About

Nathanial Mauden

Artist Statement

      As an artist, I am interested in the questions which arise during the making of art and the uses of form and composition, layering and aesthetic sense, considerations of the beautiful and the sublime and the function of signs and signifiers in our culture.  While I concentrate on building a painting, my choices are led (consciously or unconsciously) toward an overarching meaning.  As painting or sculpture is a static experience.  My attempts at making art work toward a singular moment, the overall emotive feeling, a social/theological contemplation, and sensory experience.  I want to work less toward the narrative which I feel is better served by written or time based media and more toward a gestalt or towards ontology.

     In the contemporary art world, art has lost much of its social and spiritual function.  When artworks were made prior to modernization, they had a real reason for being.  They told historical stories; they were objects of worship, told of gods and goddesses.  In ancient Egypt artworks were purely religious and political objects.  The figure depicting gods and royalty were regulated in form and proportion by the priesthood and the state.  This regulation of the figure was so that people could recognize them as being other worldly or divine.  As a Protestant, I would see many of these works as a form of idolatry in a theological sense.  The proscriptions against idolatry or the depiction of God was seen by the Byzantine, Eastern Orthodox and the Catholics as to not apply to Iconography because after the Incarnation of God as man in the person of Jesus Christ.   Since God became incarnate as a man His depiction as that man became acceptable.  I feel that the Icon can vacillate between the two, the spiritual and the idolatrous, depending on social context and interpretation.

     Icons are images that are a sign or likeness that stands for an object by signifying or representing it either by analogy or concretely as in semiotics. “Icon” is also used, particularly in contemporary culture, in the general sense of symbol, an image or depiction that represents something else of greater significance through literal or figurative meaning, normally associated with religious, cultural, political, or economic importance.

     My Icon series is painted on composition gold leaf.  The use of gold color in traditional icons is used to signify heaven or the divine. I am playing with the paradigms of perception which in their differences lead to very different interpretations for my paintings.  One is a purely religious image while the other is the contemporary usage of the word as a signifier.  I picked the image based on its cultural, depicting the idea or ideal of beauty for example, in “Icon 2” an image of a young girl wearing a prayer shawl covering her hair. I see her as iconic of a person of faith, prayerful and maintaining purity.  In “Icon 1”, is concurrently representing a humanist image of the idolization of beauty.  The gold shines through transparent applications of paint depicting her face.  Mankind is the central ideal and focus of perspective or the depiction of a Protestant saint.  “Icon 2”, although painted in much the same way as “Icon 1”, I see as a more devotional image.  It does not depict someone of particular importance, but as a Protestant, I see her as a closer representation of one of the faithful.  The gold comes through the image in both the environment and her face.  She is an unsung saint surrounded by abstracted clouds, the kingdom of heaven.

 As a Christian the feeling of awe and veneration are connected to my understanding of the nature of God.  God’s love and greatness are also closely bound to the knowledge of his greatness as the creator of the universe.  God as Creator defies our abilities to comprehend his majesty in His fullness in contrast to our limited and comparatively small lives. For Longinus, the “sublime” describes great, elevated, or lofty thought or language, particularly in the context of rhetoric.  As such, the sublime inspires awe and veneration. Longinus writings reference not just Greek writers such as “Homer” but also biblical sources such as “Genesis”. The connection between the sublime and the sense of the divine are integrally connected. Max Dessoir’s writings explained that the experience of the sublime involves a self-forgetfulness where personal fear is replaced by a sense of well-being and security when confronted with an object exhibiting superior might, and is similar to the experience of the tragic.  The “tragic consciousness” is the capacity to gain an exalted state of consciousness from the realization of the unavoidable suffering destined for all men and that there are oppositions in life that can never be resolved, most notably that of the “forgiving generosity of deity” subsumed to “inexorable fate”. The connection between the concept of the sublime and ecstatic experience is well documented in the writings of St Teresa. “I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the iron’s point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it…” (St Teresa)

A vision from St. Teresa inspired one of Bernini’s works, the Ecstasy of St Teresa at Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome.  It is a depiction of a moment of the Spiritual Sublime.  It is a moment of fear and pain which leads toward a revelation of the divine.

      In “Observations On the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime” [1764] Immanuel Kant investigates the sublime, stating “We call that sublime which is absolutely great”.  He distinguishes between the “remarkable differences” of the Beautiful and the Sublime, noting that beauty “is connected with the form of the object”, having “boundaries”, while the sublime “is to be found in a formless object”, represented by a “boundlessness”     The background of my painting “Sublimation” is a representation of a kind of formlessness and an obscuring darkness inhabited by the nude depiction of a young woman.  She is vulnerable but her reaction can be seen as ecstatic, hopeful, and maybe even fearful. She is trapped in darkness and formlessness but can see beyond it.  I do not see this image to be hopeless as some people might.  I look for God where I may and knowing of his promises, a vision of His light and find hope in a world which will not last.  She is in an environmental sublime but transcends it through a spiritual version of the sublime, contrasting with the “reason” of Kant which eliminates the feeling of the sublime and the fear of the unknown.

nathanmauden@yahoo.com
(626)354-3876

Bio:

Born, 1974 Yakima, WA

Currently Resides in Pasadena, CA

Education:

BFA Fine Art Media, Art Center College of Design, graduated 2007

Group shows:

2010 Currently showing at D Gallery, Lake Arrowhead, CA

2010 Observe Artwalk, South Pasadena, CA

2010 Endless Summer, Santa Clarita, CA

2010 Gallery Godo, Glendale, CA

2008 The Seed Gallery, Glendale, CA

2007 Santa Monica anti-Artwalk, Venice, CA

2007 Grad Show, Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, CA

2007 Senior Show, Fine Art Gallery, Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, CA

Artist Work Experience:

Art Instruction, Creative World Art School, Arcadia,CA

Logo design, Coffeen Law Group, Los Angeles, CA

Artist Assistant, Cameron Gray, Venice, CA
(painting, installation)

Commissioned Works/Paintings/Illustrations