The Mystery is the Meaning

Can space be a medium?

MAYBE I CALL THEM LEAVES

leave as is
leave alone
leave out
let go, let be
leave nothing
leave something
leave empty
drop
self-leave
fall into, out of
leave a trace, leak
leave behind, to leave, leave,
leave
one leave after another
leave of my life
leaves, pages
leave is a verb
action verb
Richard Serra’s verb list
a manifesto of leaving

two leaves, three leaves, four leaves 
more leaves?
drop, soak, spill, spread, the color
spreads!
sag, swim, stick, smudge, smear, set, seek, see
show
form, float, fizzle, fuse
pause
thicken, take
give
accept
teach
no fuss

“Remember that the fool in the eyes of the gods….

and the fool in the eyes of man are very different. One who is entirely ignorant of the modes of Art in its revolution or the moods of thought in its progress, of the pomp of the Latin line or the richer music of the vowelled Greeks, of Tuscan sculpture or Elizabethan song may yet be full of the very sweetest wisdom. The real fool, such as the gods mock or mar, is he who does not know himself. I was such a one too long. You have been such a one too long. Be so no more. Do not be afraid. The supreme vice is shallowness. Everything that is realised is right.

—Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

ABout the Artist

Louise Captein

Louise Captein is an Associate Professor of Painting and Drawing at Otterbein University who works primarily in oils and paper collage. She earned terminal degrees from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam (1991) and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2017). She has taught studio art in higher education since the mid 1990’s – both in The Netherlands and the U.S – and joined the art and art history faculty at Otterbein in 2009. Captein has shown her work locally and nationally in group and solo exhibitions at Keny Galleries of Columbus, The Ohio Arts Council’s Riffe Center Gallery, The Ohio State University’s Hopkins Hall Gallery, the Dublin Arts Council, and the Richard M. Ross Art Museum at Ohio Wesleyan University, among other venues. Her collages have been called “… quixotic in appearance yet meticulous in their approach to the formal elements of space, line, color and composition.”

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