Portfolio: Andrew Alcasid
Untitled, 2020, pen and watercolor on paper, 9 in. x 5 in.
[Image description: Watermelon cubes in a transparent cup, against a blue background and with a green and yellow drop shadow on the right.]
Love me, the sick person in the prime of their life says, trying to look as if they will grow strong again, for what I have done before, and also what I might do, and also love me for the present in which I am eternally trapped, uncertain of my exact attachment to time.
—Anne Boyer, The Undying
Artist Andrew Alcasid made the series of watercolors BMT (Blood and Marrow Transplantation) while undergoing high-dose chemo and a stem cell transplant at the University of California San Diego medical center. For two months, he lay in the hospital, unable to leave, not allowed to have visitors (this was Covid times), enduring the grueling cancer treatment. “UCSD was really nice,” he tells me. Clean and new, good food, lots of T.V. and movies. In the midst of the fear and uncertainty—and after the post-diagnosis chaos—he momentarily sat back into the luxury. But that comfort waned quickly, and he found himself wanting to draw to pass the time, to focus his energy on something, to keep himself sane.
Left: 9 19 Sept 2020 (Cut Watermelon); Right: 88 Sat 24 Oct 2020 01:11a-01:52a What is brown? If not purpl or blue? | Color light /= pigment, both 2020, pen and watercolor on paper, 9 in. x 5 in.
[Image descriptions: Left: Watermelon cubes in a transparent cup, with a multicolor drop shadow below. Right: Watermelon cubes in a transparent cup, with a dark brown drop shadow below.]
He started drawing still lifes of things he could put on the hospital table that swung across his bed. After experimenting with different subjects, washing each in watercolor, he finally decided on the watermelon he could order with his meals. In each of his paintings, the glistening cubes of pink fruit sit in clear plastic cups, their drop shadows assuming different positions as time passes and daylight shifts, their tones morphing across the individual works. On some of the pieces, he marked in writing the exact date and time he started and finished each delicate composition of wobbly lines and ethereal color.
These small paintings are radically unlike the work I know Alcasid for. His practice has, in the past, been rooted firmly in the minimalist tradition. While he has made many works on paper, Alcasid’s practice most fully reaches its potential when he is given space. He has created ephemeral, site-specific paintings on walls, floors, ceilings, and windows, often joining two or more surfaces. These works belie their simplicity as their precision effectively collapses or expands space. In BMT, Alcasid found a kinship between minimalism’s geometry and the hospital watermelon’s cuboid shape. However, instead of asserting the same bold austerity as his site-specific works, his watermelon whispers of the passing days with a sweet intimacy.
Left: 77 Thur 22 Oct 2020 1016p 1120p Bout to take a Zofran | KCRW on; Right: 124 Sat 31 Oct 2020 1112p, both 2020, pen and watercolor on paper, 9 in. x 5 in.
[Image description: Left: Watermelon cubes in a transparent cup, against a yellow background and with a double drop shadow, in green and yellow, below. Right: Watermelon cubes in a transparent cup, with pastel colors in the background and drop shadow.]
This practice of marking time in painting reminds me of On Kawara’s dates, Byron Kim’s skies, and Peter Dreher’s water glasses. Recording what’s in front of you, painting in an unchanging mode to track time as it moves forward. Alcasid’s still lifes are similarly observational, despite the fact that the conditions under which he painted them were less than ideal for observation, much less for making art. As Anne Boyer points out in her cancer memoir, The Undying, “The problem with art as it approaches suffering is that those who suffer are often so worn out from having suffered that any account of that suffering is exhausted before it is even tried.” Some days, Alcasid was able to push through the suffering and make one or two paintings, sometimes up to eight at a time. “It depended on my ableness,” he tells me. “Some days I was more sick than others.” On those sickest days he didn’t make any, but the ones he did complete added up and he eventually accumulated one hundred and thirty eight paintings, the number a sign of the seemingly interminable length of treatment.
58 08 Oct 2020 Late Night “After Oxy” 4/4, 2020, pen and watercolor on paper, 9 in. x 5 in.
[Image description: A closeup of watermelon cubes in a transparent cup, with a combination of vibrant jewel-tones and pastels.]
There is something extraordinary, I think, about marking time so specifically when you have an illness that may turn terminal without aggressive treatment. Or may turn terminal even with aggressive treatment. You are tying yourself to the present when you could so easily be subsumed by fear of the future. But maybe it’s not extraordinary. Maybe that word, that concept, just fetishizes cancer and the terrible suffering it causes. I often think about how the things that look extraordinary to other people are, in reality, just what we need to do to survive. Loving art—that which we have made, that which we make, that which we might make in the future. Loving each other. Grabbing any small moment of sweetness that appears right in front of us amidst the bewildering nature of our exact attachment to time.
— Elizabeth Rooklidge, Editor, HereIn