Look, See

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 Joeseph Hughes' 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.

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 point 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