Argus, oil on linen, 84×82 inches, 2014

In the fall of last year I was lucky to get an opportunity to meet and talk briefly with Jessie Fisher at the Missouri Valley College at a group show I was included in. I was intrigued by many of the things she said and afterwards I found her website. I was enormously impressed by her work and decided to ask her if she would be willing to be interviewed by me. From her home and studio in Kansas City, Missouri, Jessie Fisher and I talked over Skype in March at the very beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic–just before she was about to leave for Italy to work on a fresco project, which then needed to be postponed. I am very grateful for her incredible generosity by sharing with us so much of her experience and insights and to give a glimpse into her intense engagement with painting.

In researching her background I was struck by a question Christopher Lowrance asked in his interview with her in 2016 on MW Capacity.

Christopher asked… “Are you conservative, or academic?”

Jessie replied: “… Rather than conservative, I see my work as subversive in relation to much of contemporary painting and see much of contemporary painting as extremely conservative. I consider the term academic to be a compliment, as I see this a type of authorship. One that is completely present in the awareness of its own making, while being simultaneously in command of its lineage. I see this sensibility dripping from the walls in central Italy and in painters like Titian, Corot, Bonnard and Balthus. Compositional and technical extravagance tempered with analytical rigor; painting about painting.”

Fisher expands further:

“…I do resist common, or current connotations of these terms because I often find they are used in a qualitative manner and that astounds me. To qualify a mode of consideration is limiting and additionally lays bare the fact that the critic is giving an opinion and not responding to the context of the work. Strangely apt to this question, my mother recently met John Cleese after a lecture where he was speaking about the creative process in relation to several books that he has co-authored on the psychology of the creative mind. His potent piece of advice, in addition to the fact that anxiety and distraction are the enemies of the creative practice, was that, ‘very few things matter and that most things don’t matter at all.’ What matters to a studio practice is a direct engagement with an unbiased and open process and not with current boundaries, definitions or camps with in a discipline. Too often, when a student defines the conservative in their work, I find that they are naming things they are avoiding based on the opinions of their perceived tastemakers, and where they see innovation, they are often aligning themselves with a current trend.”

“Jessie Fisher received her BFA from the University of Minnesota and her MFA, with a minor in printmaking, from the University of Iowa. She has studied at the Scoula Internationale della Grafica in Venice, Italy, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Fisher has been a visiting artist and artist-in-residence at the Visual Arts and Design Academy, Santa Barbara, CA, the Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts in Maine, the International School of Painting in Montecastello di Vibio, Italy and Studio Art College International in Florence, Italy. Fisher is a recipient of the Ohio Young Painters Prize and a founding member of Studio Nong, an international sculpture collective and residency program based in southern China. Her work has been exhibited in museums and galleries in Minneapolis, Iowa, Ohio, New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Kansas City, Italy, and China.

Fisher is a Professor in Painting at the Kansas City Art Institute, a visiting critic in the Painting Department at the GuangXi Arts Institute, Nanning City, China and an associate artist with Studio Balma, currently preparing for work on a multi-year boun fresco project in Terni, Italy. Fisher lives and works in Kansas City, MO with the painter Scott Seebart, their son Valentine and their 8 cats.”

Jessie Fisher (self-portrait), 10×10 inches, charcoal, ink and oil on gesso panel, 2018

LG: What made you decide to become an artist?

Jessie Fisher: I was always interested in drawing, and although praised by others for rendering a likeness, I was unhappy with the results. I however did have a clear idea of what I thought the truth of art was from a young age. I remember, in what seemed like one day, my mother took me to the Walker Art Center and then to the Minneapolis Institute of Art to see the permanent collections. I was impressed by the formality of both institutions, but when we stood in front of the Institute’s breathtaking Lucretia (Rembrandt), I was viscerally aware that there was a clear distinction in art; between art as spectacle and art as visual poetry. We also went to the Walker at midnight to see the films of Andy Warhol which formed an image of the artist in my mind; one who was responsible for the orchestration of something that they themselves were absent from. The autonomy was very appealing. The inevitability of actually becoming a painter occurred to me when Scott Seebart, my partner of 30 years and an outstanding painter, had set up a studio in his apartment in our first years of college. He was so cool. While Scott was spending a year painting in Amsterdam, I changed my major from Architecture to Fine Arts and when he came back, we moved in together and set up studios in our apartment and I really felt like I had begun a serious practice. At the same time, I was fortuitously asked to work on a 3-year boun fresco project happening in Minneapolis. I completed my undergraduate degree through directed study credits working on the project, and that experience was pretty much the bulk of my undergraduate arts education. And now, over 25 years later, I am preparing to join the same painter, Mark Balma, in Italy for another large-scale fresco project at the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Terni, Italy which will start as soon as we are able to travel again because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The artist and her son Valentine at Bonnard’s grave

LG: The fresco artist, Mark Balma, in Minneapolis who you said you had worked with, did he take you on because of your drawing skill, and was this also an important part of your start to learning the figurative tradition?

Jessie Fisher: I was always drawn to figuration, ever since I had seen a book on the Sistine Chapel in my mother’s library when I was very young. My mother is a Dean at the university that commissioned the fresco project and she and I crashed a presentation that Mark was giving. We spoke after the lecture and he generously asked me to be one of his assistants. I had no formal drawing experience when I started the project, but I watched him very carefully. Working with him was my opportunity to see, hour by hour, figuration being developed through extraordinarily traditional processes. I was working with a group of older assistants who had a lot of training, and I realized, that as incredible as the experience was, I didn’t have any of the tools necessary to do what I was seeing being done.  So, when the project was over, I applied to graduate school, realizing the almost complete lack of information in my undergraduate program. We had no life drawing or painting curriculum and a narrow range of what was considered essential information, like color theory, surface preparation, the morphology and science of materials, discussions of visual theory and precedent…so, when I applied to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts it was in hopes of finding a way into figuration.

LG:  You likely chose PAFA because of its long tradition of figurative training but I’m surprised your early work at PAFA seemed more abstract. 

Jessie Fisher: I wasn’t trying to be antithetical, but when I got to the Academy I found it necessary to make two bodies of work. I was looking at a lot of Italian painting and, as one does, was attempting to create life-scale multi-figure paintings in what I saw as the grand tradition of painting, and was hitting a brick wall in terms of my figurative skills and knowledge of materials. I also was very aware that the figures themselves dominated the space of the painting like disembodied sculptures with no relationship to each other. I started to look at paintings through a different lens. I looked at overall ideas of spatial recession and compression, at the way in which they engaged the picture plan and how their overall shape language made no distinction between animate or inanimate. I lined my studio walls with a continuous piece of canvas that was 7’ tall and began painting. I was making large-scale abstractions, the same size as the figurative works, where I could deal with ecology of forces: gravity/levity, near/far, physicality/void, sentience and unconsciousness through color, mark, and scale, without the aid of an icon. Around that time, I had a studio visit from a great critic at PAFA at the time, James Rosen. He entered my studio, took a long look at my room, and turned his attention to the wooden chair I had set out for him. He said, “If I were to ask you to describe your chair, you might have said it was hard, and possibly, that it was cold. If I were to pour water on the chair, you might have also said it was wet. But why, when I first asked you to describe your chair, you didn’t tell me it was dry?” His question and our talk afterward, along with the series of books I was reading at the time, Modern Painters by John Ruskin, were an epiphany. I understood for the first time how the activity of the composition conveyed meaning; how abstraction was the armature on which form was built.

small abstraction series made during study at PAFA, ink and gouache on paper, 16 x 14 inches, 1998

small abstraction series made during study at PAFA, ink and gouache on paper, 16 x 14 inches, 1998

LG: I’m curious to know more about why you left PAFA.

Jessie Fisher:     I thought at it was a great program, and Philadelphia is a great city, especially for painters. Scott was there for 2 years, first in their Post-Baccalaureate program, and then both of us for our first year MFA and we became friends with several of the professors. I learned so much in terms of speaking about work, literary analogical structures to the image, and how precedent informed the category, or the context, in the reading and consideration of paintings. It was very influential to be surrounded by the range of work of the other students and to be part of its ongoing discussion, but there were no opportunities for teaching. One of the wonderful PAFA professors, Mark Blavat, invited Scott and me to be visiting critics in his drawing class at Temple University. I knew instantly that I was interested in teaching, so a large part of our decision to leave was to find a program where we could get some real experience. We took a year off and lived in a beautiful lime green micro-bus with a little sink and pop-top, visiting friends who were studying in other programs and departments and campuses around the country looking for both a wonderful place to live and a teacher/s that we wanted to work with. And that’s how we ended up at the University of Iowa to study with Ron Rozencohn.

LG: I understand the University of Iowa has an excellent writing and poetry program but I don’t know much about their graduate painting program. What was that like there?

Jessie Fisher: Iowa City is a beautiful and progressive city. Our house was built in 1854 by the Bohemians and had been restored by a local history professor. It was like a museum, with plexiglass windows in the thick lime walls showing the horse-hair insulation. It had never been inhabited by anyone other than the descendants of the original family of tailors who ran their shop out of what we used as our studio spaces. The writing program is awesome and attracts a lot of really interesting students from across the world. Scott and I were both accepted into the MFA program, and Scott started a critique group between the writers and the painters that were by far some of the best peer-to-peer critical discussions of our work we had there. The MFA is a 3-year program, which I think is a very beneficial timeline. We had incredible studios accessible 24 hours a day with a gallery in an old medical dormitory, graduate students were able to sit in on classes in the department they were interested in and chosen students were given drawing courses to teach. Scott and I had a year’s worth of credits from PAFA, and I had already taken several graduate-level art history courses outside of my degree requirements at the University of Minnesota, so we spent our time teaching, painting, gardening, attending the weekly departmental group critiques and traveling during the summers. It was a mixture of incredibly formative and positive development paired with on-going frustration. Teaching every semester, sitting in on Ron’s classes and our close friendship with him was invaluable, but our departmental critiques were another story. It was a night and day difference from PAFA where we had passionate discussions about a much broader range of work than what was being produced at the time in Iowa. Scott and I found ourselves in vilified as ‘painters of tradition’, making ‘paintings that looked like they belonged in a museum and not in a gallery.’ The critiques had little to do with the visual organization of the work, focusing on what was being said by the audience and not seen. One particularly beautiful spring evening we had a guest critic during one of my critiques, Deborah Pughe, a phenomenologist who was doing research at the time on drawings in the margins of scientist’s research notes. It was fabulous. She talked about what was happening in the work. She identified how the activity in the minutia of the surface and its arrangement within the painting’ boundaries created the condition we respond to inside of the making of the work. I vowed that if I became a teacher I would do the same.
 

Jessie and Scott in her studio

LG: Well, I’m very interested to hear more about how you run your critiques or more about your criticism about how critiques are run. That is critical, especially these days when increasingly you hear about how they can often be more about a discussion of the story or meanings behind the work rather than anything visual that’s actually going on in the work. More and more you hear about how the emphasis is increasingly on art theory and less on studio practice in many art programs.

Jessie Fisher: Making paintings and looking at painting are innately theoretical activities. I think the problem is not the theory itself, but when theory and practice are considered separately. If a painting is at the complete service of theory and not born of itself, the work is an artifact, as David Hickey would say, ‘dogma for the King’ and I want painters to rule their own kingdom. What I find the most compelling and useful in drawings, paintings, sculptures, texts or films that I admire is how clearly you see the influence. When you can articulate how an artist is speaking to histories of medium and motif, you can identify where the artist is speaking in a personal voice within that tradition. Autonomy is born through an understanding of influence, not a dismissal of it. I ask students, always, to introduce their work to the group, to try to contextualize their current work as a tradition itself, a current point of view. Not as an explanation, but to speak on the broadest level about the ideas and material ambitions that they initially brought to the work and how these have evolved throughout the process of making.

Criticality is not an opinion.

LG:  How much are you directing the structure of what your students study? Do you see your role as more to just help them discover the kind of painter that they want to be or do you have them all follow a specific course of study and direction they need to go in terms of getting a solid foundation of learning how to paint?

Jessie Fisher: All of the students have dedicated studio spaces and are creating an independent body of work from the first day of class that is fed through the year by an ongoing collection of synchronous lectures, readings, museum visits, studio visits, demos, painting sessions and structured assignments that can shift in response to the range of interests from each new group of students who I work with. I don’t separate what is foundational with what becomes their personal area of interest; one is born from the other. Students simply need to understand how ekphrastic languages activate their use of subject, that it’s not about learning a technique and throwing it on top of a personal icon. Identity and archetype can be recognized, but are meaningless unless communicated through material and visual metaphor. This integration of topics is structured to foster a close-knit and generous community of students who are intimately involved in each other’s studio practice.

Jessie Fisher drawing with students at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. Photo credit Natalie Radermacher

 LG:   I’m curious to know more about this integration. Does the other faculty share similar ideas about teaching art or does there tend to be different camps? When I was a student going from one teacher to the next was like going from night to day with how they taught or what they thought was important or true in art.

Jessie Fisher: There is a similar situation in our department, for sure, but possibly the difference is that it is the ideology of our program. Each instructor is curated into our department to purposely create the broadest possible range of approaches to the discipline and use the structure of our program as they see fit. It’s as if each year in our program is like a small graduate school known for a particular material and critical focus. Its success depends on the strong precedent set in the sophomore year by myself, and the fabulous Corey Antis who I work closely with. While the sophomores are working to distinguish the individuality, self-awareness and autonomy of their studio practice, they share a focused discussion of craft, materiality, precedent, and perception. Students have their allegiances, which I think is necessary and healthy in defining a point of view.

Drawing Marathon Interiors, black and white charcoal and soapstone on chalkboard 7×5′, Drawn during the 2016, 2017 and 2018 KCAI Spring Drawing Marathons

Drawing Marathon 2019 – walnut ink, gouache, casein and oil on Fabriano paper, 56×66 inches, 2019

LG:  That’s good.

Jessie Fisher: Well, it sounds utopian but, ideology or not, the lack of consensus in fine arts education that you mentioned creates a situation that is systemically geared towards the individual. Its effects are polarizing and seem to intensify a double-standard. Certain approaches to painting are often held to a different set of criteria than those that approach painting through the expanded field because of a misconception, or mistrust, of what is considered traditional. When those issues creep into the studio it becomes divisive and often results in a painter becoming reactionary and isolated rather than feeling celebrated by a wide range of influences.

LG:   You know one thing I keep thinking about with art school, you know that when students get out and then you’re faced with the real world, depending on where you wind up living after school, artmaking can be a completely different story. The skills you teach, strong representational skills as well as a strong understanding of the formal aspects of painting are often lost on non-art world “civilians”. The notion that you are trying to make visual poetry out of what you are looking at using the language of painting is often not understood or even on the table. What can you tell a student to prepare them for an art world that might not care about what you carefully taught them? Or is this not really an issue and they should just paint?

Jessie Fisher: It is an issue in that you do experience an inability, or unwillingness, to engage in a discussion of language rather than identity or biography. I think process is often misunderstood as purely intuitive rather than a nameable idea within the work. The gallerist and their patrons are generally not practitioners, so can you really expect them to truly understand where meaning truly lies in the work? I think it’s important to clearly champion the idea/s of making and seeing; the biography of the work and not of the self. Also, you should just paint. And, I would also say, forget about the real world, I certainly don’t want to spend any time there. My advice is to never dumb it down and to never conform.  I don’t think painters realize how subversive their work really is, how powerful it is to see a show of paintings, how an independent voice is truly the embodiment of the avant-garde.
 

(Copper Portrait of Scott in Studio Scene at Leedy-Voulkos exhibition)

Copper Portrait of Scott in Studio Scene, oil on linen, 120×72 inches, 2015

LG:  Very good advice!

LG:   Many wonderful and interesting painters sometimes fall into a situation where they get into a gallery, their work starts selling and despite never wanting to “sell-out”–the success with selling work, getting attention and finally being able to pay bills- could play tricks with their minds, rationalizing and distorting how they critically evaluate their work. I’m curious if you might warn your students about that? Also, how can they handle the knowledge that only a small percentage of people continue painting only a few years out of school because of needing to work at another job to support themselves?

Jessie Fisher: I think it’s possible to have a productive relationship with a gallery or an institution that is funding your research, but I do think the best scenario is usually when you’re not directly dependent on your work for income. The question of maintaining an objective eye and the willingness to experiment throughout your life in the studio is always a question, gallery, or not. After leaving the structure of school, the focus needs to be on maintaining a studio practice that is integrated seamlessly into the way in which you choose to live your life. It’s very important to remember that the success of your work is not in any way defined by its acceptance by the current institutions of art but rather a collaboration that the artist can decide to enter into. Whether you’re an artist or not, what you do for money should not be something that removes you from the life that you choose. In addition to art, Ruskin was a very active critic of industrialization and its horrific effects, not just on a worker’s economic status but on their quality of life, stripping them of the means for and the expectation that work should be purposeful, intellectually stimulating, and support the community out of need and not the corporate owner out of profit. Artists can be radical in this way. And I highly suggest falling in love with another painter.

Saturday Model Session, oil on panel, 7×5 inches, 2015

Saturday Milica with Neopolitan Head, ink, casein and gouache on Fabriano paper 32×84 inches, (triptych) 2019

Milica on Saturdays, charcoal, ink and oil on gesso ground 36×36 inches, 2018

LG: On your website you have a number of involved, large, long-term allegorical projects involving the figure and then you have the smaller studies that are quicker or made in alla prima model sessions. I’m curious to know more about how you work with these different approaches.

Jessie Fisher: I have run a Saturday model session at KCAI for the past 11 years where I work along-side the students and have used these sessions to play with materials and ways of working not usual in my studio. So, if this makes sense, I have used the Saturday sessions to challenge myself to be able to think indirectly in a situation that necessitates a direct approach. I wanted to use the alla prima not as an exercise, but as a way of thinking that has the possibility to be extended over a long period of time in the studio. Working with combinations of ink, casein, tempera gouache as an underdrawing for a final layer of oil, or on its own, has been amazing. I has changed the way that I am working in the studio, not just in terms of materials but in the way that I approach painting.

LG: I imagine how your casein and gouache works are similar to the buon fresco work that you that you’ve been involved with, you know, in terms of immediacy. There’s no way to go back and correct things so it must be an intense process requiring a great deal of focused concentration. Can you also talk about some of the things you are thinking about when starting a painting?

Jessie Fisher: A focused concentration, yes, but of a different kind. Working with those materials, I can approach the surface in a physical manner unimaginable in fresco and can edit almost indefinitely. More like what would be expected from a creamy and gestural oil painting. Typically, when I work over a longer period of time in my studio I am aware of the switch that occurs between drawing as preparatory and searching, and of painting as a way to play within the drawing’s structures. Because they are dry by the time I get to the end of my brushstroke, I am more experimental and intuitive, as my analytical eye tries to catch up with the speed of my hand. I am losing the distinction between the mindset of drawing and painting, they are becoming more and more simultaneous considerations.

The proportion of the picture plane dictates to a great extent how I begin. When starting a painting, no matter what combination or vigor of media I am planning to use, I am always very aware of the overall spatial ideas I want to work with. I want the dominant figural element/s to hang frozen on the armature of the structural divisions of the picture plane, and once that has been established, I can start to play with scale, repetition, arrangement, shape, and resolution. I think that might be the distinction between the sketch as a fragment with no presupposition and a picture as a guided consideration of the whole. I don’t find myself sketching very often.
 

Milica with Sculpture of Anna, charcoal, ink, casein and gouache on linen 54×56 inches, 2020

Black and white Milica, charcoal, ink, casein and gouache on gesso panel 24×18 inches, 2018

LG: Are you saying you don’t have a firm preconceived notion of the direction your painting is going to go? Is it more about the discoveries your process reveals while working?

Jessie Fisher: It is definitely about a process of revelation despite very concrete ideas of what I want to play with in terms of composition and isochromatism. I don’t know exactly how they will manifest themselves, but I am always aware of what I think, at the start, will be the most direct approach. I love the ability of the painting to portray its flatness so what I am usually drawn to is an arrangement that begins with frontal pressure against the picture plane, a strong shape as well as a complex form. I don’t work with preparatory drawings because I prefer to discover these relationships in the real scale and real-time of the painting, and how it plays out is directly a result of reading the process. Quite often there are passages or compositional strategies from the painters that I look to most often that I am interested in incorporating into my image, or sometimes I take the entirety of an influential painting as the initial condition of the work.

Valentine Laying with Birds, charcoal, ink and oil on gesso ground 36×36 inches, 2019

Pierre Bonnard, Reclining Nude Against a White and Blue Plaid, ca. 1909, Städel Museum, Frankfurt, © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2017, Property of the Städelscher Museums-Verein e.V.

LG: So do you keep everything you’re working to one area at a time? Or is your approach more gestural and work the whole painting as a whole, keeping it thin and build it up gradually in layers?

Jessie Fisher: When I’m painting, I have a clear focus on a specific form, or passage, that I am interested in building. To illusion of a form is more than its internal anatomy alone, it’s built through the object and how it creates analogies with all of its possible oppositions and repetitions throughout the whole of the surface. These relationships become attributes of that form, its visual persona. It’s very similar to how I look at paintings and what I think is essential to illusion. Nothing can be seen in isolation.

Valentine with Landscape, charcoal, oil and ink on gesso panel 24×18 inches, 2018

Anna with Striped Dress, ink and oil on gesso panel 24×18 inches, 2017

LG: I noticed that your painting’ subject matter seems to ebb and flow in degrees between being emotionally charged and confrontational or formal and subdued. Your portraits and figures, especially your small studies of the model are exquisite. But then we get to your allegories and nudes and especially some of your earlier works, like your still life’s with pigs and figures, are dramatically loaded in terms of the subject matter. Just as wonderfully painted but with a very different sensibility. I’m curious to hear about your approach to subject matter.

Jessie Fisher: I think of the subject as an extension of the language of painting, like a material that either makes its physicality known or disappears completely into the composition. In a way, I am really almost completely indifferent to the subject matter. I am more aware of how an object becomes a subject through the way it is personified by the painting: nude, portrait, emblem, tableau, still life. I’m not trying to negate the subject matter, but to dress the object in the guise of the painting. More and more, I am finding that, painting rooted in observation is enough to temper even the most dramatic of subject matter. Observation and embellishment are two extremes of a polemic that I am always considering, and I tend to land in a different place along the spectrum every time.

Double Killing Wall, oil on universally primed panel, 40×30 inches, 2007

Anna on Fainting Couch, oil on linen 62×54 inches, 2016

LG: You mentioned that you were planning on a new series of paintings, can you say something about what you have in mind?

Jessie Fisher: Starting now, as a morning warm-up for a long period of uninterrupted days in the studio, I am sculpting a group of invented half-size figures and painting a series of watercolor monotypes of their progress, almost like my daily calligraphy. My main focus will be a series of larger canvases and works on paper, about 7’tall by 5-9’wide. Not only do I want to get back to working on a larger scale, but I want to specially work with melodramatic narrative possibilities of the inanimate. After living with a still-life painter for so many years, it’s starting to rub off on me. I will be setting up more elaborate scenes with life-scale figures, using my sculptures, amazing shower curtains, mirrors, a large inflatable aqua-blue pool, and some manikins that I recently found. I want to return to a sense of theatricality that I was using and some of my earlier work while keeping the painting rooted in the observational space of the studio.

Jessie and Valentine sizing a canvas in the artist’s studio

Museum Scene with Black Wall, ink, casein and gouache on Fabriano paper, 74×55 inches, 2020

Double Valentine with Watermelons, oil on canvas, 38×22 inches, 2007

LG: Like those wild still lifes with pigs, fruit and what looked to me to be dead babies from around 2007?

Jessie Fisher: Yeah, but not as emblematic.

LG: There’s a number of painters that come to my mind in looking at the whole scope of your work, but in these particular earlier works, Gregory Gillespie comes to mind. How he combined invention with the observed and the formal with the enigmatic subject matter. Few painters have interested me as much as his work has and I would love to see where these new works of yours might go.

Jessie Fisher:   What I love about Gillespie is how linear his work is, how strongly he holds the contours that become containers for color and pattern. Gillespie’s images face the viewer, they are innately theatrical. He has images within images like Fra Angelico. Recently, I’ve tried to put a little bit of that recursive symmetry in my pocket and take it into my studio in a more overt manner.

LG: Some of your recent figure paintings have the faces are hidden behind the artwork of some type, why is this? I’m curious about what you might say about how in some Philip Pearlstein’s figures the heads are cropped out and if there is any connection to what you’re doing with hiding the faces?

Jessie Fisher: I think of Pearlstein the same way as I see what’s happening in David Salle’s paintings, essentially both artists creating a dead image, creating equivalency in every moment, neutralizing hierarchy completely. I think if you cannot recognize hierarchy it becomes impossible to formulate narrative associations. Anticipation and expectation are what I’m thinking about when I place an object where one would expect to see something else, I am thinking of surrogacy, of structures of narrative possibility and not the telling of a narrative story.

I read that Pearlstein begins his paintings with a drawing on a sheet of paper a little bit larger than his arms reach so that he has no conception of the rectangle or the pressures between the mark and its edge. He works from the center out until he finds what he must consider a type of stasis. He crops the image and has a proportionate strainer created on a larger scale. So, essentially, he is finding the composition which results from but is indifferent to, his image; where the picture plane is an artifact of his drawing. I think that that’s an interesting idea in that it is almost the exact antithesis of how I approach composition.

Nude with Carpet, oil on linen 62×54 inches, 2016

Molly with Carpeaux Drawing, oil on linen 30×26 inches, 2014

LG: Talking about sculpture, I understand you have made a number of sculptures of the figure. Can you say something about how you got into sculpture and how it relates to your painting?

Jessie Fisher: I base a lot of my lectures for my drawing classes on sculpture and find myself spending more and more time looking at sculpture when I’m in the museum. For years I have been running an awesome elective class at KCAI where we work on-site in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art on long-term drawings and paintings from the sculpture collection. It’s crazy how a sculpture’s composition rests entirely within the boundaries of its form and with how complex it is to compose infinite profiles from multiple points of view never seen together at the same time. In sculpture, scale is a physical fact and that changes everything. I met BangMin Nong, a sculpture professor at the GuangXi Arts Institute, at a short residency where I was working with figure sculpture for the first time. He invited me to study with him in China and we started a fabulous gang called Studio Nong that has been more than incredible. If you ever want to humble yourself as a painter and improve your drawing try sculpting.

Hunter Head, plaster 24x14x12 inches, 2016

Small Figure Study, Plaster 16x5x4 inches, 2016

LG: So you think you could make maquettes as studies or as a subject for your painting?

Jessie Fisher: I’ve never gone the Poussin route, but I imagine would be extraordinary for my conception of light. I have used some of the sculptures I have made in recent paintings, but they weren’t sculpted specifically with those paintings in mind. I was able to spend some time last summer sculpting again with BangMin and the gang at his studio complex in the idyllic SanMin Arts Village, and this time I specifically sculpted an arm, from the shoulder down to the fingertips, to be used as a prop, held or worn by a model in upcoming paintings. It’s been fired and is ready to ship along with rubber molds of plaster sculptures I made during our last residency. So now I have to wait for my crate to arrive and for when it’s safe to travel again. I would love to spend a semester or longer there really focusing on sculptures that could stand on their own, which are more than props or studies. I am also now a visiting critic in their painting department so I’ll be back soon.

Bust with Millefleur, charcoal, ink and oil on gesso panel 24×18 inches, 2020

Still life with Sculpture,
installation view from the exhibition,
Recent Allegories and Nudes, Leedy-Voulkos Art Center, 2015

Milica with Moon and Skull, charcoal, ink, casein and gouache on linen 54×56 inches, 2019

LG: Is it important for you to have the actual still life object there simultaneously with the model?

Jessie Fisher: I do work with the model in the exact interior set-up that she is posing in when she is in my studio, but when I am working on the painting in her absence, I don’t pretend that she is there. I work on paintings for many months to years, the light changes, the seasons change and my relationship to the iconography and possibilities of the painting changes. She could just as easily be removed from the painting as any other decision. Do you know Wilbur Niewald?

LG: Sure, great painter!

Jessie Fisher: When I first moved to Kansas City I was told that one role of mine within the department was to continue his lineage. I was invited to his studio where he took me by the arm and lead me towards a still life he was working on. He moved me into the exact position where he stood and said, “Scale is an idea, composition is an idea, subject is an idea… ideas have no place in painting. The only truthful experience is found when I am looking and responding. There is nothing else.” I thought that was awesome! I know that Wilbur would never work on something if the model wasn’t there. It would be anathema to put a mark down without being in the presence of the complete motif, for the same 2-hours of light, five days a week, over a long period of time. I am enraptured with his devotion to this idea. I thought very seriously about what he said, both in my teaching and in my studio, and came to the conclusion that what is essential is to devote yourself to constraint. Your constraint is a product of a singular practice, but it is something that binds you universally to other artists through a shared pursuit. I think this is also at the core of Wilbur’s outstanding influence as a teacher.

LG: I understand, that was also my belief for the longest time. As you may know my thoughts on that has changed more recently. I keep coming back to what someone once said to me, ‘how do you reconcile the belief about the purity of observational painting with the fact that most all the greatest paintings in all of art history have not been done directly from observation?’ Of course, they may have had studies and such from observation but that’s not the same thing as strictly working from observation. What would you say about that?

Jessie Fisher: It’s not observation or invention, its devotion that is pure. I think Morandi was devoted to observation, but I don’t think it was a rule. He is devoted because he is present. And then there’s the heightened, monumental artifice of Pontormo, drunk with influence. And then we are witness to Bellini’s sensualist evolution… What creates the transcendence of the greatest works ever made is the pursuit of a jewel that is only right in its setting, its ‘significant form’.

LG: I’m wondering if you make your own paint from dry pigments? How important is the more technical aspects of painting, especially with regard to your previous involvement, with fresco in your work?

Jessie Fisher: I love working with handmade and natural materials, I love stretching and preparing my own surfaces and go back-and-forth between using hand-made or pre-made pigments. I think Robert Doak does a much better job of making materials that I do, but with some recent handmade inks and some more viscous siccative oils I have been playing around with I’m hoping I can incorporate a little bit more of my own mixtures into my upcoming work. I have a collection of gorgeous pigments from Zecchi’s in Florence, and it’s a shame that they’re usually just sitting on my shelf looking pretty. I am so excited to be able to return to fresco on such a monumental project, as well as revisiting traditional uses of egg tempera and metal leaf in our secco decorations, and can’t wait to see what that does to my studio work. While we are working in Italy, Mark and I are going to set up a workshop and make some paintings according to his teacher Pietro Annigoni’s recipe/process for tempera grassa. I think that a lot of the paintings that we are broadly referring to as ‘oil’ paintings are really variations of grassa and this just might be the perfect medium. I can’t wait!

View of Jesse Fisher’s Studio

LG: Are there a lot of layers in your paintings? What are the surfaces like with your larger, long-term figurative works?

Jessie Fisher: There are a lot of layers in the painting but I don’t think it’s clear which mark precedes the other. I imagine the surfaces look very controlled. It might be hard to find a brushstroke broken by the topography underneath, but the paintings are anything but smooth.
 

Double Valentine with Silenus, oil on linen, 84×72 inches, 2011

Detail from Double Valentine with Silenus,

LG: In these earlier works, they’re fairly thinly painted as well? Using layers of glazing and scumbling and things like that? Or had you previously been working more directly and with more impasto?

Jessie Fisher:   No, I’m only ever the accidental impasto painter (laughs).

LG: Would you say that’s just your nature or do you just dislike paintings that are thickly painted?

Jessie Fisher:   No, quite the opposite! When I see my paintings in my dreams they look like they were my compositions painted by Eugene LeRoy. Scott has incredible surfaces, similar to late Titian, with visible, broken strokes of paint, and there’s nothing more alluring to me as a viewer then those surfaces. And then there’s Bonnard, one of my favorite painters to look at, who at times paints so thinly that I almost have to hold my breath. But, what I think is common to all the surfaces that I love, is that physicality always remains integral to the logic a form. My drawing logic deals with almost indiscriminate shifts in levels of opacity, so I really do work with physicality, just on a very compressed scale. I am also limiting my palette to heighten the luminosity of the optical mixtures so you are always seeing one color acting as many, and although I work on my paintings for quite a long period of time they do remain relatively thinly painted with shifts in physicality both restrained and abrupt.

Scott on panel, ink and oil on gesso panel 10×10 inches, 2017

Tino with Pillow Scene, ink and Zecchi’s grassa on Fabriano paper 15×15 inches, 2018

LG:   Do you do sand down your painting to get back the transparency? 

Jessie Fisher:   No, for me sanding would be like going back into a previous state of the painting. Sanding would be like I was fixing something in the painting rather than developing my understanding of it further. When I lose control of the drawing, control of the opacity and refraction, I do find myself becoming a more direct painter on top of a very indirectly developed scaffolding.

LG:   Are you saying that creates a tonal shift when you start paying more indirectly on top of something that’s built up with transparent layers?

Jessie Fisher:    Yes, a dramatic shift between two completely different senses of light, and when it emerges it can be really abrupt. All of a sudden, the ground that has been so much a part of my understanding of the interaction of color disappears and I have to completely revise the way I’ve been mixing color. Suddenly, all of the relationships that I’ve been working with become out of whack, but that’s when the painting becomes something that is unknown, that’s when the painting really starts to becomes as strong of a motif as much as what I’m looking at.

LG:     Do you ever find that the look of a painting changes too much from when seen from a distance from what you see up close? Where it looks great from 6 feet away but not so great from a foot or two away – or vice-versa? Any thoughts to share about how to finding balance between the two?

Jessie Fisher:   I think about Titian and Antonio Mancini and how they are painting for a distance. An idea in the Renaissance, especially in terms of site-specific paintings in the cathedrals, is that the optimal viewing distance for the work was one-and-a-half times its height. It essentially asks the painter to consider three different compositions. The orchestration of scale, proportion, and design of the entirety of an image seen from a distance but which is constructed at the arm’s length of the artist. Each composition relies on the cooperation of the other, and much like different sides of the sculpture, are never seen simultaneously. And then there’s that’s perfect composition halfway between the distant and the near, where the viewer is able to see the logic of the whole but also discern the physicality and methods of drawing on the surface. The transitional distance, where both possibilities of the image, the macrocosmic and the microcosmic are available to the viewer simultaneously. A painting is a visual experience, like a 3-dimensional Yarbus eye-tracker. It’s thrilling. It’s terrifying. It’s something that could never be experienced without standing in front of the work itself.

Milica with Purple Wig, ink and Zecchi’s grassa on Fabriano paper 15×15 inches, 2018

Tony, Black chalk on hand-toned paper 16×16 inches, 2011

LG: That’s a great way of saying it. I sometimes have trouble with photographs of my paintings work in that the painting looks fine on the wall from a few feet away but the photo looks all wrong, especially with smaller works. Too detailed and fussy – the image doesn’t come together, have the same sense of unity. There doesn’t seem to be any technical issues with the photo, the exposure and color are reasonably accurate, there’s no glare or noise and in focus. It just looks wrong on the computer monitor with all its warts and pimples that you wouldn’t notice in real life.

Jessie Fisher:  I understand because a photograph has nothing to do with the experience of seeing the work itself. Vincent Desiderio said in a recent interview; that when you’re a younger painter your paintings look much better in the photographic reproductions, but as you get older, and your paintings get better, more attuned to the phenomenological and the atemporal, they will start to look worse in photographic reproduction. So, maybe it’s a good sign!

LG:   That’s good to hear! It’s also tragic however. I keep hearing from people who teach that they have a hard time getting their students to go to galleries and museums to actually see paintings in the flesh, that left to their own devices will just look at art on their phones. More and more it seems people are making their work more on terms of how it’s going to be seen on a device than in real life. It becomes more like conceptual painting in a way, the sense of scale, surface poetics and the power of its objectness are lost on a tiny screen. 

Ashley with Green Fabric, oil on linen, 36×48 inches, 2015

Jessie Fisher: I think that once an artist, or non-artists alike, has an experience of seeing a work of in person that is really provocative for them in some manner they will never again be remotely satisfied in the same way with the replicated image. When I take students to Italy where they are barraged with work that they have seen through reproduction, they are universally taking aback, shocked at how different the work really is when experienced in its true scale, and often in the environment that it was originally created for. When they return to the photographic after the experience of seeing the work in person, they understand the vast deficiencies of reproduction. I don’t think that someone that has had this experience can ever think that the image of the work that they see on the Internet is anything more than a placeholder. And this gets us back to what is this of primary concern within a painting; a physical and material surface that resists a finite temporal reading where all decisions have been made in response to scale.

LG: But you know, what can we do? At least there are teachers who are still teaching traditional drawing and painting and trying to keep it alive. People like yourself still teach students this way but it’s hard to predict how the future will play out. Sometimes when I’m feeling particularly low with all of this, I go to a dark place and start thinking that painting from observation sometimes feels like we’re making historical reenactments, like people going to Civil War Battle reenactments or musicians who only play archaic musical instruments, like early harpsichords or something, you know what I mean? But I know that’s not true, it’s something more primal, more fundamental and that’s what’s scary because you know, it’s such an important part of being human, having a visual poetics and understanding of the beauty of the world around you.

Jessie Fisher: Like you said, it’s fundamental, not elemental. The loss of the shared discourse of life drawing, painting, and sculpture are tragic. It’s like trusting the future of theoretical physics to scientists who have never taken a math class and who don’t want to sit next to each other when they do.

“There must be some, one quality without which a work of art cannot exist. What is this quality? What quality is shared by all objects that provoke our aesthetic emotions? What quality is common to Sta. Sophia and the windows at Chartres, Mexican sculpture, a Persian bowl, Chinese carpets, Giotto ‘s frescoes at Padua, and the masterpieces of Poussin, Piero della Francesca, and Cezanne? Only one answer seems possible -significant form. …it is the one quality common to all works of visual art.”

Clive Bell, Theory of Significant Form, 1914

Carmine Apartment , Ink and Zecchi’s grassa on Fabriano paper, 15×15 Inches, 2018

Skull, charcoal, ink and oil on gesso panel 10×10 inches, 2018

Skeletons with Watermelons, oil on linen, 82×84 inches, 2015

The post Interview with Jessie Fisher appeared first on Painting Perceptions.

Bill Scott’s studio, Philadelphia, 2020

I’m delighted to share this email interview with Bill Scott who writes from his home in Philadelphia. I’ve long been intrigued by Bill Scott’s paintings and prints and was lucky to view an exhibition of his works last year at The Pierre Hotel in NYC. He was scheduled to have a solo show this April at his gallery, Hollis Taggart in Chelsea, NYC, NY. that was postponed due to the Covid-19 pandemic. His unapologetic celebrations of beauty, lyrical and joyful abstractions acts as a salve of color and light and a reminder there is still life and hope in our feverous times.

Scott’s 2016 interview by Jennifer Samet on hyperallergic.com’s beer with a painter is a fabulous in-depth look at his background and process. Ms. Samet asked him about the associations and motifs present in his work, Scott replied by saying; …

“…I think I paint bittersweet fictions. I don’t believe the imagery I paint exists. I am not so removed from the world that I think it is pleasant out there. I think it is close to awful. We are walking towards extinction. So, why wouldn’t I paint the Garden of Eden or something pleasurable? What am I going to gain, spiritually or emotionally, from painting something miserable? I would much rather live in a fantasy world. I want a kindness in the painting. I want there to be an emotional ease. Generally, I don’t feel that in life, so I want it to exist in the paintings.”

Bio from Hollis Taggart
Bill Scott began his career studying at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts from 1974 to 1979 but considers longer periods of working informally with painters Jane Piper and Joan Mitchell as the pivotal influences of his own painting.

Scott has exhibited widely over the past three decades at museums that include Swarthmore College, Hollins University, the State Museum of Pennsylvania, the National Academy Museum, and the University of Delaware. Major public collections with Scott’s work include Cleveland Museum of Art, Delaware Art Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute Museum of Art, and Woodmere Art Museum. His work has been reviewed in Art in America, ARTnews, The New York Times, and the Philadelphia Inquirer. In 2006, he was awarded a Distinguished Alumni award from the Pennsylvania Academy.

Scott was raised in Haverford in suburban Philadelphia and studied painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts from 1974 to 1979. Throughout this time he also studied informally with the painter Jane Piper (1916-1991) whose studio he visited frequently.

In 1980, while living in Paris on a travel prize, he met the American abstract expressionist painter Joan Mitchell (1925-1992). In subsequent years he stayed at her home in Vétheuil and painted in her studio. After Mitchell died, he wrote an appreciation of her published in Art in America.

Beginning in 2004 Scott has been represented by Hollis Taggart Galleries where he has had seven solo exhibitions.

In a 2007 review Mario Naves wrote in The Observer.com

Bill Scott is a radical artist, but not in the sense to which we’ve become accustomed.

Mr. Scott, whose abstract paintings and prints are on display at Hollis Taggart Galleries, doesn’t rely on slick theatrics, obtuse theorizing or technological appropriation. He has the temerity to plumb something deeper than his navel or the superficialities of pop culture. In an era dominated by secondhand conceptualism, he wrestles with firsthand experience. The confrontational act that Mr. Scott engages in? He looks out the window and likes what he sees.

Looking Through is, in fact, the title of Mr. Scott’s exhibition, calling forth questions of viewpoint, transparency, distance, detachment and, in the end, joyous connection with the world. The paintings demonstrate that what’s out there is worthy of our time, attention and, in this artist’s hands, unalloyed pleasure.”

all photographs of Bill Scott’s artwork are by Joseph Painter.
The artist wishes to thank Gretchen Dykstra for her help in editing this interview

Bill Scott, A Mise en Scène, 2019, Oil on canvas, 46 x 67 inches

 
Larry Groff:     I don’t know of many painters who are also considered scholars on a certain artist, as you are on Berthe Morisot. You became deeply involved with her work and wrote about Morisot on your own, not as part of an academic venture, is that right?

Bill Scott:     When I was young, I painted and drew pictures, wrote short stories, and went to the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA). I was an insecure and anxious kid, and had no plans for my future. I would never have called myself an aspiring artist or writer. Although people sometimes asked, I didn’t think of where I wanted to be in five years or even in one year. The way my life still continues to unfold feels open-ended and circuitous; it’s not so different from how I make my paintings.

Bill Scott, Mary Poppins Picking Fruit, 1964, Ink and pencil on paper, 7 x 10-1/2 inches

My father admired the landscapes of Canaletto, Pissarro, and Sisley, but appreciated them mostly as depictions of nice-looking places in pleasant weather. He loved the finished images, but had no curiosity about how one made a painting. My mother and grandparents preferred the performing arts, and had little interest in the visual. My fifth-grade teacher taught the class about the lives of artists. I still remember seeing the big 1966 Édouard Manet exhibition at PMA. My parents both saw how learning about painters and painting would be valuable for me. So, for my twelfth birthday, my father gave me a small book on the Impressionists; it included one reproduction of a painting by Berthe Morisot.

Berthe Morisot, (French, 1841 – 1895) Young Woman with Brown Hair. 1894 Watercolor and graphite on paper, 9 1/8 x 6 5/8 inches Philadelphia Museum of Art

Eugène Manet, Berthe Morisot, and their daughter, Julie Manet at Bougival, 1880, photograph, private collection

Morisot’s grandson, Clément Rouart, and Bill Scott, 1974
Juziers, France

I had been looking at monographs on other painters and those books allowed me to see the stylistic continuities and changes that occurred in their work. Compared to the others, Morisot was a mystery. Aside from a very good English-language volume of her letters, there was little documentation available. I could find only three or four postcards of her paintings. If her work was included in books on Impressionism, there was usually only one example shown. The National Gallery of Art (NGA) had several early, one mid-career, and one late painting on display. I also saw a late painting at the Phillips Collection and another at the PMA. I was baffled by the stylistic shift between her early and late works. At that point in my life, not unlike many people I have since met, I didn’t see beyond a painting’s subject. Slowly, I became less interested in the subject and increasingly intrigued by Morisot’s energetic paint application and sketch-like aesthetic. Reproductions failed to convey these aspects of her work, and I learned far more by seeing the paintings in person. It was only after I had painted for several years that I began to better understand the complexity of her use of color, composition, drawing, and paint application.

The garden in Mézy-sur-Seine, France where, in 1891, Morisot painted three canvases titled, The Cherry Tree, Photograph by Bill Scott, 1974

Berthe Morisot, (French, 1841 – 1895) The Cherry Tree, 1891, Oil on canvas, 21-5/8 x 13 inches, Private collection

Bill Scott, The Cherry Tree after Berthe Morisot, 2012, Drypoint, 12-1/2 x 7 inches

Bill Scott, The Fourth Cherry Tree, 2012, Oil on canvas, 65 x 34 inches, Private collection

Within a few years, I began writing letters to museums and individuals to ask if they owned any works by Morisot. Many people responded and often sent photographs. Eventually I met two of her grandsons, who showed me works they had recently inherited from their mother. They also took me to see places where Morisot had painted. About a decade after diving into all this—I was now in my mid-twenties—I met Charlie Stuckey. He reached out because he’d been hired to organize a traveling exhibition of Morisot’s work that would open in 1987 at the NGA. I was co-curator and, of course, I wanted to include everything she’d ever painted. Charlie introduced me to his friend Juliet Wilson-Bareau, an English scholar and a specialist on Goya and Manet. At that time she was also working on Vuillard. I credit both of them with pushing me to look at Morisot with a more discerning and critical eye. Charlie and I traveled together off and on over four years to see many of her paintings. After the exhibition was finally installed, we walked around the galleries, just taking it all in. It was as if Charlie had read my mind when at one point he turned to me, smiled, and said, “Don’t you wish we had it all to do over again?”

Entrance to the exhibition, Berthe Morisot: Impressionist, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1987. Photograph

LG:     Did you study art history or writing in addition to  studying to become a painter?

Bill Scott:     I never formally studied art history or writing. When I was in high school, someone told me American Artist magazine was going to publish an article on Morisot. I didn’t look much at art magazines. This one was sold in art supply stores and, for the next few months, whenever I saw it, I’d look to see if the article was there. Eventually, never having found it, I wrote the magazine’s editor to ask if I had somehow missed it. She replied and surprisingly invited me to write it. I did it because the editor agreed to include a color reproduction of a painting I loved but had never seen reproduced in color. The article was published in the fall of 1977, when I was in art school. At first, I didn’t say anything about it to anyone. But one of my classmates saw it and asked, “Hey, that painter you like so much—her name is Berthe Morisot, right?” When I replied, “Yes,” she showed me her copy of the magazine and proclaimed, “This is unbelievable! Did you see this yet? Someone with your exact same name wrote about that very artist you like so much. Isn’t that weird? What are the chances?” I felt crushed, but mumbled something like, “Oh, really? Who would’ve thunk it?”

Berthe Morisot, Julie Manet with her greyhound Laertes, 1893, Oil on canvas, 28-3/4 x 31-1/2 inches Musée Marmottan-Monet, Paris

I loved Fairfield Porter’s paintings and saw his exhibitions. Before I knew his paintings, however, I had read his 1960 review of a Morisot show and had a copy of the book he wrote on Thomas Eakins. I veered toward accounts of painting written by artists or their close friends. I read reviews and articles by Elaine de Kooning and the books by Hans Hofmann and Charles Hawthorne. An older painter gave me books on Renoir written by his son and another by his only student, the painter Jeanne Baudot. After the Morisot article was published, I started writing about living artists. They were all significantly older and I learned from how they reflected on their own lives and artwork. I wasn’t blown away by all of them as artists, but the interaction gave me the opportunity to meet and talk with many I probably wouldn’t have known otherwise. Eileen Goodman and Edith Neff, both of whom were realist painters, were wonderfully encouraging. They proofread some of my articles and even suggested titles when I couldn’t think of one. I suspect I’d cringe now were I to read them again. I doubt they’re as good as I felt they were then, but in meeting and interviewing so many artists, I learned much more than how they painted and their preferred materials. I learned how they felt about their lives, friendships, beliefs, hopes, and disappointments. I was naïve, but grateful I met artists who allowed me to see the art world as a cooperative and caring community.

Arthur B. Carles: Abstract Bouquet (1939) Oil on canvas, 33-1/2 x 39-1/2 inches, Woodmere Art Museum

LG:     Arthur B. Carles, a leading early figure in modern painting and a faculty member at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA), once threw model casts down an elevator shaft, presumably as a statement against academicism at PAFA. Many art schools today have reduced or eliminated traditional figurative training, such as drawing from casts or learning anatomy. How necessary is teaching representational skills today, especially for students who want to paint more abstractly or conceptually?

Bill Scott:     I’ve been asked that question before—it’s a difficult one for me to answer. I’m apt to romanticize my own education because those memories transport me back to how I felt when I was young. It’s easy to wonder why other people wouldn’t want to do that too.

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Study for the mural The Golden Age, 1843-1848 Graphite on wove paper, 10 7/8 x 8 3/4 inches Philadelphia Museum of Art

Suzanne Valadon, Catherine Nude Arranging Her Hair, 1895 Soft ground etching, 8 ½ x 9 ¼ inches, Collection of Bill Scott

There’s a beautiful figure drawing by Ingres that I looked at each time I visited the PMA. I filled several sketchbooks with pencil sketches I copied from it, along with others reproduced in a book of his figure drawings. I also made a bunch of pencil copies of figure drawings and etchings by Suzanne Valadon. In the first year of art school, I attended the required cast drawing, figure drawing, anatomy, perspective, and portrait painting classes. It was work and I didn’t want to do a lot of it. Some of the teachers had preposterous personalities, but learned I didn’t need to like people to learn from them. My impression is that education has since become an almost exclusively feel-good experience. I certainly didn’t want to do all of what I was told to do in school, but at what point in our lives are we able to do only what we want? When I was in school, I was just so grateful the draft had ended. I’d always been certain I’d be drafted and killed in Vietnam. Hence, to be in art school was a gift.

Bill Scott
Study for, “Interior”, 1979
Charcoal on canvas, 72 inches high
Destroyed

Bill Scott
Self-Portrait, 2006
Drypoint, 14 x 6 inches

Bill Scott in front of his paintings in the Annual Student Exhibition,Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1978

Bill Scott in front of his paintings in the Annual Student Exhibition,
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1977

 
 
Once my good friend Evan Fugazzi, a wonderful younger painter who then painted representational imagery, asked if I could talk with him about how one paints an abstraction. I offered to meet for coffee, but warned him I had no answer for him. I was grateful for his inquiry because he really made me think and question myself. Later that evening I described the meeting to my friend Kevin Finklea, a minimalist painter and sculptor. His response amazed me, because in one sentence he said everything I had hoped to say. “Hasn’t he realized,” Kevin said, “that there’s nothing abstract about not painting representationally.”

Evan Fugazzi, Blinds, 2018
Acrylic on linen, 55-1/2 x 43-1/4 inches

Kevin Finklea, Installation view, Pentimenti Gallery, Philadelphia, Pa.

LG:     I understand you once helped put together a show of Carles’s work. Has he been an important influence for you?

Arthur B. Carles, Nude with an Apple, c. 1914 Oil on canvas, 38-3/4 x 51-3/4 inches, Location unknown

Arthur B. Carles (1882-1952) Self-Portrait, c. 1915 Etching, 3-5/8 x 5 inches Woodmere Art Museum

Bill Scott:      Even before I was an art student I met many older artists who had studied with Carles. He was their hero, but they were mine. But I learned about him from them. He began his career as a very good academic painter and he later lived in Paris, where he met Matisse and embraced Fauvist color. By the 1930s, he made abstractions that foreshadowed Abstract Expressionism. In 1941, at age fifty-nine, a stroke forced him to stop painting. He died a decade later, before I was born. Barbara Wolanin, a curator based in Washington, DC and the foremost Carles expert, organized a large traveling exhibition in 1982 to mark the centennial of his birth. That was the first time I saw so many of his paintings in one place. I admire how his vision continued to evolve.

Betty W. Hubbard (1901-1967) Norbert Guterman, 1927-28, Oil on canvas, 16-1/2 x 13-1/4 inches Woodmere Art Museum

Elizabeth Godshalk Burger (American, 1917 – 2012)
Interior of Arthur B. Carles’ Studio, Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, 1940
Oil on canvasboard, 12 x 16 inches
Woodmere Art Museum
Gift of Bill Scott in honor of Joseph and Pamela Yohlin, 2020

I first learned about Carles’s student Betty W. Hubbard because someone told me she had known Berthe Morisot’s daughter. She translated Morisot’s correspondence and paid for its English-language publication. When I was in high school, I met Hubbard’s eldest daughter, Leslie Symington, and helped to photograph and catalog all her mother’s paintings, watercolors, and pastels. Soon thereafter I met Morris Blackburn, Quita Brodhead, Moy Glidden, Faye Swengel Badura, Elizabeth Godshalk Burger, and other artists who studied with him. I was closest with Jane Piper, who was one of his very last students. Without doubt Carles was an incredible teacher and a magnetic personality. Even years later, all his students spoke of him as if he were still some sort of aphrodisiac. He was a continuing inspiration on their lives and art.

Quita Brodhead (1901-2002)
Implosion, c. 1980
Oil on canvas, 36 x 50 inches
Woodmere Art Museum
Gift of Bill Scott, 2011

Jane Piper (American, 1916 – 1991)
Still Life with Squash, Pineapple and Wine Bottle, 1941-1942
Oil on canvas, 24 x 30 inches
Collection of Bill Scott

[Left to right] Quita Brodhead and Moy Glidden at the Arthur B. Carles: Orchestration of Color exhibition
Woodmere Art Museum, 2000
(photograph by Bill Scott)

In his classes most students painted like him. Decades later this caused confusion when those paintings, unsigned, would appear for sale in auctions or commercial galleries. The Carles-like color would prompt hopeful sellers to identify these as original works by Carles. Once you saw how the individual students painted it became more obvious who in his circle painted which ones. Hoping to correct this, in 1988, I organized an exhibition of work by his students at PAFA. Then in 2000 I organized a more comprehensive student show for Woodmere Art Museum, and presented it in conjunction with the Carles exhibition organized by Hollis Taggart and Barbara Wolanin, when it traveled there. All these projects were huge learning experiences. I think in doing all this I unwittingly shot myself in the foot because ever since I’m cited as a painter working in the Carles tradition. It may be true, but I’ve never liked feeling as if I am being put in a box.

Jane Piper in her studio, Philadelphia, 1982, Photograph by Bill Scott

LG:     You mentioned that you were close to Jane Piper—what are some important things you learned from her?

Bill Scott:     I loved Jane. I met her in late 1972, after seeing a show of her paintings at a commercial gallery in Philadelphia. I wrote her a letter and she responded with an invitation to meet and see her studio. Thereafter, I visited her every week or so and saw how she changed her canvases as she worked on them. She always asked me what I would do to the painting she had on her easel. She was very patient with me and spoke with me about my paintings. Although she taught, I felt she was wary of art schools that awarded lots of prizes and instilled students with a false sense of accomplishment. She spoke of art and artists as a community that existed internationally. It was refreshing for me because I encountered many artists who felt nothing mattered beyond the few square miles of Philadelphia bordered by Vine and South Streets and the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers. After Jane died, I met a few of her former students who disliked her and felt her teaching was formulaic. I remember feeling crushed when I heard that, but realize I feel that same way about some of my own former teachers, who I know were loved by my friends. I never attended one of Jane’s classes and our relationship was one on one. After the first Morisot article was finished, I wrote an article on Jane and helped her catalog and photograph all her early canvases. She told me, at the suggestion of Carles, she attended Hans Hofmann’s Provincetown school in the summer of 1941. In hindsight she said, “I could have learned much more from Hofmann than I did, but I thought Carles had said it all in simpler terms.” That’s the way I felt about Jane in comparison to the other teachers I studied with.

After art school, I worked five years in the gallery where she showed her work. I didn’t always like the job, but I always enjoyed organizing her exhibitions with her. She had shown her paintings in New York when she was young and when she was dying she wanted very much to have another exhibition there. One evening I called to talk with her good friend Charles Cajori, a painter who had taught with Jane at the New York Studio School, to ask if the show at the school might be possible. He went out of his way to arrange an exhibition of her last works that Jane and I organized. One of the founders of the school was Mercedes Matter, Carles’s eldest daughter. Since Carles had been Jane’s mentor, she and Mercedes had known each other their entire lives. They cared about each other, but there was a strange rivalry between them and Mercedes had undermined Jane a few times. Rumors had circulated for years that Carles had affairs with many of his female students, and apparently Mercedes always wondered about him and Jane. She finally asked Jane point blank if she had slept with Carles. Jane replied, “No.” When Jane told me this story, she laughed and said, “And then Mercedes asked me why on earth I hadn’t slept with him! She was impossible. It was as if she were mad at me. There was no pleasing her.”

Jane Piper’s studio, Philadelphia, c. 1982
Photograph by Bill Scott

Jane Piper (American, 1916 – 1991)
Sketch from Canova’s ‘Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss, 1793,’ 1973
Charcoal on laid paper, 19 x 25 inches
Collection of Bill Scott

Jane Piper (American, 1916 – 1991)
Romanian Blouse, 1981-82
Oil on canvas, 44 x 40 inches
The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. 1987

The exhibition opened in January 1991 and looked beautiful. When Mercedes arrived midway through the opening reception, she led Jane out of the gallery and didn’t return for about forty minutes. When I later asked Jane what had happened, she told me Mercedes had taken her to see one of her own paintings that she’d had someone hang for her in an adjacent room. I couldn’t believe Jane was expected to talk about and praise another painter’s artwork in the middle of a reception when her own friends had come to support and encourage her. Jane was better than I at tolerating narcissists.

One week after Jane’s opening, my own mother died. I’d been trying so hard to somehow keep both Jane and my mother alive. My father had died the previous year and I was paralyzed by sadness when my mother suddenly died. I was still in shock when Jane passed away several months later. I felt as if the core of my world had disappeared. I’m forever grateful for my friendship with Jane. Her voice is no longer there, but for a number of years, hers was the one I continued to hear most clearly whenever I was alone in my studio.

Joan Mitchell on the balcony of her home in Vétheuil, France, May 1980, photograph by Bill Scott

Preparing to hang Joan Mitchell’s, “The Good-bye Door,” Galerie Jean Fournier, Paris, May 1980, photograph by Bill Scott

Joan Mitchell, (1925-1992)
“The Good-bye Door,” 1980
Quadriptych. Oil on canvas, H. 280; W. 720 cm
Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’Art moderne. Purchased in 1980, on long term loan to the Musée de l’Orangerie, 2017
© Bertrand Prévost – Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI /Dist. RMN-GP © Estate of Joan Mitchell

LG:      You also studied informally with Joan Mitchell in Vétheuil, France. Having an influential painter like her as a mentor must have been challenging at times. What was it like to study with her? Was she more beneficial or problematic in terms of finding your way as a painter?

Bill Scott:     I saw Joan’s work in her 1974 solo exhibition at the Whitney, but it wasn’t until I saw her paintings at the Galerie Jean Fournier in Paris in 1980 that I fell in love with them. I first met her when she was installing there. She was engaging. She handed me a bottle of beer and immediately enlisted me to help hang her 9 x 23 1/2 foot, four-panel canvas, The Goodbye Door. A week later at her place in Vétheuil, northwest of Paris, I celebrated my twenty-fourth birthday with her. Joan invited me to come back and stay the following summer. She said I could help feed her four dogs and promised that the kid down the street would teach me to speak French. Most importantly, she said, I would have uninterrupted time to paint. Joan lived in a large house next to one where Claude Monet lived a hundred years earlier. The landscape appeared pretty much the same way I imagined it had been when Monet was there; it was truly like standing inside one of his paintings. The Monet landscape, however, proved to be the most seductive backdrop to what became a traumatic summer. When I told an older French woman that I was staying with Joan, she snapped back, “Don’t tell me anything about Joan Mitchell,” she warned. “She’s destroyed more lives than any one person has the right to do.”
 

Joan Mitchell’s garden, Vétheuil, France, 1981, photograph by Bill Scott

Joan Mitchell’s studio, Vétheuil, France, May 1980, photograph by Bill Scott

Joan Mitchell’s studio, Vétheuil, France, May 1980, photograph by Bill Scott

It was astute advice. At times Joan was very kind, but she could also be cruel in a way unlike anyone I’d ever met. Before meeting her I painted still lifes and figures. In Vétheuil, I stayed outside and tried to paint landscapes, but quickly veered toward abstractions that included elements of trees, plants, and water. Another painter who was staying there, Joyce Pensato, remained inside painting self-portraits. Whenever it rained or was too cold, Joyce let me paint with her in the underground room that served as her studio. Joan referred to our studio as the cistern. She had installed painting racks along one wall where many of her earlier large unsold canvases were stacked. We had a key to the door. When she gave each of us a key to our studio, she cautioned us to always be careful who we allowed in to see our paintings. Joan occasionally would ask to see what we were working on, but usually she waited to be invited.

I painted every day and at lunchtime walked around the village or down by the Seine. After we had dinner together, Joan usually walked the dogs up to her studio where she painted until 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning. If a painting was going badly or if she was waiting for the paint to dry, she’d postpone going to her studio. On those evenings we’d all watch TV together while Joan drank a huge bottle of Jack Daniel’s. She had a dual personality that was exacerbated when she drank. When she was filled with love and wonderment for painting she called herself Little Joan. I loved Little Joan. But without much warning Little Joan inevitably became Big Joan, a cruel and terrifying person. Once Big Joan was furious because she had given Joyce several very good tubes of earth colors. She complained Joyce had wasted the paint, claiming she might just as well have painted with mud. Later, but too late, Joan realized she had been too harsh. The next morning, she presented Joyce with a small, still-wet, vertical painting she made after we’d gone to bed. Joan purposely painted it with earth colors, mostly browns and blacks, intending that it might inspire Joyce to use earth colors a little differently. She handed the painting to Joyce. It was a gift.
 

Joyce Pensato in the cistern-studio, Vétheuil, 1981, photograph by Bill Scott

Joan Pensato’s portrait of Bill Scott, in-progress, in the cistern-studio, Vétheuil, 1981, photograph by Bill Scott

Bill Scott, Along the River, 1989, watercolor and gouache on paper, 9 x 13-21/2 inches

Bill Scott, “Untitled,” 1981, oil on canvas, approximately 39 x 31-1/2 inches, location unknown. Painted in Vétheuil.

Joyce and I didn’t stay in touch after I left Vétheuil. But about six years later, we ran into each other in New York. Typical for me, I immediately started to apologize for having been so crazy when we shared that studio. She stopped me. “There’s no reason to apologize,” she said. “You were the only sane one there, because you left. You knew to leave. I’ll always remember the morning you left,” she added, “when you gave me the phone number for the taxi service and tried to teach me the French words to order a cab and get myself out of there.” A moment later her eyes lit up as if she was visualizing something. She proclaimed, “Hey! Remember that little painting Joan gave me? Well, I left it there just to spite her.”

I thought Joan was one of the greatest living painters. I realize this was a burden for her to know and it took me a few years to learn to never tell her how much I liked her paintings. Admirably, Joan was egalitarian and generous in her curiosity about other artists and their work, but her scary side negated her ability to be as helpful as she wanted to be. One evening, after a dinner with four younger painters, Joan suggested each of us show our paintings to each other. The next evening she was sad and angry at all of us because, after looking at our work, none of us asked if we could go to her studio to see what she was working on. That was what we had all wanted to do, but we were too timid to ask. Unfortunately, Joan ended up feeling left out.

Bill Scott, Untitled, 1989, watercolor and gouache on paper, 15 x 11 inches

One summer afternoon a group of New York Studio School students came to meet Joan. While they followed her into the studio one student, Nancy Prusinowski, stayed behind. While everyone was looking at Joan’s paintings, Nancy set up her easel on the terrace and painted a small alla prima landscape of the Seine. Joan must have loved that Nancy preferred to paint and bought her painting on the spot. Thereafter it always hung in her house. Mary Page Evans, a painter from Wilmington, Delaware, was someone Joan liked a lot. When I started visiting again in the late 1980s, a small landscape drawing by Mary Page was always hanging on a wall in Joan’s bedroom. There were small paintings of trees that her friend Carl Plansky painted during his visits. Malcolm Morley visited in the late 1980s and made pencil drawings there. Joan later taped a bunch of them all over the dining room door. An early mostly green painting by Sam Francis was something he traded with Joan for one of her works. I was surprised when a friend of the painter Alex Katz visited. Joan asked him to ask Katz if he would trade one of her own pictures for an impression of a lithograph he made of his dog, Sunny.

The best artworks were in her library upstairs, where we watched TV after dinner. Her small five-panel Little Trip from 1969 hung above the door. The other pictures there included an ink drawing by Franz Kline, a 1950s mixed-media drawing by de Kooning from his Woman series, and an early black-and-white nude drawing by Matisse. There were two early American portraits, a wife and husband, depicting two of Joan’s ancestors. Two or three small bronze figures by Daumier were on a shelf above the television. Seeing them so frequently made me rethink de Kooning’s bronze sculptures, which I’d never much cared for before then.
 

Bill Scott, Moonlit Water Smooth as Glass, 1985, oil on canvas, 40 x 42 inches, private collection

Joan lived for a long time with the painter Jean-Paul Riopelle. They had separated not long before I first visited. His paintings and bronze sculptures were still in almost every room of the house. Joan talked that summer about her desire to make sculpture, specifically bas-reliefs in clay. She stopped herself from working with clay, because sculpture had been Riopelle’s thing. Were she to make sculpture, she said, she felt she would be perceived as being “under him.” She paused for a moment after saying that because it was important to her to make sure we both caught her sexual innuendo, which was impossible to have missed. On the wall behind the television was a case holding old rifles that she clearly knew how to use. One night, she furiously announced if Riopelle ever tried to return she would take one of the rifles and shoot him dead. Another late night, when she was rip-roaring drunk, she commanded me to take down all of Riopelle’s paintings. She wanted him gone. But I was stunned afterward when very sadly she confessed how, deep down, she believed Riopelle to be a far superior artist to herself and she would miss having his paintings around.

Bill Scott’s watercolors and gouaches hanging on the east wall of Joan Mitchell’s studio, Vétheuil, France,1989

In the fall of 1989 Joan sent me money for airfare and invited me to come stay with her again in Vétheuil. By then she was ill. She promised not to fight with me and said she wanted to give me a painting. Upon arrival she handed me a key to her studio and encouraged me to paint there. I worked there until 4:00 in the afternoon when she would come in to paint. I loved being able to see her paintings and observe how she changed them everyday over the course of a few weeks. She spoke with me a lot about my own work and hung my pictures on the east wall of her studio. It was a wonderful few weeks.

LG:      What lesson or memory from your student days resonates most deeply with you today?

Bill Scott:      I was so naïve and gullible. In high school I desperately wanted to leave home to attend the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Good friends of mine lived there and I loved visiting the museum there. My friends teased me the school’s students were all taught to make paintbrushes using their own pubic hair—and those would be the brushes I was required to use. I was afraid my friends might not be teasing me. To be safe, I decided not to go. I was such an idiot. It reminds me of what our anatomy instructor, Robert Beverly Hale, once told us: “We see what we already know, until we eventually know what it is we are seeing.”

I also remember on the first day of art school when the dean, Henry Hotz, gathered all the incoming students for a meeting. He forewarned us of difficulties we were likely to encounter in our pursuit of being visual artists. The thing I best remember was his prediction: “In five years from now, only ten of you will still be making art. And in ten years, only five of you will still be making art.”

LG:     Are there any artist biographies that you found particularly influential?

Bill Scott: I still like Philippe Huisman’s 1962 biography of Berthe Morisot and the book on Philip Guston written by his daughter. Other books I go back to include Chatting with Matisse: The Lost 1941 Interview by Pierre Courthion (Getty Research Institute, 2013); My Love Affair with Modern Art: Behind the Scenes with a Legendary Curator, a 2006 book of the collected essays by Katharine Kuh edited by Avis Berman; and Siri Hustvedt’s Mysteries of the Rectangle: Essays on Painting, which I absolutely love and recommend to everyone. I recently read Robin Lippincott’s Blue Territory, which is appropriately subtitled, A Meditation on the Life and Art of Joan Mitchell. I’m about to begin reading the new biography of Nell Blaine written by Cathy Curtis.

LG:     You showed at the Prince Street Gallery for a few years before going to Hollis Taggart in 2004. Other than making exceptionally beautiful and masterful paintings, what else did you do that was helpful to you in getting into that gallery?

Bill Scott:     I met the folks at Hollis Taggart in 1997, shortly after they presented the exhibition The Color of Modernism: The American Fauves. A painting by Carles was reproduced on the catalog cover. To follow up on the success of that show, the gallery started thinking of how to organize a Carles exhibition. Barbara Wolanin was already involved and I offered to help. Their Carles show opened in 2000. At that point the gallery committed to present a retrospective exhibition for Quita Brodhead to coincide with her one hundredth birthday the following year. Of Carles’s surviving students, Quita was the one who had been closest with him for the longest period of time. The gallery mostly represented the estates of artists and the few living painters they represented, like Quita, were much older. So, it never crossed my mind to try to interest them in my work. Believing there was no chance they would ever show my work, oddly, made our relationship much easier and more relaxed for me. At that time, I was exhibiting my work in a few commercial galleries, but a couple of years later all of them closed. I didn’t know what to do. I told Hollis about the closings and he invited me to have a solo exhibition the following May. I knew him and his colleagues seven years before they represented me. It helped that we knew each other well and had already had our differences of opinion and tug-of-wars that are more awkward in a more conventional artist-dealer relationship. A few years earlier, Hollis once told me he liked my work and lamented that the gallery, back then, did not represent living artists. I teased and shared my hope that my work was strong enough that I would be a dead artist for far more years than I was a living one.

Painting from 1980 – 1998

I continued exhibiting in Philadelphia, but concurrently, between 1989 and 1997, I had four solo shows in New York at Prince Street Gallery. My friends Iona Fromboluti and Douglas Wirls showed there. They suggested I apply for a solo show in the summer guest artist slot. I presented an exhibition of my pastels in May 1989. I had a wonderful time. Joan Mitchell sent people in to see it, and Jane Piper and Quita Brodhead came to the opening. When my parents died, Iona and Doug encouraged me to join the gallery. I’m still grateful to them for that. I had three more solo exhibitions there, in 1993, 1995, and 1997. In January 1998 I left the gallery because I felt I was a better advocate for other artists than I was for myself. It was six more years before Hollis Taggart invited me to show with him. It’s been an absolute pleasure working with him and his colleagues Debra, Kara, Stan, Jillian, Lydia, James, and Martin.

Painting from 2003 – 2017, courtesy of Hollis Taggart

Bill Scott:      I never feel I’m doing or accomplishing anything, yet when I look back I realize I’ve made a lot of work. I’m usually working on ten or fifteen paintings at any one time. Many of them are facing the wall because I simply don’t know what to do next. I spend a lot of time just looking at them and don’t touch some of them for months. But I rarely abandon a painting and, if I do, I inevitably come back to it. For example, I have two canvases I started in 1992 and every year or so I paint a little bit on them before turning them to face the wall again. Most paintings take six months to a year or two to complete. Throughout the entire academic year, when I taught, my energy was focused on helping students figure out how to advance and finish their own art. Eventually it dawned on me that, even though I was working on many canvases, I was unable to finish a single canvas of my own between late September and early May. A week or two after school ended in May, I’d find myself completing eight or nine paintings in a two- to three-week period. I don’t know why that was.

Printmaking

Bill Scott:     Twenty years ago I temporarily had no studio where I could paint. I started making etchings with Cindi R. Ettinger, an artist and master printmaker, in her Philadelphia studio. At the time she was working on a multicolor aquatint with Neil Welliver and additional prints with Sarah McEneaney, Celia Reisman, Daniel Heyman, and Kevin Strickland. I wasn’t usually in Cindi’s studio when the other artists were there. But Cindi hung the different states of each print on her walls, and I learned a tremendous amount from seeing them.

Five copper plates and individual color proofs. Installation view of Bill Scott: Hydrangea with working states and color proofs, C. R. Ettinger Studio, Philadelphia. April 24 -June 11, 2014

Cindi Ettinger in her studio, Philadelphia, 2015

Installation view with eighteen color trail proofs. Bill Scott: Hydrangea with working states and color proofs, C. R. Ettinger Studio, Philadelphia. April 24 -June 11, 2014

Six etchings printed on plaster by Cindi Ettinger hanging in her studio

 
I started out making little black-and-white linear etchings. At first I sat in my backyard and, looking at the hollyhocks and other plants, drew directly on the copper or zinc. I got tired of the time it took for the etching to be in the acid bath, so I went to a toy store and bought a Dremel marketed as a way for children to write their names on a bracelet. That created a less steady and differentiated line that made me begin to think a little differently—it took me a step away from making etchings that, to me, looked like etchings.

Soon thereafter, I started working with color that opened up tons of other possibilities. Interestingly, I started to realize if I was stymied while working on a painting, I began to pretend the painting was an etching. “What would you do,” I’d ask myself, “if this were an etching?” And vice versa. At the start of working with color, I would separate the colors and not have them overlap much. In hindsight, I realize I was probably like one of those people who doesn’t want the different foods on their plate to touch. I built up to overlapping many of the colors. When making an etching it was difficult to be improvisational in the way I am when I’m painting. I had to know in advance, for example, where the yellow was going to be and where it would overlap with blue to make green or with red to make orange or with both to make brown. And things always changed.

Bill Scott, Larry’s Garden: Winter, 2007, etching with aquatint, drypoint and white ground in four colors, plate: 17-3/8 x 17-1/4 inches

One of the first four-color etchings I made, Larry’s Garden: Winter (2007), I planned to make with red, blue, yellow, and black. In the course of printing color trial proofs, I decided the yellow plate would look better if it were printed in black—and it did! Now that there was a new black plate I had to figure out what color to make the original black plate. The printing inks don’t always align with oil paint colors. To see if I could try to have a print better match a painting, I started using oil paints that were pretty close to the inks: Carmine Red, Ultramarine Blue, Cobalt Blue, Indian Yellow. I love an ink color called Solferino Purple. But I could only really make it work in very small areas. Making etchings with Cindi allowed me to see again how gorgeous the medium can be. I love the authority and presence of a richly inked printed line. I think my color etchings are among the best things I’ve made and I wouldn’t have made any of them were it not for Cindi.

LG:     What paints do you use? Do you look for certain attributes of the paint quality?

Bill Scott:     In 2002 or 2003, when I started painting with oils again, I spoke with my friend Scott Noel. At his suggestion, I began painting with Old Holland paints, which are what he also uses. I loved them and, in using them, I began to better understand and appreciate how he uses color as both tone and color. Another painter friend, Gilbert Lewis, worked in art supply stores for decades and numerous times he suggested colors he thought I should try. He introduced me to Winsor & Newton’s Perylene Black that I love, especially when mixed with yellows or pink. He also persuaded me to try Gamblin’s radiant colors. I dislike the colors, but they’re great to mix with other colors. For example, the radiant green and radiant pink mixed together make a wonderful gray. I like the saturation in the colors made by both Vasari and by Mussini. I especially love the smell of the Mussini paints. I also have a lot of Williamsburg paints. I’m willing try almost anything. Sometimes, if I feel I’m at an impasse, I’ll go to the art supply store and buy a tube of a color I dislike. When I get back in the studio, I become completely engaged with discovering what I can do with it.

Bill Scott:     I’ve always been drawn to still life as a springboard for making paintings. Sometimes my paintings end up looking like still lifes, but I no longer paint from them. In the past I occasionally taught painting workshops. At those times, I liked to set up a big nonsensical still life at the center of the room around which the students painted at their easels. Those arrangements echo the color, shapes, and space of my paintings. I feel so excited when setting up the still life. I tell the students I want them to paint the most representational painting possible vis-à-vis color. I want them to focus on mixing the color so it’s accurate to what they’re seeing. I follow that by saying, “No drawing!” It’s a challenge for someone to be told that they’re not allowed to draw in an art class. They come to see how a line can be created where two colors meet. I want them to create the painting by juxtaposing the shapes, color, and space. Ultimately, I think that leads to a believable sense of what they are seeing. And, of course, they end up drawing.

In the last half of the class, I have them leave their palettes where they are, but I make them turn their easels around. They continue to mix the colors while looking at the still life. But they turn their backs to the still life when painting. This forces them to hold the image in their mind’s eye. These paintings are usually their best, and the nice thing for me is that they’re able to see that. It might sound mean, but I don’t want them to immediately know how to do what I’m asking them to do. I want to help and allow them to figure it out. I love the E. L. Doctorow quote, “Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

I always share with the students my belief that to paint is to allow oneself to feel vulnerable. I also say the best paintings are those made when the artist doesn’t yet know how to make them. Almost every time I go into my studio, I feel as if I no longer remember how to paint. That’s great! One needs to approach the process with a lot of uncertainty. At the start of every workshop, before they’ve even really looked at the setup, there’s always someone who protests. Or they basically stomp their feet and say they don’t want to paint a still life. Sometimes, I think, they’re disappointed because they expected the workshop to be fun, like one of those classes where people drink wine and perhaps flirt more than paint. These folks always throw me off balance. By the end of the class, they usually come around, paint a lot, and leave having gained the most. Surprisingly to me, they’re often the ones I end up having the best connection with.

Bill Scott’s studio, Philadelphia, 2017. Photograph by Paul Rider

LG:     Is responding to music part of your painting process?

Bill Scott:     One of the first concerts I ever attended was to see a duo named Hedge and Donna. They sang at a small place called The Main Point that was close to where I lived. They sang a song titled “Jamie,” which I still love. There’s a line that goes: “Your life has brought you places where your mind can make you happy, where your thoughts don’t drive you crazy.”

That is my own aspiration, my hope. I try to go into my studio with a calm and empty mind. Music is often able to help me to achieve that state of mind. I often, but not always, listen to music when I paint. Music may be for me what a cigarette is for friends who smoke. It allows me to pause, step back, and with a conscious mind contemplate what I’m working on. Sometimes, except for the sound of the brush touching the canvas, I prefer the silence. I never paint along to the music or attempt to make a visual image that illustrates or explains it. Now and then, I’ve stolen a line from a song to use as a painting’s title.

Bill Scott:     Like many others, I fell in love with Joan Baez’s songs the first time I heard one. An older friend said the first time he heard her sing was on the car radio while driving on the highway. He was so stunned, he said, he pulled over to the side of the road just to listen. I knew people who refused to play her recordings because they disliked her politics. I never understood that because, to me, her politics stemmed from an inherent kindness toward other people.

I also became a fan of Joan’s younger sister, Mimi Fariña, who was also a singer. I loved her concerts and her songs that were like bittersweet short stories: straightforward, filled with sadness, humor and anger, but totally lacking in pretension or grandiosity. For a while she sang with Martine Habib, who also had a gorgeous voice. Mimi and Martine were both very friendly. In the 1990s they came to the opening receptions for three solo exhibitions I had in San Francisco. Mimi once told me, “It takes a career to have a career: in addition to being an artist one was required to have a manager. Unfortunately artists are usually required to have both of those jobs in addition to having a salaried job so they can pay their living expenses.” It’s important advice I’ve shared with anyone contemplating a life in the arts. I felt sad as she phased out her singing career, which never took off in the way she hoped. Instead she focused on Bread & Roses, a nonprofit cooperative organization she founded in 1974 that brings free music and entertainment to jails, prisons, hospitals, juvenile facilities, and nursing homes. Mimi died in 2001, but Bread & Roses continues.

When I was very young, I did send a letter of admiration to Joan. Her aunt responded and sent a drawing. It wasn’t until I was older that I realized what an extraordinarily kind gesture that was. With this in mind, when I first worked for commercial art galleries, I offered solo exhibitions to many of the painters I had met at art school. Something in me wanted to disprove the school dean’s dire prediction. “I’ll show you,” is what I was thinking to myself. More recently I’ve enjoyed organizing group shows for Cerulean Arts, a gallery in Philadelphia run by my good friends Tina Rocha and Michael Kowbuz. A few years ago I visited San Francisco. Before going, I contacted Martine, Mimi’s singing partner, and she proposed that we meet for dinner. My friend and I met her at a restaurant and Martine surprised both of us by bringing Joan with her. Afterward Joan took us to her house and showed us her studio. She’s been painting more and more—mostly figures and portraits—since she’s stopped giving concerts. When I organized an exhibition for Cerulean last year, I invited her to participate and she sent some beautiful drawings. I was so grateful and felt absolutely wonderful. Her’s is a kindness I hope I’ve also been able to extend to other people.

LG:     Speaking of being kind, I heard you talk about the need to paint something about kindness – perhaps as a talisman to ward off evil or as an antidote to our toxic times. You said, “The happier I am usually the pictures are darker but when I’m depressed they are very bright…So I’m going to be painting very bright and buoyant pictures until the end of 2020”.

Bill Scott:      I paint what I yearn to see – or perhaps I should say, I paint the feeling I long to feel. A close friend was the landscape painter, Rose Naftulin, whose husband unexpectedly died when she was about fifty years old. After his death, she told me, she always felt peaceful when first waking up in the morning. A second later, though, she would remember and then she would begin to weep. Like many artists I know, contrary to how she felt deep down, her paintings exuded a buoyant pleasure. I began seeing them as her unconscious attempt to prolong that moment of awakening before she remembered. I try to do something similar. I like the W. H. Auden quotation, “Pleasure is by no means an infallible critical guide, but it is the least fallible.”

Bill Scott, An Inherently Hopeful Gesture, 2019, oil in canvas, 39 ½ x 55 inches

Bill Scott, A Prolonged Moment, 2019, oil in canvas, 39 ½ x 55 inches

LG:     I’m curious to hear your thoughts about how making beautiful things is still important for painters to make when we’re faced with the horror and outrages of war, climate disaster, and the potential collapse of civilization?

Bill Scott:     I think to paint and to show others your paintings, at its core, is a way to say, “I exist.” There are so many painters from the past whose work I love and am grateful they left behind such beautiful, resilient, and timeless images. Those images also say “I existed,” and there are days when I wish I could go back in time for no other reason than to watch some of those artists painting in their studios. With that in mind, on a very deep level, I think of making my paintings as being parallel to writing love letters to an unknown future. I’m fairly self-defeating, so I follow that desire by teasing that at some point in the future my paintings are apt only to be used as flotation devices or window coverings. The world has changed so much in the few weeks since we started this conversation, I now feel foolish for saying that. I wish that all this time, instead of thinking of the future, that I had focused on painting love letters for the here and now. When I read the news, I wonder why anyone continues to paint. I know it’s what one is supposed to do, but I don’t want to paint imagery that echoes or illustrates the news. I couldn’t bear to do that. I’m at an age where I accept, reluctantly, that sooner or later we’ll all be gone, probably without a trace. I was, and remain, very moved by the end of the book Long Time Coming and a Long Time Gone, a posthumous collection of essays and poetry by Richard Fariña. His widow, Mimi, wrote, “I had a dream a few days after he died that we met and I wanted to hug him and he said, ‘You can’t.’ He said, ‘Just embrace me with your thought.’”
 

Bill Scott, An Interval of Silence, 2019, oil in canvas, 38 ½ x 40 ½ inches

Bill Scott, Untitled, 2019, watercolor and acrylic on paper, 12 x 16 inches

I love that idea: to “embrace me with your thought.” I hope someday my paintings can be that kind of a gift and that somehow, in an unknown future, someone who sees them might feel they have experienced an existential embrace.

Bill Scott, Rose, 2019, watercolor and acrylic on paper, 12 x 16 inches

Prince Street Gallery 50th Anniversary Catalog (scroll to bottom) with essay by Bill Scott

Hollis Taggart’s Bill Scott page

2018 catalog:

2016 catalog:

2013 catalog:

The post Interview with Bill Scott appeared first on Painting Perceptions.

View from the Porch, East Side of House , 2003-2006, Acrylic on canvas 38 3/4” x 48”

I am very fortunate and grateful for the recent invitation by Stanley Lewis to visit his studio and home in Western Mass. and talk in person. Our conversation continued and helped to follow up on the second part of our interview which was recorded previously in our phone conversation. (Link to part one of this interview)

When I arrived he showed me a large oil painting on canvas, a work in progress made over this past winter, on hold now till the trees lose their leaves again. The subject was a view looking toward the front of his home with the light through the trees and the surrounding yard and garden. He uncovered protective plastic sheeting that was draped over his hand built easel stand. As this was a work in progress I decided to respect his privacy and not take photos of his setup or record the conversation–however, the photos above show earlier painting spots. He then explained how elements in this motif informed his decisions for his painting process. There was a large, maybe 1.5 – 2 foot, wooden viewfinder attached to the easel with clamps in which he looked through to judge how elements in the scene related in space as well as to the picture plane. This easel had numerous practical advantages such as ways its construction offered protection from the sun and wind as well as space for the palette and other items.

Front Yard, Leeds, MA, 2001-02, pencil, 42” x 43”, Collection of Cyrus and Myrtle Katzen

The painting would expand both in depth and dimension as layers of paint are added or additional sections of canvas attached as needed to meet any needs for an expanded view as determined by the relation of the boundaries of the viewfinder and the canvas edges.

Some sections of the painting that needing protection were masked by clear plastic sheeting and areas needing revision could be layered with clear plastic sheeting used to paint on and then attached using bonding adhesive (such as palette scraping and medium of some sort) additionally new repainted sections could be stapled as well as glued on. It was all very open and nothing was seemed to be held too preciously–instead the goal seemed more to get unity and integrity in the composition. I was surprised by his unconventional methods but after seeing the astonishing surface facture and compositions of his finished paintings, this approach made sense. We briefly discussed how being overly concerned with any technique’s archival longevity seemed less important than bringing integrity and vitality to the painting. That was something the art conservators could worry about in the distant future (if future humans still cared about the condition of paintings when faced with the more disastrous consequences of climate change and such.)

View from Barn Window , 2008, Oil on canvas 14” x 14”

View from Bathroom Window, West Side of House, 2004-2007, Charcoal, graphite on paper 38” x 48”

The morass of details and visual chaos one is confronted with in outdoor painting sensibly leads most painters to simplify things as much as possible. Lewis respects painters who go that route but his investigations and perhaps contrarian sensibility leads him to paint nature as he finds it. I couldn’t detect any doctrinaire painting philosophy or nature worship zealotry here, instead–that for him–what works is to trust that careful observation can lead to a greater authenticity and possibly reveal powerful visual surprises–along with directions for the paintings abstract structure. Lewis’ way of merging the observational with the abstraction comes out of the importance of getting a ‘Double Meaning’ in painting that comes in part from his study with Leland Bell as well as his interest in Jean Hélion and Lewis speaks more about this in the interview.

Stanley often speaks in a humble, plain-spoken manner–often stopping mid-point–seemingly to weigh-in on other points of view or add a related thought. He was uncomfortable hearing anything he viewed as over the top praise from admirers. He often focused on the many difficulties he encounters with his daily struggle in making paintings that meet his expectations.

He told me that not long ago he needed more space in his studio and decided to throw out a huge number of his early studies, quicker works and more abstract paintings to make more room for his current work. He expressed dissatisfaction with many of early works and that getting rid of them was freeing and a relief, that he could work with less of the past hovering over him, cluttering up his present concern with spending more time on the paintings, working everything out however long it takes to resolve and that a quicker, gestural manner is no longer the best approach for him.

Lewis also spoke often about the notion of a ‘Double Meaning’ or ‘Double Rhythm’ in painting is more visual than verbal and he expressed dissatisfaction with how he has tried to explain what this meant in his painting. I showed him the quote from the book that Deborah Rosenthal edited Poussin, Seurat and Double Rhythm by Jean Hélion. Stanley loved this quote- but wasn’t sure it accurately explained what he was doing. He wasn’t sure it needed a verbal explanation – preferring to work it out with paint, not words.

The book has a wonderful quote from the Hélion’s Double Rhythm essay that seems particularly relevant and powerful:

The least figurative painter cannot go far without getting a permanent lesson from nature. The meaning of what we create is only expressed in that endless dictionary. This is the only constant, the only light clearing the significance of any picture. The chief point is to work within the meaning of nature instead of its appearance.

And nature is full of facts that are so clear, substantial, already so far transformed into ideas:

The tree, coming from a germ-point, goes toward light, multiplies its directions into space, each of them into thousands of hands, and to catch, to hold, to receive space on an always larger surface, finally transforms them into flat leaves facing the sun.

Birds, going from one point to another and coming back, embracing space, measuring it, rhythmically dividing it and discovering a speed in its modulations.

Fishes, the more spatial beings, actually living in space. They stop at every point of it, have no limits to their progression. They know three dimensions, refined angles, complex continuities. They move in all directions, without shocks. Birds just make long hops. Only fishes fly. They do not have to come down. They constitute spatial groups. Their body, in contact with the tangible liquid space in all points, receives its call, measures it, responds to it. When one fish moves, in a basin, all others are affected. One goes up, three go down, another describes circles, slowly.

The top meaning of equilibrium is probably “thinking.” Equilibrium identifies in permanently renewed ways, ethical, plastic, everything the painter is capable of. The shape becomes thought. One cannot be parted from the other. The eye-mind of the painter goes over it all, in all directions, extricating, superposing rhythms, blowing through them, to find their longest way, their endless, their simplest, where all meet. When all elements, thus produced by many reasons, the black and the white reasons, many processes, oppositions, rhythms, waves, constitute a complex mass, controlled, solid, unified, totalized, the painter faces it and sees his complex-self in it, as in a multi-dimensioned mirror.

The whole mass of the painting shines like freshly cut copper, shines of its constitutional brilliance, that means blood running, life. Identity is reached between substance and thought. To work one is to work the other. The plastic error denounces the ethical error. Painting is a language.
–Jean Hélion, from Axis: A quarterly review of Contemporary “Abstract Painting & Sculpture, Summer 1936

Please Note: this is an affiliate link to this book – Painting Perceptions gets a small kickback from Amazon if you buy this book from this link.

View from the Barn Window (Detail) 2011,Oil on canvas 16” x 23 1/4”

Stanley Lewis quoted in Standing in the Artist’s Footprints, Martica Sawin’s essay for the 2016 catalog for the New York Studio School Exhibition(link to full catalog) “The Way Things Are”
“I think of the viewer as myself. I want the viewer to be where I was and to understand what I am doing, which is complicated. I turn my head from side to side to find my picture. I want to get from here to there, not just see a unified central image. I can’t expect the viewer to work that hard so I struggle to unify the sides.”

Martica Sawin explains earlier her Standing in the Artist’s Footprints essay:
Lewis starts a drawing by focusing on one component of a given motif with a fair amount of detail before shifting to another segment of his subject. “I love painting the small things, although I think I get lost in that detail.” It’s not difficult to imagine getting lost in the complex network of thin lines that trace the overlapping tree branches in View from Bathroom Window, West Side of House ( see below ) and other drawings of snow-covered landscapes. The strokes follow every twist and turn of even the most slender branches, weaving a delicate tracery that stays in sharp focus even as the trees recede into the distance, the result of days of labor in the frigid weather. Lewis is not one to edit out anything that falls within his line of vision, like signage or parked cars or backyard debris, so he includes the assertive lines of a pair of telephone wires cutting diagonally across the filigree of branches. A devoted plein air practitioner, he will work outdoors at his easel even as the temperature drops below freezing. When winter finally drives him inside he usually manages to angle his rendering of cluttered interiors to include a sideways view of a landscape through a window.

I invited the painters Dan Gustin as well as John Goodrich to say a few words about their friendship with Stanley Lewis.

Dan Gustin writes:

Last year my wife Cynthia and I spent a couple of days at the home of Stan and Karen Lewis. I have wanted to visit his studio for many years. Although I have been around him in Italy, I was eager to see where he works all year long. I wasn’t sure of what to expect and anxiously anticipated this visit to a great painter’s work and private lair. Nothing could have prepared me for what I was about to see.

Walking into Stan’s studio was a unique experience. It was amazing and overwhelming to see the amount, quality and range of work Stan was engaged in. It was like seeing a new country for the first time with new eyes and few assumptions. It was as if some kind of creative bomb had gone off in his studio, leaving hundreds of bits and pieces of all shapes and sizes all over the studio in every possible direction covering the floors and walls with Stan’s amazing and unceasing output of work. Every inch of space was covered with scribblings, great drawings, discarded scraps of paper, paint and pencil, finished and unfinished paintings, plaster sculptures, wood carvings, paint brushes, hand mixed paint, as well as 12 finished paintings he was sending to a show in NYC.

This was a studio where there was no presentation or formal explanation on what he was working on for the edification of others. It felt like you were inside his head where a kind of living theater of pure and intense creativity ran amuck with no script or plotting of destination. The studio housed his direct action tied to his moment of making. There were were also many copies and transcriptions of painters he loves, mostly in pen and pencil where he continually draws from sources of great painters,and sculptors to best understand how to make his own work today.

I was completely blown away by what I was seeing and how it was so different from any studio I have been in over the last forty years. It brought to mind the photos I have seen of Giocometti and Picasso’s studios, in that, the rooms were filled from floor to ceiling of ongoing work, all relating to some amazing way that made perfect sense to the artist. To me, Stan’s work in the studio is not about a self-conscious presentation set up for the opinions of others, but rather a glimpse into a timeless moment of a great creative mind always in process, always striving and always in doubt.

After leaving Stan’s studio, I was inspired but also bummed out. As I started to make the unavoidable comparisons to my own work and studio set up–I felt I had to take a look and reassess what I was doing and my own process of working in the studio. I had had this incredible experience of being truly in the belly of the beast of this great painter, and it had a profoundly sobering but enlightening effect on me. I left Stan and Karen’s house a much humbler painter and hopefully a bit wiser.

In my opinion, Stanley Lewis is clearly the most compelling, visually honest and pictorially inventive painter today who is working perceptually from the landscape. His incredible passion and relentless will for seeing truthfully, his force of pictorial articulation and plastic construction, are completely unique in today’s art world.

Bonnard spoke of trying to fathom and express “the grand and ancient patterns of nature” in painting. Like many great artists who pursued this search, Stanley Lewis is the heir apparent to that deepest of artistic pursuits–as expressed by Bonnard and the great painters of the past; always avoiding the pitfalls of fashion and spectacle. Instead, Stanley stays true to his vision of painting; trying with his incredible determination and talent to, as he says, “just see the small little things.” Dan Gustin 6/2019

Lake Chautauqua with Orange Kayak , 2012 Oil on canvas 26 1/2” x 35 1/2”

Lake Chautauqua with Orange Kayak (Detail), 2012 Oil on canvas 26 1/2” x 35 1/2”

John Goodrich writes:

“The official ritual of evaluating a painting might proceed this way: Stand at a slight distance to ascertain subject matter and stylistic treatment. Move in to register the means of facture; consider their implications about temperament. Move back once more to assess the ultimate realization of concept.

Fortunately, many of us have had the chance to listen instead to Stanley Lewis, who has arguably spent a lifetime proving that true inquiry follows no recipe. In regard to both his painting and his teaching, there seems to have been no divide for Stanley between immediate, everyday experience and artistic inquiry. What interested him in life – be it the latest astronomical discovery, traditions of jazz trombone, or an incident from an obscure artist’s life – became inspiration in the studio and classroom.

Painters may recognize a particular effect: the way, deep within the rhythms of a painting, a detail or passage arrests the eye, pressing itself upon one’s attention for no obvious reason. For years, I’ve thought of such a moment as a kind of “face staring back at you.” Not coincidentally, this is exactly the phrase Stanley used, years ago, to describe a passage that unexpectedly holds the eye, punctuating or summing up the larger movements around it.

I think of the phrase as pure Stanley: a direct and strictly honest experience, practically related, poetically spot-on, and completely unconcerned with tropes of art appreciation. It’s one instance of the free-form inquiry that has always marked not only his thinking about art, but also — and this is what really counts — the spirit behind his remarkable drawings and paintings.” John Goodrich 5/2019

Larry Groff: You have painted abstractly in the past and now mainly paint from observation. Can you say something about what you try to get at with your painting?

Stanley Lewis: I prefer working in manner that is more of a “working class” vision of how things look. I believe in being struck by the beauty of what you see in nature, like how you might sit next to me outside and remark on how great the light was on some green leaves looked or how the wires against the sky could make a wonderful subject for a painting. We’re seeing the same things, the way it looks beautiful today. There is something about going after the simplicity and authenticity of appearances that is what Derain was about. I believe in appearances rather than a systematic method of making a painting work in terms of something like an abstract rhythm. That’s how Leland Bell might put it.

At the same time I also struggle to get all the pieces to fit. If you push it too far it can backfire on you and start to become abstraction. Sometimes I think it’s more clear when you paint abstract because of how it shows more readily what you’re going for and not get confused with the appearance of the things observed in the motif. Trying to get things to sit and work together in the way you want – it often doesn’t work.

LG: Did you see the 1991 movie, Dream of Light, about Antonio Lopez Garcia painting quince tree in his garden? He marks lines on the actual fruit to note where their position to one another on a grid-like fashion. I believe it helps him keep track of changes from the fruit growing.

Stanley Lewis: I heard about it but haven’t yet seen it. I went to see his big show in the Boston MFA a few years ago. I was very impressed, so many great paintings, like his huge painting of Madrid done from a rooftop balcony. His concerns with spatial relationships – how things on the horizontal and verticals relate is similar to what I’m doing. I was also very impressed with his sculpture.

LG: Haven’t you also made sculpture as well? I saw photos online of your sculpture from the 70s or 80s.

Stanley Lewis: I still work on sculpture but in the 70’s I was making a lot more sculpture. There isn’t as much interest in my sculpture as my paintings and drawings. Few people see my sculpture, so I don’t worry about it.

LG: You gave a talk about relief sculpture, about Donatello’s relief sculpture awhile back. I’m curious if your thoughts on sculpture might relate to any spacial concerns in your paintings? How your push and pull the foreground and the background, flattening of some areas and deep recession in others. Also, there is almost a sculpted feel to your paintings with thick impasto or how you might cut and stitch together areas of the painting. Some of your incredible drawings start to look like shallow bas-relief sculptures with the build up of thick heavyweight handmade papers and other surface manipulations.

LG: I’m very curious to know more about sculpture in relation to your work, is this something you can talk about?

Stanley Lewis: It’s really too complicated and I’m afraid it would take too long to answer the questions of how and why. I do think about these issues many times and it’s clear to me how elements in the motif can interrelate but it’s all very abstract and on a non-verbal level. The figure drawings and the sculptures I made connected with trying to figure stuff out related to this.

What is more important for me to say here is that for me it all comes back to Leland Bell. Leland Bell gave lectures on the great French, Italian and German painters. He had us look at Corot and all the most important landscape painters like Claude Lorraine and Poussin. He was constantly talking about them and getting us to look and think about their work in relation to our own paintings. He spent less time looking at our own work. Leland didn’t come in our studio to point out problems, where you needed to fix something. Instead he would suggest looking at how a particular painter might approach the problem.

His example influenced how I taught continuously for my whole life till about 15 years ago. I would put slides up for at least an hour or two every class day and we drew from the images of these paintings. I would draw all the time; it could be a Durer woodblock print or a Bruegal. I immersed myself with copying paintings. Courbet, for instance, was a huge inspiration to draw from. This almost always involved working with the figure. I would find all kinds of incredible secrets going on with copying master figure paintings, mysterious underlying structures in the composition, not readily visible, kind of hidden there mysteriously in the pictures. These drawing studies were confusing but I was very engaged and hours would go by and I would realize after coming home that I didn’t really understand what I just done.

But in time, after making so many copies it would start to affect my own paintings and drawings and then I started to do sculptures of these drawings, to try to work out the problems and get a deeper understanding of the issues.

Corner of Connecticut Ave. and Calvert St. , 2002, acrylic on paper, 40″ x 45½”, Collection of William Louis-Dreyfus

Porch Steps, Trees and Snow , 2009, Oil on canvas 14” x 18 5/8”

LG: Clearly Leland Bell’s teachings have been a huge influence on you. But you don’t easily see it from looking at your paintings, which look nothing like his. What else can you say about how Leland Bell affected your painting?

Stanley Lewis: It’s too big a subject to properly answer but I can make a few simple attempts.

Stanley Lewis: Leland became my teacher by accident but I immediately fell in love with the guy, I just loved him from the start. When I first heard him talk I knew he was the guy for me. Everything he said made sense to me. That’s not to say there weren’t problems at times. I once said something that Leland didn’t like and for a long time I wasn’t even talking with him. But now, none of that is important. I just knew he had the right ideas even if I didn’t always understand it. I knew his heart was in the right place. He often talked about Hélion who became important for me as well as Derain, Balthus, Giacometti who he also talked about.

ed. note: for more check out this Link to the Stanley Lewis LSU lecture in March 14, 2018, on the Balthus, Giacometti, Derain 2017 exhibition at the The Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris

In addition to talking about drawing and space he talked a lot about about color balance and color relationships across the painting; which was important for me to hear. He never really liked the big heavy paintings that I made but he did like my little studies. The painters he talked about were often difficult to understand, Derain especially. You would become imbued by his enthusiasm these painters. Actually, over the years I’ve figured out a simple way to think about them. It’s that the French on a higher intellectual level and more complex, the Germans–like Hoffman or Kandinsky–are more physical – who push and move things around. I think I’m more inclined to be a German type who pushes and pulls things here and there, I’m not sure that is a good thing. It is really too complicated. Leland’s love of all these artists: Derain, Dufy, Renoir–he wasn’t as involved with Cézanne but of course he loved Cézanne. The ancient artists, like the Sumerians and the Egyptians, were opened up for us by Leland. He took us to see these things and we’d try to figure out what the hell’s going on. Looking at these works opened up all these possibilities, things with these double meanings, the double meaning the Egyptians and the Sumerians created, we’d see this and try to put it all together.

LG: The early Renaissance painting evolved out of the Gothic style where the flat 2D space emphasizes its linear structure. Giotto and others combined that with the illusion of an observed naturalistic 3D space. Is this something Leland was concerned with in his paintings and talks?

Stanley Lewis: I want to make this clear about what Leland said, he didn’t see it all through an art historian’s viewpoint, he kept breaking down historical patterning. All these painters were faced with these problems about the space and how to present it on a two dimensional surface and so on. Those are the painter’s issues, he’d say it in an unhistorical way. And he’d say whatever they decided on they’re all based on a sort of painter’s core problems. That’s how I remember Leland putting it. He was very interested in Derian who in turn was very interested in Roman painting, the Pompei still lives and portraits long before the Renaissance. So the whole concept of the Renaissance which became masterful innovations in masterful, technical–huge elaboration, he jumped you right back and the Coptic textiles, he kept breaking down historical patterning, he’d say you’re all going to be faced with these concerns. I’m saying this maybe for the first time for myself. He’s saying you’re all going to be doing this stuff. It’s what painting is in its nature. You take a pencil and piece of paper and then look at something or you think about something and you try to put it down, all these same issues will soon come to your mind, like how do I do it? How do I make a face? How do I find it inside the painting? If you’re kind of the kind of person who has a knack for this, then you get these issues right away, the issues are simple and clear.

LG: I think that any history that presents art as a linear progression of quality is wrong– a history that implies art goes from the primitive to the advanced–doesn’t sound right to me. That the high renaissance was better and more advanced than the early renaissance. This thinking maybe leads to the notion we can only go forward that you can’t return to past ways of working. I remember reading something where you said something like cubism is not over just that the fashion changed and people went on to other things. Isn’t all of past art fair game for reinterpretation? Couldn’t cubism be as relevant today as it was 100 years ago?

Stanley Lewis: I think that’s exactly right and I’ve always thought cubism is a part of the figuring out the problems of making a painting function. All painters are cubists in a way. Abstract expressionists are definitely cubists – cubists with a swirling brush or something. I’m not sure how to explain this without it all becoming hopelessly complex.

LG: Ok one last question and I’ll let you go. In this day and age where so many people are distracted by their phone and computer screens and even have difficulty paying attention to their immediate surroundings much less pay attention to art. What is it about painting that is still important?

Stanley Lewis: I am not optimistic about what the future will bring to the art schools. So many art schools have changed to a more post-modern orientation and using digital screen to make art with. Some people seem to be able to make something out of it but painting has definitely got its own rewards. And I can’t imagine a situation where you have a room of thirty young kids that at least one or two are going to see that painting is the best fit for their personality. Painting is something you can mess around, get dirty–like what Leland used to say, it’s colored mud. You touch it, get on your clothes, you smell it–It’s real. Who wants to sit in front of a screen all day. So I think there could still be hope because if there are rebellious people, who are not going to go along with the program, they’re going to paint. It’s just a natural thing to do. It’s sloppy. You have to get screwed up to do it. It’s all connected with some kind of primal thing that’s going on in your mind. That’s the key idea. Louis Finkelstein said something about this along these lines. I think it was in the book of his writings. I think it’s about knowing your mind. If we want to have healthy minds dealing with what we see that’s where painting can try to help deal with these issues because the ambiguity of vision–the unclarity of vision is what painting is trying to sort out. So, really there is a health issue here.

Painting is certainly waning in the educational system. But at least there is hope in that the museums haven’t been torn down. I mean you still people looking at these paintings and asking what is going on in these paintings? What is this all about? It’s the most challenging and stimulating mental and intellectual activity, painting can be extremely thought provoking. You know what is going on. What does it mean? So I’m hoping there’s always people who are going to be interested in this. That’s my answer.

LG: That’s a great answer and gives us hope. So many people are disillusioned now. They’re getting burned out with pace of everything, information overload and are visually over-stimulated and they want to slow down. Maybe more people will turn to things like landscape paintings to slow down as an exercise in mental health if nothing else. Like you said.

Stanley Lewis: One reason why I’m not such a good talker is that I tend to stress the wrong things. Once you’re out there painting and you begin to rethink your whole painting and you have to repaint your whole painting. So that is a problem. But then you start doing it. Well, then the sun comes out. I mean you’re out there. You know it couldn’t be a better place to be doing whatever you’re doing. And there are great moments, always great moments. I can’t think of a more exciting thing to do. It’s just that it’s so up and down. I mean the chance of success with your painting is very limited. I think that as long as you take the attitude of accepting that you’re not likely to succeed very often. If you cut back on the number if issues you deal with, like what happens when you paint smaller – you get a better chance at succeeding. That’s what I would tell anybody. When I do a small painting– it can work. It’s these big ones that are so impossible but then do anyway.

LG: It’s like the quote from Queen Elizabeth that you sometimes see on sympathy cards – “grief is the price of love”. The greater the love and commitment for painting the greater the pain and difficulties when it doesn’t work out, perhaps a fair price to pay in order to live life as a painter.

Stanley Lewis: That’s a beautiful idea. That’s what my wife needs to tell me. She’s always trying to get me to see things with a more balanced perspective. That’s a good balance between joy and pain, that pain is just a part of the whole process. I know that is true, I want people to paint; it’s fun! It’s especially fun at the beginning when you start out painting. Once you stick it out over a long time, you push yourself and then you get to increasingly harder problems like the ones that I’m dealing with.

An insightful video lecture on a painting by Stanley Lewis by Michael Bogin, Professor of Studio Art at Hobart and William Smith College who describes the 1985 painting, O.C Backyard, by Stanley Lewis in detail.

(note: this telephone interview has been edited and revised extensively for clarity and brevity)

The post Stanley Lewis Interview, Part Two appeared first on Painting Perceptions.

Houses on Jekyll Island, 2017, Acrylic on canvas, 23 x 34 inches courtesy of Betty Cuningham Gallery

View from New Studio Window, 2012-2017, Oil on canvas, 65 x 63 inches courtesy of Betty Cuningham Gallery

I am very pleased to be able to share this recent telephone interview with Stanley Lewis. I approached Stanley Lewis a few times over the past couple of years to see if he’d agree to an interview but he declined likely due to his preferring to spend his time painting rather than interviewing. However, recently another opportunity came up for me to bother him once again and this time he agreed, in part to bring attention to his upcoming workshop at the International School of Art in Monte Castello, Italy during July 14 – August 4th of this summer. We talked at length on the phone and eventually he became more enthusiastic about our interview.  We decided for the interview be in two parts; the first part centered around his teaching in Italy and related concerns which is posted here and the second part to come later to allow us more time and room to continue his discussion of his process and thoughts on painting. The second part will be published later this June.

Stanley Lewis, is a greatly respected painter who hardly need introduction but the Betty Cuningham Gallery website  offers this bio for anyone who isn’t yet aware of his many professional accomplishments:

Stanley Lewis was born in Somerville, New Jersey on October 31, 1941. He graduated from Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut in 1963 with a joint major in music and art. His painting teacher was John Frazer. He graduated with high distinction. In the summer of 1962, he studied with William Bailey and Bernard Chaet at the Yale Summer School of Art and Music.

He received a Danforth Fellowship for graduate study and received an MFA from Yale University in 1967. His main teachers there were Leland Bell and Nick Carone. He began teaching at the Kansas City Art Institute in 1969 in the painting department, working under Wilbur Niewald for 17 years. He joined the Bowery Gallery in NYC in 1986.

Stanley taught at Smith College from 1986-1990 and then at American University from 1990-2002 working under department chairman Don Kimes. He retired from AU in 2002.

He has taught summers at the Chautauqua Institution’s School of Art since 1996 and was on the faculty at the New York Studio School until the end of 2011.

In Sept. 2004 he was in a two man show at Salander-O’Reilly Galleries. A long-time member of the Bowery Gallery, his most recent shows there were in February, 2005 and March, 2008. He was then represented by Lohin Geduld Gallery and had a one man show there October 13- November 13, 2010. The gallery closed in December of 2011. 

From Feb. 17 through April 8, 2007, he had a major retrospective at the Museum in the Katzen Art Center, American University, Washington, DC. There was a smaller version of that show at the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, Summit, NJ, that spring. In 2005, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has been elected to membership in the National Academy.

 

Stanley Lewis is currently represented by the Betty Cuningham Gallery.

Route 39_ near North Gate, 2004, oil on canvas, 41½” x 53½”, Collection of William Louis-Dreyfus

Stanley Lewis, View of Garden from New Studio Window, Winter, 2016, pencil on paper, 55 x 42 inches (courtesy of Betty Cuningham Gallery)

The painter Ruth Miller recently agreed to send me the following that she wrote about Stanley Lewis as an introduction to this interview:

When thinking about Stanley Lewis’s remarkable work, many words rush in: passionate, unrelenting, obsessive, brave, true, generous, mad, visionary. But his work is also about the hard won image, about detail and layering, loving attention, spacial volumes, formal concerns, dogged devotion, about the concrete and about process. I was visiting the Barnes last month and while looking at those great Cézannes, Stanley’s paintings came to mind – it was Cézanne’s uncompromising search and realization – you know, that thing that brings a gasp and brings you to your knees – a push for (not perfection) but for what feels RIGHT, totally integrated and finally THERE – ARRIVED AT! For many of us, especially Stanley’s devoted students, he is a vital link to painters of the past: Rubens, Bruegel, Poussin, Claude, Constable, to name a few. He brings them back into the present with new and often surprising insights.

When looking at a Stanley Lewis painting or drawing, I feel renewed strength and hope, I feel less lonely, less alone, and for me that is a kind of fulfillment, certainly it is a deep reaffirming.” – Ruth Miller 5/6/2019

I also asked Thaddeus Radell, who has written about Stanley Lewis in the past as a contributing writer for this site if he could say a few words about his experience with Stanley Lewis:

As a painter matures and the long years in the studio grind on, studio visits and/or input from other artists, insightful and engaging as they may be, have less and less true impact in terms of the formal considerations of the paintings. The work has simply become so internalized that discussion of the actual pictorial devices in play is not, perhaps, as poignant as it would be at an earlier point in one’s history. A visit by Stanley Lewis is, in my experience, one of the very few outstanding exceptions to that general tendency. Stanley’s eye and mind have so united with the ‘deep state’ of painting that as he views and comments on one’s work, every moment of that sharing becomes somehow miraculously relevant to what one is actually doing, or trying to do. The matching of his poetic intuition and fathomless knowledge of what painting is with the brute strength of his experience at the easel results in lethal combination with which he manages to breach the wall of one’s internalized process and penetrate to its heart. During my last exhibition at Bowery Gallery, almost three years ago, I had the pleasure spending an hour or so alone with Stanley discussing my work. I found his remarks and insights piercing. And yet delivered in that endearing manner of his that puts one immediately at ease. Because he speaks to one as an absolute equal. His struggle is your struggle. And three years later I am still forging those thoughts into form in my daily studio practice.” – Thaddeus Radell 5/10/2019

 
Larry Groff: What is your approach to teaching your landscape painting workshops? What could someone expect to experience when studying with you at Monte Castillo.

Stanley Lewis: I spend a lot of time with the students who sign up to work with me. This tends to be on a casual basis like when we run into each other in the shared studio space. I’m set up to teach maybe two or three days and I give a couple of lectures. We paint outside, it can be a hard landscape to paint. It’s complicated and new for many people but the views are just fabulous and awe-inspiring. Where you look down and you see all the way across the Tiber Valley to the next town, Todi, with the farmland, trees and roads. Monte Castello is a small medieval hilltown, built like a fortress castle with a huge wall with an overlook where you can paint from. It can be a tough subject.

I paint with the students and I actually like some of the paintings that I do with the class better than some of my projects because they are chancier. I go around and see how they’re doing and that goes on all day. Teaching has helped me all during my life. I miss it actually because it can take me to interesting places I wouldn’t necessarily go to on my own.

LG: Monte Castillo isn’t too far from Assisi and all the incredible Giotto frescos at the Basilica of Saint Francis?

Stanley Lewis: Yes, We take day trips. We’re there for three weeks, so we go on these day trips, I think we’re going to Orvieto, Rome and Florence, all organized so we just go see all these overwhelmingly great masterpieces.

LG: Do you talk about the paintings with the students in front of the work?

Stanley Lewis: Yes and no. We are all together but we tend to keep it very fluid, I’ll often go off and find something that I want to draw and then drag somebody else into it with me. I’d rather draw in front of the paintings and encourage the student to do this rather than just talk about the paintings, like Leland Bell did with his students. Leland could talk beautifully. I’ve gone to listen to his lectures as much as I could but my idea about teaching is different. Drawing helps me to think about the painting so I encourage students to draw from the paintings and then I might walk around and suggest things. But I don’t usually lecture at length about the pictures on these trips.

It’s a great summer, any painting student at any age will like it, any age. The food is good and the company is great.

Claude Lorraine Landscape With Peasants Harvesting Grapes, 1641

Stanley Lewis, Study after Claude Lorraine

(above images from Christine Hartmann’s blog.

LG: So you and the students talk about painting, not in a formal way, just talking?

Stanley Lewis: No, not in a formal way, more in a kind of complaining artist’s way, more like how am I ever going to do this thing.

That’s my tone of voice and what I have to say. I’m always amazed by how hard it is to paint, especially painting from perception. It can be one of the most bizarre things you can do. I don’t find it an objective, clear thing to do. I’m overwhelmed by all that it can really involve if you are trying to get at the things I’m trying to do. So my basic strategy as a teacher has always been rather humble, the person who knows the least! I want to somehow show how amazing and difficult this all can be. However, I also say come on let’s go and do it anyway and hope that we’ll get through it. Oh my God! Let’s see if we can get through it! It’s only two more hours! And then we’re done. (laughs)

There are practical things I can suggest that can help students–Practical things like support systems like how best to hold down your picture. I mean that’s huge. I’ve always spent a lot of time worrying about how to put my picture up so it doesn’t move around from the wind. You’ve got to rope it down if it’s windy. There are other things about the setup that seem important to me like which side are you looking from, right or left? You’re constantly improvising in outside painting. You need to bring so much stuff. There are also all the straightforward things like organizing and simplifying your palette. Also, we talk about color, how the color is working. How stiff is the color, stuff like that.

Stanley Painting in Italy

LG: I was impressed with some photographs I saw of your outdoor painting setup. It looks like you sometimes build your own easel with found materials and sort of enclosure to help keep the direct sun off the painting so you could see the painting better and maybe to eliminate problems with the wind or whatever is just sort of surprising to see. You don’t go for the French easel or a fancy pochade box, instead you seem to prefer using that looks more like a lean-to or hunter’s blind.

Stanley Lewis: In Italy I will be using a French easel or fold-up easel just like everyone else. One thing to be concerned with is what do you do when it rains? Italy has these thunderstorms that come up all of a sudden that are incredible. You have to figure out ways to improvise so you can keep painting. I’ve used a plastic sheet that I would clip to my painting and then throw it over my head and this would allow me to go on painting, without having to stop. The weather system is different than we have here, it can be very dramatic at times.

Stanley Lewis, View from Studio Window, 2003-4, graphite on paper, approx. 45 x 51 inches (From the Louis-Dreyfus Family Collection, courtesy of The William Louis-Dreyfus Foundation Inc.)

Serios Pharmacy, 2005, oil on canvas, 32 x 32 inches, Collection of William Louis-Dreyfus

LG: When you paint from observation, how much is it about responding to the observable facts in front of you and how much is from some kind of personal invention that runs parallel to what you’re seeing? When painting or drawing such things as the negative spaces between tree branches and such – what keeps you from avoiding a formula but at the same time avoid being too prosaic?

Stanley Lewis: You are right. These are some of the problems and pitfalls with painting like this. My feeling is that it often feels like a horribly impossible thing to do but you somehow do it anyway. How do you do it? I have figured out is you do need to use some kind of formulas. I’m not afraid to say this anymore.

One formula involves figuring out the proportions and using a frame; that helps determine the relationship between all the tree branches and their surroundings–where the verticals and horizontals intersect–how to unify and relate spatially to each other. It can get very complicated; it’s difficult to explain. When you try to get everything working like this you realize that it actually can’t be done. How do you find a consistent stabilizing position? That’s what I’m interested in and that’s what I’ve been trying to do for my whole life.

The main person who’s involved with this that has influenced me with regard to this, but in a very different way, is Wilber Niewald. I really think he’s a key to perceptual painting for American painting. He’s the guy you should look at. I used to work with him at Kansas City Art Institute. Do you know who he is?

LG: No, Only a little, I’ve heard of him but I don’t know him or his work very well.

Stanley Lewis: You have got to find out about his paintings and if possible have an interview with him soon–He’s in his 90s. So my answer to this question flows out of many of Wilbur’s ideas. Wilbur is an interpreter of Cézanne and Mondrian. Wilber has had a beautiful career. It’s straightforward and develops very logically. He recently had a retrospective exhibition at the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City. He was chairman of the Kansas City Art Institute for maybe 30 years. He hired me right out of graduate school. And that’s where we lived for 17 years, we raised our kids in Kansas City. Wilber Niewald was such a major influence on me. Of course I’ve gone my own way but his ideas really spoke to me.

I remember back in the 1970’s during a time when I was making these large abstract-like city paintings as well as sculpture, I had listened to Wilber talking to his students telling them to paint and draw what you see, a still life setup or something, as straight and as clearly as you can. I remember thinking, I’m going to try this. I didn’t agree with everything and I wasn’t sure I was ready for this but I wanted to try. I did, just a little but this led to a big change in the long run.

Still Life with Photograph of Karen, late 1970s, oil on masonite 48″ x 54¾”, Collection of the artist

I didn’t visit his studio that much but I went there once and saw his huge painting setup with three geranium plants taking up an enormous area and this incredible painting which was completely covered with this beautifully painted complicated foliage of the geranium plants. But Wilber, who is a very interesting person–quiet, steady, and forceful, was telling me that he just noticed that in this painting the geranium weren’t in the right position, weren’t in the right place for the painting–they were off by about a half-inch and that he needed to move them all over a half-inch. This meant, of course, that he would have to repaint everything to move it over. This was staggering to me; I couldn’t believe it. It was a major revelation but has since become what I do. To get everything exactly in the position it needs to be, to have everything working together in the right place. It can be overwhelming to have to repaint things so often so I deal with these problems with my particular formulas. Which is basically– when it doesn’t look right repaint it! I find my way through these tangles by using a system that kind of organizes things, to better know where things are–their position, where they start and end, what is inside the frame and on the outside. One thing is that there is always an imaginary frame to determine the boundaries of the scene for the painting.

Late Fall – House Table + Wagon, 2010, Oil on paper, 18 x 12.12 inches

LG: By frame do you mean using a viewfinder? Is that what you mean by frame?

Stanley Lewis: Yes, I use a Viewfinder most of the time, especially with these big setups, the view finder is the key. Sometimes I can use just use sticks, two sticks but you can also lay the sticks out or lay rocks out in the actual landscape to mark where the painting is going so your eye knows where things end.

LG: What about keeping your head still, so you’re painting from the same vantage point every time. To really be accurate wouldn’t you need to put your head in some sort of vice grip so that you don’t change your position? (laughs)

Stanley Lewis: That’s the key to the impossibility of it all! Because you don’t actually have a vice grip, you’re looking is flawed. The whole thing that you set up to be clear about, like where the painting starts and stops is in flux. It can make for an impossible situation. I work for weeks trying to get something right and then get to a certain point realizing that that is not going to work and I need to change the boundary. Another thing is that I’ve figured out I have to paint everything clearly and realistically in order to be able to see where I am–not just schematically.

I asked one of his former students, Timothy King, if he would be interested in writing something about what it was like to study with Stanley Lewis for this first part of the interview with Stanley. He enthusiastically agreed and sent me the following essay. Timothy King is a Illinois based painter who has been instrumental with the running of the MidWest Paint group.

My studies with Stanley Lewis

By Timothy King

I studied with Stanley Lewis over four semesters at Kansas City art institute from 1978 to 1980. I was a KCAI painting student at a wonderful time and worked with four other great painters at KCAI before taking Stanley’s drawing class. But once I was there with Stan, it became my dedicated mission to study painting, drawing, and sculpture in his studio. In my third semester of study with Stanley, he was into a transition phase, so I was able to take in his ideas as they spanned two sides of his career. Those who got there too early or too late may only have experienced half of his trajectory as a painter. In the 1960s and ’70s, Stanley taught his kind of structuralist abstract-figurative monumentalism that he admires in the work and ideas of Leland Bell. Stanley still works to this day with these ideas in studio paintings and with even more evolved ideas and forms. Stanley doesn’t show this work as much, so it’s somewhat underground and sadly not reviewed as much. In my last semester at KCAI, I was witness to a reinvention of Stanley’s ideas that remains a part of his predominant style of today. He refers to his work now as more aligned with an approach of seeing the particular about nature and less about the ideas about the universal in nature’s forms. Stanley attributes this change in working from his time with Wilbur Niewald at KCAI. Both painters think in terms of “the particular” in looking closely at nature in building up the painting.

Stanley’s paintings were always monumental. They are a treatment of sublime structure; A natural process of destruction and creation at once. I’m thinking how wonderfully gouged out and collaged together the paintings are; so unlike any other painter I’ve experienced in his constancy in attacking with paint. Stanley’s paintings have always had the thickness of texture and full, vibrant color, built up in heavy and dripping and gloppy layers. Up close you see an entirely abstract experience. From the construction of detail, he forms his intricate abstract monumental vision. And so alike are the large gouged out graphite drawings that he has become so well known for since the ’90s and 2000s. I was pleased to see Stanley is still sculpting. In the ’70s and 80’s he was doing larger figurative work in plaster and smaller carved wood figures. Stanley set up a sculpture studio at the end of each semester, so I was able to do 3 figure sculptures in all with his help. Stanley taught me to build from the center at the armature working the pelvis and backbone out to the skull, arms, and legs. And not to depend only on the profile views. It was how he worked conceptually without a model but also with a model. I was able to see his developments back in the 70s covering his ideas about Frank Auerbach, Picasso, Helion, Giacometti and Leland Bell to the transition of his 90s and 2000s solid full blown Courbetist of today.

It’s been great staying Stanley’s friend and conversing about these gradations in his work over the last 40 years. Stanley always talked about odd things like spatial reversals and inversions and weird perspectives he discovered in the old masters. His ideas, in turn, got me intensely interested in how he saw things, as only he could convey about the hidden structure of painting to his students. Back then at KCAI, Stanley loved to teach about the great still life painters from the golden age of Dutch art and how their paintings are so perfect yet deceptively unorthodox. He showed me in these Dutch works the perception of multiple readings of perspective; warning us to look out for the fictional view and the actual underlying reality; to draw copies and make an analysis of the space beyond the picture frame to see beyond the finished facade. Stanley taught the art of “simultaneity” to discover the most significant aspect of painting’s history barely touched upon in traditional art history lessons. He was the sole source for my love of the “two-table idea” that I often discuss, to explain Cézanne’s strangest still life’s, and how these are models to understand the Dutch still-life that contains a disguised two table construction, revealed in a seamless single tabletop fiction. This model serves me as the lesson of all great painting where spatial structures are building out of inventions between reality and fiction, flipping the space, so foreground and background change positions. Among others, Stanley showed me Pieter Claesz and William Claez Heda who painted around Cézanne’s fragmented arrangement, hiding and healing the setups divisions and fractures in the final rendition.

In class, I always loved how Stanley demonstrated an immense comprehensive grasp of drawing. One demonstration of Courbet’s Portrait of P.J. Proudhon, Stanley showed how Courbet constructed a little girl pouring out her teapot by the way the ground plane and porch steps created a flipping motion into the girl’s body, forcing an action ending in the twisting wrist holding the tipping teapot, thus sending out the flowing liquid. I still have the newsprint demo sketches he did showing the underlying mechanism of Courbet’s ingenuity. And I have some of Stan’s schematic demo’s he would do just for me of Corot’s women, showing the way their clothes are always off center, and theorizing that Corot asymmetrically dressed his models with shifted garment positioning turning their clothes into a building facade to create dual readings with the real and the false perspective.

Everything Stanley teaches is not what you had learned before you got there. Through his lessons, you realize you never really understood as richly before. He demonstrated those ideas to be vivid and enduring. Stanley, in his last and best experience for me at KCAI, taught about his new interest. He started working through a view-frame. We worked with the frame at the same size as the canvas, like the Dutch masters did and Van Gogh, leading me to isolate on the extremes of abstraction in my vision and unlearning my preconceptions of visual relationships. At first, Stanley had me, as he was starting, drawing through an attached view frame made of sculpture armature wire taped to the drawing pad. Holding the pad in one arm up to my face and looking through the frame the objective was to view with my left eye and observe the original projected image as it naturally crossed over, superimposed onto the pad with my right eye. Then we traced it out like the way a camera Lucidia works, but more interesting in the abstract shapes, the directionality of line and forms that held very unpredictable distortions as the eye moved all around the frame. When I started to work on larger canvases about 36 inches wide, I learned to see this new kind of monocular vision and in the near corner where both eyes meet to paint with binocularity. Later in grad school, I shifted to a purely binocular approach. I was gratified to find out Stanley had been working with stereoscopic vision too. Stanley always taught what he used to call “the invention of the painter’s form.” It was the undoing for me of my traditional photographic assumptions about art. Working through the frame was a more painterly invention to me. Stanley still paints through the frame as I sometimes do to stay in tune and in that particular zone. It teaches me to see the unforeseen of the picture plane.

I could go on and on about my lessons with Stanley Lewis. These are just the highlights not getting into the nuts and bolts. I know many of Stanley’s former students who had different and equally valuable experience working with him. I always want to hear about these other parts to Stanley’s brain for inspiration. In my visits in person and conversations on the phone Stanley unusually leaves me with new clues and points of interest showing some of his current thinking. These tips become challenges for me and over so many years has reminded me I’ll always be a Stanley Lewis student.” – Timothy King 5/10/2019

The post Interview with Stanley Lewis – Part One appeared first on Painting Perceptions.

Profile, 12″ x 12″ 1995

Living Room, 8″ x 6″ 2000

Katy Schneider is a painter and art professor at Smith College. She is a recipient of a Guggenheim and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and of awards from the National Academy of Design and the Academy of Arts and Letters. Schneider grew up in New York City in a family of nine. Her work focuses on themes related to her upbringing: making the most of a small space, organizing chaos and uncovering family dynamics. She has always been interested in the power of light to tell a story. Her work is in numerous collections, including The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the New Britain Museum and the Smith College Museum of Art. She has also illustrated several award winning children’s book. Among various awards she received the prestigious Bank Street College of Education’s Book Award.

It was an honor to interview painter Katy Schneider. Her work is densely packed and deeply observed. Her paintings are scented with traces of Manet, Vuillard, and Velazquez, while remaining idiosyncratic and profoundly personal. Schneider composes with strength and authority…her hand imbues the weight of history onto the fleeting moment.

Studio, 8″ x 10″ 2002

Self Portrait Mae, 13.5″ x 15″ 1997

Self portrait, pregnant – Olive and Mae, hand on belly, 10 x 12″, 1999

Self Portrait with Olive and Mae, 6.5″ x 10″ 1997

Elana Hagler:     At what point in your life did you know you wanted to be a painter? Was this a direction that seemed to grow very naturally for you, or was there any internal or external opposition?

Katy Schneider:     I planned to be a doctor. After taking a really rigorous painting class sophomore year, I realized that all I wanted to do in college was paint. To get a Yale degree doing something this fun actually felt like cheating. That was the internal opposition/questioning I felt. I wondered if I was avoiding “hard work” by steering clear of classes which were heavy in reading and writing; I was constantly zoning out. But I was hyper-focused with painting. I wanted to work all the time and was completely engaged. It felt so good to have what felt like a brain massage. This didn’t seem “right.” Work could equal pleasure? That’s not what I was taught. I got used to it though.

I don’t think I ever reached a point when I knew I wanted to “be” a painter. That’s true today. I just know that I love to paint, a lot of the time. But I’ve come to love doing many things. And I treat most everything I do as a creative endeavor, an artwork in the making. This semester for example, my teaching (Smith College) is transforming. I’m extra-fascinated by it suddenly. Like painting, (or making music—another interest of mine) teaching is about effectively communicating. Recently, I came up with a couple of new assignments and just shifted the order in which I present various ideas. Even adding one new color to your palette can dramatically change your paintings. This semester, the class feels fresh, more fun, more surprising; but it also fits together better, flowing more easily than ever before. I feel clearer and lighter. There aren’t as many paintings in my studio this month but I feel really full and very energized.

Looking back, the direction towards making my particular paintings grew very naturally. Early on I loved crafts. We didn’t have many materials so I became good at recycling and repurposing. I’d make little dolls out of our old cloth diapers and random scraps of felt. I painted about a zillion eggs. I’d blow them out and create ornate patterns with magic markers. When I was eight I made “the Mr. Smith series” of little books. As a teenager I drew my many siblings. I sewed, crocheted and played guitar. Everything fit in my lap and could be stored easily. It was a small, loud, busy place (nine people in a two-bedroom apartment). My work as an adult harkens back to this place. It’s all about making the most of a small space, ordering chaos. I repurpose scraps of board to paint on, no matter how tiny. Recently I made a bunch of one-inch paintings. Eggs and holey t-shirts from high school find their way into still-life set ups. People are crammed into 8 x 10 inches. I even spiraled back to books, illustrating several when I was in my forties.

In retrospect, all the making as a child probably functioned well to create some internal peace and quiet when there was very little externally. The act of making, even just sloshing paint around, calms my mind. The world is no less quiet now, so luckily I have my outlets.

Self Portrait, 9″ x 7″ 1997

Self Portrait with Olive, Mae and Patterned shirt, 1997 7 x 9”

9th Month, 10″ x 7″ 1995

Self portrait with Olive and Mae, pregnant, 1999, 8 x 10”

EH:     Many of your paintings have a very warm light to them. Do you tend to paint at night under artificial light?

KS:     Yes, I always paint with artificial light. My lamps are the most important ingredient in what I do. I could paint with spaghetti sauce as long as I had my lamp to orchestrate the light and shadows and to construct the geometry. I usually paint in a corner of my basement with the window covered. Newer energy saving lightbulbs have been problematic. I like “old-fashioned” ones. I am often frustrated by how the paintings look when I take them out of the light in which they were painted. Lighting my easel as well as the scene I’m painting is a challenge. I often huddle to share the one light source. Adding two seems to wreck the drama I’m after.

EH:     When I look at your work, I start to think of Manet, Vuillard, and even Velazquez. Whose work do you come back to again and again?

KS:     I am a huge fan of all three painters. Vuillard is always in the back of my mind while painting. My teacher Bernard Chaet gave a talk in which he said we all have our own personal sense of geometry. This comment was memorable. I recognize something in a Vuillard (and in a Chaet) which feels familiar and powerful. The way he divides his rectangle resonates with me.

These shows really stuck with me: The Morandi and the Piero della Francesca shows at the MET in NYC. Stunning. I was really blown away by the Lawren Harris show of Canadian landscapes at the MFA in Boston (curated by Steve Martin). I was forever changed by the Alice Neel show which came to the Smith College of Museum. I hadn’t seen paintings of pregnant women before. All the portraits were so unpretentious, humorous and human. That show made me relax. Just plop people on a chair and start painting. I love the Dutch painter Gerard ter Borch. I am thrilled every time I come across one of his paintings. This month I found one in the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Again, the abstraction, the geometry in all these painters I’ve mentioned, feels familiar, comforting and right. And, to be able to achieve this level of abstraction while being so detailed, so (seemingly) faithful to reality, is astounding to me. It is horribly easy to get illustrative while painting from life.

Self Portrait with Olive, Mae and Basketball, 1997 8 x 10”

Basement, 10″ x 12″ 1997

Townsend Family 12″ x 10″ 2005

Levys 14″ x 12″ 2007

EH:     You paint scenes of families, domestic chaos, portraits, and flowers, all in times past often misguidedly downplayed as feminine subject matter. The scale of your work is also as intimate as the genres. What stands out to me, however, is that you paint with a very bold hand, stressing shape and form over detail, with the strength of design and a rugged surface holding off any sentimentality at bay. Can you talk to us a little about your choice of subject matter?

KS:     Thank you. I try hard to avoid cliché and sentimentality. I grew up with Kathe Kollwitz posters over my crib. Her lithographs of mothers and children were stories of depression and loss. They were dark portraits, the farthest thing from cute. Raising children is not all sunshine and I try to capture all aspects of being a mother in my work: love, boredom, sadness, distraction, mess, work. I will unabashedly paint babies, flowers and puppies. They have gotten a bad rap because too many people stop short, simply illustrating them. Aside from Kollwitz and Neel, most of my heroes for this type of subject matter are actually men: Manet and Fantin La Tour for flowers; Rembrandt, Velásquez and Stubbs for animals; Picasso and Sargent for toddlers.

I cried when I last saw Picasso’s First Steps. Sargent’s Neopolitan Children Bathing at the Clark in Williamstown is one of my favorite paintings in the world. It is deeply human. I have never thought of subject matter as feminine or masculine. I paint most everything except landscape which I leave to my husband, brilliant landscape painter Dave Gloman. Typically I am interested in painting a particular scene because of something formal I’m seeing—the abstraction (light, color, shape, etc). I’m interested in a balancing act between volumes and flat shapes, fuzzy and hard edges. I paint pregnant bellies for the same reason I paint peony buds. I paint smooth baby heads for the same reason I paint eggs–I love spheres.

Johannes Vermeer, Young Woman with a Lute, ca. 1662–63, Oil on canvas, 20 1/4 x 18 in.

I adore Vermeer’s Young Woman with a Lute, Check it out- She is such an egg. The one delicate, glowing orb of a head is so special because it is contrasted and supported by the flat, straight stuff—walls, map, chairs). 5% volume to 95% flatness. It’s so fake and so real. I can’t say I hear or think about music looking at her playing a lute. I think about an egg shell.

White Peonies, 2017, 12” x 12”

Pink Peonies, 2017, 8 x 10”

White Peonies on Green, 2018, 5x 7”

EH:     I personally struggled with getting illustrative quite a bit, especially as a very young painter. What advice can you offer young painters on avoiding getting illustrative and why it is important to do so in the first place?

KS:     Hmm, that’s a hard question. It might actually be helpful to say, “Hey student, I think you would be a great illustrator. You love detail. Your work would come to life, feel even more complete if it was accompanied by words, poetry, stories etc.”

If the student was sure they were not at all interested in illustration, 1. I’d suggest they copy great paintings using a big brush. 2. I’d suggest they tone a board, set up a strong spotlight on their subject and give themselves a (maybe a half-hour) time limit on painting the scene, starting with just the brightest brights. (Often this shows students how less is more.) 3. I’d suggest they do blind contour drawings and study why they might be enjoying looking at those. 

Sometimes an overly illustrative painting can feel like a grocery list. One lemon, one egg, one cup. Sometimes it feels like lyrics that aren’t yet put to music. Melody and arrangement elevate and transform the lyrics. Light, color and geometry enhance the subject matter, creating the mood. There are so many songs I love but I must admit I have no idea what the words are. I feel the song, I don’t read the song. I remember my sister breaking up with her boyfriend and blasting “Wicked Game” by Chris Isaak on a drive. I know those words and combined with the melody and instrumentation, it is very powerful. I literally blew out the speakers that day. Simply reading the lyrics over and over wouldn’t have made the same impact. I think art should make an impact. A graphic novel like Roz Chast’s “Can we talk about something more pleasant” is a brilliant work of art. The drawings and the words work together to create something bigger.

Horizontal Still life with horse, lightbulbs and patterned cloth, 2010, 4 x 14”

I find myself illustrating almost every time I sit down to paint. Sometimes I have to overdo the details in an area so I can find the palette for the whole painting. It’s important though to realize when the details have to be simplified or completely wiped out. I don’t really know how to teach this. If there were a recipe, painting would be easy. And if it was easy I’m not sure I’d dedicate so much time to it. I like the challenge and the mystery. I want to be surprised by what worked.

Lucas 14″ x 11″ 2012

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Oakland Studio 18, 12×12 inches, oil on panel, 2018

I’m pleased to share this interview with the wonderful Bay Area California painter Gage Opdenbrouw where he talks at length about his background, process and thoughts on making his landscapes and views of his studio in Oakland, Ca. I would like to thank him for his generosity in responding to my email interview questions.

His website’s general statement is a great introduction for those who may not be familiar with him and include it here:

…painting is a way of drawing close to moments, and an attempt to pay homage to the fleeting beauty of everyday observations. Regardless of the subject, whether a figure or a moment of light in an interior, the sweep of a sky above an industrial neighborhood, the goal is, as Joseph Campbell once put it, “to reveal the radiance that lies hidden just beneath the surface of every day”. I’m hoping to use a brush to create some poetry from mundane materials, and if the paintings resonate with the viewer in the eye, the heart, the gut, then I feel I’ve been successful in sharing some small aspect of my experience.

His list of solo shows includes: John Natsoulas Gallery, Davis, CA, 2017 and Luna Rienne Gallery, San Francisco in 2016, and has shown widely in group exhibitions.

Larry Groff: How did you first decide to become a painter?

Gage Opdenbrouw: I always drew a lot, as a teenager I found that I couldn’t paint in a way that equaled my command of drawing. So I found myself frustrated because I was lacking an understanding of the concept of masses.  My work was essentially linear, just drawing in color. But at the same time I had some great teachers. I was one of those smart but somewhat maladjusted kids in high school that was always getting in trouble–the type that was capable of getting A’s–but mostly getting detention.

I was in a group show a few years ago that Kyle Staver had several paintings in, and her artist statement recounts someone pulling her aside, a teacher, I think, and saying, ‘I know what’s wrong with you, you’re an artist!’ Her remark really cracked me up because it was a similar experience for me, only I had to figure it out myself.

My last year of high school was at a sort of alternative program at the local city college, where I got to take college level art and philosophy classes. I’d always been a big reader, and had been really drawing a lot and keeping a sketchbook, looking at a lot of art since my early teens. So I think a couple of the teachers that I had at San Jose City College were really big influences in encouraging me to dig deeper. I had several figure drawing and painting classes with an artist named Luis Guiterrez, who, as far as I knew from his classes, was sort of a Franz Kline-like painter. I was shocked to see after knowing him for a couple years that he had done Frederic Remington type cowboy paintings in his youth, very well, at that. But he always encouraged us to work loosely, to collaborate with the material, to draw in ways that were barely within out control. We worked from a model frequently but he encouraged our response to the model to be more intuitive rather than descriptive. I started to see recruiters from art schools in San Francisco and Oakland on campus, I was very receptive…I had both enough experience, and enough encouragement; to dare to think that maybe I could be a painter.

Walnut Lane/Philly Window #1, 16×16 inches, oil on panel, 2018

Oakland Studio 8,rainyday,bluedrapes,

LG:You studied painting at the Academy of Art College in San Francisco? What was that like for you?

GO: It was interesting. Going into it at 18 or 19, what I really wanted was a very traditional education…I think I saw being able to draw what was in front of you as a certain sort of visual literacy…not to say I valued realism especially, but it seemed to me important somehow as a place to start. it still does. Anyway, it was, and still is, a very commercial school. I started as an illustration major, as some sort of nod to practicality. I admired a lot of illustrators, and loved graphic art, especially Goya, Kollwitz, and the like. My taste was dark and dramatic, romantic…Turner and Friedrich were both revelations. At the time illustration was still seen as a viable option, when in a lot of ways it was really beginning dying off from a much healthier period. Anyway, the illustration program was great as a foundation–we drew from life constantly, mostly the figure, clothed, nude, and mostly quick drawings…I had some really great teachers. After a couple years I switched my major to painting, which was a much smaller department–between painting, sculpture, and printmaking majors, there weren’t more than a couple hundred fine art students, and really there was a core of several dozen that was super dedicated. I hung around that group and soaked up as much as could, often with a bruised ego. It was great. We would have 6-hour studio classes, and then draw or paint the figure another 3-4 hours in the evening, be back at it by 9 the next morning. It was immersive, and competitive, and I met a ton of very talented artists I’m still close with today.

On the downside, the education itself was as close to purely technical as it could be, which was great in a lot of ways–but there was, I think, no real intellectual rigor or philosophical discussion as part of painting classes…in some ways that was good, to my mind, that was what drinking beer with my friends was for, and I think we have all found what we need in that respect since, but I’d say that was the big glaring deficiency, but it’s not like it wasn’t obvious going in. I got what I wanted out of it. But it’s just now, 20 years later, that I can stand Sargent, or Sorolla, or Zorn…everyone emulated those guys with the slashy brushstrokes and a little too much cadmium…by the time I was done with school I was painting from memory and imagination primarily, as I was really sick of the idea of a painting having to be this particular kind of photographically derived, brightly colored, modern day impressionism. But I had great teachers, Craig Nelson’s quick studies class taught me SO much that is still a fundamental part of my daily practice…we would do 4-6 paintings a day in that class, usually from life, some as short as 20 minutes. I think we did 20-minute paintings before lunch and 40s in the afternoon. Just building mileage. I learned a ton about economy, paint handling, focus–how to make an observation count in one mark. How much you can do quickly, if you can attain the right level of focus. That’s still important to me–not speed for its own sake, but the keenness of observation that sort of work teaches you.

I had a great anatomy instructor, for several semesters, got to do a lot of sculpture, which really informed my way of seeing and translating forms, I made prints…All in all it was a great education, and it gave me the time and foundation I needed to begin to develop as an artist.

Studio Sink, oil on canvas, 22×24 inches, 2009-2010

Oakland Studio 23, 18×20 inches, oil on panel, 2018

Oakland Studio 19, 18×18 inches, oil on panel, 2018

LG: What have been some of your more important influences that have led you to paint the way you do?

GO: Expressive artists who were also great draftsmen heavily influenced me; such as Goya, Kollwitz, and Daumier…their drama and the sense of visual force has had a major impact. German expressionist painters, Munch, etc. were also huge. I was a pretty alienated kid so the sense of social critique, the angst, all clearly spoke to me.

Cezanne, Giacometti, Vuillard, Bonnard, Degas …Morandi…the Bay Area figurative painters have all been important to me. There was a show at Santa Clara University last year, that was really great, it was a juried show of figure paintings, “Honoring the Legacy of David Park”, they had a great panel, including Jennifer Pochinski, and several members of Park’s family. My painting “Garden”, from the series “Garland of Hours”, won a prize, and that was one of the greatest honors I’ve received thus far. It was amazing for one for his daughters to say she thought my painting was lovely and the one her father would have chosen. Fairfield Porter and Matisse have been big for me lately. Edwin Dickinson is another, we have that incredible big The Cello Player painting in the De Young Museum in San Francisco, and that’s a treasure. Andrew Wyeth is a giant for me. I grew up with books of his work, and that 100-year retrospective last year was incredible.

nude Study, 2009, oil on Canvas

SB-backlit, 17×17 inches, oil on panel, 2017

LG: How important is working from observation to your painting process? Would you say you spend more time looking at the motif or the painting?

GO: It’s important, absolutely! It remains a touchstone. But I don’t have any dogmatic feeling about it, and I use photographs and drawings, usually all in some sort of combination. Initially, I tend to spend more time looking at the motif, but overall, yes, looking at the painting dominates. So observation is important as a source for inspiration, rather than a be and end all type of philosophy… and so that’s really just an everyday habit of looking, noticing. In that sense, I think it is all truly from memory, even when we work from life or a photo. Just in looking away from the canvas, and looking back. And I think that’s good. Working from life I find it easy to be overwhelmed by too much information…it’s rich, and amazing, but I need to take some distance from the motif at a certain point, and just develop it as a painting. It should get to a point where it begins to have its own momentum, its own internal logic; that starts to tell me what it wants.

I find sustained painting from life to be a bit overwhelming in the amount of external input…that pressure is good in forming the first session of a painting, but it can often cause me to lose focus in later sessions. So often I will only work from memory or photos or drawings from that point, going back to life only if I’m stumped on something, something where more information is needed, or need a new input to force a more radical change.

Twilight Blooms, 18×24 inches, oil on panel, 2017

Sing Out, Sing Out, Garland of Hours, 24×24 inches, oil on panel, 2015-2016

LG: What are some of your considerations for deciding on what might make a good painting?

GO: The most important thing is getting a strong feeling for the motif or sharp idea that I am excited to dig into. It’s all dominated by light; the subject matter is incidental in a way and not necessarily my driving concern. Right now I’m most drawn to landscapes and interiors, both focused on color and space. And in certain ways these paintings are formally driven. I’m driven by simple arrangements of shapes of color.

There’s such joy for me in the visual world, such frequent surprise and resonance, that I think being able to put some of that down, just the pleasure of a few simple shapes, a chord of color, a visual rhythm, something very abstract in nature, that drives it as much as anything. But ultimately it’s a matter of being receptive to whatever I may notice, and respond to. I suppose compared to my earlier years, I don’t look for drama–I look for quiet, peace, radiance. The famous Matisse quote about a painting being “…something like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue.” seemed decadent when I was younger, now I find it refreshing.

I think that quiet art–small, modest with everyday themes–is becoming a radical notion. I read a review of Rackstraw Downes’ most recent show recently that was entitled something like “the radical possibility of seeing what’s in front of you”. I loved that. I want to be radically engaged with the small things of every day life, incidents of light and shadow. I feel pretty strongly that for me, art has a very particular purpose, and that’s to keep us engaged with wonder and joy. Beauty does that. It calls attention to the miracle of our lives. And that joy is what will sustain us through the storms. That probably sounds corny. Art helps me, in a very deep way, to stay connected to what’s important. But there is a Mary Oliver poem that says this much better;

Don’t Hesitate –by Mary Oliver (from ‘Swan’, 2010)

If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy,

don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty

of lives and whole towns destroyed or about

to be. We are not wise, and not very often

kind. And much can never be redeemed.

Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this

is its way of fighting back, that sometimes

something happens better than all the riches

or power in the world. It could be anything,

but very likely you notice it in the instant’

when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the

case. Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid

of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.

Oakland Studio 7, 12x12v, oil on panel, 2017

Oakland Studio 4, 20×20 inches, oil on panel, 2016

LG: Do you make a lot of drawings before starting?

GO: Not usually. Or if I do they do not bear a very literal relationship to final painting, although sometimes I’ll do a thumbnail or two. However, time spent drawing, as a way of getting close to the subject, is never wasted. I love to show students Andrew Wyeth’s drawings, they way he would do sometimes dozens of quick pencil drawings, before doing a tempera. He’d draw a room 20 different ways, and in the painting it would be different yet again, but synthesizing all those impulses, and responses. And all those observations just seep into the intimacy, the empathy with the subject. And that quality, I think is key. For me it’s all about that depth of feeling.

The way I work, the drawing often comes in last, edges are often the last thing I really develop and drop into place. But I do concern myself primarily with drawing in the sense of overall composition, initially. Color is involved but its secondary to clear interactions between the basic masses of the painting in terms of value. So I do try to do a sort of underpainting even if I don’t usually wait to let it dry before proceeding. I find that to keep the spontaneity and responsiveness that I want in my process, I like to leave a lot of conflicts and problems to be solved in the course of the painting. I like pentimenti–evidence of changes–traces of the painter’s thoughts as well as the successive decisions, weighing and considering. That’s one of the things I find so lively about painters like Uglow, or Lopez Garcia, or Ann Gale. They observe their own observations as much as they look at the subject–which I find very interesting.

Oakland Studio-17a, 12×12 inches, oil on panel, 2018

Oakland Studio 2, Joel Drawing, oil on panel, 18×24 inches, 2015

Quinault River Valley, 10×12 inches, oil on panel, 2018

LG: Do you draw regularly in a sketchbook?

GO: I try to. Just as often as draw, I write, trying to clarify ideas, write down observations that don’t make their way directly into the painting. On my recent trip to Washington I found myself, after sessions painting outside, doing a verbal ‘download’ of ‘sense memories’ from the day, often sounds, smells, etc. Really trying to retain a specific sense of place in my memory. This is helpful in jogging my memory later should I return to the motif. Sometimes I also draw after making several paintings of the same subject, to try to clarify design ideas. These are usually compositional in nature rather than little elements. Drawing in a sketchbook is something that I’d like to be more of my routine. When I can’t make time to paint for three or four hours this helps keep my creative ferment going, a little way to touch the source every day. I would draw even more if I didn’t have another job as well.

2006, gouache

nude study, pencil, watercolor, 9×12 inches

LG: Sometimes painters, during the process of simplifying views, develop a personal shorthand for abbreviating forms and colors, which if repeated over time, could risk becoming cliché or look overly stylized. On the other hand, many other painters doing the same thing preserve the integrity of their brush strokes and marks and keep their personality intact along with a freshness that seems unique and specific. Is this something you ever think much about? What advice would you offer to someone wishing to avoid this problem?

GO: Yes! Things can certainly become too mannered, in a bad way. I think mannerism, or a characteristic ‘mode’ of putting down your observations, isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But it is a very fine line. To me, it’s a question of authenticity, and that is all about authenticity to one’s own observation and impulses, it’s nothing to with the notion of ‘realism’ or ‘painting what you see’, as if that were even possible. In painting from observation we condense or compress a gigantic amount of information into a few marks, and so I think it’s foolish to be overly dismissive of any habit that we may have learned that helps us to make that digestible, a place to begin, a way of beginning and organizing.

Midsummer Sun in an Empty Room #3, 24×30 inches, oil on canvas, 2017

I think where artists often stray in this respect is when they want to have a ‘look’ or ‘style’. To my way of thinking, your true voice is not a public speaking voice, but your middle of the night voice, the one that cracks with feeling and is a bit embarrassing, the voice that anyone who loves you would recognize just by its tone and cadence. The one that you can’t help. Trying to be original is the most follow-the-herd, highway-to-mediocrity approach you can have. So if you’re out there trying hard to paint like Kanevsky, Uglow, Corot, or Sorolla or whatever it is…it could be a trap. I think what makes it sing is the authenticity of engagement with both the subject and the painting. So if you are seeing something that way, then by all means, chase it.

We are always chasing an abstract ideal, a pictorial concept we are trying to impose on the subject, which comes largely from all the paintings we have ever admired, so to even imagine we can take influence out of it is not realistic to my mind. We’re painters, we work within a tradition, which is to say a set of conventions. But yet, when we are not pushing the envelope, and surprising ourselves, that’s where the bad mannering comes in–a sort of autopilot that is the polar opposite of crisp, clear painterly observation and decision. I see it as about the quality of your attention. If you’re connecting, it will show. If you’re not, that will too.

It’s something along the lines of ‘make a certain mistake often enough and they’ll call it a style’ (some delta blues player, can’t remember now which one), or ‘character is who you are in the dark’. If you are thinking about ‘style’ while you’re painting, someone else might as well be painting.

Salish Sea, 10×12 inches, oil on panel, 2018

Oakland Studio 10, Rainy Afternoon, 18×24, oil on panel, 2017

LG: How important is seeing hand of the artist in a painting?

GO: It’s very important, one of the most poignant concerns. “The snail trail” of human presence that Bacon refers to. I’m more moved by doubt, uncertainty, skepticism than I am by virtuoso performances in that regard. In this regard I prefer Giacometti or Morandi, Vuillard or Manet, over the flashy brushwork of Zorn, Sorolla, Sargent. This speaks to how personal and idiosyncratic each painter’s concept of representation is. There’s an old Chinese proverb about the three things needing to be in balance to create a work of art. The touch. The eye. The heart. All of these things form a painter’s voice.

It’s a language that one has to teach themselves, how to digest and condense what’s in front of you in a way that remains authentic to the experience of looking or the intent. The touch of a painter is everything, how he or she builds forms, accents some and rolls others together into a generative soup…There is something incredibly poignant to me, in the wobbly humility of a handmade object, especially one that somehow conveys a wordless experience across time the way a painting can. Think of what we get from Vermeer’s hand, versus, say, Soutine. Chardin or Rembrandt. What a rich world of possibilities. It’s shocking how much can be done with paint, really, and the diversity of it, technically, given that it is such a primitive medium.

New Years Day, 4×5 inches, gouache on paper, 2018

LG: Please tell us something about your life as a painter up in Bay area? Is there a healthy community of painters there who you connect with?

GO: Yes! Definitely. Since I went to school here, I know tons of artists, both from those days and all the time since. There are so many who have moved away, and I will be joining them soon enough, despite there being community it’s a tough place to be an artist, for a number of reasons, but it’s also a place where artists like to live. So yeah, in fact I probably don’t know enough civilians, really, on balance.

Honestly though I haven’t shown much here for a long time, and I think that’s true of many artists here: there’s just not the buyer support, at least not for relatively traditional painting. And what little support there was was has dropped off and changed a lot in the last 15 years or so. Not trying to be sour grapes but I think it’s been a real change. I think space is just so painfully expensive that it’s difficult for people to sustain their creative lives here. But in general, the Bay area still has a very good creative scene overall, tons of visual art, music, lots of it very adventurous, to say the least.

My artist friends here are doing very different sorts of work, and that diversity is very inspiring. However, in terms of work that is closer to my own I feel more connected with artists outside this area. I do have a core group of painter friends here who I try to talk shop with as often as possible-–trading studio visits with other painters is great and I like to do this as much as I can. Naturally, I love to go to galleries and museums but visiting painters in their studios: those conversations are what I return to in thinking about my work.

Oakland Studio 15, 11×14 inches, oil on panel, 2017

Garden, Garland of Hours, 18×24 inches, oil on panel, 2015

LG: How important is solitude when you paint?

GO: Solitude is definitely one of my major requirements in life, and at 41 I don’t have any trouble getting it. There’s that lovely line in ‘letters to a young poet’ where Rilke says something to the effect of ‘your life will become a dusky solitude past which the noise of others will pass without notice’. To some people that sounds terrifying, I imagine, for me it sounds absolutely lovely. I like to be alone. I need it. There’s just so much noise, in it’s presence do we even think our own thoughts, feel our own lives deeply enough?

Solitude in nature is what really feeds it all, on a deeper level, for me, and that means hiking, camping, etc, frequently. The silence, the vastness, the sense of scale, including the scale of time evident in the land, in the trees and plants…all of that really feeds and grounds me. Most often I don’t paint, as I am making an effort to drink it all in as deeply as I can–I read something where Andrew Wyeth said something along the lines of ‘I get a lot of painting done, when I’m not painting’, and I know just what he meant. I think it’s pretty hard to have that kind of solitude in the presence of another person. But that doesn’t mean I always need those kinds of conditions to paint, just that it’s important I get that kind of contemplative time steadily.

There are so many kinds of solitude; maybe it would be useful to define what we are talking about. Certainly the solitude of working alone in the studio or out in the landscape is critical for me. It is the foundation of everything. The wordless connection with my life, our lives, this world, revealed so poignantly through my visual world. So it is a meditation that I need to spend time with.

I work first thing in the morning, on days when I get to paint. Sometimes it is just sitting in the studio, this morning it is writing these answers, but most often I paint something quickly with a cup of coffee in my hand. I work almost exclusively by natural light, as I have a studio with wonderful windows and soft even natural light. So there’s the solitude of living in an undesirable area that no one visits, surrounded by traffic jams (I’m in an industrial area near the freeway, train tracks, etc.), where there is no temptation to go out and about.

Additionally my space is beautiful, a big live/work loft in a converted factory, with beautiful light, high ceilings, on one side you can see out over, and on a clear day, across the bay, and on the other there’s a great view over East Oakland toward the hills which reminds me a lot of Mt. St. Victoire…I look at it a lot and haven’t really begun to paint those landscapes nearly as much as I intend to. There are just so many paintings competing to get started…So that requires time, and buying time here takes a lot of effort.

Studio work, one’s path as an artist, has so much solitude built into it. I think it’s part of why friendships with other painters is so important: only we know how to support one another in all the difficult places that a life dedicated to painting takes you. My old friend Miya Ando calls artists ‘civilians’. I think it’s an apt analogy, in the sense that a lot of folks ‘just don’t get it’. Artists have to go to a lot of relatively dark interior places to be able to make their work, and it’s taxing. There are complexes and systems of doubt that dedicated artists live with that a civilian can’t even see, much less feel the weight of. So you really need your community to lean on–not just for aesthetic or artistic inspirations but for support with all of that.

Haruki Murakami’s book, “What I Talk About When I Talk About Running: A Memoir” is a beautiful look into taking care of one’s self as an artist. After he started writing seriously he quit drinking and smoking and took up long distance running, knowing that his art would lead him to interior places that he needed to train for, to have the requisite strength to live that life. Of course, many folks take the opposite direction, but was inspiring, even if unrealistic for me. I mean that I absolutely hate running. But I love hiking, biking, backpacking, yoga, etc. Exercise and meditation and yoga are all key to keeping my strength up. I did quit smoking, finally, and it’s been a couple years. So that’s good. It’s a great book.

Above Mineral #10, 10×12 inches, oil on panel, 2018

Mineral School 8:15pm, 8×8 inches, oil on paper, 2018

Mineral School 7:30pm, 8×8 inches, oil on paper, 2018

LG: You recently were given a residency at the Mineral School in Washington near Mineral Lake and Mt. Rainier. What was that like for you?

GO: Mineral School was really fantastic. It’s a small, quiet town nestled into the mountains ringing the base of Mt. Rainier, an inspiring place to work. The residency is small, consisting of just 4 residents and a few staff and is housed in a beautiful school from 1946. It’s primarily for writers, and residents stay in classrooms with huge windows and chalkboards on two walls.

I’ve always have been fascinated by the natural world and grew up hiking and camping. My studio and home is in a converted factory loft in East Oakland, a light industrial area between the freeway and the more residential sprawl. It’s empty lots, cab-yards, warehouses, abandoned cars, and homeless camps. So I have this big space with beautiful light, but it’s in a super desolate area. And there’s a lot of congestion, frustration, noise, confusion, illegal dumping, etc. There are other things I like about Oakland but my neighborhood is pretty raw. My studio is a beautifully sunlit sanctuary, though I do end up living like a hermit. However, I suppose that’s how be anywhere. But it has a particular gritty character here.

So just being in the mountains for a couple weeks was wonderful, and the other residents were all very focused, brought big projects with them. Being in this environment where painting was my priority; thinking, reading and writing about painting or just reflecting on life in general, and feeling that I was being supported was a great feeling.

The first week there was a lot of smoke from the many fires but eventually it let up and I got outside to painted …the colors are so weird and queasy with heavy smoke, it’s an interesting challenge to paint. But there were days it was so bad I had to stay inside. Ominous.

mineral, 8×10 inches, oil on panel

Mineral Lake Sunrise, 4×7 inches, oil on paper, 2018

Mineral Creek with Smoke #2, 9×12, oil on paper, 2018

Above Mineral #12, 8×10 inches, oil on panel, 2018

Above Mineral #11, 12×12 inches, oil on panel, 2018

This is an incredible landscape, with all the volcanic forms of the cascades, these dramatic knife-edge shapes that loom in and out of the fog and the smoke. It was incredible the scale of what could be revealed once the fog and smoke cleared. I’d been there 4 days before I saw the mountain…I knew it would be huge, but I was still utterly floored when I finally saw it.

There was also a whole other component to my trip: I’d been wanting to work with the image of a partially burned house. It’s an evocative subject and one that seemed to me to speak powerfully of loss…I’ve lost a few close family members in the last couple years and have been feeling a certain pressure to put some of that grief into paint. My Aunt, who I was very close to all my life, died, in fact, after a long illness, while I was on this trip. Anyway, I looked out the window on my first day at Mineral School, and there was a 2 story house, partially burned, standing on the lot next door. I went over and had a look at it, and it was almost tailor made for what I had been thinking of, if I’d had a chance to burn a house just to use it as a setup for a painting, I couldn’t have done a better job. Parts of the facade and a couple rooms on the first floor were still intact, and the charred wood, the plants growing in the windows, the soil and broken pottery, plants growing out of the floor, peeling paint…it was all enormously inspiring, I felt it spoke so eloquently of loss, and time, and our efforts to hold on to all that we love. There was a plum tree in the yard there, and several outbuildings, and more than once when I would go over there, deer would scatter from the abandoned shacks where they’d been feasting on the plums. I even found burnt pages from books that had been in the house. I was told it had burned about 6 years ago, and slumped and slouched a little more with every winter. So I sketched there a great deal but felt oil paintings of this subject needed to be bigger in format, so I just drew and made a few small studies with paint. This has become one of several bodies of work I’m involved with in the studio at present.

Yellow House Study #5, oil on paper, 2018

LG: What would you say is the most important thing you want to get across to your students attending your workshops?

GO: That making starts is infinitely more important than worrying about ‘finishing’, whatever that is. That great Hawthorne quote about ‘know when you’re licked…’

The need for engagement with your subject, to connect with your reasons for painting, is paramount. To quote Mary Oliver one more time, “Attention is the beginning of devotion”. Painting can be a devotional activity, if practiced with love. So look at it as spending time with what you find beautiful.

LG: How optimistic are you about the future of painting?

GO: Well, I’m very optimistic about the future of painting. I really think it’s very vital at the moment, from what I can tell, there are a ton of painters, and there’s a great plurality of sorts of painting happening, so I think that’s really exciting even if a lot of it doesn’t grab me personally–there’s still plenty that does and that’s what matters. I think it remains a vital and unique form of human endeavor and communication, a pre-verbal or non-verbal way to share experience, to reflect upon the world as well as ourselves. I think that paintings that are slow, quiet, modest in its aims, and focused on human experience…that to me is soul food. It’s not the only kind of painting I enjoy but it’s what I’m most interested in pursuing.

To me this feels like an antidote, a tonic, to our times that move at breakneck speeds, has the attention span of a goldfish, and is increasingly dehumanized and unexamined.

LG: Anything coming up for you in terms of shows or workshops?

GO: My priority is to show more widely, and I’m planning, in the next couple years, some 2, 3 and 4 person shows with painters I admire. That’s more exciting to me than solo shows at the moment. I’ll be teaching several workshops in 2019.

You might have heard about the January 2018 Stanek Gallery show in Philadelphia, Disrupted Realism. John Seed, who was one of the critical players in putting that together, is finishing up a Disrupted Realism book that will be out in 6 months or so, from Schiffer publishing. There will be 38 artists included, and I’m really honored and humbled to be one of them. Lastly, I’ll be doing a solo show entitled “Garland of Hours” at Shasta College in Redding California, in March of 2019, and i’ll be giving a lecture and a workshop along with it. It’s a nice change of pace from commercial galleries

White House, Garland of Hours, 18×18 inches, oil on panel, 2017

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Threshold, 22×30 inches, pastel, digital photo, acrylic on watercolor paper, 2018

Streetwise, 22×30 inches,mixed media, metal, photo on paper, 2018

I am pleased to post this email interview with the NYC based painter Carol Diamond. I have been following her work on Facebook and have been continually struck by the original and dynamic way she paints urban structures with her modernist, abstract sensibility. Some of these works evolve out of observed, on-site engagements others are studio inventions. Taking the urban theme even further, she also makes assemblages and collages from found objects that were discarded onto city streets.

Diamond explains more in her website’s artist statement:

…“I feel a strong parallel between the making of a painting and the building of a wall, or a structure, an edifice. Each involves construction and deconstruction, and provides refuge, a haven. In the case of my interest in religious architecture, there is the element of sanctuary and sacred geometry”. For years Diamond painted directly from street scenes, churches, bridges and boats. Through abstraction she found her way back to city sources, collaging found debris into ready-mixed concrete on wood panels. Diamond divides her compositions with large movements such as arcs, diagonals, and verticals which combine her deep connection to early Modernism, in particular the works of Malevich and Lissitzky with her axial drawing methods related to Renaissance linear Perspective. Anselm Keifer’s work which unabashedly uses linear perspective, has been inspirational since her youth, where emotion and history are transformed into the most rugged images of materiality and depth by any living artist.

Since 2000 Diamond has taught at Pratt Institute where she is an Associate Professor. Diamond studied at the New York Studio School in Manhattan and received a BFA in painting from Cornell University. She has lived in Brooklyn since the late 1980’s and currently lives in Manhattan. She has had solo exhibits in the Gold Wing Gallery and the Alliance Gallery, New York City, as well as many other group and solo shows in New York City, Upstate New York and nationally.

She recently had a solo exhibition of her work at the Kent State University in Canton, Ohio – Threshold: Selected works by Carol Diamond

This show was reviewed in the ARTWACH blog by Tom Wachunas who stated:

“… There are several methodologies or modalities present in this impressive collection of works spanning (I’m guessing) at least several years: Large-scale abstract paintings, mixed media works on paper, relief collages, plein-air drawings of architectural sites, and sculptural assemblages of found debris.

Radiating from most of this formal diversity is an aura of vintage Modernism. It’s a visceral kind of tenor – alternately gritty and refined, delicately ornamental and muscular, literal and symbolic – which binds all these works together into a collective embodiment of a distinctly urban sensibility. These are fascinating explorations of facades, spaces, structures, and metropolitan detritus, comprising something the artist knows intimately – something you could call big city zeitgeist.”

I would like to thank Ms. Diamond for agreeing to this interview and for sharing her thoughts on her art with the readers here.

125th Street Arches, 38×50 inches, graphite on Strathmore paper, 2017

Larry Groff:        What made you decide to become an artist?

Carol Diamond:        That’s the easy question. I never decided, I just always did it. Always took an interest in art classes and making things, from doll clothes to papier-mâché animals in my after school art class in the basement of a family friend, Joan Silberbach in the Cleveland suburb where I grew up. We worked with enamel, tin foil relief, a lot of papier-mâché, and I did my first oil painting (I still have it) all in browns, with dried flowers and a skull!

Then High School it became real, going to a progressive prep school with a great arts facility; theatre, pottery, photography, painting, fiber art. So much experience there, inspiration from teachers, amazing creative friends, and freedom. I was pouring paint on unstretched canvas in my parent’s garage, thinking I was Pollock. I did a painting for school “in the style of” Dali, where a cloudy sky turns into a blue curtain entering a window. A rose sits in a glass vase. My sister and I took outside classes at the Cleveland Museum of art.

LG:        What was art school was like for you?

CD:        I decided to go to Cornell to get a university education and have a Fine Arts Department with no emphasis at all on Commercial Design. The Cornell School of Architecture Art and Planning was that. It was relatively hands off atmosphere but I did bond strongly with a few teachers, one of whom (Gillian Pederson-Krag) vociferously encouraged my 2 closest friends and I to stay away from studying abroad for our junior year (“If you go to Rome you will want to be buying shoes and not be in your studios”) and instead to attend the New York Studio School, where she felt sure we would benefit enormously.

So in 1980, my sister joined us from the U of Michigan and together the 4 of us walked day to day from our 6th floor walkup apartment on West 10th Street across Christopher Street to 8 West 8th Street, wherein began my true education. Though it was not even the tail end of the New York School era, we thought it was.  We were in the wake of Pollock and DeKooning, Cedar Bar stories told to us by our great mentor, Nick Carone, the draftsman and voice of the Hans Hofmann School practice, along with European history. We read the Hofmann’s  Search for the Real, and Kandinsky, but the daily practice was all about drawing the figure, Giacometti, plastic space, form, both classical and deconstructed.

Nick Carone, Mercedes Matter, Rackstraw Downes, Paul Russotto, Charles Cajori and others showed us passion, pushed us to see; cared enough to be frustrated when we couldn’t see, and celebrated us when we could.

Brooklyn Navy Yard, 24×30 inches, oil on canvas, 1997, Hess Oil collection

Low rise, High rise, 22×30 inches, oil on canvas 199?

Fire Escape, 50×38 inches, pastel, conte on Strathmore paper, 2018

Ladder, 36×24 inches, oil, latex, glass on canvas 2011

Direction, 30×22 inches, oil, latex, dirt on canvas 2012

LG:        Can you say something about how your work has evolved over the years?

CD:        Art follows personal growth and emotions, along with artistic influences. And these artistic influences are affected by what an artist is needing/trying to say, all unbeknownst to the artist. It’s all intuitive. Our interests, psychology, predilections, skills and training all guide and lead us. I feel lucky when I’m able to follow myself into terrains of expression and discovery. But as the perspective changes from the young to the mid career artist: my dreams have subsided and I’m every bit as unknowing about what tomorrow will bring as ever. There is no safety.

Mia Familia, 16×20 inches, oil on canvas, 1993

My Street, 24×36 inches, oil on canvas, 1996

Williamsburg Bridge, afternoon, 24×28 inches, o/c, 1997, Collection of the Portland, Oregon Museum of Art

14th St. Interior, 22×28 inches, oil on canvas, 1992

Cornwall Coast, 18×24 inches, oil on canvas, 1998

LG:        In the 90’s you worked a lot from life making painterly, gestural landscapes, figures and still life what where some of the reasons you changed and how was your transition from working perceptually to more studio-based abstraction?

CD:        At the Studio School I learned that Abstraction could come from elements of perceptual painting, such as the abstraction of Picasso and the cubists. Non objective painters used shape without observation of form, and abstract expressionists integrated emotion through gesture into abstract space.

I do have a group of early abstract paintings I did in the late 80’s, but I was always looking at a set-up of some sort, even a chair against the wall. Then the set-ups and objects became more clear and I maintained an aesthetic of perceptual painting a la Giacometti and Cézanne, destined to follow the existential side of modernism related to making a thing exist in space, often by a deconstruction process.  I was dedicated to plein air and still life/interior compositions, painting in a tonal palette, and then through that developed my love of cityscape and gritty urban areas albeit with a somewhat romantic glaze. This culminated in a series of works done in Williamsburg, painting the East River bridges, the Domino Sugar Factory and ships in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Something happened though after showing these works, where I felt too comfortable with my process, I had “gotten it”. I was afraid to become a traditional landscape painter going from scene to scene.

I segued to studio paintings with a trip to Southwest England painting and drawing the rocky coast and in Brittany, France, finding a more organic overall approach to line and shape. The abstract paintings I began on my studio floor involved poured curvilinear movements, and scratching through layers of paint as a way of drawing, finding content. The space was compressed, cubist inspired, while also favoring early Northern Renaissance sense of flatness and rich color.

My still life and landscape work had mainly used short vertical and horizontal strokes, the plus/minus Giacometti structure. Here I was now using mainly Circles and Arabesque motions.

I got pregnant soon after and began raising my baby! My husband died two years later to illness, then my mother in the same year.

My paintings became more spare, with a strictly black and white palette. Then broken glass found from the street and other debris entered the palette and I have since been experimenting with relief elements and collage materials in my work. I had worked as an Antiquities restorer in the late 90’s, and was lucky enough to have helped repair broken Greek Attic vases, Chinese Bronze objects and much more. This relation to materials from Antiquity had a strong but indirect influence on this direction in my work. For some years now I’ve also returned to architectural drawing to continue with my interest in concepts of Structure and the building/deconstructing process.

So the genres of representation and abstraction are fluid, and keep following conceptual needs in my understanding/expression of form and space and SELF IN THE UNIVERSE!

Fences, 25×38 inches, digital photo, pastel, charcoal on paper, 2018

Abonica, 30×64 inches, oil on canvas, 2016,

LG:        I just read your brilliant recent (7/27/18) essay Carol Diamond on Al Held   on the Painter’s on Painting site.

With this in mind I’m curious to find out more about some how you juxtapose flatness and deep space in some of your current works, like in your Fences  or Abonica. I am seeing some connections to Al Held’s use of perspective in his black and white paintings and his later works with abstracted geometric forms in space. Of course there hugely obvious differences but it struck me that many of the collaged shapes have these dramatic linear perspectives that are cut and positioned in such a way to induce a dizzying array of spacial movements not unlike some of the compositions he was involved with. I always loved how he thumbed his nose at the rules about not violating the integrity of the picture plane or modeling form as a big no-no. 

Anything more you can say about this?

CD:        Well you basically said it! And I’m very glad you can see this connection. As you said, Held “thumbed his nose at the rules about picture plane integrity or modeled form” and this is how I see him and I feel this gives license to my work to play with these rules as well. While I am impressed and enamored by many painters who develop juicy painterly flat chunks of color on the picture plane, I do crave form, love geometry, and space. I’ve grown into the love of perspective because of my teaching perspective and drawing systems, and have integrated diagonal orthogonal lines and vanishing points into my city drawings. I felt guilty about this until I saw Held’s late work some years ago and these works inspired me  to search for my own synthesis between the picture plane and deep space. Why not?

I’ve missed the space I developed in my plein air paintings and current drawings in my abstract work; missed the sense of space and atmosphere. The collage pieces from photos of sidewalks, railings, angles, textures, fused with my extended passages directing the eye and tilting the plane – this has the beginning of synthesizing my two parallel bodies of work. The many possibilities of this current direction in my work excites me a great deal.

Factory, 24×18 inches, metal, debris, photo, pigment on wood 2018

Collage Wall, installation of mosaic pieces on wood, 2018

Manuscript, 10×8 inches, metal, cement, pigment on wood, 2018

Eclipse, 24×18 inches, metal, cement, latex on wood panel, 2017

LG:        Please tell us something about the ideas and process behind your assemblages and collages. I’m particularly curious about how you collage elements like digital photos and other physical objects – flattened cans and the like. 

CD:        I’ve been picking up broken glass for a long time. (at first I embedded everything into Latex paint)  I have been using flattened cans more recently and other debris and other three dimensional found pieces I can assemble. I also save and use plastic to-go containers as plaster molds to create sort of mosaic plaques. The debris aesthetic is peculiarly connected to things and their destruction, their remains; the instant a bottle is crashed to the ground, the rusting of mechanical parts, scrap metal, colored cans. I love cement. The photo elements evolved to be able to work on paper and develop spatial drawing through shadows and ornamentation, literal elements photographed then distorted from context. Like the metal elements, coke cans and such are out of their natural element, as was practiced in Dada and assemblage art.

There can be a transformation of ANY material into art – paint itself is transformed. Why not found materials? Our materials have two lives; their original purpose (bottle to drink from, paint to make colored surfaces from) and the metaphor, the content.

I have also been influenced by Celtic Art, medieval stone carvings, mosaic inlaid objects and stained glass windows. And of course architectural forms, mainly arches and domes.

Shadows, 36×60 inches, oil on canvas, 2018

Rocklike, 48×40 inches, oil and enamel on canvas, 2000

Yellow Rising, 61×39 inches, oil on canvas 1999

Two Personalities, 48×48 inches, oil on canvas, 2002

LG:        Many first generation abstract artists believed in the potential of painting to reveal meanings of a metaphysical, symbolic nature and that abstract art has the potential express great human tragedy and perhaps hope. Do you think art can or should address the troubles of our times, like Trump, climate change and the like?

CD:        I like this subject because we are now faced with a climate of intense political upheaval, the troubles of our times as you say; many artists have shown their activism, taking on great causes while hoping to express their own voice in art. The first part of your question talks about Metaphysical and symbolic qualities in art which refer to more universal attributes such as hope and tragedy rather than an election or even political upheaval. I do think Art is about humanity, and being human. I just don’t think of artists as being activists (except perhaps as a separate duty from making art) beholden to do anything but develop their story, their craft, their commitment to emotional openness and truth and hard work.

We live and create from our own moment in time, it’s always been this way. We are not separate from the world around us, so anything that enters us can enter our work.

Blue Halo (Meditation), 30×22 inches, oil on canvas, 2010

Medieval, 48×36 inches, oil, charcoal on canvas 2012

LG:        Would you say you try to bring a spiritual dimension to your work? Would that mainly be something to drive your work on a personal level or is are you trying to communicate these concerns to viewers?

CD:        Well yes there IS a spiritual dimension to my work but I don’t try to make this happen. For one it comes from the aspect of art history I connect to that is religious. Early Christian paintings and sculpture especially, tell the stories that have impact to being human and showing humanity. The deposition scenes showing Christ falling into the arms of Mary, to me show the weight of death in our arms, the weight of carrying the burden of love and loss in our life. But as you say, this intensity might be more of the spiritual in art that “drives my work on a personal level” more that anything I try to communicate in my art.

I express spirituality in my love of the Arch form, the protective symbol, threshold to another dimension. The Dome, I’ve drawn and painted, which means much more than I understand or can express, but it’s certainly related to bigger subjects. And I completely believe in Art as a meditative, life affirming activity; to make, to behold or experience. Art is connection to life, history, and to the present.

LG:        Are existential questions–like our place in the universe or what it means to be alive–too big for paint? Why not just make art for art’s sake alone?

CD:        Not too big for paint, no. From Kandinsky to Chardin, artists paint about what it is to be alive, what it is to notice something, have something to say, experience emotion and love form and poetry. But art can’t be didactic; probably asks more questions than it answers.

Scaffold, 38×50 inches, conte, charcoal on Strathmore paper, 2018

The post Interview with Carol Diamond appeared first on Painting Perceptions.

Studio XLIX, 44X48 inches, Oil On Canvas, 2018

I’m delighted to share this new interview with Peri Schwartz where she talks about her background and process as well her studio explorations with color, space and composition. This September she has a solo exhibition titled Color and Process, at the Gallery Naga in Boston. A previous interview, given by the writer Cody Upton was published on Painting Perceptions in May 2013 can be read here.

I am particularly attracted to the vibrancy, clarity and resonance in these new works.  Schwartz studio investigations arrive at just the right tones for these color shapes surrounded by space and light but also leaves behind residual clues of where her journey took her;  how colors and shapes were changed and shapes reformed in her open and painterly applications of paint. A formal movement which balances exactitude with lyricism. The bottles and studio fixings are just a starting point, the true destination is in achieving a balance and unity and artful resolution. 

In an essay for the 2010 Page Bond Gallery exhibition catalog Lulan Yu wrote:

…Though making works of art is a thoughtful and deliberate process for Peri Schwartz, it also is one that involves much doing and re-doing. After she has arranged objects for a still life or interior, she often rearranges them while she is working in order to resolve problems and achieve her desired outcome. She also is carefully attuned to the effects of light and color that occur from the arrangements of elements in her works; she experiments by moving bottles and jars to different positions, creating subtle changes in the value and color of the liquids they contain. Although Schwartz seems to enjoy the unpredictable nature of creating works of art in this way, she is very sure and deliberate in her intentions. As a result, these seemingly quiet, contained still life and interior pieces have a dynamic, intriguing quality that invites the viewer to thoughtful contemplation.”

Larry Groff: Can you tell us something about your latest body of work and your upcoming show at Gallery NAGA in Boston? Does your new work continue with the theme of arrangements of light and reflections from transparent colored liquids in your studio space?

Peri Schwarz: My new work uses the same elements that have been my subject for almost twenty years. The difference is that in the early Studio paintings it looked more like an artist’s studio, with canvasses leaning against the walls and stools with books piled on them. In the more recent Studio paintings, the books are shapes of color with no bindings to indicate they are books. The canvasses have now been replaced with wooden boards that I paint with sample colors from the hardware store. I’m still captivated by the color I get from liquids in bottles and jars and how they are reflected on a glass tabletop. The grid that I have been using in my work for over thirty years is as important as ever.

Bottles & Jars III, 15×23 inches, etching, 2015

Jars I, 15×22 inches, etching, 2017

Studio XLIV, 48×38 inches, Oil On Canvas, 2017

LG: In previous interviews you’ve talked about the influence of Diebenkorn and Morandi on your art. What aspects of their paintings have impacted you the most with your current work? 

PS:  I love Morandi but in this group of paintings I’ve been looking mostly at Diebenkorn and Mondrian. For example, in one of Diebenkorn’s still lifes, I was especially drawn to the orange/blue relationship and how he looks down on the table. In Diebenkorn’s Berkeley years the subject and space are recognizable, giving it a more realistic feel. I’m striving for the same balance of abstraction and realism. It may be more difficult to see the connection with Mondrian. When I’m arranging the colored rectangular boards on the back wall I’m thinking of how he used color in such perfect proportions in his paintings.

Studio XXXIV, 54×44 inches, Oil On Canvas, 2013

Studio XLII, 44×38 inches, Oil On Canvas, 2016

Studio 13, 30.5×36 inches, monotype, 2018

LG: Would you call yourself a formalist? What does that mean for you?

PS: Here is where I admit I didn’t exactly know what a formalist meant when I first thought of this question. I looked it up and found this definition–Whether an artwork is a pure abstraction or representational, a formalist looks for the same basic elements and judges a painting’s value based on the artist’s ability to achieve a cohesive balance in the composition. Based on that definition I am happy to be called a formalist. About the same time I read your question I found this recent article by  Jed Perl in the New York Review of Books. I know I don’t easily fit into representational or abstract art. I’m obsessed with getting every proportion right as I observe it. At the same time, I am thinking how is this fitting into the size of my canvas and would moving an inch to the left or right improve the composition.

Studio XLIII, 46×38 inches, Oil On Canvas, 2016

Studio XI, 54 x 42 inches, oil on canvas, 2006

LG: You likely got a strong foundation in traditional painting during art school. Did your experience at BU back then also encourage modernist approaches?

PS:  I don’t know if all your readers know that we are both BU alumni. It was rigorous and intense and I loved it. Figure drawing, anatomy and tonal painting were the backbone. There are three professors that stand out in my mind for their interest in abstraction: Joseph Ablow, Jim Weeks and Robert D’Arista. All of them worked figuratively but emphasized how important the abstraction was in painting.

I loved Ablow’s class in composition. He had studied with Albers and modeled a lot of his teaching on him. I learned so much from his slide lectures and remember how he paired Vermeer with Mondrian and Morandi with Guston. He taught us how your eye travels through a painting and the important concept that a diagonal can lead you into the space of the image and also be on the surface.

Jim Weeks was part of the Bay Area Figurative Movement and introduced us to Diebenkorn, Olivera and Bischoff. That was a breath of fresh air from the old masters the other teachers were talking about.

D’Arista taught us about the Golden Triangle and how to use the proportions of the paintings in our composition. He would come into class with a bagful of objects and set up the most interesting still lifes. We could only paint with black and Venetian red and no curves- only verticals, horizontals and forty-five degree diagonals.

Studio XLI, 52×36 inches, Oil On Canvas, 2016

Studio XLV, 52X44 inches, Oil On Canvas, 2018

LG: Your paintings often switch back and forth from sharply defined imagery to work that is abstracted and loose; colorful configurations but still recognizable shapes. Does your painting’s tightness or looseness evolve on its own terms or do you start by being in a certain mood, which encourages a particular direction – and go from there?

Bottles & Jars #2, conte on Mylar 18×26 inches, 2012

PS: The tightness and looseness evolves as the painting progresses. I would say that instead of a work evolving because of my being in a certain mood, it’s more about color and spatial relationships. It takes me at least a week or two to set up a composition. I begin with a drawing, which for the last five years, has been on Mylar. Working with a combination of charcoal and conte crayon, I get beautiful blacks and the erased areas looks bright because of the Mylar’s translucency. The drawing is “tighter” than the painting will be but serves as a useful guide while I work on the painting.

Bottles & Jars #2c, conte on mylar 19×20.5 inches, 2016

Studio 23, conte on Mylar 53 x 39 inches, 2017

There are many versions of the composition before the painting is done. I know I’m not alone in struggling with knowing when a painting is finished. I also know that as I get closer to finishing it I care less about resolving everything. That would explain why some areas are clearly defined and other areas are looser. When some time has passed from when I’ve finished a painting, I find I really like the loose and unfinished sections but know they only work because I’m clear about the spatial relationships

Woman in Studio, 72×42 inches, Oil On Canvas, 2000

Studio Self-Portrait, 66×48 inches, 1996

LG: Your engagement with the colored liquids on a reflective glass table subject-matter, as well as your self-portraits have lasted many years.

I’m curious to hear what you might be able to say about the merits and risks of working thematically like this for so many years?

PS: You mentioned that my self-portraits lasted many years. I don’t think you know about the group of pastels I did in 1989-90. It’s relevant because it only lasted two years and is not something I want to go back to. To take a break from the self-portraits I was working on, I started drawing my son’s wooden blocks. After I tired of their hardness I picked up a sweatshirt and wrapped the blocks. I had worn sweatshirts in many of my self-portraits and loved the way the fabric could be molded. The idea of wrapping objects in sweatshirts developed to the point that I was making complex sculptures and then drawing them. Unlike the self-portraits or the Studio paintings, after two years I had exhausted the subject. The Studio paintings, which I have been working on for almost twenty years, feel open ended. When I compare the earlier ones to my new ones, I’m surprised at how different they are. It’s obviously the same physical space but the color and scale of things has changed

Two Wrapped Objects, 27×29 inches, pastel

Studio 24, 44×52 inches, 2018

LG: When I was in school I remember hearing people say that galleries prefer artists that have coherent and consistent body of work that is uniquely identifiable.   However, I also heard artists say having a signature style is something to be wary of – that is might risk looking too commercially driven and could stifle authenticity. How would you weigh in on this issue?

PS: I think style is something that has to be earned. I know in my own work before I make a mark either with charcoal or paint, I’m confident at the time that it is right. The next day it no longer seems right and I will replace it with something else. The scraping or wiping out of an area and the repainting it might translate as a style. Color relationships also play into what you might call a style. Is the way Bonnard used color his style? It seems to me that if you like an artist’s work, you like their style and the two things are intertwined.

Studio XLVII, 52×44 inches, Oil On Canvas, 2017

Studio XLVIII, 52×44 inches, Oil On Canvas, 2018

STUDIO XLV, 48X38 inches, Oil On Canvas, 2017

Studio L, 38×42 inches, Oil On Canvas, 2018

LG: What, if anything, does your artwork have to do with music? Do you think of your paintings as being in certain key or using musical components as harmony, rhythm, intervals, timbre, syncopation, etc. Do you listen to music while you paint? What do listen to?

PS: Listening to classical music, especially chamber music, has always been important. Aside from listening to it while I work, I go to concerts and lectures about music frequently. At the lectures (given by Bruce Adolphe for the Chamber Music Society at Lincoln Center) a movement of chamber music is broken down. An example would be a Beethoven string quartet and Bruce would point out how Beethoven goes from dissonance to harmony. He might also point out how the opening theme is “simple” and show how he expands it as the movement develops. I become more conscious of the journey Beethoven takes you on when he returns to the theme at the end of the movement. I think this brings me back to your question about formalism. In classical music there is a defined structure – three or four movements, each with its introduction, development and resolution. Beethoven keeps the structure but breaks the rules. It’s exciting for me to see the parallels in painting.

Studio 17, 25×29 inches, Oil On Canvas, 2018

Studio XLVI, 48×44 inches, Oil On Canvas, 2017

LG: It’s often hard to focus on painting when the world seems to be coming apart. Information and imagery overload from social media and the like is a constant distraction. What helps to put this all into perspective? What keeps painting relevant for you?

PS: You’re so right about the world coming apart. I listen to a lot of podcasts, keep up with the news and am constantly depressed about what is going on. Going to my studio everyday is what I do. I believe in the tradition of painting and without sounding corny want to keep it alive.

Self-Portrait, charcoal 23×16 inches, 2003

The post Color and Process – Interview with Peri Schwartz appeared first on Painting Perceptions.

Summer Pond, 24 x 30 inches, oil on panel

Garden from Above, 30 x 24 inches, oil on linen

I have had the pleasure of meeting Dean Fisher once, by accident, in the Frick Museum in NYC during a visit to the east coast. As I recall, I was staring at a Degas when he tapped me on the shoulder asking are you Larry Groff of Painting Perceptions? This was remarkable as we had never met but he recognized me from a photo he had seen online. I had written several years prior about a painting show I saw of his in Anaheim, California–in one of my early humble attempts to write about painting for this site. Talking with him at the Frick was unexpected but a delightful conversation with someone who cares deeply about painting and with expansive knowledge and insight. I’ve been a great admirer of his paintings and the way he viscerally transforms paint into painterly monuments to nature and art. I am very appreciative of his willingness to answer my questions to him by email and for taking the time out of his busy schedule to share his thoughts and experience with the readers of this site.

Dean Fisher studied at the America Academy of Art in Chicago, and since, has been exhibiting nationally and internationally in prominent galleries for more than twenty-five years. Some of The galleries he currently shows with are: Susan Calloway Fine Art  in Washington, DC, Thomas Dean’s Fine Art in Atlanta Georgia, George Billis Gallery in Los Angeles, CA, John Natsoulas Gallery in Davis, CA, Tregony Gallery in Truro, Cornwall, UK and Jessica Carlisle in London, UK.

Dean teaches painting at Silvermine Art Center in New Canaan, Connecticut and privately. He also teaches an amazing landscape painting workshop in Dordogne, France (see the link to his workshop website https://deanfisherworkshops.com/ ) and has plans to offer it again in 2019. He also plans to teach in Tuscany, Italy in the Spring – details to be announced soon.

Dean Fisher painting in the Dordogne Valley Workshop in France

Larry Groff: What led you to become a painter?

Dean Fisher: My father Shell Fisher is an artist, kind of a Jack of all trades in the visual art world, with interests in painting, drawing, the graphic arts, illustration and cartooning. He’s an especially wonderful draftsman. One of my fondest memories as a child was watching my father create a drawing; with a very deft hand and a few economical marks, a convincing realistic image would begin to appear. It was like magic seeing a three dimensional figure or portrait begin to emerge on a completely blank piece of paper.

I think this was the initial spark, creating something from nothing, in such a skillful manner, which inspired me to begin drawing and eventually start painting.

He was my main teacher throughout my childhood and youth, always instilling in me the importance of developing a sound technical language.

LG: Can you tell us about what art school was like for you?

DF: I went to the American Academy of Art in Chicago, it was and still is a school with a strong focus on commercial art. I wanted to go there because, at the time, it was one of the only schools in the country offering life drawing and painting as a major component of the instruction. There were a couple of very inspired and knowledgeable instructors in the fine arts department, Fred Berger and Bill Parks who gave so much to their students.

But actually, the most enriching aspect of being at school were the interactions with a few other talented students who were studying painting at the same time. Several times a week we would go to the Art Institute museum, which was a couple of blocks away. We looked intensely at the paintings, did drawings of them and had fantastic discussions about what we thought about the work. They were a major influence on me and without this interaction and sense of camaraderie, the time at school would not have been nearly as interesting or educational.

Silvius Krecu, one of the most talent people I’ve ever met, was one these students and is still one of my closest friends. We had a very healthy rivalry in terms of pushing each other to develop our skills and understanding of art further. We would stay at school after everyone had left and draw plaster casts and when they kicked us out head over to coffee shops to sketch people for hours.

Garden, 24 x 14 inches, oil on panel oil on panel

LG:  What are some ways your paintings have evolved since art school?

DF:  At art school our focus was somewhat limited but at the same time pretty intense. The primary aim was painting and drawing the model from life with a heavy emphasis on a painterly a la Sargentesque approach, it was about very careful observation of the model and translating what we saw into paint. This is still a major part of what my work is focused on, a faithful perceptual account of what is in front of me.

A major flaw of this school is that there was virtually no discussion about image making, what inherent aspects make a painting interesting and successful. But fortunately, I did have some of these discussions with my art school friends. Silvius was very open minded and was the first of us to embrace twentieth century movements in art. He always expressed himself very eloquently and helped to open my eyes to these things.

The most pivotal aspect of my artistic education was moving to Madrid, Spain after art school and setting up in the Prado museum to copy paintings, this was fantastic in so many ways. I went with Silvius and our primary focus was an investigation of the work of Velazquez.
An unexpected part of being in the Prado were some of the young artists from different parts of the world who were also there to study paintings. Their art school educations were very different from mine and their artwork was too, with many more modern influences in their work.
I had excellent interactions with many of these people and started to look at a lot of 20th century art. I soon began to let go of my 19th century approach to painting to experiment with paint, shape and color much more…approaching abstraction but never fully letting go of representing real forms.

I also spent a year in Paris copying at the Louvre and two years in London at the National Gallery. Along with the continued copying, I was also developing my own work., working from models and painting landscapes.

While in Madrid, I met Josephine Robinson who was living there and teaching English. She had a background in history and filmmaking and was preparing to move to South America to make documentary films. Soon after we began spending time together she became interested in painting. I was very impressed with her ability to put colors and shapes together beautifully and encouraged her to continue painting. Several months later she returned to her home town of London, England to continue with her film studies. Shortly after, I showed up at her doorstep with my entire studio in my van…yes, I was planning on staying.

Josephine soon picked up painting again and decided to study it full time.
Jo took to painting very naturally, I really think it was her calling. We eventually moved back to the US and got married and have been together for more than twenty five years. Artistically and in many other ways she has played a major role in my development, with her unique, independent and very sophisticated way of looking at the world. Her excellent paintings are a reflection of that.

After returning to the US after living in Europe for eight years, I went through a period of painting figure compositions from photos while under the spell of Balthus but after a period realized that my true love, is having the forms I’m interested in painting in front of me. Now I almost never paint from photos.

So in a sense I’ve gone full circle and am painting from life exclusively, but now filtered through a great appreciation of modernist movements as well as the entire history of art.

In Between, 36 x 30 inches, oil on panel

Tightrope, 48 x 32 inches, oil on panel

Amandacera, 20 x 16 inches, oil on panel

LG: How do you decide on what is the right subject for a painting?

DF: This for me is fairly easy. There are certain things I see which I know I have to paint, this can be many different subjects but is usually an assemblage of forms and colors which create a compelling compositional structure.

Just about any object bathed in light is extremely beautiful to me, this can be difficult because I want to paint everything…but I try to keep it limited to those subjects which scream “paint me” the loudest.

I really don’t want to analyze beforehand why a subject speaks to me so much because this is very complex, so many things enter into this equation. By defining the reasons too much I fear that my response to the subject will be too pre-meditated, based on assumptions and a fragment of what is really there, all which I believe can inhibit the outcome. Instead I just jump int and with my knowledge, experience and skills try to put everything I see, think and feel about the subject into the painting.

Vertical Still life, 42 x 18 inches, oil on panel

LG: Do you work out the structure of the painting with studies and drawings first or do you prefer to let it evolve more spontaneously while working directly on the canvas?

DF: Once I decide to paint something, I usually can’t wait to get started so I don’t do a lot of preliminary work, except perhaps a thumbnail sketch or two in pencil . As I mentioned, I don’t want to dissect or analyze the subject too much for fear of limiting myself, I feel my intuition is much more powerful than my rational mind. As the work unfolds, many of the important qualities which are present in the motif begin to reveal themselves to me and I work hard to make sure these things are clearly communicated in the work. The painting also begins to take on it’s own life and then things get really interesting, it then becomes about making decisions based on what the painting is asking for as well as responding to the motif.

Over the years (decades!)I have undergone a long process of coming to realize which qualities I feel must be present in the work for me to feel connected with it. I’m mainly talking about the quality of the mark of the brush, edges, thickness of paint, transparencies all those things which make up a painting language.

I also want the canvas to be a place of investigation and discovery and am very happy when this sense of searching and process is present in the painting, I think this is very interesting for the viewer as well.

I want the painting to look as if it’s being painted before one’s eyes, with a very active surface…the search for a resolved image is all part of that.

Portrait of Josephine, detail, 48 x 24 inches, oil on panel

LG: What do you think about with regard to getting a feeling of light and space in your work?

DF: Well, if it wasn’t for the challenge of trying to capture light and space in my work I wouldn’t be a painter. These qualities are the main subjects of my paintings. If the light and space doesn’t end up working in a particular painting, I usually consider it a failure.

I concentrate on color and tonal relationships as well as using all optical devices available to me in the painting to capture a sense of breathable air and the type of light which is present. When I decide to paint a subject it has so much to do with the quality of light which i see. I find these aspects of perception fascinating and am not interested in capturing an approximation of it. This is why I haven’t worked from photos in years.

I strive to keep all the forms open while developing a painting. When I feel that the edges around things are becoming too uniform, which I feel inhibits air and space, I’ll take a palette knife to it and by scraping the area or entire painting. This almost always greatly improves it and suggests new directions that the painting can follow.

Summer Pond II, 6 x 18 inches, oil on panel

Autumn Pond, 12 x 36 inches, oil on panel

Figure by a Redbud Tree,  48 x 40 inches, oil on panel

LG: How important is direct observation in your work? Have you always painted from life?

DF: As a child, I did a lot of drawings and pastel paintings from photos, but as I remember the best work was done from life. I did a carefully observed and rendered drawing in graphite of a milkweed seed in the 5th grade which won an award and was published in a regional arts magazine. This was memorable for me and fueled my enthusiasm for representing things I found fascinating from my surroundings.

In art school we worked strictly from life and while I was in Europe I was only doing observational painting. After returning to the US, for a period of about five years I often worked from photos doing Balthus inspired figure compositions. I learned a lot during that period but eventually came to realize that I’m always more inspired and do my best work while in the presence of the subject.

During the past ten years or so I haven’t worked from photos at all. In fact, I’ve grown to wonder why figurative painters would choose to work from photos rather than life. Why someone would want a machine to do the editing for them rather than feasting ones eyes on the subject and employing all ones senses while painting or drawing.

A trained eye sees so much more than a camera does, why only work with 60% of what is present in the subject. That coupled with the fact that an artist’s vision becomes sensitized to observing nuance while working from life, this takes many years to cultivate and is an ongoing process.

I was gratified that Antonio Lopez Garcia said almost exactly the same thing which I’m saying here and tell my students, while I was recently working with him at his workshop in Pamplona, Spain.

I also feel there is a tendency for artists to fall in love with a particular photo, so the work becomes about doing a rendering of the photo rather than an investigation of observed reality and the resulting trail and error process over time which, in my opinion, always results in richer surfaces and a more interesting work of art.

When an artist paints a painting from a photo, I rarely feel their presence in front of the subject, there’s almost always a disconnect because of the above mentioned reasons. These are qualities which cannot be faked.

In short, being in front of the subject while painting is a completely different experience than working from a flat, 2 dimensional photo. I do think however that a very experienced artist who has worked from life for years can work creatively using photography as the basis for a work. Degas is a prime example of this. But if that experience isn’t there, the artist’s shortcomings are usually clearly revealed.

March Still life, 24 x 12 inches, oil on panel

LG: Would you say you have a more tonal approach to color in your work?

DF: When I’m attracted to paint a particular subject, it’s usually because I see a strong compositional structure in the subject as well as beautiful color harmonies. I’m often so enamored with the colors relationships I see in nature, I strive to get as close to them as possible. To really come as close as possible to capturing the subtle nuances of the colors which are present and how they relate to each other is a real challenge….it’s so difficult. I’m not sure if that makes me a tonal painter or a colorist…perhaps both?

Giorgio Morandi, for me, is one of the great colorists in the history of painting. His is not a saturated or amplified color which primarily drives the work but he’s an incredibly expressive, subtle and inventive colorist.

Pear Tree, September, 24 x48 inches, oil on panel

LG: What are some of your thought on how you use color?

DF: I’ve always been in love with color as I see it in nature, it never ceases to amaze me which is why I hate to wear sunglasses.
During the past few years I’ve been doing my figure paintings directly on gessoed panels, allowing the warm, white gesso color to serve as the background as well as sometimes invade the form of the figures. I came across this approach as the result of doing small, rapid 20 minute quick sketches of the model on white panels.

While doing these paintings, I try to respond very faithfully to the colors I see in the model, but I ignore the background which is present. This initially was because I had a very short time to do the painting so I just focused on the figure and it’s gesture. Then I began to combine two and sometimes three figures (or more) together with the goal of getting them to work together compositionally.

I liked the way every mark of the brush becomes completely visible, fresh and full of vitality against the white ground.
As a result of liking the small figure studies, I began to do larger, almost life size compositions of single and groupings of figures in this fashion.

One of my favorite ways of doing this is to work in a very improvisational manner, asking the model to take different poses every half hour to forty five minutes and try to combine the figures together in a visually interesting way. Some of my most recent figure works have been made in this way. This is a very challenging way of working and can be hit or miss, but when it works, the result can be very satisfying.

LG: How much does a painters personality effect their use of color?

DF: Well, I would imagine this would be a direct extension of their personality, it becomes a major part of an artist’s personal language. Just think of the difference between Caravaggio and Bonnard, I feel I know a lot about their inner worlds without ever having met either of them.

Figure Composition, 36 x 38 inches, oil on panel

Figure with Orchids, 25 x 27 inches, oil on panel

Figure against Pink, Blue and Red, 12 x 10 inches, oil on panel

LG: I was recently looking at some posts showing the works of the Swedish-American landscape painter John Carlson.

His book from the 50’s, the Carlson’s Guide to Landscape Painting was an important resource for me when I was first trying to learn how to paint landscapes but I never saw color reproductions of his paintings until fairly recently. Is this a book you’ve used or care to say something about? What are some books that have been important to your paintings?

DF: “Carlson’s Guide to Landscape Painting” was also one of the first books about landscape painting I read as a student. I like the way he describes different optical phenomena such as diffusion or how whites become warmer as they recede in space. I also like the way he discusses the structure of the landscape in terms of big planes. This is a great way to help sort through the complexity of what is going on outside….I like to describe the mechanics of landscape painting in this way to my students, much of this is the result of his teachings.
I do find his approach to composition pretty conventional and dull though, something which I feel lets his paintings down. There’s definitely a love of what he’s painting which comes through but I always feel everything is placed exactly where you would expect it to be….not the case in the work of a great painter like George Inness, there are always surprises and as a result, a very personal vision.

I’m not a big fan of reading books about art, theoretical, critiques or otherwise…I tend to become very impatient. I think this stems from the fact that, for me, the experience of looking intensely at great art is so rich and rewarding, that the written word regarding the work pales in comparison. I do look a lot at and study paintings throughout art history, it’s an obsession.
That being said, I really love to read what great artists say about art past and present and their own, their creative process, working habits and ideas about life…coming from their own mouth. The interview in the back of the large Antonio Lopez Garcia book as well as the film “Dream of Light” are some of my favorite things on the planet.

This is why I find blogs like Painting Perceptions such an interesting and valuable resource, thank you for that Larry! I have read many of your interviews with artists here, some several times. They have been a great source of inspiration and frame of reference for me.

Plant Life, 20 x 20 inches and 18 x 24 inches, oil on panel

LG: The landscape painter Yvonne Jacquette said once that painting erases the memory of the place. What might that suggest to you?

DF: Well as Stuart Shils says; “Painting is not a laundry list of the subject” I totally agree with that. The painting is about many different things not related to the specificity of the location. But, this also very much depends what kind of painter you are, the world of art is too varied and rich to generalize. Back to Lopez Garcia again; if you’ve seen his cityscapes of Madrid and then go there, you’ll experience some intense deja vu …those paintings ARE Madrid (and much more)!

LG: Plein air painting is increasingly popular these days. Why do you think that is?

DF: I’m not really sure about that as it has always been a big part of my life. Possibly because more painters are interested in painting realistically and discover that it’s such a fantastic way to learn about color and painting space and light. I’m also hopeful that it’s because once a person experiences working on location, surrounded by all the elements of nature, it’s difficult to only paint within the confines of the studio. I myself, can’t stay inside much when there’s gorgeous light blazing outside.

Summer Pond, 16 x 16 inches, oil on panel

LG: Do you see the popular Plein air painting “movement” as being significantly different from modern landscape painting made on site?

DF: The impression I have that many of the paintings I see in Plein Air magazine which are done at the plein Air meets, etc. look very similar to me, quite technically accomplished but lacking in an individual approach. It seems there is a boiler-plate definition which one should follow in order to do a plein air painting.

There’s certainly more individuality and originality coming from those painters working on their own outside. Less product oriented and more about it being an exploration of what a landscape painting can be.

Garden, 28 x 25 inches, oil on panel

LG: In some circles it sounds like there is a revival of realism in the wind and the days of post-painting, post-modernism and such are numbered. Do you agree?

DF: I’m not the best person to ask about this as I don’t read any artist magazines, this kind of isolates me from knowing about current trends in the art world. When I frequent galleries and museums in NYC and when I travel to different parts of the world, which I love to do, I still see a great variety of types of work being shown.

When we were in Amsterdam two Summers ago aside from the Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh museum, there was virtually no realist painting to be found.

Very encouraging is the current exhibition “All too Human” in London. A wonderful survey of twentieth century and contemporary British figurative painting.

Still life V, 20 x 16 inches

LG: Would knowing you’d never make any money from your paintings ever be a deterrent to painting?

DF: From the time when I started to take painting and drawing seriously, at about the age of eighteen, I always believed that whatever you decide to make, if you make it extremely well and make it very special, there will always be people out there who will appreciate it and might even want to own it. This has proven true for me.

I never made the decision to become a painter thinking that I would become wealthy, it never entered my mind….it’s not something that I care about. I’ve always just wanted to maintain my freedom, to have a lot of time to paint and draw (and do other things I love to do) I think of sales of artwork as just that, continuing to buy freedom to continue working and doing things which I feel are enriching.

I suppose it would be very discouraging and a deterrent to a path if one were to know at the onset that you you’d never sell anything.

I think the fact that Van Gogh only sold one painting after working extremely hard for ten years made him very depressed and eventually led to him taking his own life. I don’t believe he was “insane”, just really, really upset that he couldn’t make a meager living from his work…it’s a very sad story. The public wasn’t ready for work like his, with it’s degree of intensity and individuality.

I don’t know anyone who wouldn’t be very affected by this.

Brandywine River, 14 x 26 inches, oil on panel

Still life on Colored Paper, 24 x 48 inches, oil on panel

Late August, 14 x 14 inches, oil on panel

LG: In what ways has painting changed your life?

DF: I don’t know how painting has actually changed my life because I never dedicated myself to doing anything else so I don’t have a before and after frame of reference. It has always played a major role in my life.

In retrospect, I’m glad I chose something to do with my time that is not very mainstream in this society. Surviving as an artist isn’t an easy thing to do. It has forced me to be imaginative, independent, resourceful and appreciate my individual strengths as a person.

I also feel that a life spent looking at great art throughout the ages and trying to make art has heightened my sensitivity to the beauty, amazing richness and mystery of my surroundings and helped me to not take Nature and all that I see for granted.

I feel very fortunate, because of the time I’ve spent looking at art and attempting to make art, that I can go to a museum and be completely overwhelmed by what I see there.
This really struck me in a big way the last time Josephine and I were at the Louvre, a few years ago.

We were in the room where the Mona Lisa is hanging, ninety nine percent of the museum goers (about a hundred and fifty people) in this room were massed around Leonardo’s famous work and virtually no one, at any time noticed any of the many other sublime masterpieces in this room.

I really feel so fortunate that these works hold so much meaning for me.

Still life x 2, 26 x 34 inches, oil on panel

Figure Against Red, Ochre and Green, 12 x 4 inches

Figure by a River detail, 12 x 8 inches, oil on panel

The post Interview with Dean Fisher appeared first on Painting Perceptions.

The Artist and His Daughter, 48 x 36 inches, 2016, Acrylic on Canvas (images courtesy of Gallery Henoch and the artist)

Mel Leipzig is a renowned New Jersey painter who for over 40 years has painted people in their working spaces from observation. He paints family members as well as many other painters and artists of all types, from graffiti artists to major NYC painters such as Lois Dodd as well as students, janitors or cafeteria workers he’s became friends with over time. Leipzig’s inventive spacial compositions and delightfully quirky details visually project the sitter’s personality onto the canvas and connect us in ways that transcend traditional portraiture.

Leipzig paints people without irony, pretense or propaganda. His straight-forward manner forgoes displays of verisimilitudinous display or technical bravado; instead seeking an honest, enthusiastically painted response to the people and places in front of him. Leipzig talks in this interview about coming to maturity under modernism which often frowned upon painting the observed figure. He also discusses his early lessons in how important it is to follow the path best suited to your sensibilities, despite lack of approval from the art-world intelligentsia. 

Gregory at Gallery Henoch, Acrylic on Canvas, 48 x 36 inches

Dan Bischoff states: If Leipzig feels like something of a discovery, that could be due to the lingering prejudice against portraiture. Modernism threw portrait painting into history’s dustbin for nearly a century, despite portraiture’s central role in secular art ever since the Renaissance.

After all, portraitists are required to more or less produce a likeness, which ties them to realism and not abstraction. And while portraits have always been made in every era, the process of building a career in portraiture has always involved a certain amount of patron flattery and therefore compromise — not what the Modern revolution was about.

Leipzig pursues portraiture without commissions. He paints directly from life wherever his sitter is at home, and pays his subjects $25 an hour, no matter if they are rich or poor. Flattery isn’t necessary (though he is usually kind to his subjects). The only limit, Leipzig says, is he finds it difficult to paint “anyone I don’t like.”

“They used to say ‘It’s been done,'” the painter says of realistic portraiture, “and you would not be able to do it any better. That was supposed to put you off the attempt.” … from Mel Leipzig’s ‘As They Are’ at Aljira — portraits of artists, friends, and 21st century fellows Jul 16, 2015 by Dan Bischoff For The Star-Ledger (full review link here)

Mel Leipzig shows at Henoch Gallery in NYC, please see his extensive bio information at the end of this article.

Larry Groff: Thank You for taking the time out of your busy schedule to talk with me.

Mel Leipzig: You’re welcome.

LG: I’d like to start with asking, how did you become a painter and what where your early days like as an art student?

ML: When I was in high school, at about 15 years old, I got a scholarship to study art at the Museum of Modern Art on Saturdays. So I went to MOMA the guy who taught it there said that Symbolism was the most important thing in art. He showed us great paintings and he explained things in terms of the symbolism in the paintings.

After I left that class I started doing a lot of realistic portraits, which I was paid for (not a lot of money) Actually, the most famous person I painted was a guy named

Two Reflections, acrylic on canvas, 1987, collection of the New Jersey State Museum

ML: I went to Cooper Union where abstract expressionism was the dominant mode of painting. Morris Kantor and Nicholas Marsicano were my painting teachers and Will Barnet was my printmaking teacher.

They all had certain things that they were hung up about. Like, when I was in Morris Kantor’s class, I decided that I wanted to do portraits of people because I really wanted to paint the figure, and anybody who knew me knew it was obvious. Morris gave … he had a very thick Jewish accent. And he said, “Vat do you mean, you’re gonna try to get a likeness.” I’m thinking ” so what?” He says, “No.” Cooper Union was free in those days. If you failed one class you were thrown out. So I painted still lifes in Morris Kantor’s class, but one thing I learned about from Kantor, I must admit, I learned how to use the color–pure white. That has stuck with me throughout my life. And then I studied 2D design with Neil Welliver … do you know who Welliver is?

LG: Sure. He’s an incredible painter.

Homage to Neil Welliver, 48 x 48 inches, 2014, Acrylic on Canvas

ML: I loved him. He was wonderful and he’s the one who told me to go to Yale. When I went to Yale, it was the time Josef Albers, from the Bauhaus, ran the art program. The majority of the students were painting color dots, whereas at Cooper Union the majority were influenced by abstract expressionism.

At the Cooper Union Nicholas Marsicano was my first painting teacher. There was a setup, a figure or still life, I was trying to figure out what to paint so I kept turning the painting around. It was a mess of incoherent lines. Marsicano came up to me and said “You know, You’ve got something there” and I was thinking that’s how they got you to move away from figuration or any form of realism into doing non-objective work.

I never did a non-objective painting in my life. I just didn’t want to. Another one of my teachers at Cooper was Sidney Delevante. How have you heard of him?

LG: I’m not familiar with him, no.

ML: Yeah, well he was my drawing teacher. While I was painting one of the still lifes from Morris Kantor’s class, Delevante came up to me and said, “Mel, what are you doing? This is not you. You’re a figure painter, that’s where your heart is.”

And so when I got to Yale, I decided on doing the figure. I should say that it was my still lifes, especially the one of leaves that I did in black, white, greys and with a touch of green along with my woodcuts that got me into Yale.

The Woodcut (detail) 58 x 68 inches, 1994

Josef Albers, ran the school in those days. He was very authoritarian. The difference between Yale and any other art school I’ve been in, is that everyone, including the teachers stood at attention when he talked. In some ways, I admire him. You know, I like his paintings and non-objective painting. I have nothing against it. I just don’t want to do it myself.

Francesca at the Door, 57 x 36 inches, 1992, Acrylic on Canvas, collection of The National Academy Museum, NYC

Portrait of a Marriage, (painters Jenny Tango, and Robert Bunkin) 54 x 71 inches, 2008, Acrylic on Canvas

ML: Why should you paint what somebody else tells you … if you do that, you’re selling your soul. It’s just wrong.

I really struggled to do the figure at Yale. Neil Welliver was teaching there and was also trying to break away from Alber’s influence. Welliver had been doing color abstractions, that were very pretty but he was trying to move into painting the figure so he defended me. It was a hard time. You know, if you are actually fighting for something there’s something good about it. That you’re sticking to your guns.

Tracey Jones, 48 x 48 inches, 2014, Acrylic on Canvas

Selina Trieff, 48 x 36 inches, 2008, Acrylic on Canvas, collection of The Provincetown Art Association and Museum

LG: After Yale, you went to Paris on a Fulbright. Any interesting stories to share about this time in your life?

ML: When I graduated from Yale I had gotten a Fulbright for my woodcuts and went to study in Paris. I was having something like an aesthetic nervous breakdown. All these voices were in my mind. I remember an incident once when I was in Paris and watching an opera production, I think it was Tosca. I was sitting up high in the theatre, and all I could see was the negative shapes coming at me. You know, because in non-objective painting, the idea is not to get an illusionistic space, but to get the background to come forward.

I didn’t do any woodcuts when I was in Paris. I didn’t want to–all I wanted to do was to paint. One good thing that came from Albers was this: Because Albers didn’t approve of concentrating on the figure, he didn’t encourage or provide for figure drawing, you never had a model in the class. We used to have models, at Cooper Union, but there was none at Yale. So I got into the habit of sort of inveigling people to come to my house to model for me. I’d give them a spaghetti dinner in exchange for posing for me… this was during my time in Paris.

LG: That’s a good way to do it.

ML: And so that helped me a lot because that is actually a method that has lasted all my life. I go to places. I find real people, and they pose for me.

Robert Henry, 48 x 36 inches, 2008, Acrylic on Canvas

LG: One thing that struck me when I was looking at your early teacher Morris Kantor’s work and who also discouraged you from painting the figure… anyway it struck me that he was doing a lot of figures similar to what you’re doing now. Paintings of people in their surroundings, perhaps people he knew. There was a wonderful painting he made with a ship captain sitting in his home with a landscape in the window. Seems odd that he would discourage a student from painting the figure if he was a figurative painter himself.

ML: What year was the painting done?

LG: I think it was in the 50s. Maybe 40s. I don’t really know his work very well at all.

ML: He changed his style constantly. His most famous painting is called, “Farewell to Union Square“. It’s a rose being thrown out of a window on Union Square. He was doing abstractions at the time that he was my teacher.

But he believed, by the way, you should constantly change. But I did learn how to use white. That was the one thing and that has stuck with me.

The Sun Room, Director of Photography and Narrator Aubrey Kauffman and his wife Michele

LG: Many painters seem very opinionated during that time, true believers in the modernist doctrine. I don’t know how much things have really changed.

ML: Yes, they were very dogmatic. There were a group of us who wanted to do figure paintings. Actually one of my friends dropped out of Kantor’s class because she couldn’t take it. It was a time where you were learning your teacher’s opinions. That was it. I’m a teacher, so I think I can say this. They thought that painting should be what they were doing, in fact.

LG: That sounds about right. Let’s switch gears a little now, can you talk about what artists have influenced you the most over the years?

ML: Manet is my favorite painter, that actually started when I was introduced to him at Cooper. I also like, Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, Piero della Francesca and other painters of the early Renaissance. In fact I named my daughter Francesca after him.

LG: Do you travel in Italy much to see these paintings?

ML: Yes, my wife and I … My wife passed, over ten years ago, but we went to Italy–we went to see everything.

LG: Have you painted there? Or just traveled…

ML: No, I don’t do that kind of painting.

LG: I see.

ML: Also I don’t do sketches. I have to have a person; a figure in the painting, no matter what the painting is about.

But the main thing that interests me is not just the figure. It’s the way the figure related to the background. That has led me to what might be called environmental portraits. It’s mainly the composition of the painting that really excites me, but I must have a person. It’s an essential part of my being, I guess.

LG: Some of your paintings of people in their surroundings reminds me of Vuillard, a portrait of a man in an office with books and papers all around – I forget the exact details

ML: No it is. You mean that Vuillard in the Metropolitan Museum, that painting? I love Vuillard. But I also love Matisse… I love his paintings.

Let me give you a little more of my history. I was doing paintings in grays, black and white when I was at Cooper Union. And it was one of my still life paintings in black and grays that got me into Yale. Albers loved the painting. I mentioned this before. I couldn’t paint realistically at Cooper Union. They literally would have thrown you out.

So I was using bright color. I ended up using a lot of bright color. I thought I was being under the influence of Matisse, Vuillard and Bonnard. Those were painters from the modern movement I was drawn to.

When I got back to America from Paris, I was going back and forth with color in my painting; sometimes with bright colors and sometimes with grays. And then around that time …my good friend and great painter, Bob Birmelin came and said, “You know, Mel, your paintings are schizophrenic.” He said that because my drawing were completely realistic and my color was abstract and all over the place.

Bob Birmelin, 36 x 48 inches, 2008, Acrylic on Canvas

ML: By working this way, you know, the color would negate, the drawing. Around 1967 I made a conscious decision to start to paint realistically. I switched from using oils to using acrylics at that time. The first things I painted were nudes, what you usually do.

But in 1968, I got married. My wife, Mary Jo, literally made my life possible. She was wonderful and made everything possible for me to become an artist. Also at that time I got my job in teaching here in Trenton, at Mercer County Community College. At the beginning of my doing my realistic paintings, I would paint Mary Jo all the time. I have two children, they’re grown now, in their forties and have children of their own. I started painting them as well. But then at a certain point my wife didn’t want to pose anymore, she got tired of doing it. So she said, “Go get your students.” So I got students to come to my house and pose. Everybody was clothed, by the way. They came to my house and they posed, you know.

LG: Did you give them spaghetti dinners?

ML: No, I paid them. I pay all my models. I paid them ten dollars an hour back then.

ML: I was teaching art history, I’d say at the end of class, “I need people to pose for me.” I got lines of students who wanted to pose. Especially since they were going to get money. I paid my children, even after a while, as they got older. But they would then pose for me.

ML: Early on, my first approach was to do a drawing and then do the painting.

But then I realized what I was doing, that I was mainly interested in compositions, the relationships of the space that the figures where sitting in. And I painted everything in the space that I could see.

In those days I used a limited palette of eight to twelve colors. I was trying to figure out also to different color combinations. I would do a drawing of the figure in the room and then square off a canvas, proportionate to the drawing and then paint the figure and the environment directly from life.

Joshua’s Tattoos, 54 x 64 inches, 1996 Acrylic on Canvas, *Collection of the Zimmerli Museum, NJ

ML: Around 1980, I had an artistic epiphany. I realized it was the background with the figure that interested me. So I did the drawings of the background first–without the figure. Then I had a model come and sit or stand in the environment and then draw them in the space. A very good friend, an abstract painter who also taught at Mercer, He said, “You know, Mel, something’s happened now with your placement of the figures in your paintings… It’s much better now.”

I was painting my students and also my children. I didn’t get on well with my parents. So I allowed my children to do anything they wanted to with their rooms. The thing was is that I wanted my kids to be happy. My son, Joshua had three friends that were all in a band. They all started writing on the walls and the ceiling of Joshua’s room.

Joshua’s Room, 60 x 66 inches, 1991, Acrylic on Canvas

Francesca’s Room, 60 x 66 inches, 1991, Acrylic on Canvas

ML: And my daughter, Francesca, plastered her walls in her room with these posters of Madonna and Marilyn Monroe. She liked gutsy individualistic women. My wife didn’t like it but I said it was okay. I did four paintings, two each of the two rooms and I think are among my best paintings. In fact the one of my son’s room, Joshua’s Room, is my favorite painting.

My son is now a professional tattoo artist… It is amazing. I always told my kids, I said, “You should do something that you really love.” Well, he really took me seriously. He works in upstate New York, in Plattsburg and supports his three children. I have done several paintings in the Tattoo shop, where Joshua works.

LG: I saw that you had made other paintings of graffiti artists, maybe two other graffiti artists?

Trenton Graffiti Artists, Their Pets, 48 x 60 inches, 2015, Acrylic on Canvas

Trenton Graffiti Artists Homage to Warhol, 48 x 60 inches, 2016, Acrylic on Canvas

Will Kasso 48 x 48 inches, 2015, Acrylic on Canvas

ML: I just tell them my son is a tattoo artist, and all of a sudden I’m one of the gang. That gets me in with all the young people. They’re terrific. I’m now painting, doing a series of paintings of the graffiti artists of Trenton. And they did a painting of me, in fact, on a wall, a huge painting.

mural of Mel Lepzig

ML: After eight months it eventually got covered up.

ML: So I also started painting the graffiti artists outdoors in front of their graffiti paintings. They are now part of my Artists Series.

LG: I see.

I forgot to mention something important… in 1990 I limited my palette to just four colors. A dark red, a blue, a yellow and a white. That’s all. Just four colors.

The reason I did that was that I had done a sort of Matisse-like painting of my wife, when we were first together, using just those four colors. And I really liked it. I thought the color looked really nice.

LG: This helped to unify the painting?

ML: Yes, it does. It’s an automatic thing of sort of harmonizing the whole thing. And you just mix the … the red must be dark. The blue can actually even be a cobalt blue. Mixing those two colors you get a black, which is actually a dark purple. With the yellow and white mixed with the blue and red you get browns and grays.

LG: I assume it also helps to combine drawing and painting together if you’re not having to deal with an overly cumbersome palette with many different colors?

ML: Yes it does make it easier for you, especially as I travel to different places to paint, it simplifies things with only have 4 colors. Well, I added black a few years ago, so I now have five colors.

Lou, 62 x 80 inches, 1996, Acrylic on Canvas, collection of The Whitney Museum

Detail

I had an office mate at Mercer County Community College where I taught. His name was Lou Draper. https://hyperallergic.com/307286/a-photographer-who-captured-the-complexity-of-black-life-in-lyrical-ways/ You can look him up, he is a famous photographer now. Sadly he died in 2002.

ML: Lou was an obsessive collector. In the sense that our office that we shared was filled with boxes of all this stuff. I mean, to give you an example, it would be like, if I wanted to throw out stuff from my office and would put it outside the door. Lou would just bring it back in again saying “why are you throwing this away?” So I would have to go into another building to throw it away. He truly was obsessive.

I did a very large painting of Lou in our office surrounded by boxes with one of his photographs. The Whitney Museum now owns that painting.

Then I realized that If I have my students come to my house to pose, what do they have to do with my home? It doesn’t say anything about them. So I began to think I should make the background say something about the person, like how a cluttered room could say something about Lou. Like how I made the background in my children’s rooms tell you something about them and what teenagers will do.

So from that point on, I started painting other teachers at my school. I started painting at the college, getting people to pose for me, different people, like when I painted the cafeteria workers in the school cafeteria.

LG: I saw that painting. That was amazing, You actually set up your easel right in the lunch line, practically, or …?

ML: Yes, well, the restaurant would be closed. The people who worked there would stay there and pose for me.

College Cafeteria Cashiers, 36 x 48 inches, 2012 Acrylic on Canvas,

ML: And I would paint them there. I liked doing that. I loved teaching. I really did. I loved dealing with students.

ML: It was the painting I did of Lou Draper, “Lou” that gave me the idea of painting the other teachers. In fact, Lou told me “Why don’t you do the other offices?” I then started doing artists in their studios. You know George Nick, right?

LG: He was one my teachers, yes.

ML: I painted George, his wife, and his daughter in his gorgeous studio. Did you ever go to his house?

LG: Yes I have. Great, so you included Assya and Katya in the painting as well?

ML: I painted them. I love Assya, yeah. That’s right. I met them in … Well the reason I painted George is that Neil Welliver knew George.

LG: Right, George studied with him at Yale. In fact I think he once painted Welliver at his home.

George Nick, (with Assya and Katya) 2009, 48 x 48 inches, Acrylic on Canvas

ML: He’s the only person that Welliver ever complemented. He said, “George Nick is really a good painter.” Everybody else, and the list is a mile long, Welliver didn’t like their work. One of my students from Mercer ended up studying with George. Through her I met George on Cape Cod. And I immediately, I told him I wanted to paint him. So I painted him.

I also painted a lot of architects, … Do you know who Robert Venturi is? And Denise Scott Brown?

LG: You know, I’m not really up on my architects, I have to admit.

Robert Venturi & Denise Scott Brown, 48 x 64 inches 2004, Acrylic on Canvas, *Collection of the Architectural Archives of Univ. of Pennsylvania

ML: They are of the founders of postmodernism in architecture.

LG: I did watch the wonderful PBS documentary about you, Everything is Paintable, where they talked at length about your painting and how you painted the architect Michael Graves at his home. (Visit this link to watch the video – https://www.pbs.org/video/mel-leipzig-everything-is-paintable-91rwyv/ )

ML: Yes, I painted Michael Graves, who lived in Princeton. He designed his house. It used to be some sort of garage or barn. And now he’s made it unbelievably beautiful. In fact, you know, if you see houses like that you think, how can you live in it, it’s so nice. I couldn’t figure out which room to place him in. So that ended up being like a five-panel painting. And he’s only in the middle panel. He was in a wheelchair, because his lower body was paralyzed.

Panel 1, 48 x 36 inches, 2009/2010

Panel 2 48 x 36 inches, 2009/2010

Panel 3, 48 x 36 inches, 2009/2010

Panel 4, 48 x 36 inches, 2009/2010

Panel 5, 48 x 36 inches, 2009/2010

ML: Yeah, I know, it’s a horrible thing to happen to somebody, but he started painting as a result of that.

ML: I love Ibsen, you know the Norwegian playwright? Are you familiar with him?

LG: Henrik Ibsen? Sure.

ML: I read his plays when I was thirteen, and I fell in love with them. There are certain writers I have liked throughout my life, but he’s the one that has lasted all my 83 years. I’ve done a whole series of paintings dealing with Ibsen. I became a member of the Ibsen Society of America. That was founded by a man named Rolf Fjelde, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolf_G._Fjelde who was the leading translator of Ibsen into American English. And so I’ve done a whole series of paintings on productions of Ibsen plays. I got the people in the drama department at my school to put on productions of Hedda Gabler, A Doll’s House, Peer Gynt, and Rosmersholm. They did productions of those plays, so I did paintings of the actors and directors involved in those productions.

The Ibsen Translator’s Family Tree, 48 x 48 inches, 2009, Acrylic on Canvas

The Cast of a Doll House*, 2009, Acrylic on Canvas

The Cast of Hedda Gabler, 60 x 72 inches, Acrylic on Canvas, 2009

I also I made a whole series of paintings on Rolf and his family*. With all sorts of Ibsen paraphernalia around. So that’s another series that I have worked on. (*Considered a more accurate translation of A Doll’s House.)

LG: Amazing. What are some other projects you’ve been involved with?

ML: Right now, I’m the artist-in-residence at a high school, and so I’m doing a series of paintings on the high school students. Not just the students; the principal, the teachers–all the people. That’ll end up being about 16 paintings.

Mel Leipzig painting High School students

I also was doing a series of paintings at the New Jersey State Museum. They asked me to be there and I started painting different sections of the museum. And then I met the people who run the New Jersey State Council of the Arts. The young woman who was leading the team, she was interviewing me. She was very pleasant, so I said, “I want to do a painting of everybody there.” So I go now to the New Jersey State Council on Arts and I’m doing a series of paintings that’s much different than my other types of paintings. It’s an homage to all the arts and artists of New Jersey, which includes popular entertainers like Frank Sinatra and Meryl Streep.

Francesca and Louis Married, Acrylic on Canvas, 2002

ML: This is how my paintings progressed. Around 2005, I was painting my son who was grown, and with his girlfriend, who later became his wife. My son has been married twice. He’s just been remarried. He and the woman who became his first wife were living in an apartment near my home in Trenton, and I started doing a series of paintings of them. Then I thought what if he was to tell me “Dad, we decided to move out”. Well, what am I supposed to do with this painting?

So at that point, I decided to get stop making preparatory drawings. In the past I also did a color studies. I would Xerox the drawing, and then do a color study for the painting. After that I would make the painting.

ML: But this time I figured I better not do that. I needed to get this done quickly. So I just started just the painting with the figure, painting directly without any preliminary drawings or color studies.

I really like painting directly the best. My paintings have become more fluid. I have no idea what the composition is going to be until the painting is practically finished.

ML: Do you know the painter Ben Shahn?

LG: Ben Shahn. Sure, I love his work.

Portrait of the artist Bernarda Bryson Shahn in her studio, 2000, Acrylic on Canvas, collection of The Springville Art Museum, Springville, Utah

Jonathan Shahn, Acrylic on Canvas 54 x 72 inches, 2006, Acrylic on Canvas

ML: I didn’t paint him, but I’ve painted his wife, who was a wonderful painter. He died in his sixties. Bernarda Shahn lived to 101. I painted her when she was 98. And I painted his son, who’s a terrific sculptor, Jonathan Shahn. And Lois Dodd … you interviewed Lois, I saw.

LG: I did interview her. She’s a wonderful person. I love her paintings.

Lois Dodd, 42 x 63 inches, 2007, Acrylic on Canvas

ML: She’s a great painter, she’s a great, great painter. And she’s a great person, I love her. I painted Lois, Eleanor Magid, who was awesome, another artist. You know Audrey Flack? You know who she is?

LG: Sure. She was well known for her photo-realist paintings…

ML: I painted her as well.

Audrey Flack, 36 x 60 inches, 2013, Acrylic on Canvas

LG: I think I heard she doesn’t paint anymore, is that right? I also heard that she plays the banjo?

ML: She’s making sculpture now and drawing – she also plays the banjo.I also painted Alex Kanevsky and his wife Hollis Heichemer. I recently finished a painting of Scott Noel? You know him?

LG: Oh yes. We published an interview with him not long ago.

ML: I just finished a painting of him. Oh by the way, my paintings have changed as a result of my painting the graffiti artists. They use brilliant color, you know. It’s unbelievable what they do with color on the outside walls of a place.

At one point it just dawned on me: I couldn’t make the sky just blue. I made it yellow. It fit with the painting that I was doing.

I’m still basically realistic, but it’s ironic that I have gone back now in my old age to using really vibrant colors. I used very vibrant colors in the painting that I made of Scott Noel. I painted Scott very realistically, with his dog, he has a dog that he likes, and then I copied several of Scott’s paintings. But the walls of his studio I went to town with color.

LG: Sounds wonderful. I’d love to see that painting in person.

ML: This is essential. I tell this to everybody I know: You have to learn to trust your instinct. You really do. You know, to be an artist, because I have seen, from my generation… I think this is true now as well. That artists are sometimes ruined by their education. People with tremendous talent during the heyday of abstraction, people with like this tremendous talent for reality, who would be discouraged by their teachers, and then they would go into doing all sorts of garbage. So when they left school, they stopped painting.

LG: I know quite a few people like that.

ML: I think you need to trust your instinct; you have to learn how to do that. So I now follow wherever my whims takes me.

LG: Over the years I’ve heard many people complain about some art teachers, at Yale in particular, who bullied students and would equate problems with their artwork with the student’s moral failure or other means of trying to strip the ego from the student – to rebuild them or something.

Mel Leipzig Oh yes. They were terribly cruel teachers. I mean, Kantor could be cruel. I saw him making fun of students behind their backs. I think, if you’re a teacher–you teach what you know. And everybody has a certain limitation of what they know. They don’t know everything. They may not necessarily be sympathetic but you should really encourage people. You’re supposed to give them something that can last their life.

LG: Right, right. That’s what I liked hearing you say, in one of the videos I saw, where you didn’t want students to paint like you do and instead wanted to help students to find their own voice.

ML: That’s right. Some of my students became very good non-objective painters. Good, that’s what they wanted to do.

Four Painting Students, 32 x 62 inches, 2004, Acrylic on Canvas

LG: Who are some of your students … did Valeri Larko, who paints cityscapes (often with graffiti), study with you?

ML: No, Valeri wasn’t a student … but I did paint Valeri. A favorite student of mine is actually Linda Pochesci. She introduced me to George Nick. She’s a very good painter.

LG: I met her a few times, from a longtime ago.

ML: Did she have long dark hair when you met her?

LG: I believe so. She paints realistic interiors?

ML: That’s right.

Linda’s Studio, 48 x 36 inches, 2008, Acrylic on Canvas

LG: To follow up more on your thoughts on teaching. A lot of students today who want to learn how to paint figuratively are having a hard time because the schools are cutting back or even eliminating on studio practice and instead emphasize art theory.

ML: Oh, I know.

LG: I’m curious what you have to say about that.

ML: I think it’s bullshit. I’m sorry to say that, but most of it is exactly that. I think students should learn how to be vocal, that’s true, but you know, Matisse said, ‘that the first thing an artist should do is cut out his vocal cords.’ It’s ridiculous, they talk all this phony baloney–it’s destroying painting. I have nothing against doing installations. I think all that stuff is good, but we’re in a very decadent period.

LG: So you’re not very hopeful for the future of painting?

ML: You know that saying about how If silk goes out of fashion, it doesn’t stop the silkworm from producing silk. So, what does it matter? There are still artists who want to paint what they see.

LG: I some times think that back in the 50’s and 60’s art students back then were less preoccupied with becoming famous and more concerned about just becoming a good painter. Now it sometimes seems the emphasis is more on how can I leverage myself to get ahead or how can I market myself?

ML: That’s right. Yes.

LG: Anyway, What I wanted to ask you is what makes painting such a joyful experience? I understand that since you retired from teaching and as you get older you’re painting more than ever, still making fantastic paintings.

I’m wondering what you could say about what rewards does painting offer you, other than the money and all that?

ML: I’ll tell you. Painting has saved my life. There’s so much in this life that you cannot control. I lost my wife, it was very hard for me but because I paint I could get through it. Painting is unbelievable in how it can help. I feel that they should teach people, starting in high school, that you should do something that is creative. You don’t have to paint. You can write poems, anything you have a passion for, which is so important for your being. Otherwise, you just stupidly go over and over things in your life. It becomes wasteful. I feel so invigorated after I’ve had a session of painting.

It’s very life-giving. It really is. Creativity is very life giving. Van Gogh would have shot himself a lot earlier had he not been an artist.

LG: It does give us a good reason to live.

ML: Yes. It does.

LG: Not just individually but as a societal level as well.

ML: Yes. It does. And by the way, I taught at a community college, which meant that I had a lot of older students of mine taking classes. People in their nineties, in fact. And let me tell you … One woman, she would come in, she had this thing in her nose, you know, for the oxygen. She’d come in and paint, and she was in her seventh heaven.

They don’t want to become famous. That has nothing to do with it; they just want to do good paintings. It makes them feel terrific.

Self Portrait

Toshiko Takaezu (Triptych), 2010 Acrylic on Canvas, 48 x 120 inches (overall)

Toshiko Takaezu Triptych_panel one, Acrylic on Canvas

Toshiko Takaezu-Triptych pane two, Acrylic on Canvas

Aubrey Kaufman at Mason Gross Galleries, Rutgers State University

Bio From Mel Leipzig.com website

MEL LEIPZIG, born in Brooklyn in 1935, resides in Trenton, N.J. He was a Professor at Mercer County Community College where he taught Painting and Art History until his retirement from teaching in 2013. He has had over 40 one-man shows, including shows at museums, art centers and university galleries in New York City, New Jersey, Florida, Georgia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Arkansas. He had a Retrospective at the New Jersey State Museum in 1998. In 2009 he was the subject of two exhibitions at the New Jersey State Museum. One, a selection of his paintings completed in the first decade of the new century, “Mel Leipzig, Selected Paintings”, curated by Margaret O’Reilly, Curator of Fine Arts and the second, “Mel Leipzig, The Artist As Curator”, an exhibition of gurative paintings from the collection of the museum, curated by Mel Leipzig.

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His works are in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Academy Museum and the Cooper-Hewitt Museum in
New York City. In New Jersey his paintings are in the collections of the New Jersey State Museum, the Montclair Art Museum, the Morris Museum, the Noyes Museum, the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Museum at Rutgers and the Jersey City Museum. In 2003 the American Academy of Arts and Letters purchased his painting, “Bernarda Shahn” and donated it to the Springville Museum of Art in Utah. In Pennsylvania his paintings are in the collections of the Woodmere Art Museum and the Architectural Archives of the University of Pennsylvania which purchased his painting “Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown”. In Provincetown, MA his painting “Selena Triff” is in the collection of PAAM, Provincetown Art Association and Museum.

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Leipzig received a Fulbright Grant to Paris (1958-59), a Louis Comfort Tiffany Award (1959-60), and four grants for painting from the New Jersey Council on the Arts (1982, 1986, 1992, 2002). In 1980 he was the first recipient of the Mercer County Community College Distinguished Teacher Award, Gold Medal and in 1996 was one of the last individual artists to receive a grant in Painting from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2000 and 2002 he received awards for his paintings from the National Academy, NYC.

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He studied at The Cooper Union (3 year certificate) under Sidney Delevante, Stefano Cusumano, Nicholas Marsicano, Morris Kantor, Will Barnet and Neil Welliver (1953-56), Yale University, School of Art & Architecture (B.F.A.) under Josef Albers and James Brooks (1956-58) and Pratt Institute (M.F.A.) under Nan Benedict, Ralph Wickiser and George McNeill (1970-72).

He is one of the seven painters included in the book SELECTED CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN FIGURATIVE PAINTERS, published in 2010 by the Tianjin People’s Fine Arts Publishing House, edited by Qimin Liu, the purpose of which is to introduce contemporary American realist painting to China.

In 2006 Mel Leipzig was elected to the National Academy.
In 2011 NJN, New Jersey Network, produced a half hour program, 3 years in the making, called “Mel Leipzig:Everything Is Paintable”.

He is represented by Gallery Henoch in NYC.
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