Don’t Look Up, 2022, 58×81 inches, oil and collage on canvas

Gerry Bergstein is a well-known Boston painter and teacher who has hugely influenced many artists since the 1980s. I recently was viewing his work online and became re-enchanted by his astounding talent and wide range of art historical references, styles, processes, and subject matter. His morphing and juxtapositioning of visual and cultural opposites has made for a highly inventive and personal art unlike any other. I particularly love his resistance to doctrine and his contrarian takes on the possibilities for art. I decided to ask him for an interview and was incredibly delighted and grateful when he agreed to talk with me on a Zoom call.

Ars Longa Vita Brevis, 2022, 67×101 inches, oil and collage on canvas

The late Francine Koslow Miller wrote in a 2002 Art Forum review of a Gerry Bergstein exhibition at the Howard Yezerski Gallery.

“Bergstein pursues darker concerns in his vaguely architectural black-and-white paintings of mounds. An amalgam of decaying mountain, medieval building, and phallus, the mound always appears to be imploding or exploding in these works, which resemble pencil drawings on damaged paper (here the artist etched lines into a prepared surface of black paint overlaid with white). For Mount, 2002, Bergstein moved his stylus back and forth across the highly detailed central form in strokes imitating the rhythmic gestures of a cellist. In the monumental Self-Portrait as Tower of Babel, 2002, the mound is under siege, pierced with luscious black holes; it begins to topple before a romantic cloudy sky. References to Leonardo’s Deluge drawings, Brueghel’s Tower of Babel, and Piranesi’s ruins abound in this anthropomorphic citadel, whose stony skin appears to be ripping apart. (It’s hard not to think of the World Trade Center as well.) Hidden among the gaps in the tower are self-portraits and other small images: insect caricatures, a paint tube, a Guston “eye,” a thumb, a rocket ship.

In these works Bergstein equates nature and culture with personal ambition and ideals. The mounds may posit civilization as a beautiful pile of garbage, but they also suggest Bergstein as existentialist antihero at the foot of his own mountain of ambition (his goal being to achieve global relevance while staying true to himself). As Albert Camus ends his Myth of Sisyphus: “This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” Bergstein likewise transforms the torment of his struggle into victory.”

—Francine Koslow Miller

Theory and Practice, 2019, 22×30 inches, Oil on Paper

close up detail from Dithering Machine, 2022, 86×102 inches, oil and collage on canvas

Nicholas Capasso wrote in his essay Expressionism: Boston’s Claim to Fame
(Originally published in Painting in Boston: 1950-2000)
 

“…Bergstein distilled all these sources”(Max Ernst, Rene Magritte, de Kooning, Gorky, and Guston) “…into a personal approach in which Surrealist techniques of free association and irrational juxtaposition were brought to bear on expressively distorted images created with an amazing facility of craft. This artist could draw and paint like an expressionist, an Abstract Expressionist, a veristic Surrealist, and a trompe-l’oeil master—and convincingly combine these styles on a single canvas. During the eighties, this stylistic spectrum was matched by an equally diverse range of imagery drawn from art history, self-portraiture, nature, popular culture (especially television), and the suburban cultural landscape—again, all on the same surface. “
“…I continued to explore the spatial tensions obtained by juxtaposing thick and thin paint. I had always been interested in juxtaposition of images (Magritte). I was finding that juxtapositioning of different surfaces could be just as strange and surreal.”

The point of Bergstein’s technique and approach to imagery is fundamentally humanistic and expressionistic. He seeks to express ineffable mental states conditioned by his own experience of the world—an admittedly chaotic and confusing world—as a model for emotionally apprehending larger issues in contemporary society, psychology, epistemology, and ontology. These weighty themes, though, are always tempered by humor. As the artist explains it, “My goal is to do for painting what Groucho Marx and Alfred Hitchcock did for movies and television. My work is a representation of the paradoxes, ironies, and absurdities of our media-bombarded culture, translated through the language of paint.” Elsewhere he wrote, “I still wonder how the unexplainable creation of the universe, the light-speed movement of all those subatomic particles, and billions of years of evolution could have led to squeezing the Charmin, tax returns, life insurance, the art world, and other strange results. If, as Einstein said, ‘God does not play dice with the universe,’ maybe he was playing bingo.”

Roadmap, 2021, 22×30 inches, oil on paper

From Gerry Bergstein’s website:

Bergstein’s work contrasts the awesome and the trivial, the high and the low, the manic and the melancholic using sources from Brueghel to “The Simpsons.” He is the recipient of an Artadia grant (2007), a career achievement award from the St. Botolph Club (2007), and a four-week residency at the Liguria Study Center in Genoa, Italy (2006). His solo shows include Gallery NAGA and the Danforth Museum; Howard Yezerski Gallery, Boston (’04, ’02, ’99, ’97); Stephan Stux Gallery, NY (’99); Galerie Bonnier, Geneva, Switzerland; Zolla Lieberman Gallery, Chicago, IL; and the DeCordova Museum, Lincoln, MA. He is represented in the collections of The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; MIT; DeCordova Museum; Davis Museum at Wellesley College; IBM; and many others. He has been reviewed widely in the local press as well as Tema Celeste, ARTnews, Art in America, and Artforum. He has been on the faculty at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston for over two decades.

Larry Groff:
What were your early years growing up like? What was your family like? 

Gerry Bergstein:
I grew up in the Bronx and Queens in New York, where I stayed till I went away to college and left New York. We lived in Bayside Queens, which was nothing like Manhattan. I would be very surprised if anyone else on my block ever went to the MoMA, for instance. However, my father loved to draw and paint; my mother loved music and literature.  I may not have become an artist if not for their support. Like when my mother told me to go to see that Max Ernst show. If my mother were alive today, she would have become a Music or an English professor, but she didn’t get to go to college, sadly. My father was an accountant. When he was younger, he did a lot of wonderful realistic drawings of his family; many of them are hanging in my home.  He might have made it as an artist,  but his family discouraged it, and he needed a job to support the family. He continued to draw and play the piano like Mozart, and  Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata was one of my favorites. So I grew up around classical music and older art. 

My parents didn’t get contemporary art. One time, when I was much older, I went with my mom to the Guggenheim, which had just reopened with a Dan Flavin show after having been closed for a time, and the first thing she said, “Well, I guess they don’t have the art here yet – they’ve just put the lights. (laughs)  And so, part of my issue with high and low art is that I have that skepticism of my mom, but on the other hand, I also like a lot of that stuff. Eventually, I came to like Dan Flavin. So I have mixed feelings about high and low, and I like combining them. So I’m a contrarian I always see both sides of everything, which is both fun and healthy. 

as yet untitled, 2022, 40×26 inches, oil and collage on paper

LG:
 I read that your mother encouraged you to see a Max Ernst retrospective at the MoMA in the early 60s. I was curious so I looked online to see if there was any information about that show and found the catalog for the show on the MoMA website – I found a quote that seemed like it could have also been describing your work. 

“From Ernst’s frottagee, decalcomanlas and flows of pigment emerge a procession of visions sometimes obsessive and often prophetic: new landscapes inhabited by new phantoms and animals; new adventures and new terrors revealed by the rarest and most significant dreams. The world of Ernst can be turbulent, eruptive and violent. It can also offer with irrational lucidity and calm, an explanation of the magic of objects, the black humor of human foibles and the apparition of unseen presences. Like the looking glass, the Imagined world of Ernst is a reverse image. It is also a universe.”

Can you say something about your interest in Ernst and any other influences that are most important, especially the surrealists?

Gerry Bergstein:
I used to do these little abstract, very detailed ink drawings. They were mostly abstract, but my mom must have recognized something about their complexity, so she sent me to the Max Ernst show, which blew me away. I agree with the statement you gave.

“new adventures and new terrors revealed by the rarest and most significant dreams, the world of Ernst can be turbulent, eruptive and violent“, is something I’m very interested in as well as “The magic of objects”.  Magritte put it differently. Magritte did a painting of a wedding ring floating on top of a piano. He had this idea of secret and magical affinities between objects, you couldn’t put these affinities into words, but I love that idea. I guess that’s a whole Surrealist idea. And the last line that Max Ernst’s work as a universe also rings true to me. Although my work is a universe–it’s the universe inside my brain and my studio. Maybe the universe is in the brain of the beholder.

I recognize stuff from working on a picture. I’m not very good at observing reality in nature. I’m kind of bad at it, maybe, because I’ve never done it that much. However, what I am good at is exploring my brain visually in response to the marks I make, I have this sgraffito process, in which the paint stays wet for a month, and I can draw into and out of it. I combine different things. I’ll leave the studio and then come back the next day, and it’s telling me something, to enhance this or to deemphasize that. I’m pretty good at that. It’s just who I am, which involves free association and rorschaching. Gregory Gillespie talked about rorschaching a lot and is similar to what I do – but different.

Hamburger Express, 1979, 24X50 inches, Oil

Larry:
I’m wondering if the painter Ivan Albright has some affinities with you? It’s not surrealism or rorshaching, but the intensity and drive of his vision perhaps are related to you and Gillespie’s work.

Gerry Bergstein:
Absolutely, I think the ironic thing is about these polarity things I went to Chicago and saw Albright’s painting, That Which I Should Have Done I Did Not Do (The Door), a couple of years ago. I saw a picture of it in a book when I was a teenager, and it totally blew me away, but when you get up close to the actual painting and look at one square inch of that door, it looks like a microscopic Jackson Pollock. So many little interesting marks. I like art that refers, intentionally or not, to the whole of Art in an original way.

Gerry Bergstein:
One more thing about surrealism, do you know the painting Hide and Seek by Pavel Tchelitchew?

LG: Sure.

Gerry Bergstein:
I loved it as a teenager, and then in 2017, I retired from teaching, but in 2019 I was persuaded to teach a grad seminar, but I was shy and nervous about my hearing and was afraid I wasn’t up to date enough. So to soothe myself, I visited MOMA just two days before that class started in 2019. And I walked up to the third floor and there was Hide and Seek hanging again after it had been in storage for like 30 years. The wall text said that in 1961, which was the year I first saw it, was voted by the public to be the most popular painting in our collection. Well, I thought that was such an affirmation. I don’t love it as much as I used to, but I thought, ‘what goes around, comes around’.  It suffered from acclaim, rejection, and re-acclaim. I think that’s so great.

Like it or not, the politics of art aesthetics in the art world come into my work, in a very ambivalent way.

Reconstructive Surgery, 2022, 44x33x10 inches, oil and collage

LG: 
You studied at the Art Students League?

Gerry Bergstein: I studied at the art students league for a year with Harry Sternberg. Who was a great teacher. He taught me what freedom was. Harry Sternberg was friends with Jack Levine. And his work, at times, was a little bit like Jack Levine. Edwin Dickinson was right next door. And Lennart Anderson was there at the time. I moved to Boston by accident. I had no clue about the Boston expressionist school, but I thought it was ironic that I moved to Boston and became somewhat involved with that tradition and Boston rather than New York.

LG:
Why did you move to Boston?

Gerry Bergstein:
I had to go to a place that was affiliated with the college. Otherwise, I would have been drafted.

LG:
What was your experience going to the museum school (School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University) back then?  You studied with Henry Schwartz, Barney Rubenstein and Jan Cox, a Belgian Surrealist painter. Was Barney the main teacher to help you learn realist and trompe l’oeil painting?

Factory, 1973, 5×5 ft., oil

Gerry Bergstein:
Henry Schwartz taught me more; he had these bizarre setups that were surreal, and they reminded me a little bit of some of Bruce Connors’s early work. Surreal setups with musical scores and portraits and different things pasted it together, and they were delightful and hilarious. I learned a lot from that project and I guess that’s what got me interested in trompe l’oeil. Barney was more of a friend. I adored Barney and learned a lot from him, but it wasn’t a teacher-student thing; it was more long conversations. Plus, I loved his work. Jan Cox awakened certain things in my imagination. I took a design class with him, and he was sweet and accepting of unusual ideas.

I experienced the museum school in different ways. I was a  student there in the last two years of the ultra academic curriculum to the student revolution in 1970, which changed that completely. Soon after that, Clement Greenberg began to hold sway in Boston with new faculty at school and Kenworth Moffett, a  Greenburg acolyte, being hired as the M.F.A.s first contemporary curator. Clement Greenberg was seen by some as being at the apex of modernism in Boston; although his influence was already in decline in New York. I liked modernists like Morris Louis and Jules Olitski but I thought that the idea that you couldn’t show realism or surrealism due to some second-rate philosophy was just infuriating.
Even though the museum school was really academic for the first three years I went there, I managed to find my way through that, and I’m glad I had some exposure to, you know, real academic drawing and that kind of thing. Even though I wasn’t that great at it,

Gorky’s Room 1976, 84×84 inches, oil on canvas

LG:
Do you think painters need that kind of academic training?

Gerry Bergstein:
That’s a very good question. The museum school changed radically in 1969. The student strike during the anti-war movement. The head of the school was fired, and a new head of the school replaced him, and policies were changed so students could make their own curriculum; you didn’t have to take any course you didn’t want to. For the first few years, the results were disastrous. But eventually, it sort of worked itself out. Do all artists need that academic structure? I’m not sure, I think I needed it, but I don’t know. What do you think?

LG:
When I was in school, I sought out traditional realist training. Some of the abstract painters whom I admire the most also went through that academic rigor. But then there are other abstract painters who were self-taught or didn’t get much academic training, who I also like. So I don’t think there’s any right way to learn art, although I do think it’s critical to learn art history well. I don’t believe in just one right answer and try to resist art doctrine.

Gerry Bergstein:
There’s no one answer; I absolutely agree. Yeah. I mean, I think de Kooning was a great draftsman and I adore his early work; I don’t think Pollock was such a great draftsman.

LG:
However, Pollock did study with Thomas Hart Benton, who helped give him an understanding of structure.

Gerry Bergstein:
That’s exactly right. I think his compositions have something a little bit in common with Benton’s compositions.
Pollock knew what he was; he knew the terrain. Kids going to art school today get very little of that, although maybe that’s a gross generalization, I don’t know. I think it can still be possible to get it if you want it enough.  Gregory Gillespie once said to me that despite going to the San Francisco Art Institute, he considered himself self-taught because it was strict abstract expressionism when he was there and didn’t offer much in the way of learning how to be a realist painter.

LG:
Maybe that’s not always such a bad thing sometimes. Gillespie may have taught himself the way he wanted to paint realistically, but his time at San Francisco Art Institute eventually helped him become such an amazing painter; he must have gotten something out of it, just not realist painting chops. Gregory Gillespie is among my favorite painters.

I Love Painting, 2019, 4x2x4 inches, mixed media

Gerry Bergstein:
I remember a story about Chuck Close, whom I think went to Yale. He was a pretty good abstract painter back then. I heard him speak once at Harvard, and he said, The problem with abstract painting was that he would leave his studio thinking, ‘this is the best thing that’s ever been done in the world’. Then he would come back the next day, and it looked like complete crap; he wanted to do something that he could be verifiable that he was doing it right. He also wanted to get as far away from de Kooning as possible. So if de Kooning used a lot of color, he used black and white. If de Kooning was totally into the act of painting, he was watching TV while he was painting. His move to be self-consciously away from that is interesting to me as well. Later on, he joked that he had made more de Kooning’s than de Kooning himself with all his little “colored pixels” in grids that you see in his later work.
So we’re on this sort of lineage. Probably if I hadn’t taught, I don’t think I would be thinking about the stuff much at all, but since I taught, it’s a crucial thing to me.

LG:
It’s probably not helpful to always be reacting against something or rebelling. At some point, you have to decide what you want to be.

Gerry Bergstein:
The act of rebellion in itself doesn’t guarantee good art. There has to be some sort of element of love and discovery in the work, not just rebellion.  I need both love and rage.

The Gleaners, 2016, 13.5×12.5×8 inches,mixed media on panel

LG:
How did your career as a painter evolve after finishing school? What was life like for you back then? Were you able to paint full-time? Did you start teaching right away?

Gerry Bergstein:
when I first got out of school. I got a traveling fellowship and spent four months in Europe, which was life-changing.  When I got back, for around five or six years, I worked full-time as a picture framer. I didn’t get much time to paint then. I had to make a living, but I made it a point never to give up. 

In 1973 I got a grant to go to an artist in residency in Roswell, New Mexico, for six months. They gave you a stipend, house, and studio. I went there and got to know some serious artists. We became friendly. I got to know their work habits and know what it was like to have time to work, which was terrific. 

When I returned in about 1977, I got a job teaching at the night school in the Museum School. But it paid five dollars an hour, my parents would send me money once in a while, but I was living hand-to-mouth. I made friends with some artists; Miroslav Antic was one. He was a teacher at the Museum School. He was much pushier than me and had a friend who opened a gallery. He brought this friend to my studio, who then offered me a show. I also got a job teaching at Concord Academy, which was a little better than being a picture framer as it was part-time but a little bit more money. I was struggling along. And then, I had a show at Lopoukhine/Nayduch Gallery in 1979; nothing sold, but there was a lot of interest from artists, and it was very encouraging.

Grants, so I was beginning to do okay. I’m a very shy person. For a time, I would break out in a sweat just walking into a gallery, let alone asking them to look at my work.

I went to New York and fell in love with artists like Susan Rothenberg, Robert Colescott, The bad painting show at the new Museum, and Philip Guston, Oh my God. I thought this was the ultimate negation of the Greenbergian tyranny.

Self Portrait, 1979, 60X72 inches, Oil

Elements Of Style, 22X30 inches, Oil/Paper

Gerry Bergstein:
When I first saw Philip Guston in 1975 at BU when he first started doing the Klan heads and I loathed it, but then in 1979, I was doing this self-portrait of me covered with a blanket in bed, and the shape of the blanket was a lot like one of those Klan hoods. There was a cigarette with really thick smoke coming out of it; then I remembered that show, and like it was love. I still love Guston. I became very excited about this new direction in painting. My friend Miroslav was kind of a mentor then. Henry Schwartz, whom I adored, rejected that work completely, but I didn’t mind because I knew Henry loved me. 

I got into a show in 1981, Boston Now, at the Institute of Contemporary Art, where every year they would put on a show with about eight Boston artists; it was really exciting, and then I got into another Boston Now show the next year and then got picked up by Stux Gallery. After that, I started selling every single thing I made. From about 1981 to about 1995. I sold everything. As a result of this, I was able to teach full-time at the Museum school because I was showing. Teaching at first was just a day job, but then I learned a lot from it, and it was really fun.

Effort At Speech, 1981, 60X90 inches, Oil

LG:
Do you see yourself as part of a continuum of the tradition of Boston Expressionist painting, such as Hyman Bloom,  Jack Levine, David Aronson, Karl Zerbe, Henry Schwartz, and others after them? 

Gerry Bergstein:
I have somewhat mixed feelings about the Boston expressionists. I love Hyman Bloom. You know,  people like Arthur Polonsky and David Aaronson, I thought they were a little too slick, too crowd-pleasing, almost too romantic, but I guess they’ve all had a big influence on me. Strangely enough, the year I quit teaching, no one had looked at those guys for decades, I decided to do a slide show of all of them for my class. The students came up to me and said this is the best art we’ve seen in years; we love it! 

 LG:
 Would you call yourself a Neo-Expressionist, or do you reject being labeled as part of any particular school?

Gerry Bergstein:
Would I call myself a neo-expressionist? I did when I was in the 80s. Along with Francesco Clemente, Jorg Immendorf, David Salle, and Julian Schnabel. I was interested in some of their work; I placed myself in that spectrum. But there was a lot of bad Neo-Expressionism too.  Is Philip Gustin a Neo-Expressionist? I don’t know

The Irascibles (3D), 2013, 6x12x10 inches, mixed media

LG:
I think his late work could fit in with that on some level. I anticipated that you might react against being labeled as a Neo-Expressionist; I thought maybe you’d resent being labeled, That you’re in a school of one.

Gerry Bergstein:
I’m more into my ancestral lineage. Maybe beginning with Bruegel and Hieronymus Bosch, going on to Piranesi, Velasquez, and Goya, and then up through Ensor, Rousseau, the Surrealists, the German expressionists, and the Abstract Expressionists like de Kooning. Arshile Gorky, Gorky was a big influence, and then the Neo-expressionists are also my forebearers.&nbsp

But what you want to do is to add your own take to whatever you’re doing–you want to make it your own. You’re advancing the tradition a little step at a time. it’s a very broad tradition. I mean includes near-total abstraction and also artists like Bouguereau and Fragonard. Late in life, I suddenly fell in love with Fragonard, who is almost my complete opposite. His sentimentality is so blatant that I just can’t help but love it. However, Boucher, I don’t like as much.

A Brief History of the 20th Century, 2015, 67×21 inches, mixed media

LG:
I don’t know if you’ve seen the new Artificial Intelligence image software where you give text prompts to combine imagery gleaned from millions of images on the web. I saw recently where someone combined a Bouguereau nude and some kind of blue monster.

This sort of AI surrealism is, more often than not, quite dreadful, but I still think it could be useful for generating ideas visually. Kind of like drawing thumbnail sketches. I tried this a while ago, writing in the prompt, Picasso painting of the Tower of Babel, to see what might come up. It was interesting what it chose to do.

Gerry Bergstein:
It’s fascinating and terrifying at the same time.  Is the painter going to be like the chess master, who can no longer beat the computer anymore? I don’t know. But what terrifies me one year, I can fall in love with the next.

LG:
 I guess the point I’m thinking about is that so much of our lineage is open for reinterpretation and making it new. Like maybe making hybrids like medieval-neo-expressionism or cubist-photorealism. Technology, as well as our contemporary mindset, allows the past to continue in new, exciting ways. Painting is far from being dead. 

Gerry Bergstein:  
Painting has been declared dead for well over 100 years. (laughs)
Past and future generations examine the same issues through the lens of their culture and through their technology. Some things may evolve technically and culturally, but the big issues like life and death, love and sex, power and rage all stay the same.

as yet untitled, 2022, 40×26 inches, oil and collage on paper

LG:
That’s a very good point. 

You’ve talked in the past about your fascination with juxtaposing contrasting imagery and ways of applying the paint. You often paint trompe l’oeil elements, especially flat things like tape, over or alongside expressionistic elements. You might also incorporate flat, cartoon, or child-like drawings, collage, and sculptural pieces next to realistically painted fruits. You seem to revel in combining the high and low-brow, sacred and profane, and the banal with the extraordinary. You once stated that your “paintings contrast the awesome and the trivial, the historical and the personal, the manic and the melancholic.” Can you say more about why this has engaged you for so long?

Zip, 1997, 96X69 inches, Oil

I’m Painting as Fast as I Can, 2019, 16 × 12 1/2 inches, Mixed media on paper

Gerry Bergstein:
I grew up with reading comic books, Mad Magazine, Twilight Zone, and science fiction magazines, and one of my favorite shows that I saw more recently as a show of Pulp Fiction covers at the Brooklyn Museum. I think they’re so great.

My parents were very cultured, but they were very shy and isolated almost, so I had a lot of conflicting influences.  I like to joke that I was the rebellious son of accountants and dentists. I have all that obsessiveness in me, but I often explode. It’s built into my psychology; even in the 60s, during the height of the student strike, of course, I was absolutely in favor of peace and civil rights, but there was also what I called psychedelic fascism. It was like the left telling you what to do as like the right was telling you what to do–‘meet the new boss, same as the old boss’–or something like that, right? 
I’ve always been a skeptic, and I’m not sure why, but I think it’s an interesting place to be. I have two quotes on my website, one from John Lennon and the other from Groucho Marx. Lennon says all you need is love and Marx says whatever it is, I’m against it! (laughs)

Book I, Handbook, 2015, 20.5×34 inches, mixed media on paper

LG:
That’s so funny. Great.

Gerry Bergstein:
I also think I can learn stuff like what Ivan Albright has in common with Jackson Pollock, maybe not the deepest connection, but it’s there. What does Chuck Close have in common with the de Kooning, and what makes them different? I think the thing about Chuck Close was that he was temperamentally unsuited to be an abstract painter because he was because of the emotional roller coaster of abstract expressionist painting– I do this as well; if I make one good mark, I suddenly think this is the greatest thing that’s ever happened in art.  The emotional; ups and downs were too much for him. He also said that he thought abstraction was not an arena for major breakthroughs at that time.

Chance Meetings 2002, collage and installation floor to ceiling installation

Chance Meetings 2002, collage and installation floor to ceiling installation

LG:
William T Wiley stated in an interview talking about one of his shows, 

“It’s like Sir Francis Bacon’s statement, “There’s no thing of excellent beauty that does not have within itself some proportion of strangeness.” So, you know, high and low meet at that point where authenticate expression emerges, I think, and some inspired expression emerges, whether it’s with a razor blade or an old sock, it’s whatever that particular thing. So you could have something there that, the most recent post-modern term is, “Looks like art, so it must be art.”

How do you decide the balance between the disparate elements and the proportion of strangeness?

Gerry Bergstein:
I like that William Wiley statement very much. I think that kind of sums it up for me.

LG:
We talked a little about Greenbergian Modernism art dogma and such, along with the rigid doctrine of both the right and left and other similar closed ideologies that have influenced your art and life. Is there anything more to say about this?

Gerry Bergstein:
The problem with ideologies is that they must be put into practice by people. They all have a degree of truth, but I think that personal ambition is like the “uncertainty” principle” of the art world and most other human worlds. It is never mentioned in ideologies but is a hidden part of their creation. I feel strongly about that, maybe because I was so shy for so long and people around me were expressing themselves with great authority–I was terrified of them. But that’s not true anymore. Now I won’t shut up. (laughs)

LG:
Did underground cartoonists like Robert Crumb or earlier cartoonists like George Herriman ever have much influence on your work?

Gerry Bergstein:
I like R. Crumb. I love that documentary about him. I’m uncomfortable when he beheads women in his work. Still, I think he’s a brilliant draftsman and a kinky guy in an interesting way. George Herriman, I like just because Philip Guston liked him, but I don’t know him very well. I never read psychedelic comics. Instead, I read stuff like Archie and Superman when I was very young. The Hardy Boys, the American dream, Father Knows Best, the American Dream–you’re a good boy. You solved the crime–you’re a good boy. That was a total lie, and that compels me, knowing how we delude ourselves.

Gerry Bergstein’s Palette gurney

LG:
Can you say something about your painting process? I’m curious how much you consciously plan out your paintings or do they take on a life of their own without much planning beforehand?

Gerry Bergstein:
I’ve had many different processes, but I can give you a few of them.

When I was still in school, I was in love with Arshile Gorky, and I loved the sort of eroticism and delicacy of his line and shape. I loved his rigorous compositions, but I couldn’t get it in my own work. And one day, I had this color canvas, and in a fit of pique, I just painted the whole thing black and scraped into it with the back of my paintbrush. I thought, Oh, there’s Gorky’s line. So I fell in love with it. I thought it was the best painting of the 20th century, and I showed it to BarneyRubenstein, and he said, well, it’s very nice, but it looks like Gorky. So I learned that you have to add something. The technique that I’ve probably used the most, and what I’m working on right now, are these black and white pieces where I start out using black gesso and two or three layers of ivory black with a little wax medium. So there’s a little bit of tooth to it; I blot it and let it dry. I then apply zinc white mixed with a little clove oil which keeps it wet for a month. I then use these different tools that I scrape into the picture. I usually have a structure in mind. 

Dithering Machine, 2022, 86×102 inches, oil and collage on canvas

Dithering Machine, 2022, oil and collage Detail

Until about three months ago, for about a year, I was doing these orb-like shapes; sometimes, they reminded me almost like a flying saucer, or Earth, or maybe my brain.  I would draw in the structure and then randomly, with a lot of agitation, move my arm around within the structure. I would try perspectival and other ways of making things look round. Gradually biomorphic shapes or ruined landscapes parts of it would emerge, and every day I come into the studio and do it some more, and then when that all dried, I would take these little tiny brushes and enhance some of the shapes that I saw. They became quite different. 

And in my newer ones, I have collaged photographs of different parts of different paintings, and I print them in slightly different colors from black and white. So the newest ones have a little bit of color in them again. So that’ sgraffito technique affords me the opportunity to rorschach and free-associate and make mistakes. 

Shard, 2016, 46×30 inches, mixed media

I tried another thing a few years earlier for my show “Theory and Practice” at the Naga Gallery  I became seduced by digital photography, for better or worse. It took me about 10 years to do anything I sort of liked. My studio floor is a mess, it’s a painting in itself, and every time I cut out a little figure or historical image that I’d want to try out in a painting. it falls on the floor along with the drips on the floor, and then I decided to pour white house paint on top of all this and cover up some of it, but not all of it. I then would walk around it until I’d find a composition I liked. I then had a friend come in with a 200-megapixel Hasselblad, and he took a picture of it for me. I photographed it and printed it out large, very large on canvas, like five by six feet. 

Hap, (after Poem by Thomas Hardy) 2017, 48×74 inches, mixed media

LG:
Did you print that yourself or did you have someone else?

Gerry Bergstein:
Luckily I had access to the Museum School’s printers and their Tech Assistants. 

LG:
Wow, that’s great.

Babel, 2015, 18.5×90 inches, mixed media on canvas

Gerry Bergstein:
So I would do that, and then I would take detailed shots of little parts of the floor. So the big shot was the floor meeting the wall.  There was graffiti on the wall, and there was stuff on the floor. But then I would take these drips of white house paint that would crack after a while. They would also get distressed after I walked on them after they were dry. They would begin to look like fossilized de Kooning pours. So we take pictures of them and then cut them out and collage them into the painting. One of my favorites sort of looked like a fossilized de Kooning. There too, I would paint into them and see things in the abstract shapes that look like images, but then if they became too much like images-that, they got corny, I might need to scale it back. It was a kind of a juggling act.

Special Delivery, 2016, 19x13x5 inches, mixed media on panel

Valentine 2003, 24x24x3 inches, bas relief collage

LG:
Those fruit and flower were almost little sculptures made from thick paint, right? 

Gerry Bergstein:
Yes, some of them used toy model railroad workers who were constructing fruit out of very thick paint. I love the idea of something being pure paint and image simultaneously. Like how you might see in Thiebaud’s thickly painted picture of  Ketchup, Mustard, and Mayonaise.

Sometimes what happens is that I’m doing something for three to five years and I begin to get bored. First, it’s a learning curve, and then after I learned how to do it and do some really good work, It begins to be a little too easy, and I get bored. And so I think the reason I stopped doing this sgraffito for many years was that I got sick of it. However, now, I’m into it again.

In a still earlier phase, I would paint fruit on a canvas, and then I would drip white paint on top of it, then I would paint into the white paint, and gradually, there were so many drips on top of it that they became totally abstract. Eventually, I lost my way, and I went into something else. 

I developed a couple of techniques for a series of figure self-portraits where the head looks like a drawing, but it’s actually a painting. I would take a photograph and then have this white paint on top of black paint and then trace an outline from the photograph; I would then very carefully render the head on the canvas with a pencil. So it looked like a pretty good realist depiction. But then, on the bodies, I would have image illusions of little scraps of paper with all my favorite artists listed or images from artists like Gorky or Vija Celmins to my father’s head, to an anatomical chart part. And so my body became art history or something personal as an artist thing. Randall Diehl, a friend of Gregory Gillespie’s did this great self-portrait with tattoos of different artists all over his body. I like art about art.

Garden of Delights, 2016, 64×32 inches, mixed media on canvas

LG:
That’s so interesting. I noticed that in a few of your paintings where you include some type of self-portrait, You’re wearing this paint-dripped shirt and pants that look a little like a blend of a de Kooning and a Hubble photo of the stars, making you look like a cosmic house painter. Is that something you made?

Gerry Bergstein:
I made that myself; it’s a t-shirt with black Jeans with acrylic poured on top of it. I wore that outfit of the day opening of that show.

LG:
That’s so funny.

Gerry Bergstein:
Actually, I just wore the shirt I didn’t wear the pants; that would have been too much.

LG:
I’m not sure if  Cosmos is the right word, but there seemed to be a motif of the cosmo running through a number of your works. I’ve read that electron microscope imagery of the structure of neural networks in the brain look remarkably similar to astronomical photos that show the larger patterns of millions of galaxies. Your work sometimes seemed to speak to this fascinating comparison on some level.

Gerry Bergstein:
The macro and the micro Yes. Absolutely. Subatomic and deep space. Yes.

LG:
A great idea for a t-shirt!

Gerry Bergstein:
I’m interested in the cosmos because it is so awesome, mysterious, and spiritual. I’m sort of an agnostic, but I believe there’s something that I’ll never understand or even have a clue about; it’s so wonderfully mysterious. And then you look at the Earth, and we have Donald Trump. Certainly not wonderful and mysterious, he’s the complete opposite of that, from the sublime to the ridiculous. I’m interested in that issue too.

LG:
Ugh, please don’t get me started about Trump! I love these new photos coming from the new James Webb Space Telescope. Just so astounding that we now get this new appreciation of where we are in the larger scheme of things and how small and insignificant we are but at the same time so rare and precious.

Gerry Bergstein:
I know, they’re going to be able to maybe get clues of where there might be life. It’s totally amazing.

LG:
I read a quote from John Walker saying something along the lines of  ‘…his forms have to have the volume so that they could imply other things, that his paintings need to be imbued with feeling. Otherwise, it’s just design or decoration.’ Would you agree with this and care to comment further? Do you know him?

Gerry Bergstein:
I don’t know him but I admire his work. It’s a fine line. As someone who loves Bouguereau and Fragonard – I might not be the best one to answer about sentimentality.(laughs)` I think there’s a difference between emotion and sentimentality. There is a lot of feeling in Max Beckmann; There’s a lot of feeling in de Kooning. There’s a lot of feeling in Vija Celmins. Strangely enough. It’s inclusive of feeling, intellect, and process in varying proportions or more or less important to different artists. At times an artist like Hyman Bloom gets a little sentimental but it is a sublime sentimentality. So you know, I think it’s borderline, but art would be nothing without feeling, and art would be nothing without somebody’s mind and imagination. Art might also be nothing without individual techniques of people develop. So I think they’re all important.

Whirl, 2019, 30 × 22 inches, Mixed media on paper

LG:
I understand you are married to the painter Gail Boyajian who paints incredible panoramic landscapes with birds. I noticed that one of her paintings ( Vanitas, 2015 ) includes the Tower of Babel. And some of your fruit and flower paintings show some affinities with her work.  Despite your subjects and styles being so different, there seem to be a few points where they intersect. I’m curious to hear anything you might say about having a painter as a partner.

Gerry Bergstein:
I made those Fruit and Flower paintings for her; We had one in the background in the place where we got married. I first saw Bruegel’s Tower of Babel painting in 1971 on my first trip to Europe, but I loved it so much that I went back later with Gail; there is a whole room of Bruegel’s paintings. We both love Bruegel.

Tower, 2019, 44×34 inches, Oil on canvas

LG:
I find both the story of the Tower of Babel and Bruegel’s painting so compelling – like the bible saying humans need to stay in their lane – don’t evolve with greater ambitions like advances in civilization. To not build our knowledge, medicine, science, and humanity any higher. It shows how insecure this God must be to worry about humans rising above their station.

Gerry Bergstein:
I see it as human ambition taking over from God, and That’s why he destroyed it, and it’s hubris, and it’s the kind of like power-seeking or knowing everything or which we never can do because (goddamn) God made us so we couldn’t do it. (laughs)  But I can see your point; I think it’s the opposite side of the same coin. It’s about the folly of ambition and power. But on the other hand, that’s all we have, and I love ambition and power. It’s a double-edged sword.

LG: 
Sorry, I interrupted you, please continue talking about your wife.

Gerry Bergstein:
It’s a really interesting relationship. She rarely watches television. She doesn’t know what Mad Magazine was. She doesn’t know the New Wave music I used to listen to. But she’s a total expert on Henry James and George Eliot. So when we first got together, we vowed that I would read Portrait of a Lady, and she was going to watch LA Law. (laughs) So she watched one episode of LA Law, and I read one chapter of Portrait of a Lady, and we’ve been arguing about it ever since. But now we’re starting to come together in the center. I read a great biography of Henry James recently; I was fascinated by it because he was an ambitious insecure guy, just like the rest of us. (laughs) So we have great discussions, and she’s a good critic of certain things in my work, like where something is spatially. So we’re encouraging and helping each other in our work. Since our work is so different, we’re not competitive with each other. She has a different sort of ambition than I do. My ambition is changing as I get older, a little more contemplative. I’m not so anxious.

Book II, Fragile Sky, 2016, 21×32.5 inches, mixed media on paper

LG:
As you get older, are you working on a smaller scale?

Gerry Bergstein:
Actually, it’s getting bigger; it’s getting both bigger and smaller.

LG:
The scale of so many of your works is huge. I’m curious; some painters I’ve talked to start to work smaller because they don’t have the storage space or other reasons, but you sell most of your work, so that’s probably not an issue, right?

Body Politic, 2019, 88×102 inches, oil on canvas

Gerry Bergstein:
I don’t sell a huge amount of work. I like the people at the Naga Gallery–they are really honest and helpful. But I think some of my newer work is too fragile and large, I don’t know why I like  to keep doing it. I guess I’m an idiot. (laughs) Maybe working larger is a reaction to mortality. I’ve had a few health problems; nothing will kill me imminently. But I realize, in a way, I never have before, that this is going to end, and I want to get my last shot in or something. Last year I worked on three super large paintings, the largest of which was 90 by 112 inches. That took over a year, and now I’m returning to somewhat smaller work.

LG:
The population explosion of painters over the past several decades has made the competition to show and sell paintings impossibly stiff, especially in a higher-end market where someone might make enough to live on. Paintings are often valued less for artistic merit and more for saleability or marketing. What opinion can you share about this dynamic? 

Gerry Bergstein:
That’s an interesting question because I love to sell work, and I’m always fantasizing about selling work, but if I were more interested in selling, I’d make very different work. So it’s a mixed bag. I do work that is difficult and then complain if no one wants it. (laughs)  I do think about it, certainly, but I don’t let it interfere with decision-making in the actual act of painting. It’s a balancing act.

Theory and Practice, 2019, 22×30 inches, Oil on Paper

LG:
It seems to me that for some artists, the more they try to make it sellable, the worse it gets. The important thing is to focus on the integrity of the work, which you do. 

Gerry Bergstein: 
It’s really hard. Putting yourself out in the world. It’s very important. I do it reluctantly, but I do it. However, I do it less as I’m getting older. I’m showing less and getting out in the world.  Covid, of course, was bit of a damper. (laughs)

LG:
How much should young painters care about the commercial potential of their artwork? What advice might you offer the younger generation of painters coming up?

Gerry Bergstein:
They should be thinking about making friends with other artists. That’s good for discussion of the work and also good for introductions. I got my start from a friend who introduced me to a dealer and got a show. I probably would have never done that on my own. But you can go too far in either direction. I agree with you. Students need some sort of discussion of what happens right after school and how to survive, how to survive with a day job, and have a goal to work themselves up to. As shy as I was, when my work started getting good, about 1980, and I began to stand behind my work, I didn’t have any problem showing it to people, but before that, I was always a little shaky, and maybe for a good reason. Even now, I don’t often send my work out to dealers very much in other cities. I used to do that. I showed in places other than Boston. 

I think young artists need to know that it’s a hard business. They have to be very persistent so that they might luck out and have a show and sell when they’re very young, which comes with its own difficulties. Or they might have to work for several years. I had I’ve had students for whom I write letters of recommendation to get into graduate school every year for ten years, and then finally, they get accepted. I think it takes a long time to learn how to paint. There is one woman I taught; not only did she get into grad school, but now she’s getting these teaching jobs. She’s a great landscape painter, and if she hadn’t worked for eight or nine years without much recognition, It would have been sad because she’s doing terrific work.

If you get discouraged and want to quit, that’s your business. I’ve also had painters who got out of grad school and started showing in galleries a year later and sold their work for a lot of money, and then–just like that–it ends. They can’t figure out what else to do. Whatever you’re doing, you have to be in it for the long haul, be honest with yourself and let the chips fall where they may. The whole thing about the overblown art market, work selling for hundreds of millions of dollars, is obscene. But the other question is if I could sell a painting for a hundred million dollars, I bet I would! (laughs) I still think it’s obscene. Artists deserve to make a living, maybe even a comfortable living, but this commodification stuff, with people, are buying art for the wrong reasons, is awful. The young artist has to navigate commodification as well as being able to navigate socializing and friendships. They have to be assertive and get their work out there and don’t expect it always to work out, to have a thick skin. Applying for grants and the like, it’s a crapshoot. And you know, Maybe if you’re lucky, you’ll get one in 20 tries, so just keep doing it.

Treehouse, 2019, 36 × 30 inches, Oil on canvas

LG:
Do you have a show coming up at some point in the near future?

Gerry Bergstein:
Yes, in September 2023 at the Naga Gallery.

LG:
You’ll be showing these new large paintings you mentioned there?

Gerry Bergstein:
I have some small ones to show too. The Gallery Naga is so great; they encourage you to take more risks and not be worried about what people think; they’re very supportive. I’m happy about that.

LG:
From what I know, it’s a brilliant gallery with a wonderfully diverse range of painters. 

Gerry Bergstein:
Yes, they do.

LG:
Many galleries are having a hard time in this economy and all. Are they doing ok?

Gerry Bergstein:
Yes, the Naga is healthy because they’re good business people. Since covid, it has complicated things for all the galleries.

LG:
is Arthur Dion still the director?

Gerry Bergstein:
No, Arthur retired. Meg White replaced him. Arthur has become a very serious Buddhist.

LG:
Is Buddhism something that interests you as well? It’s been important for many painters, like Gregory Gillespie

Gerry Bergstein:
Only peripherally. I’ve tried meditation, but I’m so bad at it. David Sipress had a great cartoon, of a man raising his hand in a meditation class saying,  “I’m thinking about not thinking, is that correct?” (laughs)  And that’s what happens to me when I meditate. I do it once in a while, and it’s helpful if I’m anxious about something. How about you, do you meditate?

LG:
No, however,  after lunch, I like to listen to classical music in an almost asleep, dreamlike state for 20 minutes or so. It’s rejuvenating. I don’t think it’s meditating, though, but it works for me.
Do you paint while listening to music?

Gerry Bergstein:
Classical music, yes! I love chamber music. When I started this new series of paintings, I listened exclusively to the chamber music of Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert, and Mendelssohn, while I was painting and it was so inspiring. I also love rock music.

Whitewash, 2019, 30X70 inches, Oil on canvas

LG:
Do you ever worry about the music influencing the painting too much on some level?
Gerry Bergstein:
Yes, I’ve heard that; maybe that’s true. And I used to always until I was until about 1990 I listened to music constantly in the studio. Either classical or new wave, Punk or whatever. And then suddenly I started listening to the news…

LG:
Oh no, that’s pretty sad these days. (laughs)

Gerry Bergstein:
And then now I’m back listening to music. But not quite as much, I have to remind myself. But when I’m doing it, I love it.

LG:
I feel that I want to paint as much as I can. If I spent all my time painting with no music, then I’d never get to listen to music. Life’s hard enough; you might as well enjoy it wherever you can!

Gerry Bergstein:
Exactly. I agree; I love music; I think it’s the highest art form.

LG:
Sometimes I imagine what musician would be most like a certain painter, what musician would I equate them with? Maybe your musical doppelgänger would be Frank Zappa, would that be fair?

Gerry Bergstein:
Absolutely!, We’re in it Only for the Money is one of my all-time favorite albums.

LG:
A funny thing – that album I heard was part of a project that Zappa called No Commerical Potential – yet it was such a huge success. Another example of the importance of being true to your creative self.

Gerry Bergstein:
I also listen to John Coltrane and Charlie Mingus. Sometimes I imagine the blacks in my painting remind me of someone playing the cello, like a Bach Cello Suite or something. So it’s a wide range.
But then, I’ll listen to Little Richard the next day. I want to have Beethoven’s Grosse Fugue, followed by Chuck Berry’s Roll Over Beethoven, played at my funeral.

LG:
That sounds perfect. Let’s hope that won’t be for many, many years in the future.

Fortress, 2022, 26X40 inches, oil on paper

The post Interview with Gerry Bergstein appeared first on Painting Perceptions.

The artist Frank Galuszka lives and paints in a magical place, Santa Cruz, California. I first knew him when he was a very well-known and important member of the Philadelphia art community, back in the 1980s when there was a lot going on with the galleries, museums and art schools in Philadelphia. Before his recent retirement, he had been a Professor of Art at the University of California in Santa Cruz. He is known as a painter of mysterious and evocative figure paintings, animated with enigmatic women, and for his beautiful abstract paintings. He’s also an amazing painter of the Santa Cruz beach and landscape.

Frank Galuszka studied at Syracuse University and at Tyler School of Art of Temple University, with an MFA in 1972. For many years he was a Professor of Art at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Previously, he has taught at the University of the Arts, Philadelphia; Vermont College of Norwich University, Montpelier; and The Studio School of Painting and Sculpture, New York. He has had thirty solo exhibitions since 1970 and over sixty group exhibitions, nationally and internationally, including at: the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia; the Pennsylvania Academy, Philadelphia; The National Academy of Design, New York; The Drawing Center, New York; and The National Academy of Sciences, Washington DC; as well as in Italy, England, China, and Japan. Galuszka served on the Philadelphia Art Commission from 1988 through 1992 as the chairperson of the Art and Architecture Committee and as chair of the Public Art Council of the City of Philadelphia. From 1994 to 1999 he was the president of the American Society for Cybernetics.

Coyote in the Kitchen, 78 x 80 inches, 2004

Jeffrey Carr:     Frank, I first met you back in the 1980’s, when you were a major presence in the Philadelphia art scene. Then you moved out to Santa Cruz, California, to be a professor at the University of California. You painted a series of magical landscapes of your favorite beach in Santa Cruz, which you showed in Philadelphia. But you are also well known for your elaborately constructed figure paintings and allegories, and for your mysterious abstractions. You’ve retired now from active teaching, and just recently had a show in Santa Cruz at the R. Blitzer gallery of your large-scale figure paintings. I love Santa Cruz, because I attended the university there a long, long time ago. I’m sure it’s changed. What’s it like there now?

Frank Galuszka:     The weather is perfect, as it always has been. It’s in a big state of change, not only because of people coming out of the pandemic but because of the impact of what is happening with housing. People from Silicon Valley are moving to live here, and the cost of living forcing out a lot of the hippie-type people who were once here. Still artists and writers here.  Big homeless population. Surfers.  Academics. Fires. Tourists. There’s a big transition going on. Who knows where it’s going? It’s a very expensive place to live, even though it looks congenially ramshackle the way it did whenever you saw it last.

JC:     You were a professor at UC Santa Cruz, and for a while, the department chair. Have you completely retired from teaching?

Frank Galuszka:     I’m teaching classes now. I’m teaching a class by Zoom. I had retired, but I’ve got so many paintings, and such a big storage bill, that I have to teach in order to pay my storage bill. That’s the truth. I’ve got a surprisingly large amount of paintings. Five of my students are in China taking the class from China, one of them from a hospital room, where he’s been assigned since he was tested positive for COVID. He doesn’t have any symptoms. And he doesn’t have any art supplies, so he’s doing everything on his iPad.

JC:     I’m friends here with an artist who is an extraordinarily good portrait painter. He does these little quick sketches on his iPad, and he’s really good at it. He’s very comfortable with digital media.

Frank Galuszka:     I’ve had a number of students do it, and some of them create interesting things with a program that has various brushes. One is called Bad Brush, so you can paint electronically with something that duplicates a brush that hasn’t been cleaned enough, that has got bristles sticking out, or with something like a more bristly brush, or a more stable-like brush. one of the great things about this program is that it gives the people more courage to experiment because they can always go back and eliminate the last decision they made.

Beauty 2013, 47 by 43 inches  2013

Advice, 45 by 47 inches, 2016

JC:     I’m impressed with the visual effects. A lot of contemporary painters seem to be affected by the effects you can get with a computer.  I was in a collector’s house the other day, and I saw a Lisa Yuskavage print.  I liked all the insane Disney Technicolor color that she uses; all these weird pinks, chartreuse, and the color combinations that come out of people working with electronic colors and not working so much with actual visual appearances.

Frank Galuszka:     It has a kind of luminosity that’s different from paint. And it’s different from stained glass windows. It’s its own thing.  

Shades of Night Descending,  20 by 16 inches,  2019

The Saint I, 68 by 72 inches, 1985 

JC:     I like the way things look on the computer screen. As you said, it has a kind of luminosity. With a digital image, I can see details of paintings that I couldn’t see when I was in the museum.

Frank Galuszka:     There’s an important aspect to this. Unlike a photograph, I don’t think a painting has a fixed visual identity; it looks different in different light situations, and it also looks different when it’s processed through different media like photography. It’s all part of its identity. For instance, a digital photographer documenting people’s artwork, is able to photograph everything in extreme detail so that some of the people complain that the photographs of their paintings are too accurate. The photographs capture so much detail. It’s different from the way paintings might look with the human eye looking at them.

JC:     That makes me think of certain portrait photographers like Avedon, who would photograph people so that they appeared too gritty, with every little freckle and every wrinkle standing out.

Frank Galuszka:     With photographs, part of it is using the strobe and polarizing filters. A polarizing filter can make an oil painting look like a gouache painting because it eliminates a certain amount of ambient light that gets reflected back. The strobe eats through the top layer of the paint so that the bottom layers of the paint are more dominant, and the top layer is gone.

JC:     You are talking about the very different ways paintings look in different contexts. Your series of paintings of encounters between the two dueling shaktis, your goddesses, could have a series of votive candles in front of them and be in a little niche like you might see in a Hindu temple.

La Vista Totale: a partial view; 56 by 44 inches, 2015

On the Threshold; 42 by 34 inches, 2021

On the Threshold; 72 by 48 inches, 1984

Between Amherst and Delphi; 102 by 68 inches, 1995

Frank Galuszka:     I would like that. Yes. Candles flicker and change. That would be good. I like daylight too. I think of the Rothkos where he was insistent that they be seen under natural light. Looking at one’s own paintings in daylight, they can look very different from moment to moment. The light changes. That’s good. But not glaring light. That makes the painting so much of an object it undermines space and atmosphere. It’s like the strobe again. There’s this story about Edwin Dickinson when he was doing a painting of the spiral staircases, the ruins of Daphne, that hangs at the Metropolitan. He’d been working on it for years and they took it outdoors to move it, and his heart crashed when he saw what it looked like in daylight. You get used to looking at a painting in a certain kind of light.. When I was in Philadelphia, I would paint my paintings under artificial light. That’s where I had them. And then I would take them into Chuck More’s gallery and he would light them a whole lot. I would complain, you’re over-lighting these paintings! Could you please not light them so much? You’re making them look like a Mercedes in a dealership showroom. And he said, that’s how I want them to look; I want them to look expensive like that!

JC:     Talk about Chuck More and his gallery. The eighties were an amazing time in the history of Philadelphia painting, and Chuck More’s gallery was at the center of it. To me, Chuck More was like the Philadelphia Duveen. And I know you are writing a book about this period of Philadelphia painting.  (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1951/09/29/the-days-of-duveen)

Frank Galuszka:     I love him! And Chuck was actually a fan of Duveen, and he studied Duveen and Duveen’s methods; like the scheme that Duveen had going with the Gainsboroughs, right? He got all of that. (https://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/gainsborough-showstopper-the-blue-boy-comes-home-to-the-uk-after-100-years)

JC:     What about Philadelphia in those days? I mean back in the 80s and that period. You showed a lot, and you were part of that scene. It was an amazing time.

Frank Galuszka:     I think it was. And I think that Chuck was responsible for a lot of what happened then, He was willing to show things nobody else was willing to show. He had a certain vision. It included an appreciation of ambiguous, moody, depressive art that no one else was interested in showing. He would show Sidney Goodman paintings and some of my things and things by other people that did not look upbeat and cheerful. There was a real taste for that in Philadelphia, that I think he discovered through doing this. I think even some of Randy Exon’s early paintings were like that. And Bo Bartlett’s early paintings were like that.

Beirut; 21 by 22 inches, 2020

Brunhilde and Kali in the School of War; 20 by 16 inches, 2019

Ceremony in the Forest; 10 by 7 inches, 1997

Corine, Katie and Greta; 68 by 72 inches, 1992

JC:     I’m also thinking of Ben Kamihira. Kamihira represents this depressive, dark, morbid, and weirdly sexual quality. This weirdness. There was this bright, cheerful side of Philadelphia painting that was the color sensibility represented by Arthur B. Carles, which was a contrast to the dark, tonalist depressive sensibility. I don’t associate your work at all with that depressive stuff, though. Your work to me is mystical and transcendent. There’s a quality of that in a lot of Philadelphia painting; some sort of otherworldliness, a little touch of something that is not quite surrealism, but maybe a little tiny dash of Duchamp. Duchamp’s darkness hovering over Philadelphia. And David Lynch is also part of the darkness.

Frank Galuszka:     Yeah, I think that’s right. I think there is that and other things. One of them is going back to the mystical statement. It’s the mysteriousness of tantric art, where some of it has a sublime abstraction and luminous color, and some of it is dark and terrifying. David Lynch’s appreciation of the darkness of Philadelphia is an important factor. He was at the Pennsylvania Academy. He writes and talks about how living in Philadelphia was dangerous. It is. When I was working in Philadelphia, I was living in a place where there were gunshots all the time. My car was shot. My office was shot.

Little Mecca; 72 by 48 inches, 1986

Greta in the Green Dress; 48 by 36 inches, 1984

JC:     He had a show a few years ago at the Pennsylvania Academy (PAFA) of his early paintings he did as a student. When he saw how much the neighborhood around City Hall had changed, he said that everything was so light and nice, and that he missed the gunshots and the sordidness.

Frank Galuszka:     Where I lived there was fantastic. The only negative was that it was dangerous. I had a talk about my work. Here, in Santa Cruz. There were some writers there, and one of them was a mystery writer and he said, “These paintings have a kind of film noir quality.” And then we talked about that a little bit and he said, “It’s like Philadelphia paintings have a film noir quality.” There’s a sense that what’s happening underneath is different from what’s on the surface. This goes back to David Lynch. And also the idea that there’s also some kind of spiritual strangeness going on… like Harry’s Occult Shop. Did you ever go to Harry’s Occult Shop on South Street? You would have so much fun. Dragon’s blood, stuff like that.

Mary and Martha (Bethany), 106 by 80 inches, 1982

Afternoon; 68 by 72 inches, 1987

Three Philosophers; 108 by 80 inches, 2008

JC:     Your work has that quality of spiritual strangeness. Like David Lynch, your work explores a strange, mysterious sort of narrative. I’m thinking of that series of encounters between two mysterious women in which there is some kind of ongoing dialogue; the talking is continuing. In these paintings, I feel like I’ve stumbled into a grove, and there are two luminous emanations, and I don’t know whether they’re visions, or goddesses or actual people, or a combination of all three. These figures are very intense as if they are having a conversation that’s been going on forever. With the two figures confronting one another, you’ve got one light one, who’s luminous. And then you’ve got one dark one, who’s sinister. And she’s the Sphinx. That painting reminds me of that amazing Ingres painting with the interrogation of the Sphinx by the hero Oedipus. She’s very dangerous-looking; a real dark goddess vision.

Frank Galuszka:     I hadn’t even thought about the Ingres painting. Even more so, for me, is the Gustave Moreau version of it. The thing about the Moreau, I don’t know if it’s so much in the Ingres, is the way that the earth drops off right at the bottom of the painting, as it does in some of the Leonardos such as in The Virgin and Saint Anne. It not only drops away, but it creates this gulf between the viewer and the painting, so that you’re looking at the painting over an abyss, which I think is something worthwhile. That the cliff or the side of the earth is falling away, also reinforces the picture plane. It creates a sense that the painting is somehow like a cliff itself. It’s a really interesting thing to me.

JC:     I love the Salome painting by Gustave Moreau, with the great death goddess holding the head.
I can contrast this to an artist like Bellini, where there is more of a sense of solid ground to believe in, and I’m approaching the figures and they’re in the middle distance. In your own paintings, and those of Leonardo da Vinci and Gustave Moreau, it seems like we are looking into a dark crystal and the objects are hovering there in mid-air, and we don’t know where we are. I don’t know if I’m approaching some kind of visionary state or if I’m actually there.

Above and Below; 108 by 80 inches, 2006

Frank Galuszka:     We could talk about Leonardo for a long time. I’m very interested in the two versions of the Virgin of the Rocks, and what happened between the first one and the second one. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_of_the_Rocks). There is the idea that the first one is an apex of a Renaissance vision, but the second one is a full-on mannerist vision, with the quality of imagination and invention taking over more and more completely from observation. That’s crudely stated; it’s just such an unbelievably elegant thing. This goes to Gustave Moreau. I really love the art movement of Symbolism. I’m meaning symbolism in the terms of the Symbolist movement rather than in terms of using symbols. One of the Leonardo paintings is in Paris and one of them’s in London. The one in Paris is the earlier one. The one in London colder, more linear. The earlier one has a red color in part of it, but there’s no red in the second one. It’s austere and artificial. Blue; green, dark. It has a different kind of luminosity. It is almost the same as the other, in composition, location, size, but it has the feeling of a different world. (https://eclecticlight.co/2020/03/27/gustave-moreau-and-symbolism-salome/)

My partner Christina is a big Mahler and Wagner fan. We were watching this fantastic performance of Tristan and Isolde yesterday. It’s all about creating the same kind of space or place, where then the narrative enters into it. But the narrative is just something that is animated within the space, which is mystical, and gives life to the mystical environment that it’s in. I would say that I aim at that kind of condition for painting, too.

Frank Galuszka:     Yes, the story floats there, but it’s not about the story. The story is a conveyance of something else. What we’re going back to is the mystical world. There’s just a whole lot of things. And one of them is, for me, the last page of On the Road, the Kerouac novel. The whole thing unwinds. It goes on and on and on, and then there’s no real plot. It’s like a travel book, basically. But then at the end, there’s just this incredible poetic vision that just fills up the entire space of America.

“So in America when the sun goes down, and I sit on the old broken-down river pier, watching the long, long skies over New Jersey, and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, and all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa, I know by now, the children must be crying in the land where they let children cry and tonight the stars’ll be out. And don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.”

That is one of those things, as far as I can see. Especially things like “the evening star must be shedding her sparkler dims. It’s beyond anything. We were talking about David Lynch, and Christina and I had just been watching the 2017 Twin Peaks iteration, and we went back to watch Fire Walk with Me, which I think was an interesting artistic mistake. It takes the great mysterious space in which the Twin Peaks myth takes place, and makes it into a concrete causal chain based on Laura Palmer’s life. It becomes too material, and it loses its power in a strange way. The narrative overtakes the atmosphere, freezes it, dulls it. I have to say that the story itself is exquisitely and intricately plotted. But you could feel the strength and authenticity of the plot without knowing everything. You feel it inside yourself. But then it’s taken away. It no longer belongs to you. It reverts to the author. I think there’s always this temptation for the artist to explain. The author wants to reclaim his creation after it has begun to belong to the viewer. It’s a mistake to explain too much, not only because the artist doesn’t know everything, but because the artwork has already succeeded.

Summer at Emmaus II; 42 by 36 inches, 2015

The Fit; 12 by 9 inches, 1992

I paint those two figures to find out why I’m painting those two figures. And I never find out. There are more questions.. I keep going back to it. It’s something that is probably going to be with me forever. That’s fine with me. They become the means by which other things become known or visible or come into existence and then go away. There’s a Dali quote that I liked from his manifesto, the Conquest of the Irrational that he wrote in 1935. He’s only 31 when he writes this. It says that just because he doesn’t know the meaning of his paintings when he’s painting them doesn’t mean that they have no meaning. Because he doesn’t know the meaning of the paintings he’s painting when he’s painting them, the meaning is coming through. Going back to surrealism, it is beyond the comprehension of the person at the moment of encountering these meanings as they appear in the work.

Jesus Negotiates with the Gods of India for the Souls of Men; 80 by 108, 2004-2008

Making the painting is active. It’s not like having some idea and then filling it in. I have no process. When I begin painting, I don’t know where it’s going to go. I certainly don’t even really know how to begin. It isn’t like I have a drawing process that leads to an underpainting process that leads to a blah blah process, and so on. It’s completely open when it starts. And it opens up further. And then at a certain point it begins to close, and then it may open up again. It closes again.

The Painter in His Studio; 7 by 5 inches, 1997

JC:     I’ve read that some artists ask critics or poets to come up with titles to the paintings, because they don’t know what they mean. An artist can be so influenced by critics that they start painting what the critic tells them the paintings are about. Artists can start believing in their own myth. After a while, they can start illustrating themselves.

Frank Galuszka:     I think that success is damaging in exactly that way, because it creates such expectations, and even expectations within the artist, which narrows the artist’s vision. I think the moment that the inspiration goes away, Pollock paints a Pollock, rather than painting into the unknown as he was when he was doing his greatest work. When de Kooning is painting into the unknown, he’s discovering something like an encyclopedia of ways of creating space in one painting. But if De Kooning just paints a de Kooning, then that creates a negative impact on his earlier work and the earlier work has something taken away from it by that.

JC:     People like to explain what they think paintings are about. Like Hopper, for example. Everybody thinks they know what Hoppers are about. They talk about loneliness or the American Scene or something like that. They aren’t about that. A great Hopper is beyond comprehension; it’s inexplicable.

Frank Galuszka:     I think part of it is because in his work, there is some uncertainty. He is not affirming the way he painted it in the past, and that this is his way. He hasn’t created a formula. He hasn’t over-branded himself. I’ve done abstract paintings; I do all kinds of paintings. But I think that too often artists create a brand.

Untitled (Jesus Preaches to the Gods of India); 19 by 23, 2020

JC:     I’m thinking about your very mysterious mica paintings, your abstract paintings, and they remind me of Gustav Klimt. In both, the work has this gold, the glitter, the goddess, and this overall quality of mystery and the unknowable. What would you say about someone who might look at your mica paintings and say they look like Gustav Klimt. What’s the difference?

Venus at Fifty; 108 by 134, 1999

Frank Galuszka:     I like Gustav Klimt. When I first started using mica, it wasn’t to do abstract paintings. I started using it on representational paintings. I did this because I didn’t like the surface of my paintings to be in contact with the same world that they were being viewed from. I wanted there to be some barrier between the surface of the painting and the space. I saw a retrospective of Francis Bacon paintings in the 1980s, and in the large late paintings, he would throw a large splat of white paint on a lot of them so that there would be this thick area of white paint. Then he would frame them in massive gold frames, with glass over the paintings. Of all people, it would seem that Francis Bacon would be someone who wouldn’t want to isolate the painting behind glass, as if that might reduce its expressive power. But doing that seemed to intensify them, to create this privileged or enchanted space between the glass, the underside of the glass, and the actual surface of the painting. The viewer could look at the painting, but they would be physically distanced by the glass. And then they would see through the glass to this space that existed between the underside of the glass and the painting itself. This would create a certain way of seeing the perspective space and also the physicality of the painting, so that they would be combined and preserved by that.

I believe that a painting has to have a material presence. That doesn’t have to mean it’s necessarily thickly painted. A Vermeer has a material presence, The paint has a vulnerable, tender quality of a handmade thing. It touches the heart to see them.

This is in Mondrian too. Mondrians in reproduction look like they’re cold paintings. But in real life Mondrians have a kind of tenderness to them. They are filled with self-sacrifice that comes from him changing them to make them better and better, and being able to see through the paint at how many times the lines have been moved, and how many times the color shapes, the color squares, the rectangles have been moved. That creates a quality that is hard to explain. When I left Philadelphia and came here, I think that I was more in love with painting than ever, because I couldn’t just see a great painting as easily as I could when I was there. So it created a great feeling for painting to be away from them.   

Starmaker; 78 by 108 inches, Acrylic and Mica on canvas

JC:     I love your landscapes. For us Californians, the landscape takes us into this incredible light, and your paintings are filled with that kind of mystical energy. You’re like Casper David Friedrich.

Frank Galuszka:     I think that’s the thing about Santa Cruz; it keeps moving between being Friedrich and being Bonnard. I love this landscape. I tried to paint the landscape in Philadelphia and failed. I couldn’t really do that at all. Many years ago when I was in Rome, I knew the people who were there at the British Academy. One of them was Graham Nickson, who I still know and am friends with. He’s a great person. There were a couple of other painters, and they were interested in the landscape, and they were all interested in Friedrich. I hadn’t really paid attention to Friedrich; I hardly knew who he was. I thought he was sort of a footnote. So I paid attention to him. Of course, at that time, I was trying to be more modern than that. The idea of using those earthy colors was something that seemed to be a pull into the past that I didn’t want to take part in. But there was a great Friedrich show at the National Gallery in Washington, probably in the very late 70s or early 80s. It was overwhelming, it was so profound, and no denying the importance of Friedrich for me after that.

JC:     Friedrich painted rainbows. Have you painted rainbows?

Frank Galuszka:     I painted a terrible rainbow. I had a moment in the 60s when I was doing silkscreens. They were pop art things. One of them was a rainbow. It was called “Rainbow Shimmers over Water. Other than that I haven’t painted rainbows. Graham Nickson painted rainbows. Once there was a rainbow that I saw at sunset and because of the color of the light from the sun, the red part of the rainbow was knocked out. It was just the other colors. A blue rainbow. Some kind of weird color effect because of the sun. And I did a little painting of a rainbow that was in the Salinas Valley. It was just a little chunk or like a little square of rainbow; not a whole rainbow. Friedrich painted the rainbow. And that’s a painting of Goethe right? Friedrich has a romantic feeling that is like reading about Goethe in Italy. And there is Goethe’s incredible loyalty to Angelica Kauffmann, who he declared was the greatest painter of the 18th century. They would tour Rome together on Sundays.

Madonna of the Dark; 44 by 82 inches, 2018

Yellow Sky; 26 by 43 inches, 2015

JC:     Whenever people talk about women artists, they usually talk about their relationships; that she knew so and so, and these are her love affairs and this is her family. By contrast, they discuss men as isolated monuments. Matisse is an example; he is discussed as a modernist revolutionary. But his wife and daughter managed his career as an artist and his daughter was interrogated by the Gestapo. But this is rarely mentioned in a discussion of his career. He is portrayed as this isolated genius in the studio.

Frank Galuszka:     They also complained about Matisse doing some radio show during Vichy France. They complained about Matisse being a collaborator. That’s really going a bit far. On the other hand, Dali’s sister was tortured by the communist side in the civil war in Spain. They don’t mention that his sister was tortured when they talk about Dali going back to live in Franco’s Spain. So much is personal. He wanted to go home. He wanted to reconcile with his father. Dali’s politics are complex. Or simple. I don’t know. At one point he was a leftist activist. Mirroring his art, Dali’s politics are retrogressive. In his youth he was a leftist firebrand, he becomes an obsessive capitalist, he dies a monarchist..

JC:     We should discuss politics and art. A lot of us, myself included, paint as if politics doesn’t exist. But we’re all affected by politics. What is the artist’s responsibility to political or to larger societal issues?

Frank Galuszka:     I want to paint as if politics doesn’t exist. But politics colonizes everything. Avoiding it becomes a political act.

JC:     Everybody has political opinions, but as artists, how are we affected by it?

Frank Galuszka:     In general, politics is corrupting for art. Politics and art are opposites. Politics is more delusional than art; more narcissistic. I think that the politics of the artist has got to do with freedom, including freedom from the oppression of politics, and it has to do with individuality, intimacy, and direct, unmediated personal relations. This is antipolitical. I think that as an artist you go within yourself to create the thing which is most faithful to things that one feels are true but that no one talks about. From this you can create, rather than creating something which is understood by everyone before you paint it, or even understood by you, or simply very popular. I think that my whole project is influenced by the idea that nobody really knows what it is to be anybody else. Nobody knows what it is to be inside anybody else. I think the presumption of identity politics is that you can limit people, group people together and make them into predictable units or data that you can move around like pawns in your game. This is something that I find offensive. With my students, the whole point of teaching is to emphasize the individuality of the student, as it is reflected in individual style or individual viewpoint, and not that they produce things that are going to be pleasing to me or to anybody else.

I had no particular political orientation when I was young. But through circumstances which I didn’t predict, I went to Romania on a Fulbright when I was 22, during the Ceausescu regime and the Cold War. My political birth was in that environment, in a surveillance culture, an oppressive culture, and in a culture where I encountered the reflection of American foreign policy in the State Department, which was another factor. It was a world in which the whole idea of good guys and bad guys was not what it was about.

JC:     I liked what you said about teaching your students to be themselves. If the ideal is freedom and individuality, then perhaps the best contribution an artist can make is to be an individual.

Portrait of John C, 16 by 12 inches, 1993

Frank Galuszka:     I’m fortunate to teach a class in abstract painting. This means that in the class all subject matter is forbidden. Today’s students frequently feel that they don’t have a right to do something that doesn’t generate some kind of social benefit. This class makes it impossible for them to do that. So then they have to look at themselves rather than trying to think up something which is going to be a kind of contribution elsewhere. If they’re only contributing elsewhere, they’re never looking at themselves. They deny themselves and so lose contact with themselves. In this class they feel so happy! At first, they might resist it a bit, some of them, but then they feel liberated by it. I have a number of Chinese students who have similar experiences. So it’s not just American students. I think it’s a good thing. It isn’t that I’m trying to convert anybody from anything to anything. I’m trying to let them have the opportunity to see themselves as individuals in the course of doing this work.

Algebra; 12 by 16 inches, 1993

JC:     My understanding is that a lot of the early abstract movements were towards some kind of reductivist, universal visual language that would be divorced from personal experience and convictions. In other words, it had an agenda that you were expected to conform to.

Frank Galuszka:     Oh absolutely. Yes, I remember that. It was like that when I was in school. Radical potential is always suppressed. Look at the disappointment of the Russians, who were creating all that stuff (Editor: Russian Constructivism; Suprematism, etc.) around the time of the revolution and then they find out that the government eventually just wanted to have the same bourgeois teacups for everybody. They didn’t want to have anything that looked like a new world.

JC:     If I were a Soviet commissar at the time, I would have agreed with that. I would think that people don’t want anything revolutionary or utopian. People want what will make them feel happy; pictures of happy peasants, portraits of fearless leaders.

Frank Galuszka:     That’s exactly right. You know the popularity of Kinkade. The popularity of his work says something about a universal desire for coziness, security.

JC:     Is popular art always bad art?

Frank Galuszka:     Give me an example of popular art.

JC:     A tricky one might be Edward Hopper. Is he a “popular artist? Another tricky one might be Andrew Wyeth. Everybody loves Andrew Wyeth. But many of us were taught in art school that Andrew Wyeth was bad, that he was an illustrator. Artists are now reevaluating Wyeth. But as a popular artist, he remains universally beloved.

Frank Galuszka:     I love Andrew Wyeth. I also was taught that he was bad. Wyeth threatened the hegemony of modernism. When modernism was about to fall. He created anxiety in the art establishment. Andrew Wyeth is a great original painter. Certain paintings, like the one showing these legs, walking in the fields (Trodden Weed); just looking down at those legs and feet, walking, and the painting of the torn curtain (Wind from the Sea) It’s a vision that he saw and nobody else saw.

Christina and I were in Rome, and we were looking at the Caravaggios from the St. Matthew cycle in the church, San Luigi dei Francesi, and one of them is The Calling of Saint Matthew. And above the Christ, Matthew and the other figures who are sitting down, there’s a wall, and there’s a closed-up window. Christina pointed to that and she said, “Wyeth.” And it’s true. You look at that painting, with that sense of a flat brown light, a kind of plainness and the filled-in window has the feeling of reticence and melancholy that is in Wyeth’s paintings. It is interesting that Antonio Lopez Garcia, who everyone adores, including me, is somebody who admires Wyeth.

In Antonio Lopez Garcia’s paintings of people, and also of things, buildings, anything, he achieves a feeling of dignity and sympathy. This doesn’t seem to be something planned. It is something that comes through his character or personality in the course of painting. Of how he looks at things and paints things,. It is expressed. It comes from inside him. It says something about him. Wyeth’s work also has those qualities. The style is different. It has a thinner feeling or a more brittle feeling.

  
JC:     I’m struck by your portraits of Christina. In these paintings, she’s inhabiting her own space, and she’s very much herself. What does it mean to paint a portrait, especially a portrait of someone who means a great deal to you?

Portrait of Christina, 36 by 30 inches, 2020

Frank Galuszka:     I’m glad that you think she is herself in those paintings. I think so too. I’m not trying to interpret her, understand her, or sum her up. There is not that much distance. In the beginning of a relationship, there is an avid desire to close a distance, to arrive at the other in the painting, to consummate the relationship in the painting. It is an objective or ambition that has to do with that emotional moment, but it opens to other things over time, to things that are more subtle, intimate, mysterious and, again, inexplicable. Painting, including portraiture, is not about copying something. It is about these other things.

JC:     Many artists just paint themselves. I would have thought that you would have painted yourself all the time. Instead, you paint this Other; over and over again. Your paintings are often about dialogues or interactions between two figures. Maybe that’s part of the content: you want to be in dialogue with somebody.

Frank Galuszka:     I think that’s true. I did paint, many years ago, a couple of self-portraits. But I made a decision not to paint any more self-portraits. This led to other things. There was a time when I tried to paint the painting to include the viewer of the painting as a character in the painting. It was a complex effort. I don’t think anyone ever understood it. But I thought that the artist is painting their own portrait, psychologically, in everything that they’re doing. In that sense, there’s a kind of redundancy about doing a self-portrait. Also, the idea of self objectifying is very difficult, so you’ve got this whole problem of objectification and the object. And then, if I’m painting, I’m working from the point of view of a completely subjective environment, and I have no idea what I look like. In fact, the first time I did a portrait of somebody who posed for me, I was painting a schoolmate and I was painting her so intensely that when I stood up for a moment and glimpsed my face in the mirror, I laughed in surprise because I’d forgotten that there was anybody who looked any different than this young woman that I was trying to paint. Her face had become the only face there was. I forgot that there was any other way that a person could look than the way that she looked.

JC:     The models for a painting are like characters in a fiction. They’re like characters in a movie. If they’re artists themselves, I think they get into it, and they actually help stage the painting, as a good actor or actress might work with a director. 

Lynn; 16 by 20 inches, 1980

Lynn; 16 by 20 inches, c.1980

Frank Galuszka:     That’s really true. They become the means by which something comes about. I was talking with a playwright, talking about models. She was asking about models in a painting and I said that some of them are like actors. I have a model that I wish would still work as a model, but she’s also, among other things, a great actress. I said to her, be Mary at the foot of the cross, she instantly fell into a posture, a gesture, an expression- down to the fingertips – just perfect. The artist and model can create between them a separate being, a fictional being. A being that lives its own life. The Mona Lisa is surely neither Leonardo nor his model, but another creature fully believed in.

JC:     My experience is that you can’t tell ahead of time if someone’s a good model or not. It’s an intense relationship; even an erotically charged relationship. But it is not about ordinary romantic attachment. It’s about being totally infatuated with the image in the painting.

Frank Galuszka:     Intensity of attention is read as erotic. Maybe it defines ‘erotic’. I don’t know. ‘Erotic’ is a supercharged word with a lot of meanings. There is an intensity of attention to the subject and to the painting. With what you are talking about, like the erotic charge, there has to be like an understanding of distance, and distance made visible is felt emotionally as desire. Our friend the painter Scott Noel gives a lot of thought to the concept of desire in painting. I think he defines it very broadly. You should ask him about it. I don’t think about it. I don’t think in those terms. If I have a favorite model, I could look at her so intensely, comparing how she looks with how the painting looks, and the painting looks awkward, distorted, and not like her – until she goes away.

JC:     Good models lend themselves to the fantasy of the painting, to the enactment of this fantasy. I’ve found that the most difficult people to draw or to paint were extraordinarily beautiful people.

Frank Galuszka:     I would agree. But that’s conventional beauty. As if without personality, where there’s no bias to work with. There is also uncanny beauty that refuses interpretation. It embarrasses creativity. It’s hard enough without bringing beauty into the picture.

JC:     Matisse said he was completely dependent upon his models. The artist is inspired by the presence of this fantasy Other; this mysterious other being. The dialogue between the artist and the model becomes the painting.

Frank Galuszka:     There is no psychological analysis of this that benefits the artist. It just–there’s really no understanding of it…

Kali; 8 by 4 inches, 1994

The post A Conversation With Frank Galuszka appeared first on Painting Perceptions.

Secular Sanctuary, 48 x 72 inches, oil/paper/panel 2019

I’m delighted to share this interview, conducted by email, with the San Francisco-based painter John McNamara. There is much to see and think about his enigmatic subject matter, compositional inventions, and painterly surfaces. I am very pleased that he was willing to share such a detailed and nuanced background of his long and accomplished career as a painter. In looking at his works I’m continually surprised and challenged by his contrarian impulses to modernist dictums about what’s proper or permissible in painting. His work seems to invite us to join him in a hopelessly complex board game, where you make up the rules as you go along in something like an alchemic version of the Snakes and Ladders game where form wrestles with content and the picture’s destiny is advanced by chance rolls of memory, curiosity, and desire.

In a 2018 interview on the Studio Work blog, McNamara stated:

I don’t however want to be didactic in any way. I’d much rather feel things out, rather than self-consciously and analytically think the meaning out. I think more interesting meaning comes forth from/through intuition. And frankly, there are always many possible reads to any piece of work. My hope is to provoke a sense of curiosity within the viewer, similar to the curiosity I feel when making a painting. I strive to make a painting that has visual and conceptual engagement.

From a statement from the 2013 exhibition at The Painting Center in NYC:

John McNamara has investigated the relationship between painting and photography for the past twenty-eight years, through making paintings that engage photography as a hidden painted element. Since the photography literally exists beneath the surface, there is a strange conceptual ambiguity relational to the frozen moment of a person, place, or thing that lies underneath the interpretive nature of the painting process on top. In a number of his paintings McNamara uses photographs of people who are engaged doing things in different parts of the world on a particular day of a year, to make a new sense of place and time. In other pieces, he may take people of roughly the same age, but coming from different decades, and fuse them into the painted reality. McNamara is sensitive to the “time machine” aspect of collage and its potential. The content of his work investigates conceptions of transcendence, moments in popular culture, and sharable life realities. McNamara considers his paintings to be open investigative narratives. His goal in making paintings is to provoke a sense of curiosity about meaning within the viewer, similar to the surprise and curiosity he experiences when constructing a painting.

The Gift of Consciousness: The Challenge to Negotiate Meaning

Larry Groff: Please tell us how you got your start with artmaking. I understand that in part, it started as a way to avoid the draft during the Vietnam War era. I’m also curious to know about your early mentor – who was also a professional boxer?

John McNamara: I grew up in a working-class family in Alston, Mass. When I was quite young, my father bought me a “paint by numbers” kit. My father had aspirations of becoming an artist, but after the 1929 Stock Market crash, both he and my mother had to work to support their families. I made a good deal of paint by number pictures, finishing with the “Last Supper!” When I was 12 or so, I started to make paintings from photos I liked. I didn’t have all of the colors I needed but made due. I was an underwhelming student at St Columbkille School in Brighton for 12 years. I really hadn’t thought of becoming an artist for my life’s work, but when I was 16, my mother invited her friend over to look at my work. His name was Joe Santoro. He was an ex-marine, former prizefighter, who now ran the Watertown School system. He was also a watercolor artist, who made watercolors with a Winslow Homer sense to them.

He looked at all of my work, gave me some pointers, and then mentioned that I should take Saturday Art classes at Mass Art during the fall of 1966 when I was a senior in High School. I did that and kept talking with Joe. I applied only to Massachusetts College of Art and wasn’t sure what would happen. During the winter of 1967, I received a letter telling me I was accepted. I couldn’t believe it! I was told earlier by the academic dean at Mass Art, that my grades were too low for me to be admitted. I found out some years later, that Joe S and the dean, Henry Steeger, had been in the Marines together. I think Joe asked the dean to give me a pass on the academics since my art-making potential was strong. Steeger went along with Joe, and I was admitted.

I really hadn’t thought much about the Vietnam War during high school. I’d see the death and destruction on the nightly news, so I was aware of what was happening. It seemed unreal to me, but I would have gone if I hadn’t gotten into Mass Art, and wouldn’t have tried to avoid it. When I got to Mass Art, and a few of the students were returning from the war, that’s when I knew I wouldn’t go, based on what they told me and others in detail, about what was going on there. My initially wanting to go to Mass. Art was based solely on my wanting to pursue art-making as my life/career.

The government had a lottery system in place as I got nearer to graduating Mass Art. They made an offer, that if you gave up your student deferment, and your number wasn’t called during the last few months of 1970, you would become 1A second priority, meaning the war dept. would have to go 1 through 365, and then come back to do the process again, before your number would be called. Since I was around number 256, I decided to give the offer a try. And it worked out.

The Nature of Inquisitive Persistence, 9 ft. 3 1/4 × 8 ft. 7 1/4 in., Oil on canvas,1984–85, Edith C. Blum Fund, Metropolitan Museum of Art

LG: What was your education like during your undergraduate and graduate years at Mass Art? How well did it prepare you to become a painter?

John McNamara: Attending Mass. Art at 17, in 1967, was a tremendous opportunity for me. I loved every bit of it. I was among people who had similar goals, and I worked like a demon right up through graduation. Three instructors had the greatest influence on my coming of age as a painter. They were Jeremy Foss, Rob Moore, and Dan Kelleher. I saw making paintings as my calling, based on the influence of these teachers. They were examples of artists who taught, their painting was a vocation, and teaching an avocation. The spring semester before I graduated, I had already begun working on a group of paintings to be shown in the fall of 1971. So there was no letdown after graduation from Mass. Art for me.

1st commercial gallery show – January 1980 – paintings made in 1979

LG: Can you say something about your early experiences after leaving school? I understand your paintings were well-received early on, getting into a number of group shows in museums such as the Rose Art Museum and the ICA in Boston. How did success affect your growth as an artist?

John McNamara: I was 21 when I graduated from Mass. Art. For the next seven years, I painted, away from any notion of recognition. It wasn’t until Roger Kizik, who worked at the Rose Art Museum, mentioned me to Carl Belz, saying he should take a look at my work. He did and included me in a show at the Rose in 1978. That began career things more in earnest. Previous to that show, in the fall of 1977, I installed a painting in the restaurant of the old ICA on Boylston St., which kind of got some people to see my work. In January of 1980, I had my first show at Cutler/Stavaridis Gallery on Congress St. in Boston. Things really began to pick up after that show. Ken Baker reviewed me in the Boston Phoenix, and Elizabeth Findley reviewed me in Art in America. I kept shifting the process of my work while continuing to explore a kind of transcendent space in the paintings. I think that early on, success had an effect on me, in that I wanted to push the scale and complexity of the pieces for the “next show.” It was exciting for sure. But anyone who has looked at my output over the decades can see, I had no hesitation to engage different approaches and subjects. I think in the end, this was confusing to some people.

LG: How did your work evolve from abstraction to being more figurative and narrative? Was there anything, in particular, that was a catalyst in making this change?

John McNamara: While I was at Mass Art, I went back and forth between non-objective, abstract, and figural subjects. I was very interested in the contemporary art movements present at that time. Amalgams that fluctuated between painting and sculpture and installation.

The above would be examples of that. I was also interested in 19^th French painting. Making space within painting also continually fascinated me. Often figural compositions employed spatial qualities. The paintings of Morris Louis were very important to me. Eva Hesse also fascinated me. Henri Rousseau’s figural compositions influenced me, relational to the figure in a magical landscape. The painting below is an example. It was made with minimal prep and worked up in an intuitive way. I let the narrative as such, pour out of me. I relied heavily on intuition, right brain trust.

a 78” x 20’ painting – 3rd show at Mass Art, 1st after graduation

My small painting above was directly influenced by Rembrandt’s Conspiracy.

Rembrandt, The Conspiracy of the Batavians under Claudius Civilis, 1661-62. Photograph: Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Sweden

My small painting above was directly influenced by Rembrandt’s Conspiracy.

Although one might say I was painting my way through history, this shifting back and forth from contemporary abstraction to the figure worked for me, so much so, that it has occurred right up until the present moment. Since 1993, I have fused aspects of abstraction with figural situations.

LG: In looking at your paintings I’ll occasionally see traces of other artists like the works of Jess, Paul Klee, Robert Rauschenberg, Edward Kienholz, cubist painters, and many more. Can you say something about the artists that been most influential to you and why? Picasso has been famously quoted with his declaration “good artists borrow, great artists steal.” You made a similar statement in your gallery talk. Why is stealing not a crime in art-making?

John McNamara: I’m going to have to break this answer down, starting with the abstract expressionists. I saw my first Pollock when I was 17. I instantly got what he was saying, and how important intuition was in art. He made me aware of invention, working one’s way through an art-making process. I’m thinking primarily about his drip paintings. There was an elegance and sureness of flow that these paintings had.

Morris Louis and George Seurat were strong influences on me also. The key element that each shared was their ability to engage a process to its end, in a very clean, effortless way. They had a methodology, which was very clear. Each stayed the course until the work was completed, in Seurat’s case, 1.6 million points of paint in A Sunday on La Grande Jatte. Seurat’s use of painting his frames the same way he painted the canvas has had a continuing effect on my own use of a frame in a frame in a number of my paintings. To me, these artists were alla prima painters of sorts. There was a freshness to their process. Put it down and leave it down. In contrast, artists like DeKooning and Guston were always breaking things down, at war with their paintings, finally arriving at resolution. I more and more wanted a process that was immediate and fresh. No matter how many layers I put on a painting, I’m always seeing it as an addition, not something to cover up a mistake.

The painters you see traces of were definitely people I had looked at carefully. When I was very young, say 20, I’d appropriate various artists’ conceptual and constructive components, without any hesitation. I felt I was using these elements in my own way to make a new whole. I’m always appropriating.

Cycle, 30 x 40 inches, o/p/p 2017

Utilitarian Abstraction’s Rebirth, 48 x 36 inches, o/p/p 2019

LG: How do you go about selecting and using the photos for your paintings?

John McNamara: My paintings during the 1980’s, utilized painted photography in certain areas. I liked painting over the photo, many are taken from calendar images.

But in the spring of 1993, I began working on wooden panels, where I’d use various images that could tell a story. Below was one of the first pieces done in this manner. I made a kind of puzzle with the images, one where all pieces are cut to fit together like a puzzle. I still use this process today. Then I would paint.

Untitled, 24 x 28 inches O/P/P 1993

A number of the early paintings were a deconstruction of art historical tropes. I went then, and do now, to search for images that would be part of the human narrative, of small and big issues, that people generally encounter. Over the years, I have built up an image bank. Often a new image will catch my interest, and I will go to the bank to try other images with it. I end up playing with the image/s and see what they conspire to do.

One of my recent paintings came to meaning in this way. Its title is “Painters of the Past”

Painters of the Past, 24 x 30 inches, O/P/P 2020

The figures in this painting were taken from a photograph by Aaron Chang, sometime in the mid 1980’s. It appears that Chang came upon the young men in his travels, in the evening, near Highway 17, Charleston, South Carolina.

Eventually, a wide range of images by various photographers was used to make a book. This book covered a number of topics in the various U. S. States. Unfortunately, I don’t have the book anymore. The heading for Chang’s photograph read:

“In Charleston, Coming to Terms With the Past: The compulsion to engage the Charleston area’s history as a slave-trading center was, for the writer, a visceral thing, akin to the urge to revisit a crime scene.”

I’ve had the young men’s image for some time. What drew me to the image initially, was the way in which this group of guys appeared to be relating to each other. I felt they had worked together for a while and had a connection to one another, a comfortableness, a friendship. Of course, photographs are fiction in one way or another, and realizing that I couldn’t really know them. I ended up putting them in an architectural construction that warped time and physical structure, while also having a painting of them on the wall. My artist statement below has guided me over the last twenty-seven years.

“I investigate the relationship between painting and photography, making paintings that engage photography as an overt, painted element. Since the photography literally exists beneath the painting’s surface, I find a strange conceptual ambiguity, relational to the frozen moment of a person, place, or thing that lie underneath the interpretive nature of the painting process. I am sensitive to the possibilities of the “time machine” aspect of collage, also playing with this element to engage meaning.

The content of my work focuses on conceptions of transcendence, moments in popular culture, and sharable life realities.  I consider my paintings to be open, investigative narratives. My hope is to provoke a sense of curiosity within the viewer, similar to the curiosity I feel when making a painting. I strive to make a painting that has visual and conceptual engagement.”

Surveillance, 40 x 30 inches, o/p/p 2017

Optimism’s Promise, 36 x 48 inches, o/p/p 2019

LG: Do you manipulate the photos digitally and then print them or just take them as you find them? Anything special about how you glue them to the canvas or board?

John McNamara: Other than enhancing color, I don’t manipulate the photos digitally. I send my photos to a printing store, having 13” x 17” hard copies made. I use a 100pd paper for the copies. This gives the puzzle-making application more robust. I use Yes glue directly from the container to stick puzzle pieces without wrinkling. I use a printmaking brayer to roll out the puzzle sections.

LG: Do you prepare the photos in any special way to better protect them or the oil paint’s adhesion? Like applying resin before painting?

John McNamara: I take the freshly glued piece on the panel outside, and spray eight, light coats of matt Krylon sealant on the surface. Once dry, this makes a stable surface on which to paint.

LG: What are some of your most important considerations with color in your paintings?

John McNamara: I work out color ideas while putting the collage together. The process is very physical, with cuts happening right on the wooden panel. I feel the main reason why my color doesn’t repeat is directly related to this process. I have used Color-aid paper, and bits and pieces from magazines for developing color ideas. Once the painting begins, I make many changes with the color, while staying within the overall color idea for the painting.

Memory, 36 x 36 inches, o/p/p 2018

LG: Many of your works have richly impasto surfaces and geometric configurations of thick paint that seems to float above the rest of the painting. Can you say something about that?

John McNamara: I have always been interested in the physical nature, and presence of paint. When I was in art school, we had a class where we learned how to make both oil and acrylic paint. Oil paint has the pigment, and I would put plenty of the pigment in the blender, followed by the linseed oil, a dispersal agent, and an anti-fungus chemical. Then blend. The paint we were making was equal to the best paint one could buy. For acrylic, the binder I used was called AC-34, a liquid vinyl sold by WR Grace company. I used these paints on my early installation pieces.

I came to believe that the artist’s fingerprint was in the material paint. That is why the paint presence is so strong in my paintings. I use a number of visual devices to up the ante when I’m making a painting. There are quite a bit of taped areas in my paintings. I respond to the hard edge as it relates to the more organic applications of the paint. I sometimes hand cut the tape to 1/16 of an inch, so thin, that you really have to examine the painting closely to find the geometry.

Getting up close to a painting of mine should give a sense of surprise in what is discovered. I believe the excitement I feel while making the painting, will possibly be a moment of unanticipated joy/surprise for the viewer.

LG: In a gallery talk (link to talk here), you mentioned that you don’t often plan out a painting beforehand and that a painting direction often takes on a life of its own. Can you say something about your process with regard to how you compose and make your paintings?

John McNamara: A backdrop: In the spring of 1989, after my final show at Stavaridis Gallery, I began to question my painting process and my paintings. I had gotten so good at what I was doing, I was in a disconnection about valuing, or finding meaning in my paintings. I stopped painting for almost four months, considering at that time as to whether I wanted to become an object maker. I realized that would be running away from painting, so I felt I needed to find a way to make painting have meaning again.

The answer was to make my paintings about ideas and human experiences. Each painting’s point of departure would be revealed in the title. It was going to be necessary, however, to make a plan for each painting. I used color aid and other color sources, and I wrote my thoughts about what the piece was going to present. Below is an example of what that looked like.

The above paintings, made between 1989 and 1992, are examples of work without employing collage that I was making during that time.

But in the spring of 1993, while I was teaching at SFAI, I began to use painted collage expressly. I reached a point where preplanning got a bit out of hand and became constraining. If I used painted collage, my research materials were directly taken from sourced visuals. Playing with the pieces of paper, allowed my right brain to pick up more of the unexpected, but totally relational insights.

The process has remained the same, while the positive anticipation toward the next idea/painting remains consistent.

Whittling Down, 36 x 48 inches, O/P/P 2020

LG: I’m curious if there might be a connection to dreams or even maybe some type of Jungian dream analysis aspect to the subject matter in your work? For instance, some of your paintings show multiple perspectives of rooms on different levels of a building or home – like in your Whittling Down and Painters of the Past?

John McNamara:  The catalyst for the Whittling Down piece was based on a conversation I had with a friend some years back. She had cancer and was receiving rounds of chemo at various points over a two-year period. I commented on how great she looked, and asked her how she was doing. She told me how the chemo was weighing her down. Then she made a reference that chemo’s effect was like a pencil that was constantly getting sharpened. Eventually, there was no more pencil/person left.

I chose a series of images of cancer operations from the early, mid, and late 20th century, as well as one where a robot is the surgeon’s hand. I also included images of abandoned operating theaters and hospital rooms. I, like most people, find these abandoned spaces scarily seductive. The top images were taken from a book on lofts. Berlin 230M2, architect: Alfred Peuker – Berlin430M2: Höing Architekts.

As with all my paintings, I develop a point of departure and then see where the process leads me, a process very familiar to most painters.

The Loss of Memory: The Inability to Forget, 24 x 30 inches, oil/paper/panel 2019

The room definitely has subconscious meaning for me, a place of retreat/safety, and restraint. Architecture in general finds its way into many of my paintings. The Jungian dream analysis is most probably there. I can’t say no to that. I’m very intuitive. I trust feeling to get me there. The logic comes in in the collecting of materials for a given piece, and the initial layout. The best place to be is where one has good trust in the right and left sides of the brain, with the corpus callosum doing a good mediating job.

When I was nine yrs. old, I got very sick. My parents kept thinking I would get better. They kept me in bed for three weeks, as I got sicker and sicker, chills, temperature, etc. Finally, my mother took me to the hospital, where I was diagnosed with advanced pneumonia. I was in an oxygen tent for two weeks, and another two weeks until I could go home. Penicillin shots twice a day. I actually felt fine as a nine-year-old being in the hospital. I knew they would take care of me, whereas my parents were dysfunctional and messed up. To this day, I feel comfortable in hospitals.

Cancer had been a continually occurring fear of my mother’s. Her mom and father had died from it, and she would always talk about it to me as a young kid. My friend who made that statement about her journey with cancer caught my attention. Entropy and aging show themselves in this painting. I try not to be didactic with my work. As far as I’m concerned, it is open for various readings, and because my subconscious/right brain is so much afoot, there are always meanings others perceive, that when told to me, I can see.

Five of All, 24 x 36 inches, oil/paper/panel 2019

Encroachment, 48 x 36 inches, o/p/p 2018

Deep, 30 x 90 inches, o/p/p 20​18

LG: If painting decisions made during moments of heightened concentration can tap into one’s unconscious in ways that the more left-brained activity can be blocked from.

I’m curious if you might respond to this quote by Jung below in relation to your paintings.

Jung said: “I have noticed that dreams are as simple or as complicated as the dreamer is himself, only they are always a little bit ahead of the dreamer’s consciousness. I do not understand my own dreams any better than any of you, for they are always somewhat beyond my grasp and I have the same trouble with them as anyone who knows nothing about dream interpretation. Knowledge is no advantage when it is a matter of one’s own dreams.”

John McNamara: I agree with what Jung is saying here. The one thing that I don’t know, is if dreams portend the future. I feel that my subconscious/right brain functions lead me to the best choices within the making of my work.

John McNamara, 1982 – standing in front of “Specchio è Figura”

LG: There is an epic quality of huge deep spaces, multiple vantage points, and multiple possible storylines to many of your large paintings. Grand history paintings such as The Battle of Issus’ by Albrecht Altdorfer come to mind for me. What attracts you to working on large scale paintings?

John McNamara: When I was in my 20’s and 30’s, I constantly made big paintings. The painting below was 9’ x 17’. I made a number of paintings at this size. Very few survived, a few of them being in institutions. The painting above is in the Honolulu Museum of Art. I was a bit taken with the of the heroic for sure, but I also was interested in the idea of intimacy on a large scale. An environment of intimacy. Starting in 1984, I became overtaken by Neo-Ex, and in 84, 85, let the paint really fly! It was on some level a false lead, but one I had to explore, to get out of my system. Albrecht Altdorfer’s paintings are amazing! And ironically, very intimate.

In the last 27 yrs. the largest painting I’ve made is 48 x 72 inches. That was last year. When I was making those large paintings, something 4’ x 6’ seemed like a study. My thinking about scale got very distorted. My thinking back in those days aligned with a heroic stance on what paintings had to be.

LG: You recently had a retrospective exhibition titled A Visual Dictionary What did this title mean for you in relation to your show?

John McNamara: This show was conceived in its entirety by Farley Gwazda, the director of the Worth Ryder Gallery at Cal. I asked him if he would put the show together. He came up with the title, which was based in part on a series of generic images from a visual dictionary. I had taken these images and tried to give them a new life as paintings. Below is an example of two of the paintings, 16 x 20 inches and 12 x 20 inches.

I turned the show over to Farley because I truly respected him, and because I had always made the choices in shows previous, and wanted to allow another to make the choices.

LG: What does it mean to say a visual thing is poetic?

John McNamara: Usually, paintings that are poetic are valued more from a feeling they give, rather than from a descriptive characterization. I never considered myself a poetic painter. Well, maybe that’s not entirely true. The painting below was made in 1987/88. It’s influenced by Thomas Cole’s,Expulsion from the Garden.

Untitled, 80 x 124 inches, 1987/88

There may be others along the way that could be seen as poetic, but it’s always problematic to self-identify as poetic. It’s like saying: I make beautiful paintings. This leads one to deduce that it’s possible to consciously make a poetic or beautiful painting, when in fact, beauty or poetics come directly from the artist’s process, not being connected to self-consciousness.

LG: What more can you say about the collage aspect to many of your paintings and the paste-ups of photographs that you paint on top of?

John McNamara: All of my work starting in the spring of 1993 is painted collage, where the vast majority have paint completely covering the photographic element.

The first part of my artist statement focuses on this process.

“I investigate the relationship between painting and photography, making paintings that engage photography as an overt, painted element. Since the photography literally exists beneath the painting’s surface, I find a strange conceptual ambiguity, relational to the frozen moment of a person, place, or thing that lie underneath the interpretive nature of the painting process. I am sensitive to the possibilities of the “time machine” aspect of collage, also playing with this element to engage meaning.” 

DeWitt Cheng wrote a catalog essay for a show of mine, and in part said:

Cubist and Dadaist collage, developing with Johns’ and Rauschenberg’s hybrid 2D/3D artworks and Pop Art’s mass media image appropriations. McNamara continues this rich tradition by assembling printed images from magazines and other sources. Instead of presenting the works as is, however, or re-photographing them (or composing them in the computer), McNamara repaints the images in oils, preserving the source material in idealized, unchanging form, atop the original material. His unorthodox practice is analogous to, say, decorating mummy cases with encaustic portraits of upwardly mobile dead Egyptians, or making a 1:1 scale map of the topography underfoot, as in Borges’ story quoted above. McNamara, fascinated with combining photographic frozen moments from different eras and areas, and preserving them in the amber of art, writes: “For me, collage is a time machine of sorts. The painted skin on top jettisons the photo document into the world of painting; but these people, places and things still speak from underneath the painted skin.” The artist thus practices a kind of Photorealist painting—he particularly admires the complex urban landscapes of Richard Estes— crossed with conceptual performance and ritual, the painting being the end product of his focused attention, even compulsion. “Total fixation activity—I admire that tremendously,” he says, of the paintings of Beat painter/collagist Jess Collins.

LG: The famous collage artist Jess hung a plaque in his San Francisco home that said “Seven Deadly Virtues of Contemporary Art: Originality, Spontaneity, Simplicity, Intensity, Immediacy, Impenetrability, and Shock”  The contrarian post-modern spirit that Jess offers here interests me a great deal. Any thoughts to share about this? About Jess’ work in general, especially with regard to your own work?

John McNamara: When on the East Coast, I knew of Jess, but only his collages. I admired and identified with his process and complexity. But when I came to San Fran, in 1992, I saw his paintings, which blew me away, and I’m sure influenced me. His painting process was mind-numbing to me. I couldn’t figure out how he went about making the. I also responded to his personal and pop culture storytelling.

I didn’t see Jess as a postmodernist per se, but more as a quirky offshoot of painting’s long history. I saw postmodernism, on the East Coast, as a cool, detached, conceptually based activity. I don’t see Jess this way. I greatly admire him.

The Idolatry of Longevity, 36 x 48 inches, o/p/p 2018

Lost, 48 x 36 inches, o/p/p 2018

Glimmer, 36 x 48 inches, o/p/p 2019

LG: I understand that you are a Professor Emeriti at UC Berkeley where you taught and lectured for many years. Some of your fascinating slide lectures are available to be seen online. (link to video series here) I love the surprising range of ideas and artists that you talk about in these lectures. In your teaching practice did you place more emphasis on studio practice like life-drawing, learning color, and other traditional painting skills, or has your focus more on theoretical concerns in artmaking?

John McNamara: For starters, I wasn’t a professor at Cal, but rather a “Continuing Lecturer.” Much less pay, and to some degree a lot less bureaucratic pain. The slide talks I gave, were part of a program called: Art8: Introduction to Visual Thinking. It was both the course that undergrad art majors had to take, as well as the Graduate Teaching Program. The grad students taught the classes, and I delivered talks on the various projects. I was responsible for mentoring the grad student instructors and keeping everything moving along. I photographed all of the images that I used in my talks, and there were many I shot with a film camera. I stressed the conceptual and intuitive aspects of art-making primarily. I also learned a great deal from having to put these talks together. Or maybe I should say relearn.

I did teach painting courses, where I taught more standard painting processes and material handling. I also was in charge of the undergraduate honor student critique session every Wednesday night. These were select students who had their own studios. The sum of all this teaching was that I learned a great deal from many of these exceptional students. Besides the art majors having to take the Art 8, students from throughout the university would take the course. And that was true of my painting course also. These students were from areas such as molecular cell biology, the philosophy and history departments, anthropology, and psychology departments. They brought their knowledge to my courses. And they made some highly interesting pieces.

Upon leaving, I commented that I had received a wonderful education! My forty-three years of teaching was a direct result of Joe Santoro stepping into my life and mentoring me. I made a promise while I was finishing high school, that if I ever could help somebody in the way Joe helped me, I would be there. So, when I started teaching while a grad student in 1975, I began to keep that promise. And, I never turned anybody away in those forty-three years of teaching. I don’t want any pat on the back for my efforts. It was a pleasure to be able to help people when they came to my office door or contacted me otherwise. That in the end, was my greatest satisfaction in teaching, people.

Fake, 24 x 36 inches, oil/paper/panel 2020

LG: How has painting been for you over the past several months? How are you surviving the pandemic, political turmoil, fires, and general craziness of the world?

John McNamara: Since March 17^th I’ve been by myself, and except to go food shopping, don’t go out. I am 70 and suffer from asthma, so I’ve got to be careful. Otherwise, being able to paint each day has given me a sense of meaning in my life. It is a terrible time, for all of what you mentioned, and most people I know are in a similar state, a malaise, and anger, and just generally disgusted.

A few final thoughts: I started painting seriously when I was eighteen. I define that as making paintings for myself, and not for an assignment. Each summer, starting in 1968, until the present, I’ve focused entirely on making paintings/my work, for fifty-two years.

The most important facet of painting is: what are you going to make paintings about? Most people stop making art, not because their skills aren’t good enough, but rather because they have nothing they truly care about enough to want to make art.

Moments and Thoughts:

When I entered art school at 17, my first class was with Jeremy Foss. He told us that we were going to make our first painting, and it had to be no less than 4 x 5 ft. I had worked 3 x 4 ft, but this was going to be my biggest painting, and I knew exactly what I was going to do. I was going to make a seascape. This seascape I had painted many times, so many times in fact that I had it memorized. And boy, was it really going to blow everything in the class away! Ha, yes competitive.

But then, Jeremy said we couldn’t have any recognizable things in the painting. So that was the beginning of abstract painting for me! And so it went, back and forth between abstraction and figuration.

January 1984 – I had been making abstract paintings since 1978. My show at the Bess Cutler Gallery in NY, was open on March 15^th. I took a call from her that Jan. night. She told me that the paintings I had made for the show would probably not go over well, since Neo-Ex was the only thing people wanted to look at. She told me that she was going to show my work regardless, but very little would probably happen. When we ended the call, I started thinking about how I had really wanted to make some figurative pieces but had pushed it back in my mind as being not feasible, and kind of jumping ship. But it was on my mind in a big way the next day. So, I made the decision to make an entirely new body of work for the NY show.

Below is an abstract painting I was going to exhibit in that show. 9 x 17′

Below are three of the figurative pieces I did between Jan and March 1984. Very large also, with a lot of figuration and painted photography. This was the first time I engaged photos in this way.

These paintings go back to the figurative/abstract fusion. Shown in NY – 1984. these paintings were the first to use painted over photography as an element. and they were large

detail view

detail view

detail view

detail view

detail view

It was nine years after making these paintings of 1984, that I finally settled on direct painted photography. I use now, as I did in 1993, a puzzle-like interlay of the photography. Below are two close-ups of the piece I’m working on now, without paint, and showing the puzzle-like interface.

Trip, 40 x 48 inches, oil/paper/on panel, 20​00

Detail close-up of a WIP

Detail close-up of a WIP

It is odd, that such a well-worn historical process took me so long to arrive at. For the past 27 years I have followed this approach, and interestingly, haven’t felt the need to revise it. The last part of my artist statement has kept me occupied.

The content of my work focuses on conceptions of transcendence, moments in popular culture, and sharable life realities.  I consider my paintings to be open, investigative narratives. My hope is to provoke a sense of curiosity within the viewer, similar to the curiosity I feel when making a painting. I strive to make a painting that has visual and conceptual engagement

The post Interview with John McNamara appeared first on Painting Perceptions.

Going, Going, Gone, oil on linen, 34 x 50 inches

Dusk Colors, oil on linen, 34 x 50 inches

Martha Armstrong was in San Diego a few weeks ago and agreed to an interview with me. We met at a mutual friend’s home where we sat out on a hillside deck overlooking a huge valley with the distant city and ocean beyond. We talked at length about her history, painting process and thoughts on art, occasionally interrupted by roaming peacocks looking for handouts.

I’m keenly interested in Martha Armstrong’s paintings especially as a means to further explore the range of possibilities for painters to use observed nature as either as a point of departure or as a reason in and of itself. Martha Armstrong’s painting combines close observation with invention in a balanced measure, which she uses to create solid structures and harmonies that dance parallel alongside nature. Armstrong takes the most interesting aspects of what past artists have explored in this realm of abstracted observation–Bonnard, Braque, John Marin, Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, Georgia O’Keefe, Lois Dodd among others–and makes it a uniquely personal and inventive manner of responding pictorially to nature.

The New York Times’ Roberta Smith reviewed Martha Armstrong’s Bowery show, Martha Armstrong’s Nature Scenes at Bowery Gallery, in Sept. 24, 2015 saying:
“… Ms. Armstrong is the suave disciplinarian of a muscular style. She stacks blocky shapes of color that describe one landscape — a hill with some woods and a shack — visible from the window of her Vermont studio that may be her Mont Sainte-Victoire. But her shapes also maintain a nearly sculptural independence, hovering slightly above the image, just beyond legibility. At once improvisational and carefully carpentered, these paintings explode toward the eye, like nature on first sight, at it’s most welcoming and irrepressible.”

Martha Armstrong is conducting an early June residency workshop in Italy at the International Center for the Arts at MonteCastello di Vibio. See this link for more information.

Below the end of interview I’ve included quotes of paint-wisdom from her previous writings, these gems read like art-koans. I’d like to thank Martha Armstrong for being so generous with her time and attention with making this such a thoughtful interview.

At the end of our interview I’ve included quotes of paint-wisdom from her previous writings. These gems read like art-koans. I’d like to thank Martha Armstrong for being so generous with her time and attention with making this such a thoughtful interview.

Martha Armstrong is represented by the Elder Gallery, Charlotte, North Carolina;  Oxbow Gallery, Northampton, Massachusetts, Gross McCleaf Gallery Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and the Bowery Gallery, New York City.

From Armstrong’s website:

Martha Armstrong has had many one -person and group shows in the United States and Italy. She has received grants from Smith College, a residency at Hollins University, and at the Camargo Foundation in France, and was a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome.

She has taught at the Kansas City Art Institute, Indiana University, Smith, Mount Holyoke, Dartmouth, and Havorford Colleges, and now is a graduate critic at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.

In 2003 Alexi Worth wrote in The New Yorker, “Armstrong’s high, sharp energy is Yankee Fauvism at it’s best.” Lance Esplund, in Art in America, wrote in 2004, “I enjoy the all-out belting of the melody which is full of honesty and heart.” In 2009 Victoria Donohue wrote in the Philadelphia Inquirer, “In these works it’s still possible to believe that aesthetic presence might have some impact on the hard reality of everyday existence”, and in 2011 she wrote: “Her landscapes have a simplify and power; Their intensity of focus on feeling and seasonal changes (are) ambitious exercises in reconciling geometry and gesture…”

Armstrong studied at the Cincinnati Art Academy, Smith College, and Rhode Island School of Design. In addition to Bowery Gallery she shows at Gross McCleaf Gallery in Philadelphia, Elder Gallery in Charlotte NC, and Oxbow Gallery in Northampton, MA.

Larry Groff:     How did you become a painter? Was there a lesson you learned that was most important in shaping you to be the painter you are today?

Martha Armstrong:     This is an easy question because I remember thinking of myself as a painter in grade school. I remember a teacher in kindergarten who could never get me to put the paintbrush down. I loved painting then but of course “art” was pasting cotton balls on paper plates.

The great teacher in my life was Anneliese von Oettingen who came from Germany after World War II to teach ballet. She taught me what art is. She had been the ballet mistress of the Kurtfurstendamm Children’s Theater in Berlin. She was demanding, loved dance—it was the most exciting thing to do. She taught what form was and what rhythm was. I had such a feeling from her about what art was and the discipline needed to get there. I always considered her the best teacher I ever had, an amazing person.

LG:      You later went to art school, this was early on?

MA:      I went to The Cincinnati Art Academy in seventh and eighth grade with friends. We found it kind of a lark, it was part of the Museum. We could always go over there to look at paintings. There were serious classes in perspective, and eventually life drawing and still life painting. We had a wonderful time. I look back on that as some of the best training I had. These were art students teaching classes to kids, and they were good. Later, one summer while in college, I studied landscape painting with Julian Stanczyk who had been a Polish refugee via Africa. He made a comment that after his experiences in Poland in World War II, he could never paint anything figurative. The physical world was just out of the question for him. He had gone to Yale and was an Opt artist. He shows at Danese Gallery in New York. He was a great teacher, a humanist in a way. He got me to read John Marin’s letters,  directed me to look at certain artists.

Orchard Post, Vermont, 30×48 inches 2008

Adam’s Circles, 30×48 inches oil on canvas 2009

LG:      Is painting from observation central to your process?

MA:      I certainly start with something or someone I’m looking at, and often I’ll go from beginning to end just looking at each subject. But my whole motive will be to get what I see, and determine how to translate that into painting. That is the first question. How do you put that down? How do you make sense out of that visually in paint?

It’s the most exciting thing in the world to do—to look and paint. But I don’t know if I end up there. I will take something back to my studio, and continue to work on it. However, the issues are completely different then. When I’m teaching outside and have someone look at something and the student eliminates this and that I’ll ask, “Wait a minute. What are you painting here?” They’ll say, “Well, I didn’t like that tree or, you know, I can’t paint cars so I left the car out.” But that’s just jeopardizing the whole purpose of what you’re trying to do, learning to look at something and put it down.

If you’re out painting a landscape you try to deal with what’s there. Take it into your studio and it’s a different story. You have to make a painting out of it. I get curious and try things, try to paint things several different ways- often destructively. You have to do what you have to do to make a painting. I can always take it back out again too, which I often do. It has to recreate my experience of looking at something, and I think the older I get the more complicated the world seems. I don’t want simple answers. I just want it to be truthful to how I see the world now and to get a painting at the same time, and that’s hard.

For me it’s very important to stay with the subject and deal with what’s there. If I’m painting outside, that’s what I want to deal with. That’s half the fun. I don’t feel I can leave things out; that’s lying. I have to stay with it as long as I’m painting outside. I think Suzanne Valadon is a compelling painter because she didn’t lie in her work—she told lots of lies about her life. In her work she was straight, honest. Her paintings can seem awkward but you trust them.

I make studies from life because the light changes so rapidly. To get it you have to paint with all your concentration to get an equivalent, go through the subject from beginning to end. It’s like playing a piece of music. You ask how does this relate to this, and how does your eye move in the landscape?

Now you can make corrections and changes as a painter. A performer can’t do that in music, but it’s trying to make everything connect the way you play a piece of music. It’s linear in time but it’s not linear like music. It’s all over the place.

Dawn at the Stone Cottage, oil linen, 34 x 50 inches

Mock Orange, oil on linen, 30 x 48 inches

LG:      Is thinking while painting something you welcome or avoid? Why?

MA:      Thinking is a curious thing. If I’m out just looking at something and trying to paint it I’m hell-bent to get what I’m looking at, and my thinking is focusing on that. It is a kind of discipline to stay with it until you’ve tried to see yourself through something. I’ve painted a lot of small paintings that way. Big paintings as well but they’re a different problem.

Mostly I try to get everything out of my mind. I don’t want to think. You need to get away from all your critics and get away from all your demons. I don’t want to think about them. I don’t want that to be part of the present. I want to be as free and open as I possibly can. Often I’ll put on the radio to distract me. I don’t need to listen to it; it’s just enough of a distraction that I have to concentrate on what I’m doing.

I put music on too but music is so demanding that I find it hard to paint. You’re entitled to do anything to keep your energy up. I’ve put on opera very loud to force myself to concentrate.

LG:      Do you ever find that music can give you a false sense of how the painting is going? Like if the music is really upbeat and makes you feel good and then you also feel good about your painting but interferes with you from seeing the work?

MA:      I agree with you. It has nothing to do with the painting. I think that’s an issue. I think it just makes me concentrate on the music and not the painting, and so I find that a distraction.

LG:      But music could also be a good thing if it helps get rid of other distracting demons, or other thoughts that would kind of mess with your painting concentration.

MA:      Right. You can’t get at your intuitions if you’re too focused consciously on what you’re doing. I’m an intuitive painter. I think that it’s very important for me to get beyond conscious thinking so that I can just paint. Intuition is really the right word. I can’t … I know that that’s where I want to go in my head when I’m working. I don’t want to figure everything out logically. The only thing that gets you there is working.

LG:      Some people feel that when you “get into the zone”, or however you phrase it, this is where you let go and start working on as intuitively, that’s where the best painting happens–when you’re on automatic pilot and not even aware of time going by.

MA:      Absolutely.

LG:      It can be like, “Who made this?”

MA:      True! Afterward I sometimes have no memory of doing it. I won’t necessarily think it’s a good painting. In fact I might think, “Well, that’s not what I was after.” A year later I’ll think, “My gosh, that’s a really good painting. Why didn’t I see it?” I don’t remember doing it. But I can be miserable and feel desperately self-conscious and hopeless—and do a good painting.

LG:      I think that’s one of the most interesting things about working from life. Many people don’t get the appeal of being outside and dealing with the struggle of working from observation. For me it’s harder to lose your self-consciousness and to get in that space unless you’re reacting against something outside of yourself. Of course you can still get at it working from your imagination and other more internal means but it’s from a different angle.

MA:      Absolutely. That’s wonderfully put. I agree with that.

Last of the Sunflowers, 30×48 inches oil on canvas 2009

New Day II, oil on canvas, 30 x 48 inches

Evening Flame, 25×40 inches oc2010

LG:      What artists are you most interested in having a conversation with in your paintings? What sorts of things might you want to talk about?

MA:      When I’m working I want to get at my own work. I think it’s really what any artist has to do. I don’t want to think about other painters while I’m working. Philip Guston once said, “You’ve got to get everyone out of the room when you’re painting, and then you have to get yourself out of the room.” That’s very well said.

It’s interesting that, as a painter, you can have friends 400 years old who you feel very close to and with whom you have conversations so easily; but not while I’m painting. Something might flash into my head, but I certainly don’t want my painting to look like someone else’s paintings, because then –that’s not my work.

LG:      How about conversations when you’re not painting?

MA:      Oh, yes. Endless conversations. I mean, it could be Matisse, or Kandinsky, Manet, or it could also be things … I love trees and like to identify them, I studied botany. When we are in Vermont there are so many different mushrooms with such beautiful colors. You can line up 6 gray mushrooms but every one is a different color, they’re amazing. I have conversations with many different painters but also with things, about what things look like, how they’re constructed.

Dummerston Hill Vermont, 30×48 inches oil 2006

Marco Polo Tree, 24 X 15 inches oil on canvas 2005

Morning Mock Orange II, oil on board, 12 x 9 inches

Mock Orange and Shadows II, Charcoal on paper, 18 x 24 inches

LG:      Your use of color to give the feeling of light is astounding. Please tell us something about your concerns in translating your response to light into paint?

MA:      It does seem to be translating light into color, but color is the substance of painting. You don’t have actually a light in there, a light bulb, so how do you translate that? I think a lot about translating light into color, but you have to structure the painting at the same time. Maybe it isn’t tied to the physical structure that’s out there; maybe it’s tied to the painting structure, which might not be the structure you see. It’s really both, in terms of the painting. I want to create a light in the painting.

One painter I’ve always loved is Pieter de Hooch. He is an odd painter from the 17^th c. His color feels very modern to me, compared to Vermeer and other contemporaries. You see this in how he plays this red against that red, or how he’ll use blues in the sky in relation to these reds; his paintings are really built on color. You forget the subject. They’re abstract. I remember going through the Louvre once, you get these little rooms that are floor to ceiling paintings, and I was looking around and all of a sudden there was a wall that just seemed lit up, it was a group of Pieter de Hooch’s paintings–surrounded by other Dutch painters of the same period. The color was working as a light in his paintings in a way that made them stand out from the others. Compare Velasquez to Zurbaran: Velázquez was a tonal painter, and yet Zurbarán’s color, to me, is so emotional. I just look at it and feel like I’ve been hit over the head.

I spent a long time making collages, like Ken Kewley does. I mean doing collages, collecting lots of paper that I collected from everywhere. Things like cigarette wrappers I’d find in the street. I’d pick up anything, pieces of metal, photographs, and other stuff I might run across and by making these collages I could see how the colors work together, to make a structure. Some of my collages are figurative, others are abstract. Gross McCleaf showed a whole bunch of them about a year ago. Making them years ago really taught me a lot about color. It’s a very specific way of learning about color because you can change the composition over and over until it is clear, then glue it down.

A lot of my teachers wanted us to paint abstractly. “Why don’t you paint a lemon, it’s going to be a lemon anyway, if you have to paint representationally.” That’s a quote from a teacher. “If you have to paint representational, at least try to make it interesting.” That’s another quote. People believed pure abstraction was going to be here for a thousand years. I think there are a lot of painters my generation who loved abstraction, but I loved to look at the visual world and to paint the visual world, so, I found that idea too limiting—to eliminate the subject. All painting is abstract anyway.

Martha Armstrong with Peacocks in San Diego 3/2016

LG:      When you paint a scene like what is in front of us now, a huge vista with trees and bushes in the foreground out here, I somehow don’t see you painting it with same naturalistic greens that we see. I imagine you would find an equivalent, to transpose what you’re seeing. Do you look for something similar in value, saturation or feeling perhaps? I’m curious how that works for you.

MA:      I think my choices come from doing collages. If you get too many different colors together, they start cancelling each other out. Matisse would start a painting with 3 colors, he’d often put on 3, like a touch of this, a touch of this, a touch of this. What are they doing for each other? I don’t do that, but I know you can’t make a color statement out of too many pieces of color. You’ve got to focus on what this does compared to what that does. Grays become extremely important to make these colors sing, because the grays aren’t going to take over the color or alter the color, they’re going to give them space to breath.

Looking out at this landscape I see beautiful bluish-greenish grays, and that’s where I’d start, trying to figure out which real pieces of color I could use to set up that kind of harmony. It would have to be a learning process of what do I really need? What statement in blue is going to go with this statement of sort of a greenish-gray that’s going to give you something equivalent? Paintings are metaphors; you’re not looking for a copy. You’re looking for a translation. A copy doesn’t do it. You can take a photograph, and this is the thing that a painter has that a photographer doesn’t have. A photographer’s got to deal with it all, and choose how close, how far, and what kind of focus. Painters have the ability to say, “Okay, I need this and that, but if something doesn’t work, I take it out.” (I don’t think this is a contradiction about dealing with the whole subject!) I might start with too many colors– it would be a process of synthesizing to get what I need. I am wary of things becoming decorative; colors should say something, not match.

Morning-Study-I

Noon Rhythms, 8×10 inches oil on board 2009

LG:      That color translation of the observed world is a big part of what gives painting it’s power and poetry. Painters who copy photos can often miss this.

MA:      Photographs are extremely seductive for painters. Can you imagine when photography first came along and painters were looking at an image and thinking, “My god, I just spent 3 weeks on this hand and this photograph got it in seconds!” I think it led to Cubism. I think Cubism came from artists saying, “This is how I see it, not the camera.” It’s very natural to painting; the motive isn’t to get a representation but to bear witness to seeing. Photography can be seductive. Photographs are not paintings.

LG:      Is there a point in your painting when you respond more to the painting’s needs and less to the observation? You said you often work on the painting in the studio after you’ve been working on it outside.

MA:      Dichotomy always seems to be the word that describes painting best for me. There is the 3-dimensional world that your are trying to put down in a 2 D flat space. There are periods in painting that seem to me to represent that idea like Early Renaissance paintings, when painters still had a foot in the Middle Ages, all those bright colors and various conventions and kinds of abstract devices that were used for painting. Then you have people wanting to represent the world the way they think it looks—which changes from period to period. In the High Renaissance artists looked to the Romans (and Greeks). In the work of Michelangelo and Raphel and Leonardo painting feels seamlessly in one world. But those earlier painters, like Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti and Benozzo Gozzoli, Pierro della Francesco who have strange bright colors, and they have these little constructed narratives going on, it’s a dichotomy of two different worlds at once.

I think Cubism is also a dichotomy between the physical world and the artist’s take on it. It doesn’t get completely abstract and it’s not completely representational. The observed world is a vehicle; the painting has its other demands-two different things you have to juxtapose.

Rambunctious, oil on linen, 19 x 22 inches

Seated Figure, Hollins, 16 x 16 inches oil 1999

LG:      What are some thoughts you have about deciding on the underlying structure of your painting? Is this something you study before starting or does it come after you’re underway–out of the paint?

MA:      When I was young with little kids and was out painting, I would often take a scrap of canvas because I didn’t have time for stretching one. I would chastise myself thinking, ” You should be more disciplined. You should get up earlier in the morning to stretch the canvas, etc.”

However, I soon realized it was a tremendous experience to paint on a completely random piece of canvas because I had to build the image from the inside. I couldn’t lean things up against the edge like, “Oh, you’ve got this line and this line and this line, these are lines on the painting.” I don’t have those. You have to build the painting and then decide what the edges are.

In Vermont I used to have a huge piece of plywood, 4 by 8 foot, and I’d tack a canvas to it because there was so much wind up on our hill that it was very hard to hang on to a canvas. I never knew quite where it was going to end … They could be big paintings, sometimes 48” by 60” or something like that, or almost square, 48” x 49”.

I have some still lifes all done on pieces of canvas where the light first comes in on the left and I start work at the edge and then the light is moving and it’s picking up the same bowl or orange. This is the last piece of it on the right. The painting is put together from 3 different takes on the same still life. This bowl is this bowl, the light has moved over there to the right. Nobody gets that when they look at the painting. It isn’t obvious that’s what’s going on—but I’ve painted the same still life 2 or 3 times in the same painting.

The light in an hour is changing every 10 minutes completely. You’d paint it once and then you’d paint it again and then you’d paint it a third time. (See Triple Valentine) That might be the end of the painting.

Triple Valentine, 26 X 28 inches oil on canvas 2007

LG:      You thought of that beforehand or this sort of occurred to you as you go on, “Oh I can just move with the light?”

MA:      It happened, I didn’t plan it, but it came easily from painting on scraps. I got into doing a whole lot of paintings that way. It’s in our kitchen in Massachusetts. I would see this and think, “I have to paint that.” It was on the breakfast table. Then the light would be over here, “I have to paint it again.” Then to start connecting them in the same painting was what happened. It’s just sort of experiential. You’re looking and you keep on looking. I’m following the light rather than the subject.

LG:      Then later you would go back and perhaps unify it more or eliminate something that didn’t quite work right?

MA:      Yes. Okay, I’m going to put things in that are not in the light and develop them after the light’s gone. I probably made a note of them. These things all were noted in here right away. Then you’d have to decide how to make a rectangle out of it. Sometimes I have to add something because I have a hole. See Venus of Sicily below. The vase is a folk art vase from Sicily. It wasn’t in the painting but I needed something in the lower right corner. First I tried orange sections, which didn’t work. Then I chose the vase and did a series of practice heads.

Venus of Sicily and her Tribute
20″ X 30″ oil on canvas 2007

Sicilian_Vase

At first they were just little paintings. I did them to warm up before I went to work on a landscape that I probably had out in my studio that I couldn’t take back to Vermont because of the snow on the ground. I thought it was really interesting because I realized it had a lot to do with Cubism.

A cubist painter will look at your head and make a mark then draw a line the shape of your glasses going around your head. Then you might move and you’d paint right on top of it something else. To hell with it being logical. You’re making a painting and it makes complete sense. You can make it make sense. You’re not describing, you’re following where your eye goes and what it connects to next.

I’m sure that Cubism was just like, “I’m not taking a photograph. This is my experience,” and that just to bear witness to being an artist seeing something and not a camera is one of the impulses of Cubism. It was basically representational. It was tremendously experiential of what a painter goes through to see something and see it again and again. Matisse and Giacometti are doing the same thing in a way. They’re just leaving the evidence of these different takes in a painting the way Cubism does. That became okay.

To go back to structuring the painting–There’s a painting here. This is a big painting, it’s 54” by 64”, I was having a hard time holding this painting together. There are some lines in this, which you can’t see. If you go for the geometry of the canvas itself you start understanding what the geometry of the whole space is— its proportions, diagonals, and center—the golden section.

If the painting gets out of control for me, I’ll go back and I’ll find those lines to figure out what are the important lines in the painting. Often I’ll have put them there but if you need to organize the painting a little bit better and you find the rabatment of the rectangle—the squares within the rectangle—the diagonals, the center, and so on. These important lines—just in the geometry of the canvas—are useful. I’m sure painters always used these before, but we’re not taught that. There’s a book called “The Painter’s Secret Geometry” I heard about from Justin Kim (http://www.amazon.com/The-Painters-Secret-Geometry-Composition/dp/1626549265 ). It’s an interesting book. [Painting: New Providence Farm]

Most paintings were on walls then. You had to know the proportions of the room, where’s the center and how it relates to that wall over here. Giotto’s Arena Chapel in Padua is pure geometry. You can figure the whole thing out in terms of rectangles and rabatments in relation to the room, windows, and doors.

LG:      How important is it to have empathy with the thing you’re painting?

MA:      Not empathy, I think my painting is visual. I’ve accosted people that I’ve barely met and said, “Would you sit for a painting?” I can paint them only if they hold still. I often can’t paint people I know really well or would have a lot of empathy with.

LG:      I meant more empathy of the thing you’re looking at, not so much as a person but as a, like you have to fall in love, some people they just see a subject more for its formal appeal and others want to paint it because, “They just love the view or identify with it somehow.” They just sort of fall in love with whatever it is, a group of trees, some rocks, a house, people, or whatever.

MA:      I think of empathy as feeling for another person but you’re right. I guess I just bypass thinking of a landscape that way. I think it’s really visual; I look at something and I love the look of it. Sometimes it takes a long time to understand it in terms of painting. A musician doesn’t play a piece of music once and say, “Okay, did that.” You want to play it again and again and again. If that’s empathy, then yes, that’s falling in love with the look of it and wanting to paint it repeatedly.

LG:      Maybe empathy isn’t the best word. I heard someone say that once and I really liked it, that they imbue human qualities into aspects of a landscape. I think I can see that in some of your landscapes. Something about the gestures or the shapes of things.

MA:      You’re right, I do. I can look at a landscape and think of dance. I think of what a dancer moving through space or interacting with other dancers or just the rhythm and movement. That relates to how your eye moves in an image. You want the painting to be alive at any cost. You’re going to try to go for things that make it move and you’re taking them from the landscape.

New Providence Farm, oil on linen, 54 x 64 inches

Lighthouse&Bay

LG:      That’s a great way of putting it. Is not letting yourself be too refined about something you think about? Are you after a certain kind of quality of roughness with your painting?

MA:      There’s something about being American. I don’t think of roughness painting in Italy. Italy has such a worked over and designed landscape. American landscape doesn’t feel that way at all, to me it’s a billboard landscape. It’s gasoline stations and whatever is expedient, or, “We’re going to tear this building down over here because we want something different. We’ll make more money out of this.” It’s a completely different feeling for the landscape.

The roughness comes out of how I paint. It’s not a decision to be very precise and refined about painting. I’m going to grab and run. It’s just a result of the way I go after the painting, that it can be very rough. I kind of like that. I feel that expresses who we are. All painters don’t feel that way so I guess that’s personal. I don’t go after roughness; it’s a byproduct.

LG:      Do you think some painters sometimes go after that roughness intentionally and it becomes more of an affectation?

MA:      Yes, but you can’t think about style. It just gets in the way. I think looking at things is so powerful that when I see things I think I’d be sick if I couldn’t try to put them down. I think it’s a way of dealing with being overwhelmed at how beautiful things are to look at. Trying to put them down seems, my greatest motive. I don’t think about other things when I’m working. I don’t always get a painting either.

LG:      Good. So you wouldn’t, when you’re working outside and you come back into the studio, you’re not necessarily going to think, “Jeez, if only I’d made this line a little straighter,” or, “I didn’t quite get this thing right.” It’s not about refining it later back in the studio.

MA:      Sometimes it is. Sometimes you know that that’s a wonderful straight line and I’ll take a ruler. I’ve been working with a telephone pole in Tucson and it’s got a little thing at the top, you know a little canister or something. I want it at certain angle and I want that line to be straight. I use a big yardstick that I found in the house. I don’t hesitate to use rulers or T-Squares or whatever is going to give me a strong shape or a strong line. I don’t do it everywhere. It’s a tool. I do a lot of clarifying in the studio.

Four Studies, 20″ X 16″ oil on canvas 2008

First Light

LG:      What about deciding if a painting is to be big or small? I noticed that many of your paintings are quite small and then some are big? I figured the smaller ones are more likely to have been done on-site outside and then the big ones are studio. How does it work? Is it really determined by some other means entirely? What is scale to you for your paintings?

MA:      Small paintings are usually one-shot paintings, not always, but … For me to get my mind around the whole image, “How do I put this together here? Maybe I should be there.” I’ll do lots of small paintings. I’ll do them sometimes after I’m 90 percent finished with a big painting. It helps me get my mind around the whole image and to see it in a nutshell, so to speak.

A big painting has to be lots of different takes, lots of different times, has a much more layered feeling to it. I like big paintings. I don’t necessarily want all the layers to be congruous, if they’re incongruous that’s okay. In fact, I often will go after things that don’t seem perfectly balanced or don’t seem perfectly harmonious, like I would disrupt resolution. In a big painting you have lots more chances to do that.

In a small painting, I’ll go after it once and it’s usually to clarify something for myself in, “It’s this to this to this. How do I put that down? How do I get that?” I do that all the time. I think it’s a great practice just to constantly re-see something through a 20-minute study.

The Lighthouse Cassis, 16×12 inches 1995

Adam’s Tractor Tracks, oil on linen, 34 x 50 inches

LG:      How do you start a painting? When you go out, what is your process like? What do you do?

MA:      To have as little process as possible, basically. I don’t want to pre-think the painting. I want to go wherever the landscape takes me. It’s hard to get away from yourself, from your habits. I repeat myself all the time; I know that. I like Diebenkorn saying, “When you start you want to get as far away from home base as you can”.

Recently I’ve been ordering canvases from Twin Brooks Stretchers in Maine. They make beautiful canvases and I usually will order something as close to a golden section as possible. I’m doing landscapes, not always, but … I really think it’s been inhibiting. I think I’m going to get away from that, just go back to the open space, that’s trying to find out where a painting would go without my pre-considering the size of the painting or the shape of the rectangle.

What else can I say about that? I don’t have a plan. It’s very embarrassing to go out and paint where people are going to watch you because they must think, “God, that person is absolutely crazy. What is she doing?” I like to be alone when I’m painting. I was at Mount Gretna School of Art. I’d get up at 6:00 in the morning and go out there, other people get up at 6:00 in the morning, too. Somebody comes up to me and says, “Do you do this often?” I’m out there trying to figure out this landscape. They can’t make head or tail of what I’m doing. People would never read over a writer’s shoulder and comment.

LG:      I also find that difficult, because I sometimes paint in a suburban area, on the sidewalk in front of people’s houses and sometimes people can see me as being very weird.

MA:      I think it’s very brave.

Bloomington II, 48×60 oil 1987

Bicycle, 66 X 60 inches oil on canvas 1999-2000

The Japanese Robe, 66 x 60 inches oil on canvas 2011-2012

LG:      I’m used to it but it does worry me sometimes that painting in public can influence how you paint. Despite knowing it’s ridiculous, I sometimes feel I censor myself from doing anything too wild because someone might come by and think I’m a nut. If I don’t paint realistically, then they’re going to think I’m wacko. Of course this is totally wrong, so I increasingly want to find the more remote places to paint or just stay in the studio. However, it’s probably wrong of me to say this but if I’m painting in more urban areas, with lots of homeless people around, I usually paint a lot better. I might get hassled or even robbed but at least they’re less apt to be judging my painting.

I don’t know if you ever have anything like that. It’s why I think it’s so great that your recent paintings increasingly seem move away from the presence of people. More pure landscape.

MA:      Absolutely, I feel exactly the way you just described. I was painting in France and people would bring their school of artists up behind me and very quietly and in French mumble things. I would just be beside myself and know, “I’m going to have to scrape this entire painting as soon as they go away.” I would tell them, in French, my limited French, “Go away and come back when I’m finished. I can’t talk to you now.” I can’t talk and paint. It would drive me nuts. They would come between the painting and me and ask me questions.

LG:      I heard Ken Kewley say something that helped me with this once. He said to be a good painter you have to be willing to risk looking like a complete idiot. Just paint and don’t worry about appearing crazy. He talked about once bringing a class into a grocery store and having them draw fruits and vegetables in the produce department. I could never do that, especially if I was trying to draw in an abstracted manner, in a grocery store. I can’t imagine anything harder. I like to think this is sometime to aspire to, to be able to lose my sense of inhibition, but there are many things I need to work on before that.

MA:      Listen, it’s one thing to talk about it afterward. It’s another thing to be there. I think if you’re in a group of people doing that in a grocery store, you’re safe, you’re okay. If you’re the only one, oh no, I don’t think so.

LG:      That’s very true. There’s safety in numbers.

MA:      I know a lot of painters have no problem with this–stand outside the subway in New York City, no problem. Actually, you’re probably safer in New York City doing it. In a suburban grocery store I don’t know.

LG:      They would probably have the security guard come and take you away before you got very far.

The Magi, 30 X 48 inches oil on canvas 2006

Two-Trees—Spring

Off the Roof, Vermont, 41×47 inches oil 2003

LG:      Where do you usually paint? What are you painting these days?

MA:      My favorite place to paint is certainly in Vermont. We’ve had a cabin up there since ’69 and it’s just a place I know really well. I almost know every tree, every branch, the way the light comes over the hill. It seems endlessly interesting to me, endlessly varied. You go from winter to summer to fall, the colors. I love to paint there and I’m absolutely alone, so far.

I love to paint at the ocean. I think the ocean is an awesome subject. Although, we haven’t had many opportunities to do that. When I’ve had chances to paint there, I think, you could paint there forever. It’s endlessly complex and interesting even it’s absolute simplicity. If you don’t put sailboats and rocks and too much other stuff in, it’s just an abstraction and it’s such a challenging abstraction.

I also love painting in Arizona now. It’s like being on the moon, these huge saguaro cacti that are all over the place. All the mountains in Tucson are geometric; they’re very new and very jagged-y. It looks like somebody put big blocks out there. I’m painting a mountain called Sombrero Peak and it looks like a big saddle, then on one end it has what looks like a hat. It’s an interesting form and there’s all the stuff in between, lots of telephone poles. Nobody runs lines underground; it’s all rock.

High Blue Sky, 39 X 58 inches oil on canvas 2002-04

LG:      There is sometimes a gestural flow, a linear movement in your paintings that brings Poussin to mind for me, is there something to this?

MA:      I wish I had a relationship to Poussin. I admire him tremendously as a painter, that he could make such solid form in a painting. His drawings look modern. His drawings sometimes look like Cubist drawings or Impressionist drawings. They’re so quickly done and they’re so structural at the same time. The paintings and drawings are solid. I think if I could teach a painting class and say, “Okay, all I want you to do is draw from Poussin’s paintings,” that would be the whole class. You would learn how to draw. I think they’re amazing paintings in that regard. Cezanne said something like; he wanted to do nature over from Poussin…

When he had to fill out some sort of questionnaire when he was young about who was his favorite painter, he mentioned Rubens. When you look at the touch in Cezanne and the touch in Rubens, you can see there’s a startling relationship. You can see Poussin in some of the paintings of his wife, the figures become rocks, like he’s painting Mont Sainte-Victoire in Hortense; there she is, a rock. I love that quality in his work but I don’t see it in my work … That’s not me.

LG:      I was thinking more of a relationship similar perhaps to when Jackson Pollock studied with Thomas Hart Benton, Thomas Hart Benton was all about these gestural flows and rhythms arabesque movements through the painting and how one figure’s gesture will blend into another one and go into some part of the landscape or something like that and then it turns around and comes back. It’s like an underlying curvilinear structure.

I think Pollack perhaps got a similar sort of curvilinear gestural flow through his paintings. I think that with Poussin and  Rubens you see a similar thing with the gestural flow through all the things that relate to each other … how a line will extend through a figure, through the axis of a figure into the axis of a tree and the way the branch flows down that will go into some clouds and will come into this and when you start looking at it, it’s all over his paintings. Not so much in terms of the structure of the forms, which is a whole other thing, but I think I see something like that in your paintings. Perhaps like how in your landscapes certain lines of the tree branches would relate to gestural lines in other trees or elements in the painting … There’s a whole curvilinear rhythm in your paintings that seem to have a baroque feel to it.

MA:      I love what you said about Thomas Hart Benton and Jackson Pollack, I never thought of that and I’ve never read that anywhere. That’s really good, I like that. In my work I think it’s from spending a long time drawing in museums. The more you draw from old masters, the more you see that constant making of relationships, or this rhythm is echoed by this rhythm. I think it’s an idea about drawing that goes back to ancient wall paintings.

LG:      In medieval art you have that same sort of thing. I thought it was brilliant you were saying how the early Renaissance blended the medieval linear rhythms with the observed world.

Two Trees- Snow, 54 x 64 inches oil on canvas 2013

Two Trees- Fall II, 54 x 64 inches oil on canvas 2013

Two Trees- Early Fall, 48 x 60 inches oil on canvas 2011-2012

Summer Green II, oil on linen, 30 x 48 inches

MA:      Sometimes we forget that. Sometimes we forget that you can get very representational painting from a photograph, but you don’t get that abstract sense of constantly making relationships in the painting. The human element is outside the photo.

I was looking in the Norton Simon Museum yesterday and you see all these Indian reliefs and they look elegant like they could have been done in Venice in the Renaissance. They’re second century, not Renaissance, they look like Greek reliefs. They show what happened on little steles that you see in Greek art where you have two figures here and have another figure there and then how the artist relates the three of them. Maybe you have an animal of some kind. The beautiful way they’re put together, the way they’re structured. I think that’s really forgotten in a lot of modern painting that comes from photographs. It isn’t there anymore. I think it goes way, way back. You could see it in tomb paintings from Egypt, this wonderful sense of making things relate to each other and putting them together, composing them so that they have unity. That’s interesting.

LG:      Does your painting have an affinity with the early modernist landscape painters, like Arthur Dove, John Marin and others–can you say something about your relationship with them?

MA:      One of the things about them is that they’re non-academic. I can feel an affinity with them in a way that they just went out there and they painted from themselves, they made their own images of what they were looking at. Of course they were looking at everything and other painters and of course they had teachers. I am bemused by teachers who say, “It has to be like this and these are the rules.” Dove, Marin and Hartley started from inside themselves, not armed with academic dogma. They also seem to represent an earlier simpler America–maybe a myth but we treasure that.

I feel much more at home with them and Burchfield because they trusted themselves, they didn’t need somebody else’s rules. That’s what makes them so refreshing for us. You discover your own by working. Where did Picasso get his ideas?

Villa Aurelia

Fountain from 305 American Academy Rome, 9×10 oil 2006

LG:      Can you tell us something about the workshop you’re giving this summer in Italy and your approach to teaching?

MA:      I’ve been painting in Italy since 2000, and I first went to Italy when I was in college on the Experiment in International Living. I went one summer and lived with a family, and I fell in love with Italy, it was home away from home. I love the Italians, they’re incredible people. The landscape is so ancient, so lived in. When I was first there everything seemed like art, I was frozen in terms of trying to make my own drawings. But it didn’t feel that way when I went back as a painter after I got out of school. Italy has such a complex history, and it has such beautiful light and atmosphere. I’d had enough experience finding my own voice to bring to it when I went back. You want your own response. Imagine ten people improvising from a piece of music. You desperately want to know what you would do.

The history of art is present everywhere in Italy, you see it inside and outside. You see it in the landscape and then you go in a museum, it’s there in the paintings, the people are in the sculptures. It’s an important experience for a painter. Everything feels present; the traditions seem alive in Italy. It’s not as if, “Well, this is an old dead culture and we don’t have anything to do with this anymore.” It’s not like that.

Monte Castello to Todi 36 x 30 inches February 2000

LG:      What about Monte Castello? You’ve painted there before; you’ve been involved with the International School in the past?

MA:      I went in 2000 to teach Hollins’ January term and stayed there after the students left. We were staying in Todi—an Etruscan town, elegant and spacious—and painted in Monte Castello di Vibio, a small mountain town given to a Roman soldier whose family name was Vibio. The town is charming, medieval and cozy. Both have magnificent views that are fascinating to paint. People are very respectful of the artists working. It is a perfect experience for a painter.

LG:      How do you go about teaching your workshops? What can you say about what someone might expect.

MA:      This workshop is for people who are into painting, I’m more of a group leader, and I’m not running it as a class. We will get together and talk about painting, and the painters coming are serious painters. We will simply get together and exchange ideas and talk about each other’s paintings. I’ve been teaching landscape for years, I can hardly keep quiet about it. The one criticism I’ve had as a teacher over years and years is that I don’t tell students what to do. (I do tell them, “You’ve got to deal with that tree!”)

I want them to make their own decisions. I can raise issues and make suggestions but I don’t tell them what to do. I make them decide because I think that’s really what painting is about. Moments when I have been overbearing and telling them what to do, I usually find I go into my own studio and make a liar out of myself. As soon as I pick up a brush I’ll do something absolutely contrary to what I just shoved down that student’s throat. I’m really conscious of that, and how quirky painting is that way. It’s something that you don’t own; it’s just there. Stay out of the way.

This summer I want us all to go out and paint every day. Think about it later. Throw ourselves into the landscape and make lots of paintings good and bad just to see what’s there, what we choose to put down, and talk about it later. Go to Florence and look at paintings. By the end of a week we will be thoroughly immersed and have something to wrestle with. I want everyone’s work to be his or her own.

Umbrian Afternoon, 20 X 30 inches oil on canvas

LG:      I often find that whenever I start hearing someone say that painting is supposed to be made a certain way, I immediately start counting reasons why that’s really not true.

MA:      You got it.

LG:      There are very few rules in painting where the opposing opinion isn’t equally valid.

MA:      Bravo. Exactly.

LG:      But still if you don’t even know the rules or don’t pay attention to them simply because good color or drawing is too hard, you can still make crappy paintings, especially if you try to paint like you’re the first person ever to pick up a brush. There are lots of people these days who have a mindset of wanting to “deskill like crazy”.

MA:      I agree with you. It’s too simple to say that there aren’t any rules. All of art history is there setting rules. You don’t want to get too hemmed in by your own ideas. I started with this classic ballet teacher–there is nothing more demanding than ballet in terms of rules and correctness. You have to quit because you don’t fit that image, you are not Suzanne Farrell.

Suzanne Farrell was in my ballet studio growing up. She became George Balanchine greatest dancer. She had a perfect body for ballet. In painting that doesn’t happen, and in a lot of modern dance it doesn’t either. I mean you can be all over the place, you don’t have to have a perfect body. In classical ballet, that’s the way it is. The “Leap Before You Look” exhibition on Black Mountain College shows you where dance and art went in the ‘30s. I was out of classical ballet before I left high school and into Martha Graham and Agnes De Mille. When you’re young the ferocious discipline feels important, but as you get older you want more—invention, expression, feeling—how does this feel—as a judgment coming out of yourself in the present. There is something ethical about that. Students need to get there.

LG:      Thank you very much for this interview.

Selected Writings on Painting by Martha Armstrong

Excerpts from the catalog: Some Conversations with and about Martha Armstrong, Painter

“The fight is between what is and what you can get—want to get—in the painting. If you just take everything you want and forget the subject matter you lose the meaning urgency of the painting.”

“When I look at paintings I’m looking for something real, something to hold you down to earth. I’m looking for connections.”

“The artist makes your eye move. Compare a photograph of a man in front of a barn to a Roman stele. I think this is what Leland Bell meant when he spoke about painting the arabesque.”

“The painter’s problem is to make his work feel it will hold up like architecture. It’s a fake, you can put anything down, it doesn’t have to hold up, but I want my paintings to feel that they do hold up, have that kind of balance.”

“Pictures: the quickest ones are comics. They have to be fast, essential. Picasso knew that. The model for Guernica is the Katzenjammer Kids, which Picasso read for years, but what he made from them! We don’t think “comics” when we see Guernica.”

“Each piece of a painting should bear significance like the words of a poem—resonant, signaling.”

“It should carry more than a description of something. You want the shape to be interesting itself but also to carry meaning beyond description of a limb or tree. You want something beyond the landscape itself.”

“Making images is as old as human beings. In a way photography has thrown us off to think that painting is only about pictures. Photography has led us to advertising.”

“When I start doing something and realize the camera can do it better I realize the absurdity of what I’m doing. Much of the history of painting is based on images the camera can do better.”

“At one time some painting had the purpose of some photography today — to make a record, capture a likeness exactly. What would Holbein draw today? For 30,000 years, from the earliest-known cave paintings, painting revealed an internal life rhythm, heartbeat, dance, breathing. The photograph cannot give that. When we see ourselves in a photograph we see ourselves static, dissociated from our life rhythm. That’s our image of ourselves today.”

“You draw from an Albrecht Durer etching, it’s like crawling around in his mind, it’s so structural, yet it’s so flat, it resolves flat so it sits perfectly on the surface. Strange. Poussin: his work is the most logically three-dimensional. I should always be drawing from Poussin. Cezanne said, ‘I want to do Poussin over from nature.’“

Hillside Improv II, oil on board, 9 x 12 inches

Meander Study II,, oil on board, 5 x 7 inches

“Paintings have to be about the meaning of visual form. Representation is only one of the tools.”

“I don’t think you can learn about these things without really studying drawing and looking at the past. There’s a lot of past in painting.”

“The search for meaning in a painting is not superficial or quick any more than it is in looking for meaning in a Keats poem or in a play by Sophocles or in a piece of music by Prokofiev. Creativity is not cleverness.”

“Creativity needs room to play and be wrong and experiment and go where you don’t know where you’re going. It’s true what Veronese said to the judge in Venice: ‘Artists must be allowed the same latitude as children, drunks, and the insane.’”

“I don’t want anyone to outlaw my craziness or make me feel self-conscious about my studio being a sandbox.”

“I feel there’s something wrong with a painter when I look at his work and it doesn’t make me want to paint – which is true of much painting today. It looks impressive, but it is digital and it is dead.”

“A painting should have a sequential feel to it, something that could happen over time. It can be the exploration of an idea, or something you imagine, but it is an exploration. You can hear the human mind working in a painting by Matisse. You can feel the drive in Picasso—the unstoppable expression. It has a heartbeat, it has a rhythm, it has a pulse, it is alive. A wall painting from Knossos has that, a Braque still life has that. It’s not different over the centuries.”

“So much art today feels like it was done for the audience—to show what the artist could do, or to please someone else. Then you look at a David Park and realize he did it entirely for his own reasons.”

“It’s much easier to paint a small painting. You can get away with murder in it, and no one will notice. If the structure isn’t right a big painting won’t hold up. A big painting has to be simple and can’t hold a lot of detail.”

“Classical landscape has background, foreground and middleground. Modernist space takes from abstraction: everything is on the picture plane, everything sitting on top of everything else: intimacy.”

“An artist who works from life wants the image to feel like a glance, a snapshot, the way Edgar Degas has figures halfway into a painting as a photograph might catch the image. Yet the painting must be fully composed. A painting has its own imperatives of composition that have little to do with the subject.”

“Lots of artists today use photographs as subject —from Picasso to present day artists. It is different to compose from life—from the eye, through time, to the hand to the canvas. It is more like playing a piece of music—you must know it to some extent, you must concentrate completely to make one thing connect to another. Unlike the musician you can correct or change later. But the painting is basically there. Painting draws on the whole mind— intuition, sensation, intelligence—in a way that the manipulation of photographic information does not.“

Excerpts from the catalog: Martha Armstrong, Recent Paintings March 1998

“A painting has to come to terms with everything the artist has experienced, everything suffered, enjoyed, felt, understood. It has to have that kind of complexity. Nature has that immense complexity. Think about collage, fractures, dissonance, playfulness, exuberance, pain, anger, everything.”

“How do you get that if you stay with straight representation? Abstraction doesn’t connect to anything. The full impact of photography is coming to bear on painting.

“The only way I can keep my painting from feeling frivolous is to stay very close to the fact of the landscape. It is mundane and has its own peculiarity. Thee only justification for changing anything I’m looking at is when I can’t paint it straight—when that will not get what I see. But painting is always a translation—an illusion, not an appearance.”

“Seeing—and the painting that comes from seeing—can only be one way at a particular moment. Some paintings are done in a day; some have pieces of many days. To get what you see you cannot paint what you see. It’s a battle between what you see and what you know. You take what at you need to make a painting. The landscape has everything and nothing to do with the painting.”

“What you’re trying to do in painting is make the marks, forms and colors bear all the weight of reality and of feeling. I get at this best painting outside—the studio without walls.“

Stanley Lewis on Martha Armstrong: (From Martha Armstrong: Up to Now February 19-March 14, 2009 Gross McCleaf Gallery catalogue.

“The problem with American Realist painters is their tendency to feel obligated to describe reality because it is there and in the most obvious way, skirting the nagging feeling that perception is originating behind your eyes, not in front of them. This is a problem I have. This is the hardest problem you face when you get outdoors ready to paint: “What am I seeing?” Martha seems to say, “I’m going to paint it like this because I just got a message to do it.”

“Martha’s friendship has been important to me. She helps me define how I could be different from my teachers. I want to take on some of her defiance toward authority. I feel better after we talk. She can give a push in a positive way. She is a great teacher. We have always liked each other’s paintings. It is important to have good friends.“

Fall II,

Mock-Orange with Forsythia,

Two Trees In My Head I, 5 x 7 inches oil on canvas 2013

The post Interview with Martha Armstrong appeared first on Painting Perceptions.

The Costume, 45×54 inches o/c 2015

I’m delighted and honored that Susan Lichtman agreed to this telephone interview and thank her greatly for being so generous with her time and attention with sharing thoughts about her art and process.

Susan Lichtman is a well-known and greatly respected figurative painter living in Southeastern, Mass. She is an Associate Professor of Painting at Brandeis University. Select recent shows include: List Gallery, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA, Smith College, Northampton, MA, and has shown at the Gross McCleaf Gallery, Philadelphia, PA and the Lenore Gray Gallery, Providence, RI as well as many other venues.

The JSS in Civita, (Civita Castellana, Italy) announced that Susan Lichtman will be the 2016 JSS in Civita Master Class Guest-of–Honor. Ms. Lichtman will be in residence July 11th to August 1st. Here is a link for more information on her workshop in Italy.

Larry Groff:  What led you to become a painter?

Susan Lichtman:  I started drawing from life in high school. I moved with my parents from New York to the woods of southeastern Massachusetts, and I had a lot of time on my own. When drawing I simply felt most engaged with the world, least bored and most in-sync with passing time. But great paintings made me want to be a painter. I fell in love with all kinds of painting. I went to college knowing I wanted to study art as well as art history and literature.

LG:  You studied at Brown University for your undergraduate degree and then went on to Yale for graduate school. What was that like for you?

SL:  I have said that being an art major at a liberal arts college affords the slow, scenic route to becoming a painter. Not the most efficient route–progress is slow. But at Brown I read many things I would not have otherwise, was exposed to ideas which I know now have been crucial to my understanding of art. I was a bit of an odd ball at Brown. Most students were interested in abstraction or conceptual art. We all were reading Clement Greenburg.

But for a variety of reasons I wanted to paint from direct observation. One reason was that I come from a family of scientists. I thought at the time that representational painting was more objective, less arbitrary or derivative than other kinds of art making. I went to the Yale Norfolk summer program after my junior year where Andrew Forge and Louis Finkelstein were my teachers. It was the first time I was shown a connection between perceptual painting and the world of ideas. They put together a reading list for the painting students, (Proust, Dostoyevsky, Gombrich etc.) and talked about phenomenology and Cezanne. I felt so inspired and also so terribly deficient–I had so much to learn. I remember coming back from Norfolk and saying that I didn’t want to be an artist–I just wanted to be a painter. Which was funny thing to say at Brown where we didn’t declare majors in any one discipline. But I knew I wanted to commit to this specific niche of art.

I arrived at Yale still anxious and inexperienced. I needed a lot of remedial training. I had great teachers at Yale and made close friends–including my husband Dennis Congdon. At the end of my first difficult semester Dennis gave me very large old stretcher bars used by former students who were abstract painters, and I started making very large paintings of simple studio still life setups. Working large allowed me to work more slowly, and construct a painting without doubting every move. I still prefer to make large paintings–not practical, but it’s the way I compose best.

Hostess, 66×45 inches o/c 2015

Sisters, 66×45 inches o/c 2014

LG:  Who have been some of your biggest influences?

SL:  I always painted interior spaces, and am obviously influenced by all the European and American painters of domestic interiors, from the De Hooch and Vermeer, to Hopper and Porter. When I was young I saw the large Vaquez murals by Vuillard in the Petit Palais. I thought they were the most remarkable things I had ever seen. I still love Vuillard and the Nabis, Bonnard and Gwen John.

William Bailey, one of my teachers in graduate school, gave me the confidence to be a figurative painter and to work from life and from the imagination. His interest in literature as a model (and the analogy of painting as a “fiction”) is important to me. It’s helped me come to terms with the issue of realism or naturalism in painting, which I’ve never been able to pull off. I am also influenced by cinematography–the way we experience places in films; scanning and focusing over a duration of time. I want to make paintings that are more like cinematographic passages than like still photographs, where the eye can move around and apprehend things slowly.

Visitors, 59×66 inches oil/linen, 2006

LG:  I’m curious to hear more about this notion of painting as fiction, especially with regard to William Bailey’s comment.

SL:  Bailey once titled a show of paintings–Studio Fictions. I don’t remember him using the word fiction when he taught–but he let us know he was interested in the way painters could invent believable worlds which weren’t completely truthful.

He did encourage figurative painters to work from memory as a way to get to something clearer and more interesting.

Bailey paints his still lifes from memory but these objects do exist. You wouldn’t see the same arrangement on a table that you see in the painting but they might be somewhere nearby. He’s inventing it, describing it as if it were seen from a distance, certainly not the same kind of space you see in a perceptual painting. He also has a body of work that includes figure paintings. Particularly beautiful is a recent series of two women lying on the grass, maybe in homage to Courbet. I don’t know if he used a model for these paintings, but is does it matter?  When writers are writing a novel they might base one character partly on their mother and partly on a friend, they’re getting to another kind of truth about their families or the way people interact in the world. It’s not journalism or documentary but it feels real because of the imaginative editing.

In my painting I would like it to seem plausible that all these people really were at my house at a particular moment with the light just that way, of course it never really happened exactly like that but I want it to feel believable.

I remember when I first started painting I thought that it was remarkable about how Degas could make paintings with lots of figures. How does a painter make a multi-figure painting, especially if the figures are moving?  A teacher in a summer course told me it was simply because Degas was a genius. I wasn’t told that he worked from drawings, or from photographs that he took of his models, or how he used the same figure in several different paintings. There wasn’t a lot of talk about his way of composing a picture; how he painted moving figures, something that can’t really be painted from life.  I just had to work this out on my own.

At Yale, I took Bailey’s figure painting class, one of the first times I ever painted from the model. He was always showing images of many different artists how one painter worked one way and another person painted it in a totally different way.  Of course he was very firm about his belief in certain things, and he gave us a lot of information, but he didn’t think that there was just one way to put your painting together. He talked about how we needed to find our own language; and left a lot for us to figure out by ourselves.

Cinderella, 56×68 inches, o/c 2003

Family at Sundown, 56×72 inches O/C 2003

LG:  Did you ever have doubts about choosing your life as a painter?

SL:  If I had any doubts it would be about other things. Sometimes I wish my husband and I had lived in New York. I think living in an isolated area has been hard at times. But it allowed us to get a lot of work done, grow a lot of flowers and vegetables, and keep a small menagerie of animals, including goats.

LG:  Are your works autobiographical in any way?  What importance do you give the story in your paintings?

SL:  I have been interested in mothers and daughters as characters. I often use a surrogate figure–not me–to represent a mother-type. (A working mother, a housewife, a distracted mother, a glamorous mother, a mother who is domineering or a shadowy presence.) Ultimately though, these mothers relate to me as well as suggesting mothers from myth or literature.

A story gives me motivation, a conceptual justification for making the painting. But I don’t want to give it away too easily. I feel the more I push a narrative the more abstract the painting has to be. I worry about the complex issue of being illustrative. I have always cited the poet Mallarme claiming that the pleasure of poetry lies in evoking, not naming. The painting needs to put forth an event, or an idea, that is purely visual.

Large Tulip Interior, 45×60 inches o/c s2013

Father, Dogs, Daughters, 62×60 inches o/c 2007

LG:  How do you go about starting a painting? What can you tell us about your painting process?

SL:  I have a strange method of starting a large painting, but it works for me. I resist the temptation to plan out a composition before hand or to work from a study. Instead I start by painting something small and specific from direct observation, (a vase of flowers or a leg or the shape of a head) somewhere within the rectangle. From there I begin to imagine what might be to the right, left, above and below that thing: another object, a piece of light on the floor, the dog. It’s as if I was zooming out from a close-up of particular form, slowly revealing what might be in the periphery vision. I can only do this with places I know very well, where I know how light falls and how figures interact with things. But the process is totally arbitrary–if I feel like want a piece of yellow, then I put in a daffodil or a lemon, or a yellow dress I saw in a magazine.

Eventually I get enough things down to claim where the depicted image takes place and what is going on. Then there’s a period of editing–taking things out, moving things around. I might make a small painting from the larger painting-in-progress. Maybe things never fit together, or I just don’t believe in the world I’ve made. I might have to put the painting away for a while and come back to it.

LG:  It’s interesting that you work from the specific to the general that is so different that what most people learn when first studying painting. I’m curious if you might talk more about what lead you to work this way and what advantages does it offer you? Or what disadvantages do you see?

SL:  We’re taught in school to get the color shapes down first and then start to build specificity. However, I’ve had difficulty getting specificity into a painting that was already all laid out. I want the painting to be about the act of looking so I try to start with a focal point of something I’m seeing. Even if I’m working from memory I’m trying to imitate that process of perception where your eyes focus on one thing and then dart around to another object and then meander to focus on something else.

When we see, not everything is given the same amount of attention. We look harder at some things, because of our interest in them. We are more curious about some things and see more information; other things not so much. So specificity fluctuates according to our attention.

When I work this way I find I can get my brush to explore unexpected places like a piece of floor. If my attention moves from say a bowl on a table then slowly to a piece of floor and then move to a leg on the floor that is quickly seen, it’s not so much about painting negative shapes or figure ground relationships. It really becomes more about weaving a fabric of visual moments out of the chaotic ways we look; perhaps walking into a room and first see a bright light on a table, then a couch on the side, a kitchen in the background and then you realize there is a figure in the shadows.

Home From School, 54×45 inches o/c

Painting this way reminds me of telling a child a story you make up as you go along, like once upon a time there was this frog and then the frog lived in the woods and then the frog met a fairy… you gradually build a specific structure and before you know it you have a story that can be totally surprising. That’s kind of what I’m doing with this everyday stuff in my house. I think this might be a way that some writers create a narrative–they don’t plan out an entire whole novel before hand. They might start with a character or a particular incident, and then they build the larger structure around that idea. It’s a way of breaking habits of composition or a way to keep from becoming formulaic.

LG:  This must involve a lot of revision and need to keep this process very open.

SL:  Absolutely, yes; total revision. This process gets me to a structure; the ‘actors’ on this stage get there usually in a way I would never come up with on my own. I take things out and put other things in, shift focus, sometimes making a figure smaller or bigger, I might change the pose or I bring my daughter into the painting, ask her to pose for me after trying to invent a figure based on a photograph or memory. I think that’s what I meant when I said I work from the specific to the general. I start with the specifics but then everything is modified so it finds its place its proper position in the design afterwards. I don’t start with that positioning of shapes; I discover them.

LG:  I love it when people shake up the rules for painting. Once you know what you doing and see the painting as a whole; bringing a creative vision and intelligence, you then can paint anyway you want.

SL:  Right, as students we learn the importance of designing the whole; how parts can’t be separate, they need to contribute to an organized design. But eventually we find a personal way of building an image that reflects the particular way our mind works.

LG:  I understand that you prefer to work from memory and don’t normally work from observation. What are some of your reasons for preferring to work this way?

SL:  That’s not exactly true. Every painting has elements that are painted from direct observation–still life elements, a random body part, the view out my studio doors. Figures are usually pieced together from close observation of photographs and drawings. But the whole painting is composed in the studio–just steps from the motif. I feel like I am painting from life, with a slight time delay. I only paint the downstairs of my house and the view from my studio doors. So my motifs are close at hand. I also like to paint things that are moving, transient, in flux. Beams of late afternoon light and walking figures–they would be hard to paint from direct observation, especially on a large canvas. I feel that my work is about perception of a place over a few moments in time. But in order to convey those moments, I have to compose things carefully, and that takes a lot of time, and a process of trial and error.

First Nice Day, 60×45 inches o/c 2013

Yellow Bag, 8×10 inches gouache on panel 2006

LG:  What can you say about the difference between light in a painting and light in nature?

SL:  Well, it’s like the difference between ambient sound and music. I would say that this difference is the most important thing. Light in paintings is where the voice of an artist resides.

LG:  You work in a broad open manner using flat shapes of color and you seem to prefer the suggesting form instead of illusionistic, realist form. Has this always been true for you?

SL:  Some paintings flaunt their artificiality, the raw material that builds the illusion. You see the symbol at the same time that you see what that symbol represents. I love these paintings. For me it seems the most honest way for me to paint, to make a color shape that asserts itself before it dissolves into meaning–form or light.

LG:  Do you still use a limited palette? What are some of its advantages?

SL:  Yes. It helps me to glue together complicated compositions. I like economy, when I can get one tone to mean totally different things in different parts of a composition, light here, shadow there. I’m not actually sure what the advantages are of using a huge palette for the kind of symbolic language I use–I know there must be some! I’ll have to research that. One thing I’ve been doing lately is keeping a limited palette as I begin the painting, then at some point late on inserting something totally new. For example, with a red, black, yellow, white palette, inserting something blue-hued after a time. It glows.

Fresh Air, 12×12 inches 0/p 2005

Moments with Pets Caught, 66×60 inches o/c 2010

LG:  You also have made small works on panels with more matte mediums such as casein and gouache. I’m curious, this seems similar to the distemper Vuillard used, who often painted in this “a la colle” manner, a much slower, difficult and less convenient approach. Jacques Salomon, Vuillard’s nephew said that: “…not only did Vuillard prize the matte tones obtained by this method of painting, he considered that this refractory process helped him to keep his excessive facility under control, and allowed him to deliberate more fully over his work, if only during the pauses when his colors were drying.”

Is keeping your facility under wraps a concern for you? Why would that be important for a painter to think about?

SL:  Such an interesting story about Vuillard. I do think I find the matte surface of casein and gouache beautiful because it reminds me of his distemper, as well as fresco. But my reason for using it is totally the opposite of Vuillard. The quick drying paint allows me to make many changes quickly. Lately I’ve been using acrylic gouache for the small paintings, and sometimes I will make the paintings with one brush–a #4 round watercolor brush- and just repaint quickly and obsessively until I get what I want. I will change the tone and drawing of a shape over and over. The paint gets crustier, but I don’t get the mess I would get with that kind indecision in oil paint.

But getting back to the idea of facility–yes, slowing down and finding more contemplated forms is an important thing for all artists to think about. The first solution, the obvious solution, is not always the one that endures. Some painters I admire do work on one-sitting paintings, but I think they arrive at the easel well prepared for the performance.

LG:  I loved what you said in the 2008 article in American Artist that; “To me, close-valued color is magical. It’s a way for the paint to imply the fiction of light and air. A palette of close values also gives the picture a kind of envelope into which everything is placed.” Can you share some more thoughts about this?

SL:  Close valued color creates a sense of distance, as if atmospheric perspective was applied to things close at hand. I have liked this sense of distance, especially when painting my own home and family, as a way to avoid sentimentality. Now I am trying to use blacks and whites in my paintings and everything in between. I might hide important things, (figures) in close value passages, and use vivid contrast where nothing much is happening, making pictorial “red herrings.

Labor Day, 72×45 inches o/c 2006

LG:  I’m intrigued by the notion of pictorial “red herrings”; can you further explain what you mean here?

SL:  The perceptual experience of reading the painting considers that we are phototrophic, that we move toward light; ultimately, though, we are most interested in looking at people. If you play a little balancing act between elements of light and bright color and the pool of figuration you slow up the reading of a painting. A red herring is a distraction from the central, important elements of a picture. I often don’t want the figures to reveal themselves too quickly. Of course there are many ways to paint, but I love paintings where the figures are revealed slowly, for example, in Bonnard’s pictures figures emerge gradually, maybe not seen at first, as they are woven to the wallpaper or background. Rembrandt often put the eyes in the shadow and places the light somewhere else, like on a shoulder–that brilliant light redirects the eye, it is placed somewhere where it isn’t actually important and then only after a while do you discover the eyes, the windows of the soul, and all the humanity they contain. You’re playing with the weight of perception.

I’m frustrated by people who just glance at a painting, especially a representational painting, to identify what particular thing the painting depicts. I want to make it more difficult to read, to slow it down, so that’s what those red herrings are for. You go to all these different places before you get to girl in the chair. I think I’ve always wanted to make slow paintings, to make images that unfold slowly over time.

Sisters at a Table, o/c 2015

Father’s Day Study,9×12 inches

LG:  You will be the guest of honor and teaching the master class workshop at the JSS summer program in Civita Castellana. Have you spent much time in Italy before?

SL:  I am so looking forward to the summer at JSS! I have been to Italy many times and always find something new there.

The great thing about being in Italy is that you can’t see anything comparable in this country; like seeing the Piero frescoes in Arezzo, Monterchi, and Sansepolcro. Or the Giottos in Assisi or ancient frescoes in Pompeii, just fabulous. I can see how the Renaissance painting spoke to that tradition of wall painting from Pompeii’s Villa of Mysteries. I love the way you can experience a wall painting not just with the eye, but with the body first, as it is a part of architecture, a surface. You have a similar physical relationship that you might get in front of great abstract paintings. And it’s incredibly inspiring to see the sculpture from antiquity and the Renaissance that is everywhere in Italy. Figurative sculpture is a thing that sits between life and drawing, it occupies our space, but it is also expressively coherent, full of information for painters.

Solstice, 45×60 inches o/c 2013

The Green Z, 45 x 54 inches o/c 2014

The post Interview with Susan Lichtman appeared first on Painting Perceptions.

Eve Mansdorf, Subjunctive Mood, 40 x 48 in. oil/linen

(Please note: all images in this article show a very large version once clicked )

I was delighted to get a chance to meet Eve Mansdorf last summer in Italy where she and her husband Tim Kennedy lead a workshop at the JSS in Civita Summer Art School and Residency in Civita Castellana. I’ve long admired her paintings and was thrilled when she agreed to an interview with me over Skype and email. I would like to thank Ms. Mansdorf for taking the time to talk with me about her background, process and thoughts on painting. Eve Mansdorf is a faculty member in the Indiana University Painting department and an important figurative painter coming out of the tradition of Balthus, Edwin Dickinson, and Lennart Anderson. Mansdorf’s paintings and words here celebrate the continuing relevance of painterly representation and the visual poetics of paint.

Mansdorf has had solo exhibitions at the First Street Gallery, NYC and has been represented by Gallery Henoch in NYC. She has participated in numerous group exhibitions including: SoFA Gallery, Indiana University, Zeuxis: A Moveable Feast, Westbeth Gallery NYC, Lori Bookstein Fine Art, NYC, Eric Dean Gallery, Wabash College, Richard Stockton College of New Jersey, George Nick Selects, Concord Art Association, Concord, MA Hackett Freedman Gallery, San Francisco, CA. Her work had been reviewed by Mario Naves in the New York Observer (8/2005) and Jed Perl in The New Republic, 4/2005

Lindsay, 12 x 16 in. oil/muslin on panel

Willow, 40 x 48 in. oil/linen

Larry Groff: What led you to go to art school and become a painter?

Eve Mansdorf:  It was not an actual decision; rather it was a process that evolved.  I went to college with no intention of becoming an artist; it wasn’t even on my radar. I didn’t think that was something you could realistically do with your life. It wasn’t until after college that I started seriously taking art classes and once I started doing that, I got addicted to taking them and I couldn’t stop. Eventually I went to graduate school and I think at that point I knew I was in it for the long haul.

LG: You were a Psychology major during your undergraduate studies at Cornell University?

EM:  I don’t know how much being a Psychology major really was a choice as much as it was a default major. I didn’t really know what I wanted to do when I was in college. I got a BS in Psychology and would sometimes tell people that yes, that’s what it was-BS!

LG:   You studied with Lennart Anderson and Francis Cunningham, what was that like for you?

EM:   Dick Cunningham’s class at the Art Students League was my first real painting class. It had an oddball approach. Cunningham had us crop pieces out of a set up, never painting the whole thing. The setup would have drapery that cut across the model in odd ways to obscure the fact that you were painting a figure. The main emphasis was on color-spot mixing with a palette knife, trying to get accurate shapes of color next to each other. I think this was taken from the way Dickinson taught painting. It wasn’t until later, after having been in other painting classes that I realized how unusual this was. Despite, or maybe even because of, not placing emphasis on getting the whole figure or getting proportions right it was a very good way to start. It immediately got you using a lot of paint and thinking in terms of relationships of shape and color as opposed to identifying objects.

Drawing, 40 x 48 in. charcoal/paper

Drawing, 40 x 42 in. charcoal/paper

It was during Dick Cunningham’s class that I was first exposed to artists like Edwin Dickinson.  I eventually decided to go to graduate school at Brooklyn College so I could study with Lennart Anderson, whose work I really admired. I don’t think I necessarily knew at the time that Dickinson had influenced him. I just knew that I liked his painting. I had seen a portrait Anderson had done of Leonard Petrillo in a show at the National Academy of Design. There was a part in the painting where the angle of a hand met a corduroy jacket sleeve and it was just a magical moment of paint. There really was almost nothing there, just a few smudges of paint in the right places but everything was established–the texture of the corduroy, the shape of the hand, the strangeness of the foreshortening. Lennart’s main teaching strategy involved the idea of getting three points as a basis for drawing and he talked a lot about getting the location of things and striking the “right note”, which is also a color spot idea. He would say it was easier to move a location than a thing. Sometimes Lennart would paint on your paintings during his Saturday morning figure class. It was wonderful, if a bit frustrating, to watch him Lennart-ize your painting. Once he sat down at my painting and after struggling with it and sighing and groaning for a while he looked up at me and said, “Well I wouldn’t have gotten it into this state in the first place!”

Interior, 96 x 96 in. oil/linen

Nude on Sofa, 86 x 78 in. oil/linen

LG: I can see where their color-spot teaching is still an important aspect of your work.

EM: Many times the first things you learn really stick with you, so you should be careful with what you first learn!

Also, part of the attraction of Lennart’s paintings for me, and Dickinson’s as well, is sensitivity to edges, the allowance for a come and go quality to the edges, that lost and found feeling to things. And there is the robust use of the paint itself, the paint being a critical factor in the making of the thing as opposed to drawing first.

LG:   What more can you say about Edwin Dickinson in relation to your painting?

EM:    I think for every generation of artists there is a Zeitgeist, a circle of painters that appear to everybody at one time. Many of the painters I came of age with also were attracted to Edwin Dickinson. There had been a Dickinson show at the National Academy of Design as well as a couple of shows at Hirschl & Adler. Many people including myself had seen these shows early on when we were first starting to paint. Dickinson was known as a painter’s painter and there was a reverence for him floating in the air. However, it wasn’t just Dickinson. Balthus was a big influence. I can sometimes see more of Balthus in Lennart’s work than Dickinson. There were also Lucian Freud, Antonio Lopez Garcia and Euan Uglow, among others.

Double Doors, 90 x 96 in. oil/linen

Second Story, 86 x80 in. oil/linen

LG:   What did you do coming out of graduate school?

EM:    I knew I wanted to get a college teaching job. I was convinced that I was going to need some other means of making a living besides painting. I wanted a job that would enable me to paint and that selling my paintings wasn’t likely to be enough.

I had worked at graphic design jobs before going to graduate school and it had seemed that every job I had turned into a full time job, which I didn’t want. I wanted a situation where I could spend most of my time painting. I started applying for university teaching jobs very soon after finishing graduate school but it took six years before I got the position I now have at Indiana University. One of my problems was getting some initial teaching experience, as the graduate program at Brooklyn College did not allow for teaching assistantships. I had various adjunct positions and teaching jobs including some with children in the New York City schools where I was a kind of visiting art program–I would drag all my stuff around on the subway. My jobs were part-time, which allowed me time to paint. I rented an apartment where the bedroom was my studio and I painted a lot and got by. It was a good period and, looking back, I’m glad I didn’t get a full-time, tenure track position right away, that I had that extra time in New York and was able to be exposed to so much great art and truthfully, painting in my bedroom at that point was just fine.

LG:   You were making smaller paintings then?

EM:   No, I was making huge paintings! They were my biggest paintings of all. 96 by 96 inch paintings, all I needed was a big enough wall. It was usually no small matter to get a painting that size down the stairs of a fourth floor walk-up.

LG:   Did you have to take it off the stretcher bars and roll it up to get it down the steps?

EM:       No, I tried to avoid that–you get never get them tight enough again. But I have had to saw a painting in half and fold it around a rug core to get it down the stairs. Or lower a painting between the banisters.

Doorknobs, 14 x 11 in. oil/linen

Still Life with Geranium, 30 x 38 in. oil/linen

Stairwell, 60 x 48 in. oil/linen

When I was in graduate school I mainly painted still lifes but the first few years after graduate school I concentrated on the figure paintings. I tend to paint things close to life size so my paintings got exponentially bigger very quickly, especially since I want to allow for an environment for the figure to be in. I have always been interested in painting the figure in a space, in a way setting a stage. The places I lived in were important as I used a lot of the architecture; I liked the moldings, the staircases. I also liked the evocativeness of a space–the “idea” of kitchen or bedroom and what can be dramatized there. To this day I have trouble working in a real studio space that doesn’t have that kind of architectural detail or connotation.

Bad Housekeeping, 58 x 72 in. oil/linen

Conversation, 58 x 72 in. oil/linen

LG:   I find it intriguing that you’ve combined observation with psychology. In the catalogue for your 2005 First Street Gallery show you stated…

“The two most important elements for me as a painter are the psychological situation I am trying to present which manifests itself as the mood or event, and the phenomenology of the painting that, for me, is its formal nature. In the first instance I am somewhat Freudian and in the second, Kantian. The more observational it is, the more engrossed I am by the experience of painting. The struggle between disinterestedness and grasping often characterizes the evolution of a painting for me. At the same time I enjoy the artifice of painting, the act of bringing into being something that is willed, created. I think of this as this psychological event of the painting.”

Do you think that there is a risk for observational painters becoming too involved with formal concerns and not thinking enough about  psychological realms or the emotional presence of the painting?

EM: What I am saying in that quote is that I often want a tension between formal elements such as form, light, color and other elements that are more subjective and psychological. I guess the Freudian part is the psychological aspect of the painting. The Kantian part is the formal part but really what I am arguing for there is for the uselessness of art–the value of aesthetic experience as a thing in itself rather than as something that improves life in the community or edifies in some way.

When you’re doing figure painting, one way is to paint the model as a kind of objectified form where the model sits and poses for you and you’re treating them a bit like a still life object. Once you move away from that and become concerned with creating activity in the painting, a social world, a contextual space, a psychological tension develops in the painting. It is inevitable in some ways and, as the painter, you have to manage the dynamic that is coming into being. You are starting to create artifice. Some people call this narrative.

Compotier and Cap Guns, 20 x 28 in. oil/linen

Many observational painters are uncomfortable making that leap–they feel it is dishonest somehow. I am not interested in a really overt narrative. I find it too confining. But I am interested in creating metaphors and relationships between things that are not simply formal.

Often the real immediacy, the really engrossing aspect of painting for me is the activity of observation, putting my hand on the brush, the back and forth between myself and a motif and the sense of being in the moment, but it limits what you can do. For instance, you can’t paint someone running down the street or dangling from the ceiling. The idea of movement is difficult to deal with for an observational painter.  It is an obstacle just to paint an environment that is not very close to your studio.

Many kinds of figure paintings I do or like stretch the definition of observation. There is a desire to get some other element that goes beyond a strictly observational moment into the paintings.  On the other hand among my favorite paintings are those where someone is working from a source and not trying to embellish it, like Lennart’s beautiful portrait of Barbara S. You wouldn’t ask for anything more in a painting like that and I can feel guilty that I do need more. However, sometimes in observational painting there can be a kind of hemmed in quality and you wish the artist would interject something more than strictly looking at the source. When I was in school Lennart would sometimes tell me, “You’ve got to get the life class look out of your painting.” I think that’s true–you have to get past that classroom mentality in a painting, you’ve got to get ownership of it.

LG:   That’s a great way of putting it. You have to find your own voice, sometimes that can come best out of direct, honest painting from observation. Of course you should also go beyond just making inventory or copies of what you see in nature. However, if the emphasis is just on the formal, visual concerns, like a geometric arrangement or color interaction; sometimes emotion and ideas are downplayed or eliminated altogether. However, I’m not sure this formalism is something still relevant or frequently talked about in today’s art schools.

EM: I think when artists went back to figuration in the shadow of Abstract Expressionism there was a need to justify doing it by insisting on the formal qualities of a painting and removing other kinds of content. It was like you were making a modernist, formal statement that was similar to an abstract painting.  I think things have gone very far in the other direction, almost too far. Among the students I have now it can be very difficult to get people to talk about formal things, everyone wants to tell you about their childhood and other personal matters and to become so subjective that you actually want the formal stuff back in. There is always that pushing back and forth.

Upstairs View, 30 x 24 in. oil/linen

Girls in Bikinis 16 x12 in. oil/muslin on panel

LG: They might have a great personal or political story to tell but sadly, all too often the paint and the drawing tells us a different story, which is that they don’t yet know how to paint. Many art schools today encourage art theory over practice, the narrative and emotional over the formal painting issues. Perhaps some teachers fear that studio teaching of painting fundamentals might seem like learning a trade or craft, and believe teaching painting should be on a higher intellectual plane than just learning about how to draw the figure or get good color in your painting.

EM: There’s a formal language to painting, there are certain kinds of grammars and if you have no facility with the language or craft it’s a real problem. On the other hand there is the danger of being over-taught. In some schools now there is the idea that you learn what you need in order to make what you need to make. But you can’t just pick up a brush and expect magic to happen. There is a learning curve. On the other hand, almost in reaction to the non-teaching that can happen, there is a resurgence of academies, where the teaching is stultifying. I think it is best and it shows in the work, when you are learning and having insights as you are making a body of work and you paint to the level you can at any given period.

I now put things in my paintings that I would have been aghast to consider using when I was in graduate school. I would have thought you shouldn’t put such a highly personal, kitschy and recognizable thing in a painting. At that time I had ideas about the “purity” of form. Recently I’ve been doing still life paintings that have superheroes in them, Wonder Woman and things like that, there’s definitely a narrative going on and I would have been very against that in graduate school.

LG:   It wouldn’t seem serious enough? Didn’t Philip Pearlstein make some Superman paintings when he first stopped painting abstractly?

EM: It wouldn’t be serious and it was in really bad taste somehow. Lennart emphasized a kind of muteness that could be evocative. Sometimes when I start putting a lot of crazy things in my paintings and cluttering them up I wonder if it isn’t a bit of a rebellion on my part against his sense of reserve.

Shark Pool, 32 x 24 in. oil/muslin on panel

Mirth, 64 x 46 in. oil/linen

Voyage, 40 x 48 in. oil/linen

LG: Post-modernism has opened up different ways of working and subjects that were previously shunned. This is a good thing don’t you think?

EM: Yes. For me the allowance for the inclusion of pop culture, nostalgia and sentimentality have been liberating. Humor and irony are interesting and do not undermine the seriousness of the effort. I like visual puns. I am also interested in the idea of a collaged together kind of painting. I think the rigors of Modernism can have a slightly fascist quality when taken too far.

I usually wonder at some point during the genesis of a painting if what I’m doing is just too stupid, too sentimental, too garish, etc. I used to be afraid of these moments, now I see them as good, self-questioning stages to go through–necessary even.

LG:   Did you ever have doubts about choosing your life is a painter?

EM:       Before I went to graduate school I think this was the continual question- should I do this or not. But once I went to graduate school I had a sense of commitment–no looking back. This is it; I’m going for it. Maybe because it had been such a difficult decision, I didn’t really question it afterwards until maybe five years ago. I was suddenly having a lot of doubts. I guess I was having a painter’s midlife crisis. That was when you had originally asked me for an interview and that was part of the reason I declined at that time.

One of the reasons I didn’t want to do the interview then because I wasn’t sure about what I thought at the time. I was wondering is this something valid, do I want to spend all my time doing this? Also, maybe it was at a point where I was feeling that painting was in a beleaguered state and I wasn’t sure about the painting world itself- if painting mattered in the way that it should matter or the way that it had mattered to me. I was really questioning painting as a form. I think many painters go through this at different points. However, I think I’m getting past that now.

LG:   So what are the answers to these questions? There are many of us who are still asking and wondering?

EM:   I had never experienced any kind of painting block or lack of wanting to move forward in my work so it came as a shock to me. I think partly I needed to change some of my ways of working. I had been using models a lot. I generally had a whole crew. But the people who model in Bloomington tend be college students and I was starting to find it difficult to relate to them and use them as subject matter. They are all just too young.

Sisters, 60 x 56 in. oil/linen

I think maybe if I could have found a whole cast of 40 and 50-year-old models it would have been great. Recently I have gone back to what I was doing out of grad school when I couldn’t afford to hire models which is to use a video camera, now a digital camera, and myself and a boyfriend, now my husband, Tim. I paint off a TV screen and from life and I kind of collage it all together in the paintings.

I think my paintings have always reflected the stage I have been at in my life and the nature of my relationships, particularly with men. Mark Greenwold has a quote that I love, which he got from Donald Antrim, “When you’re dealing with psycho-sexual anxiety, you never run out of material.”

LG:   Depending on what level of realism you’re interested in or the level of observation you pursue; working directly from the model might become less important. Not being as dependent on a model might free you up to focus more on the narrative, the composition, the paint surface and such, even though it might also limit your abilities to get the naturalistic light, skin tones or a particular gesture and anatomical shape. Art history, of course, filled with examples of great figurative painting done without live models; like Goya or Michelangelo who I understand painted more out of their head or from drawings than from life, does that interest you or are you after something different for painting and you really want to have your paintings grounded in looking?

EM: I do want to have my paintings grounded in looking, in some way. However, I tend to mix it up, it doesn’t all have to be in front of me in one piece. It can’t be actually. However, if I’m in the studio for too long without something in front of me to look at and respond to I tend to get bored; I just don’t want to be there. It’s essentially a visual experience for me; I don’t know how people do it, to just paint out of their heads. The great “masterpiece “ painting from art history does present itself to me as a challenge. Many artists today want to disavow art history but I just love certain paintings too much–they haunt me.

Waiting for Spring, 90 x 60 in. oil/linen

Backyard, 64 x 46 in. oil/linen

Crouch, 60 x 48 in. oil/linen

LG:   There is openness, a breathable atmosphere that envelops form in your work. Some of this seems to stem from how you orchestrate the edges. What things do you think about with getting the feeling of air in your paintings?

EM:       Early on it was a very conscious thing to try to get air in my paintings. At this point it has become intuitive and I can’t help it. With still lifes I would set things up to make that happen. I would group things so that objects would merge into each other and then, in comparison, other things would appear more distinct. So there is a kind of seeing atmosphere and figuring out how to paint that atmosphere as much as trying to paint the objects themselves. It’s like painting the light as much as you’re painting the object. Painting the immaterial aspects of what makes the thing be there. But with the larger figure paintings there is a way I’m moving the painting around for quite awhile during the process of painting it, so it’s literally open in a certain way for a long time and maybe parts of it don’t ever completely close up. I’m still pushing it around when the painting is just about finished. Also I do a lot of removing–scraping and sanding–and then reasserting what is there.

I always seem to need very fluid edges in my paintings. I have fought it sometimes, trying to be more Northern in my approach–more crisp and linear; but it never works out. I think I once read a quote from Gerhard Richter where he talks about how he tries to paint paintings with hard crisp edges but in the end he always goes back to the blur. I guess I kind of have that problem.

Kiddy Pool, 48 x 40 in. oil/linen on panel

LG:     How do you go about starting a painting?

EM: I usually spend about three years producing a body of work. It seems to take about a year for a body of work to gain a certain momentum, to develop a theme of sorts. That is something that started in graduate school. Actually one of the best things about graduate school was the sense of working in a time frame. A kind of arc that now seems Pavlovian. Often the first paintings can be difficult to get off the ground. Either it feels like there are too many possibilities or there is no clear reason why I should do anything in particular. But then when things are going well one thing can lead to another. I am usually working on a couple of still lifes and two or three figure paintings at a time. The still lifes often reflect something that is happening in the figure paintings or vice versa.

I don’t start with any sketches or preliminary drawings. When I begin a painting I often keep the paint kind of thin and the edges very open as I figure out what is going on. I will keep the composition fluid and malleable for quite a while. I do this by painting things in a blurry way, massing large shapes that stand in for things, and as Lennart would say “painting locations as opposed to things”. With the figure paintings I will usually get attached to something–the gesture of a figure, the color of something and I begin to work off that. Very often what got me started in the first place has to be removed later on. The paintings can change drastically as they go along, sometimes until quite late in the process. It can alternate between being frustrating and exhilarating. With still lifes the set up is very important–it is, in a way, the sketch. And as I am working from something in front of me, there is more of a sense of direction right from the beginning. I guess somewhere in the back of my mind I am committed to this idea of painting as a process of ‘finding” and “finding out” as opposed to executing something. So I am amenable to a seemingly very disorderly process.

Fish, 11 x 14 in. oil/muslin on panel

LG:    What more can you tell us about your process?

I use palette knives and soft brushes. I often mix and apply paint with a palette knife and move it with a brush. I sometimes start the big paintings with large Chinese bristle brushes that you can buy in the hardware store very cheaply. I don’t even wash them. I just throw them out at the end of the day. I love painting with them but the problem is that they shed hairs. I am often experimenting with a new color palette. I will have some idea about color–whether to restrict it or open it up–and my palette will reflect this. Lately I just use cadmiums, ultramarine and cobalt blue, alizarin crimson and titanium white. I have banished earth tones, black and oddball colors. But I used to use a lot of earth tones and I love trying oddball colors so that will probably change again. I am opposed to flake white because of its toxicity, but I understand some people believe in it as a kind of alchemy-that you just can’t paint it without it. I have been using real turpentine lately-so there goes my idea of being against toxicity. I had a lot of problems last year experimenting with driers like Liquin and now I am back to an old medium I used to use which is thirds of Venice turpentine, stand oil and regular turpentine.

I will often sand and scrape my paintings and do things to mess them up as I am going forward. It is not a linear process that moves straightforwardly toward completion, but more, if I’m lucky, a two steps forward and one step back kind of movement. Sometimes the paint or the surface becomes intractable and needs to be resuscitated!

Shared Resentments, 84 x 54 in. oil/linen

Photo of interior of studio house

LG:     You bought a house to use for your set-ups and models, can you tell us something about this?

EM:    When I first got tenure here, I bought a house to paint in. This had always been a fantasy of mine–to have a real interior to paint from and to have everything all together in one place. I had been doing the large figure paintings in my studio but I was creating interiors that were based on where I was living–so essentially I was painting the space from memory. For instance, when I first moved here the house that I lived in had French doors between the living room and the dining room. I thought this created a great motif. I would use the memory of the French doors while painting a posed model in the studio. I also bought a paned glass door at a junk shop and leaned it against the wall in my studio as a reference. But I couldn’t really just see the figure standing in front of the French doors. I was always making things up and trying to figure out how to make things “work” in the paintings–what the scale of things should be, where the feet should go, etc.

Buying that house was like getting a life-sized dollhouse or a studio set to paint in. Suddenly it was all in front of me. Things that had seemed like enormous problems of mental construction suddenly became straightforward acts of observation. I had a wonderful 4 or 5-year period of painting in this house.

LG:   Was anyone living in the house?

EM:       No, it was just a house; I was using it like a rented studio. It seemed like an extravagance but in Bloomington it’s actually cheaper to buy a house than to rent something. I sold it after I felt I was done with that body of work and didn’t lose any money. I eventually tried doing this a second time with another house but it never really had the same kind of magic as that first time did. The second house I bought to paint in is actually where I live and work now. Eventually I found that I not only wanted a real space to paint in but that I wanted to paint real life–the living room as it really is used, etc. Of course then your whole living room ends up taped off and you can’t actually live in it anymore!

Haircut 74 x 84 in. oil/linen

Studio view of the setup for Haircut

Cat’s Cradle, 58 x 72 in. oil/linen

LG:   I’m curious if you’ve looked at Paula Rego’s painting much? It seems like there are some affinities, especially with that psychological edge and with the interaction between the figures, like with your painting of the woman cutting the man’s hair. That seems like a Paula Rego moment.

EM: Oh yes, definitely. There is a painting of Rego’s from a series called Departure where a woman is combing a man’s hair. A very Balthusy-type painting.

LG:   I think she also made one of two women undressing a man.

EM:       Yes, that is a painting called Family. I think they are actually dressing him. I love that about Paula Rego, the intense use of the bodies to act things out. She has such good poses. I love the paintings of the women as dogs, very visceral–I love that.

LG:   I don’t know how she works, if she uses models but I would imagine it wouldn’t all be in the same space at one time.

EM:   I have read some things about this–I think she uses a model a lot, she has a woman who poses for her, who I thought was her, but is actually someone who is a model that I think physically resembles her. She builds many of the props for her setups; I went to a show of hers where she had all the props in the show, like theatre props. There doesn’t seem to be an orthodoxy about it though; she’ll use the stuff she needs to–that is part of what I like about her work–the sense of improvisation in the face of necessity.

LG:   You’re mentioned earlier about leaving a painting open until the last minute. How do you decide when the painting is complete and do you ever go back into work into older paintings?

EM: I will work on a painting as long as it’s still in the studio and hasn’t been shown yet. It’s always up for grabs. My painting process at this point allows for that to happen. I often start a painting and really go at it for a while but after several months reach this point where I get stuck and don’t know what to do next or maybe I just hate the painting and don’t want to look at it for a while. I will let it sit while I work on something else. I wouldn’t have done this earlier in my painting life, I might have been more destructive, but I now realize it can be a fruitful thing to leave it just sitting there. I will start something else and it usually seems like after about 6 months I’ll turn around one day and get a new idea about it and start painting it again. However, once I’ve put the work in a show or it’s really been seen in a public way I can feel detached from it. Even if it comes back to the studio; it’s almost like it’s not mine anymore, even if I realize things I should have done.

LG:   Is observation a point of departure for you or the whole reason for being there.

EM: It’s both. It’s a point of departure in that I’m not completely tied to the observation. I will mess around with it if I need to.

Conversation, 42 x 42 in. oil/linen on panel

LG:   Being engaged with the painting is maybe like having an experience with the world through paint, not just that you’re trying to recreate the world in your head, it’s like you’re a participant with the world. Does that make sense?

EM:   I’m not sure I follow you.

LG:   When you’re painting from life you’re responding to something. It’s not all internalized, instead there’s an interaction with looking at the outside world, an experience. This can result in a loss of the sense of self, with this intense process of looking and responding; it becomes this all-consuming experience.

EM:       Exactly. That’s very true. I think there are two distinct experiences or attitudes I tend to want to have. One is the “in the moment” Zen-like sense of just being there and responding to something it front of me–trying to get it in some way. In that moment my brain is almost completely not verbal–it is just saying things like, “…no move it to left, no redder, yes that’s it…”, etc. And there is great pleasure in that. It is probably the real “turn on” of painting.

But there is also a pleasure in standing back from the painting at the end of the day, sitting there and thinking about the painting, what’s working and what’s not working, what is being suggested, what I might title this painting–the cigarette moment, although I don’t smoke anymore; this is when I am more removed and getting distance from the painting and trying to figure out what the painting is trying to say. I’m being an audience for my own painting. Both experiences are a way of stepping outside myself.

LG:   Do you think there is a difference between beauty in nature and beauty in a painting?

EM: A Rembrandt self-portrait with his bad teeth is an exquisite, beautiful painting but he doesn’t look beautiful. I once showed a reproduction of Antonio Lopez Garcia’s painting of a woman in a bathtub to a friend of mine and I said, “Isn’t this beautiful? ” and he looked at it and he said,  “I don’t know she’s kind of dumpy.”

Barbecue, 40 x 40 in. oil/linen on panel

Study for Barbecue, 16 x 12 in. oil/muslin on panel

LG:   Many people and even artists don’t get observational painting, dismissing it as outdated or perhaps lacking intellectual rigor and substance. What might you say to help them get past this bias?

EM:       Open your eyes! I think the problem is there’s not enough critical discourse about observational painting. Of course not all observational painting is good, just like not all conceptual art is good, not all abstract painting is good, etc.  Some of it is wonderful, some mediocre and some of it is terrible. The problem is when it’s dismissed out of hand and not looked at critically and when people aren’t being discerning between what makes this a really good painting and another one not. I wish more people would have critical thoughts about what makes an observational painting good.

I also think that there can be such an emphasis in criticism on what’s verbal and very often observational painting defies verbalization, it’s not easy to put a visual experience into words and it may seem less interesting to a writer.

LG:  Does the lessor status and attention given to observational painting in the art world ever discourage you?

EM:       Yes, of course. I don’t think it helps. I just wish there could at least be more discussion about it because I think it would be nourishing and interesting to people who are doing it. I’m always excited if there is someplace where people are having a lively fight or discussion about observational painting. It helps me think about it for myself, what I think is good or not good.

LG:   Do you have much going on at your school? I’ve often heard that Indiana University’s Painting program is a good place for people wanting to study figurative painting. So I would imagine there’s a lot of support there.

EM:       We do tend to attract a certain group of painters who want to have that discourse, and because of it those types of discussions evolve more readily. But it can go in many different directions here, we’ve had classes of students who are very rejecting of the idea of painting from life or of painting from any tradition at all! Or of painting! It was similar at Brooklyn College too. There would be years where people would be very interested in Lennart’s ideas about painting and then other years where people might reject his ideas. He was always there as a kind of fulcrum and you had to react to him. In a way, that’s also what Tim and I are here at IU.

Backyard View, 38 x 30 in. oil/linen

LG:   Do you have other faculty members that are your opposites? That are conceptual or doing other things that are completely different? Or is it mainly figurative?

EM:       In the Painting area there is an inclination towards figuration as well as for the painting to be about paint. The art department is large and is broken down into distinct areas such as Sculpture, Photography, Ceramics, Printmaking, Digital Art, etc. These areas have diverse points of view and emphases which broadens the conversation. In many studio art programs people are now doing videos and calling it painting, and we do have some of that, but not without question, and there is an attempt to maintain an idea that painting in the end really needs paint. So things float around a certain parameter. There’s Tim Kennedy and me.  Tina Newberry teaches here-she’s a wonderfully eccentric figurative painter- as well as Caleb Weintraub-he’s a figurative painter who uses mixed media, video, installation and technology in his paintings. There is a rotating visitor position. Right now Gabe Phipps, who is an abstract painter, is our visitor. Painting at IU isn’t all going in one direction, it’s not all observational, there’s a kind of continual challenge to the idea, but then the observational painting also reasserts itself. Which is how it was when I was at Brooklyn College.

LG: I have a quote that I thought you wrote, regretfully that I’m unable to find, anyway someone, maybe you said; ‘painting should be less about an art object to work on and more as someone to attend to or a place to live in’. What can you say about this idea and what thoughts do you have about bringing life to a painting?

EM:       Well I think it’s a great idea, even though I don’t remember saying that, I would love to have said it! I do think that is the way I feel when I’m very immersed in a painting. It’s like a personal relationship in my life. One of the reasons I paint really large paintings is because they are these big things that cannot be denied. Once I’ve started a big painting I know I’m going to make something out of it and finish it. Although I love other artists’ small paintings, especially when they are very realized, with my own small paintings, when I get to a frustration point, I can too easily just push it aside.

Once I’ve started one of the big monster paintings it’s like any other kind of relationship, it’s got it’s ups and downs, and I really have to deal with it, argue with it and make up with it–it’s a very immersive involvement. I have to carry through with it and see what I get at the end. That is one of the reasons I am not dogmatic about the idea that it has to be from one particular source or follow any particular rule that I might have in my head about what painting should or shouldn’t be.

At a certain point the painting has a kind of existence. It just needs certain things, it makes its own demands. That’s exciting. Sometimes when I listen to lectures by fanatical movie directors who have gone to great lengths to pursue a project, I can relate to it as a painter; this fanaticism about wanting to see your ideas realized.

Garden, 48 x 58 in. oil/linen

Bathers, 72 x 58 in. oil/linen

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Introduction by Susan Jane Walp

I met Lennart Anderson during the summer of 1968. I was an undergraduate student at Mount Holyoke College, attending a summer program run by Boston University at Tanglewood, and Lennart was the painting instructor. We painted from the model, and Lennart painted along with us. Later he expressed some guilt over being paid for a summer of painting with very little active teaching, but nothing could have been more worthwhile for a beginning student than to observe firsthand how he worked. What I remember most from the silence and subdued light of that studio is Lennart’s palette and the orderly piles of paint he had mixed. That color could be so beautiful and that painting could involve these subtle, unnameable tones was a revelation to me.

Ten years later, after several years at the New York Studio School and a period of working on my own in Denver, Colorado, I found myself once again studying with Lennart in a still life class at Brooklyn College. I remember a large room with a wall of north facing windows. We students lined up our easels, and we each set up our own still life on the narrow shelf running the length of the east wall. Lennart made the rounds and sometimes, with permission, would work on a painting, bringing our unruly tones into relationship, softening and eliminating edges, helping us to see the big notes that could provide a more reliable basis for moving towards the smaller forms and details.

There was also a weekly evening session from the model that he supervised and that was open to all of the students in the MFA Program. At the time I had an inexplicable aversion towards Degas. I remember one evening becoming frustrated with how Lennart was going on about him, and I blurted out, “I think…[grasping for the right example]…Giotto was a greater artist than Degas!” After a few moments he gently, and with great kindness, replied, “I agree that Giotto was a greater artist, but…Degas, I believe, was the better painter.” I cringe a little now to look back on the naiveté of my comparison. His pithy response (he, of course, has no memory of any of this) was one of many things he has said to me over the years that went to the heart of some underlying obstacle in my own thinking and gave me something to contemplate for years to come. I was a slow and sometimes resistant student, but over time came to more fully appreciate the other painters in his pantheon (Matisse, Corot, Poussin, Velasquez, and Titian), the amount of time he spent studying their work, the detail in which he had memorized so many of their paintings in his mind’s eye.

After moving to Vermont in 1985, for a number of years on my visits to the city I often would bring along a painting or two to show to Lennart in the beautiful north light of his Brooklyn studio. He loved talking about painting but was reluctant to continue in the role of teacher as critic outside of the class situation. He had to be coaxed. I would ask questions, and eventually I would get something out of him, some insight into the work, a limitation, an obstacle, something to contemplate and work with until the next visit. I am guessing I am not alone among his students in saying that I didn’t turn to Lennart for compliments, which were rare, but rather for his honesty and knowledge, and I think also for the privilege of witnessing the integrity of his own inquiry, its clear focus and spirit of open questioning, the absence of dogma, the intimate and fluid relationship between his thinking mind and the activity of seeing and painting.

I have remained a student of Lennart’s work for most of my painting life. For me this has had nothing to do with imitation or with blind faith. It has been a repeated and evolving experience of recognizing qualities in his work that I quite selfishly want for my own, things that his paintings know that my own paintings want to know. Recently I have been studying a reproduction of his Portrait of Matthew Devlin (2001). I remember seeing this painting in a 2008 exhibit on Staten Island, and now I find myself marveling all over again at the subtlety of the tones, the exactitude of the drawing, the smallest details in perfect relation to the larger forms, and yet the brushwork so completely free, open, alive. I have been asking, how does he accomplish this? It is like seeing more clearly the next step for my own work, in this case a more compatible relationship between accuracy and spontaneity, and recognizing the habits that are blocking the way and not serving the seeing.

Lennart Anderson, Portrait of Matthew Devlin, 2001 24 X 17

Is it possible to say in a few words what I have learned from Lennart? To zero in on something essential that could be of benefit to younger painters who are finding their way and haven’t had the opportunity of studying with him? I think back to that magical Tanglewood summer and how he opened my eyes to a new way of seeing the world, as an interconnected web of relationships, of colors and tones and light and space, free of the limiting labels of trees, grass, arms, and noses, and how thrilling the experience was of finding an equivalent for these relationships in paint. For lack of a better word (and one he might not approve of), it was an abstract world. Entering it was entering a realm of infinite possibility, and from the very beginning I loved dwelling in it. He has remained my guide and friend ever since.

Conversation with Lennart Anderson

This past August I was very fortunate to get invited to Lennart Anderson’s studio in Brooklyn where I went with Kyle Staver to talk informally about his thoughts and experience on painting and drawing. Regretfully, The first few minutes of our discussion failed to record properly and was lost. My recollection of this early part of our talk centered around his approach to drawing; Specifically with his use of three points along a vertical in drawing (especially the figure) to determine the width in relation to the height. He also talked about the importance of finding horizontal and vertical relationships of points seen in nature in a grid-like manner.

Lennart said he wrote an essay on drawing and painting that covered many of these concerns, saying, “I wrote that essay so I wouldn’t have to be interviewed!” (link to that essay below) I then asked how Lennart’s approach differed from the British painters like Euan Uglow, William Coldstream, etc. who had a similar preoccupation with measurement. Lennart, as I recall, said that to them measurement was everything but that wasn’t enough for him—he was more interested in other composition aspects besides just the vertical and horizontal alignments. I had asked him if perhaps their painting was more about mapping than traveling. This lead to asking what he thought of Euan Uglow’s more planer approach to form and color. Lennart seemed to be less interested in this approach, saying we don’t see form that way. This in turn lead to talking about the role of color in painting which is where the conversation began to be recorded properly.

LA:  …Color in painting is almost not important. It is really a very simple thing.

Larry Groff:  If that’s true how come so few people can use color as well as you?

LA:   Because they are probably thinking of themselves.

Kyle Staver:  Who should they be thinking of?

LA:  They should be thinking of what they are painting and the relationships of those colors. It’s all about trying to paint what you are looking at.

KS: How do I know it’s your painting? How come your color and your light is particular to Lennart Anderson…what makes it your unique color?

Lennart Anderson, Standing Nude, 1962-5, Brooklyn Museum

LA:   This gets complicated. It has a lot to do with the key that your painting is devolving to. It(the painting’s key)changes as you work from day to day, so that what you end up with is not exactly what you’re looking at. It’s as close as you can, but is dropped some, or probably will be dropped in tone from that because paint tends to drop in value as it dries. So, the decisions I’m making are against that kind of thing, I’m trying to hold it(tones) up. So that gets into my look to some extent. I’m always trying to get the what the relationship is…

It’s all Corot, you know, you’re a landscape painter, he’s the great tonalist. The real intimate kind of exactitude of a light in a spot. The ideal I like to refer to is his Bridge at Narni… what do you see when you look at it? oh my god, it’s the sun and everything, yes, you look at it and you see that he took a real… he saw something that no one else would have seen, that the shadow under the bridge is a blue, it’s BLUE – and the whole thing works because of it, in a sense.

I wouldn’t want to be able to tell how anything really works but that’s the excitement in the picture, really. That’s the excitement. It’s a relationship, as you said before, it’s about comparisons. You get excited when you look at it That’s A BLUE – but when you isolate it that spot through a pin-hole, you certainly wouldn’t see blue, it would be some nothing.

I was looking at a catalog of Sargent, and he was trying to paint somebody, and he was in the sunlight or something, a real Sargent tour-de force. and he couldn’t get it( he couldn’t get the right color) and all of a  sudden he slapped his head, Its MAUVE! MAUVE!-(laughs) but if you isolated that you wouldn’t think it was mauve, in the context of the picture of a figure in the landscape It probably wasn’t really mauve but only in context.

Boy, that was a good question, why my pictures look different from someone else is because I see something that someone else wouldn’t see, somebody might even see it better. What I do is not necessarily better. but I think actually what makes my pictures the way they do… its hard to say because I’ve painted different things, different ways. Generally – landscapes are all one shot paintings. So that the light that is in the canvas is used to help out the light in the scene to some extent. You don’t want to lose the brilliance of the outdoors by mudding up the tone underneath. Try to hang on to the white, so you paint thinly.

landscape, 60’s

LG:  Do you use the knife when painting outdoors, scraping the paint to keep the painting thin, to keep the paint layer very close to the white ground, to keep the light up? to keep the paint layer thin and more transparent, close to the ground..

LA:   No, no, never did, don’t use a knife, I’ve used a knife but never for that.

LG:  So, you prefer to paint thinly to begin with then?

LA:   Lately I’ve been trying to put more paint on the canvas. I’m trying to paint thickly now but its just developed but (I hate to bring up my eyes) try to keep that light tone underneath. and it had a lot to do with the surface of the canvas…

Rita Natarova 2013

Lennart Anderson, Rita Natarova 2013

KS:  The first time I met you were wearing a really nice suit with a blue tie and I remarked on what a nice blue tie you had, and you said don’t you know I’m a tonalist. Do you remember that? Can you tell me what you meant by that?

LA:  Well, everyone is a tonalist, some are poor tonalist and some are better at it. I make a case for myself when I work but I don’t. I think people who are fighting it are hampering themselves. Matisse is a great tonalist. His color is never away from tone…

 …(Matisse)… He’s basically a tonal painter. I don’t know what a color painter is, actually. I like to say that the only time there is color is when it’s in the tube. It’s in the tube, the screw is on there – that’s the color. It’s in there. Once you bring it out, it’s tone. Once you put in on the table, or on the palette, it’s a tone. It’s in a place; it’s taking part of the area. I think I more agree with Picasso that color is very tricky, and I know it’s true in terms of how light changes the picture so much. So tonal painting or value painting – the less color the better in a sense, because it stays there, it doesn’t keep shifting around.
Painting, to play with this business of certain intensities of different colors together that are the same value, is very interesting. There’s a saying, “Nature is best at the distance, it’s all together.” There’s a harmony, and I guess that’s what interests me: harmony. That includes color – color is an element. I made paintings based on black and white Muybridge photographs. There’s no color in them. But I don’t have any problem dealing with that. To me it’s not hard to understand what the colors might be when you look at a black and white photograph.
  from an interview with Lennart Anderson by Jennifer Samet -see full interview here.

It’s all tonal, where you get into bad tonal painting–the question is it (tones) all together or not. I think with Kandinsky when he was painting realistically, he was out of his element but afterwards when he was painting abstractly–more kandinsky-like, its ok, not great but its ok. but color, I don’t like to get into this because people make color into a religion.

LG:  Why is that?

LA:   Because of Cezanne, I think, mainly.

KS:  But you’re considered a colorist?

LA:  I am, but so is everybody, you can’t put something down without it also being a value. That’s what tone is about, value.

LG:  Perhaps the colorist’s have better tones because they think about value more. I always thought the tonalists are more about the drawing, drawings with color added–using the tone to accentuate the needs of the drawing rather than the sensation of color in its own right… or do you think I’m off base here…

LA:  Well we talked about that to some extent, this is sort of like the difference between the Florentine and the Venetians. The Florentines put drawing first, I think the Venetians put drawing along with the color, with the value – especially value.

So much of what is great in painting is that if you reproduce it in black and white it comes out great too. You know because of the relationships. (of the values) I’m sure that the Bridge at Narni will look great in black and white because that blue is a surprising value there, and it will show, that when you expect to see something darker, it isn’t.

LG:  Does the process of comparing tones and close study in observational painting offer advantages in color that invention can sometimes lack? Of course it’s still possible, but isn’t it harder to get at because you’re not comparing it to anything external? You have to do it all in your head.

LA:   I do make up painting and I key them where I want them.

LG:  so it’s the key, the keying is the key…

Lennart Anderson, Seated Nude 1963 57 x 70

LA:  Yeah, it’s still dark, middle and light but it isn’t necessarily black and white, but something else. It’s about key and value–what is the value that picture has assumed, or fallen to, or risen to. I think everything should be together. I don’t know of any painting that…, You would have to go a great deal to put up a still life that you couldn’t manage the color of no matter what you did on the table, you would still be able to handle it– because it’s taking the light of the room, it’s taking the place and it blesses everything together, you know?

So you can get things that a designer might say, would counter; “you can’t put orange there, we know that orange doesn’t work with such and such, or that you can’t put blue with green”–like Manet did in The Balcony, if you’re a painter you can do a lot with–the color, that’s good tonal painting.

LG:  On many of your paintings you reduce or compress the range the values, keying the painting to a certain range of middle tones, often avoiding extremes of light and dark. Does this allow for much richer color, working in this more compressed color space?

Lennart Anderson, Still Life, 1960’s

LA:    No, it think it has more to do with my different periods. When I was painting in the 50’s I was into what I call “kissing color”, things that were so close that you could hardly tell them from one to another, hardly tell them apart, what they were… I was into that and you could have something that was orange or pink. Well, de kooning was into that stuff too… maybe I got some of that from that kind of painting. But that is what I was doing to some extent… but generally, I think I make a mistake in that I don’t go dark enough in the darks because I know I’m not going to be able to keep it, that its going to move and I don’t want to try to move dark tones underneath things, you know what I mean? Its covering you don’t want to have too much to cover, I think I may have overdone that. I think I could have a better, a richer range from dark to light but I don’t think that necessarily follows from what you said what you just did… you are really just talking about a certain pictures at a certain time. You can’t say that (about my work as a whole) on really essential pictures like Barbara – no one would say that I’m cheating cutting back down (on a full range of color value) on her…  but I am because there’s no black.

Portrait of Barbara S, 72 x 60 inches

This is something I take on, what is the word… like a religion. The way I’ve taken it… there’s got to be space in the picture so there’s no black, the black is in the tube – once it goes out it’s part of the room, as it moves back into the picture it can’t be black..so that’s something I’ve used as my… sort of a rule.

KS: That you can’t have a black?

LA:    You can’t have a black if you’re painting nature

LG:  Not even in a nocturne?

LA:   Well, I’ve never painted a nocturne…

LG: You don’t like to paint dark paintings?

LA:  No, I don’t tend to like dark paintings, actually. However, Lois Dodd has painted black.

KS: You don’t like dark paintings?

LA:   (laughs) You’re getting more than you figured on…

LA:   Rembrandt, is he dark? is he black? Where as Caravaggio, he can be black…

LG:  What about the notion of holes in the painting? Is that the reason you avoid black or is it more that you don’t want that kind of contrast…

LA:    That’s interesting, holes in the painting. If you are Manet, you’re not making holes when you use black. When you’re Matisse and use black you’re not making holes – so it is a tonal thing if you are making a hole, it’s not good tonal painting if (your black) results in a hole.

Still life with Salt Shaker, Artichoke and Potatoes

LG:  But if black is used as a great color? that sings as a beautiful color note in the…

LA:    Well, I’ve said that, Matisse and Manet are the modern painters of black

KS:  Also, Renoir’s blacks are beautiful. Like in the painting of Madame Charpentier, the woman with the black dress…

LA:   I’m not saying I don’t think his blacks are beautiful but I don’t think they’re there. It’s a very tonal, dark paint. There may be a black in it.. Manet would have a black but no it wouldn’t be characteristic of Renoir… you wouldn’t characterize that painting as black. The whole picture is a middle value…

Auguste Renoir, Madame-Charpentier and Her Children, 1878 Metropolitan Museum of Art

LA: If you’re saying Renoir painted beautiful blacks you may be right, if he uses it, he probably uses it well. But I don’t think that characterizes Renoir. You don’t think of Renoir as a painter of black.

LG:  What painter have influenced or driven you the most – I’ve been told you spend much time in the studio looking at art books before you even start painting, what painters do you go to the most? What do you find, or is this something you can’t really answer – that it’s different in every situation?

LA:    Right, it all depends on what I’m trying to paint. If I’m painting heads, I have a whole table full of books on paintings of heads that I like.  If I’m painting landscapes I’m looking at landscapes, looking at Corot, for instance.

LG:  I wondering if you might have anything to say about Ingres and how his work might speak to you or about why he may be relevant. You have some great books here on Ingres…

LA:   I have this big book on Ingres, it has a photo of a painting that isn’t anywhere else – that I look at over and over again, it is a painting he did of his girlfriend – they just discovered it I guess.

Ingres, he’s a terrible painter, nothing worse than Ingres except maybe Courbet – of course the two of them have different ways of being terrible. They’re terrible when they are terrible.

LG:  Why do you say that?

LA:    Well, Courbet is his own problem. Ingres, he doesn’t seem to know, He knows he’s great but he doesn’t know when he is bad.  Ingres doesn’t seem to know when he’s bad.. he knows he’s great. he does these terrible pictures, spending a lot of time on them. The truth is he probably doesn’t have a good imagination. I mean he can’t imagine really well, so, he does better when he’s working from something or from drawings that were done from (looking at) something.

KS:  So those big allegorical paintings are horrible?

LA: No – they’re the best ones (laughs)

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Apotheosis of Homer, 1827

Lennart Anderson, Street Court, 1950’s(?)

LA:    The Apotheosis of Homer is a wonderful painting. That was one of the inspirations for my street scene that I did in the 50’s. The grandeur of those male figures, it’s just fantastic. You may not like the whole painting, I do, but it is full of wonderful painting, and a conception of what people could be. He was up to it, yeah, he was up to it. That was meant for a ceiling in the Louvre. You know what struck me about him was when I went to Paris for the first time, especially seeing pictures like that, what struck me was, what wonderful color.

I think that all had to do with fresco painting trying to make oil painting compete with fresco in the key, the value – it’s up. It’s not Delacroix. You see the difference and there is a big difference between those two artists. And you are right to think Delacroix. But for me as a painter, I was all Ingres – I didn’t like Delacroix at all.

LG:  Why was that?

LA:    I never liked that kind of overstatement that he was making with his values. I did like the The Massacre at Chios and The Death of Sardinopolis but generally I don’t like Delacroix…. But I’m searching for another great Ingres – that little Ingres is just so incredible…really like that little Ingre portrait. There is nobody that can compete with this… This is one of the few unfinished pictures that you can really study. Just shut up and look at the eyes…

Head of a young blond girl with blue eyes (Laure-Zoega) – Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres

LA:    Aren’t those eyes unbelievable!

Ingres vs Hawthorne – follow-up question

A few weeks after the interview, I wrote Kyle to ask Lennart for the below follow-up question about drawing and color in relation to Ingres and Charles Hawthorne’s teachings about color and painting written in Hawthorne on Painting . Also, A great essay by Francis Cunningham comprehensively explains Hawthorne’s Color Spot ideas in depth as well as its relation to Edwin Dickinson can be read here.

 Kyle Staver recorded the following conversation in Lennart’s studio.

Ingres said:

Drawing does not simply mean to reproduce contours; the drawing does not simply consist in the idea; the drawing is even the expression, the interior form, the plan, the model. Look what remains after that! The drawing is three-fourths and a half of what constitutes painting. If I had to put a sign over the door of my atelier, I would write: School of Drawing…and I’m certain that I would create painters.

LG: Some painters advocate painting along the lines of Charles Hawthorne’s color spot approach, giving the resolution of the big color notes priority over precise drawing. Do you see Hawthorne’s advice as contradictory to the Ingres’ quote above?

LA: One makes a picture with a number of things, drawing is one of the ways to go about certain subjects, especially figures. However there is no reason to think that a painting that has many figures in it that was not passed through ideas about areas of color. So it doesn’t mean that it couldn’t end up with an Ingres-like look, but the original composition could

KS: Did Hawthorne start with color? Was that his deal?

LA: I don’t think anyone starts with color, everyone starts with tone but also they’re usually (inaudible) thinking about the size of the canvas and where to place whatever it is you’ve decided to paint.

KS: Previously you told me you always go back to drawing when you don’t know what the hell you’re doing with the painting. Can you talk about that?

LA: If you are painting… I wrote a little piece about drawing while painting.If you lose track of that you end up without painting, you end up trying to solve the problem with drawing.

KS: When you lose track of the painting?

LA: If you lose track of the painting approach to it, which is one of place and shape. But mostly place, the minute you start shaping actually you start drawing and it sends out the form. One should have in their mind the composition. If this is just a simple composition of the figure, which often times that’s what these (Hawthorne) quotes are referring to. The problem I can see with this is that once you draw it how do you begin to paint it? Where if you paint it, if you’re using relationships of place it’s easy to locate where you’re working to – from, you can – drawing just naturally begins to make definitions for you, the paint has to be there. You’ve put the painting through a succession of relationships that support what you’re saying, the drawing is almost put in late.

KS: What you’re saying is that there isn’t a real contradiction to what Hawthorne and Ingres are saying?

LA: No, I don’t think either one of them are talking about…, they are talking differently I suppose, I don’t know how, where Hawthorne fits actually.

KS: What do you mean?

LA: Is he a Venetian or is he a Florentine? (http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/painting/colorito.htm) I would think that he tends to go towards Venetian painting. Ingres with his determination would go toward Florence.

KS: So Florence is drawing and Venice is color?

LA: Yes but I don’t think I made anything up when I was pressing the thought that drawing has to be carried on at the same rate as the painting. It shouldn’t be in advance of the painting more than a stroke. You don’t draw it and then paint it because the painting has to include things that cross over divisions of subject matter.

KS: So there is no argument? So why does Ingres say it’s all drawing, drawing, drawing?

LA: …When you’re painting it comes down to that to some extent, it’s not something that… in spite of what I said it’s still so integral to what you’re painting, the drawing is being struggled with as well but no ahead of everything. You’re dealing with proportions, relationships of tone – which includes color. You have to understand when I say tone, it includes color. There’s no elimination of color, if you want to eliminate it you use value, you use chiaroscuro or something. And you can do that and then break that into color and it will work but if you do it with line; it won’t work. Which is probably an Ingres thing, he would be a person who was going to solve it with line. It’s true that his paintings are linear or have a compositional element in his best paintings that can be seen as drawings. However, did not Ingres say that you finish your painting with drawing, put the rage of drawing into your painting at the very last, so it’s drawing at the end not at the beginning.

KS: So he would be in agreement with Hawthorne? I don’t know Hawthorne’s work…

LA: Well, you don’t have to know Hawthorne’s work. I could say that what he painting like up to a certain point was like what he taught but the ones I’ve seen often times end up with a drawing being separated at the end. Being at variance to what one would think Hawthorne was teaching.

Edwin Dickinson, Hawthorne’s Garden 1935, Pencil and Charcoal, 14 x 9 inches

LA: (Edwin) Dickinson curiously eliminated color from his tone, almost totally, almost all together, so Hawthorne is making the case for color, his most famous student is negating it. I don’t have his book (Hawthorne, so I can’t quote exactly) I understand or thought that Hawthorne was interested in using almost impressionist color but he’s not evidently, he’s really interested in solidifying the color of impressionism into a larger tone. That’s what Dickinson seems to be agreeing with in his work. In some ways he’s a Hawthorne student but he’s not a Hawthorne student because he’s not a color person. Hawthorne himself is not a Hawthorne! If you know his work, he returns to drawing at the end and often times I found it to be the case, not altogether, he’s a very traditional kind of Velazquezian painter, in many ways. I mean there is a big school of Velazquez that taught everyone how to paint but not how to compose, how to think about the painting as a whole. So it tends to be simple and simplified composition.

Charles W. Hawthorne, The Family, 1911 40 × 40 in
Albright-Knox Art Gallery

Everything I say is to be denied! I don’t know that many (Hawthorne) paintings. Coming from Detroit I know that they had I think two Hawthornes that were in the Detroit museum. I can only recall the first one, which was there when I was a youngster. The second one I came across when I visited this museum a few years ago. He’s a kind of bravura painter and tried, I’ve seen reproductions of his paintings from Cape Cod. Doesn’t seem to be about color they are too complicated and filled with forms that don’t really make you think I wish he had painted with more color, it wouldn’t have helped them.

KS: Would anything have helped them?

LA: Well sure, but you’d have to redesign the painting. They’re not bad paintings but he’s emblematic of Cape Cod with his fishermen and their life. He tried to paint the fishermen, their occupation and struggle. I suppose that’s a good thing but it doesn’t matter if the paintings are heavy and not euphoric.

end of the follow-up question

LG:  It’s hard for painters today, do you think it’s any harder for painters today than when you were young? What advice do you have for a young painter who really wants to learn how to paint from life. In terms of study, what would you suggest?

LA:    Study, who cares about study. You’re trying to make great painting from day one. When you’re in a class you should try to make a great painting, to hell with studying, you know! Only recently, since I can’t see have I had to study, you know…

KS:  You are still trying to make great paintings.

LA:    Yeah, I’m looking at things very closely that I’ve looked at for years and never really, they’ve become more… I can understand them a little bit better… I shouldn’t say understand, I should say I can appreciate what it takes to do and how simple it is. You look at the painting of the Cardinal by Velazquez that is in the Hispanic Society..  I was just telling someone, Velazquez made it so simple it was a joke. You look at it and wow, everything is there and there is nothing to it. So what were you questioning me about?

Diego Velazquez, Portrait of Cardinal Camillo Astali Pamphili, 1650 at the Hispanic Society of America

KS: What do you say to students who come wanting advice?

LA:   This is a difficult thing to answer honestly, because you know, the truth is, they are not going to make it. I wasn’t going to make it. They are not going to make it. Forget about what year they are painting in, they are not good enough, they are not committed enough, they don’t use their brain enough so they can push away things that aren’t essential, you know. In a sense it is intellectual, you have to look at it, you have to discern what makes things really interesting and as you paint you find out that that wasn’t right and find out that it was even more interesting.

And another thing, people think that when they’re painting their best, that that is enough. but  no… that’s just where you start. You have to paint better than your best and then even better than that! And sometimes when you are really lucky you get one that happens by accident and those are the best.

LG: Sometimes it can be confusing to decide which ones are best, isn’t this something you learn over time to recognise?

LA:   Sometimes, yeah sure. I’ve found pictures that initially dismissed and then found I….

KS:  Lennart Anderson, come on, when you hit like a big white shark you know you’ve hit, right?

LA:   No, No, I should say that in my racks I have pictures that I didn’t consider much, but then later on, wow, that was really relaxed, that it really came out. When was relaxed enough to let it happen, it’s nice.

LG:  The commitment for students is hard for them to get these days, especially with so many distractions. Especially with facebook, smart phones and things like that…

LA:   (laughs)I don’t know anything about that.

KS:  What were the distractions for you when you were a young painter?

LA:    There was never any distraction, never distractions.

KS:  You just painted no matter what?

LA:   Well, I didn’t paint all the time but I was always about it, which I still am, I sleep with it, try to figure it out. I’m really, at night, thinking how to get the head right, (ask myself) what is it? all the things that I do, that I make up out of my head that I think about at night – perhaps I should try this or that. But it’s all washed away when you look at nature. Nature is just so much better than anything you can think up.

Landscape from the 1960’s

KS:  Are you glad you are a painter?

LA:   There was a time when I didn’t know if I could make it as a painter and that I might need to do something else to support it. I was thinking then maybe I could do some sort of minor crime and then (get arrested) and they would put me in a cell where I could paint all day.

KS:  How did you get to be a member of the Academy of Arts and Letters in Rome?

LA:  That’s a nice story. I was in Rome and certain painters came through to check out what was going in the studios in the Academy. This is something that happened to me a number of times, They discovered me then it’s like I’m their personal discovery, you know? And I was doing things that were touching them, I was really into it… it would be like “he’s not painting my dream but you know it was like that. I was grabbing things and holding them to myself, you know.. Piero, Ingres, Degas, Poussin – I was grabbing them all and I was treating them as my thing. And that was important and my work had some of that quality in it. And they recognized that, I shouldn’t say “they” there weren’t that many people I suppose but Rapheal Soyer was critical. He’s the guy who put me in Arts and Letters. Philip Guston was there, he came by, that was a thing.

LG: He was there while you were there in Rome?

LA:  Yes, he just visited. I was somebody that fulfilled something that they sort of envied, like they were thinking “I should have done that…”  “He’s doing it” There was a kind of envy there at times. I don’t know if it was honest by these big deals, especially somebody like Guston. When I came back to the States and I had a show at the Graham gallery in ’63. Guston got Barnett Newman to come, I had Barnett Newman at my show and we were talking away because he knew all about “French Academic art” and so he could talk about to me! (laughs)

LG: Did you give him an earful?

LA: No, Not really – we talked more about Larry Rivers, he thought Larry Rivers was a fake.

LG:  Did you?

LA: No, he was a very interesting painter

LG:  Who were some of the other people you meet who came to your shows?

LA:  Lots of people, Nicolas Carone, Carone was a big fan. My last show, this was before he died, he was living in upstate New York in Beacon or something like that, he was upset that he couldn’t get down to see my show.

Brief edits of I-Phone video footage taken by Alex Goldberg of Lennart Anderson talking with Israel Hershberg and others about comparing vs looking in painting, thinking about a painting, the power of artbooks and some discussion about his current drawing process during his 2010 visit to Sienna, Italy at the JSS Summer Program in Italy.

Portrait of Barbara

Drawings from Anderson’s files, — Photo credit Jason Houston

Drawing for Painting

Lennart Anderson’s essay written for the Rider University Gallery Catalog of his show “Drawings and Paintings” April 2000

These figure drawings were done in class with poses lasting five, ten or twenty minutes. I always begin with a measurement that encompasses the length of the figure. The problem is then one of width. Using a standing figure, I take a measurement from a specific point. usually under the foot that bears the weight, to a specific point, perhaps at the bottom of the crotch. This measurement, taken at arm’s length, is held on a pencil. The pencil is then raised until the thumb, which is at the foot, is found at the point of the crotch. The point of the pencil is now found at a specific point in the face. I now have three points. The distance from the first to the second, and the second to the third, is the same. I then decide on the size of the figure I want to draw, and place my points accordingly on the page. These points are regarded as true. The bottom and middle points are fixed. The top may wander to the left or right based on the movement of the model during the pose.

My drawing develops from these points by a series of guesses, casting lines about trying to get a feeling for the mass, asking questions: How near? How far? Is it above this point or below? Is it to the right or the left? I have no aim to finish in the time allowed, but feel that everything is tending to its proper place. I concentrate on place rather than thing. This is especially important for painting, because I feel I can move a place more easily than a thing–for instance, a hand. In painting, certain qualities of place, such as tone and scale, can be dealt with before distinguishing it as a specific object. Paint has an advantage here in that it can approximate a visual effect more directly and completely. I find that working this way emphasizes relationships rather than subjects, and maintains spontaneity through the process.

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Gorky’s Granddaughter Video Interview with Lennart Anderson Sept. 2014

Lennart Anderson, Sept 2014 from Gorky’s Granddaughter on Vimeo.
Fantastic new video interview at the Gorky’s Granddaughter’s site. Many thanks to Christopher Joy and Zachary Keeting for their incredible gift to Painters with their “Gorky’s Granddaughter” documentary art project, where they visit studios and talk to a wide range of important artists.

Lennart Anderson, Lion’s Mask, 2013

The post Conversation with Lennart Anderson appeared first on Painting Perceptions.

by Noel Robbins

( ed. note… Painting Perceptions give many thanks to Noel Robbins for sharing these brilliant notes on perceptual painting which were originally written for his students in Texas.)

Charles Hawthorne “Artist in Plein Air” 1910

In order to make believable paintings of our visual experiences we have to translate them into a language of painting focused on visual experience. Painting perceptually means painting masses of colors and edge qualities as they appear to the eye. Seeing subjects figuratively has to be suppressed in order to paint conditions of light and space; we have to interpret the people, places and things we see as masses of color.

Details are not important. Well observed color relationships are what make paintings feel believable and real, not details. No amount of careful detail work will ever give a painting the qualities of a unified visual experience if the painting does not have well related colors. Let go of the desire for detail. Instead, condition your eyes to appreciate how a few carefully related colors can create a world within the picture plane. Study great paintings with this in mind.

Squint at the subject. The more we squint, the more the image in our eyes is reduced to essential color masses.

Determine the overall qualities of light, space and form by looking indirectly at the subject. Glance at it, squint, look at it in a dirty mirror, a curved mirror, think about the dark colors while looking at the lights, think about the light colors while looking at the darks, think about the whole effect on your senses while looking away from the subject. Is there a color quality to the place? What is the tonal range? How much can you simplify the color masses and edges and still capture the visual impression of your senses?

Start with your favorite color, relate your second favorite color to the first, then the third to the second, and repeat until the whole composition is blocked in.

Look for the similarities. If you see multiple parts of your subject as similar in value or color, then group them as one color and make the difference later.

Do not draw outlines; a few quick notations of related points in space will give all the compositional structure needed to start massing in the fundamental colors. Reduce the subject to the fewest number of color masses possible. Use measuring and mapping techniques to determine the placement of the center of each color mass.

Paint from the center of color masses out to their edges. Do not paint outlines or contours and then fill them with color. Paint from the center out to find edges and where one color meets another.

If a color inside an object is similar to a color in the background next to it, lose any edge between them and group them as one color.

Start with transparent oil color and paint simple masses. Scrape, scrub, and wipe to achieve desired colors and edge qualities. Use more paint to get darker colors and less for lighter colors.

From the great painting teacher Charles Hawthorne: “Let the eye go from one spot to another without the aid of outlines. Jump from the center of one spot of color to the center of the next. Keep your eye away from the edge a little more – don’t insist that the eye shall stop at the edges. Mechanically lose them by rubbing the palette knife though them…. Don’t paint up to a line, work from a center; don’t fill in an outline but make the inside form the outline.”

Once the essential color masses are blocked in add opaque paints to deal with particular qualities of space, atmosphere, light and form.

Transparent paint applications typically feel more textured and spatially aggressive, while opaque applications feel softer, more atmospheric and recessive. Look at paintings done by masters in museums and galleries – not in reproduction – to examine how they used transparent and opaque paint applications to achieve particular effects. The Blanton Museum has some good examples in their permanent collection.

One common approach to using transparent and opaque paint applications is to paint the light colors opaquely and thickly after painting the dark colors transparently and thinly. This can be reversed – opaque darks on top of transparent lights – to achieve different qualities.

Elaborate on the block in by adjusting color masses and edge qualities. Use all the tools available to you including brush handles, knife, fingers, Q-tips et al. to add, remove, and manipulate the paint as needed to achieve unified visual statements.

Lennart Anderson, another great painting teacher, said in an interview:

“You paint the quality of the place. The figure or objects or whatever your subject is comes out of the whole, not the reverse. You can’t get a whole, a unified composition, by painting the parts. The problem people run into is they try to pin down parts as they go, which ruins any chance of getting a unified composition.”

Perceptual paintings are not mere descriptions of what we see, and they do not serve narrative. They are artistic inventions made in response to sensory experience of the external world and the medium itself.

Let people find their own closure. People naturally make figurative images out of abstract masses of color, so it is not necessary to paint every detail; play with perception by leaving parts of your paintings unfinished. People feel a connection to images that they have to complete from their own memories. If you have captured the essential qualities of your visual experience then you can leave the painting as abstract as you like. In fact, it may be better to leave a particular painting in a more abstract state if by continuing to work on it you risk losing unity.

The method of direct painting (a.k.a. alla prima, premier coup) can be broken down into the following steps:

1. Use the indirect seeing techniques described above to determine what your sensory responses are to the subject, and plan your composition.
2. Lightly sketch in the major relationships of points in space, or go straight into color masses.
3. Using transparent paint on white canvas mass in your favorite – the most prominent – color. Be careful mixing all your colors. Use the spot screen and value stick to help you achieve good colors. Identify the value, hue and intensity of each color you mix. By determining the value, hue and intensity of each color you will find mixing them much easier. In time mixing color will become more automatic, but for now get into the habit of slowing down and identifying the three basic characteristics of colors before mixing them. Use the palette knife to mix your colors. When applying the colors to the canvas refrain from massing them all the way out to their edges. You will more easily find edges and make connections between the masses as the painting develops. Hold back on the temptation to pin down the contours of the masses, and stay open to making changes.
4. Relate the second most prominent color to the first with squinting and indirect seeing. Identify its characteristics, mix and mass it in.
5. Mix and mass in the third most prominent color relating it to the other two while squinting and looking indirectly at the subject, using the spot screen and value stick, and identifying color characteristics.
6. Repeat this process until all the essential colors are blocked in.
7. Once all the color masses are blocked in use the indirect gaze and squinting at both the painting and the subject to figure out what kinds of changes need to be made to the colors to tune them to each other. Make these changes by scraping, wiping, mixing and applying fresh colors. Introduce white to your mixtures as opacity is needed. As you apply these mixtures begin pulling the masses together to find edges.
8. Add color variations as distinct intervals of freshly mixed color. Wipe or blot where these color intervals will be massed. Keep the edges soft unless a more firm edge is needed for the composition. Reserve the hardest edges as finishing touches.
9. Step back and look indirectly at both the painting and subject at the same time. Take a ten minute break. Repeat indirect gazing at both subject and painting. Look at them in a mirror if possible. Make adjustments to colors, masses and edges with capturing the unified visual experience that you had when you first looked at the subject as your goal.
10. Add any details and hard edges at this time. If these hinder the unity of the composition then delete or change them.
11. Hang your painting at home where it is readily visible. As time goes by it might speak to you asking for changes. Make those changes, but keep in mind that the ultimate goal is a unified composition.

Painting Perceptions greatly appreciates the generosity of Noel Robbins’ in sharing above notes on perceptual painting which were written for his students. Noel Robbins received his MFA and taught painting and drawing at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the mid-nineties and currently teaches at Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas.

Cone and Pile, 2002, Oil on Panel, 5″ x 7″

Emily Warm and Cool , 2004. Oil on Linen, 16″ x 12″

Mansfield Dam 9-11, 2001, Oil on Linen on Panel, 15″ x 34″

The post Notes on Perceptual Painting appeared first on Painting Perceptions.

(Painting Perceptions gives enormous thanks to Jordan Wolfson for this thoughtful and important essay and greatly appreciates his generous contribution. You can find more of his work and information on his website.) He is also leading a workshop “Painting as Interbeing” – May 5-8, 2014 in Colorado, you can contact him for more here.

Jordan Wolfson, Still Life with Flowers (In Memory of Tamar B.) 2014, oil on linen, 18 x 16 inches
Click here for larger view.

Painting has no real context today.  What I mean by that is that we have no larger story and meaningful myth within which to hold and nurture the activity of painting.

This activity that we call painting, that seems so clearly full of esteem as “Art”, has no place of stable purpose in our contemporary world.  It’s rather arbitrary whether what a painter paints is going to be seen as important or not.  It doesn’t correlate with whether the actual painting is any good—quality is not a mark against it, just not necessarily for it either.  It has much more to do with how well the painter is able to interface with market forces; the galleries, curators, collectors, etc.  That is, it has much more do with the context of the art world, and that has become a very odd context indeed.  Further, given the growing secularization and fragmentation of our society we have no place of purpose and meaning for what we call art, and for what we call painting, as might be found in a more traditional culture where the sense of an overarching story is still intact.  One can still hope to find a niche of the art world that might appreciate what one has to offer, but in terms of really contributing to a larger story the only thing we seem to be able to count on today, the only story with common consensus and shared terms, is the story of financial amount: how much is it worth?  And that doesn’t really measure the value of the thing.  The situation isn’t just possibly personally frustrating, it’s culturally bewildering and deeply saddening.­

Other questions arise when one looks at the state of the world in general – where we seem to be headed.  One doesn’t need to know the latest climate change information, the details of human trafficking, or worldwide poverty to wonder “What the hell am I doing?  The world is burning and I’m sitting in the corner coloring?  What does it matter, one more picture?  What does it matter, one more painter?”  It turns out it does.  And more directly than we might think.  What I would like to present here is a case for the utmost relevance of painting.  The house is burning.  If painting isn’t coloring in the corner, then what is it?  How does it matter?   Is there a way for painting to actually contribute to help heal our world?

The question of the meaning and purpose of painting has a history.  The question of painting’s relevance only came into existence when the fine arts as a cultural category was gradually invented and then solidified in the eighteenth century.  Until then, painting and painters had a clear role and place.  As Larry Shiner delineates so well in The Invention of Art: A Cultural History, painting as an activity of image-making was always clearly imbedded in the cultural and economic needs of European society.  The category of fine art, as a distinct realm of creativity in which paintings were made for their own sake out of the inspiration of creative genius, didn’t become a cultural norm until the eighteenth century.  Before that, although there were steps being made in this direction from the time of the Renaissance, and although concerns of form and beauty were considered and essential, the term “art” as we know and use it didn’t exist.  The vast majority of painters performed tasks that they were assigned through their guilds and through commissions; there was always a purpose and use to the images being made.  The terms of individual creativity and the notion of art for art’s sake didn’t arise until art became separated from craft, the artist separated from artisan, and pleasure separated from utility and then ultimately refined into aesthetics.  The rise of fine arts as a cultural category was inextricably linked to the rise of a market economy, a process of commodification, and a growing middle class.  By the nineteenth century the normative view was that fine art was a separate realm of spiritual sustenance, ostensibly serving no other purpose than its own existence.

Matisse, La Musique, 1910, 102 x 153 inches, Hermitage, St. Petersberg

How we think about painting was and is extremely flexible.  Our cultural attitude towards painting as an aesthetic object that must, first and foremost, exist for its own sake if it is to carry any real power, and that any use to which it is put threatens to harm its integrity, is an attitude with a history.  It’s fluid, not inevitable.  Perhaps the aesthetic power of a painting may be re-contextualized, revealing a larger purpose within a larger story.

Indeed, at the same time that this split in the eighteenth century was growing between craft and art, there was a pushback, a resistance to the stripping of art of purpose. There was an accompanying resistance to the split of art and life, this making of art into a distinct, separate realm with its own aesthetic jurisdiction.  This pushback occurred from the beginning and continues down to our day.  We see this resistance in the examples that Shiner brings: the works and writing of Hogarth, Rousseau, and Wollstonecraft.  We can see it continuing in the work of Goya—giving testimony to the horrors of war and violence and injustice, with Manet and the other Impressionists, in their desire to eschew history painting and turn to the everyday life around them.  We see it in the anti-art of Dada and Duchamp, in the 1960s with the developments of Fluxus and the Happenings of Allan Kaprow.  We see it in the work and teaching of Joseph Beuys and the writings of Suzi Gablik, the work of Tim Rollins and the K.O.S., the community based works in Chicago curated by Mary Jane Jacob, the myriad of artists affiliated with the Green Museum, and the real estate development of Theaster Gates.  Whether in the realm of social justice, community building, spirituality or environmental concerns, the claim of art as a pure domain of disinterested aesthetic contemplation has been relentlessly challenged for over two centuries.

Joseph Beuys, How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (excerpt)

How is it that we have come to think of art as its own world with no purpose outside of itself?  And if that makes no sense, than how does art function in our culture and civilization at this point?  What are the various purposes for what we call art and which of them might we actually care about?  The period of history in which painting had ostensibly no utility beyond the aesthetic is short, a gradual transitioning of two to three hundred years.  Painting served various purposes before the onset of the realm of fine arts and it will continue to serve various purposes after the end of art as well.  When I write of “the end of art” I mean the end of the story of art that we’ve been telling culturally, a narrative of sequential style that has viewed the long history of human making through the lens of the last two hundred years.  Arthur Danto and Hans Belting have both written about this and come to similar conclusions independently: the story of art as we have known it is coming to a close.  Larry Shiner, in his book, also speaks of this closure and asks what will be next.

Piero della Francesca, The Nativity, 1470-75, 124.4×122.6cm, National Gallery, London

Before turning to try to answer that question let us first look at the possible uses that art has been put to, even during the period of history in which art was defined as necessarily having no utility, and up through today.  Indeed, art does function as an opportunity for refined contemplative experience, and that is part of why we love it.  It also functions as entertainment and distraction.  It functions as decoration.  It functions as philosophical inquiry.  It functions as social action, as environmental action, as an inquiry into, and protest against racism, sexism and inequality and injustice of all sorts.  It functions as financial investment, as a badge of social and class status, as a badge of cultural hipness and cool.  It functions as religious icon and symbol and as a focus of contemplative meditation.  Art functions politically, financially, socially, culturally, spiritually.   Clearly, art functions.  Clearly it has use and utility.  We may not always agree to the uses to which an object is being put to use, but that it is done so is simply a fact of our world.

Given all of these various uses there is a function of art that is of particular importance: art carries presence.  But then actually all objects, everything, carries presence.  Nature, places, people—all carry presence.  And there is the category of things made—some of those things we call art, most we don’t.  Is there a difference in presence between art and non-art?  Today, it seems that the quality of presence is not a determining factor of whether something is defined as art or not—the difference is simply the decision to name and claim that this given object is art.  It can be anything.  We have seen since the time of Duchamp that any object, even one that is factory made, can be turned into art by a switch of the mind.

Soutine, Landscape at Ceret, 1920-21, 56x84cm, Tate, London

So, while strong presence is not the defining attribute of contemporary art, we do find throughout history objects that carry strong presence, and no matter the categories of those cultures, we have come to call these objects “Art”.  That is, one of the functions of what we call art throughout time and place has been this imbuing of objects with presence.  And whether the cultural category of fine art will continue or not, the practice of wielding and imbuing presence will carry on.  It is an integral part of what people do.  I believe this aspect of human making, to take raw material and somehow charge it with presence, is one of critical importance and I would like to now look at it more closely.

What is presence?  And how does it get associated with an object?  What is the process with which material gets charged or imbued with it?  How is it that a human being can take colored mud, smear it around on a piece of fabric and end up charging the materials so greatly that it resonates with vitality hundreds of years after the person is long gone?  How is it that a human being can take raw material and form it in such a way that it moves our hearts and quiets our minds?  And what does this have to do with saving the world?

Titian, Saint Jerome in Penitence, 1575, Nuevos Museos, El Escorial, Spain

First, the question of the nature of presence:  The experience of presence is consciousness becoming aware of itself.  Eckhart Tolle writes about presence beautifully in his book The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment:

 Have you ever gazed up into the infinity of space on a clear night, awestruck by the absolute stillness and inconceivable vastness of it?  Have you listened, truly listened, to the sound of a mountain stream in the forest?  Or to the song of a blackbird at dusk on a quiet summer evening?  To become aware of such things, the mind needs to be still.  You have to put down for a moment your personal baggage of problems, of past and future, as well as all your knowledge; otherwise, you will see but not see, hear but not hear.  Your total presence is required.

Beyond the beauty of the external forms, there is more here: something that cannot be named, something ineffable, some deep, inner, holy essence.  Whenever and wherever there is beauty, this inner essence shines through somehow.  It only reveals itself to you when you are present.  Could it be that this nameless essence and your presence are one and the same?  Would it be there without your presence?
(Tolle, 1999, 96)

A little further on in the book Tolle defines presence:

When you become conscious of Being, what is really happening is that Being becomes conscious of itself.  When Being becomes conscious of itself—that’s presence.  Since Being, consciousness, and life are synonymous, we could say that presence means consciousness becoming conscious of itself, or life attaining self-consciousness.  But don’t get attached to the words, and don’t make an effort to understand this.  There is nothing that you need to understand before you can become present.
(Tolle, 1999, 98)

One of the gifts of making work, drawing and painting, is the possibility of becoming present—in fact, it’s a key ingredient to making strong, living work.  And one of the gifts of viewing objects of beauty and strong presence is that they stop us still and invite us to become present with them, to meet their presence with our presence. This is a particular gift of all art forms, and perhaps the most important gift.  This is how art awakens us, rekindles, reminds, re-hearts.  We remember that we are alive, that things matter, that life matters.  In this sense, beauty serves as a gateway to presence and sheer meaning.  But what does presence as a function of art have to do with saving the world?  And further, we seem to be talking about art in general, the power of presence that can be found in all making.  Does painting in particular have something to offer that goes beyond the general category of art?

Diebenkorn, Ocean Park #79, 1975, 93 x 81 inches, Philadelphia Museum of Art

In an article on Richard Diebenkorn in the New Republic from the September 2013 issue Jed Perl wrote, “Ever since the Renaissance, painting has been the grandest intellectual adventure in the visual arts, a titanic effort to encompass the glorious instability and variability of experience within the stability of a sharply delimited two-dimensional space.”  What Perl is describing here points towards something very specific and profound about the nature of painting.  When he writes of the twin aspects of painting, the stability and instability that paintings exhibit, he is getting to the crux of the matter and may help lead us to the unique contribution and gateway that painting provides.  Painting offers two contradictory experiences.  On the one hand, a painting is a flat two-dimensional object, with its surface texture and color shapes.  On the other hand, a painting offers the possibility of a three-dimensional experience, the illusion of moving into space and discovering form.  Stability and instability.  Fact and imagination.  Actual and fictive.  It is this twin role, and its simultaneity, that gives painting such power.  Real and unreal.  Real and more real.  Painting, through the coexistence of two seemingly opposite experiences, interwoven into an actual unity, may provide the receptive adult the possibility of moving from an experience of fragmentation into an experience of wholeness and integration, not only within oneself but with the world at large.  Boundaries between me and other, between inside and outside, prove to be not quite as firm as previously thought.  This occurs not only because our minds are teased into non-discursive awareness by the shimmering interchange between the two-dimensional and three-dimensional experience; “I see a flat colored surface, no wait, I see a sky and valley  below, no wait—will you look at those marks!”  The experience of wholeness also occurs because the respective completeness of the two-dimensional and three-dimensional is each dependent on the other.  That is, in order for a painting to maintain a consistent three-dimensional arena for the viewer to inhabit, in order for me to visually remain looking at and in the painting as a spatial situation, its two-dimensional composition must be complete—it must hold me visually, and then figuratively.  Conversely, in order for the two-dimensional composition to be complete the marks and design, transitions and edges, must appropriately accommodate the parameters of the given three-dimensional experience, whether that is deep and far-reaching space like a Turner or more shallow as in a Braque, whether full bodied as in a Titian or subtly expansive as in a Matisse.  Clement Greenberg got painting’s essence exactly wrong.  It isn’t the stability of painting’s flatness—its “ineluctable flatness”; it is the inextricable unity of painting’s impossible flatness/fullness, stability/instability, stillness/movement.  This is life.  And this is why painting carries such an extraordinary metaphoric force.

Paul Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire c. 1887 oil on canvas 26.4 × 36.2 inches Courtauld Institute of Art

Again, this may kindle an extraordinary aliveness and wholeness, but what does it have to do with saving the world?  There is one more component that I would like to add to the mix and then I’ll try to put all the pieces together.  Recently I came across a book, The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible by Charles Eisenstein.  The basic premise is that the world we live in is truly unsustainable.  It isn’t just a mess, it’s on the verge of truly collapsing.  If we are not only going to survive, but also thrive, how are we going to get from here to there?  Eisenstein attempts to find the roots of our situation, what has brought us to this point, and what must change, and it has to do with our story.  That is, we tell ourselves a story about who we are, what is important, how the world works—important questions the answers of which lead us to create our world in a particular way.  He describes our current story and offers an alternative one to help us transition into the more beautiful world we know is possible.  Eisenstein writes:

We live today at a moment of transition between worlds.  The institutions that have borne us through the centuries have lost their vitality; only with increasing self-delusion can we pretend they are sustainable.  Our systems of money, politics, energy, medicine, education, and more are no longer delivering the benefits they once did (or seemed to).  Their Utopian promise, so inspiring a century ago, recedes further every year.  Millions of us know this; more and more, we hardly bother to pretend otherwise.  Yet we seem helpless to change, helpless even to stop participating in industrial civilization’s rush over the cliff.

Francisco de Goya, The Colossus 1808–1812 Oil on canvas (46 × 41 in) Museo del Prado, Madrid

I have in my earlier work offered a reframing of this process, seeing human cultural evolution as a story of growth, followed by crisis, followed by breakdown, followed by a renaissance: the emergence of a new kind of civilization, an Age of Reunion to follow the Age of Separation.  Perhaps profound change happens only through collapse. (Eisenstein, 2013, 3)

He goes on:

What do I mean by a “transition between worlds”? At bottom of our civilization lies a story, a mythology.  I call it the Story of the World or the Story of the People—a matrix of narratives, agreements, and symbolic systems that comprises the answers our culture offers to life’s most basic questions: Who am I? Why do things happen?  What is the purpose of life?  What is human nature? What is sacred?  Who are we as a people?  Where did we come from and where are we going? (Eisenstein, 2013, 3)

Eisenstein describes for a few pages what he believes are our civilization’s answers to those questions and then precedes to offer an alternative of “interbeing”:

Here are some of the principles of the new story.  That my being partakes of your being and that of all beings.  This goes beyond interdependency—our very existence is relational.  That,  therefore, what  we do to another, we do to ourselves.  That each of us has a unique and necessary gift to give the world.  That the purpose of life is to express our gifts.  That every act is significant and has an effect on the cosmos.  That we are fundamentally unseparate from each other, from all beings, and from the universe.  That every person we encounter and every experience we have mirrors something in ourselves.  That humanity is meant to join fully the tribe of all life on Earth, offering our uniquely human gifts toward the well-being and development of the whole.  That purpose, consciousness, and intelligence are innate properties of matter and the universe. (Eisenstein, 2013, 16)

Frank Auerbach J.Y.M. Seated No. 1 1981, 711 x 610 mm Collection of the Tate

Eisenstein explains,

“The fundamental precept of the new story is that we are inseparate from the universe, and our being partakes in the being of everyone and everything else.  Why should we believe this?  Let’s start with the obvious: This interbeing is something we can feel” (Eisenstein, 2013, 16).

We painters know this, and experience this all of the time—it’s why we look at great painting!  Painting directly participates in, enacts and furthers the story of interbeing.  Painting is one way, surely among a myriad of ways, to further this story.  But it is a particularly powerful way that I will try to describe.  And for those of us that paint, painting is our way to lend ourselves to, and help facilitate, the Great Turning, because that is indeed what is happening.

In Eisenstein’s book, he moves through a series of short chapters, exploring various aspects of the situation we are facing.  He has titled the chapters according to their focus, such as Separation, Breakdown, Cynicism, Force, Hope, Naiveté.  Near the end of the book he has a chapter on Story and writes:

We have seen already how so much of what we consider to be real, true, and possible is a consequence of the story that embeds us.  We have seen how the logic of Separation leads ineluctably to despair…We have seen how civilization has been trapped, indeed, in its “own postulates”, its ideology of intensifying control to remedy the failure of control.  We have seen how so many of our efforts to change the world embody the habits of separation, leaving us helpless to avoid replicating the same in endless elaboration.

[T]o exit this trap we must operate from a larger context, a more comprehensive mode of consciousness.  This means not only inhabiting a new story, but also working in the consciousness of story.  If, after all, our civilization is built on a myth, to change our civilization we must change the myth. (Eisenstein, 2013, 213)

Morandi, Still Life, 1954, 26.5x41cm, Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, University of East Anglia, Britain

If indeed what is needed to shift our world is a new story, how specifically can painting contribute to a new myth and help tell this new story?  Interbeing is a term coined by Thich Nhat Hanh, a translation of the words tiep hien.  The word tiep means “being in touch with” and “continuing”.  Hien means “realizing” and “making it here and now.”  When we paint, whether from observation or memory or non-representationally, we have a situation which invites us to “be in touch with”, with what we see, with our inside – ourselves, with our outside – the world in which we live, with the places that slip back and forth between what is inside and what is outside—and to bring these places into our marking, our touch, and put into concrete form these sensations, in paint, “realizing” them, and further — providing others the opportunity to have these sensations slip into their selves.  Painting seems to magically allow one subjectivity to slip into another, one person’s experience to be felt and embodied by another, from the inside!  How can it be that one person may have a sense of another’s experience, somehow made available through dumb, raw material?

Earlier, I spoke of the twin nature of painting as both a two-dimensional reality and a three-dimensional experience.  I would like to add to that and relate that twinning to interbeing.  Our interbeing begins not with our relations with another person, but with ourselves, for we human beings are twin in our apparent nature.  We are constantly and impossibly twinning and splitting in our experience.  We are body and soul—or if you prefer, body and mind.  And our identification with either leaves us incomplete because we are both (and, in our deepest truth, neither).  Here the two-dimensional surface of the painting functions as the fact of our body and the three dimensional experience performs as our soul.  The achievement of great painting, the exquisite integration of the two-dimensional and three-dimensional, gives us not just hope that wholeness is possible.  More than that—great painting serves as a reminder, a rekindling, that such is the truth.   Reality is whole.  We are whole; it is only our minds that have slipped and reconstructed away from this awareness.

Monet, Water Lilies (The Clouds), 1903, 29.5 x 41.5 inches, private collection

The degree of availability that a painting presents, the availability of its trans-subjectivity, of our being able to enter into its space, its reality and being, depends on the degree of presence it embodies.  The degree of presence a work embodies depends on how engaged we are when we paint, how much life force goes into the material, the sheer marking and making.  This isn’t stylistic.  It isn’t about closed marking or open marking, realist or abstract.  It’s about life opening.  It isn’t about emotional intensity, or velocity of marking.  Marks can be slow or fast.  It has to do with the amount of inner involvement, life-force, heat, the maker carries in the moment of the making.  That is, the more we as painters bring ourselves into the work, the more open and vulnerable we allow ourselves, the stronger the presence and the more resonant the work, the more the work weaves the world.

Milton Resnick, Saturn, 1976, 97 x 117 inches, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario

Telling a new story isn’t a small thing.  It is the thing.  Painting does have a necessary and ancient function; it isn’t to depict the world—it is to weave the world; or rather, it is to reveal and make visible the actual weave of the world, the weave that already exists.  What does this mean?  When we paint we have the possibility of bringing our selves into the work—bringing our life force into the mark, the material, bringing our actual being, in this very moment, as it is, into our touch and setting free that vibration and energy.  To do this is not easy, although it is simple.  But it means daring to bring our actual selves, as we are, without judgment, into the work.  It is also a risk and challenge to receive work, to open ourselves up to painting as a force from another person, another life, to feel safe enough to receive that force and allow it in.  This also is not easy, although this too is simple.  And we find that when we do open to the given surface that there may be a sense of aesthetic force, perhaps beauty, perhaps sheer presence, a kind of transmission from one person to another through the material.  When we paint we are not simply making images, we are weaving our subjectivities, and we are doing this through the medium of colored mud on a flat surface—dumb material participating in the exchange and heightening of awareness.  Painting is not simply an activity of self expression—it is an activity of interbeing, of our intersubjectivity, of our actual interconnectedness.  Painting reveals this, gives proof to it in its very nature.  We are not who we think we are.  Painting carries the possibility of getting us out of our minds and into an awareness of our being.  That is what occurs when we receive a painting, whether from another’s hands or from our own.  The reality of our experience facing great painting, the power and force of transmission remains a mystery as long as we remain in the story of Separation.  As we dare to allow our minds to enter into the story of Interbeing, painting affirms the larger truth of this new story.  Its essential nature re-storys the world, reimagining who we are and where we are going.  As we paint we have the possibility to not only make an object to look at, but to retell our story.

Berthe Morisot, In the Dining Room, 1875, 61.3x50cm, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.

Painting is currently trapped within the category of fine art.  But what if painting isn’t about a picture, isn’t even about an object.  What if painting, actually, is about the interaction between two minds, two hearts, two beings—the painter and the viewer?  What if painting is about a way of coming to the world, a kind of communion?  John Dewey writes in Art as Experience, “In common conception, the work of art is often identified with the building, book, painting, or statue in its existence apart from human experience.  Since the actual work of art is what the product does with and in experience, the result is not favorable to understanding” (1934, 1).  In other words, there is no work of art outside of our experience; that is where the reality of art is located.  It is an interaction that reveals an inherent interconnectedness, an interbeing that reveals the illusion of separation. If that were our cultural story of painting what would that look like?  What would an exhibition look like?  Would that change the way we paint?  What happens to the fetish of the object?  The possibility of an interlacing communion through the lending of colored earth to human sensation: mud and oil embodying human consciousness.  Rembrandt understood this.

Rembrandt, Self Portrait with Beret and Turned Up Collar, 1659, 33.3 x 26 inches, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.

Painting isn’t about beauty.  Beauty is about consciousness.  Beauty is a gateway, an adornment and invitation to space.  The space within the painting.  And space is consciousness.  Space is being.  When we paint we are exploring being.  That is why we need the three dimensional illusion—it isn’t an illusion, it is a gateway—to being.  We are experimenting with different ways of being.  See Rembrandt.  Cezanne.  Monet.  Morandi.  Matisse.  Titian.  Piero.  Chardin.  Soutine.  Martin.  De Kooning.  Diebenkorn.  Auerbach.  Kossoff.  Giacometti.  Resnick.  This is what painting has to offer.  It isn’t the object, for God’s sake.  It is being.

I want to be clear that what I am suggesting is not, in my understanding, a new way of looking at painting.  I believe that what I am trying to describe here is actually an ancient way of looking at painting.  Images carry power.  It is only with the rise and development of our secular culture with its accompanying market economy that painting has found itself delegated to a luxury commodity that is devoid of any real use and value in our society beyond sophisticated decoration, investment and chic.  This is not particularly the plight of painting—so much in our culture has been radically reduced to a flattened materialist, financial definition—the logical endpoint in the Story of Separation.  But the act of painting carries much greater power than that.  And we need to re-describe this activity, re-imagine it, in order to sharpen its power and focus; in order for painting to more fully participate and take its place in our global regeneration.

De Kooning, Gotham News, 1955, 69 x 79 inches, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY

For many years now, thinking about the great painters of the 19^th and 20^th century, I’ve deeply envied them.  It’s seemed to me that they, Monet, Cezanne, Matisse, Picasso, de Kooning—they lived at a time when a painter could still believe in painting.  Painting really mattered.  We certainly weren’t inundated with images like we are today, with television, movies, the exponential growth of the internet and the constant deluge of images from our mobile devices—how could images of paintings compete?

I doubt that painting will ever carry again the kind of privileged position that it once had up through the middle of the twentieth century.  But painting does carry enormous importance as a hand-made object, revealing one person’s being to another, and in that revelation furthering the blossoming awareness of our irreducible interconnection and indeed, our interbeing.  The earlier artists and painters of the 19^th and 20^th centuries had a great, eloquent and noble story called Art.  I’m not sure we really have that narrative anymore—certainly not like we did in the past.  But we might just have something greater—called the survival of our planet, the Awakening of Humanity and the Age of Reunion.

We do not, of course, have to believe this.  We may choose to continue to think of painting as a wonderful activity of depiction.  It is!  And there is nothing wrong with that.  But I am suggesting that there is a much larger story taking place and painting has a central, ancient place in the unfolding of that story.

Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, Water Glass and Jug c. 1760 Oil on canvas, 32,5 x 41 cm Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh

Painting Perceptions interview with Jordan Wolfson by Elana Haglar.
Sources:

Belting, Hans.  2003.  Art History after Modernism.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press

Danto, Arthur.  1997. After the End of Art.  Princeton: Princeton University Press

Dewey, John.  1934.  Art as Experience.  New York: Penguin Group

Eisenstein, Charles.  2013.  The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible.  Berkeley: North

Atlantic Books

Gablik, Suzi. 1991. The Reenchantment of Art. London: Thames and Hudson

Jacob, Mary Jane. 1998. Conversations at the Castle. Cambridge: The MIT Press

Perl, Jed. “The Rectangular Canvas is Dead.” The New Republic 7 Sept. 2013.

Shiner, Larry.  2001. The Invention of Art. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press

Thich Nhat Hanh, 1997. Interbeing.  New Dehli: Full Circle Publishing

Tolle, Eckardt.  1999.  The Power of Now.  Vancouver: Namaste Publishing

Winnicott, D.W..1986. Home is Where We Start From. New York: Norton

The post How Painting Can Help Save the World, Actually appeared first on Painting Perceptions.

 A’Dora Phillips interviews Lennart Anderson

in Collaboration with Brian Schumacher

Lennart Anderson on painting from life with central vision blindness; what vision loss has taught him about painting; art school; creativity; genius; influence; not fitting in; and hunkering down.

The perceptual painter Lennart Anderson, who turned eighty-five this summer, currently has a show on view of figure drawings and portrait paintings at Leigh Morse Fine Arts. Several of the works in the show have been done in recent years, as Anderson faces the greatest challenge of his artistic career and struggles to paint with central vision blindness due to macular degeneration.

The disease struck his right eye in the late nineteen nineties, but for a few years, he was able to continue working with little trouble using the monocular vision that was left to him – partially because he’d always relied more on his left eye to paint. When his left eye succumbed to the disease in 2003, it was a different story. Within hours, he went from being able to see to having such a disorganized glimpse of reality that he doubted the solidity of the world around him. On direct glance, a gray spot stood between him and whatever he focused on. In addition, straight lines looked wavy, doorways appeared out of whack, and objects seemed smaller and farther away than they were. He could no longer read, recognize faces, perceive color, or put his finger down precisely on the spot he wanted.

While Anderson has not read the New York Times since that day in 2003, he continues to paint, sometimes from direct observation, though more frequently from drawings he did when fully sighted. His painting techniques have necessarily evolved as his vision has deteriorated, but his daily ritual has changed little from what it has always been. By mid morning, he is in the third floor studio of his Park Slope Brownstone, classical music playing as he mixes paint. His work-in-progress waits, his palette, the monographs on Velazquez, Ingres, Degas, Poussin, and the many other artists who have influenced him. He has worked in the same third floor studio since 1966, and a collection of objects reveals the passing decades: catalogs from shows long past, drawings and notes composed by his children when they were young, sketches and photographs of Anderson’s late wife, Barbara. His studio’s most recent additions include accouterments related to vision loss: a magnifying glass on top of his Ingres monograph, a magnification machine, a big button phone, rulers and bits of paper with mathematical calculations on them, which he uses in preparation for transferring a gridded drawing to his canvas.

Some of what Anderson has painted this past decade is undoubtedly among his strongest work, though decidedly different from what he did before suffering from macular degeneration.

Brian Schumacher and I spoke with Lennart Anderson at his Park Slope studio on several occasions between January 2012 and July 2013 and were joined by the photographer Jason Houston on June 22, 2012. We found on our first visit to Anderson’s studio one of the walls dominated by “Idyll III”, a painting Anderson had been working on for more than thirty years. We were amazed by Anderson’s determination to finish as a legally blind artist a painting he had started two decades before, especially as he described how erratic his vision was and the problems this created for him as a painter. He persevered, however, and “Idyll III” served as the centerpiece of Anderson’s March 2012 exhibition at Leigh Morse Fine Arts (which Jed Perl of the New Republic cited as one of the year’s top three gallery shows). Over the past year and a half, Anderson has moved on to a composition of three figures on a bluff, based on drawings he has gridded and transferred. He has also been painting portraits from life. We have talked with him about his drive to work from life, the painting challenges that come with diminished vision, how to use the inspiration you get from other painters, and what it was like coming to New York City as a young artist in the nineteen fifties.

Photo credit Jason Houston

VISION LOSS & LOOKING

A’DORA PHILLIPS:  You have been legally blind due to macular degeneration for the past decade, but are still painting.  This must mean you are still able to see to some degree?

LENNART ANDERSON: What I see is erratic and very hard to describe. I can’t say I’m blind, but, when it comes down to it, I don’t see well. That’s why reading is so damn hard. I have that blind spot. If I’m looking for something, I can’t find it. I have to look over and underneath and to the side.  I think I make a lot of it with people. What are you asking for?  Sympathy? I just want people to understand that, even though I can see, there is a problem – though I gather it’s pretty easy to spot that there is a problem.  It’s interesting, for instance, how quickly people will give me a seat when I get on the subway – right away, usually. But, I’m old, really old.  And maybe it’s that.  Maybe people don’t even notice that I’m blind.  That I’m having trouble seeing.

To keep my eyes from worsening, I get an injection every seven or eight weeks. When I go in to the doctor’s office, they always do the same thing. They have me sit down, and they project letters on to the screen. They always start with the letter E, and I can’t see it. Every time I go there, the same thing. So, they try the next one. But my eyes haven’t really changed – or I don’t think they have – since the summer of 2003, when within a few hours I went from seeing well to not being able to make sense of things.

Because of my vision, I’m using my life now when I paint. I mean by that, all the painting that I’ve ever done.

Photo credit Jason Houston

PHILLIPS: I notice you have a stack of books here, with a magnifying glass.  Are you able to take in a whole painting or drawing now from a book or do you have to look at it in pieces?

ANDERSON:  I live on books.  They’re the greatest things.  Before my eyes went bad, and I would take out my book on Velázquez every evening and pore over his paintings.  I was learning, but I wasn’t studying.  It was coming in from another place.  Now, I can’t see the images in books much at all, but I still pore over them.  I know the paintings so well that I imagine I’m seeing them, but I don’t really see them.

PHILLIPS: Despite your vision loss, you paint in your studio nearly every day. What is your working day like?

ANDERSON: I get up early and come up here and procrastinate. Often, I just listen to music and don’t do anything until about two and the light is going to go. Then, I might work for an hour or two. That’s to save myself. But that has always been my habit. When I was painting in the nineteen fifties, I would sometimes find myself going through some job lot five blocks from my house, when I was supposed to be working. After supper I would start to paint, because I did not want to lose the whole day. It’s always been that way. Unless I have someone posing for me.

PHILLIPS: Habits aside, you have gotten a lot of painting done since 2003 and have had two shows, one in 2008 and one in 2012.

ANDERSON: Yes. And all the paintings in my 2008 show were done after macular degeneration. Most people are surprised that I’m working. Are you still painting? What else would I be doing?

PHILLIPS:  Up to when you lost central vision, you painted detailed still lifes from direct observation, along with figures and portraits. In the first few years after your eyes went, you did a few more still lifes of a lion’s mask, and they are entirely different from what preceded them. Did you have to modify your painting process significantly to complete your lion’s mask paintings? Did you work from direct observation, as you typically had?

Lion’s Mask, 2006, Anderson’s last still life painting

ANDERSON:  I did three paintings of the lion’s mask. I painted it once with a tiger plant and once with an artichoke up in Maine the summer after my eyes went. In fact, I took the mask with me to Maine precisely to paint it, since it’s nice to know what you’re going to do, instead of hanging around and worrying about it. The third painting, the one with the simple head on it, I did later, in my Park Slope studio.

When I painted the lion’s mask in Maine, I used photos, a very difficult decision for me. I had always hated the thought of depending on photographs, since you’re not painting the subject, you’re painting a photo. But, honestly, a damn photo is better than your eyes, even if you can see. I always knew that, but I didn’t want to cave in. People say, ‘photos lie,’ but that’s bullshit. I never painted a better head than Bart Giamatti’s: for weeks, I drove to Yale and spent Sundays in his office, trying to paint him while he was watching football.  I could never get it going. Then, at some point, a photographer went in to take some pictures of him. I asked to have some of the photos and used them to finish the portrait in my studio. With “Lion’s Mask,” I didn’t rely on photos entirely, though. I also had the mask very close to me. So I referred both to photographs and the mask as I painted.

Later, back in Brooklyn, I set the mask up again, right next to me – it had to be close for me to see it. There’s no stepping back now to see something better; if I step back, I lose sight of something altogether.  When I painted the mask in Brooklyn, I tried to do so without using a photograph as an aid. I wanted to just try painting it from direct observation, but without my realizing, the image would slip away from where I put it on the canvas by a quarter of an inch or so. The more I worked on it, the more it would go off. Rita Natarova, a painter and former student of mine, was living with us [Anderson and his daughter] at the time, and she would help me correct the drawing when I couldn’t control it and it shifted. It was quite an effort. I have the same problem now. When I try to paint the blue around the figure in the painting I’m working on right now, I think I’m painting right next to the figure, but in the end, there’s a faint halo around it.

You see, it is hard for me to paint with my eyes in the condition they are in right now for a number of reasons. I can’t even see some points that are close together.  I can’t put my hand down where I want to. I can’t make a line where I want to. When I can’t put something down where I think I’m putting it, it’s off. Then, you have to correct. I can’t work with a full brush. I don’t have confidence in it. You can’t see it so you don’t know if it’s right. It’s bad enough when you can see!

PHILLIPS: The lion’s mask paintings are your last still lifes after a lifetime of still life painting. Did you abandon still life because it was too hard to see the subject?

ANDERSON: That’s right. I can’t see a still life.  Like, the apples over there on the mantelpiece, I can’t really see them. I know them well enough that I could paint them from memory, but that’s not what I do.

Photo credit: Jason Houston

PHILLIPS:  Do you work from direct observation anymore?

ANDERSON:  I still have people sit for me sometimes. I put them through hell. I tried to do a head of a beautiful girl, Dali-lah, we call her.  Delilah is her name.  Dali-lah.  It would have worked out had I had the confidence.

PHILLIPS: You started to lose confidence in what you were doing?

ANDERSON:  I don’t know how I can beat that. If you can see, that’s good, but if you can’t see, you have to hope that the painting is going well.  I kept changing my painting.  It was much further along at one point.

Maybe the most significant problem I now have with painting – and this definitely makes it harder to do a portrait – is that I have a difficult time painting back to front. In the old days, I would have put in the big form that the eyebrows sit on before painting the eyebrows themselves – which involves working more comprehensively. But I can’t paint through the eyebrows anymore because if I did they would be lost.

I try to set things up so that I can work in a broad way if I can.  I try to work with a bigger brush. Not get into this tiny stuff.  I can actually paint better with a bigger brush than if I was into the small brush. I can just get a feel for the gesture of the form.  And that helps.

PHILLIPS:  Is that because there’s a memory in the hand about the gesture of the form?

ANDERSON: It may be. That’s probably true to how I feel.

Portrait of Rita Natarova, 2013, as shot in February 2013

PHILLIPS: After working on Delilah’s portrait, you undertook one of Rita. Do you essentially follow the same process as before macular degeneration when you set out to paint a portrait, as regards having the model sit for you and painting from observation?

ANDERSON: I could never paint a head the way I used to, often in a single sitting, with the subject at a distance. I can’t see anybody. It’s just my bullheadedness that makes me try. That’s what it is. Straight out bullheadedness.  Wanting to paint a beautiful woman. Wanting to do a great head, not one you have to make allowances for, but a head that will really knock people out.

Sometimes, I had to be within inches of Rita when I was painting her. The drawing was constantly changing. She would tire and couldn’t hold the pose and, like with “Lion’s Mask,” I couldn’t keep my drawing steady on the canvas. With these two things moving around, the shape of her head kept changing. Every day, a different shape, but it still looked like her. This went on for weeks. She must have sat for me twenty or twenty five times. I never got into the features while she was posing; by the time our painting sessions ended when she left for London, I still hadn’t put in the eyes and mouth. I remembered the shape of her mouth one day – it was something I could keep in my head – and put it in from memory, as well as the eyes. She thought she would have to come back to pose for me again at some point so that I could work on the features and was surprised when she saw her finished portrait on the Internet.

Now I’m working on a portrait of Kyle Staver, who has a unique head. The problem with that is that you have to be able to see well. I can’t fake it or paint from expectation. I have to rub noses with her, literally. It’s really terrible. With my magnifying glass. And even with a magnifying glass, I can’t compare two points. It’s very frustrating, because that’s what you paint with – similarities and differences.

PHILLIPS: Aside from the occasional portrait, you work mainly work from drawings now.

ANDERSON:  That’s right. When I returned to New York from Maine the summer I lost my sight, I decided to see if I could make painting from the drawings I had done of models. I have a lot of figure drawings from when I drew with my students on Saturday mornings at Brooklyn College. I treat the drawing as if it were the model, which relates back to one of the things I used to emphasize when I taught – that you don’t have to make drawings, unless you won’t have the model to work from later. Sometimes in class, I would see a student making a drawing, and the drawing would be terrible, but they would be planning to paint what was in it, because they felt they needed to stay true to what they’d put down. Don’t use the drawing. There’s the model. That’s your drawing. You don’t make something in between you and it.

Some of the figure drawings Anderson has in his files and now works from.
Photo credit: Jason Houston

Because I’ve been working from my drawings, I’ll tell you, I’m constantly amazed by them.  They don’t look like a whole lot, but then you start to analyze them in order to paint from them. The subtlety in them is mind-boggling.  None of them took more than twenty minutes and some of the best ones took ten, but there’s a great deal of information included in all of them.

The big painting of Jupiter was the first painting I worked on using my drawings – an awful thing to have done so soon.

Jupiter and Antiope, 2004/5, the first painting Anderson undertook after losing central vision in 2003, using drawings he had done from the model pre-macular degeneration for reference.

A photocopy of the drawing that Anderson used as a model for Antiope in his painting “Jupiter and Antiope”

Anderson’s Study for “Jupiter and Antiope,”

PHILLIPS:  What sort of painting process do you follow when you use your drawings as models?

ANDERSON:  When I compose my paintings, I pull the figures from individual drawings that had nothing to do with one another.

I start by Xeroxing the drawings I’m working with – which I learned I had to do after screwing one up. Then I decide where it should go on the canvas, and divide the drawing in half, which gives me three points – having three points has always been crucial to me. After dividing the drawing in half, I take quarters, and so on, creating a grid that will allow me to transfer the essential lines of the drawing to the canvas. I go to a great deal of effort with the grid, trying to map out the drawings accurately. Not infrequently, there are three or four lines on top of each other, and I have to choose between them. I sometimes make mistakes, since marks that may not look like anything, or that might even seem like mistakes, turn out to be meaningful and descriptive. I try to keep the mathematics as simple as possible, but it gets kind of horrible sometimes.

The drawing Anderson used as a model for Antiope, gridded

PHILLIPS:  So you use the grid to control a sense of scale and as a way to transfer the movement of the lines, right?

ANDERSON:  The grid is the master. I don’t fool around with it. It can be murder trying to paint what is in a line. It’s harder to paint from a drawing than it is from life, by far. Though, of course, painting from a drawing now in my situation is not what it would have been.

One of the reasons it is so hard for me to work this way is because you have to keep telling it what it is, you know? One of my main tenets has always been: Don’t tell it what it is; ask it. That’s what I always told my students. But I can’t ask it anymore, and I often have to go on what I remember.

The irony is that because of working with the drawings – like in that painting – my painting is tighter than it has ever been before, more precise, when you’d think it would get sloppier. It’s all on that edge of how many sixteenths or thirty-secondths of an inch it is. In fact, I mentioned to someone recently that these days, my line is actually closer to an Ingres line than ever before.

“Still life with salami and olive,” one of Anderson’s last still lifes before his second eye succumbed to macular degeneration.

PHILLIPS:  You seem to work from a much more limited palette than you used to.  Does that relate to your vision, as well?

ANDERSON: I don’t see color very well and have limited my palette accordingly. I understand what the few colors I use can do, and I don’t vary how I use them. Even so, mixing colors is very difficult. Yesterday, I mixed up something for the flesh tone – white and ochre, a little black to darken it. I left the pile of yellow ochre on my palette, next to what I’d mixed. I got my brush into the ochre, and it ended up on the painting, but I didn’t see it for a long time.

It occurred to me recently that I really ought to use a small painting palette now because I’m working with so few colors. The middle figure on my painting of “Three Nymphs on a Bluff” was essentially done with yellow ochre, white and black.  Maybe some brown and raw sienna.

Above and below are two separate paintings Lennart has been working on since about January 2012 based on a composition of drawings, sometimes called by Anderson “The Three Graces” and sometimes called “Three Nymphs on a Bluff”. He was still in the process of working on them when these shots were taken, in February 2013.

I’ve learned a lot about painting from macular degeneration. Just yesterday, I had an observation about a painting of El Greco’s depicting an artist with a small palette in his hand.  What the heck is he doing with such a small palette? That guy’s small palette really tells you something. The painter is not going to work on the whole painting, but just in one small area. There were probably one or two colors on his palette all together. Or, look at the dress in Ingres’s portrait of Princess Albert de Broglie. It was painted with Prussian blue, period. You know how dark Prussian blue is?  It goes through the entire range.  Ingres is not messing around with black or anything else. You see what a powerful thing it is to limit your palette. Historically, painters didn’t use color the way Cézanne or the other impressionists did. They screwed up color terribly, I think.  Made it much more complicated.

PHILLIPS:  You have been influenced by Degas ever since you encountered the auction catalogs from the sale of Degas’s studio contents at a friend’s house back in the nineteen fifties. It’s now widely accepted that macular degeneration was also at the root of Degas’s eye troubles, though in Degas’s case, it was an early-onset form of the disease. A lot of your recent strategies for working are similar to Degas’s. For instance, as his eyesight worsened, he seems to have relied on photographic reference and began tracing over his drawings as a starting place for paintings, exploring multiple iterations of the same subject, much as you’ve done with the “Three Nymphs on a Bluff.” Were you thinking about Degas as you strategized about how to keep working?

ANDERSON:  No, not really. Degas is complicated. I don’t know how he did it, and I don’t know what the state of his eyes was. He was complaining about them forever and didn’t paint for the last fifteen years of his life. That was probably the eyes, but he might have just said, ‘the hell with it!’

For myself, I just had to figure out some way I could keep going, that’s all. Like today, I wanted to quit. I said, ‘this is ridiculous, just ridiculous. I’m not doing anything but measuring and getting it all wrong and throwing myself on the floor.’

ANDERSON’S REFLECTIONS ON THE CRANBROOK ACADEMY, 10^TH STREET IN THE NINETEEN FIFTIES, AND HIS OWN PLACE IN THE ART WORLD

PHILLIPS:  Changing direction somewhat, your drive to work from perception – that has been with you since you were in art school, if not before. As I understand it, you had to be somewhat bull-headed as a young artist in the nineteen fifties in order to pursue your interest in working from life. That includes when you were at The Cranbrook Academy, which touts itself as the cradle of American modernism and certainly aligned itself with the abstract expressionist movement when you were there.

ANDERSON:  Even before I went to Cranbrook, when I was an undergraduate at the Art Institute of Chicago, they didn’t think much of things like likeness.  Do a great head, you know, whatever that was and they all did some kind of thing, but it wasn’t a likeness.  A good head in those days was a zero with a couple of lines in it. I left Chicago thinking I was an expressionist painter. After a time at Cranbrook, I found myself tiring of painting expressionist pictures. I started getting fellow students to pose for me and did portraits of them for $15 a piece. I was told not to paint the figure. But one day I saw the first model I’d ever drawn (in Detroit in 1943) at Cranbrook. Her name was Leona.  She’d come out on the bus and was just sitting there.  So I said, ‘why don’t I paint you?’ and I did.

Anderson holds his painting of Leona, done around 1951, when he was at the Cranbrook Academy.
Photo credit Jason Houston

PHILLIPS:  Were you unique in that?  Because that was definitely not a figurative period of time.

ANDERSON: I had friends who regarded me more highly than the faculty generally did. Even though I had a good final year at Cranbrook, I just slipped out. Nobody raved about my work except the sculpture teacher, who said I should stick with it.

It’s curious, though.  The school wanted to show its breadth, so they used my painting of Leona in their catalog when I was there.

PHILLIPS: Why did you tire of expressionism?

ANDERSON: There’s a good answer to that. I’m not dependent on what I’m carrying around in my head. If you have something to look at, and if you’re diligent, and if you love it, you can make good art by working from perception. Otherwise, you think you have to have an idea. And then you paint your idea.

PHILLIPS: And why is it important, when you’re working from perception, to strive to represent what you see with a high degree of similitude? Why are you striving to do that even now, when it requires so much effort?

ANDERSON:  I’ll give you a smart answer. Why do you play tennis with a net? You understand my answer, don’t you? It means you’ve done something right. That doesn’t mean copying, because you can’t do that, not well. You have to see and to organize.

PHILLIPS:  So, you didn’t really have any training in figure and portraiture.  You figured out how to work from life on your own?

ANDERSON:  No.  I’ve been looking at paintings forever. And I got a few pieces of advice early on that were crucial.  For instance, I had a teacher in Chicago my first semester, Elmer Forsberg, and his mantra was that you had to draw the whole figure on the page. He had a way of doing so with circles, and I didn’t know of any good painter or good drawings with circles, so, I never adopted his technique, but I did get the whole figure on the page then and have ever since – when I wanted to.

I want to say something about the fact that I knew Pat Passlof at Cranbook. She was important to me. On the back of my expressionist canvases, she found the figure paintings I had done at the Art Institute of Chicago and liked them. That generated the representational direction for me.

PHILLIPS:  But when you arrived in New York a few years later, you were still torn between working expressionistically versus representationally, weren’t you?

ANDERSON: When I came to New York, I had the idea that I wasn’t going to be an abstract expressionist, but it was the dominant style in those days and everybody – I shouldn’t say everybody, but almost everybody – was doing their version of it. And I was genuinely interested in de Kooning’s work, especially his early work, and what was behind the abstract expressionist movement. The abstract expressionists were there because they were fed up with representational painting – dark paintings, sentimentality. I thought I could do paintings that the expressionists could recognize. I met de Kooning and Franz Kline, though I wasn’t friendly with them. In fact, De Kooning visited my studio at the Academy in Rome when I was there, but he didn’t have much to say about my work, which disappointed me – unlike Philip Guston, who was excited by what I was doing. I knew Milton Resnick, as well, since his wife was Pat Passlof. Milton was a frightening man. He would scare you to death. Thought he knew everything. Once, when I visited Pat, I had a few small still lifes with me. Milton came in, looked at them, and said something like, ‘why are you doing these for?’ I said, ‘I’m trying to make a go of it, you know.’ And he said, ‘no, you’ve got to get with it and get on the bandwagon and take charge.’

But Pat made efforts on my behalf. She got me into the Artist’s Club, which was not easy to do, and I’d go there on Friday nights to listen to people talk about painting. And Elaine de Kooning once came to see my work when I was living on 10^th Street and was encouraging. Before she left, she asked me what my rent was. I said, ‘$29.75′, and she bought a little wash from me for that amount. Later, when I needed a letter for the Rome Fellowship, she wrote one for me, though I don’t remember being the one to approach her about it.

Still, I’ll tell you, I was reclusive. I was in New York in the nineteen fifties, and knew a few people, but they weren’t the big names or anything like that. I lived on the same block as some of them for a year and a half – with Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning, and Esteban Vicente, and Milton Resnick. They are history, but I’m not history. It’s just the way I am. I’m not unfriendly, but I feel like I’ve always been hunkered down, you know? I’ve got something I want to do, or try to do, and am working to get by.

THE ARTISTIC PROCESS, GENIUS, AND INFLUENCE

PHILLIPS: I feel like, historically, artists have been much more able to move from imagination to observation, perception, and memory, that it all goes into the pot and is used. You’re one of the few contemporary artists I know who also seems to have embraced that path and move fluidly between different modes of art making.

ANDERSON: I don’t fit into anything very well. I didn’t deliberately do that. I just followed whatever I was interested in, painters and paintings that inspired me. I don’t claim to be one of those geniuses. You’re not supposed to be influenced. You’re supposed to be yourself, but I’ve always been influenced. Painters steal. Artists steal. I remember when I went to Cranbrook, I was so intimidated by the jargon about creativity. Creativity – I never knew what that was. I still don’t know. There it is.

Are you getting anything out of this – are you recording me?

PHILLIPS:  Yeah.  I am recording it. The recorder is right here.

ANDERSON: So, you’re getting material?  Great.  That is what I was hoping, that you were going to nail me down, ask the right questions, and make me talk. ‘Don’t tell it, ask it,’ as I used to tell my students.

Photo credit Jason Houston

A’Dora Phillips holds an MFA in Fiction Writing from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and studied painting for several years, including with Jacob Collins at The Water Street Atelier and Daniel Graves at The Florence Academy of Art.

Brian Schumacher is an artist and designer whose paintings and drawings are held in many private collections. He is also an Assistant Professor of Drawing and Design at the University of Cincinnati College of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning Brian has studied, taught and practiced traditional drawing and painting for over a decade.

This article has been written with the generous assistance of the American Macular Degeneration Foundation (AMDF), which is committed to the prevention and cure of macular degeneration and offers hope and support to the afflicted and their families:  http://www.macular.org/

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Painting Perceptions would like to thank A’Dora Philips and Brian Schumacher for their generosity in making this fabulous and important interview available to our readers. Additionally we wish to thank the American Macular Degeneration Foundation who has provided invaluable financial support for the professional photography and the many other expenses related to this project. They are also providing support for a planned film related to this issue, more information will be made available as we know more. They’ve given the art world a huge gift with this interview and artists should return their support as much as possible with their donations.

A previous Painting Perceptions article that includes a slide talk Lennart Anderson gave in Italy can be seen from this link.
A website dedicated to the work of Lennart Anderson as well as essay’s and interviews can be seen from this link – lennartanderson.com

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