Some artists choose to exhibit their work once every few years. Todd Hackwelder, however, takes the opposite approach. The US expat hones in on a particular idea and finds as many different ways as possible to present it. A sampling of his prolific output, titled A Collection of Different Series, is currently on display at Wendel’s German Bakery and Bistro in Tienmu.
“My philosophy is to have as many shows as possible. I’d have a show in a bathroom if it was nice and my paintings didn’t get damaged,” joked the 34-year-old, who has lived in Taiwan for seven years. “Each show creates a new idea and it gets me to think differently.”
The 50 or so works on display at the spacious German restaurant were chosen from five previous series — Blues, Numbers, Drum, Experimental and Secondary Language, Secondary Color — as well as a sixth series called One-Eyed Clowns that he is in the process of finishing.
Hackwelder received a BFA in graphic design from the State University of New York at Fredonia and studied design at a Yale summer program in Brissago, Switzerland. He says he has worked in design for 18 years. In Taiwan, where he is currently an English teacher, his projects have included the menu for Forkers and the business cards for Coda, two expat-run restaurants in Taipei. He picked up the paintbrush two years ago after gallery-owner and painter Timothy Nathan Joel encouraged him to do a show.
“I didn’t know what I was going to do. I was going to maybe show design. I’m also a photographer — I’ve taken like 50,000 photos since I’ve been here [Taiwan] — so I wasn’t sure,” he recalled. “And then I said: Maybe I’ll do painting.”
What emerged was a show called Blues, a series of paintings that takes the music genre as its theme and features black stick figures in various poses and actions on backgrounds of many shades of blue.
The series Secondary Language, Secondary Color sees Hackwelder filling out the stick figures with outlined characters. The liberal use of numbers and languages also feature prominently in this series. The five-panel Orange, for example, uses a visual language similar to graffiti to meditate on his travels through Southeast Asia. The picture’s narratives are punctuated by words and phrases culled from a particular country’s language.
“There is a lot of outline in my work. I paint my canvas in a solid color and then I draw on it. I get it to where I like it and then I paint it almost as if like a coloring book,” he said.
The paintings in One-Eyed Clowns, his most recent series, are all signed using his Chinese name Hai Ke-ha (海克哈) — an indication, perhaps, of his increased confidence as an artist.
Hackwelder said he sees a lot of himself in the clowns he created.
“It’s me as what I do,” he said of the colorful figures. “It gives me a genre of what I do. How many other people have painted clowns? A lot. How many people have done a series on one-eyed clowns? Probably nobody,” he said.
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