Look, See

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Alan Ebnother Interview @ Minus Space

I recently finished an interview with painter Alan Ebnother conducted via email that is now posted at Minus Space. Here's a quote:

I moved to New Mexico for the light and land inexpensive enough that I could afford to build a studio here. My studio is about 4000 square feet and twenty three feet high. I could actually construct an airplane in here. I designed it for the light, with all my attention going in this direction rather than for comfort. The light in here is the best that I have ever experienced! I was painting in Germany and then bringing works over to New Mexico for shows and seeing the actual color for the first time when hanging the painting up in New Mexico. German light is very grey and silvery but almost never bright and clear. In my first visits I could not even walk around outside in New Mexico without sunglasses. This is truly a case of light affecting or becoming the painting.

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The following conversation between Alan Ebnother and Chris Ashley was conducted via email during April 17 - May 4, 2005.

CA: Your biography states that in 1975 you “began to recognize painting.” You were then in your early twenties and involved in the dance world. What does this mean, to “recognize painting,” and when and how did you actually begin painting?

AE: In 1975 I was 23 years old. I had just moved to Europe to be in the John Cranko Ballet School. I was friends at this time with San Francisco painters George Lawson and John Meyer, so the realization that people were involved in painting was not a new concept.

In Stuttgart where I was in dance school my roommate was married to Spanish painter Vicente Peris, an art professor from Valencia: He came to live with us and was painting everyday in the house. So, looking at painting and talking about it became a part of my daily life. I guess that to me the term to “recognize painting" means an attempt to understand it and accept it into my everyday life and thinking.

CA: And so when did you yourself actually begin to paint? Why did you begin, and how did you get started? Had you ever painted before?

AE: In 1979 I actually left my job as a dancer with the Hamburg State Opera, and painted for one year. I painted every day, without a solid direction. I was like a ship lost at sea. Embarrassingly enough, I actually had an exhibition in the lobby of the Opera house at the end of this year, selling almost all of these works. But they were horrible, expressive little religious icons- Christ’s bleeding on the cross. After realizing how bad the works actually were I quit painting until 1985, when I had the courage to start again.

CA: When you started painting again in 1985 where did you begin, and how did this lead to the green paintings?

AE: When starting again I chose to work with as few elements as possible, thinking that my energy would then be directed to the actual paint problems and issues. I was working not so much on producing a finished product, but rather experimenting with materials and the task of attempting to present color in a viable and stimulating manor. It seemed to me that if a painting was not successful or boring then adding more elements would just convolute the problem and make it less apparent. I actually wanted to deal with the problem or issue and not to hide it. I painted white squares for almost one year. I was living in Zurich, and in the basement of my building there was the storage facility for a house painting company. So every night I went down and took their plastic and covered my floor. I also took their paint and these square pieces of cardboard that they used for masking or something, and I painted all night. In the morning I returned all of their equipment except the painted squares. This continued for almost nine months until I finally found and rented a studio in Ulm, Germany.

In Ulm I began work in my studio and was painting monochrome squares until I realized that I could not paint into the corners. The paintings seemed to have a natural movement and rhythm until I came into the corners. I actually did not yet have the technical ability to paint freely in the corners, and the marking seemed stiff and contrived, so I simply tried cutting them off. The resulting circle had a freedom that I could handle. So for the next ten years I painted tondos. After about seven months I painted a Veronese green tondo which was extremely beautiful and really interested me. So, I simply tried another green painting with the same pigment but pushing it into another green tone, with yet another brush mark, and this work also interested me. So here I am twenty years later, still interested and still experimenting. Perhaps one day I will feel I have pushed green as far as I can and move on. But, presently, I work painting to painting, just following my progression of experiences. So, who knows? This is actually not a planned strategy, but just something that has happened.

CA: I believe for a long time you painted tondos; what meaning does that shape have for you?

AE: After ten years of painting tondos the shape has many meanings to me. How could I begin to put into words ten years of painting? Let’s say that I understand the circle, and by painting this form I had a little bit of time to develop my skills outside of the critic’s eye! You see, at this time nobody else was really working the tondo, so the other painters and critics had nobody and nothing else to compare me with. This gave me the necessary time that I needed to actually develop my painting skills. Interestingly enough, it was simply an experience with another painter which made me paint another square. One day I had a studio visit with Ulrich Wellmann, a German painter. He commented that he liked my paintings, but not the fact that they were round. His argument was that there was no top or bottom. I argued that a square had only four possibilities for a top and bottom and that a tondo had endless possibilities. After he left, I was so mad and frustrated that I stretched up four small squares and painted them. The amazing thing was that they looked liked paintings even before I painted them. Everybody is so used to seeing the rectangular form in everyday life. This is an architectural form common to our eye. The circle was always something alien or new. A rectangle resembles the form that humans have become conditioned to expect a painting to resemble; it seemed so easy after the circle. I must actually say that now in painting my corners this is the area where I enjoy experimenting the most, and where I tend to mimic the linear borders imposed by this shape. Some day I shall go back and paint the circle again.

CA: Can you talk specifically about the various characteristics of your paintings? Maybe you could discuss your different stretcher sizes and shapes. What about different brushes, sizes, and brush strokes? And do you grind your own paint? How do you approach each work so individually?

AE: All right let’s speak about December 17th 2004[1]. This was a very complex stretcher, 38 1/2 X 38 inches, so there is just a one half inch more height giving the viewer a vertical work and not a landscape format. Not visible in the photo is the thickness or depth of the stretcher which is 1 3/4 inches thick at the top and 3 inches thick at the bottom. So the back of the painting plane runs parallel with the wall and the front painting plane is thicker at the bottom and thinner at the top (like a wedge of cheese). The bottom of the paint surface is pushed out into the light. I paint with skylights, so the light is coming from above. I ordered two stretchers in these proportions as an experiment and then attempted to paint my way out of the problem caused by the sculptural, 3D effect of the wedge. I painted against the form using marks that drew the attention to the top and upper middle portions of the painting and then gradually faded out the surface leaving just enough information to present the bottom of the work in a few areas, but not in its entirety. I was simply drawing attention away from the form. The non-critical viewer does not realize that the canvas is so dramatically wedge shaped. I have completed two of these wedge painted and am OK with the finished results, but as I am not working as a sculptor and have other painting problems to deal with they will also be the last.

I have mixed and ground my own pigments from the first year of my career. George Lawson, who I mentioned earlier, and Phil Sims were both so generous in sharing all of their knowledge and experience at the time with me, and basically taught me how to do this. In the meantime my experimental nature has led me to explore many areas of pigment and different oil-based mediums, and after twenty-odd years I seem to have a fairly good grasp of oil paint.

You also asked about brushes. Well, each different mark has a different brush that seems to lend itself to it. I usually shape the hairs myself with scissors and then grind down the ends of the bristles to keep them from splitting. I customize the brush for many different reasons- for shape, drag, stiffness thickness etc. I also often cut down the wooden shaft to make it an extension of my hand and wrist, or sometimes change the shaft to make it longer and an extension of my arm or body. This depends on the sort of mark that I decide would be an interesting or correct mark to present a particular color with. While mixing the color I am able to watch the different changes that occur with the addition of different pigments, clay, balsams, or wax to this mass. Sometimes there are close to a hundred different hues that I happen to see and work thru before I decide to stop. One of the reasons that I used this Veronese green for so long was that it is a very transparent pigment with very weak personal strengths that lends itself to be pushed in many different directions, while keeping its drying and textural proprieties.

CA: What is the connection- physically, emotionally, aesthetically, philosophically- between your painting and your past work in the dance world?

AE: Learning to dance means many things, and the connections between dance and painting could be talked about for hundreds of pages. I don't really have enough words for all the connections, but let me try. The feeling of doing a tendu, a basic ballet movement where the leg is extended straight out from the supporting leg with the foot fully pointed, is much the same feeling as creating a brush stroke. With a tendu I would gently and forcefully rub the sole of my foot along the floor. At the same time, my foot and leg would fight to become extended. I felt as though I was making love to the floor. I feel this same way when dragging a brush laden with paint across a surface! Painting is a very sensual and tactile experience, as is dance. Both rely on instinctual decisions, with the critical eye entering and judging after the act.

CA: The way you compare painting and dance makes me think of course of the often-quoted description of the Abstract Expressionists by Harold Rosenberg, “At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act – rather than a space in which to reproduce, redesign, analyze or 'express' an object, actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.” But I suspect that this description doesn’t match your intentions because your work is more than an arena for an event. You are also concerned with constructing space and light, and with making an expressive image and an integrated object. Do you have any thoughts about your work in relation to Abstract Expressionism, and what you’re trying to make that is beyond an event?

AE: The act of painting is perhaps dramatic and perhaps a performance, but it is a performance just for me! My paintings are not about drama or theater, but about color and defining space with this color. Exploring the prairie, perhaps, but not about the theater. Painting is not a performing art form. I am attempting to present a color with what I believe to be a rhythm, mark and time that best suits it. This drama takes place in a studio with only one spectator (me), and when the drama is over the traces left on my linen are a painting.

CA: I remember that in the first or second email you sent to me almost two years ago you boldly exclaimed the beauty of the light in New Mexico. For years you lived and painted in Germany. The light and space of these two places is quite different. What brought you to New Mexico, and how did these two locations affect your painting? What does green mean in each place? It looks to me like your paint is getting thicker and more lush. I think your current studio is much larger than your German studio- if so, how is this affecting the paintings?

AE: I moved to New Mexico for the light and land inexpensive enough that I could afford to build a studio here. My studio is about 4000 square feet and twenty three feet high. I could actually construct an airplane in here. I designed it for the light, with all my attention going in this direction rather than for comfort. The light in here is the best that I have ever experienced! I was painting in Germany and then bringing works over to New Mexico for shows and seeing the actual color for the first time when hanging the painting up in New Mexico. German light is very grey and silvery but almost never bright and clear. In my first visits I could not even walk around outside in New Mexico without sunglasses. This is truly a case of light affecting or becoming the painting.
Well, back to marking- I have been trying to open up the painting for some time now. This task is not new, and is something that has been on my mind for several years and has had a lot to do with my move here. I am in the middle of nowhere. This is empty space. I want to bring this space onto the canvas. It seems to be a slow process, but it is finally working and is completely my goal. To define this empty space with a reduced amount of color, that is painting for me. Clyfford Still was on to something, and I would really like to go back and pick up his sensibility and morals and continue, but with simply one color.

Thinking about what we have spoken of so far I feel the need to also say something about this phenomenon happening with many monochrome painters of simply painting the same painting time and time again. It is simply not enough to change the color and paint the next work with the same concept and markings as the last work. Every different hue has a new way of application that exposes more or less the individual characteristics existing within it. The exploration of these characteristics is an important part of my work (perhaps is my work) and I feel something needs to be said about it. This exploration is one of the key elements in the work of many very established painters, such as Robert Ryman, where for him not just the paint application comes into play but his choice of methods for attaching the painting to the wall or the actual date and signature on the work become a pivotal piece of the composition. Each painting has its own paint structure, signature, date concept, and wall attachment. The color hue remains fairly constant with the actual paint mass radically changing. Ryman has explored a small avenue of painting without reaching boredom.

Look at Joseph Marioni and his subtle changing of the supports which corresponds to the individual choice of colors, opening or closing the top surface veils of color presenting differently sized and shaped windows into the work. This subtle yet earth-shattering attention to detail presents a path for the young painters of today. Perhaps thirty years ago, when this genre of painting was new, one could simply change color and create the department store effect of a “red one or a blue one or a green one.” But today we have progressed way beyond this point, and to continue to just produce work that resembles a product with your name on it, with little or no change or growth within it, is simply parasitic. The general practitioner (house doctor) of the past is gone. We have entered an era of specialists, in painting and in technology.

Abstract art is still a new concept, and it is in the hands of today’s artists to push and develop this concept further along. The changes do not have to be large and the directions don’t have to be specific, but an exploration of the genre itself must transpire in order to keep it alive. The public cannot be relied on to support this exploration, as they are basically still content with watching Swan Lake, listening to Mozart, and viewing Rembrandt, all of which are wonderful but transpired long ago. Historically speaking, progress in the fine art fields has not always been immediately accepted by the audience, so it is literally in the hands of today’s painters to support and push this exploration forward, regardless of the response from the viewing public.

CA: It can sometimes be helpful- and sometimes not- to talk about an artist’s work in relation to other art work. We’ve already talked about dance, and you mentioned Ryman and Marioni. What other painters are important to you, and why?

AE: Joseph Marioni is very important to me for completely different reasons than Ryman. Joe’s progress can be extremely difficult to perceive as the changes, improvements, and differences are all quite subtle to the uninformed eye. But once you begin to be aware of the vast amount of “improvements” or refinements that are taking place, canvas to canvas, the hunger to see more becomes insatiable. Watching Marioni’s or Ryman’s painting reminds me of people that first come to the desert and say that there is no vegetation or wildlife. On closer observation the desert opens itself to their vision and a complete world of plant and animal life becomes apparent. Everything is there waiting for the viewer to educate him or herself.

CA: Talk about the kind of space that you are after in your paintings. In some of the recent work the paint seems very thick; the brush strokes are extremely visible and present. One can almost see your strokes as a kind of allover calligraphy, and there is something about the space in some of your paintings that seems to build into a space like, for example de Kooning’s ribbons of color that are layered and overlapping, and working with and against gravity.

AE: Well, each painting is different. There is no master plan that I can refer to for additional information! I have never studied calligraphy but comparing my internal space to de Kooning would be the work of an art critic, not a painter. Why not compare Ryman and Monet, or Ter Borch and Umberg? From my viewpoint there is often nothing similar about any of these artists’s work except the materials. Perhaps an art critic could find something similar and compare them with each other, but for me each and every painter has his own dialogue and nuances that wait to be discovered by the viewer. To attempt a comparison would be an attempt at defining or categorizing a particular artist, which would only make the public stop looking. If you go into one of the larger, more popular exhibitions in a museum today you are faced with masses of humans reading wall texts or listening to tape recorded comments about the individual paintings. At that moment these people actually stop viewing and stop experiencing the work in exchange for some art critic’s explanation. THERE IS NO EXPLANATION FOR ART. IT MUST BE EXPERIENCED!

[1] December 17th 2004, 2004, Oil on linen, 38.5 x 38 inches
http://www.minusspace.com/ebnother/images/ebnother8_jpg.jpg
http://minusspace.com/ebnother/images/ebnother8a_jpg.jpg

Alan Ebnother lives and works in Stanley, New Mexico

Chris Ashley is an artist, writer, and educator living and working in Oakland, California

Updated 20060106

Richard Schur @ Artothek, München

Richard Schur sends some intallation shots of his huge painting at Staedtische Artothek, München (April 28 thru July 2, 2005). Some of the text I wrote for Richard has been translated into German and is posted on the exhibition page.

"Richard Schurs neueste Bilder sind intensive Abstraktionen, schräg, voller Spannung, die Geschichte bejahend. Wie hätte Mondrian nach einem trunkenen Nachmittag mit Shitao gemalt? Wie hätte Richard Lohse Formen verschoben nach einer Woche Kritzelei in der Scrovegni-Kapelle in Padua, umgeben von Giottos Frescos. So zum Spaß: man stelle sich Sol Lewitt vor, Farbe und Raum von indischen Miniaturen klauend und, nur ums noch weiter zu treiben: Barnett Newmans und Andy Warhols Love Child auf der Montessori Schule, Paul Klee-Reproduktionen in der Cafeteria. Blöd, aber vielleicht vermitteln die Farben, Formen und Räume, die sich in diesen Szenarien erschließen ein Gefühl von den wundersamen Dingen, die Richard Schurs Gemälde erwirken können." (Chris Ashley)

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The Infinite Line 1-10

1. Picture
2. Series
3. Infinity
4. Diagram
5. Tableau
6. Encounter
7. Studio
8. List
9. Mobility
10. Utopia

From the Yale Press site:

A fresh perspective on some important twentieth-century art

This landmark book offers a radical reinterpretation of the innovative art of the late 1950s and 1960s. Examining the work of major artists of the period--including Mark Rothko, Piero Manzoni, Agnes Martin, Dan Flavin, Eva Hesse, Blinky Palermo, and Louise Bourgeois--Briony Fer focuses on the overriding tendency toward repetition and seriality that occurred at the moment of modernism’s decline, gained ground in its aftermath, and continues to shape much of the art seen today.

Although seriality is mainly associated with American artists and with Minimalism, Fer broadens our understanding of it, looking at Minimalist seriality as one crucially important strategy among several. She argues that repetition becomes generative of new modes and habits of making and looking; at stake is how we think about the artwork in relation to both temporality and subjectivity. Paying close attention to specific artworks, this timely critical reassessment offers a fresh perspective on a wide range of familiar and less familiar art.

Notes on Kathryn Van Dyke's Maps of Possibilities

Notes on Kathryn Van Dyke's Maps of Possibilities

Kathryn Van Dyke: Recent Paintings at Stephen Wirtz Gallery, San Francisco, April 20 - May 28, 2005
All images Kathryn Van Dyke and Stephen Wirtz Gallery, used without permission.

1. Selection
Kathryn Van Dyke's exhibit at Stephen Wirtz includes ten paintings in the main gallery and six works on paper in a side hall. In a sense there are really three bodies of works represented.

• The works on paper and two of the ten paintings are much smaller than the others. The works on paper are incidental. The two small paintings are out of place in the gallery because of their size, imagery, and awkward stretchers. They are uninteresting little paintings that in the context of this exhibit seem disconnected from the larger work. They are filler.
• Three of the larger paintings are made with flat, thin, pale oil. Two of these contain out-of-square or round-cornered rectangles, and the third is a pale field with an elongated diamond in the middle. These paintings don't interest me, either.
• The five remaining paintings are all graphite and oil on canvas. The surfaces of all but one of these contain a hand drawn, spider-like web of pencil lines spanning edge to edge. Small areas of these webs are painted in bright colors like multi-colored gems spun out of random lines, except for:
  • One which is all web with small dots of color where some lines intersect...
  • And a final painting isn't completely covered in a web, but does have a painted section of shapes made by a smaller interior web.

These notes are about the web paintings, specifically the three that are completely covered in a web of pencil lines that contain painted smaller sections: Thought Pattern Revisited- Feeling Forms (2005, 30 x 42"); Earthbound/Airborne (2005, 66 x 72"); and Map of Possibilities (2005, 30 x 50").

2. Wander
Van Dyke's paintings are covered in a penciled web that doesn't necessarily have the logic of a spider's web. It's more dot-to-dot. It's like doodling. Begin at one point and connect it by line to another point, and so on. Vary the length of lines, make them closer and further from each other, and build little networks of lines projecting from or circling around a particular point. Slowly a structure starts to build. Make it up as you go along. It's the search for a structure, and a way to cover the entire surface. Balance it, spread it out, counterweight heavier areas with lighter areas.

3. Fingerprint
The web of drawn lines can be taken as post-modern device following the modernist grid. The web is a self-consciously personal accumulation of wavy and skewed multi-directional lines. It refers to other things in the world, the result of a procedure of ambivalence and uncertainty. A web isn't measured. It is unevenly weighted but equitably distributed across the surface. Van Dyke's hand-drawn web begins as a tentative commitment to a process that requires heightened attention in order to result in a found and acceptable conclusion. "I went from A to B to C to A and D. Where I have arrived is fine." An artist's anxiety about and need to cover a surface is the need to compose, to find, to claim, declare and own, to reckon with emptiness. And then there is the worrry of going too far. A lightly penciled web is easier to keep from going too far than heavier kinds of imagery.

4. Elastic
The web is an elastic, distorted, rotated cousin to the grid. The grid is a modernist strategy for covering, mapping, and containing the entire surface of the painting's surface: the "picture plane." Covering the entire surface in some kind of structure is a compositional strategy. Like an armature, an allover support structure composes the painting, and makes the plane whole and held in place like a hair net. By snapping down, covering, and containing a field, the field becomes more visible, a singular field standing apart from other surfaces. A grid maps an area, and lets you see this larger area via inter-related sections. The grid as a map is an ideal of the thing that is mapped, and helps us understand the real thing. The grid is an idea to hold in memory, through which we better see the thing the grid lays over. A web is irregular because it isn't measured according to a standard. Because of its irregularity, the web as a distorted and rotated grid is a personal, intimate structure. Using the web (grid) Van Dyke lightly covers (composes) the painting's entire surface. In one light application a field is mapped and contained by a web of lines. The surface is composed.

5. Tender
Webs are fragile, swayed by breath, weighted by dew, dried and lit by the sun, constantly interrupted by mobile humans who wipe them out of their hair. Webs are temporary. They have a job to do. They catch things. Webs are places to hang out. Flying things get caught in them and stand out as foreign objects. Webs catch light and have color that isn't always seen. Van Dyke's webs quaver. They hum quietly.

7. Precedent
The web is a fishing net. The web is veil. The web is screen. The web is a model. It's a telecom diagram, with central points as nodes from which lines emanate as paths on a network. Our eyes trace the protocol of the web. Webs are organizational charts, workflows, captured brainstorms of ideas and flat lists of low-lying hierarchies. A web is peer-to-peer, an outline of relationships. It's a thin or shallow space. Some webs have volume, but the archetypal web is flat and radiates out from a center, like a wheel with spokes. Webs are easy to draw and are perfect for doodling. Large empty spaces between the thin lines of a web are empty spaces into which our eyes are drawn and our consciousness slips. Webs are as much about not making as they are about making, as much about borders as they are about holes, as much about not drawing as much as they are about drawing

8. Realism
Sub-areas of Van Dyke's webs are filled-in by even smaller webs-within-webs. These smaller webs coalesce as pockets of mass within the greater web, as aggregations of individual clusters. Sections of each cluster, triangles and rhomboids, are painted in forming multi-planed, faceted, diamond-like, multi-colored shapes. Adjacent sections in these shapes are colored in tints and shades that achieve the effect of "realism" when each cluster appears as a faceted surface of logical folding and unfolding planes like a crystal, origami, or a crumpled ball of paper. The space is Cubist, it is de Kooning's Excavation. These multi-colored crystals are brightly colored, hardened sections of the web, solids suspended in a web of lines and voids. The solid spaces of these shapes are depictions that turn the paintings from the conventions of abstractions to figuration, still life, and illustration. This isn't abstraction, it's realism.

" The termite/white elephant essay cashiered "masterpiece art, reminiscent of the enameled tobacco humidors and wooden lawn ponies bought at white elephant auctions decades ago." White elephant directors "blow up every situation and character like an affable inner tube with recognizable details and smarmy compassion" or "pin the viewer to the wall and slug him with wet towels of artiness and significance." Farber instead tracked the termite artist: "ornery, wasteful, stubbornly self-involved, doing go-for-broke art and not caring what comes of it." Termite art (or "termite-fungus-centipede art," as he also tagged it) is an "act both of observing and being in the world, a journeying in which the artist seems to be ingesting both the material of his art and the outside world through a horizontal coverage." Against the white elephant "pursuit of the continuity, harmony, involved in constructing a masterpiece," termite art mainly inheres in moments: "a few spots of tingling, jarring excitement" in a Cezanne painting "where he nibbles away at what he calls his 'small sensation'"; or John Wayne's "hipster sense of how to sit in a chair leaned against the wall" in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.

Van Dyke's webs and colored clusters are made by nibbling step by step towards an end that isn't predetermined. (As an aside, this is part of my definition of Abstract Expressionism.) The webs are "ornery, wasteful, stubbornly self-involved, doing go-for-broke art and not caring what comes of it." They are acts "both of observing and being in the world, a journeying in which the artist seems to be ingesting both the material of his art and the outside world through a horizontal coverage."

10. Emerge
Each cluster is like a Scholar's Rock, mined from the tangled mass, identified and selected, cleaned and polished, spot lit and isolated.

11. Traffic
Think of a painting as a broadcast into personal space, a projection that I engage to meet halfway. A painting isn't static. As I view it I receive or select details and assemble them into a narrative, or several narratives, sometimes simultaneously, sometimes successively. Unlike the stream of radio or film, when I look at a painting I choose (and I may be guided in my choices by the painting's composition, color, brush strokes, etc.) the order in which I receive the details, and the speed at which I assemble my own narratives. I can pause and restart, take detours and tangents, and do extract and assemble over and over. The web in Van Dyke's paintings is a weave of lines I can trace, a space into which I can enter and follow different paths, rest at points, ricochet in another direction. In a dense web of lines the larger and small aggregations of line will ebb and flow and permit a variety of readings. It is hard to see the painting as a whole, but the web lets me feel it as a whole.

12. Obit
Is painting dead or isn't it? Nah, of course not. But if modernist painting is dead in any sense it may be dead in that painting seems to have returned to installation. A painting doesn't stand alone. Once upon a time painting was part of installation; think of fresco, of altar pieces- these are installations. No painting is just its surface. And like it or not, for a painting to be seen it must exist in a place. A gallery exhibit is an event in a specific place. And that specific existence is an installation. Gone is the painting as a disembodied plane hovering before a wall. The gallery frames everything it contains as a single entity and heightens all elements.

13. Event
I take into account everything: How many works are on the walls? How deep are the stretchers? What is the support, canvas or linen? How low or high are the paintings hung? Do I see the gallery as a support, a frame, an intervention, or a distraction? The meaning of work in an exhibit is about more than any single work. Inconsistencies in the body of work draw my attention. Are inconsistencies a problem or are they unique aspects of individual works? A painting is an object with a body. The relationship between painted bodies is sensitive. In that moment, how paintings are related is important. Different sizes of stretchers, or different grades of canvas or linen used for paintings side by side interrupt the reading of the paintings, and disrupt my trust in the artist. Van Dyke's smaller paintings are awkward in this body of work. They are weak on their own and don't add to understanding the larger work. Their presence isn't needed. Likewise with the small works on paper. And material inconsistencies between the larger paintings make me feel like this body of work isn't cohesive. It creates an unnecessary barrier to my engagement.

14. History
What I see as three bodies of work is a distraction. The web paintings are the strong works. Van Dyke's 2002 show at Wirtz[2] had a similar problem. In that show a variety of approaches confused meaning and the smaller works were filler. A exhibition as an installed event must avoid the chunky and random feeling in order to have integrity. This is not advocating for standardized conformity, for a product line, but for a standard of quality, a sign that coherence is a conscious concern of the artist. Evidence of conscious concern for coherence tells us something about the work, how the artist thinks about her art, how in control she is, her intentions.

15. Names
What is the significance of the titles? The titles of the three paintings I am discussing align with my description and analysis. Thought Pattern Revisited- Feeling Forms alludes to a process of thinking to arrive at expressive forms. Earthbound/Airborne refers to something held and something free. The title of this essay uses the title Map of Possibilities because it perfectly captures what I think is Van Dyke's exploratory approach, openness, and the idea of a grid as a map quirkily loosened and rotated into a web.

16. Paths
Think of a scribbled Twombly with hand-scrawled loopy lines and bursts of smeared atmospheric color masses. Imagine opening this image in Photoshop and applying a filter that instantly straightens out lines and and brings the smeared color into crystalline focus as faceted shapes. Think of Twombly's paintings from the early 60's, Untitled[3] or The Italians[4]. Van Dyke's paintings process, compositions, and motifs are slower, embroidered members of the Twombly family. She shares a casual, doodly, full-arm, hand-drawn, moving from the shoulder, almost arbitrary approach. Twombly line is from a revolving shoulder, an outburst. Van Dyke's line is from more tense shoulder, moving with the breath. Both Twombly and Van Dyke repeat and iterate. But her line leads to a different end. Twombly's work is the impulsive expression of an idea that already exists. This is literary, like writing out a thought. Van Dyke's work, while poetic, isn't literary. It results from a series of decisions that is a slowed-down expressive process building into an idea, a psychological space. The visual result is one of dispersion, distribution, empty space, linking, interrupted by areas of density. Engaging in a repetition of the mental process as a viewer takes one through these spaces. It is through the empty spaces and the hard, colored facets that the poetic and emotional emerges.

17. Reason
Van Dyke's 2005 Wirtz exhbit is uneven, but I found that the three web paintings had a strength and interest worth exploring through writing. The web as a variant on the modernist grid is a provocative idea. I don't think that the idea is nearly tapped out in these three paintings.

18. End
End.

Chris Ashley
Oakland, CA
April-May 2005

[1] Polito, Robert. Painter of pictures: The Farber equation is never simple. ArtForum. April, 2002
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0268/is_8_40/ai_85459257.
[2] Katharine Van Dyke: New Paintings, Stephen Wirtz Gallery, San Francisco, CA, November 13 - January 18, 2003,
http://wirtzgallery.com/exhibitions/2002/exhibitions_2002_11/vandyke/vandyke_2002_frame.html
[3] Cy Twombly, Untitled, 1961, Oil, house paint, crayon, and pencil on canvas, 8' 4 3/4" x 10' 7/8" (256 x 307 cm), Private collection
http://www.artchive.com/artchive/T/twombly/twombly_1961.jpg.html
[4] Cy Twombly, The Italians, 1961, Oil, pencil, and crayon on canvas, 6'6 5/8" x 8'6 1/4" (199.5 x 259.6 cm), The Museum of Modern Art, New York
http://www.artchive.com/artchive/T/twombly/twombly_the_italians.jpg.html