October 16, 2004
October 15, 2004
Joseph Hughes' Paintings, 2004
This essay was originally posted on 20041015, and is based on what I recall from my own observations and some factual statements I heard the artist make at the gallery opening on Thursday, October 7, 2004.
Further revised January 24, 2005; corrected a few facts about Joe Hughe's painting process, and elaborated on craft in the next to last paragraph.
Seeing the Hovering Image: Joseph Hughes' Recent Paintings
Introduction
Joseph
Hughes is showing six paintings at the Takada
Gallery in SF. All are vertical, stout rectangles. Five paintings
are in the eighteen to twenty inch high range, and one painting, by
far the largest, reaches sixty inches in height. All are painted in
acrylic; four, including the large painting, are on canvas and the
final two paintings are on linen. (Right: 2004/II (Thalo Dioxazine),
acrylic on canvas, 18-1/2 x 17-1/2")
Walking in the gallery one initially appears to be confronted with six monochrome paintings, each a different color, but if one spends just a little time with the paintings one finds that there is much more going on here than that. To describe the making of these paintings in terms that sound like a system or method is not to say that the paintings are either systematically or methodically made with a predictable outcome, that they are all the same but just use different colors; it simply means that the artist does employ a process that can be described, and that the paintings are individuals in a family of work exploring a set of problems on which the artist is for now focusing.
Shape & Drawing
Hughes' stretchers are actually trapezoids. The top and bottom
edges are parallel, but the top is slightly wider than the bottom,
which helps the eye make a visual correction so that the stretcher
appears to be square. It isn't something immediately noticeable, but
if you look close enough you'll wonder if the rectangles are actually
square. I thought I saw that the paintings were not square rectangles
and asked Hughes about this, which he verified.
Most painters today don't do this, though it's not an uncommon technique among painters very concerned about the painting as an object and a perceptual experience. Go back four hundred years or more to look at, for example, paintings made for a particular wall high above the viewer in a church; the height at which the painting is hung requires the viewer to look up at the painting, thus forcing a foreshortened view of the painting, meaning that the painting appears to narrow the higher it gets. If instead the painting is actually physically wider a certain amount at the top it will appear to flatten out to the viewer's eye, preserving the appearance of a square rectangle. The higher the painting, and the larger it is, the wider it may be along the top edge. Various tricks like this can be employed to influence the viewers perception of the work.
If one doesn't look close enough at the painting to notice its actual shape then it's easy to accept that it is actually square, which is how perception works. It's an illusion. One could call it realism, in the sense of the commonly accepted use of the word in art: making something appear real or natural through illusionistic means. That's just one little argument in the many I could make that abstract painting is actually realism. It is physical and perceptual, it is an actual viewing experience itself as well as associative, provoking feelings within the viewer that are in the moment, not abstracted or in reaction to a depiction of experience or feeling. But that's another essay.
Think of these trapezoids, a means of perceptual correction, even coercion, as the second piece of drawing the artist undertakes in making each work. Yes, it is drawing, because it is specifying a shape: it is a border, a line around what happens inside the painting and the environment that contains it, and it is illusory. But actually, the first piece of drawing is the size of the stretcher, because the size of the stretcher is a factor in the amount of correction required, determining the angles of the trapezoid needed to force paintings of different sizes to read as square. (How is this done? I don't know; there must be some formula, but I've never done it myself. That's a little research project.) And speaking of drawing, and having mentioned how high a painting is hung, there is a final piece of drawing in making the painting, typically considered after the actual painting phase of making the work, which is how high the painting, if it isn't site-specific, is hung on the wall. I've just described several drawing decisions to be considered even though a pencil or brush hasn't even necessarily touched the surface of the painting yet.
Painting
The actual painting phase in Hughes' process for this group
of paintings requires, as I understand it, basically four steps after
the canvas or linen support is secured over the stretcher. All painting
takes place while the stretcher is hanging on a wall.
-
First, the surface is covered evenly by a rolled-on colored acrylic ground; in the series this ground may appear to black, although it is actually a mixed color.
-
When the first ground is dry another layer of acrylic is applied over the entire surface. This ground may have some small amount of acrylic mixed in, but remains transparent. Essentially, Hughes is using a glaze technique.
-
After the second acrylic layer dries a prepared brush is used to paint vertical and slightly diagonal strokes of more fully pigmented acrylic. The prepared brush is a wide, flat brush modified by cutting out sections of the bristles to create gaps so that the brush no longer paints an even, solid stroke. Imagine the orignal brush like the fingers on a hand, straight and touching sides, forming a solid surface. Now imagine spreading the fingers out so that there are gaps between the fingers. The prepared brush, like spread fingers, will not paint a solid stroke. This is yet another drawing decision Hughes makes: he creates and uses a brush that paints several roughly parallel and separate smaller brushstrokes at once. In addition, he attaches the brush to longer handles, from two to six feet long, so that the brush isn't immediately held in his hand but is extended several feet from his body, transforming the act of painting from mere wrist or elbow movement through his arm and shoulder into the rest of the body.
- After the stroked colored paint is dry a final coat of lightly pigmented acrylic is poured over the painting.
The general approach undertaken at each stage of the painting is one of allover-- the entire canvas is the area of attack during each step, beginning with the design of the stretcher, through the gestural painting, to the final pouring of clear acrylic. At each stage Hughes is dealing with the entire surface as a flat field to be filled, marked, or covered. In the end the painting is a self-contained unit, a single body comprising several layer, each layer a series of gestures, smooth or gestural, designed to span and fit the complete surface. The viewer sees the painting in at least three modes: as a painted, gestural, flat image fitted over the surface; as illusionistic light and space through color and drawing; and as a single object composed of combined materials integrally locked together.
Subject & Color
The gestural component of each painting is probably most
easily taken to be the subject of the paintings, and at least the
most immediate level they are, if one thinks that a painting has to
present a figure, or depict an object, or wear some kind of decoration,
and that any of these is necessarily the subject of the painting.
The gesture can be read as figure, object, or decoration,
as a thing that exists in an environment or on top of a surface. But
there are other components of the painting at work, and the reading
of the gesture as a figure is just one of these components working
in tandem with the others.
The gesture is dependent on the black, a very uncommon color over which to paint--putting aside paintings on velvet--as it tends to kill color primarily because it does not reflect light back through the color on top to the eye. The two layers of poured acrylic, however, are a layer through which light does pass, and these clear layers give each painting a kind of buoyancy, as if the colored gesture is hovering ever so slightly. The bottom layer of clear acrylic separates the gesture from the black ground, and the top layer of acrylic seals-in the gesture, containing it under a clear surface and fixing it within the painting. This shallow space over the gesture wraps the painting up, integrates its components, and makes it a single object. But these two planes of clear acrylic do something very subtle and surprising, something even barely noticeable: the colored gesture is suspended, floats between two clear sheets, like a leaf in a book, an insect in amber, or moisture in a double-paned window, and perhaps even more powerfully: like an image in a mirror or a window. It is an image not quite there, faint and hard to hold. The gesture is a record of the artist's hand, susepended in a strange light in just that moment, and suddenly the painting has incredible depth, while still remaining very much a solid object.
The
gesture as an image resembles a flash, a stroke like a small explosion,
a flower underfolding, an action in the moment. And yet each gesture
is a flash as in an idea, like a sudden thought--something
flashed in my head, or flashed before my eyes-- and
is the manifestation of this idea or thought in an action. The gesture
is the least mechanical and least programmed component of each painting.
As thin, quickly applied, streaky paint , held between two sheets
of acrylic, hovering over a dark background providing minimal reflected
light, the colored gesture is almost a glimpse, like something fleeting,
but of course is also something static that can be returned to over
and over. With this in mind it may not only be that the gesture is
the primary image of the painting, but that the entire constructed
painting as a fleeting image--black, two layers of clear acrylic,
and a suspended colored gesture--is the primary image: it's not a
literally a mirror or window acting as a fleeting image, nor is it
the painted illusion of a mirror or a window, but instead is a construction
that enables the experience of looking at and for a fleeting image.
I'd like to suggest that this viewing experience is a primary subject
matter of the paintings, and that possible meanings to be found in
these paintings include: the act of looking for something; the act
of trying to isolate this something; the act of seeing something closely;
the act of trying to visually hold on to this something; the act of
taking time for looking; and the act of losing sight of something.
That the gesture is barely a something, is almost a nothing, allows
the viewer to look in a way that emphasizes the experience and the
recognition of this experience, not the recognition of a specific
object, place, or person, which would make the painting a picture
of something rather than something in itself.
The poet Jim Harris helps to illustrate this idea of looking and recognition as a flash by identyifing "the many Japanese Haiku poets who make use of the lightning flash as an initiating event (and metaphor) for a complete and fleeting instant of sudden perception[1]." These poems, all translations by Robert Hass, also connect to the ways I've attempted to delineate of experiencing the marks and imagery in Hughes' paintings::
How admirable!// to see lightning and not think// life is fleeting. -- Basho
Lightning flash--// what I thought were faces// are plumes of pampas grass. -- Basho
A dry riverbed// glimpsed// by lightning. -- Issa
Harris provides a final Haiku which frames "an act of layered perception with the strobe of a glimpse, which seems analogous to... the end-product... of Hughes' method" I describe above as a suspended, just-caught image:
Calligraphy of geese// against the sky--// the moon seals it. -- Buson
In this recent body of Hughes' work, however, there is an exception. In the smaller paintings the colored gestures barely cohere into something more than a slight spray, fan, or web-- the flash--which makes them better able to integrate into a painted object. The largest painting (Left: 2004/III (Jenkins Green), acrylic on canvas, 60 x 56") is quite a different story. It is covered and filled with a density of strokes that are roughly the same size as those in the smaller paintings. Where the smaller paintings more easily navigate the image/object dichotomy, the larger painting, filled with overlapping strokes, so much more readily reads as a picture. By this I mean something more than the obvious ways in which the many clustered strokes can begin to look like blades of grass, a field, falling or spraying water, or crystals, though they can do that, too. I mean that these bundles of strokes cluster into shifting angles and form what might conveniently be called a cubist kind of space: twisting, sudden changes of directions, and overlapping. This space is one which the viewer experiences and enters, moves within and can find places to anchor to. The large painting, because of its size and the accumulation of strokes, can't possible provide the intimate experience that the smaller ones do. It is a window onto a place with fixed spaces, and so is a representation, a picture. In this respect the large painting never becomes an integrated object.
Craft & Presentation
Hughes' paintings are finely crafted. How they are made is clear and
consistent. I was most impressed by the bead of acrylic that runs
along and stops at all four edges of the canvas as a kind of border.
The evenness of surfaces, the fine marks, and the clean edges of the
canvas are evidence of the great care with which these paintings have
been produced. These details are not small things; to be attuned to
this aspect is to find signs that pont the way towards the value of
close looking, a way that, if followed, shows the viewer that everything
counts, that to not closely observe every aspect of each painting
is to miss the content and meaning of the paintings. Hughes' conscious,
intentional decisions and process, made plain to the careful observer,
and the craft by which his decisions and process are carried out,
are indicators of the deeper purpose and content of his work. His
craft makes possible the joyful rewards from moments of visual concentration
and contemplation.
A final note about presentation: the two photos that accompany this essay are from the Takada Gallery website. These kinds of photos do nothing but a disservice to the paintings. For starters, the photos are cropped to the edges of paintings, paintings which do not have right angles in the first place, meaning that some part of the painting, the top left and right edges, is missing. Photographing paintings head-on implies that one believes that what is being photogrphed is flat and can be captured, like a picture, but these paintings are are not meant to be "pictures," not are they to only be looked at straight-on. Since the actual painting as an object is important in this case, shooting them head-on denies important aspects of each painting. And no lighting conditions will never be able to capture the color and surface of these paintings, so why even try? My recommendation would be to photograph each painting as an installation: either shoot head-on but show wall space and shadows around each painting; or shoot at a slight angle to show the edge of the canvas (examples below). Showing a painting in an installation view prevents the viewer from relying on assumptions about what kind of painting is being shown, instead reinforcing the knowledge that they are only seeing the merest photographic representation of the painting, which will never replace looking at the painting in situ.
[1] Excerpted from an email from Jim Harris to the author on October 23, 2004.
Chris Ashley, 2004
| Installation examples: | |
 |
 |
| Richard
Schur, Untitled (86), 2004, arylic
on cotton, 150 x 140 cm |
Brent Hallard, installation view, 2002 |
Stephen Westfall Interview
Stephen Westfall interview at Artnet:
...out of this repetition a kind of deep-structure evolution takes place. So the changes when they come are profound. But the changes don’t mean that I just drop what I have been doing and then just repeat that change. Rather, it becomes another element in a group of possibilities that I reserve the right to retain, not put down in favor of the new thing. So, at any moment now the work can go in any number of directions. It’s like if you are a pitcher in baseball, they say you are a good pitcher if you have three pitches. But what if you have like 11 pitches, or 15 pitches? Nobody can conceive of that in baseball, but I think you can conceive of that in art.
Stephen Westfall
Señor Stack
2004
alkyd/oil on canvas
36 x 36 in.
October 14, 2004
October 13, 2004
October 12, 2004
James Harris: Singing the Body Electric
Written for the CD "Christopher Ashley: HTML Drawings 2002-2004," for which I owe many thanks.
James Harris: Singing the Body Electric
Illuminations:
. . . Celestial Light,
~ ~ ~ ~ All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from
|
Observations:
Chris Ashley's pictures, illumined images on a flatscreen surface that cross over from inner-vision to realization via keyboard and code, not brush-stroke and paint, are surprisingly embodied. These are "table drawings" created using HTML—hypertext markup language, the programming code that enables the World Wide Web. Individual pictures appear as part of a series or set, with the sets accumulating over days, months and years at Ashley's website. That's the practicum, the result is a body of work that interrogates color, and in the bargain, investigations of arranged space interrogate time. These discrete events, going past as daily images, gather and grow together, becoming a metamorphosis . . . which is, after all, an embodiment of time.
It would be a mistake to consider these as images created only for instant consumption—they present a panorama of temporality in the synoptic revelation of light, color and shape; they depict tension and resolution in formal choices rendered onscreen while deploying a full range of painterly strategies. Ashley's relentless rectangular shapes—called to the service of color—jostle for primacy, get on top of one another, are symmetric at times, asymmetric at others, resolved today, ruptured tomorrow; some pictures are labyrinthine, others multi-dimensional; the most haunting invite a viewer to meditate on propositions of depth or movement aglow on the still surface of the screen.
I find most compelling those pictures made of delicate, discrete rectangles, patterned across larger color fields toned to hues that mimic translucence—the Hummingbird and Three Edges sets are good examples. These formally austere medleys rise above the clichéd noise of saturated color working too hard for emotional approval—a frequent outcome in computer generated imagery. Look into the bounty of these pictures: a straight line fibrillates along the edge where two colors meet; a synonymous hue spreads across a paced gap of smooth, tepid space; a jumble of small box-shapes pulsates.
The underlying formal strategies often appear effortless, or better, quietly inevitable; they rarely over-reach the artist's active eye, rarely fail to heed slow zones of light and color where the mind seems to pause and catch its breath (find inspiration?). The most successful creations in Ashley's work—and plenty exist to choose from—are saturated with an invitation to dwell in their amplitude, to enter an idealized space that seduces like raw reality.
The pictures I frequently return to (in addition to the sets mentioned above, also see 18 Lohans, 11 Bodhis and Dasarâjadharma) stream into view free of the fantods and caprices of a computer image beholden to its aura of technological origin; these are seminal creations, not illustrative examples; given color, given light, given bounded space, they are phenomena not epiphenomena.
On many occasions when returning to look at these pictures, I encounter musical elements that inform and suffuse them. It's difficult to choose a good way to explain this. For starters, consider how the existence of a musical score is analogous to the source code that defines and circumscribes, but does not enact, perform or present the "table drawings". If you've listened to an 18th Century keyboard piece, played on both harpsichord and piano (think of Keith Jarrett’s harpsichord and Glenn Gould’s piano performances of Bach's Goldberg Variations), you will have come across an antecedent to a 21st Century debate about computer-enabled imagery: where is the artist's intent when code-generated images based on one source display differently in different computing environments?
But there's more. When Keats wrote, "Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard/ Are sweeter," he had been looking at the images on a Grecian urn, an "unravish’d bride of quietness" and the "silent" revelers depicted at a wedding. Something like Keats' experience—to hear, or imagine, music when looking at an image—is one reaction I have to Ashley's work. I've had similar experiences looking at the later paintings of Piet Mondrian—aware of something musical that is more formally fundamental and essential than simply the suggestive words in titles: Rhythm, Fox Trot and Boogie-Woogie. I also find musical elements in several of M.C. Escher's graphic sets: Sky & Water and Symmetry and Metamorphosis. Why these two Dutch artists, dissimilar as their work is, when other examples might be given? Because each of them—and Ashley—achieves, with minimal compositional elements, the effects I find musical. Furthermore, it's fair to say that some of Ashley's images echo, if distantly, Mondrian's rectangular grid and limited palette. And, Ashley can create the illusion of dimensionality and depth on a flat plane through the transformation of basic geometric shapes, as does Escher.
In Ashley's practice, the ongoing daily presentation of each picture makes it available as part of a lineage that can approach visual melody through subtle color variation, or in a shape doppelgänger, and often both. This referential accretion within the sets—of color palettes and kindred abstract forms—creates a larger context for the individual images. These forward driving re-organizations and re-statements unify a thread (a kind of content free narrative excursion) that arcs through claimed time in a visual sequence of tones, crescendos and recapitulations. One trope of Ashley’s practice, invoked occasionally at the conclusion of a set of pictures—to re-present the whole group in a single concatenated image—makes readily available the fugal elements that migrate and turn up from one picture to the next in many of his sets.
Daily improvisation drives the images through time. This is as true for these pictures as it is for the found melodies of jazz. In the liner notes to Miles Davis' album Kind of Blue, pianist Bill Evans compares jazz improvisation to the spontaneity demanded in Japanese zenga—lively brush-stroke painting. Evans remarks: "As the painter needs his framework of parchment, the improvising musical group needs its framework in time." One of the fascinating things about the pictures being considered here is how their improvisations unfold, and remain visible, while incorporating a temporal dimension. The incongruent notion of temporality represented in stasis that these pictures embody—a sort of cousin to Keats' unheard melodies—carries with it an invitation to contemplation, meditation, and a rainbowed celebration of space and time.
The source-coded way of making pictures electronically is still in an early stage of emergence, not yet fully fledged. Again, think of a musical analogy: for most of human history the auditory vibrations that create the sounds of music have been produced by physical acts of scraping, plucking, banging, shaking, blowing; recently, technologies that create sound electronically have opened new possibilities for instrumentation and musical exploration. Similarly, computer generated graphics extend the traditional, physically mediated, realm of images—paint, dye, canvass, silk, wood, ceramic, plaster, metal, and so forth—making possible the creation of light and color and pictures out of only electronic impulses.
Whether these pictures are art, as opposed to decoration or doodling, depends not on how and where they are produced and reproduced, not on the use or absence of historical materials, not, in the end, on tradition or fixed ideas, but on the possibility and intensity of perceptual experience purchased by the made thing, purchase that enables imagination to restore a fragment of time to wonder through the spirit of a thing created. The last two lines of Walt Whitman's I Sing the Body Electric are:
O I say now these are not the parts and poems of the body only, but of the soul,
O I say now these are the soul!
It seems to me the pictures Ashley's making are worth looking into.
Meditations:
Shot with innumerable hues — Sappho
Light is the first of painters — R.W. Emerson
Isn't that the artist's best joy, to control light? — Dorothea Tanning
Doubt leads to form — Paul Valéry
The shapes nearest shapelessness awe us most — A. R. Ammons
Time seen as an image is time lost to sight — Barrett Watten
Why isn't the power of sight absolute? — Czeslaw Milosz
Viewing is not a trivial shift — Lyn Hejinian
James Harris
Summer 2004
October 11, 2004
George Lawson: Chris Ashley's
Written for the CD "Christopher Ashley: HTML Drawings 2002-2004," for which I owe many thanks.
George Lawson: Chris Ashley’s HTML Drawings
Chris Ashley is a painter. That’s the first thing I want to say, and as it may turn out, the most radical, because he creates his color images without paint. Ashley uses HTML (hypertext markup language), the original and rudimentary instructional software of the internet, and delivers the results to his audience via the web. No brushes to clean. No walls to leave nail holes in. His studio/gallery is, in the parlance, a Blog, an online journal he maintains on a day to day basis. As a typical viewer, my experience with his work is quite a bit more intimate than it would be in a gallery setting, checking in every few days as I do, usually curled up in bed with a laptop, to find out what’s new in this 24/7 digital version of Malraux’s Museum Without Walls. Ideas and images flow unfettered out of Ashley’s agile, leaping sensibility, and if I’ve been away for a week, it’s generally quite a feed, for every day brings a new image.
Ashley creates his art through coded instruction, simple commands that give his rectangles hue, width and breadth, and determine their location relative to one another. His method is constructivist but his manner is decidedly expressionist—he builds his grid-bound images intuitively, almost in spite of the grid, through a series of choices that accumulate and graft onto one another. The result is organic: a kind of cluster, like rectangular grapes on a rectilinear stem. He feels his way into the color, and into the broader implications of his task. The daily offerings unfold serially, usually around a conceptual theme cued in by the title. A week’s worth gives one the chance to see the development of Ashley’s running idea and to consider the relationship between his formally constrained abstraction and the narrative reference he extends by association. It is in this timely accumulation, with images so easily archived and cross-referenced, that Ashley finds the real strength of his medium.
There are philosophical implications to the virtual reality, the non-physical aspect of these HTML images. Rather than painting, one might call them coding, and one could ask angel-on-a-pinhead questions like, “What direction is the light coming from?” and, “How big are they?” They don’t conform to painting’s standard vocabulary, deriving their color as they do neither from mass tone nor undertone. For the many ways they are different from painting, though, what seems to differentiate the actual experience of viewing them most is their convenience, how readily accessed they are. Considered as paintings, Ashley’s images conjure the same pros and cons compared to physical objects as emails do compared to handwritten letters. What digital correspondence lacks in the perfumed, autograph, keepsake department, it makes up for in its running immediacy, and the same holds true for the generative nature of Ashley’s art, lending itself as it does to published output with its own built-in currency. A visit to Ashley’s blog always feels like late breaking news. Traditional painting, by its static nature, has a way of arresting and stretching time. Images unfold according to inner clocks. By working in an iterative medium that is so responsive to the moment, so readily updated and refined, Ashley has found a way to introduce even more plasticity into painting’s inherent ability to manipulate time. He enjoys both the suspended release of static painting and the serial accumulation of the web, a kind of painted journalism.
Since the pioneering days of the internet, creatives have described the challenges of making online art as “designing on water. ” Ashley seems perfectly at home with the flux of his medium, with colors that shift from monitor to monitor and an oeuvre that consists at its core of nothing but electronically stored chains of zeroes and ones. Whether or not his art conforms in fact to any conventional definition of painting, his artistry, its intent and application, is very much in keeping with the highest standards of the painter. The simple language he chooses keeps him much more closely aligned to the painter’s vocabulary than to the dizzying technology of computer generated imagery. He uses the inherent constraints of HTML to create new freedoms and uses this freedom to imbue his work with fresh meaning, extending the vernacular and experiential impact of constructivism. In spite of their classical roots, these are subtly tuned and freshly spawned works. The substantive value of Ashley’s imagery will outlive any novelty value that his working in HTML carries. He never forgets that his true medium is color and light, and he wields these basics with a deftness any painter would envy. By whatever means, he paints. In the process, and through the accumulative context within which he frames his work, he breaks down the false dichotomy between formal structure and narrative content, creating an art which is as rewarding to ponder as it is to view.
George Lawson
Oakland 2004