundreds of students, patrons, fellow artists, and gallery professionals in Hawai`i over the last 50 years.

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As he prepared for a major retrospective exhibition at Hui No`eau Visual Arts Center on his home island of Maui in 2011 (“Waltzing with Time and Space”, March 12-April 22, 2011), Orwig stated, “The paintings are about photography. They always have been.” Indeed, he has delighted in documenting time and place, accepting and then transcribing in his paintings the surprises that inevitably creep into a photograph as the shutter snaps. Throughout his work, he invokes the perception of a photographer steeped in darkroom processes: precise tonality, deliberate framing of composition, apprehension of a fugitive moment, and the mood of light. By moving these elements into the realm of painting he drives his work beyond representation, taking control of composition and adding subtle content to his imagery.

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Notably, Orwig has used the two-inch slide format in many paintings over the course of his career. These paintings are both art and artifact, homages to a bygone type of pictorial documentation; one poignantly relevant to those of us whose family histories were documented in those mysterious little bits of film encased in cardboard frames, coming magically to life against the backdrop of a humming projector and collapsible screen. By formatting these canvases as two-inch slides (no matter the size of the actual canvas), with the white canvas standing for the slide frame, Orwig references the communal experience of viewing projected slides while unveiling the mystery of the original transparency.

Orwig has certainly been driven by the pragmatic imperatives of his family heritage. He recalls every Orwig being expected to make useful things: food or objects to be used or sold. So, he learned to draw and drew everything; then he learned to use paint mediums and pigments. During his college years at Chico State, he encountered the notion of art as lifestyle; that artists must relentlessly connect everyday experience with artmaking. He also honed his dedication to the processes of artmaking. The underpinnings of his imagery are classical, anchored by careful observation and highly competent draftsmanship. At the same time, he does not exclude the quirky, even the surreal. He may have traditional notions about artistic competency, but he does not define “everyday” for anyone but himself. Equipped with his own brand of pragmatism, and the drive to apply his skills and art thinking every day, he pokes through remembered experience, his current interests, and tomorrow’s ideas. Thus, the travelogue.

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His family heritage likely also explains Orwig’s enthusiastic tinkering (indeed, photography requires plenty of mechanical know-how). Orwig has built models of airplanes and war ships over the years. He remembers devising an Egyptian-style system of logs to roll a gas-fired kiln 20 yards downhill at the Hui No`eau in the early years of his tenancy there. He has also built elaborate installations, most notably for “Poi Dog” in (Year?, Maui Arts & Cultural Center). As a gallery director, he approached exhibition preparation methodically, using his own model of the gallery space at the MACC, including modular walls, to plan the layout of the gallery and placement of artwork.

If you have had the opportunity to work with Darrell Orwig, it is impossible to go without mentioning his sense of humor. He relishes mischief, can tell the same story or joke in different ways at different times and places, and still reduce you to debilitating laughter at his dinner table, in the waiting area of an airport gate, over the phone…. No matter what, in meeting him, you are guaranteed his undivided attention and at least one memorable one-liner.

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Around the time of his 2011 retrospective exhibition, Orwig received a diagnosis of Parkinson’s Disease. It would be reasonable to expect this devastating news to curtail the work of an artist like Orwig, used as he has been to being in virtually perpetual motion. On the contrary, he seemed to hit the afterburners, producing scores of tiny, jewel-like oil pastels, large-scale urban imagery, and clay sculpture. Following a deep personal crisis a few years later, he turned to enormous canvases using a somber, brooding palette in abstract compositions as he worked through a process of existential questioning and resolution.

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As his condition has advanced, he has returned to past themes and a bright, clear palette. But there is new serenity in his solitary highways and vast vistas, as if suggesting the open-endedness of a life lived in terms of art.