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Painters' Table Blog
A Conversation With Patrick Jones
Submitted by Brett Baker on May 16, 2012
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If there’s one thing the 21st century is teaching us, it’s that the act of painting is far more generative than 20th century end-game modernism predicted. This is certainly the case in the paintings of Patrick Jones. Over the course of a long career, Jones has developed a rich visual language and applied his rigorous, abstract process to a wide range of interests from Dogon carvings to political injustice. In his recent work, Jones’ poured and stained canvases have absorbed the space, light, and color of his coastal surroundings.
I recently had the opportunity to correspond with Jones about his career and recent paintings. He has been kind enough to share with Painters’ Table his thoughts on painting and images of his work in advance of a retrospective exhibition, Celebrating Abstraction, which will be on view June 7 - 14, 2012 at the Appledore Festival. What follows is a reflection on Jones’ work punctuated by Jones’ own observations.
Patrick Jones, Mindscape, 2012, acrylic and yacht varnish on canvas (courtesy of the artist)
Now 64, Patrick Jones began his career studying at the Birmingham College of Art. In the 1970s he travelled to the United States where he earned an MFA at the Maryland Institute. Introduced by sculptor Tony Caro to the critic Clement Greenberg, Jones was selected by Greenberg for the Triangle Workshop in 1982. Jones, who returned to England in 1994, noted the lasting effect his time in the U.S. had on his work:
Patrick Jones at Triangle Workshop, New York, 1982 (photo courtesy of the artist)[Greenberg] chose me for Triangle New York, where I met Helen Frankenthaler and Larry Poons. I had already met Olitski in Carolina in the 70s. Meeting the people involved spending hours in the studios, cropping and evaluating. I was most influenced practically, however, by a Canadian painter, Terry Keller, who was painting all/over grey paintings. The division-less canvas was a revelation to me.
I was broke, living in Long Island City and working as a marble floor layer for a Sicilian family. On my days off I’d walk from Grand Central to the Met, Frick, Guggenheim etc. I met the Caros (Tony and Sheila) who I knew from London. They took me to the opening of Dogon carving at the Rockefeller Wing. One sculpture, Twin Couple from the Lester Wunderman collection completely changed my view of art. Before that I had been a formalist... This was of a different dimension entirely, and like the Easter Island Totems, spoke of World Art and specifically the art of other cultures. I had already been interested in totems from David Smith, who I regard as a huge influence. Around the same time there was a Braque Retro at the Met, which also blew me away. As a consequence, I stopped painting on canvas and started to make reliefs out of construction materials. They were eccentric shaped canvases made out of doors and still wall based, but breaking out of the rectangle... Everything about Braque was the antithesis of good painting, which was loose-limbed, open and daring. His paintings were stuffy, like being in a cupboard, endlessly repainted like a blind man fondling a large pebble. But they seemed a way into personal reflection.
Patrick Jones, No Pasaran, 2010, 60 x 90 inches, acrylic on canvas (courtesy of the artist)Personal reflection is a hallmark of Jones’ work. Through the daily practice of painting he is able to relate quotidien activity with wider concerns about the world. Concerned with political injustice and civil rights, Jones painted his recent No Parasan paintings, which combined the process of color-field abstraction with anti-fascist flags. Jones notes:
The phrase is derived from the spanish civil war and means 'they shall not pass.' As an abstract painter I, of course, realise there is no narrative plot, no stories to be told.
It is the reflective nature of painting, however, that defines its relevance in the age of digital photojournalism. While the deluge of instant images no longer possesses the power to shock, the slowness of painting enables Jones to ruminate on what he has witnessed.
Jones paints most days, “constantly searching,” he remarks, “with variable results.”
I must have painted many thousands of large canvases. Yet I only have a dozen or so to show at any one time. I’m 64 now, have painted seriously since I was 21... In my studio is a huge red, black, and white monstrosity, all over the place, but I felt good doing it, that something is cooking... I’m hooked on what I don’t know and need to learn from Painting.
I don’t want to know what I’m doing too well. I love seeing what comes out of me when I least expect it. To that extent I work into unprimed heavy-weight cotton duck, which I damp slightly and then free/form improvise. I use a variety of different acrylic paints, which allows drying over night, so I can evaluate the next day. Evaluating is problematic and I have often reworked what I should have left alone. That’s my bug bear.
Describing his studio practice, Jones stirs thoughts of Flaubert who purported to write hundreds of pages of prose to achieve the perfect sentence. Jones’ unique attentiveness to, and immersion in, the search of painting has been noted by others. In 2007, painter Sanford Wurmfeld wrote that Jones “looks afresh for ideas - ideas that are pure color and form... For him it is a visual language from which arises pictorial events to be savored.”
This close attention to what is happening inside the painting and how each action and its resulting mark relates to those that preceded it is the cornerstone of Jones’ work. A distinctly external awareness is palpable as well. Although firmly rooted in color-field abstraction, Jones’ paintings consistently register as 'pictures' - their spatial organization hints at a window space of varying depths even while the physicality of the paint asserts the surface. The space, color, and form inside the painting seem to subtly accept cues from outside the painting. These cues, in concert with an exploration of the physical experience of the paint, create an invisible yet highly animating tension. In this sense, Jones’ paintings function like memory or after-image.
Patrick Jones, Jean, 2009, 55 x 89 inches, acrylic on canvas (courtesy of the artist)I asked Jones to comment on the role of external cues, landscape or figurative, in his work:
[Expression] is more important to me than whether or not I use the visible world. I feel that [the tendency to incorporate the visible world] is to do with an accident of birth. I lived as a child in the most idyllic surroundings of sea, beach, boats, and weather and have always been drawn back. Today I spent an hour studying the grey horizon line and the tonal variations along it as the squalls past. It’s about looking.
I now live right by the sea and am really attached to the visible world just like every painter would be, particularly Turner. A rough sea and broad rainbow yesterday definitely went into my subconscious image-box. The after-image idea would fit with Surrealist automatism, a process I appropriated from Pollock, of letting the images come through in the work [and occasionally veiling them].
Patrick Jones, Spirit, 2011, 10 x 12, inches acrylic on canvas (courtesy of the artist)In Jones’ paintings, actions - staining and pouring - become objects. Gestures and pools of color attain a sense of the 'aura' of objects, a palpable, singular identity. In this way Jones has assumed the mantle of Pollock’s late paintings such as Portrait and a Dream and The Deep, mining the unconscious shared meaning between gesture and image.
I am by nature a struggler. I have a vision, try and paint it and get stuck, so it becomes pretty quickly a battle for survival: The Painting or me. This doesn’t happen with one shot pictures but [rather] when I use the activity of painting to reveal the vision, or the plastic realisation of it. The paintings seem to have to be born in some way when my interference is secondary or relegated... I feel this is more than happy accident, it’s connecting with something. I have occasionally felt in a state of grace when things are going well, where the paintings are flowing thru me. I’m just the conduit.
------------------
Patrick Jones exhibits at Poussin Gallery, London. He has had solo exhibitions at the Serpentine Gallery (1978), Nicola Jacobs Gallery, London (1981), ICA, London (1982), and Hunter College, New York, (1983). A retrospective of Jones’ paintings, Celebrating Abstraction, will be on view June 7 - 14th at the Appledore Festival with works by ceramicist Sandy Brown. A discussion on Abstract Painting and the Visible World with Mel Gooding, John Daly, and Sam Cornish will accompany the exhibition.
The Drawings of Clyfford Still
Submitted by Brett Baker on April 23, 2012
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"I went back to my own idioms, envisioned, created, and thought through. And the insight and the momentum established altered the character of the whole concept of the practice of painting." - Clyfford Still 1
The Clyfford Still Museum's inaugural exhibition provides new insight into the development of Clyfford Still's groundbreaking abstract paintings. In addition to rarely seen early landscapes and early figure paintings, a gallery of never before seen works on paper reveals the process behind Still's visionary work. Though only a small selection of Still's 1,500 drawings are on view, they reflect a practice of lifelong visual inquiry and show drawing to be an important, perhaps crucial, tool in Still's dramatic evolution from regional artist to icon of the New York School.
Clyfford Still, PP 241, 1936, pastel on paper, © Clyfford Still MuseumStill's transformation from a regional painter of the pacific northwest to a celebrated avant-garde artist has, until now, seemed uncanny. The shocking way Still's paintings fused figure and ground so completely left his 1940s contemporaries (as well as art historians) flummoxed and awe-struck. His 1946 show at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century Gallery was, in Robert Motherwell's words, "the most original. A bolt out of the blue. Most of us were still working through images... Still had none." 2
Still's works on paper suggest the key to his originality lay in his willingness to explore, test, and reflect upon his vision. Still's drawings contain clues to his initial motivations and to what interested him within his own work. In them, we also see Still as an artist committed to direct observation and investigation. A traditional approach, it seems, provided the starting point for Still's innovation.
An early study of a seated nude demonstrates not only Still's ability to render forms accurately but also his attentiveness to the planes of light and shadow that define the figure. Given his later achievement of merging figure and ground, this early evidence of sensitivity to planar shifts in light and dark is unsurprising. It does, however, convincingly trace Still's deft manipulation of figure and ground back to observation. To see Still engaged in drawing from a life model, a basic academic exercise, lends new irony to Pollock's later comment that “Still makes the rest of us look academic.” 3 It it also dispels the notion that Still's radical visual language owed its origins to a lack of technical facility. 4
Clyfford Still, Portrait of a Girl, charcoal on paper © Clyfford Still MuseumAn adjacent, engaging portrait of a girl seated with her elbows on her knees shows Still again working from life. His interest seems piqued by her pose - her arms and legs are folded into her body, her elbows resting on her knees, and her head held in her hands. He draws her limbs and dress as one, rendering them together in an inventive series of jagged lines, while the "all-over" print pattern of her dress further flattens the image into an arrangement of compact, tectonic shapes.
Another striking portrait is a pastel of a Native American whose face is furrowed by age and hardship. This drawing serves as a realist foil to the many mask-like faces in Still’s paintings from the 1930s. Above this drawing to the left hangs a rapidly sketched, colorful shawl notated with just a few marks. An array of bright colors against a neutral background, it presages the spare oil paintings Still painted in the 1970s. Below the shawl is a simple landscape drawing with a teepee and shelter in the foreground. This unassuming drawing, a travel sketch, is one of an artist inclined to record his surroundings. To see that Still, infamous for his unwaveringly high sense of purpose, valued matter of fact notation is refreshing. Hung as a suite, these three drawings effectively demonstrate how Still used drawing as a tool to feed his repertoire of increasingly abstract images and marks with fresh visual information.
Installation View, Clyfford Still, works on paper from 1943 © Clyfford Still Museum
A long wall of drawings in oil paint from 1943 are the most exhilarating in the exhibition. That Still achieved his full maturity during the period when these drawings were made while he was teaching in Richmond, Virginia, is well documented. 5 Still's time in Virginia set him on the path that would shock and awe visitors to the Art of This Century Gallery and solidify his position as a leading Abstract Expressionist painter. These works in oil on paper show Still considering and working through an increasingly personal vocabulary of forms.
Each piece seems part of a continuum of thought, and in variation after variation, Still lets his new forms morph freely across the sheets which offer no resistance to his racing mind. The fluidity and freedom of the group suggests they were done one after another after another. They are exciting to see, like frames from a film, and clearly show Still speeding closer to pure abstraction. They are deft, sure, and ecstatic and do much to reinforce Still's contention that his work was a source “joy.” 6 More importantly, they show the practice behind the certainty of Still’s large paintings.
A group of lithographs hangs opposite the oil studies. Done "after" specific paintings, they serve more than a documentary function; they show Still using drawing to study his own work as he studied the world. In them, Still teases out and simplifies the forms in the paintings. Through this simplification, we can see him working toward the final merging of figure and ground. His working "after" method, shown here, may also shed new light on his controversial practice of creating "replicas" of his own works, supporting his statement that this practice served to "clarify and refine." 7
The majority of the later works on paper in the exhibition are pastels. Though his use of pastel was evidently lifelong, Still completed around 1000 such pieces in the 1970s. 8 His technical mastery of the medium is evident, and the examples on view show Still using a range of touch and often working on colored paper. Many feel like studies, perhaps done concurrently with paintings, that investigate possibilities and variations. In them Still tests amounts of color and horizontal divisions of space. He also employs a wide range of mark, from short spark-like strokes to velvety clouds. He experiments with color as well, including a primavera palette of ochres, turquoise, and lavender - colors that appear infrequently in Still's oil paintings.
Clyfford Still, PP 43, 1959, pastel on paper, © Clyfford Still Museum
As in some of his best oil paintings, however, black holds sway in the strongest pastels such as PP 43, 1959. Still moves well beyond a study in this work where a blanket of warm blacks enfold an area of deep purple. Across a gray field, a tenuously vibrating white filament creates a compelling counterpoint.
The Clyfford Still museum has introduced a rich, hidden history of one of our most important painters. Still's works on paper reinforce the notion that originality is achieved through attentiveness to the world as well as one’s own vision. They suggest genuine originality isn't possible with one or the other - it needs both.
Notes
1 Clyfford Still quoted in Patricia Still, Clyfford Still: Biography, Clyfford Still, 1904-1980 The Buffalo and San Francisco Collections, pp. 114.
2 Dean Sobel, Why a Clyfford Still Museum?, Clyfford Still Museum Inaugural Publication, p. 31.
3 Ibid, p. 31.
4 John Golding, Newman, Rothko, Still and the Reductive Image, Paths to the Absolute, p. 153. Golding writes that "It says a lot about the nature of abstraction that it was the vision of these artists and not their natural gifts that enabled them to turn themselves into great artists."
5 Still's productivity during this period is acknowledged by Sobel (p. 23) and described in detail in Thomas Kellein, Approaching the Art of Clyfford Still, Clyfford Still, 1904-1980 The Buffalo and San Francisco Collections, pp. 16-17.
6 "A great free joy surges through me when I work." Clyfford Still quoted in Neal Benezra, Clyfford Still's Replicas, Clyfford Still Paintings 1944 -1960, p. 87.
7 "There have been occasions when I have painted, deliberately, replicas... to clarify or refine a specific work." Ibid, p. 92.
8 Sobel, p. 37
Gordon Moore: On His Work
Submitted by Brett Baker on April 19, 2012
In one of a recently posted series of videos from Betty Cuningham Gallery, painter Gordon Moore discusses his work and the experience of being a artist.
Moore notes that over time: "you become very clear about what's essential and what isn't, and gradually that leads to a specific direction, in which the path becomes much clearer for you, much more open and I think that's the one great virtue of staying with something… If you pay attention and you're alert you start making progress…" He continues: "I'm feeling better and better about first of all the opportunities, the possibilities, the expansive possibilities of what I can do with this material - paint - and secondly that what I'm doing is more formed because it's based on… constantly looking and making."
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Dazzling Darkness
Submitted by Brett Baker on March 7, 2012
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Dark Matters, Paintings by Andrea Belag, Ryan Cobourn, Arthur Dove, Bill Jensen, and Ellen Phelan, curated by Jennifer Samet, at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, February 23- March 18, 2012.
In his Theory of Colors, Goethe observes that "the greatest brightness short of dazzling acts near the greatest darkness. In this state we at once perceive all the intermediate gradations of chiaro-scuro, and all the varieties of hues." In Dark Matters, currently on view at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, the theme of darkness unites dazzlingly nuanced explorations of color and painterly approach in works by Ryan Cobourn, Arthur Dove, Andrea Belag, Bill Jensen, and Ellen Phelan. The superb selection of paintings spans nearly a century, adding a temporal dialogue to the mix.
Ryan Cobourn, Neighborhood, 2012 Oil on canvas, 46 x 52 inches (courtesy Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects)Painting darkness is a new and highly successful direction in the work of Ryan Cobourn, who has turned his searching, energetic brushwork from evocations of flowers and light on water to a sensate exploration of the indistinct. Painting the winter city at night, Cobourn embraces the challenge of observation in the absence of light. Masses of dark, uncertain forms are punctuated by far away lights - blinding touches that momentarily disrupt the ability to perceive the dark passages. Forced to actively focus and re-focus, neither painter nor viewer can locate forms with certainty, and Cobourn's paintings remain an active visual experience. They present the difficulty of seeing; darkness compels their forms and focus to remain constantly in flux.
Across the gallery hangs Arthur Dove's Music from 1913. For Dove, the difficulty of rendering forms in darkness proved a useful step in the early-modern march toward abstraction. Instead of painting sights, here Dove painted sounds - the Cagian cacophony of the night city. Dove’s sound-forms fan out rhythmically as their spiraling dark mass echoes, fills, and obscures a distant skyline.
Arthur Dove, Dark Abstraction (Woods), 1920 Oil on canvas, 21 x 18 inches (courtesy Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects)In Dark Abstraction (Woods), 1920, Dove paints a forest landscape hovering between darkness and light. He connects two worlds, representation and abstraction, through a shared palette of muted, rich color. On the opposite wall, Ellen Phelan's Autumn Bay, 2003, investigates a similar duality, but her painting, shrouded in a nocturnal mist, seems more like a reminiscence whose shadows derive from the vagueness of memory. Juxtaposing these works from different centuries underscores the concerns specific to each. In Phelan's 21st century painting the tension between representation and abstraction, so palpable in Dove’s time, has been demystified and become a thing of the past.
Other paintings in the show by Phelan, Bill Jensen, and Andrea Belag mine another lineage of dark painting, that of Goya and El Greco. In this tradition of dark painting, psychological tensions replace formal ones.
In Goya's "Black Paintings," relentless natural, supernatural, and historical forces condemn human beings to desperate acts and melancholic contemplation. In this exhibition, Bill Jensen's concerns align closely with those of Goya. Jensen's Sorrow and Optimism, 2006-12, confronts uncontrollable fate in the form of 9/11, ongoing war, and illness. The lower half of the painting evokes one type of void, a cold watery depth, while the upper half evokes another. The upper surface of solid, dusky violet is disorienting - one moment a taut plane and the next an infinity. This visual struggle recalls that of Goya's dog, whose struggling is faintly hopeful in the face of near-certain death. The eye likewise struggles to comprehend the close-value color and sheer physicality of Jensen’s Ape Herd VI, 2002-03. Its shale-like, tactile surface resembles nothing so much as activated carbon, a substance whose uses include purification and the filtration of toxins.
Andrea Belag Red Lantern, 2012 oil on linen, 30 x 22 inches (courtesy Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects)Jensen’s paintings speak to a nearby work, Phelan's Untitled (two parts), 1979, where anxiety presents itself in oily blacks and somber grays. Encountering this painting is to encounter a reflected glare. The eye cannot penetrate the darkness save through a small cross, physically punched out of the aluminum support. The painting is an example of Phelan's early work which sought to reconcile painterly abstraction with process based minimalism, but in this context the cut surface feels more desperate, as if the painter were punching a hole through which to breathe.
Andrea Belag's Red Lantern, 2012, alone on the end wall is an electric return to pure color, seen through a veil of limpid blue violet. Calling to mind another of Goethe’s observations, that “blue in particular, can be made to approximate to black,” Belag's dark colors surround and amplify a spectrum of pure primaries. The jewel-like result is a celebratory, chromatic energy reminiscent of El Greco's energized supernatural spirituality, signified by darkness shot through with brilliant color.
Per Kirkeby On His Work
Submitted by Brett Baker on February 8, 2012
Click below to watch Per Kirkeby discuss his work while visiting his retrospective exhibition at BOZAR Brussels, on view through May 20, 2012.
In the film, Kirkeby discusses the experience of seeing his entire body of work represented in a single exhibition. He notes remarks that "it doesn't care too much if it's from the 60's or from last year - it's kind of the same thing... apparently there are certain structures, certain ways of organizing a painting that's there, that I'm born with as a painter."
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David von Schlegell: Paintings
Submitted by Brett Baker on January 31, 2012
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David von Schlegell, Grey Over Yellow, 1992, Oil, Polyur on Aluminum with Wood, 19.25 x 22 inches (courtesy China Art Objects, Los Angeles)
David von Schlegell at China Art Objects, Los Angeles on view from January 7 - February 4, 2012
David von Schlegell is known primarily for his large scale, outdoor, and public sculpture projects; however, he began his career as a painter - learning to paint from his father. He returned to painting late in life. His final show was at Althea Viafora Gallery in 1991, and it focused on monochrome, poured paintings on wood. These last works form the core of a new exhibition at China Art Objects in Los Angeles. Images of von Schlegell’s early paintings are difficult to come by, but an early expressionist landscape in the Smithsonian evokes a romantic approach to nature still evident in the later paintings.
David von Schlegell, Horizontal Blue, 1961, oil on canvas 40 x 48 in. Smithsonian American Art MuseumVon Schlegell’s experience as a sculptor, however, is the primary influence on these paintings, which reveal a fascination with the material states of paint and poetic transformations that occur from one elemental state to another. The paintings are made from a viscous mixture of oil and Polyur - an industrial paint - poured onto wood panels. The resulting effect, Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer noted recently in Artforum, is that “each panel is a gradient field of darkly pooled pigment with a concentrated opacity that simulates surprising depth.” Though solid, Von Schlegell’s pooled fields of paint retain their aqueous appearance while their resinous quality alludes to both amber and varnish, a material made by combining burned amber with linseed oil.
In these final paintings, material is subjected to both a physical and philosophical alchemy that returns von Schlegell the sculptor to his romantic, painterly roots.
David von Schlegell, Cerulean Blue, Light to Dark, 1992, Oil, Polyur on Wood Panel, 48 x 48 inches (courtesy China Art Objects)
David von Schlegell, Dark Red Over Blue, 1991, Oil, Polyur on Aluminum with Wood, 19.5 x 22 inches (courtesy China Art Objects)
Siri Berg: All About Color
Submitted by Brett Baker on January 23, 2012
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Siri Berg, It's All About Color, Installation View (courtesy of The Painting Center)
Siri Berg, It's All About Color at The Painting Center, New York on view from November 17, 2011 - January 28, 2012
Siri Berg in her studio (Photo courtesy of Mats Petersson)Coinciding with the exhibition Re-Generation, which maps the lasting effect of Josef Albers teaching on three successive generations of painters, is a small but exuberant show of paintings and works on paper by another teacher of color theory, painter Siri Berg.
The exhibition, entitled It’s All About Color, is dominated by three polyptychs, each consisting of progressions of monochrome panels. Though all three share a visual language, their arrangements are varied, and each stakes out its own chromatic territory. Carrie Patterson, who curated both shows, notes that “one set of nine canvases are shown in sequence; the second series is far more playful and invites the viewer to mix and match the canvases in different order where the viewer chooses the orientation and gradation of the series.”
Working in such series is not new territory for Berg. Heli Haapasalo noted in a 2003 review that Berg’s “modular" systems are "a flexible method of creating and combining work, a process by which [her pictures] can each stand apart or join others as an ensemble, with no loss of visual integrity.” In the current exhibition Berg’s signature serial deployment of colored panels results in an optical recreation of the process of mixing color.
Although Berg’s formats and surfaces are cerebral and calculated, she has stated she wishes to “Embrace the Expressionistic!” 1 Conceptual restriction, in Berg’s hands, does add up to exuberant expression and has a painterly feel. Berg’s language of pure color and forms (formats, really) is simultaneously precise and animated. Berg’s works are, thus, a paradox - exuberance born of control.
1 Re-Generation, catalogue essay by Carrie Patterson, p. 45.
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Ray Parker's Meta-World
Submitted by Brett Baker on January 13, 2012
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Ray Parker, Simple Paintings from the 1960s at Washburn Gallery, New York on view from January 5, 2012 - January 28, 2012
Ray Parker, Untitled, 1962, oil on canvas, 77 x 68 inches (courtesy of Washburn Gallery)Ray Parker's "Simple Paintings" from the 1960s, on view at Washburn Gallery, are loosely brushed but clearly defined forms on off-white grounds that give the curious impression they are observations painted from life even though they are abstract expressionist works through and through.
Parker used "rags to apply the paint, allowing the color to spread to its 'fullness of volume'" and he let the rag "respond to the pressure of his hand, recording the nuances of touch and feeling, change and movement, like a psychic seismograph." 1 This subtle vacillation creates an attitude of suspension that fulfills Parker's stated mission to create forms that are "quiescent, bound by the gravity that makes bodies in orbit hang in a stillness where the slowest movement marks the space from one to another." 2
Although process dominates the work, Parker's paintings seem to long for the natural world. The accretions of color feel as if they want to become objects. They hover near observation, approach recognition, then quickly recede again into 'pure' abstraction. Recalling the most synthetist works of Vuillard, the upright form in Parker's Untitled 1962 resembles a mirror but never becomes one. They are open "to the notions of reverie and suggestion" but lack an implied narrative - the kind that animates Philip Guston's black and gray abstractions, for example. 3 Three paintings in the show, all Untitled from 1959, 1961, and 1962, could be forms lying on a table, shadows of objects unseen, or galaxies forming and dissolving. They speak, perhaps, to a poetic, universal scale, dependent only on one's point of view.
Installation: Ray Parker, Simple Paintings from the 1960s (photo: Brett Baker, courtesy Washburn Gallery)Parker's impulses align closely with Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still, and Jackson Pollock who each sought to harness particular universal energies through the act of painting. His work hints at galactic possibilities, other worlds forming through the interactions of particles, their engergies hinted at by clouds of vapourous color and light. This harkens back to the symbolist impulse (defended by Newman and opined as a nuisance by Greenberg) in early abstract expressionist painting. As Gauguin said no to the art of Paris and sought fresh inspiration in the south seas, Parker’s "Simple Paintings" seem to say no to pure formalism. Discussing his work, Parker said he wanted to "cut out everything else but pigment on ground and let color tell the whole story." His emphasis on story and on recognition turns Maurice Denis' formalist dictum on it’s head. 5
Regardless, there is pleasure in how the works are painted and pleasure in looking at their quirky, but wholly satisfying meta-world.
More Resources
An excellent PDF e-catalog from the exhibition Ray Parker Paintings 1958-1971: Color into Drawing, Haggerty Museum of Art, Marquette University, Milwaukee, Wisconsin is available online here.
Notes
1 William C. Agee, Ray Parker Paintings 1958-1971: Color into Drawing, Haggerty Museum of Art, Marquette University, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, p. 6.
2 Ibid., p.5. Agee quotes a statement by Ray Parker, Catalogue of the American Collection, (London: The Tate Gallery, 1978)
3 Guy Cogeval, Edouard Vuillard, Yale University Press, 2003, p. 430.
4 Agee, p. 6.
5 “We should remember that a picture - before being a war horse, a nude woman, or telling some other story, is essentially a flat surface, covered with colors arranged in a particular pattern.” Maurice Denis, ‘Definition of Neo-Traditionism,’ Art In Theory: 1815-1900, Edited by Charles Harrison, Paul Wood, and Jason Gaiger. Blackwell Publishing, Ltd. 1998, p. 863
Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011)
Submitted by Brett Baker on December 27, 2011
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Helen Frankenthaler, Mountains and Sea, 1952, Oil and charcoal on canvas, 86 x 117 inches, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., © 2008 Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Inc.
Painter Helen Frankenthaler, a key member of the New York School, died today in Connecticut. Frankenthaler, energized by Jackson Pollock’s all-over method of painting, pioneered the technique of pouring paint onto unprimed canvas early in her career. Radical at the time, this technique was memorialized in Emile de Antonio’s seminal film Painters Painting. She noted: “I did not want a small gesture, standing at the easel with a sable brush ... I literally wanted to break free, put it on the floor, throw the paint around… “ 1
Helen Frankenthaler, Snow Pines, 2004, Thirty-four water based color Ukiyo-e style woodcut (courtesy Leslie Sacks Fine Art)Frankenthaler took improvisation to new heights. In a 2003 interview with Ted Loos, Frankenthaler noted that “her decision-making process was wholly unregimented. 'There is no ‘always,’... No formula. There are no rules. Let the picture lead you where it must go.” This experimental, free form approach to painting also led her to make unprecedented strides in abstract printmaking - particularly woodblock printing. Through overprinting (sometimes thirty or more layers) she was able to emulate the fluid, process oriented mark-making also found in her poured painting.
Frankenthaler described her own work as “pictures [that] are full of climates, abstract climates and not nature per se, but a feeling… “ 2 She was uniquely able to coax cogency from painterly accident - achieving images that are a unique blend of eastern and western styles and recalling at once calligraphic landscape painting and analytic cubism.
Notes
1 Quoted in a clip from Helen Frankenthaler, Video portrait, John Feldman. Commissioned by Purchase College School of the Arts for the 2008 Nelson A. Rockefeller Awards.
2 Ibid.
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Re-Generation: Josef Albers' Legacy of Teaching
Submitted by Brett Baker on December 20, 2011
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Artist/teachers from Thomas Eakins to Robert Henri and Charles W. Hawthorne have played an important role in shaping generations of American artists. From the mid-century and into the post-war period Josef Albers had a great and lasting influence on American art. His famous color excercises, collected in the seminal text The Interaction of Color, were published in 1963 with the help of his students.
During Albers’ long tenure at Yale he taught countless artists, many of whom became renowned artists and influential teachers, themselves. The new exhibition Re-Generation looks at “three generations of painter-teachers" and "traces the regeneration of thought in painting and art education by linking the translation of visual ideas" - ideas that trace back to the teaching of Josef Albers.
Painter and professor Carrie Patterson who conceived of and curated the show agreed to answer a few questions about the exhibition, which opens January 5, 2012 at The Painting Center in New York.
PT: Although the exhibition embraces influence, the work in the show is strikingly diverse. Harold Bloom’s “anxiety of influence” doesn’t seem evident. What do you think this says about Albers’ teaching and about teacher student dialogue in general?
CP: Making art has always been a collaborative process. If someone scanned history it would be hard to find an artist who was not part of a larger dialogue involving issues of aesthetics and the role of art and its manifestation. Simply by opening our eyes, ears, and hearts we are influenced by visual, cultural, and historical experiences. During his lifetime, Albers influenced many aspiring artists, but he also trained teachers.
I think he trained teachers to have respect for students and to require that students know the craft of making an object. The teachers that graduated from Yale during that time are theorists and build work conceptually. They have passed on both of these attributes to their students and are excellent at their craft.
Heather Brammeier, Upstairs Downstairs, 2010, Oil on Canvas, 45 x30 inchesThe initial idea for this show started with origin and collaboration in mind. I was teaching and found books to help me teach drawing much more readily than painting. Painting is mysterious and teaching painting is a challenge. Drawing is, too, but you can find places to start. With painting, I found myself remembering what my former teachers did or said. I realized if I was doing that, maybe my teachers were, too, and that led me to Albers and the idea for this show. I am not talking about Albers' color class, just to be clear. I am talking about the whole package. I wanted to know about the time when Albers was teaching at Black Mountain. What was different there than at Yale? What ideas were floating around?
I read the Fred Horowitz and Brenda Danilowitz book: To Open Eyes, and my student research assistant, Brittany Sigley, and I spent a few days going through the archives at the Albers Foundation. I read so many wonderful letters, interviews, lectures, and listened to the transcripts of interviews with students that Fred Horowitz conducted. Albers' words and actions are remembered so well by his students because he was not afraid to talk about the importance and power of art in our society. Plus, he was direct. He wasn’t afraid of offending someone. He just said what was not working or wrong and expected that you would fix it and move on.
Through the research process I learned that Albers was committed to teaching the basics. Many art schools and artists have reinterpreted basic to mean boring or formulaic or non-contemporary but, actually, basic just means you know your craft. You can make what you want to make. No one would ever dream of sending a web designer into the world without teaching them to understand code. Painting is the same - and for painting, basic proficiency does not happen in a year or two. It takes many years to understand the craft.
PT: Certainly when we think of Albers we think of color theory, and it seems the artists in the show have absorbed and passed on a sophisticated color sense. What other, subtler aspects of Albers’ influence manifest themselves in the works in this exhibition?
CP: What I see in the exhibition is freedom. I see artists who know a certain set of rules and they have learned those rules extremely well. Within that given set, they are able to embrace improvisation, spontaneity, reductivism, beauty, and the absurd - all using a similar set of rules.
I also see a search-and-find a way of working where nothing is taken for granted. All the artists question things they find - basic things – like a vertical line, or a thread, or a piece of masking tape, or taxi cabs or birds on an electric wire – and they push the idea of material manifestation into something else. Sometimes this becomes structural like in Lois Swirnoff’s work, and sometimes this creates a narrative situation like in Ron Markman’s work. One commonality I see is that all the artists are dealing with dichotomies – is it this or is it that – a playfulness with construction and perception.
PT: You studied with Robert Slutzky, a student of Albers. How does the combined influence of Albers and Slutzky influence your own work and approach to teaching?
Robert Slutzky, untitled, 44 x 44 inches, 1997, Private collectionCP: The combination of my training in abstract, schematic thinking and my perceptual training at the New York Studio School has shaped the type of teacher and artist I am. When I was an art student, I had many supportive teachers: Barbara Grossman, Rosemarie Beck, and Robert Slutzky to name three. During my first meeting with Bob, I shared with him that my family lived in Switzerland. I talked about some of the buildings I had seen and loved. We had an intense conversation about what I knew and didn’t know – ranging from Goethe to Paul Klee. I remember now that I also saw an Albers Retrospective on my first trip to Switzerland. And, of course, I know now that in my undergraduate design courses and drawing courses many of the exercises were Albers-based - plus I had the traditional color theory class. So Albers was always in my cone of influence so to speak!
Later on I was lucky to be Bob’s TA for his collage/color course during my second year at Penn. At the same time, there was a retrospective show of Bob’s work in the Arthur Ross Gallery. I now realize that this experience was a rare gift. By observing his teaching methodology and experiencing his work at the same time, I saw and heard how his teaching overlapped with his own painting practice. When he talked about the possibility of “tipping space,” I contextualized this idea within a framework of shared visual knowledge. When he talked about embracing the flatness of a plane, I understood the implications of schematic space in relation to his discussions with architecture students.
Bob encouraged me to stop looking at the surface of a building and start exploring the structure. He also gave very practical advice on how to paint a painting, and I do the same for my students. I talk about brushes, paint, other tools that might be useful. I think everyone should know how to work the tools in the woodshop before they graduate. If you can’t find your way around the studio and can only talk about painting, then you are going to have a hard time getting started.
Bob also encouraged students to take classes in other disciplines to understand contemporary art. “You've got ten paintings in one – take a break and try to figure out why you are painting.” His advice shaped the type of teacher and painter I would become. As I develop my own courses at a liberal arts institution, I include information and ideas from many disciplines. My color theory course includes teachings of Albers, but it also includes color from the perspective of a physicist, musician, historian, and psychologist. My drawing class includes walking through architecture and learning, not only about the structure and surface, but also the history embedded in the building, and the fictions that lie beneath. Bob Slutzky expected you to not only challenge yourself but to challenge him.
Re-Generation features the work of Heather Brammeier, Reni Gower, Heather Harvey, Ric Haynes, Victor Kord, Richard Lytle, Ron Markman, Deirdre Murphy, Richard Emery Nickolson, Alice Oh, Carrie Patterson, Richard Raiselis, Edward Shalala, Robert Slutzky, Reba Stewart, and Lois Swirnoff. The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated catalog with a essay by Jennifer Cognard-Black, introduction by artist Richard Nickolson, and statements by each artist. For more information visit www.re-generation.us.com and www.thepaintingcenter.org .
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