Look, See

The color yellow, for example, is an ideal; anyone who has bought paint for a room at a hardware store only to bring it home and find out how wrong their judgment was knows this. The word "yellow" is a label, a sign, shorthand. If it really existed home decorating would be a snap.

The actual color "yellow" itself does not exist; instead we hold the ideal of the color in our head while in our environments the yellow-family colors we percieve are simultaneously contextual (defined by and dependent on setting, relationships to other colors, light, and the material by which the color exists) and infinite (no two yellows are alike, despite what we think, or idealize).

"Duh!" would be a brutal yet apt assessment of this notion. But turn the other cheek, so to speak (I use that metaphor intentionally), and it's "Whoa! Infinite color! Endless relationships! A vast visual world to explore!"

This is an important issue to consider when looking at the work of painters who are called Monochrome Painters, and who produce paintings called "monochrome paintings" which are, allegedly, monochrome paintings. But the monochrome is an ideal. An amount of "blue" painted on one half of a surface next to another blue painted on the other half is not necessarily a blue painting; chances are, it's a two blue painting. All painters deal in color(s), even someone who falls into the camp of monochrome painting. (Left: Blue Violet Studio Painting, 2004; acrylic/linen on board; 23 x 16 inches)

Also, all painters deal with (and sometimes forget to deal with) all of the other identical painting issues: surface, space, light, scale, edge, drawing, mark, image, object hood, wall, environment, time of day, season, and time. Each painter has other unique decisions to make about tools, process and sequence, speed, material. and there are other personal and organic factors even more unique to each person: height, width, weight, reach, temperament, mood, age, language, culture, race, nationality, to name a few.

I am making this overly long introduction because I want to stress the point that labels curb vision, that in all paintings, good or bad, there is much more going on than is immediately apparent which must be evaluated by careful looking, that small differences are huge, and that painting, even highly reductive abstract painting, is not a simple undertaking, but is a field of trips, traps, and other difficult to negotiate, failure inducing pitfalls.

~ ~ ~

I wish to say a few things about the artist Phil Sims, a well known painter often positioned in the monochrome camp whose body of recent work shown at Brian Gross Fine Art in San Francisco comprises paintings that at a glance might be called monochrome.

Sims' previous show at Gross in 2001 included paintings that try really hard to be monochromes: smooth single-colored surfaces with barely any inflection, but they shine and respond so much to light that there is no way that one can see a single color. The paint is so dense, the color so intense, that the paintings are hard to see. The surface of each floats like a disembodied colored plane. The weakness in this 2001 work as presented as a single representative body is that the selection is a color sampler: here's one in blue, and one in red, and a green one, and, oh yes, yellow, too. Besides dimensions and proportions, that's the big difference.

The current show continues the sampler mode, yet it is also a prime example for the argument that while "Monochrome" as a label may be a convenient shorthand it is actually a deadening misnomer. It's like this: you can walk up to a Sims painting, look at the surface, look at the edges, and there are other colors from previous layers under the top layer, and one is aided in seeing these different colors by the sand that is mixed into the paint. Sand? Yes, and more about this later.

Sims' current work is a mixed bag; the smaller work is intimate, beautiful, and resonant, yet his largest paintings show how an experienced painter's minor but serious miscalculation in his attention to a fundamental of painting can result in dreadful failure. (Right: Green Studio Painting, 2004; acrylic/linen on board; 20 x 18 inches)

The gallery is, roughly, broken into two exhibition spaces. There is the main space, two rectangles joined one end to one side to form a blunt L-shape broken by the attendant's desk to create an awkwardly proportioned space. A second smaller gallery is partitioned as a nearly enclosed rectangle. The main space contains Sims' large, figure-sized paintings; these are the problem paintings. The smaller gallery holds several small paintings, vertical rectangles in the twenty inch range, and in between the paintings are large, round, thick-walled tea bowls with gray and brown glazes mounted on wooden wall-hung pedestals; this work is successful. (See the installation view below at Rupert Walser, Munich, November-December 2004)

Let's start with the room of smaller paintings and tea bowls. These paintings are a familiar portrait size, natural mirrors and windows. They are well-proportioned, beautifully colored by successive layers of hues, and the surfaces are enlivened by sand mixed directly into the paint. As the eye moves over these paintings words like "grit" and "traction" have literal and visual meaning. The sand makes a pitted, rough surface that brings light to and slows the eye as it skitters across and scans this texture, looking beneath the grit, taking in hidden color. There is a logical relationship between the size of these paintings and the kind of surface the sand makes: this is called scale, and it works in these paintings because our relationship to these smaller paintings brings us closer, is intimate. The sand makes the painting's surface more literal and object like, flat, making color a material body, while one also sees the painting as depicting space-- it's a picture: a fading sun, a burning dune, light reflected off wet sand, haze, fog, a halo around a light, a mirage, a memory, a glimpse, an impression.

The tea bowls are perfect for two cupped hands. These are familiar, functional objects removed from use. Roughly wheel-thrown, one can feel how they're shaped between hands, how they're transformed by fire from impermanent mud to hard, lasting ceramic. We look at the surface, we peer inside, literally, and we can almost smell what they might contain, which reminds us that while looking at the paintings we look at the surface and try to see deeper, to see what we contain. (Left: Tea Bowl, 2004; Anagama fired ceramic, Shino glaze; 3-3/4 x 4 inches diameter)

There are many obvious parallels between the small paintings and bowls: paintings are containers of images and bowl are containers of liquid; both paintings and bowls have marked, decorated, colored, drawn surfaces; clay is earth, as is the pigment and the sand in the paint; paintings and bowls have defined physical depth (the thickness of a painting's stretcher, the diameter of a bowl); both have space, though while a bowl's space is actual volume, a painting's space is depicted; and both have ritual and spiritual implications.

This is a humble, earthy, lovely installation of handmade objects. The tea bowls make the paintings seem more functional, as if they have a purpose or use, and the paintings make the bowls seem less functional, as if in their non-use they are art. The duller glazes of the ceramics are a rhythmic counterpoint to the brighter colors of the paintings, and it is through these contrasts that our engagement with the body of work in this room is elevated, and each medium reminds us of the meanings found in the other.

The paintings in the main gallery, while larger, are not bigger, better paintings; they have problem a fundamental problem of scale. The sand Sims uses for these larger paintings is more or less the same granularity as that used for the smaller paintings, and he is trying to take a surface that works over a 20 x 18" surface and spread it out over a painting as high as four or six feet using the exact same granularity and application. A gritty surface that is contained and experienced intimately in the smaller paintings is now dispersed over more real estate, but since our physical relationship to a larger size is a different experience-- we stand back, our bodies become involved, we scan larger areas-- we lose detail, the surface breaks down, the painting loses tension, and we find ourselves confronting, frankly, a prettily colored stucco wall. This is Sims' miscalculation: materials and a surface may work for one size but not for another.

This is not to say that Sims needs to use gravel for the larger paintings; that would make for an entirely different body of work. And similarly, I don't intend to suggest that a two foot square painting made with a one inch brush can be easily scaled up to a six foot square painting by using a three inch brush. Perhaps there is a solution for using finely grained sand in making larger scale paintings; if so, Sims hasn't found it yet. I do wonder, however, about the pressure artists feel to make work important by making it big, when instead perhaps sometimes what one should work with is the modesty and humility found in a tea bowl.

Chris Ashley
January 2005
Oakland, California, USA

All photos from Brian Gross Fine Art website, except below.

~ ~ ~

Below: Galerie Rupert Walser, November-December 2004, Munich; Tea bowls, Umber Studio Painting 2004, 46 x 40,5 cm, Acrylic/Linen on Board