April 30, 2006
Leaf Thirty: Feast
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Leaf Thirty: Feast, 2006, HTML, 365 x 265 pixels
April 29, 2006
Leaf Twenty Nine: Unfold
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Leaf Twenty Nine: Unfold, 2006, HTML, 365 x 265 pixels
April 28, 2006
Leaf Twenty Eight: Throw
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Leaf Twenty Eight: Throw, 2006, HTML, 365 x 265 pixels
April 27, 2006
Leaf Twenty Seven: Slip
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Leaf Twenty Seven: Slip, 2006, HTML, 365 x 265 pixels
Motherwell's "The Little Spanish Painting"
From a November 24, 1971 interview with Robert Motherwell by Paul Cummings for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution:
PAUL CUMMINGS: I think it was the end of 1941 or thereabouts that you painted The Little Spanish Prison which seems to be a key picture of that period. What is there about that painting that you feel is so important at that point, say as it changed or remained the subsequently?ROBERT MOTHERWELL: Actually it was the first year I began to paint seriously. Before that I was a student who painted on the side. And I would imagine that that was the first picture in which I hit something that is deep in my character, as two years later when I made my first colleges I hit something else that is deep in my character, and as seven years later in making the first Spanish Elegy I hit a third thing that's very deep in my character. But what it is I don't know. What it stands for I don't know.
William C. Agee writes: "In the early 1940s, Robert Motherwell interpreted Mondrian’s verticals in the crooked bars of his witty painting, Little Spanish Prison (Museum of Modern Art, New York)."
Giovanni Joppolo writes that The Little Spanish Prison refers to the Spanish civil war, where "on a lemon-yellow yellow ground take shape six vertical bands of moderate white color and a small magenta horizontal bar, the whole painted in a free and significant geometry," which remotely recalls, "Mondrian with the reality of the bars of prison which lock up the yellow of the Spanish flag."
I've always been interested in this painting. But Mondrian? That's too obvious, and maybe not that significant.
I like that this is a stripe painting unconcerned with presenting nice, even stripes; they're wavy and vary in width and color, like stripes on a sheet hung on a line blowing in the breeze. Physically, what one sees on the canvas- the lines and paint- don't really make the image of a strong prison; they're not straight and hard and strong.
However, the fact that the red rectangle is more square and locked-in place provides a visual focus point; focus on the red rectangle and the wavy yellow and white lines appear somewhat in the periphery, as if we look out at a distant red rectangle, and the yellow and white lines are closer to our eyes and face, becoming something that is felt, that we may be looking out of instead of at. We are peering through bars looking out of or into a space.
It isn't clear who is in prison, and why a prison would be called small; is this a prison of one? Is it something from which we free ourselves? Is this painting, close to the size and appearance of a flag hung lengthwise, breaking down, shimmering, loosening so that we may find our way beyond it, to find a place of greater personal control- freedom- in the red rectangle that is a great distance from these bars?
Rather than Mondrian, I think Matisse's Tête blanche et rose is a more apt comparison in terms of graphic quality, paint, and texture, and also because of the feeling of lines against the face. The bars in Manet's Le Chemin de Fer seem a more important predecessor in terms of spatial depth, as something to see through. And the shawl in Courbet's The Sleeping Spinner is a model for how paint is handled, how it is a material thing with physical properties that is used to depict and create illusion. Finally, Goya's Group on a Balcony, a model for Manet, is a painting with mysterious shadowy figures and very theatrical lighting. Images of each are below.
Aside: in The Devil's Cloth : A History of Stripes, Michel Pastoureau "traces the negative connotation related to stripes in cloth and clothing in Western societies as evidenced by documents and illustrations from the Middle Ages until today. He begins with the Carmelites' scandalous use later banned of striped monks' habits in the 13th century and gives numerous examples of striped clothing "marking" marginalized members of society: prostitutes, mimes, domestic servants, bankers, criminals, and, sadly, concentration camp inmates. He admits that the use of stripes on coats of arms is not pejorative and that stripes have been used successfully in modern fashions (Amazon)."
Read Joe Fyfe's review The Devil's Cloth.
April 26, 2006
Leaf Twenty Six: Wire
Leaf Twenty Six: Wire, 2006, HTML, 365 x 265 pixels
Andre Cadere at Art: Concept by James Hyde
Ever since, as an undergrad, first reading about and seeing pictures of his barres I have been interested in Andre Cadere.
| FindArticles > Art in America > Nov, 2005 > Article > Print friendly Andre Cadere at Art: Concept James Hyde
The form of Cadere's barres de bois is exceedingly simple: they are wooden rods of varying length composed of sections painted in primary colors. In total, he made about 180 barres. All have a disarmingly handmade quality; the plainly painted individual units are fitted together the way a careful child would stack blocks. The smallest barre in the show was baton-sized and mounted horizontally on a wall. There was a longer piece propped against a wall and another floor-piece, consisting of 8 batons of 12 units each, which diagonally bisected the gallery. Cadere valued his works as conversation starters--props for opening dialogue. This is consistent with the formal patterns of the barres themselves. Cadere maintained he had a mathematical system for the patterns of colors on the barres, but would include an error, though he wouldn't say what the system was or what might constitute the error. The small wall-mounted barre here consists of 12 units--four black, four red and four yellow. The irregular, rhythmic sequence tempts one to decipher its logic, but even with this simple piece it is virtually impossible to grasp the pattern. In the process of trying, however, the viewer opens a dialogue with the work. While the colorful barres are exquisite to look at, Cadere is best known for how he presented them outside the gallery. He would turn up at bars, cafes, openings and art fairs carrying his staff-length rods. Sometimes, although uninvited, he would place them in galleries and museums. These actions were a utopian assault on the art system, but also had an edge of self-promotion. This contradiction suggests that Cadere was proposing a revision rather than a destruction of the status quo. Cadere's typewritten records of the times, dates and places of his appearances with his barres lent an elegiac note to the show. There were also numerous pictures of Cadere, youthful and earnest, a modern shaman with rod in hand. The show included a single grainy black-and-white photo of him hoisting what must have been his largest barre--a log-sized example--on his shoulder. In the image, the artist looks toward the camera with an expression of burden and challenge. As staffs or batons, the barres are images of mobility. They are also mobile in terms of medium, slipping poetically through received categories of performance, painting, sculpture and documentation. You can also think of the barres as dashes (in French, this is one of the meanings of barre), because of their ability to connect things and people. Thirty years on, even without the artist's presence, they haven't lost this power. COPYRIGHT 2005 Brant Publications, Inc. |
April 25, 2006
Leaf Twenty Five: Loop
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Leaf Twenty Five: Loop, 2006, HTML, 365 x 265 pixels
April 24, 2006
Leaf Twenty Four: Press
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Leaf Twenty Four: Press, 2006, HTML, 365 x 265 pixels
April 23, 2006
Leaf Twenty Three: Screen
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Leaf Twenty Three: Screen, 2006, HTML, 365 x 265 pixels
April 22, 2006
Leaf Twenty Two: Wave
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Leaf Twenty Two: Wave, 2006, HTML, 365 x 265 pixels
April 21, 2006
Leaf Twenty One: Curtain
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Leaf Twenty One: Curtain, 2006, HTML, 365 x 265 pixels
Comedies of Fair U$e at NYU
Joy Garnett emails about "COMEDIES OF FAIR U$E: A Search for Comity in the Intellectual Property Wars", taking place Friday, April 28 through Sunday, April 30, 2006 at NYU. Nice coincidence that, via Tyler Greene, Eyeteeth features this today:
 Yesterday's Google logo, inspired by the works of painter Joan Miró, upset the artist's family and Artists Rights Society, the overseer of copyrights for more than 40,000 artists. They requested Google take down the logo, alleging copyright infringement; Google complied. |
About Comedies of Fair U$e:
Some of the most contentious issues bedeviling cultural life today are increasingly coming to revolve around the question of what proper deference ought to be paid to the notion of intellectual property. Just what is copyright, what is its point, who is it designed to protect (individual creators and their legatees, be they individual or corporate, and necessarily to the same extent?) and what is it designed to foster (the most thrivingly fertile intellectual community and intercourse possible?)? How might such objectives, thus stated, be internally at odds, and how might such tensions in turn be resolved? What sorts of product ought to be copyrightable and for how long? To what (increasing?) extent is the cultural/intellectual commons being divied up, fenced off into ever more diminutive swaths of barbed and monetarized terrain? And what exceptions ought to be made to this tendency? What is "fair use" and how ought it to be extended (and perhaps expanded)? How do all these issues play out across different media-textual (books and magazines), visual (photos, paintings, films), and aural (musical)? And to what extent are rampaging developments on the cyberfront expanding or constricting all possibilities in this regard?
Panelists to include Lawrence Lessig, Art Spiegelman, Susan Meiselas, Jonathan Letham, Errol Morris, Geoff Dyer, Susan Meiselas, Joy Garnett, Jonathan Letham, Art Spiegelman, Geoff Dyer, Errol Morris, Joel Wachs, Judge Alex Kozinski, Siva Vaidhyanathan, Lewis Hyde, Lawrence Ferrara, Carrie McLaren, James Boyle, and others.
Sounds fascinating. Read more of the who, what, when, and where...
April 20, 2006
Leaf Twenty: Mirror
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Leaf Twenty: Mirror, 2006, HTML, 365 x 265 pixels
April 19, 2006
Leaf Nineteen: Cushion
Leaf Nineteen: Cushion, 2006, HTML, 365 x 265 pixels
Joanne Mattera's Encaustic Paintings
I'd written notes in a post on 20060404 about Joanne Mattera's paintings. Here is a revised, extended rewrite of that post.
Joanne Mattera's Encaustic Paintings
That these paintings are encaustic, made with wax is a prominent and significant aspect of this work. When I think of encaustic I think of two characteristics: something that has body— is an object— but is luminescent, and a process that involves heat, speed and layers. I think of these two characteristics literally, but also historically, culturally, and psychologically.
Wax is a thick substance but is translucent— one thinks of candles— and it is crystalline and heavy but eases friction— consider wax on surfboards and skis. Wax is durable and protects what is covers or encases. We wax our cars and furniture. A candle is always and forever usable as long as the wick is good. Egyptian Fayum portraits are fresh and vibrant after 2,000 years. Wax can be used to seal jars and bottles. Leaves may feel waxy, and our ears produce wax for protection. Beeswax supports and nourishes colonies in the thousands, and when we think of wax of course we often think of bees, which convert the sugar in honey into wax which is excreted from the abdomen. Encaustic looks and feels so different than oil paint because, aside from the pigments, these two mediums are actually competely different substances. The oil in oil paint has vegetable origins (linseed, walnut, safflower), and much of what we think of as wax is paraffin, which is a petroleum product, a purified substance that results from the production of gasoline, kersosene, and lubricating oil.
Wax is milky but not clouded. It can be colored, but never quite opaque. Light goes in and comes back out as color. In the depth of wax light is held and it glows. But it isn't clear light; it's frosted, subdued, quiet. The wax is thick, and it might be in layers. In the glowing light of wax's body seeing is slowed down. We see the surface and we also see into the wax. On the surface we might see texture—brush strokes, scrapes, marks, lumps, pits, etc.— and then our sight goes beyond and below the surface. There is an actual depth that our vision goes and sees into, and our vision can stay there. We see light and color as a suspended substance, like looking into an ice cube or a crystal. The act of looking into something is an instance, like when we see our breath on a cold day, or when we look into slowly moving water. The colored wax is a body that holds the light— it is a physical colored thing into which environmental light enters and glows— and it is also paint, a flat colored medium the function of which is to depict light— for example, two different colors next to each other can have the physical and the illusory effect of space, brightness, and contrast. (Right: Joanne Mattera: Silk Road, 2005, encaustic on panel, 12 x 12 inches each)
To paint in encaustic means to engage in labor. It requires melting and mixing, and preparation is both physically hot and time consuming for the artist. However, when the encaustic is ready the actual act of painting must be conducted quickly. We see speed in the paint's application and the resulting gestures recorded in the paint. Recognizing this, we enter into a recognition of pacing in the paintings; we see evidence of different speeds. There is the knowledge of a slow preparation, there is also the actual speed of the execution, and there is the slowness of our looking into glowing color. We see how the execution is actually a frozen moment or, rather, the cold state of something done quickly, having been executed in the (pun alert) heat of the moment. This somewhat contradictory state—of contrasting slowness and speed—is something to which the qualities of encaustic seem particularly suited.
I think Mattera intimately knows encaustic as both a material to use and as a natural component of her subject. This gives her work integrity—she has the skill to make a physically refined art work, and she has found the balance between knowing how to put the material at her service conceptually and recognizing how the qualities of the materials can better help define her conceptual stance. She recognizes encaustic’s pace and light and body, and she allows the medium to be its best by using it directly and by staying out its way, but having said this I certainly don’t mean that she does this passively by simply letting colored wax do what it will do. She has to employ general construction techniques like controlling buildup and exercising finesse with surface. And of course as a painter she also has to do the usual painterly things like pay attention to scale (for example, the relationship between brushstroke and paint density to image and each panel's size), orchestrate color, and work the edges, both the edges of the panels and the edges where different areas of paint meet. I would think that for a painter using encaustic it would be tempting to try to make or let the wax do too much, to let the encaustic take over as something beautiful, dense, and physical. But what I see in Mattera's imagery is that it is reduced to a point where the material becomes an active ingredient in her work’s meaning, but the imagery is also still complex enough to be about much more than wonderful effects of encaustic; they are paintings.
Wax makes light physical, and the medium of encaustic makes light both physical and pictorial. Light is a major preoccupation throughout western painting's history. One can go backwards from Rothko to Seurat and the Impressionists to someone like Gerome to… well, what road would you like to take? Fragonard to Chardin to de La Tour and so on? Or from Goya to to Rubens to El Greco to whoever? Eventually you’ll get to Durer and Van Eyck and Holbein and Van der Weyden. Pick your own names— you can easily make your own list which leads towards hard, polished, glazed, luminous, painted surfaces of physical light, and depicted scenes of light and shadow. Light is prominent in other arts: think of hard, shiny Limoges Email peints; think of the glazes on Islamic tiles and Chinese Sancai figures; think of stained glass. And think of Dan Flavin, or Robert Irwin, or James Turrell, and the importance of the actual phenomenological experience of light and perception. Light is a major preoccupation because light is how we see, and various qualities of light have different moods, evoke different times and places, and create drama. Mattera's use of encaustic and color for light places her in this historical lineage.
Another historical connection I see is a use of color and an organization of space that not only brings to mind the intensities of Klee and Seurat, but also go back to Indian miniatures and Medieval illuminated manuscripts. Klee, of course, used the grid and playful color, and Seurat combined intense color in structured ways to create form and atmosphere. Mattera does both of these things, with the added bonus of encaustic's tendency towards atmospheric effect. Indian miniatures also often use intense color, a finely rendered surface, and brush strokes which, even at the micro level, are integral to the image—these qualities are also found in Mattera's work. Finally, illuminated manuscripts (examples here) often use bands of intense primary color to divide areas of an image; a manuscript page will boldly present a single image, or will divide an area up into sections, each with it's own but related subject, and these images often typically have a narrative quality. I think Mattera shares these qualities, as evidenced by her own compositional impulses, and through the presence of paint that as a recorded act; looking at a painting one sees a story unfold. And in fact a painting like Uttar 135 can be seen as pages laid out in a grid on a table, each page part of a larger whole.
The stripe, the dot, the stroke, and the field are a way to make light and color a clear subject. The phenomena of our visual world can be broken down into these kinds of marks just as easily as shapes can be defined as circle, square, and triangle, and forms can be categorized as cube, cylinder, sphere, and pyramid. These basic marking components lend themselves to stacking, gridding, layering, weaving, circling, linking, netting, dripping, blotting, covering, and accumulation. A reduction of painted line, shape, and form into the basic marking components of stripe, dot, stroke, and field leaves pigmented wax to be handled broadly and naturally, allowing the encaustic to retain its properties of light and color. (Left: Uttar 267, 2004. Encaustic on panel, 36 x 36")
Mattera's paintings are covered, from edge to edge. But unlike many other painters seemingly working in similar terrain who don't seem to recognize that a painting is not a small slice of eternal space and time, Mattera knows that a painting is a unique object, a defined space and time with a specific size and limits. Her paint does not run off the edge into a suggested continuum beyond the painting's surface. She knows that the edge of a painting—where it ends and where the wall begins— is crucial terrain. How shapes and marks are arranged on a flat surface, and how they interact and how their edges meet, and what kinds of relationships those shapes have to the boundaries of the painting, are what makes a painting dynamic, contained, and holistic. How that is handled—we're talking about compostion here—is the difference between a functioning painting that is worth looking and experiencing and just another colored slab hanging on a wall. She gets it. See, for example, Ruby Road (Uttar 270); the way she strokes the paint from side to side and lets the paint drip gives each panel, and the three panels together, a completeness. Another good example is Uttar 237. And it is this completeness—achieved through paint handling and shape placement, and which makes the painting function as a self-contained body—which visually and conceptually makes the painting retain its color and light qualities as part of an essential to this unified whole.
The light and color in Joanne Mattera’s paintings is about the present and the just passing present. Seeing light and color in the material is about the absolute present moment because it’s physical, because this is an interaction with the environment and with current lighting conditions, and because we see it now, in this instance. But if her art has what some might call a contemplative dimension it’s because while the light is a real thing that draws us in, it’s the way this light is lingeringly held in the wax, and the way we look below the surface and into the depth of this light-filled wax, that our looking is slowed down just a beat to an even more present presence, a moment that is slow enough for us to see passing. If our looking stayed on the surface our attention might glance off and finish. If our looking goes beyond a surface, even if a only a fraction of an inch into a physical depth and a depicted depth, our seeing is more settled. The physical effect is slower looking. The psychological effect is awareness of self in relation to the phenomenological world, and that happens in front of the painting. Our seeing becomes the light and the color, and when this happens we live the color and forms of the paintings.
In order to be clear about what I think is the value of Mattera's encaustic work, let me say this: artists often state that one of the functions of their work is to make the viewer more aware of how they see the world, or to help the viewer see the world in a new way. Artist's say this so much that it's a laughable cliche. What happens when your art has made me see the world in a new way? Is the art disposable, with a shelf life dependent on how soon I can use it to see anew? One can easily find art that allgegedly has this goal, and usually that art fails. Frankly, I don't see this as a signifcant function of Western, painted, abstract art. I see this kind of art as having functions and experiences specific to no other media. I want a painting that is well-conceived conceptually, visually dynamic, skillfully executed, that looks and feels thought and felt and integrated. I want my visual experience in the painting, I want to see the painter's decisions, and I want all the parts to work together. I want to stay with the painting, and I'm willing to give a lot to it as long as it is giving back to me. I think Joanne Mattera's paintings add up, and I think they're worth looking at.
Additional info: Joanne Mattera: Ten Years of Encaustic Painting was published on the occasion of her solo show at Winfisky Gallery, Salem State College, Salem, Mass., March 21 – April 13, 2006. The catalogue is 8.5 x 8.5 inches, and contains 16 pages, fifteen color images, a statement by Joanne, an interview with Julie Karabenick, a selected critical overview and biography, and a short essay by Flavia Rando. Joanne will also be showing at Marcia Wood Gallery in Atlanta, April 20 - May 27, 2006.
Grayson Perry: Trust your own reactions
Grayson Perry in the UK Guardian: Trust your own reactions, don't seek enlightenment
...We all have a part of ourselves that cries out for certainty and meaning. If we encounter a contemporary artwork one of the first things we ask is: “What does it mean?” We can be uncomfortable with not knowing, not being sure, not having the safe ground of the authorised, correct interpretation. When encountering an artwork we seek the explanatory panel.All the art historians and curators coming out of the ever-expanding universities are keen to explain. Knowing what they think it’s all about may increase our enjoyment of the artwork but perhaps that can also lead to us devaluing our own personal uninformed response. This is typical of the way we can discount the things we learn in life that don’t get us a GCSE. We are all equally well qualified to say yuk or wow.
Alan Bennett thought there should be a big notice up at the entrance to the National Gallery that says “You don’t have to like everything”. We are sometimes coy about expressing our tastes for fear of appearing ignorant. I am educated enough to know how much I don’t know. I gave up at school as soon as I made my decision to become an artist. I feel insecure around knowledge and maybe this has led to me having a reverence for academics that may be misplaced.
Susan Sontag said: “Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual on art.” Perhaps she means that heady types are mystified and a bit jealous of artists’ ease with creativity and free expression so they theorise the fun out of art. Excellence at book-learning is only part of being truly bright...
Still & Hofman at Sotheby's
It's pretty fascinating to look at the auction catalogues online, to see the estimates, and to read the text that accompanies most items. Sotheby's email notification (it's easy to sign up for a free account) pointed me to the online catalogues for the two upcoming contemporary art auctions, and I glommed onto the Still reproduced below; it is rare to see one of Still's works on paper. The text for this lot is one of the shortest; a 1962 Ryman estimated at 4,000,000—6,000,000 USD has an 1,100 word essay.
A small, hasty, saccharine Elizabeth Peyton portrait of a young David Hockney with bright red lips is estimated at 300,000—400,000(!) USD claims that, "Despite their modest scale and deceptively casual manner, Peyton’s portraits draw the viewer like magnets, condensing emotion into the picture plane. Her concise brushstrokes imbue the photographic image with an emotional energy simultaneously recalling both Renaissance miniatures and Pre-Raphaelite romanticism." OK, if you say so.
I'm also reproducing a Hans Hofman here because the subject and image is so unusal for him, and because I like it when Hofman draws with the brush.
CLYFFORD STILL (1904-1980), UNTITLED (FEAR)
Est. 500,000—700,000 USD
oil on paper, 26 1/4 x 20 in. 66.6 x 50.8 cm., signed and dated 45
PROPERTY FROM THE COLLECTION OF DR. AND MRS. JEFFREY ZISSU
CATALOGUE NOTE"By 1941, space and figure in my canvases had been resolved into a total psychic entity, freeing me from the limitations of each, yet fusing into an instrument bounded only by the limits of my energy and intuition. My feeling of freedom was now absolute and infinitely exhilarating." In statements about his work, Still referred to painting as an "instrument" and believed that art was a total idea, encompassing life and death, freedom and subjugation. Still saw art as influential in society and it was the artist’s responsibility to use the instrument of paint as a confrontation with his inner self and with society as a whole. Like Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, Still considered art to have a transformative potential that could impact the public in transcendent and deeply emotive ways. Still sought to achieve the ecstatic through primal forms that abandoned the human figure as subject matter, leaving the human gesture of paint to signify the human presence in art. In the mid-1940s, with works such as Untitled (Fear), Still arrived at his unique mature style of abstraction that achieved a fusion of color and form that aimed at momentous content and sublime beauty. By eliminating figuration or narrative intent from his compositions, Still orchestrated his strokes and surfaces toward his real subject matter, which is the dramatic interaction of painted forms and color harmonies. His jutting forms and muscular shards of color are redolent with a sense of crescendo within an organic formation that fills the picture plane and intimates a continuation beyond. Still’s forms and painterly expression were in perfect sync with his foreboding and unusual palette. Still, in an acknowledgement of Edmund Burke’s theory of color, employed melancholic colors such as black, brown or deep purple to access the Sublime, yet he also knew the value of expanding his palette to include the lighter colors of orange, red or yellow to animate the composition and increase its expressiveness. In Untitled (Fear), the counterpoints of color - the flickering red, touch of blue, outlines of white and wisps of yellow - harmonize with the more somber ground, and fulfill the artist’s intent to highlight the paradox of light within dark in which radiance is a means of revelation of the Sublime. PROVENANCE
LITERATURE AND REFERENCES |
HANS HOFMANN (1880-1966), GERMANIA III
90,000—120,000 USD
signed and dated VI 27 49, oil on canvas, 48 by 50 in. 121.9 by 127 cm.
| CATALOGUE NOTE
Hofmann’s Germania III portrays the lumbering movement and posturing of an unstable, ugly and fantastical animal. The title refers to the recently fallen 3rd Reich. It also satirizes the notions of Fascism, referencing Tacitus’ account of Germania, from which Hitler drew many ideals. It is a direct reference and afterthought to Max Ernst’s Fireside Angel, 1936. The Fireside Angel is an incarnation of the beast of Fascism that Ernst believed would flatten Spain in a blind and violent manner. It is possible that the title also refers to chapter III of Germania, which describes the war cry of the tribes as "chiefly... a harsh note and a confused roar." This may be Hofmann's interpretation of the Fireside Angel and homage to Ernst's penchant for leaving subtle clues to the classical and old masters. Hofmann’s Germania III celebrates the fall of the monster and parodies its grossly misconceived direction. It continues the artistic and political commentary of the 1930s and belies its fears. The simple coloration of yellow, black and white in three rectangles is an unassuming and peaceful backdrop in comparison to the many swirling greens, reds, purples and blacks of the furious Fireside Angel. Hofmann’s Germania III is a unique painting in his oeuvre, is historical in its context and interesting in its continuation of an artistic and social reflection. PROVENANCE EXHIBITED |
April 18, 2006
Leaf Eighteen: Settle
Leaf Eighteen: Settle, 2006, HTML, 365 x 265 pixels
April 17, 2006
Leaf Seventeen: Gather
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Leaf Seventeen: Gather, 2006, HTML, 365 x 265 pixels
April 16, 2006
April 15, 2006
Leaf Fifteen: Wash
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Leaf Fifteen: Wash, 2006, HTML, 365 x 265 pixels
April 14, 2006
Leaf Fourteen: Fountain
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Leaf Fourteen: Fountain, 2006, HTML, 365 x 265 pixels
April 13, 2006
Leaf Thirteen: Bow
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Leaf Thirteen: Bow, 2006, HTML, 365 x 265 pixels
Berkeley Paintings: a little background
The six Berkeley Paintings I have featured the last six days (compiled on a single page) were made for a large meeting room at UC Berkeley by request; a fancy word for that would be commission-- I just saw it as an opportunity to respond to a situation, make some paintings, and get them shown.
The meeting room has a curved wall with seven windows; in between each window is a section of wall about 36" wide. That's six sections, perfect for six paintings. Outside these windows across an intersection is a corner of the university- buildings, trees, looking uphill, sky. The idea was to use the green and blue Qinglu palette I'd been using in the drawings so much last year (see installation view, Gallery Siano, Philadelphia, October 2005), as it would combine the idea of the colors and spaces one sees out these windows. That idea was well received. The place for which these were painted also gave me titles: Tilden, Cragmont, Panoramic, La Loma, Strawberry, and Ocean View are neighborhoods in Berkeley, though Strawberry refers to the Strawbery Canyon area east of the university with steep hillsides and a looping road, and out of which a creek runs that goes right through the middle of the university.
What I didn't anticipate is that it would take me seven months and six wrecked canvases and six fresh ones to make these, and that these would take such a strong turn towards Chinese landscape painting.
Actually, I shouldn't be surprised by either of these turn of events, I suppose. I really had no idea of the motif I'd use, and I worked through many, so I had to practically destroy six canvases just to find my way to open space again. And the more literal Chinese-influenced motif shouldn't surprise me-- that's been turning up to some degree in all the work. I'm very happy with the outcome, I just didn't think it would be so pictorial. Except...
In December 2004 (see 200411219) I quickly painted four canvases in scummy blue/green turpentine, expecting to take them further. Instead, I stopped, looked them over, put them away and have pulled them out many time to see what they might tell me or point me towards. I ended up leaving them just as they are and giving them an Irish name, Sliabh Gorm (Green Mountain); besides the Chinese reference they also made me think of Co. Armagh in Northern Ireland, where we spent some time in 2000. They are pictured below. I re-photographed and posted about them again on 20050724; I wrote at that time, "Tentatively called "Green Mountain" or, in Irish, "Sliabh Gorm," these are from late 2004, oil on canvas, 16 x 12 inches each. These were made in a matter of minutes from thinned blue green oil. I've left them as is. I take them out every once in awhile to look at and see what I can learn from them and why I want to leave them as they are."
At that time I was thinking about them but didn't know what to do with the information. Well over a year ago they pointed the way toward the Berkeley Paintings, which I didn't know, and at which I eventually arrived. I think there is more to be gotten from them, and from these new paintings.
Sliabh Gorm, 2004, oil on canvas, 16 x 12 inches each
Martin Bromirski & Tao Chi (Shitao)
Martin Bromirski writes to comment on the Berkeley Paintings, notes my connection to the Tao Chi (Shitao) painting, and then points out to me his 2004 painting. Take note:
Martin Bromirski, 2004
Tao-chi: a leaf from an An Album for Taoist Yü, late 17th century.
Ocean View (Berkeley Painting #6)
Ocean View (Berkeley Painting #6), 2006, oil and aluminum Rust-oleum on clear acrylic on linen, 23 x 15 in
April 12, 2006
Strawberry (Berkeley Painting #5)
Strawberry (Berkeley Painting #5), 2006, oil and aluminum Rust-oleum on clear acrylic on linen, 23 x 16 in
Westfall & Sillman in Brooklyn Rail
The Brooklyn Rail seems to be doing lots of things right for the (arts) community there. For example, two interviews in the recent issue: John Yau with Stephen Westfall and Phon Bui with Amy Sillman.
Westfall: I like that it flickers back and forth between whole and fragment. There’s this back and forth between seeing the whole and then only being aware of fragments and being aware that the whole is made up of fragments. And again, in other words, it’s like, humility is both a great and awful word because nobody can wield it in reference to themselves and be humble. You can’t advertise humility as something that exists in one’s process, so you say this vulnerability is there. I believe there’s such a thing as a generous irony as opposed to a cynical irony—in fact we know there’s many different kinds of irony, and we live in an ironic way. But that means there’s also a compensatory irony that is the awareness that there’s a doubleness to things that have history. What I would hope is that when you look at planar abstraction, the other thing that we get, via Matisse, is a celebratory quality that can feel commemorative on a certain level. So you have this celebratory aspect coexisting with the shakiness and maybe a kind of humor comes out of the combination.
Sillman: I haven’t read much of Calvino’s work. What is present in my paintings is never based on a strategy or a plan. I suppose that’s the difference between writing and painting. I don’t know. I just have this perpetual faith that if I make these paintings they will be about something. I think they are now about struggling more than about play. The struggle is more evident. The images that end up showing are very simple: legs, a bird, a tree, a structure, some plumbing. The nameable things in the painting are elemental things, as if a child were trying to recognize the nomenclature and the tangible properties of the world that surrounds them, for sure.
April 11, 2006
La Loma (Berkeley Painting #4)
La Loma (Berkeley Painting #4), 2006, oil and aluminum Rust-oleum on clear acrylic on linen, 23 x 17 in
Tao-chi: a leaf from an An Album for Taoist Yü. See my essay About a leaf from Tao-chi's Album for Taoist Yü, December 2004.
Ernie Kwiat / Creature Ink
Old friend Ernie Kwiat (as in, we've known Ernie a long time, going back to undergrad days around 1979) tags his newish weblog Creature Ink with the following:
If there is one constant element with the art I have created, beginning from the first time I tried to draw until now, it would be monsters and creatures of all sorts.
Check out the grubs (fine drawing) and Ernie's definition of the difference between illustration and fine art.
You should see Ernie's place- plastic painted creatures and figures and monsters, comic books, posters, books, and a bunch of guitars. Occasionally Ernie and I get together and bash out a few songs. He has a wonderful voice and is fun to play with.
If you bought a Sesame Street product in the 90's- a book, a watch, a t-shirt, a bib, some blocks, and on and on- there's a pretty good chance Ernie drew the images on it and did a fair amount of the layout. I have an Oscar the Grouch watch.
I believe he's still making work for Sesame Street. But he's branched out, and has a few select items available at Uncle Ernie's Oddball Collection of T-shirts & Fun, which of course I highly recommend.
April 10, 2006
Essay at Furtherfield by Rob Myers
Late last week I received an email telling me that I had been given a "Furtherfield ID Card!" I had no idea what that meant; there was little info in the email, and only one context-setting line that said, "Update your Artist ID Card." I thought it was some type of commerical pitch, like, "Register with us and start selling your art now!".
I clicked the link, and boy was I surprised: there was a page about my art with two images and an excerpt from the esssay that George Lawson wrote for me in late 2004. Neat. It turns out that "Furtherfield is an online platform for the creation, promotion, and criticism of adventurous digital/net art work for public viewing, experience and interaction," and is a "London based, non-profit organisation. We aim to develop a sustainable model for the promotion and support of networked and distributed creativity."
As I looked through the names of artists collected there I recognized several names, among them Rich White, who I met through -empyre- last June.
Later I looked at my Furtherfield page wondering if I could edit it-- partly because one of the images there is actually oil on canvas not anything more hifalutin' that that, and when I clicked on a button on the bottom of the page labeled "Review" I was taken to something completely unexpected: an short essay about my HTML work by Rob Myers, which is quite wonderful and perceptive; I am delighted to read it. The complete essay can be read at Furtherfield, but I am going to borrow it and reproduce it below so that I have a complete copy here in my archives.
Rob Myers is, among many other projects, the author of draw-something software and the maker of lots of very interesting image types. He also translated or helped translate the essay that Manik wrote about my work almost a year ago, They Are What They Are & Layers.
Two more things before the essay:
First, Rob is the first person besides myself to comment articulately about the connection between my HTML work and the work on paper that I've been saying has been there all along. Thanks very much for that, Rob.
Second, Furtherfield does the same thing most other web sites have done when reproducing my work, which is to force an HTML drawing to become a graphic file. Look at the image on the essay page- the image is a JPEG, and slightly grainy, too. It is made from a screen capture. What's extra odd in this case is that the source of that captured image, Red Hoops of 20060329, is actually made with HTML and an animated GIF in it, so it moves, wheras so much of the rest of the HTML drawings are perfectly static. Because of the site's design, of course, which is formatted to place an image at the top of the page rather than some markup that makes the browser display an image, well, my work is a round peg forced into a square hole, and changed because of that. That's par for the course; in a way, I like that my work has a right place and form of presentation, that there are places where it really can't and shouldn't go.
But no complaints, really. Read Rob's essay; this is nice.
Every day since 2002 Chris Ashley has created an abstract coloured drawing in hand-coded HTML tables and posted it to his weblog “Look, See”. The structured format of a weblog frames these small but often complex works perfectly. Weblogs are an informal medium and personal weblogs often have the quality of a diary or consisting of a confessional nature. This is a deflating context for art, one that in Chris's case allows some of the aesthetic content of high and late modernism to be rehabilitated without bathos. What was once meant to be universal is made personal, not with the knowingness of Neo Geo but with a remixer's virtuosity and enthusiasm. Weblogs are also a highly referential medium, some weblogs consist almost entirely of commentaries on news or links to other blogs. The visually referential nature of Chris's HTML drawings shares this quality. Despite being grid-based geometric abstracts they evoke the heroic universal grids of high modernism, 8-bit computer graphics, or to the colours and forms of scenes of nature or technology. This is quite apart from their titles, which often refer to concrete entities. Again the informality of the weblog's context prevents the problem of how something concrete can be expressed or represented in abstraction from becoming a problem. These are very successful works, and paradoxically it is the limitations of their chosen medium that helps make them so. Grids, especially HTML table grids, are a restrictive format. But this formal limitation can serve to free other qualities such as colour and composition. And formal constraints have often been used as a spur to creativity, by Dada or the Oulipo for example. Looking at the watercolour works that Chris has also posted is instructive. Like the HTML table drawings they are formal but playful exercises in colour and composition. There is a strong hint of Sol LeWitt's geometric abstracts to some of the forms, and like LeWitt Chris's work can be seen as an ironic continuation of high modernism after its death in the 1960s. Where LeWitt's ironisation was in the form, with the platonism of pure abstraction recast as rigid geometric specifications, Chris's is in the subject, with visual referentiality replacing that hermetic platonism. Recently, Chris has added another classic web design staple to his HTML, single-pixel animated GIFs. The result is not limited animation but very succesful moving images. Duration and movement of colour become formal properties alongside hue, saturation and transparency. Falling strips of colour evoke rain, flashing panels of contrasting brightness become lightning or city lights. This is more distillation than abstraction, it is peak shift evocation of visual experience. It is the way that Chris's HTML table drawings hold and animate their aesthetic references that give them the internal complexity required to have a critical voice. Like a political weblog they draw in, interrogate and comment on issues from a larger world, although the world of aesthetics rather than politics. And it is this that gives them their lasting value as art. Look, See - http://www.chrisashley.net/weblog/ Reviewer: Rob Myers
Earlier HTML Drawings - http://chrisashley.net/htmldrawings/
Watercolours - http://www.chrisashley.net/weblog/archives/cat_on_paper.html
Moving Images - http://www.chrisashley.net/weblog/archives/2006_03.html
Panoramic (Berkeley Painting #3)
Panoramic (Berkeley Painting #3), 2006, oil and aluminum Rust-oleum on clear acrylic on linen, 23 x 17 in
Gainsborough's Brushstrokes
In May 2005 I saw Thomas Gainsborough's (1727–1788) The Mall in St James's Park at the Frick Collection in New York. I had never given Gainsborough much thought before, but I was so impressed by this painting, particularly by the qualities of paint and light, and how despite its depiction of a certain privileged class of the time the paint and the painted marks seem so radically gestural, expressive and material, that I wrote a few brief thoughts in Thomas Gainsboroug: How Modern? (see the painting there).
In mid January of this year I spent a Sunday afternoon at the San Francisco Legion of Honor, one of the two Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (FAMSF), the other being the De Young, with the recently opened new building. On this afternoon I discovered a painting that has probably been hanging in the museum for decades, and one which I probably have walked by dozens of time, being somewhat immune to most portraits. Well, live and learn; always keep you eyes and mind open. Behold: Gainsborough's Mrs. Fitzherbert of 1784.
The image below is a scan; the FAMSF has an online image database that holds a fair amount of the collections, and which used to have hi-res tiling images that allowed a very close look at individual works with a fairly high degree of resolution. The database was hosted and run at UC Berkeley, probably as a research project. However, without explanation this feature suddenly disappeared from the FAMSF website sometime in Janaury, leaving only smaller, almost useless images (but a still useful text), and so my hope of a decent image to write about a bit was nixed, until Saturday, when the musuem member's magazine arrived in the mail, and there inside was a full-page image of Mrs. Fitzherbert. Apparently, I am not the only person who thinks highly of this painting. Although this scan doesn't at all approach seeing this painting for real there are a few things evident here that will give the viewer a good idea of what is going on in this painting. First, take a look:
At first glance the painting seem conventional enough. Mrs. Fitzherbert is caught in her youthful beauty- porcelain skin, good health, intelligent eyes, obviously kind and reflective, caught in a moment of thought or relaxation, full of contentment. As is typical the face gets the most finish (hence, time and the most paint), and next come the hands. After that the clothing is painted in, slightly out of focus or lacking in detail so as not to detract from our lady. Finally, the background gets filled in, appearing to not really matter so, except for the gorgeous red glow of a curtain's edge on the left which has been pulled back slightly to show a hint of landscape and sky along her arm above the elbow, just enough to connect her to the world, to light and air, to property and otherness, a slight opening that breaks the vacuum of an otherwise sealed off setting.
This is a pretty solidly constructed painting; in spite of its looseness in areas in feels like a whole. There is a real feeling of life and breath. The eye takes great satisfaction in moving around the painting, from her face down her arm to out beyond the curtain, then back inside and sliding down her sleeve for a glance across her ambiguous lap to skitter back up the switchbacks of white squiggles in her collar, climbing the rungs of her hair into the erotic darkness around the edge of her neck, and back out to her face. Or you can take that loop in reverse. In this painting you've got your compositional triangles, circles, and cylinders. Gainsborough knows what he is doing.
Painters in these times were basically contractors for hire. A good portrait painter cranked out a lot of work, making appealing likenesses by freshening people up a bit, making them look beautiful or important or powerful or simply visible in a way that these days we take for granted. Now, anyone can have their photo taken. In Gainsborough's time, with some exceptions, typically only the well-to-do were recorded. But a painter, one who is an artist who engages in process and invention, who enjoys the magic of mixing paint and coaxing the paint to make some kind of image, is going to push things a bit, to see what more they can get out of the whole act besides filthy lucre. As any worker wonders, "what's in it for me?" Apparently, what really got Gainsborough going, was brushwork. Look close at this detail below and note what he is up to; this is a big part of what caught my eye in January:
This is some wicked, loose, fast brushwork. Gainsborough loves the brush. Some of the paint here is no more glorified than fingerpainting, except the finger is a paintbrush and it's an extension of him, a master in full control making a few strokes and loops say so much.
Hanging down from the middle top, look at the four or five dark broad strokes of hair; there is umber and white and probably something like ultramarine all streakily applied with a wide, soft flat brush in just a few short, stop-and-start strokes.
Beginning in the upper right corner a white stroke, probably made with a stiffer round brush, cascades down in a few turns and disappears in the lower left, merging into a mass of pushed around strokes with barely any definition. When you see the painting for real this white stroke is brighter and meanders down in one continuous, curvy movement. It's breathtaking in its directness and simplicity and descriptiveness.
In the top left corner compare the hanging dark hair to the lighter hair on the right; it's different in color, and texture, and weight, and it's just the right thing to show by contrast that the hair on the right is closer to us than the darker hair on the left.
And finally, look at the far right about one third of the way down: suspended in the darkness of the background, and rooted in her collar but thrown out into space like a lasso, a single stroke loops around itself and ends, poised like a pipe cleaner, pointing towards the right edge. Look back at the image of the complete painting above and find that stroke-- it doesn't really quite make sense. Sure, it looks like the edge of a part of a layered collar in shadow, but it also just looks like a loopy stroke of painting hanging off in the middle of nowhere.
These strokes are a lot of the territory where a painter like Gainsborough lives. This is where he is finding amazing little ways for paint to do things that someone else may not be able to do. Most painters are trying to do something like this, whether whether with strokes, or paint qualities, or color, or kinds of surfaces. I am reminded of James Elkins' What Painting Is. I'll end with this brief excerpt below, hoping that I've gotten across the point that looking at a painting to see how it's made, to see what the artist is doing, provides essential of information about that painting, its time and place, the artist's attitude and ability, the interplay of representation and abstraction, standards or expectations and individuality, material and application, and the degree to which paint has many levels of resolution: at a viscerally visual level, as physically brushed liquified pigment; at the level of how images as representation coalesce and dissolve; and at an intellectual level, were the physical use of a material in a conceptually framed format is a problem that accomodates many different kinds of solutions.
The sensations I get from paint come from attending to different marks and the way they were made. I am using very small details in this book to to make the point that meaning does not depend on what the paintings are about: it is there at a lower level, in every inch of the canvas. Substances occupy the mind by invading it with thoughts of the artist's body at work. A brushstroke is an exquisite record of the speed and force of the hand that made it, and if I think of a hand moving across the canvas-- or better, if I just retrace it, without thinking-- I learn a great deal about what I see. Painting is scratching, scraping, waving, jabbing, pushing, and dragging. At times the hand moves as if it were writing, but in paint; and other times it moves as if the linen canvas were a linen shirt, and the paint was stain that had to be rubbed under running water. Some painting motions are like conversation, where the hands keep turning in the air to make a point. Others are slow careful gestures, like touching someone's eye to remove a fleck of dirt.
Painters feel these things as they look at pictures, and they may re-encact the motions that went into the paintings by moving their hands along in front of the canvas as if they were painting the pictures at that moment. In a musuem, it is often possible to tell an experienced painter from an historian because the painter will step up to a picture and make gestures, or trace outlines. Those movments are not always done in any deliberate way-- they are second nature, a kind of automatic response like waving to a friend (Elkins, James. What Painting Is: How to Think About Oil Painting, Using the Language of Alchemy. New York: Routledge, 1999. pp 96-97).
April 09, 2006
Leaf Nine: Script
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Leaf Nine: Script, 20060409, HTML, 365 x 265 pixels
Cragmont (Berkeley Painting #2)
Cragmont (Berkeley Painting #2), 2006, oil and aluminum Rust-oleum on clear acrylic on linen, 23 x 18 in
April 08, 2006
Leaf Eight: Ladder
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Leaf Eight: Ladder, 20060408, HTML, 365 x 265 pixels
Tilden (Berkeley Painting #1)
Tilden (Berkeley Painting #1), 2006, oil and aluminum Rust-oleum on clear acrylic on linen, 23 x 19 in
April 07, 2006
Leaf Seven: Cylinder
Leaf Seven: Cylinder, 20060407, HTML, 365 x 265 pixels
Energy and Abstraction at the Studio Museum in Harlem
Holland Cotter in the NYTimes:
Energy and Abstraction at the Studio Museum in Harlem
HISTORIES get lost. That's how life is. Then, when the time is right, they get found. "Energy/Experimentation: Black Artists and Abstraction 1964-1980" at the Studio Museum in Harlem, is about such a history, which went something like this:During one of the most radical periods in 20th-century American politics, the black power era, a group of African-American artists was working with what was, and still is, one of the most radical forms of 20th-century art, abstraction. Radicalism is relative, though, and in this case politics and culture were on different tracks.
At a time of impassioned gestures and hot visions — raised fists, "the fire next time" — abstract art appeared cool and noncommittal. It had been conceived as a revolutionary language of color, line, shape. But the 1960's revolution was about bodies and beliefs. Also, abstraction raised authenticity issues. It was widely seen as white art, academic art. Whites viewed black practitioners as copycats; blacks dismissed them as sellouts.
So, while a few figures like Melvin Edwards, Sam Gilliam and Al Loving (1935-2005) gained visibility, abstraction by African-Americans as a phenomenon faded from view, and its invisibility has persisted. The Guggenheim Museum's 1996 survey, "Abstraction in the 20th Century: Total Risk, Freedom, Discipline," included no artists of color.
But now the relationship between aesthetics and politics is changing. Many young artists see racially defined art as limiting; a problem, not a solution. A return to the story of earlier artists who struggled with that same view is in order, and that's what the Studio Museum exhibition does.
William T. Williams's "Trane" (1969)
April 06, 2006
Leaf Six: Minaret
Leaf Six: Minaret, 20060406, HTML, 365 x 265 pixels
Pulse 2006, 1708 Gallery, Richmond, VA
I will be in a group show titled Pulse 2006 at 1708 Gallery in Richmond, VA opening May 5. Artists include: Rachel Hayes, Lisa Fletcher Rundstrom, Brad Hampton, Anna Von Mertens, Steve Karlik and myself.
I will be showing a huge wall-sized installation of 365 printed HTML drawings from 2005-2006 and a projection of the same 365 drawings in an HTML slideshow.
Here's the front of the announcement that can also be seen on a weblog for communications about the show:
April 05, 2006
Leaf Five: Showers
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Leaf Five: Showers, 20060405, HTML, 365 x 265 pixels
Will Fair Use Survive?
The Free Expression Policy Project at the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law has issued a report titled Will Fair Use Survive? Free Expression in the Age of Copyright Control (PDF).
In NYFA Currents Herb Tam connects this report to the arts, where appropriation or re-use are still going strong:
Given the resurgence of appropriation-based work, it is timely that New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice recently issued its status report on copyright laws in the current cultural climate. Titled Will Fair Use Survive? Free Expression in the Age of Copyright Control, its conclusions, while grimly stated, actually offer some legal elbow room for contemporary artists (not to mention hip-hop producers and documentary filmmakers) whose work depends on appropriation. In a cut ’n paste, information-based culture where sharing is becoming an ideal (think Wikipedia.org) and intellectual ownership is being questioned, what do copyright laws have to say about the practices of those artists mentioned above?
April 04, 2006
Leaf Four: Repose
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Leaf Four: Repose, 20060404, HTML, 365 x 265 pixels
Joanne Mattera catalogue
Revised and reposted on 20060416.
I recently received Joanne Mattera's catalogue Joanne Mattera: Ten Years of Encaustic Painting, published on the occasion of her solo show at Winfisky Gallery, Salem State College, Salem, Mass., March 21 – April 13, 2006. The catalogue is 8.5 x 8.5 inches, and contains 16 pages, fifteen color images, a statement by Joanne, an interview with Julie Karabenick, a selected critical overview and biography, and a short essay by Flavia Rando. Joanne will also be showing at Marcia Wood Gallery in Atlanta, April 20 - May 27, 2006.
Notes on Joanne Mattera
The fact that these paintings are made with wax is a prominent aspect of this work. When I think of encaustic I think of two things: something that has body but is luminescent, and a process that involves heat, speed and layers. I think of these two things literally, but also historically, culturally, and psychologically.
Wax is translucent. It is milky but not clouded. It can be colored, but never quite opaque. Light goes in and comes back out as color. In the depth of that wax light is held, it glows. But it isn't clear light. It's frosted, subdued, quiet. The wax is thick, it might be in layers. In that body, and in that glowing light, seeing is slowed down. We see the surface, and we also see into the wax. On the surface we see texture--brush strokes, scrapes, marks, lumps, etc.-- and then we can go beyond and below the surface. There is a depth that our vision goes into, sees into. We see light and color as a suspended substance, like looking into an ice cube or a crystal, and the act of looking into something is an instance, like when we see our breath on a cold day, or when we look into slowly moving water. The colored wax is both a body that holds the light, and as paint it is also a medium that functions as a depiction of a quality of light. (Right: Joanne Mattera: Silk Road, 2005, encaustic on panel, 12 x 12 inches each)
To paint in encaustic means to engage in labor. It requires melting and mixing, it's hot and time consuming. But when the encaustic is ready the actual act of painting must be conducted quickly. These movements are fast. We see that in the paint's application and the recorded gestures. And here we enter into a recognition of different paces in the paintings. There is the knowledge of a slow preparation, and there is the slowness of our looking into glowing color, and there is also the actual speed of the execution. We see how the execution is actually a frozen moment or, rather, the cold state of something done quickly, in the (pun alert) heat of the moment. This somewhat contradictory state—of contrasting slowness and speed—is something to which the qualities of encaustic seem particularly suited.
I think Mattera intimately knows encaustic as both a material and as contribution to her subject. She recognizes the situation regarding encaustic’s pace and light and body; she allows the medium to be its best by using it directly and by staying out its way. But having said this I certainly don’t mean that she does this passively by simply letting colored wax do what it will do. She has to employ general construction techniques like controlling buildup and exercising finesse with surface. And of course as a painter she also has to do the usual painterly things like pay attention to scale (for example, the relationship between brushstroke and paint density to image and each panel's size), orchestrate color, and work the edges, both the edges of the panels and the edges where different areas of paint meet. I would think that for a painter using encaustic it would be tempting to try to make or let the wax do too much, to let the encaustic take over as something beautiful, dense, and physical. But what I see in Mattera's imagery is that it is reduced to a point where the material becomes an active ingredient in her work’s meaning, but the imagery is also still complex enough to be about much more than wonderful effects of encaustic; they are paintings.
Encaustic makes light physical, almost an object. Light is a major preoccupation throughout western painting’s history. One can go backwards from Rothko to Seurat and the Impressionists to someone like Gerome to… what road do you want to take? Fragonard to Chardin to de La Tour and so on, or from Goya to to Rubens to El Greco or whoever? Eventually you’ll get to Durer and Van Eyck and Holbein or Van der Weyden. Pick your own names— you can easily make your own list. And light is prominent in other arts: think of Limoges Email peints--one sees a luminous surface that is about light; think of the glazes on Islamic tiles and Chinese Sancai figures; think of stained glass. And think of Dan Flavin, or Robert Irwin, or James Turrell, and the importance of not only light but the actual phenomenological experience of light and perception. Light is a major preoccupation because light is how we see, and various qualities of light have different moods, evoke different times and places, and create drama.
The stripe, the dot, and the stroke are a way to make light a clear subject. The light in Joanne Mattera’s paintings is about the present and the just passing present. The light is present in the material— it’s physical, and it interacts with the environment and with current lighting conditions. But if her art has what some might call a contemplative dimension it’s because while the light is a thing that draws us in, it’s the way this light is held in the wax, and the way we look below the surface and into the depth of this light-filled wax, that slows down our looking just a beat to an even more present presence, one that is slow enough for us to see passing. If our looking stayed on the surface our attention might glance off and finish. If our looking goes beyond a surface, even if a only a fraction of an inch into a physical depth and a depicted depth, our seeing is more settled. The physical effect is slower looking. The psychological effect is awareness of self in relation to the phenomenological world.
Notes to add: color, mark, and line.
Revised and reposted on 20060416.
Douglas Witmer Minus Space catalogue
Part of the introduction I wrote to Douglas's interview is printed in the catalogue. Here is the entire introduction:
Douglas Witmer makes paintings with a purpose. I mean this in two ways — he makes paintings purposefully, and his paintings have a purpose. This is not to say in the least that his paintings are predetermined and strictly didactic. Despite their apparently structured appearance they are expressive rather than merely planned and executed, and porous rather than closed in meaning.Witmer’s varied and improvised use of color, surface, form, and material is surprisingly expressive. Anyone who spends time with Mondrian’s signature paintings, for example, knows that they are not rigid repetitions. Similarly, the viewer will find that Witmer’s paintings are individually achieved, and this is part of where his purposefulness lies: geometry is not something always precisely measured; it can be nuanced and emotional, and it often breaks rules or has unlikely sources. My mention of Mondrian of course risks a misunderstanding via an assumed derivation or inheritance, so perhaps a more appropriate and useful reference might be Klee’s sensitive, playful, and inventive qualities.
As for the purpose of Witmer’s paintings, this is always the tricky part — society generally wants to know what a piece of art is about, what it means, and what it is good for. But what does it really mean to understand art? Does it mean to know something with certainty, to explain it definitively, and then to move on? There usually isn’t a single answer to art’s meaning. Most good art is slippery — the meanings we try to catch and hold instead make us return to an art object again and again for confirmation and renewal.
Willem de Kooning’s oft-quoted statement is apt here: “Content is a glimpse of something, an encounter like a flash. It's very tiny — very tiny, content.” What we get from art may come in fragments, on the periphery and over time, and is often unexpected, indirect, and personal. Not only are Witmer’s paintings open to viewer associations, but they intentionally invite these associations. This, I think, is part of the purpose of Witmer’s art: these beautifully crafted, carefully considered paintings bear graphically clear but ambiguous images that make pictorial and physical spaces for the viewer to see, feel, and think. These spaces, handmade and shared, where nuance and touch are important, and where close-up observation of details matter, are where glimpses occur and meanings arise. These paintings involve the artist and the viewer in an intimate collaboration of looking. In a poem called Telling You All Rilke writes: “Let's invite something new/by unifying our silences;/if, then and there, we advance,/we'll know it soon enough.” Meaning is found in the experience of looking at Witmer’s paintings, not just in explanations, and in that looking a kind of knowing is possible.
— Chris Ashley, December 2005
April 03, 2006
Leaf Three: Shade
Leaf Three: Shade, 20060403, HTML, 365 x 265 pixels
April 02, 2006
Leaf Two: Spring
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Leaf Two: Spring, 20060402, HTML, 365 x 265 pixels