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

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 I recently was viewing his work online and became re-enchanted by his astounding talent and wide range of art historical references, styles, processes, and subject matter.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

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

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

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

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

—Francine Koslow Miller

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Gerry Bergstein’s website:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hamburger Express, 1979, 24X50 inches, Oil

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

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

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

LG: Sure.

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

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

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

LG: 
You studied at the Art Students League?

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

LG:
Why did you move to Boston?

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

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

Factory, 1973, 5×5 ft., oil

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Self Portrait, 1979, 60X72 inches, Oil

Elements Of Style, 22X30 inches, Oil/Paper

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

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

Effort At Speech, 1981, 60X90 inches, Oil

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LG:
That’s a very good point. 

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

Zip, 1997, 96X69 inches, Oil

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

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

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

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

LG:
That’s so funny. Great.

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

Chance Meetings 2002, collage and installation floor to ceiling installation

Chance Meetings 2002, collage and installation floor to ceiling installation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gerry Bergstein’s Palette gurney

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

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

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

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

Dithering Machine, 2022, oil and collage Detail

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

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

Shard, 2016, 46×30 inches, mixed media

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

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

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

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

LG:
Wow, that’s great.

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

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

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

Valentine 2003, 24x24x3 inches, bas relief collage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LG:
That’s so funny.

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

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

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

LG:
A great idea for a t-shirt!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gerry Bergstein:
Yes, they do.

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

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

LG:
is Arthur Dion still the director?

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

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

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

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

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

Whitewash, 2019, 30X70 inches, Oil on canvas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fortress, 2022, 26X40 inches, oil on paper

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

Interview by Jessie Fisher, guest contributor

Janet Niewald, The Palisades II, oil on canvas, 24×30 inches, 1999

Wilbur Niewald, Quarry, oil on canvas, 40×50 inches, 1964

Wilbur Niewald, Rocks at Greystone Heights IV, oil on canvas, 26×32 inches, 2001

I have long been an admirer of Wilbur’s work and had the pleasure of knowing him for the past 16 years, visiting him in his Kansas City studio and attending his exhibitions and gallery talks with students in tow. Just after meeting Wilbur, he suggested I look at Janet’s website and I was more than a little impressed by the articulate and varied body of work of this decorated professor and accomplished painter whom I have since wanted to reach out to. I had the pleasure of meeting Janet this past August at the dedication of the Wilbur Niewald Senior Studios at the KCAI Painting Department. She was able to arrange for the three of us to sit down together at Wilbur’s home in Kansas City on a lovely August morning, with the 7-year cicadas in full chorus, to discuss influence, teaching, and practice. The following is a collection of excerpts from our conversation in 4 parts, beginning with written correspondence with Janet.

I would like to thank Janet for her diligence and excellent writing, Wilbur and Gerry for inviting me into their home and Wilbur for his continued insight and encouragement. Images of Wilbur Niewald’s work are generously provided by HAW Contemporary and E.G. Schempf.

Jessie Fisher
Professor in Painting at the Kansas City Art Institute

Janet Niewald

Janet Niewald exhibits her oil paintings, watercolors and drawings nationally and regionally. She was selected for two Invitational Exhibits for non-members at the National Academy of Design Museum, NYC. Her work has been included in many respected juried competitions, including the Bowery Gallery, the Prince Street Gallery, and the First Street Gallery biennial competitions, all in NYC. She shows often at university venues, such as at Wright State University’s “Drawing from Perception”; a 3-person show, “Pictorial Strategies inches, at William and Mary; and a solo show at Washington and Lee University. Her work has been exhibited at art centers in the Northeast and the South (SECCA; the Greenhill Center; the Sawtooth Center; the Washington Depot Art Center, CT). Her paintings have been shown at the Masur Museum in Louisiana, the Taubman Museum in Virginia, and the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City. She was affiliated with Bedyk Gallery, Kansas City; Munson Gallery, Santa Fe; and Reynolds Gallery, Richmond, VA. After attending Connecticut College, New London, and the New York Studio School Program in Paris, Niewald transferred to the Kansas City Art Institute to earn her BFA in Painting/Printmaking. Subsequently, she received her MFA in Painting from Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. She was then awarded a year-long, Ford Foundation Grant with a residency at the University of Georgia, Athens. Following a stint of teaching at UGA, Niewald moved to Blacksburg, Virginia where she still resides. From 1980 to 2014, she taught in the School of Visual Art at Virginia Tech where she was awarded the SOVA Teaching Excellence Award as well as several individual research and teaching grants. In 2008, she received the Virginia Tech College of Architecture and Urban Studies’ “Career Achievement Award”

Wilbur Niewald

Wilbur Niewald is professor emeritus of painting at the Kansas City Art Institute, where he studied, taught, and for twenty-eight years, served as chair of the painting and printmaking department. Under his chairmanship the school was known as one of the best traditionally based undergraduate art school programs in the US. He has influenced generations of students during his long tenure in the college’s heralded painting department. Prof. Niewald also taught in summer programs at the NY Studio School, Yale University, Boston University, Vermont Studio Center, and Chautauqua Institute. He is the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Charlotte Street Fund, based in Kansas City, Artist in Residence, Grand Canyon National Park, and the Distinguished Teaching of Art Award from the College Art Association. He is a member of the National Academy of Design. Prof. Niewald’s recent exhibitions include a retrospective at the Albrecht Kemper Museum of Art; Marianna Kistler Beach Museum, Rider University; Dolphin Gallery and Morgan Gallery, Kansas City, MO; Wright State University, OH; a retrospective at the Kansas City Art Institute; New York Studio School; Dorry Gates Gallery, MO; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art; Zeuxis Gallery, NY; National Academy Museum; and the Ingber Gallery, NY. Niewald’s work is in the collection of numerous museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art and the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art

PART 1

Janet Niewald- ON INFLUENCE, NARRATIVE AND TEACHING

Janet Niewald, Pink Brushpile, oil on canvas, 24×30 inches, 2008

Janet Niewald, Still Life with Dancing Girl, 22×28 inches, 1998

In museums, my parents sometimes went separate ways, my father stopping to draw and my mother exploring other parts of the museums’ collections, with me in tow. I developed, and retain, a voracious, “wide eye” – Sung-dynasty landscape paintings, Japanese byōbu, Northern European altarpieces, Giotto, Masaccio, Titian, Mayan frescos and cylinder pots, 20 ^th c. Mexican muralists, Monet, Van Gogh, Matisse, Mondrian, Pollock. As someone married to a ceramicist, I study more pots than most painters do, particularly Ancestral Puebloan and Mimbres ceramics. Rembrandt and Giacometti have been especially moving to me, in all media and through all periods of their lives, as well as mine. Both artists explored and revealed, as Mary Shelley wrote in Frankenstein, “the tremendous secrets of the human frame.”

As I age, my interests change. For example, when young, I was interested in Archaic and Classical Greek sculpture but now, Etruscan. Cezanne’s influence may feel somewhat inevitable to me, both directly and indirectly, but with both Cezanne and Alice Neel, I continue to feel something akin to what I feel with Etruscan art–a frank joy in nature rather than reverence for an idea.

Janet Niewald, Stacked- ExEnNe, oil on canvas, 32×24 inches, 2017

During the COVID year, unable to travel to museums and galleries, I was surprised just how little I looked at my artbooks. More and more, my influences come from nature – the mountains, the trees, the river running through our valley, natural processes and events, and the other animals I see, everyday. Perhaps now, I might “see a landscape instead of a Pissarro”, to paraphrase Giacometti (also an artist’s child). What I observe and experience in this world, what I live – and also, what I read about natural processes and about the crisis in our relationship with the rest of nature – are most vital to me.

I don’t consider myself a true narrative painter – I’m more of a quasi-narrative artist, I think. To discuss anything at all about my subject matter gets right to the heart of my work and I find it difficult to talk about. A tendency toward narrative surfaced quite naturally in my work, especially during the past decade. Story-telling, or story interpretation, has a deep history in painting, perhaps from its inception since we don’t really understand early cave paintings or rock art. I’m not inclined towards doing “history painting” and I generally work from observation, but I read a lot and sometimes books affect my choices in the studio – I don’t have a big nose but I follow it.

Janet Niewald, 3 Thugs (triptych), oil on canvas, 32×78 inches, 2014-15

I often read nature/scientist writers, (Suzanne Simard, Sylvia Earle, Barry Lopez, and others), and they have had an impact on me; a current series of self-portraits relates to my own environmental concerns and consequent reading. That said, my sources can be more off-beat – like a late-night murder mystery called “The Thing about Thugs“, by Tabish Khair. In it, I learned about the shadowy, possibly mythical, “Thugs“, gangs of highway bandits and murderers in 19thc. India, who used yellow ropes to strangle their victims. I had just started a painting of a seated nude – the next session, I handed the model a length of yellow rope to stretch across her thighs. One thing led to another and a triptych developed, three different women with ropes. The triptych may refer to various mythological trios of women, or not. I came to know all the models for this painting; one was a very good friend. They are “ordinary” people and, as such, have the potential for terribleness. For me, narrative is often just another way of expressing the complexity I find in the ordinary.

My still lifes often come from a tendency to pick up cool things as I walk around our land – bones, antlers, teeth, cedar roots, bird nests made of our horses’ hair, etc. My husband also brings me his finds; I have a good recipe for bleach baths for some of the juicier finds. And I have a postcard collection of paintings, and of photos of animals. Also, I like textiles and rugs. I’m not an object-shopper, but I can be moved by an object that I encounter – an antique, Korean ceramic bottle; plastic taxidermy mounts; a Zapotec rug; a shower curtain of a breaking wave; fossil ammonites.(The ammonites took on an added significance after I read Elizabeth Kolberts’ “Sixth Extinction”.) Some paintings and many drawings stem from studio clutter, or detritus; some are more consciously arranged. The relationships between juxtaposed objects, and our strange personal relationships to all kinds of objects and images, fascinate me.

Janet Niewald, Flora and Fauna- Pendants, oil on canvas, 30×68 inches, 2007-09

I can’t say enough about the land and my relationship to it. Much of who I am and what I do in the studio comes from the rich, dynamic land where I live. I don’t view “it” as “mine” but rather a briefly borrowed gift in which I am immersed. The mountains and the trees, like the two oaks behind my studio, are daily companions and mentors, not just paintable subjects. One mountain, called Paris, appears different, almost every morning. The biggest lessons for me have had to do with flux – a big oak killed by Hurricane Andrew, a large cedar split by the wind, gardens eaten by hungry deer, the changeability of brush piles, animals that come and go, our variable weather. Lots of going, but then coming too.I don’t doubt that the dynamism of nature has formed me as an artist. How could it not?

Janet Niewald, Two Trees-Pink Cloud, oil on canvas, 36×48 inches, 2015

Janet Niewald, Two Trees-Spring, oil on canvas, 26×32 inches, 2007

Janet Niewald, Two Trees-Evening, oil on canvas, 26×32 inches, 2007

Janet Niewald, Two Trees-Grey, oil on canvas, 15×20 inches, 2007

For 34 years, I taught at a large state university that emphasizes engineering, technology, and research sciences.I taught numerous non-art majors, many from the life sciences – they were often thoughtful and eager students (and my interactions with them informed my interest in environmental issues). The institutional ignorance about art, which faded over time, lay primarily with the faculty and administration, not with the students. In early years, I taught both studio and lecture courses but during the final decade of my teaching career, I was able to focus on teaching painting to art majors, with full control of the studio situation; I was able to relax!

Janet Niewald, Color of Water (triptych), oil on canvas, 21×85 inches, 2000

Sometimes, we get more from struggling than we do from having everything set perfectly for us. Through teaching, I actually learned how not to explain everything; how to manage my time (as an exhibiting artist and a teacher, with family and home responsibilities); how to lecture to 200 people without vomiting in advance; how to write clearly and be a better reader; how to make do with what I had and how to advocate for myself and others to make things better. I don’t really know how teaching directly affected my painting practice. I did often enjoy talking with upper-level students, seeing what they were interested in, encouraging them to pursue those things, finding ways to help them do that. I’m sure that they introduced me to things I would not have seen otherwise. But I also liked teaching drawing and helping students (and myself!) to see. Despite the many different courses that I taught over the years (22 courses, in fact), my teaching and my studio experiences were generally complementary somehow. I made it that way. Until finally, I had enough, and retired.

PART 2

Wilbur and Janet Niewald – ON TEACHING AND SEEING

Wilbur Niewald, Santa Fe, oil on canvas, 26×32 inches, 2006

“I want to emphasize the importance of drawing. When I paint, I am drawing.
I am not only drawing when I paint, but when I see.
I am constantly putting things together two-dimensionally; I am drawing all the time…”
-Wilbur Niewald, Oct 14^th, 2021

Wilbur Niewald: Actually, it’s drawing itself that I could talk about. At one time we (at the Kansas City Art Institute) had a president who wanted to really define drawing. So, we (the faculty) met and asked, ‘What is drawing?’ We had a long discussion, and, in the end, it was ‘marks… in relation’, but I’d even take it a step further. I can say drawing, in addition to design, is anything where you’re setting up a two-dimensional relationship. In other words, I can take blocks of paper and train the eye to set up the relationships, even to something that I see, and that would be drawing in the larger sense, to me.

Wilbur Niewald, Gerry, pencil on paper, 14×11 inches, 2019

Wilbur Niewald, Rocks at Cambridge Circle, pencil on paper, 11.25×15.25 inches, 2019

One of the faculty members said that we needed to draw from the cast. Well, I was the younger teacher, so of course, I was asked to teach the drawing from the cast. We borrowed a few Donatello casts from the Nelson-Atkins Museum, and so, I was going to teach it. Well, I knew my influence to drawing right then was very much my teacher, Campanella (Vincent), and my ideas, (were) drawing primarily using charcoal with short poses. But that then puts the big question, would I have been, in another situation, required to change my thoughts about drawing at that time, or train myself to teach, a longer sustained pose, which would have been foreign to me. And that’s when I found, for me, teaching had to be satisfying to the teacher, otherwise you’re not teaching honestly. So, what I did, I got the Donatello and other sculptures, and put it in the center of the room we were around (it) in a circle, and they would draw for one sitting, and then I would turn the sculpture a quarter, and then we would draw again. And that’s the way that I was able to do the fast drawing which was satisfying to me. Now, later, later even in my teaching, I would’ve done it a little differently, in that I would’ve had a more sustained drawing and we would probably not even be working in charcoal.

Henri Matisse, Memory of Oceania, 108×108 inches, gouache and chalk on paper, cut and mounted on paper, 1952-53

Henri Matisse, The Snail, 112.75 x 113 inches, gouache on paper, cut and mounted on paper, 1953

Wilbur Niewald: No, but he is in his mind…see it’s almost like it’s a form of thinking, drawing is really visual thinking, but it’s like you said, design, isn’t that the French word for drawing, dessin?

Janet Niewald: Yeah, because it’s so, so fundamental. You know when you look at that cave paintings, Altamira, Lascaux, which I know you like too, that you know that it’s just such an instinct, a drive, a human drive… it’s interesting.

Janet Niewald, Oaktrees, pencil on paper, 15×22 inches, 2019

WIP, Blacksburg, Virginia studio

Janet Niewald: You know I had a similar thing. I taught at a very different institution, as you know. Our question about drawing proposed by our Dean, in all seriousness, was if you can teach 20 students drawing, why can’t you teach 200 students drawing at one time. It was when they insisted that I teach anatomy, and I said, well I think anatomy is very interesting, but it’s not what I do. They were all surprised. They assumed actually that because you paint the figure and you come from certain kind of background that your background included anatomy.  I often would have a big class of 30 students, and I would get 3 skeletons and group them in 3 circles and say let’s draw the skeleton today. You do end up talking about the bones, but not with their formal names that a doctor needs to know. It was actually my only way, as you say, to make it integrated to who I am.

Wilbur Niewald: Yes, exactly.

Janet Niewald: Other faculty, many of them abstract painters, went and got books on anatomy and learned all the bones and the muscles, one of them learned the nerves. This is not going to teach you how to see, not going to teach you how to draw.

Wilbur Niewald: In my experience of setting up any kind of program which meets the needs of all students, for example, with drawing as a subject, we always ended up feeling that it was the individual description of what they (the faculty) would do, because anatomy, to me, is not a requirement. But, if you’re like Bill McKim, I said sure, go ahead and teach with anatomy as part of it, that’s fine. Its (teaching) defined always by where you are as an artist. This has stayed with me. When I was retiring, for some reason this came out. I was sitting with the faculty, my own faculty in painting, and I said, I would never want to be in a position to set up a program, as a provost, I just want to be myself teaching, and let’s say one is in a position to say what is basic for everyone. Do you think that everyone should have an experience in drawing where they were correcting to what they see? And interestingly enough, particularly, one faculty, said no. And I couldn’t argue against it.

My thought is, suppose you took the first day of a drawing class, let’s say you draw from the model, what are they trying to do? Basically, they’re trying to draw what’s there, in other words, to correct what’s there, and even if it is controversial to some, teaching for me was always an extension of a personal experience in the studio rather than a philosophy of teaching itself. I didn’t teach the medias of drawing, but I taught the students, first with charcoal and then with pencils, erasers and good paper, to develop the ability to see more clearly. I wasn’t teaching the students to make art, but to see. You see drawing is the small part between the media and the idea, and in my classes when I would learn something about this, I would share it with the students.

Wilbur Niewald, Amy, oil on canvas, 36×26 inches, 2007

Wilbur Niewald, Kelly, oil on canvas, 32×23 inches, 2007

Janet Niewald: The idea of correcting is a difficult thing especially for beginning students. I encountered a lot of them (students) where I taught, they didn’t like to make changes to work, which meant if you if you can’t make revisions and changes to your work, the work is controlling you. If you’re not in control you’re not going be able to think through something. So, it’s like you’re stuck with whatever you do at the beginning, ‘I don’t want to change it’, ‘that’s perfect…’, and so drawing from a model or observation of any kind where you do make corrections, is a natural way for students to learn how to think about the process of making something, and that it’s not a bad thing, to make changes and revisions, it’s a good thing, based on the drawing, and it’s a very natural way to get to that. What was it Matisse said in Notes of a Painter, something like, ‘Accuracy was (is) not Truth’ (Exactitude is not Truth, Precision is not Reality) I may have that wrong, don’t quote me!

Janet Niewald, The Actor (Harvey), oil on canvas, 38×32 inches, 1997

Wilbur Niewald: Yeah, I can take that. One of my faculty that I had some differences with because I did emphasize the idea of correction, had posted…’Matisse: Accuracy is not Truth’, as if I were to carry on with this, I had to know that. At that time, I was studying Matisse because I was giving a thing (lecture, workshop), which I don’t do very often, at Smith College and I was using Matisse, who also said something like, ‘…if I get closer to what I am after, then that’s right for me…’, in other words, there’s always something in Matisse’s drawings, in contrast, to say Picassos’, which I really discovered at St. Paul de Vence, at the Matisse Chapel Chapelle du Rosaire), that they (Matisse’s drawings) are very naturalistic in a way. They are not stylized, they are more out of nature, out of observation and therefore more expressive.

Matisse, Chapelle du Rosaire de Vence, France, 1947-51

Janet Niewald: Never repetitive. In the de Vence chapel, it’s interesting how individual they were (are) Now, the other thing Matisse said is about format in drawing. He said, ‘If I…’ again this is misquoted I’m sure, ‘If I look at something and I draw it on a vertical page, I won’t draw it the same if my format…’ and again that’s not the word he used, ‘…my format is horizontal, or if it is smaller or bigger, I will see it and draw it differently.’ And I’ve always found that really profound, there’s not some kind of overriding rule when you look at something about how big or small or where it should be placed on the page or on the canvas. That it all has to do with the response to that moment that thing, and that includes what you’ve picked up to draw on. I’ve always found that really profound.

Janet Niewald, Brushpile 1, oil on canvas, 26×42 inches, 2007

Wilbur Niewald: Yeah, I think so too. And you know, one can make the subject smaller, in other words, do it to the format. I’ve never entirely understood this, it’s quite natural to draw to the format, in other words, you reduce it.

Janet Niewald: Like those tiny Rembrandt self-portrait that are like postage stamps?

Wilbur Niewald: Yeah, it would be perfectly natural, (to reduce) but I don’t think you could go over life-size without it becoming more an idea. But you see, I think that’s learning. In other words, I have the same experience with my still lives, early on they were bigger. I think it’s almost universal, I mean that most students tend to do that, and then you learn… so why is it important to learn to bring it to, I don’t like to use the words site/size, but to the size that you see? All I can say is that if you’re in accord with the subject, you’re in accord, and that does take time.

PART 3

Wilbur and Janet Niewald- ON INFLUENCE

Barkley Hendricks, Lawdy Mama, oil and gold leaf on canvas, 53.75X35.25 inches, 1969

James McGarrell, Spots: Near Distance, oil on canvas, 110×176 inches, 1984–85

Janet Niewald, Vanessa and Herself III, oil on canvas, 32×40 inches, 1992

Janet Niewald, Bottle and Bowl (diptych), oil on canvas, 28×52 inches, 2001

Piet Mondrian, Church Façade 6, charcoal on paper, 39×25 inches, 1915

Wilbur Niewald: So, that was a tremendous influence, to me, not an influence… as it’s written, more the idea of… the vertical, the straight line, the vertical, the horizontal… of opposition. I also wanted in a way to be abstract. But what I found is that I could never be abstract because I could never put away the illusion of space. In fact, the illusion of space, in spite of it being an abstract idea, the illusion of space was really what I was about. I was really about color as an illusion of space, in contrast to Mondrian. Then as far as the influences beyond that…. all great art I suppose. My teacher Campanella (Vincent) influenced me to really look at painting… there were some particular artists, Giotto would be one, or, well, like Masaccio who, in a way, I really understand more than I do Michelangelo. In other words, it’s when you’re learning not how to take the actual work as itself, but to be more mannered. That became the base, sort of, and Rembrandt always, is still a giant, but I can’t say that it’s a direct influence. And then, Janet and I were talking about Neel, Alice Neel, who is an important painter, but I can’t say I had any direct influence (from her).

Janet Niewald: Well, you two are more contemporaries, when for me she was a member of the older generation, and a woman, and there weren’t many examples of that when I was a student in the 1970s. So, I can see where she’s more like a colleague to you in painting.

Wilbur Niewald: Well yeah, see we knew her, and I visited her in New York in her home too, and I have a letter from her…I’ll get that out. She stayed with us here. But… she… so what is it? I saw an Alice Neel exhibition in New York with another adjacent gallery with a painter that I knew, and I thought, Alice Neel’s (show) looked like a museum. And I think it was, what is it…. I happen to think that drawing is the thing that comes to mind. Cezanne drew better than his contemporaries, better than Manet, Monet, Courbet… and Alice Neel, in spite of what Hilton Kramer, who I knew, and I respect, he said that she couldn’t draw, but there is evidence that she very much could. So, in the end, the influence is the work itself, is that it moves you… you can’t really explain it.

Alice Neel, Geoffrey Hendricks and Brian, oil on canvas, 46.75X36.75 inches, 1978

Janet Niewald: You and I were talking the other day about Rembrandt, and we were saying, you know, what a powerhouse Rembrandt remains for both of us. But you said that you didn’t feel like you could really learn from Rembrandt, you said, ‘What could I learn from Rembrandt?’, which I thought was interesting, as I used to feel this way, until 2012 when I was in Amsterdam. And, for the first time I did feel like I wasn’t just standing there, wowed and just moved, I was also able to kind of see… ‘well look what he did there, he put something in the dark while he has something in the light… these are both kinda focal points… how interesting… the way he narrated, which was, well let me put it this way, was part of his duty as a seventeenth-century painter, you know, to tell a story, and the way he did it, I began to actually really access it. I think it’s also because that’s more of an interest for me now, to be able to narrate.

Wilbur Niewald: Yeah, afterwards I thought a little bit about that, and I would stand on what I said. Because it’s true what you’re saying, that like, say the ‘Clothmakers’ (Syndics of the Draper’s Guild). You don’t realize how revolutionary it was, to put that in that context in contrast to what was the norm of a group (portrait).

Rembrandt, Syndics of the Draper’s Guild, oil on canvas, 1662, 75.4 x 110 inches

Wilbur Niewald: Right, and even recently, I’ve always said, for me, drawing… we draw in color. In other words, I would talk about, say the corner of this room, or ceiling, where it comes together. Now, when one is reacting to that, and this has to do with visual sensitivity, he’s going to draw that so lightly. You don’t think that it is because that’s the way it is, it’s not a structure. In other words, it’s not imposing (ideas, presumptions) upon the vision. And then I saw a Rembrandt drawing, and I could see even more how much he drew in color, so beautifully.

Janet Niewald: And they’re such wonderful expressive lines, amazing. So, would you say Cezanne, and for you Mondrian, Rembrandt… Matisse, to some degree?

Wilbur Niewald, Three Skulls, oil on canvas, 2012, 26×22 inches

Wilbur Niewald, Still life with Pomegrantes, oil on canvas, 2010, 21×25 inches

Janet Niewald: I hate to keep bringing up Matisse again, in Notes of a Painter, and I know Notes of a Painter is right over here, I should just get it out, but he spoke about being at a certain point later in life and then going back and looking at your early work, to see what it was that really generated the whole thing for you. What it was then that you felt so strongly about as a youth, and I think there’s truth to that because you can go back and learn in your own work, early work in particular, what set you off.

Jessie Fisher: Wilbur, the other night at the dedication ceremony you mentioned that you found the 4X4” glass slides of the drawings you submitted to KCAI when you were 10-years old? These drawings allowed you to attend Saturday drawing courses with Ms. Poke. And then years later you found them at the KCAI slide library when they were shifting to the smaller format. Do you still have those? (Wilbur: Yeah!) Do you recognize any way of composing or way of moving the mark that you see in your work now?

Janet Niewald: Does it look like yours?

Wilbur Niewald: Well, I’ll tell you a story about that. The faculty was out here, we would periodically have them out here for dinners, and I mentioned that story. And it was Stan (Stanley Lewis) said, “would you (go) get that” and he thought that it told something…he liked them, and I’ll show them to you. What they show is that, and that’s why she (Ms. Poke) was a great influence, they showed a simplicity. In other words, at 10-years old some young people can draw very naturalistic things. This (drawing) was simple, it was a person posing, a simple pose of a man, seated. In other words, I like the simplicity, and I liked the simplicity in that the palette where we just had the primary colors, which I still use to this day, and that was another one of the big influences of this experience (being in school with Ms. Poke). But more than anything else it was her enthusiasm. She loved color and she loved Impressionist painting…. in contrast to what was going on at that time in the art school, which was more connected to the Academy, and they weren’t into Impressionism, that enthusiasm really made an impression on me.

So, the influences, all the way around, our influences are really where we are at the time, ourselves (as artists). But in conclusion, of where I am now, I want to emphasize that the great influence on my painting is Paul Cezanne. Some artists do say that Cezanne is the greatest painter to have ever lived…but was he greater than Rembrandt? Rembrandt, for me… just everything about his work… is the most incomparable artist to all others, but as I said earlier, not a direct influence. Cezanne has always been and still is, a direct influence on my practice. Cezanne is always contemporary for me. From when I first recognized him and his ideas, Cezanne is without a doubt, for me, the great painter of our time. His inspiration is always there.

PART 4

Wilbur and Janet Niewald – ON DRAWING AND PRACTICE

Janet Niewald, Ammonites and Shells III, oil on canvas, 22×30 inches, 2015

Wilbur Niewald, Still life with Apples and White Pitcher, 26×32 inches, 2014

Wilbur Niewald: Well, I’ll tell you how I knew that she was an artist. First of all, it was when we went to the Grand Canyon in 1974. I gave you an easel…

Janet Niewald: And you thought you were going to get it back! They gave me a French easel for Christmas, was it Christmas or my birthday that year? But you guys had bought it for me, it was a gift, and I’ve always teased you that you probably thought that about a year later you probably get it back.

Wilbur Niewald: No, but anyway I could see the talent. Then when… I was teaching in Paris, through the New York Studio School, that’s the first time we were working together, and we went south and stayed in Aix-en-Provence. We (Wilbur and Gerry) came back earlier than Janet did, she was a student at the time and independently she continued to work… and then I knew. And she sent a beautiful letter that said, ‘I have decided to be a painter and I want to go to the best art school and that’s the Kansas City Art Institute…”

Janet Niewald: I did! And it was a huge decision, as you can imagine.”

Wilbur Niewald: “….and I want to study with daddy.”

Janet Niewald: Yeah, “I want to study with daddy.” And I had looked around, it wasn’t out of the blue. Before I went to France because I was at school in the northeast, I had gone to RISD and checked it out, I had it gone to what was then PCA in Philadelphia, and I’d gone to New York. So, I had considered art schools in the northeast. And then I began to put it together when I realized it was really truly painting that I wanted, I just think this (KCAI) was a remarkable program, just a remarkable program. I mean he (Wilbur) was an amazing teacher, but there were other amazing teachers- it was a phenomenal group.

Lester Goldman, Dinner, oil on canvas, 60 x 73 inches, circa 1976

Wilbur Niewald, The Pink House, oil on canvas, 24×30 inches, 1971

Warren Rosser, Avebury Swing, monoprint on paper, 30×22 inches, 1982

Ronald Slowinski, Prayer Stone, acrylic on canvas, 20×26 inches, 1976

Stanley Lewis, Blue Apartment November, oil on canvas, 32×48 inches, 1985

Michael Walling, Mark, oil on canvas, 26×28 inches, 1975

Janet Niewald: And yet we have differences, you know, I work differently, and our studio practice is more different now than it used to be, that is that you have, I guess still, a morning painting and an afternoon painting, is that right? And then I’ve got usually about 7 or 8 things going- I tend to have a lot of different things that I work on. I cannot have one painting in the morning one painting in the afternoon, I seem to need to have multiple paintings going, and I also have some paintings that I work on that aren’t from observation. Only one of them so far has even been exhibited, and then I took it down took it home, took the top and bottom panels off, it’s a polyptych- a triptych with the top and bottom like a predella, so it’s like a 5-panel polyptych and I was so discouraged with it after I showed that I took it home and ripped it all apart and I’m actually now working back into it, so if I ever finish it will be like a 5-year wonder.

Janet Niewald, Self-Portrait, Red Neck, oil on canvas, 22×18 inches, 2015

Janet Niewald, Mithras Quarry, oil on canvas, 26×40 inches, 1993

Janet Niewald: Well, you’ve had really four, because you have one here (at his home studio), and then down at the Livestock Exchange studio, plus two landscapes, the morning and the afternoon, in landscape weather, and then sometimes you have a self-portrait, or a portrait as well, so actually if you think about it, there are times you may have something like 5 balls in the air Wilbur!

Wilbur Niewald, Trees in Loose Park VIII, oil on canvas, 26×32 inches, 2009

Wilbur Niewald, Pine Trees in Loose Park XV, oil on canvas, 32×28 inches, 2013

Janet Niewald: Is it done?

Wilbur Niewald: No! See, the truth is, she doesn’t know it (gesturing towards Janet), but I don’t need it, the model, contrary to what I preach all the time. There is a little thing right here (pointing to the outside corner of his upper lip) that I discovered can make a difference in the expression. This goes up just a little bit…. and I don’t have it. I fully intend to correct that. It’s amazing how moving it up a little bit can make the expression softer.

Janet Niewald: So, you don’t need Pam anymore?

Wilbur Niewald: No, not on that painting…

Janet Niewald: Did you know that David is posing for me now? This is an ongoing battle because mama doesn’t like to pose for daddy, and David doesn’t like to pose for me, so my mother and my husband share this aversion to sitting and being models.

Wilbur Niewald, Pam, 23×19 inches, oil on canvas, 2014

Wilbur Niewald, Gerry in Black Vest, 32×23 inches, oil on canvas, 2007

Wilbur Niewald: I will say that Gerry, now really has cut it off. I wanted to do one more. I think it would be really great, but it doesn’t appear that it’s going to happen, I don’t think, but we’ll see. She and Pam were both outstanding models. I have always wanted to paint another portrait, and every three years or so, I have painted a nude.

Janet Niewald: Getting back to drawing, I used to draw in my sketchbook every day, and then sometimes do bigger drawings, larger drawings, pencil or charcoal, and now I tend to work in a pen actually in a small sketchbook. Are you drawing as much as you used to?

Wilbur Niewald: Well, you know, I feel in a way that I have never drawn as much as I would like to, but, where drawing changed for me was, in the early years as a student and in early teaching, I liked to use charcoal, or chalk…conte crayon, that’s what I liked in terms of drawing, and then when we traveled, I always used pencil. And so, when I, after that first experience, coming back I completely changed, and this will illustrate how much I believe in that you’re teaching what you like, in other words, I completely put aside charcoal, and we (the students) worked almost exclusively in pencil. It just made more sense, and it was very simple, and it didn’t rub off, and even in a way it was like writing. But I have always wanted to draw more, in other words, it was hard to get that much in, but Janet, she draws a lot.

Janet Niewald, Museum notes, pen in sketchbook, 7×8 inches, 2012

Janet Niewald: Not so much anymore, not like I used to, that’s why I was asking you because you used to draw a lot and you used to do a lot of watercolor.

Wilbur Niewald: Oh yeah, watercolor.

Janet Niewald: I think you did more than you realize. Consistently with your oil painting, you are also, often doing some watercolors, especially in the summer, or if we would travel, you know when I was young and living at home, we would travel, and you would work in watercolor wherever we went. And sometimes pull over the side of the road, get out and do some watercolors and mom and I would wander around looking at flowers.

Wilbur Niewald: It all had to do with where you were, in other words, I could never do this in watercolor now, (then) I could complete a watercolor in one session. I had watercolors that I sustained while we were traveling and could complete them in just one day.

Janet Niewald: (To Wilbur) When you started at the Art Institute (Kansas City Art Institute), not as a child, but for your bachelor’s degree, did you come in knowing watercolor? Had you painted in watercolor prior to that? Because, you started in illustration, actually.

Wilbur Niewald: In high school, I did watercolor. Watercolor was always a very natural medium, I had to learn oil and other opaque mediums. But with watercolor, I liked the transparency. I never liked opaque watercolor, gouache, but transparency was always a very important part of my work. It’s really over many years and many watercolors I was really thinking of the abstraction of the…. (landscape). My watercolors, now, I work on for a long time, and I accept that. I would like to be able to stop (sooner), but right now, I would be very self-conscious. Right now, I have to push it…I don’t care if it becomes opaque …it’s all about correction, that’s what I care about.

Wilbur Niewald, Pine Trees in Loose Park 5, watercolor on paper, 22×17 inches, 2019

Wilbur Niewald, Rocks at Cambridge Circle 1, watercolor on paper, 17.75×22.25 inches, 2017

Wilbur Niewald: Well, that was probably the Strathmore Kid finish, but very soon after that, I went to Fabriano. The other watercolors that I do are the same, probably Fabriano, but I think that watercolor affected my oil. My oil painting in the ’50s and the ’60s is really indirect. That’s why it took me a while to learn in oil. I didn’t mix a color (directly), I made a color on the canvas through this idea of warm and cool, you see in layers, I would put a down a warm… warm generally meant forward and the cool meant back, and so I would make the color, and then come over it with another because I wanted to push it back. And you can see this on the canvas particularly there (gesturing to the oil painting over the fireplace) You can see all these obvious brush marks, one over the other, in other words, I was thinking much more of a total, and you can see how they became much more like where I am now. And basically, mixing the color, that’s what I meant when I said to adjust to the opacity and the transparency. I noticed that Donald Judd did write something way back, and for me, it was somewhat of a favorable idea from him, this was the 60’s, and, he said, something about the color… ‘accept the greens.’ All the greens (in my paintings) were not mixed with green, they were a mix on the surface, so they’re not exactly greens that I liked, but it’s the idea of controlling color in space that was more important than the idea of the color itself. The color is the result of the idea. In other words, the idea is in the illusion.

Wilbur Niewald, Trees 1, oil on canvas, 40×50 inches, 1962

Janet Niewald: This, this is phenomenal, have you seen this one? (Referring to an image, The Dessert, 1900-6, pencil and watercolor on paper, 18×24.5 inches, private collection, in the catalog from the recent Cezanne, Drawing exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, NY.)

Wilbur Niewald: I have never seen that.

Janet Niewald: I haven’t either, and he clearly decided he didn’t want that fruit, and of course it’s watercolor, and you’re not going to erase it, but he just painted all over it, this is really interesting, it’s really beautiful.

Wilbur Niewald: Well, you know, his late watercolors, they were really developed. Oh, there’s the one that’s in Dallas. Actually, they were always very developed.

Paul Cézanne, Still Life with Apples on a Sideboard, watercolor over pencil on paper, 19×25 inches, 1900–06

Paul Cézanne, The Dessert, watercolor over pencil on paper, 18×24.5 inches, 1900-6

Janet Niewald: Teaching your mind to see and to stay awake.

Wilbur Niewald: Yeah.

Afterward, Wilbur showed us the letter from Alice Neel. Beautifully scripted on a light golden onion-skin stationary paper. The letter thanked Wilbur and his wife Geraldine, for hosting her and remarked on Wilbur’s paintings which still line the walls of his self-designed Kansas City home.

I remember all the paintings on the walls,
the brain is a wonderful gallery
in which one deposits every painting that is visually interesting.

Alice Neel, 1974

Editor note:

Painting Perceptions is enormously grateful to Jessie Fisher for making this conversation available. I thank Jessie Fisher for this phenomenal gift to painters with the enormous amount of time and thought she gave to this project.

Lectures and Video Interviews with Wilbur Niewald

added by Painting Perceptions

The post Visible Influence: Janet Niewald and Wilbur Niewald appeared first on Painting Perceptions.

re-edited on the occasion of the exhibition Bernard Chaet (1924 – 2012): A Life in Art – Alpha
Gallery, Boston – December 1, 2012 through January 2, 2013

Bernard Chaet taught painting and drawing at the Yale University Art Department from 1951-1990 and was the Chairman of the Art Department for a number of years.

Chaet’s friend and School of Art colleague William Bailey called the painter “one of the great figures in American art.”

A very good article from a 2013 WBUR episode by Greg Cook is transcribed here Bernard Chaet’s Far Horizon and this Wikipedia page.

Bernard Chaet’s, The Art of Drawing, comes out of his teaching experience at Yale and is put to great use here in this timeless book about creative drawing. This book has been hugely popular and influential to art students for many years. It’s more about making art than technique and materials. Even as he introduces basic concepts such as line and value, his illustrations show the inventive ways great artists used these concepts in the making of their art. Chaet avoids the regurgitation of academic rules that discourages creativity and provides a fresh approach that is as relevant today as when this book first was published in the ’70s.

The post Bernard Chaet: A Life in Art, 1997 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.

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.

​

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.

​

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.

​

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.
​

The post Interview with Mel Leipzig appeared first on Painting Perceptions.

27 x 50 inches

60 x 72 inches

By Tina Engels

A couple of summer’s ago Tina Engels and I had the great pleasure of meeting and interviewing Dan Gustin in his incredible home and studio in Italy. A number of delays prevented us from finishing and publishing this wonderful interview that Tina Engels wrote until now. I would like to thank Dan Gustin and Tina Engels both for their time and energy in putting together this insightful look at his background, process and thoughts on painting. – Larry Groff

Dan Gustin has been a Associate Professor of Art (tenured) at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago since 1984. He has been a visiting artist for many years at the International School of Art in Umbria Italy. He received his M.F.A. at the Yale University in 1974 and his B.F.A. at the Kansas City Art Institute in 1972. He has had numerous solo shows at the ISA Gallery, Umbria, Italy, Geschiedle Gallery, J. Rosenthal Gallery, and the Lyons Weir Packer Gallery in Chicago, Forum Gallery in NYC and Alpha Gallery in Boston, the Paul Mellon Arts Center, and the Rockford Art Museum. and many others. He has shown in over fifty group exhibitions throughout the United States.

Gustin’s work is in the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington D.C., Art Institute of Chicago, The Huntington Museum of Art, West Virginia, Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, MA and in private collections in New York and Chicago. Mr. Gustin is a recipient of the Purchase Award at the annual Arts & Letters Show in NYC and is a member of the National Academy of Design. He has also won grants from the Illinois Arts Council, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago Faculty Enrichment Grants and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Dan Sheridan Gustin spends his summers painting and teaching near his home in Umbria, Italy. While there Gustin paints the landscape often working on three or four paintings a day. During the rest of the year Gustin is an associate professor of art at the Art Institute of Chicago. While home in Chicago the artist focuses on his large scale narratives.

William Bailey

William Bailey wrote about Dan Gustin and Langdon Quin in September 2017: “…Each has found challenge and meaning in this Landscape so often painted throughout history. They bring their own histories, as did Claude and Corot in their time. They paint with conviction and imagination, shunning the mannerisms which conventionally assure contemporaneity. Gustin and Quin share a subject but find completely different content….Dan Gustin’s landscapes are typically large-scale, and executed entirely within the setting portrayed in his paintings. Using a full range of vigorously applied color and tone, he fills his canvases with the space, light and atmosphere which characterize each particular place. Gustin’s painterly presence and mastery are his own, but one can sense the extravagant Courbet lurking nearby – urging him on.”- William Bailey

30 x 40 inches

24 x 40 inches

Dan Gustin painting in Umbria

Larry Groff: Please tell us how you came to be to Italy?

Dan Gustin:  Initially I was hired by Helaine Trietman, Mark Servin and Nick Carone to teach at the International School in Italy during the summer. The first month I was there, I just stayed in my room and could not paint. I had never painted landscape and I had no ideas or desire to do it. I thought I had to paint large narrative paintings here and I just couldn’t. I was depressed and completely blocked. I didn’t know what to do. One day I just kind of peeked out and started doodling away. One thing led to another and I was soon out in the landscape and totally fell in love with the place.

I think people who paint landscapes are looking for a home. I know I was. I found my painting home was here in Italy. The light the spaces, the land and sky all became familiar in some strange way and it was what I wanted to paint about. Then I had to do hundreds of terrible paintings. But, everyday I am here I learn more.

48 x 84 inches

72 x 108 inches

Tina: You certainly found the perfect place to do this work. These enormous vistas appear cinematic, spectacular. Your translation seems fitting.

Dan: It took me years to do paintings here in Italy, meaning paintings that I could look at or exhibit. I believe you work from where you are. I had many ideas about how I should paint, and while co-teaching in Italy with many terrific painters. One starts to believe in certain rules and devise certain ways of working. You want to fit in. One wants the work to stand up to other painter’s ways of working and painting from the landscape. You get into this thing of what can you do vs. what do you want to do. It took me years to try to even get away from what do I want to do as opposed to what I can do.

Tina: When you go back into the studio, do you imagine or recall the landscape to paint back into your paintings?

Dan: You know how we all tweak things. You pull things out; push things around, little things, but not a lot. I don’t work a lot away from the landscape and I’ve learned only do this in natural light. When I use electric light, the color shifts are all off and I end up with two different paintings.

Tina: I’ve heard you say before that being capable of creating scale is more important to you than the physical size of the painting. For example, a small painting can look big.

Dan: The idea of scale became so apparent to me in Italy. Landscape painting for me is so much about seeing from here to there and about how one creates relationships that work or fit together in this vast space.

24 x 42 inches

36 x 80 inches

48 x 84 inches

Larry: So a miniaturist could do it?

Dan: Right. A lot of people think scale means the size of the picture but it doesn’t at all. It’s the relationships to the parts. If you look at a Van Eyck, the painting looks immense, but it’s physically it is really very small.   I’m not that good, so I can’t do that. In a way, I use size to get scale. Which maybe is a problem, but I’m okay with it.

It’s that battle between your intuition and what your mind tells you to do. For years I kept doing these smaller pieces and then I realized it’s like an ocean out there. How do I paint the sea? Do I want to paint a little part of the water? It started to extend the painting both horizontally and vertically. The wider it got, the deeper it got. Again, it’s that thing, a lot of people paint shelves and others paint distances.

Tina: That’s a great way of talking about painting the landscape. Thinking of the landscape/ sky as a sea. It’s a wonderful metaphor.

Dan: There is a kind of arrogance too. There’s a kind of extreme narcissism to try to take in all of this. And the more I would distance myself from other painters to see how they saw and painted Italy, the better my paintings became. That was hard for me because I had to find a way I could believe in making a painting from a landscape, yet, still feel I was making my own paintings.

Larry: Why do you perceive of it as arrogance?

Dan: Maybe it’s not arrogance, but the hope that you can do something so difficult and still get it somewhat right in relationship to what you are seeing.

60 x 108 inches

60 x 90 inches

Tina: How does one of your paintings near completion? I’ve heard you say you don’t make drawings, or preliminary studies.

Dan: If I look at something and there’s kind of wholeness to the experience, and I know that I don’t want to reopen the whole painting and/or I stop having ideas about it, things don’t jump out. I wouldn’t say it is finished, but I would probably say the painting is resolved. I think for me, drawing sets up the finish idea, the completion, and I think more about the color idea and the disposition of masses on a plane set up a different expectation. In a way, I can never finish a painting. I stop working on it, but they always seem open-ended to me. That’s why I work on paintings for years sometimes. Constantly changing them to the conditions present, yet hoping and believing in the resolution in the end.

Tina: We asked you about composition and abstraction. I’m wondering if the organization or if the abstraction reveals itself as you are initially looking at a vista or as you paint it?

Dan: Because I am so involved with seeing this world, I don’t believe there is anything really abstract out there, its all real to me. I think that’s pulling in an idea of painting into the landscape. Again, I don’t see anything in the world as being abstract. I mean they’re formulations of an image based on seeing. Obviously it’s not the thing I’m seeing. It’s a re-presentation of the thing I’m seeing, and of all the decisions and changes that I make while “seeing” what I am painting.

60 x 72 inches

60 x 96 inches

Larry: Isn’t that just another way of saying abstraction?

Dan: Yes, possibly, but abstraction is not the way I think about making a painting. What I am trying to do is to visually link together successive moments in what I see in front of me. Or, you might say a specific piece of the world as it is in that moment. Each moment is based on trying to find that equivalent in paint while always fighting assumptions to what I am looking at. The painting is built, then, from that succession of decisions and corrections until I find a kind of unified resolution of the whole painting. This is why the weather is so important to my landscape paintings, because that determines in the most specific sense what is happening in front of me, yet is constantly changing. That is the chase I am on.

12 x 20 inches

48x 86 inches

50 x 60 inches

Tina: Your paintings require a slow read, or a process of getting to know them. I also find the periphery of your paintings charged. Are they seem to be meant to see not from one point of view, but from all sides.

Dan: I like to move the canvas so that you come in from the edge on different angles, so that you don’t get a static vanishing point. I don’t create a space where everything leads in to one point and try to take different points of view from varied angles of the painting to get different things happening, from different sides and different angles of vision. Lester Johnson talked to me about this.

It also shakes up your idea that you know what you’re doing. When you get out there, it’s beyond any sense of your comprehension. The more I get into it, the less I know what I’m doing, the less I compose, the less I think about say Corot or other landscape painters, that’s when I paint better. Whereas, if I want to compose, I am lost and spend the rest of the time painting, fighting against that very idea of composition, that I imposed on the painting in the first place. I don’t want to think about making a certain painting, or psychologically align myself with other paintings. Better to ignore all that gets in the way of what I am seeing now.

I think that’s the hard thing, knowing you’re not a great painter, but going out there and painting. We’re all taught to be great painters. When, in reality, hardly any of us are. That’s a very difficult idea for the ego to digest. As students all we hear about and see is great painting. I think, for me, I have to be able to accept this idea that rather than try to be a great painter, you do the best you can and that’s got to be good enough. I go for progress not perfection.

42 x 84 inches

48 x 84 inches

Tina: The impossibility of painting?

Dan: No, I’m just not good enough. Other people can do it. That’s the hard thing for me is to go out there. That’s the hard thing for me, is to go out there knowing full well you’re just doing your best and it’s not going to measure up to great painting. That’s the tough truth about painting.

Larry: What about just saying, “Oh, well I’m unhappy with this particular aspect of my painting, therefore I want to concentrate on bringing that to a higher level”? It’s not like you just sort of accept the idea that this is all I can do. Don’t you keep moving it forward?

Dan: Oh no. I’m talking about the big picture. In the little picture there are the nuts and bolts of painting. There is the moving of things, constantly repainting, not protecting your assumptions regarding what you see and paint. Of course we address what does the painting need, there is that.   But that’s different than what I’m talking about. Yeah, that’s all I do. All I do is look at what’s wrong.

48 x 68 inches

50 x 62 inches

Larry: Is there something about a painter’s innate abilities or character that limits how far they can go with their painting? That painters like Corot or Antonio Lopez Garcia are impossibly rare?

Dan: I never think about it. That just gets me into a whole world of problems because there are so many good painters out there. I think this is an incredibly strong time for representational painting. They are so many people who really believe in it, and are doing fantastic work. You start looking at it and you just start to see how good it all is. Yet, for my own psychology it is a double-edged sword.   Constantly seeing all this terrific work inspires me in many ways, but it also wears me down a little.   And myself trying to control how my painting “looks” in comparison to other artists.

You know, we can all relate to Corot’s paintings. We see the world a little like that and we can all paint a little. And there is a commonality there that we can all share. No one can do that with Cezanne.

Cezanne led me more to the intuitive as opposed to the intellectual.  This is why I love Cezanne so much.  He is such an intuitive painter.  Nobody speaks about Cezanne anymore.  He doesn’t conform to people’s ideas about painting at all.  You never hear people talk about him because you can’t find a hook into the painting.  We are all looking for how to paint and Cezanne does not reveal that.

It is more difficult because there is no hook, because it’s about the way this amazing artist changed painting.   He just drains it of any type of humanness so there is no cliché in his work. He was an incredibly intuitive artist who painted the world as if seen for the first time.

24 x 48 inches

48 x 108 inches

60 x 72 inches

Tina: That’s a great way to put it.

Dan:   That’s the hardest thing for me to do. We all have memories, we all know how to paint, and we all think we’re good, we all talk to people, and we all look at art. For me feeds into a think-tank of the clichés that you carry with you every time you paint. Cezanne was able to just break through all of that, which has to be the hardest thing to do, I would think.

Tina: You worked with Wilbur Niewald at the Kansas City Art Institute. What do recall about Wilbur’s teaching?

Dan: Wilbur changed my life. He introduced me to this whole idea of painting from observation, directly from nature. He gave me a sense that it was possible and worthwhile to work from observation as opposed to painting conceptually and I started to find myself in that idea. I was very close to him. He was the guy that got me started painting in a very committed way, so that my life revolved around painting. Through Wilbur I began to understand the difference between looking and seeing. This is the foundational idea and thrust of my work to this day. I don’t know that I would have been a painter if it weren’t for him.  I had never thought about being a painter. But somehow it resonated deeply with me and I thought it might offer a new direction to my life. Somehow it seemed appropriate and immanent. I met Wilbur and he just took me under his wing. I trusted what he said and allowed him to help me find myself as someone who is a painter. He brought me to this whole idea of observational painting.

50 x 96 inches

48 x 84 inches

Stanley Lewis and Dan Gustin

Larry: And was Stanley Lewis at KCAI then?

Dan: Wilbur was my main mentor. He talked a lot about Cezanne and about this idea of seeing. Stanley was teaching next door, but Stanley was too much for me then. I loved his work, but I just didn’t have that sensibility, I don’t have that energy and intensity. I’m much more of a slow, ponderous kind of guy. Stanley’s all about painting with an extreme kind of energy, so at KCAI I really gravitated towards Wilbur.

25 x 50 inches

48 x 60 inches

70 x 84 inches

Tina: Then you studied in the MFA program at Yale in the ’70s. What was it like as a student working with William Bailey, Andrew Forge, Bernard Chaet, and Al Held?

Dan: I studied with Al Held a little, but he was very tough and probably not that interested in what I was doing. He came from a very different position. Mostly, I worked with William Bailey, Bernie Chaet and Lester Johnson. They were all very supportive and talked to me about very different issues regarding my work. It was pretty much the formal stuff we worked on.

Larry: What kind of painting were you doing?

Dan: I was working on large paintings looking out from my studio window at the street and cityscapes below. I would paint from the light and life on the street, watching how it changed from moment to moment, painting in and painting out of situations as they occurred throughout the day. My canvases corresponded directly to the size of the large windows I was looking through. At that time the work was big for representational painting.

Larry: Why did they encourage big paintings so much back then?

Dan: I don’t know if they did encourage it. I just felt it was necessary for my work. I recall one day Al Held came into my studio to look at what I was working on. I was painting these small still life’s of apples, fruit, pots and stuff. He looked and said, “You can’t do that anymore. It’s over. You just can’t do still life any more.” These were really heavyweight painters and they were saying, “You’ve got to find something else to paint.” Held said, “Look out your window. That’s better than these paintings.” So I did.

At first I started doing small paintings looking out my window, but then I got into the same problem of size and distance and the idea of including whatever I wanted to paint. I began painting the whole window and the paintings kept getting bigger and bigger. The paintings became more narrative and I started to get interested in what was happening down the street. I’d sit there all morning and hunt for these little episodes.

25 x 60 inches

50 x 60 inches

Tina: And that became the narrative?

Dan: Yes, the cars, trucks, people interacting and the narrative of the color and people walking by as well as the constant process of seeing “change” and then repainting what I saw. I would paint whatever I wanted and then I’d paint it out. I got into this mode of painting the flow of things as they happened. And that’s when I began repainting a lot. I think there was only one other figurative painter at Yale when I was there, so there was a heightened sense of feeling kind of alone and isolated regarding the direction my work was going. So many other things were happening in New York and the kind of painting I was interested in was not at the forefront of what was being shown or discussed.

Dan:   Once Fairfield Porter visited Yale to give a talk. I remember he was practically booed off the stage. People attacked him for being an elitist, living on his own island and for having a position that stood for the sake of artistic perception.

48×108

25x50in

25x50in

Larry: That’s ironic because he was leftist politically.

Dan: He wrote the art and technology essays. But students saw him as an elitist and criticized him. “You have no right because you just live on a little island in your secluded world, and you just make little pictures of your house”. I saw him as more a poet/painter than as someone who wanted to re-invent art. That concept seemed lost on the audience.

After the lecture I went up and talked with him, I thanked him for speaking and told him I thought he gave a great talk. He asked me if he might take a rest in my studio, and commented on the tough audience. He walked into my studio and looked around. I asked him if there was anything he could tell me. He replied, “The only thing I can tell you is paint what you love.” At the time, it really helped me and gave me a kind of support.   I have tried to take his advice to heart ever since.

William Bailey and Dan Gustin

William Bailey was really helpful. He would come and talk to me and would show me paintings. We would look together and he would ask questions like, “Why do you think this is here? Why is that there?” This helped me to start thinking formally about a lot of different issues in paintings. Bailey is very much about the stillness in a work, how forms and color relationships pulse and don’t really move. William Bailey and Stanley Lewis are my favorite painters and the two people who have influenced me above all.

I also worked with Lester Johnson, who got me into this whole idea of directions, as opposed to moving in and out, moving across the surface, side to side and up and down. He was very much interested in activating the space with diagonals and packing the space so that everything stays up front on the picture plane.

Bernie Chaet was a wonderful teacher and later a great friend. He was supportive of everyone and there to talk about the problems we were having in our work. Bernie loved looking at paintings and transmitted to us this love of art and how paintings are developed from the point of view of the artist. We stayed friends and he was a constant source of support to me and many other young painters.

40 x 50 inches

40 x 72 inches

36 x 72 inches

Tina: What was your association was with Andrew Forge; did he play a part in your study?

Dan: Yes, I met him, he wasn’t at Yale when I was there, but I was a friend of his wife Ruth Miller, and we would talk a lot about painting. I met Andrew through Ruth. He spent about six weeks here in Italy, for two summers I think. I would sit in his studio and watch him paint, and we’d talk, but so many of the things he talked about were beyond any understanding I had at the time about art and aesthetics. I think he was kind of a genius. He would look at something then look out the window, he’d be smoking his pipe, I’d be sitting in the back and he would just look at something and put down a mark, and then walk back and sit for two minutes looking at the spot or mark he just made seeing its relationship to the other marks as well as what he might have been looking at out the window. That’s a long time to look at one mark, and then walk up and do another one. It reminded me of stories about how Cezanne painted and the gap in time between what piece of nature he saw and what piece of paint he put down.

Dan: Andrew was very supportive and positive about my work and at the end of the summer we traded paintings. He said to me, “I really believe in you Dan, you keep going, don’t let people talk you out of it, stay strong and committed to your vision”. Really, all these people I met, I never really wanted to paint like them. I never felt I could, I couldn’t paint or draw well enough. But I had a kind of willed ambition, not so much for the career but for my work. My ambition tended to go always towards my work, and how to be a more truthful painting. I was showing at Forum gallery then and Fischbach really took an interest in me and helped me.

Yale was great, the final thing Bill said to me at the group show, “Well, I don’t know what to say. Now what?” And that was it. It was kind of like, “Go little fish”. I always wanted these guys’ approval. They would give it to me but never in the ways I really wanted. It took me a long time to be able to understand what they saying in their own way, and not the way I felt I wanted, which is really the last thing I needed. They never wanted painters to paint like them. They never wanted your work to be like theirs, but were always trying to help you make your own paintings.

42 x 84 inches

Tina: Do you try to do that with your students now?

Dan: Oh yeah, I think the worst thing is if the student feels they need you or if they feel they must paint a kind of work that reflects back to you as “their” teacher. I am not interested in students painting like I do. I try to teach much more about seeing and how to understand the decisions, changes and assumptions one makes seeing and how that is brought to drawing and painting. I really try to create an experience so that students are always thrown back on themselves. For example, if they ask me something about how to paint or something like that, I respond by asking why they posed a particular question. And suggest that they might find out more by trying to “see” what it is they are looking at and try to see it in different terms than they are at that particular time.

I want them to be able to answer their own questions and follow their own intuitions when they are out of school working on their own. You want students to get strong and independent so they can be on their own. That’s hard! A hard thing for them to swallow I think.

I really wish the best for students. I really love them and I love working with them. It’s just a hard gig. I can see they all have to have jobs and one day will have kids and significant others and they have to support themselves. How do you do all that and yet paint? It’s hard today. I worry for them, I do.

Larry: You’ve had times in your career where you have had these hugely important shows.

Dan: It’s not like I’m trying to put myself down, I’m just saying it’s not this stellar career. It’s a kind of steady career… I think people respect my work, whether they really like it or not. As I said, I have this kind of willed ambition to make my work truthful and that is what I think about.

10 x 18 inches

25 x 50 inches

Tina: It’s interesting to me that you’ve created a world for yourself that really does reflect your ambitions as a painter. And you recognize the length and breadth of the journey and serendipity required to continue working. It is a grand struggle requiring momentary and often monumental ups and downs. Doesn’t that describe the life of a great writer or painter? There are no guarantees…

Dan: Gabriel Laderman said, “Be ambitious about your work, not about the career.” Today that’s completely reversed. You tend to measure yourself against that. We all do, I think.

Larry: These things you’re saying are great. Good painting teachers help people realize it’s a lifestyle choice with a set of values about what’s truly valuable in life. Being a good painter is its own reward.

Dan: That is the reward. But, only if you don’t feel badly about not getting the level of success you feel you might deserve. And if you do, never take that outside with you or in your studio when you are painting.

Larry: The career should be less important than knowing that you have integrity as a painter and that you’re doing what you love. Nothing could be more rewarding. But then again, it’s obviously nice to have money and not worry about food or rent, etc.

Dan: Doesn’t it nag away at you? It nags at me, the whole fame thing.

Larry: It seems like it’s almost over. Like it’s not really possible, except for a very small minority of people. It’s time to figure out a new paradigm.

Dan: I totally agree with that. The other thing is that I don’t think it’s so much that I chose to be a painter; I think it chooses you, actually. I think when you’re a child, you’re a maker, you imagine. Then how do you create a life for yourself? Students ask me, “What do you think is the one prerequisite for being a painter?” I say, and I kind of mean this, “You can’t be good at anything else. You can’t want to do anything else.” They perceive that as terrible because now you’re supposed to be able to do all these different things and are supposed to wear many hats. It’s making a world. I think that’s the thing, in terms of when do the world and your vision start to come together? That’s the real thing, I think, for me. How do you start to make your vision and the world coincide? The painters I respect, the painters I really like, couldn’t do anything else. I’m sort of like that. I couldn’t do anything else. You’re able to re-imagine and re-invent your world. What a great thing.

60x72in

60x72in

Larry: I think it’s in the boundaries of your definition of painting. For instance, Piero was not only a great painter but he dabbled in architecture.

Dan: He was a great mathematician. But, you are talking about the top of the pyramid here. So that the inside is painting, the outside is informing the inside. For the greatest painters it just becomes one. That’s the hard thing. That’s kind of why this, whatever you call it, has became this overpowering obsession with me. How do I absorb this that I see and use it? How does it make me paint it? I try to give myself over to it. Again, the painters I like, come to painting with an incredible sense … they come on their knees. They are humble people in a way and great visual listeners. I think great painters take a referential attitude towards nature, time and space. I try to align myself more with those people, as opposed to Jeff Koons or Andy Warhol and that direction of making art that they come out of.

I’m down here. I just do what I can do. You’re talking about the ten geniuses in western art. They can do anything.

Larry: Right, I agree.

Dan: That’s where everything has gone. I met Warhol once and I’m telling you, I felt I was around evil. There was something incredibly pernicious about him. It was a bit scary.

Tina: You also met Picasso once, can you say something about that?

Dan: Oh I did, yeah, as a kid. My mom once said to me, when she was alive, she said, I was having a bad day, this was maybe 15 years ago, 18 years ago, and I said, “I feel just like a little Chicagoan.” She asked, “Why’d you just say that?” I replied, “I don’t know, it just popped into my head.” “This reminds me of something I haven’t thought about in 50 years.” When I was a kid, we had a friend who was a dealer and we used to travel in Europe. The dealer said, ‘Why don’t you go visit Picasso?’ We had lunch with Picasso and Jacqueline. The minute he met me he just took me into his studio, he said, “Let me take the little boy.” He put me on his shoulders. I guess he loved carrying kids on his shoulders. I spent all day there.

Larry: Wow.

Dan: Yes, I don’t really remember it, but he gave them a pot and he gave them a drawing, which they lost. As we were leaving, he took me on his shoulders and handed me to my parents and said, “You’re my little Chicagoan. ” Somehow I think I remembered the phrase… I don’t know, because I would never have used that phrase.

Tina: Earlier you referred to ‘outside painters’ and you spoke about how painters look for a home. Can you explain what you meant?

Dan: Yes, but I am referring to those painters I like, those painters who seem to look for a home.  I am not sure Duchamp looked for a home. 

60 x 72 inches

Tina: Alex Katz spoke about the landscape as being a question of how much light a painting can hold. When I see your landscapes I feel like they are bursting with light from corner to corner. 

Dan:   Well the light is everything for me.  You turn the lights off and it’s a dark room.  Everything I see is light.   For me there is a kind of light that works with and captures my imagination and makes me feel like I am home. I long for this light, for this recognition; it’s what I search for in every painting, although it is seldom realized. That’s what I am after and what Italy held for me.  Italy made me see a kind of light that was both light and a painting simultaneously. When these two elements coalesce there is no division between the light and the landscape. Perhaps it is because I lived in the Middle East, Europe, and lived in California in my early years. There the light is similar to Italy.  I think so many painters whom I love and look at are all in search of their light. They just recognize it when they find their landscape. When the inside and outside line up, my search ignites and it is the intensity of this search that is something I find in those painters that I admire.

There is this idea of sunlight that infuses everything I think about, as opposed to the darkness, like we would find in a Ryder painting.  Ryder is someone whom I really love, but that is not what I see as a painter. One can try to change that or try to deny it, but for me the best thing is that I go with it as much as I can.

48x84in

50x96in

48x72in

Tina: You mentioned your dreams; can you tell us something about how dreams play a role in the large narrative paintings?

Dan: Some years ago, I was living alone and painting without interruption, both in Chicago and Italy. My imagination was so active.   I found a way to stop a dream, then enter into the dream so that I became part of the story as if I in a movie. I could control things and travel around in the dream and see things. Then, I would come out of the dream, wake up and do a small painting of what I’d experienced. The next morning, I would gather all these little paintings and recall the context of the dreams. I used to be able to do this, but I really can’t do this anymore.

8 x 13 feet

8 x 15 feet

Larry: How big were the paintings?

Dan: Around 6” by 6”. They were tiny. I would use them as triggering mechanisms and as imagery. They became something I could use to create the larger narrative paintings, which weren’t really about the dreams, but instead were about the collective of the smaller paintings. Before that, I used to paint from models, and would set up domestic situations, women getting out of bed or cooking or you know, things like that, sort of a housewife. But it just didn’t resonate with me at all. I realized, I had to find stories that I believed in, and I really didn’t believe in my domestic paintings.

When I started to jump into this dream imagery, I was for the first time able to believe in the stories I was creating.   They made linkages from imagery that I felt was real. I didn’t understand them. But rather, the understanding came through the process of painting.

I don’t think about composition anymore. I don’t pre-draw things. I used to think it about it a lot. Now, I sort of accept what I see as a given. And my job is to really see it. So I let the scene make the composition. I probably know pretty much about painting and painting ideas. But once I go out to paint, I try to keep all this out.

Tina: Can you describe the relationship between your large narratives and the landscapes?

Dan: For me the narratives are very related to my landscape paintings, in that I completely believe in what I am seeing. Be it in the actual landscape or in the imaginative sense of making a world that is real to me both psychologically as well as visually. Each form helps me to paint and to see the other. The gap between the two is what interests me.

8 x 15 feet

9 x 16 feet

9 x 14 feet

Larry: And how do the demands of the landscape paintings fit into the narratives and visa versa?

Dan: The landscapes help me paint the narratives and the narratives help me paint the landscape.  The hard part is how do you believe in them.  When I am in Chicago I have to fill in this gap.  But, once I get into the large narrative paintings I fall back into the language of painting.  The hardest part is figuring out how to believe in the paintings, so you don’t have this gap.

While the painting language is the same, the intent is different. In the narratives, I try to find what is underneath, what is submerged in my imagination and how through the process of painting and repainting, I can bring it to light to remake the imagination into a painting form that is material and real in the same terms that I would pursue when painting from the landscape. I am working from pieces of dreams, fleeting thoughts, and buried impulses, that through the act of painting come to the surface. All this is then reconfigured into the painting so it works and lives together, but in a new form, one that I could never anticipate or coax out.   Perhaps one that comes from the struggle of images that must be remade into a new whole, which is the sum of countless changes and revisions, each fighting to stay in the painting.

This is also the process I experience when painting in the landscape. I work on paintings outside in many different light situations and weather conditions until a whole form emerges that makes sense as the painting comes to light. This is the gap I work best in, I try to slip away from what I know or think I see into this other way of working where doubt becomes the fuel and the intelligence in making the painting. That’s when I feel most alive as an artist.

8 x 15 feet

9 x 14 feet

The post Interview with Dan Gustin appeared first on Painting Perceptions.

Scott Noel in his studio. Pictured in front of Persephone’s Departure.
Photo Credit: Josiah King

Upon arrival at Scott Noel’s studio space at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, I was struck by the abundance of richly painted, large-scale canvases leaning against the walls. Noel, who has been working in Philadelphia since 1978, is a prolific painter of the still-life, figure, and landscape. The artist engages in the making of images through observing his subjects directly. Many of his paintings consist of constructed narratives, in which figures are engaged in roles reminiscent of ancient mythologies. I spoke with Noel about his process and mode of thinking as he was preparing for the opening of Philadelphia, a show of his work at Gross McCleaf Gallery in April, 2016.

Noel received a B.F.A. from Washington University in 1978. In addition to having over thirty solo exhibitions since 1980, Noel’s work is included in many public, private, and corporate collections. Noel has been reviewed in Art in America, American Artist, and Arts. He currently teaches figure drawing and painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he has taught since 1996.

Josiah King:   For starters, I’d like to talk about your phrase, ‘the space of desire.’

Scott Noel:    I group observational painters with painters that work out of their imaginations, and I set them in contrast to somebody who works a lot from, say, photographic references. You get great work anyway, I’m not dogmatic about that, but when you’re working observationally, or you’re working from your imagination, in both instances you’re tending to try to channel some kind of longing.

You just wouldn’t do anything as gratuitous as make art unless you needed it in some way. You don’t do it because you want to do it, you do it because you need to do it. What you need from art is very elusive, but it’s almost as compulsive as an itch. I’m thinking of someone like Hammershoi, or Degas, or Velasquez, or Vermeer. Part of what we recognize in their work is a kind of strange, compulsive, working out of a series of concerns or needs.

When I use the term space of desire, I talk about the way when you’re looking at something, your looking becomes kind of flawed over time. To know it, in a sense, I have to imagine it in a certain way. That act of knowing through imagination is always fueled and driven by appetite, by desire. These are people I’ve been painting for years. (gesturing towards a painting) Patrice: every time I paint her, her particular appearance is being mapped against other things I care about…such as characters in art.  You really want to look at where the locus of desire in a passage is. Look at the intervals. The sense that the intervals are charged with a kind of purpose, or a kind of meaning, not in a literary sense but in a formal sense, or a figurative sense. They become animate.

In fact, there’s a great line in The Remembrance of Things Past by Proust. Near the end, where one of his characters, who is an aesthete, is on his deathbed, he’s dreaming of Vermeer’s View of Delft. What he obsessively circles on, it’s the little patch of yellow, the sunlit roof on the right hand side of the painting. He keeps talking about that little patch of yellow. I know exactly what he’s talking about. That idea of realist painting answering a need, or a longing, or a desire, is very important to me. It’s never as disinterested as just the facts.

Even Euan Uglow with that kind of compulsive act of measuring, what’s he really measuring there? He himself says that it’s really about proportion. The proportions out to the edge of the rectangle, even the decision about the proportions of the rectangle, are as profoundly expressive as figuring how to get from there to there on the face.

JK:    These spaces in between – these intervals – are as important as the figures themselves?

SN:    They would be. I would want them to be at least as important.

Because of the perverse way we tend to privilege things and people, I’m attracted to artists where you almost sense that the intervals are more important. Who am I thinking of? Morandi, Dickinson, Vermeer, Velasquez. There’s a certain kind of painter – Piero della Francesca – where interval is very meaningful. In fact, Edwin Dickinson actually had a specific word for this. He talked about his interest in terstices. If you look at Dickinson, you can actually find a strange fetishization of these small, tendril-like shapes that move between things.  In the hands of a lesser painter or a young painter, they’ll paint something like this beautifully, and then they’ll forget how to resolve the form toward the edge.

You look at Dickinson and Morandi: you can see they’re really thinking about those places as important. You can almost see it a lot of times in my own painting. The last thing that will get painted is a reiteration of a shape, which will bring the form into focus. Once you start really looking, that’s happening all the time. I might say, in a way that I can’t account for fully, those are sights of strange, almost erotic investment.

In a certain kind of painter, maybe all great painters, things like color and shape are erotically charged. It’s not just neutral, it’s not just scripted. There’s just a kind of a deep affinity among painters where the actual stuff of their métier: shape, color, forms of elision – that’s a fancy word for editing – the translation of space and volume into shape form: those are charged categories. They’re not neutral. Every painter knows this, but most civilians do not. That’s, in a short form, what I mean by the space of desire.

Scott Noel, Portrait of Bettina, Oil on linen, 2014, 40 x 38 inches, courtesy of Gross McCleaf Gallery

JK:    It’s funny how the quiet moments can be the most powerful in a painting.

SN:    Well, yes, I agree, although, I wouldn’t call them quiet. Look at that Degas: that’s a study for a painting in the National Gallery called Madame Camus. Lots of young artists, and lots of really good professionals, would say, “Oh, Degas has done a really great job of off-center composing and it’s a really beautiful design.” I think it’s much more radical than that. I think Degas is in love with that abstract shape as an evocation of that wall, and it’s reciprocally related to her body as the shapes of the yin and yang symbol. I don’t think that’s just a big design decision: I think that’s…profound.

JK:    I’m also intrigued about your thoughts about light, which is really important in your paintings.

SN:    Absolutely.

JK:    Natural light.

SN:    Absolutely.

JK:    You’re taking this substance, light, that you can’t really grab hold of, and you’re using a material to actually make it real, in a way.

SN:    That’s the deal.

One of the civilian mistakes about light is to think in terms of a binary of light and shadow, as if they were opposed categories. Again, one of the things every painter eventually learns is that there’s no such thing as the absence of light. Every shadow has light in it. Basically, what you eventually have to formulate as an artist is a kind of theory of light. What is light as substance for you?

Most painters, especially since Vermeer and Velasquez, have been more and more inclined to see light in terms of what I would call color atmosphere. Because what we’re really after is the color of light, and light doesn’t really have a color until it passes through the prism of an atmosphere. You see how almost ludicrously attracted I am to low humidity blue skies, which – for me – they’re just the most beautiful thing in the world. I love winter for that.

One of the clichés of Impressionism is that if it’s sunny, shadows are blue or violet because, for some reason, it seems like – back with Canaletto and Velasquez – shadows were grays and then suddenly, with Impressionism, shadows become blue and violet. Well, what happened? An art historian will give you a big talk about color theory and stuff like that. Another art historian will talk about plein air painting (painting outside). What happened in that transit from a tonal interpretation of light and shadow to a more color-based one? One of the questions involved trying to figure out, what is the color of sunlight? It’s kind of obvious when you’re standing in full sun, the kind of strange heat that sunlight has, and the way it transforms different local colors, like a green and a red and a pink, into an overall golden light. Certainly, artists – at least as far back as Turner and Rembrandt – got that, so what was their interpretation of shadow in that light? Again, the Impressionists make the warm color of sunlight more explicit. You’d say, “All right, it’s only natural to make the color of shadow more explicit.” Most people tend to think of shadows as an absence of that sunlight. Every painter knows it is the absence of that sunlight, but what kind of light fills that absence? The sky.

When you cover up the sunlight, you realize that a shadowy passage on a sunny day is diffused with reflected light. In fact, it’s more beautiful, because it’s not as absolute. It’s just color ricocheting everywhere. My evolving feeling about color, with more and more appreciation of what I would call light fields or light worlds, are expressive of a reflective light source. The most obvious one is the way, on a sunny day, the blue of the sky is a second light. It’s a distinct light from the sun and, when the sun is excluded, it becomes a parallel.

The big laboratory for this is what I would call inside-outside painting. I started getting interested in painting figures silhouetted against bright light, because it was so powerful emotionally. There was something about it: it was almost cinematic in its evocative power, but you try painting a figure silhouetted against bright light, it’s a bitch because, really, what you see on a bright day is the figure almost looks like this black thing against the light. If you took a photograph of it, that’s what you’d see. If you try to photograph anybody against a light like that, to get any detail on the city-scape, you’d have to stop the exposure down so far that this would register black. To get any detail in the figure, that would blow out as a white, right?

Painters have been painting this convincingly for centuries, so what are they doing? They’re exchanging a literal value scale for a color scale. The best abstract version of this I can think of is Bonnard. Bonnard is this brilliant colorist that can get light so beautifully, but he never uses what I would call a literal value scale like Vermeer, or even Dickinson might use. When you actually go back and look at Velasquez or Rembrandt or Watteau, all the best painters, they knew it too. They just didn’t use the same color fields or the same color interpretation. It’s always color based, it’s always more radical than copying, and yet it’s profoundly tied to a sense of atmosphere that locates things in very specific depths of space. and very specific fields of light.

Whenever you think your work is about a motif, like a figure or a landscape or memory, eventually you get led to a very concrete visual question, which is, “What is your conception of the light?” My conception of light has really been increasingly filtered through a sort of love of color that is, for me, evocative. I’m absolutely convinced that I’m painting the color I see, and everybody who’s ever seen my paintings says, “Well, that’s your color.” That’s not always a friendly assessment. Some people just do not like the clichés of a given artist’s color. The joke I sometimes tell is my color…actually, as much as it’s driven by the experience of looking at nature, there’s a side of it: it’s almost like a strange Proustian memory of my mother’s interior decorating. Does that make sense?  If you had in your family somebody who had a real creative bent for decoration that you liked or responded to, sometimes their color gets in your bloodstream.

JK:    It’s ingrained.

SN:    Yeah. There were colors that got in my bloodstream when I was a little kid, blue-greens, certain pinks, certain golds. They’ve never left. Arshile Gorky, one of the subtitles for that great artist and mother picture is How My Mother’s Apron Unfolds Through My Life. Nothing is ever just simply an empirical iteration of the facts. It’s always the facts running through experience and meaning.

Still Life with Poppies, 2016, Oil on linen, 46 x 42 inches, courtesy of Gross McCleaf Gallery

JK:    This meaning, or a sense of narrative, is a strong component in much of your work. Whenever you have these ideas, how do you go about realizing them? What are your steps in building a painting?

SN:    In the early going I had such a reverence for artists like Degas and Reubens. I really wanted to paint complex narrative paintings, but way back then, I tried to do them and they would crash and burn very quickly. My visual imagination hadn’t been furnished with enough experience of how things look, or what’s important to you.

My process for probably the first twenty, twenty-five, years of my working life was almost relentlessly what you’re doing now: looking. I hated still-lifes when I was twenty-one. By the time I was twenty-seven, I realized this was the very best laboratory for understanding what I need to learn, so I became a pretty prolific still life painter. Still do it a lot. Lots of looking, at landscape, the figure, and still life, for years.

In my thirties and when I was forty I started to regain that courage to do narrative painting. I started heading in this direction around ’93 to ’95, when the pictures started getting bigger and more complex. I would start with places or spaces that I wanted to paint, and then those spaces would, little by little, begin to suggest mythic stories or narratives. As the spaces developed, it was very natural to just ask a model to pose here or there, then find them within the space in a way that always felt organically right. The minute a figure came into the mix, you’d almost exactly know where they should be, what they should be doing, how they should be made out of reflected light. When the figure came in, pretty quickly after that, there would usually be some sort of resonance with a story.

Persephone’s Departure, 2016, Oil on linen, 78 x 244 inches, courtesy of Gross McCleaf Gallery

(Pointing to Persephone’s Departure) This story is the myth of Persephone, where Persephone is about to take leave of her mother to go to the underworld for half the year with Hades. Hades has come up at the end of the summer to collect Persephone and take her to the underworld. No one knows this shit. In fact, I have people on YouTube who, in a very sweet way, mock the preposterousness of my stories, because no one would fucking know. The stories are important to me, because they put the specific character of a place or a figure into what I would call a little archetypal dialect.

That’s one of the things that poets do. I don’t think a poet really connects with a mythic story unless they somehow recognize that story’s vibration or resonance with lived experience. At least I don’t. You know, you can find lots of examples. An arch-realist like Eakins has got all kinds of pictures where he’s trying to tell stories, like these Arcadian landscapes and those swimming hole pictures. Even the scullers are a certain kind of hero that’s set loose in a recognizable setting, like the Schuylkill River, or something like that.

Degas was certainly like that. Love those early Degas mythic history paintings, like the Daughter of Jephthah, and the Young Spartans. Those are key works, because you can see, especially with the Young Spartans, those look like a bunch of Parisian gamines set loose on the fields of Arcadia or something. The tension between the mytho-poetic and the realist is actually what is so exciting. It’s not a parody, but it’s definitely got an element of wit and humor to it. That would be another part of – I wouldn’t call it my process- but my temperament.

The Convention Center from the 10th Floor, Oil on linen, 36 x 156 inches, courtesy of Gross McCleaf gallery

JK:    You have paintings comprised of several different canvas sizes, joined together to make one picture plane.  A perfect example is The Convention Center from the 10^th Floor.  How did this come about?

SN:    That’s a more recent development. It weirdly flows from the narrative thing. Probably about twenty years ago, I did start thinking that I loved large-scale decorative painting, but I’m really basically an easel painter. I’m somebody whose touch and temperament is tied more to the improvisation of a smaller surface. You know, if you’re doing big frescoes or giant altarpieces, you’ve got to plan those things out, because they just demand it, for all kinds of reasons.

My discovery was that I could combine the improvisation of easel painting with the grandeur of something a little bit more architectural and narrative by adding canvases. For years I did it to create a new, unified, single rectangle. About six or seven years ago, out of sheer accident, all the canvases that I had on hand were different shapes. I wanted to paint more than I had time to build the right size canvas, so I started putting them together thinking, how could I map the thing I want to paint against this composite surface? I realized that it actually worked well, because there’s a way in which, as you’re adding up the elements for the visual field, it’s almost like you zoom in or zoom out. Even the forms don’t all naturally align with a single scale rectangle. I started trying to use that as a way of deepening the experience.

I had this fantasy that sometimes these multi-canvas pictures will be broken up, panels will be lost, and I want each piece to have enough internal energy to be self-sufficient. Each moment, in a sense, has to be a germ of whatever the totality was.

The Furness Building Restoration, 2016, Oil on linen, 32 x 94 inches, courtesy of Gross McCleaf Gallery

JK:    As far as surface area on the canvas, how do you figure out what you’re going to work on for the day? Do you work in a small section?

SN:    Well, I’m trying to learn to work in bigger and bigger areas. The final iteration of this, to be convincing, had to be all in one day. That doesn’t mean it’s only one day of painting, it might have been one or two statements that had to be rephrased, but that’s one layer of paint in there. If I don’t do that, I don’t get the articulation of the tones fine enough so that your eye really flows. My ambition is, above all, a sense of almost seamless flow. It is a lot like fresco painting. Fresco painting is basically giant alla prima paintings, a big watercolor painted into wet plaster. I like that idea.

The logic of this ‘all at once’ painting is my universal solvent for all the weird stuff I’ll put in the picture, even flying figures and flying objects. I found I can do the strangest things, and people will hardly even notice, because the unity of the color and the surface is enough where they just say, “Oh yeah, of course.” By the way, I think that’s what Tiepolo and Caravaggio would do, too: making the impossible completely plausible.

Short session paintings executed by Scott Noel during Sunday painting sessions at PAFA.
Photo Credit: Josiah King

JK:    Do you have anything you want to share about where you’re moving forward?

SN:    I’ve never thought that way very much. I’m one of those painters that thinks mostly from painting to painting. I want more and more to keep synthesizing the elements of this imaginative world that my painting has become. For a very long time I thought of myself as a very straightforward observational painter. I still think that’s what I essentially am, but that doesn’t fully describe what I’m doing. The paintings are becoming more and more a kind of arena to put experiences together that illuminate each other and, in that sense, become an expression of something that I want to affirm. Maybe that has to do with just how durably beautiful the world is. The world is magically beautiful, especially as it crystallizes in the occasion of a painting. One of the things that paint does is bring us to our senses, in a way that almost nothing else can do.

Painting is a pretty unique thing. It’s endangered a little bit, because if you don’t have or cherish direct experiences of paintings, you can forget what they do. Your generation does so much painting by reproduction, by the internet and stuff. You can know a lot from that, but it’s also sort of numbing after a while.

I hope to keep renewing that thing that I love about painting. That way that painting creates a world. They’re the symbol of so many domains of experience and then makes them durable, because it’s always worth remembering… Paintings don’t move; they’re still, but if they’re any good at all, they don’t feel at all still. They get your imagination moving, they get your mind moving, they get your sensuality more articulate, because they make specific and concrete all these moments of consciousness. I hope I get to be in that conversation. I absolutely know that conversation is real and powerful when I get to see Piero and Chardin.  Those guys don’t seem passive to me. When I was young there was that sense of something being great, but old. They don’t seem old to me, anymore. It seems more radical and fresh than ever.

Scott Noel’s paintings can be viewed at grossmccleaf.com/artistpages/noel-t.html

Painting Perceptions greatly thanks Josiah King, for his generous, thought provoking contribution.

Josiah King is a painter working in Eastern North Carolina. His paintings focus on moments of beauty and interest in the everyday. For the past two years this focus has included the gridded, reflective surfaces of floors and walls. King is a graduate of the University of Mount Olive and Edinboro University of Pennsylvania (MFA Painting). He currently teaches art as an adjunct professor at the University of Mount Olive, Barton College, and Wilson Community College.

You can view his work at www.JosiahKing.com

(ed. note) An abbreviated version of this interview was originally printed in ShopTalk Volume 7: A Journal of Artist Interviews by MFA Candidates at Edinboro University, ed. Terry McKelvey, MFA.  (View: https://issuu.com/edinboro/docs/shoptalk_web)

More on Scott Noel:

The post A Durably Beautiful World: The Process and Vision of Scott Noel appeared first on Painting Perceptions.

I’m pleased to present this three-part interview with the distinguished painter Stuart Shils who recorded his thoughts about the twelve questions I sent to him. The audio recordings available here (in three-parts) in addition to the written and lightly edited transcription. In this first-part of the interview, Stuart Shils speaks at length about his new body of work and what moving beyond representation has meant for him. The second-part he talks about his teaching and the third-part examines a number of concerns he has for painting today.

Stuart Shils is a Philadelphia artist who studied painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. He is represented by steven harvey fine art projects ,New York, NY. Shils’ works on paper is represented by DAVIS & LANGDALE, New York, NY

Shils is the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

From the steven harvey fine art website: Stuart Shils uses a variety of media to explore an evolving fascination with the perceptual process. Known for many years as a painter of landscapes working from direct observation in Ireland, Italy, and Philadelphia, Shils now explores the intimacy of place within the world ‘out there’ by way of improvisational urban street photography, paper collage, painted photographs and monotype. While the urban photographs are direct examinations of the specific qualities of material presence and ‘place’, the monotypes, collages and photo collages are more evocations of memory and feeling.David Cohen says, “the palimpsest of screens and frames that characterize his photographic motifs are equivalents of a painting process that is somehow at once alla prima and layered, marked equally by impressionistic responses and minutely deliberative editing, a kind of temporal push-pull that exploits dichotomies of composure and snap.”

You can listen either streaming or downloaded to your computer from the links below.

Link to the page where you can download the podcast to your computer, https://archive.org/details/1234SShilsAudioF

The play control below is for the streaming version of the audio

Larry Groff:

I’d like to find out more about your recent compositions with layered papers, transparencies and LED light table, light through collaged paper & tape and your many photographs from your iPhone and small Leica. What lead you to make this new body of work?

Stuart Shils:

Where my recent work comes from is more complex than was immediately apparent to even me – remember that I was the there in the midst of it and not at all a rational outside observer with some distance, but just because I have my hands on the material doesn’t necessarily mean that I have a clear sense of what is going on or ultimately have that much control over destiny. So in relation to the idea of origins, here is a comparative pair of images: a painting from 1995 (shown in b&w) and then, a three dimensional object made in the studio last February 2016, to suggest that that the connection between the past and the present is not something planned or that could have been anticipated.

While recently putting slides together for a talk, I noticed that the abstract form or structure of this painting from the mid-90s (which was not at all on my mind because for me, being in the immediate moment annihilates clear memory of the past), was strikingly reminiscent of objects I was constructing now, and this juxtaposition reinforced the idea of how the passing of time sheds light on and illuminates the notion that seemingly disparate things may not be that different and that the past and the present are often closely connected. And, that regardless of what we want to happen, things connect in their own ways and at their own pace, moving slowly like very deep tides beneath the surface of the sea. So really, this new work you are asking about has a lineage in deeply rooted preoccupations and obsessions that go back to childhood.

As a kid I loved visiting building and demolition sites with my Dad in the city, and was always aware of urban form as a teenager while wandering around Center City Philadelphia, and then while in college I developed an even more sensuous passion in architecture school for a few years before dropping out.

If you read Louis Kahn (who was an early hero of mine) he talks about riding around Philadelphia as a child and the impact all those brick factories had on the development of his awareness of form. For me, perhaps THE SINGLE MOST important visual influence was taking the Chestnut Hill Local train into town as a child, repeatedly and for many years, thousands of times, back and forth in and out of the city.

During the 20 minute ride looking out the window as the train went through North Philadelphia, Wayne Junction and Germantown, my eyes and senses visually tasting and absorbing the impact of the abandoned factories and warehouses, those cathedrals of industry whose massive forms, even in states of decay or damage, gave me a rich feeling for tactile, architectural sensation and established in my feeling senses an awareness of scale.

I believe this was the fuel for everything I did as a painter in later years and now with collage and the camera. (And by scale I don’t mean anything to do with what size something actually is, but rather with how it feels formally as an abstract presence within a spatial context, how a unique intersection of parts or notes creates a unified presence in the moment as say in music with a chord. I like the chord analogy for how we taste a visual moment. When I first heard the ending chord in 1967 in A Day In the Life on Sgt Pepper’s, it made a lot of sense in relation to visual presence and how things hit us.

(note all images in this article display a larger view when clicked)

I was showing slides recently that included paintings of mine from the mid-90s, and someone asked me, where the magnetic pull comes from, where does the desire arise that pulled me in a certain direction with regard to my work.

My fast answer was, remembering an 8th grade after-school cotillion class when the boys were sitting on one side of the room and the girls on the other, and the chaperon/teacher said, “okay, kids, It’s time to go over to the other side of the room and choose someone to dance with.” How did we know who we were going to choose to dance, other than it’s based on something not related to words, but to a feeling and to certain qualities of impulse that are possibly not so easy to describe.

So perhaps it’s the same thing with how we find ourselves rooted in our work. Those landmark directions are related to things that precede words and that live beneath literary descriptive language, more related to sensory impulse. And it’s all a long story, like dropping a bucket down into a well and waiting a long time to hear it hit water.

So much of the recent work is not ‘painting’. But I’ve gotten to the point where I ask myself what is painting? And yes, it only exists, almost exclusively, in photo documentation–and I mean, the improvisational evolving window collages and light table drawings that are really ephemeral or transient presences, none of which are intended to exist in any ‘final’ form other than transitional stops along the way and certainly not, or at least not yet, in three dimensional world other than the photograph. They are made in communities of related graphic impulses and are changing by the hour as I move pieces of paper around, adding, taking away, trying things out.

It’s true that I use my iPhone and the iPad which has a fabulous camera and the screen is so large and fun to look through, really delightful for the senses. And I have two very small digital cameras, a pocket-sized Leica and a pocket-sized Sony. And that’s pretty much it.

There is something about this slightly lower-res quality of the iPhone that I really enjoy. I’m so tired of being surrounded by such high-def images, and the obsession we are living through with high tech everything is wearing on me. If you look at the photographs of Saul Leiter, I’m thinking of his work in color from NY in the 50’s, there is nothing HD about them.

Last year my life underwent a huge change and I moved into an apartment with windows in the kitchen, and in the somewhat separate eating area I set up a table that it turned out I never used for meals but instead, as a small domestic studio space facing a single vertical window. And over the course of many months, I began using the window as an easel.

Pushing the pause button for a moment to digress, around that time I acquired a collection of very old Japanese paper and was using it in my studio to make small architectures.

I really can’t take myself back to a precise beginning point, I mean, that I can’t clearly explain the exact origins of all this to myself. All I know is that three dimensional form gives me a lot to think about, and by think about I don’t mean ‘critical theory’ or philosophy or any kind of verbal intellectualization – which actually I don’t like to do at all.

I’ve always tried in my work and within my practice to be as non-intellectual as possible. For me, theory and critical theory just don’t work. But I enjoy reading about other artist’s ideas, and I might even occasionally have an idea myself, but I try not to, other than visual ones. I mean if I’m going out for drinks with a friend, we can talk about ideas, but when I’m engaged with my work, I want it to be almost sexual, erotic or sensory, you know, in terms of touching or digging into the materials that I’m using, and being hyper aware of presence and how materials are talking back to me or pushing against me, and really we are working together dialogically very rooted in sensation.

The narrative reference I always use about how I want to work is, that when I was a very young boy I would often stay at my Grandparent’s apartment in Philadelphia. And I loved my Grandparents, and in the morning my Grandmother used to slice oranges for my Grandfather to have with breakfast. And I would watch him eat oranges in cut slices. And he was a simple and unpretentious man who grew up in Russia and hadn’t had the easiest life, and yet was passionate about what he enjoyed, and would eat the oranges with great pleasure and sometimes the juice would run down his chin amidst all that delight. And for me that’s a kind of analogy for how I want to be feeling when I’m working, and when I’m digging into my work, and into connection with the visual world around me. I want my work to feel as I do.

Ok, so going back to the very old Japanese papers that I acquired, I began one mid afternoon – by my studio window when the light was coming directly in, making little architectures, small objects that sat on a piece of mat board platform held on my open palm. And I would hold the object in the direct western light. (Btw, I have never wanted a studio with the often coveted and much touted ‘northern’ light, to me that was always too cold, too ‘classical’, too predictable and too boring. I much prefer the fabulous opportunities offered by direct light coming from all directions and always from the side rather than the top.) And I began photographing these things using the panorama function of my iPhone… and I would turn the object a little bit as I was also moving the iPhone, and that would introduce an element of slight blur. Not an extended “bluuuuuuuuuuur”, but a subtle blur.

And some places were crisp and other places were a little bit blurred, and I became fascinated with and obsessed by the appearance of these things in photographic image, and also, with how it felt to be locked in the moments of presence with them.

And I just did it more and more. Day after day, week after week, month after month, I made these things first in white paper, then in using blue glassine and then using red glassine, and then a mixture of colored glassine papers and white and slightly off-white Japanese paper… and before I knew it, I had a huge photo archive of these images.

And early on in that time – and this is an important step for me – as I was making these, I began hanging pieces of paper on the window to filter the light and to vary the backgrounds, which, were always part of the set up. Because remember, I’m working close to the window to be close to the source of the light and I was aware as in ‘landscape” that nothing exists as an object alone but only in inter relationship to and with other things, so what would be behind or near the object was very also important.

And then one day I turned and actually looked at the window, and noticed the graphic footprints of the moves happening to and on the window as it became covered with and layered by a variety of papers. It was almost like making conceptual stage sets for a very abstract and minimal Zeffirelli opera. And one afternoon my friend, the artist SaraNoa Mark, came to my studio and took very conscious notice of what was hanging on the window: pieces of paper, bounty towels and some tape, and she took photographs of these things, and that attention just focused my eye a little bit more on the evolving reality of what was happening on the windows separate from the actual objects that I was making. And now looking back on those window hangings, it’s bizarre to me how they formed a prescient platform of desire and expectation that is very much alive here now.

And there’s another part of this story, running parallel, that informs how and where all this came from, and that involves how we carry that which we see in the world ‘out there”, back into the studio, and how it takes root almost unknowingly. And I’ll only mention this in passing and not go off on a tangent. Around this time I was spending many hours on my bike, exploring some streets and abandoned houses in North Philly, photographing and absorbing aspects of their architecture. And again recently, while going back through older photos I realized that one place in particular was influencing the design and structure of how I was thinking graphically with regard to the stage set like arrangement of papers in my studio window. And I came to realize that the place I was looking at in North Philadelphia, a window in a wall, was having a profound impact on the development of what I was doing to my windows as the backdrops to the built objects.

My point is that sources and influences are multi directional and often combine in the most unexpected ways that bring us to the moment that is almost formed by its own momentum.

Larry:
Your collages look like they were been great fun to make and it’s very exciting to witness this celebration of visual poetics. Do you ever want to recreate these compositions in some manner with paint or once you’ve made the collage or do you prefer to move on to the next event?

Stuart Shils:

So yes, I have a great time making these collages, actually, a glorious time that I wasn’t having more recently with painting. And there is NO interest AT ALL in doing them as paintings or even right now with painting for that matter. But actually if I’m going to be honest, the later is not totally true, and there are recent paintings, as you you can see in this image below.

But in an overall way, with regard to painting I simply got sick and tired of hearing other people’s thoughts about the kinds of paintings I was making vs the ones they thought I should be making, and so there need to be ways of circumventing all that inflammatory nonsense to preserve my sanity and most importantly, to sustain joy. I always tell students and young artist friends, to build a tough firewall in their heads to filter out other people’s thoughts. Those voices became for me a kind of poison and for now I’d rather glue polka dots to paper, which actually I do quite a bit. 

For much of the past year I was very engaged with the window collages by day and by night, as you suggest, going from one to another in a flow, although I haven’t made them now for a few months. I find that working in the same way for too long closes down my focus somehow and even when I was painting a lot with brushes and pigments I often found that moving between oil, acrylic, monotype, gouache and graphite, really kept things fresh, like having cross breezes in a room.

So I’m working on the light tables for now and windows, but bringing to it, a painter’s mind organizationally, with enthusiasms for paper, layering, and translucency. It’s all painting and I’m not interested in making separations between things. Every move made on a light table collage has everything to do with every thought about structure and color and mood that I had or have as a painter. And, with my moment to moment engagement with seeing things out on the street, because where do we think our studio thoughts come from if not emerging from the constant, day to day visual digestion of what it is that we encounter out and about in the world beyond the studio.

So I’m thinking that the recent collage works are paintings, just paintings by way of other means. And, a different kind of ‘landscape’. I lived as a painter in an engagement with ‘landscape’ as we see it with our eyes ‘out there’ for years, but don’t we need a break, if only to step outside of ourselves and remember what it is we are doing in the first place?

I mean, don’t we get bored out of our minds looking on the internet at so many ‘landscapes’, more dull and boring paintings of the Gowanus Canal, more lifeless paintings of Italy with no color and no electricity, more paintings of kitschy fields and woods and towns all over America–that seem to be about nothing really.

I don’t want to be offensive to people who may be working in earnest and I know saying something like this is risky, but come on, we are surrounded by perhaps more horrific paintings than ever before. Dick Blick stores all over America are raking it in because everyone can be an artist, this is what the Plein Air movement has given us.

But it has to be a ‘painting’ first before it is a landscape or whatever. It feels to me that we are in a deeply mannerist period in which almost everyone is looking at everyone else. It seems increasingly impossible to be alone because of the constant over the shoulder presence of the internet. There is an overabundance of images but we only know most of them in reproduction and that is a lie in its own way. The speed of the internet is frightening and the sheer volume of what it hurls at us cannot be constructive with regard to the cultivation of one’s private thoughts which need shade, isolation and and slow pace to gestate, not this constant bright lights on, absorbing so many influences and actually aware of what everyone is doing in Bushwick, and elsewhere, AS IF it really matters. What does knowing all about this have to do with the development of a voice or of one’s work?

Of course there are people making very gorgeous paintings from nature and who really comes to mind is my friend David Brewster and his more recent work which feels like it’s in an elegant maturity.

And with regard to the idea of what ‘landscape’ means beyond painting, another notable current exception might be the small color photographs of Israel Hershberg which, are each a kind of revelation, visually epiphanic in a way that offers a huge charge and inspiration. They are to me what looking and seeing is all about: joy and discovery. And of course they have everything to do with painting in the sense that they are the consciously shaped thought dreams of a painter, yet, their total casualness and unpretentious elegance is not achieved by way of paint.

People keep asking me, are you going to paint these images that I’m making and I want to say, these ARE paintings, just not with paint.

Larry:

The ephemeral nature of some of your material that seems to push aside the usual notions in making sellable products. Is that something you think about?

Stuart Shils:

Yes, the recent work I’m doing only exists (so far) by way of photo documentation, I’m really kind of crazy about the ephemeral nature of these materials: torn and cut paper of all sorts, tape and sometimes string.

Of course in making photographic prints I’m using very decent paper, but for the objects themselves, no. Archival, handmade, precious, imported, forget it, it feels like an irrelevant conversation and they are not necessarily intended to BE anything other than forays into a range of thoughts about visual presence and tactile materiality.

For many years when I was making paintings on gessoed paper, people used to say, ’paper’, for real”?, ‘is it archival and will it last?’ And I would say, ‘will we last?” or, have you ever looked at the work on paper (glued to board) from Corot’s first trip to Italy in 1826?, they are in perfect condition.

It’s all a gamble and in doing our work, the important thing is to keep in mind what Grace Slick told us in 1967 , ‘Remember what the Door Mouse Said: Feed Your Head’. What matters is not how it’s made, but rather, the cerebral and sensory impact of what the work is offering. What else is art for?

The world is going to hell around us, the ice cap is melting, animals are moving toward extinction, major American cities have highly compromised educational systems and urban poverty is pervasive, in Philly we have the worst heroin problem in the country, our government is in the hands of crooks, and I’m going to worry about my materials or saleable products? And I’m the first one to line up and declare how beautiful this life is, and to notice the important role that art plays as a balance to the madness. But I have little interest in consciously making anything that’s saleable per se

because I don’t even know what that means anymore. If someone wants to buy something, great. More than great. But, generally, what are sales?

And in the middle of the night alone with myself, given the context of our America and the pervasiveness of poverty, and what I see in Philadelphia where I ride around on my bike, despite the fact that restaurants are packed, it’s a minority who are enjoying privilege and I’m very conflicted about my role in it all and, I have huge issues related to the elitist aspects of art consumption. Not with the idea of art itself, I love art and I am really fond of my collectors, as we all are. I have and have had extraordinary relationships with serious and devoted people who collect and who surround themselves with objects that inspire their lives, not because the objects are expensive or culturally coveted, but because they want these things to fuel their imaginations and to give their days buoyancy.

So yes, in a sense I need to sell things because I have obligations to the world in terms of supporting my material existence, but I have no interest in making anything on speculation that is overtly sellable right now because that game of let’s see if the fish bite is one that wore me out and I can’t play it anymore.

Four or five years ago a successful businesswoman and collector said to me, ‘why can’t you make the paintings we all loved’. She was referring to my past work; to someone I used to be.

Well. If that’s what’s involved then I don’t even want to think about sellable products. I was passionate about that work then and, it was not at all made for the market with product speculation in mind, and I enjoy the gallery world in terms of going to see shows and I have a very dear and beloved friends who are dealers but I can’t go back to whom I was in the past because I’m not even sure who that was in the first place other than, the same person who is here now, but telling stories differently.

I remember as a teenager and young adult, going to concerts, to small folk venues with well known singer songwriters and I can recall the dissatisfaction often washing across the crowd when they would do ‘new’ material and not the stuff they were loved for by their audience. My father got cancer for the first time when he was 65 and I just turned 63 and have a strong Woody Allen streak in my mind, and a sense of mortality breathes down my neck with regard to my work and my time on this earth, so I’m letting the kite string out in my own terms and not looking back but am taking notice of who follows along.

Larry Groff:

Do you have plans for showing this work? What are some concerns you might have about showing the pieces that seem closer to installation, for instance would you recreate this in a gallery window or just show photographs in some manner?

Stuart Shils:

I would very much like to show this work in some way,

and so I’m engaging with questions about how to present it and what life it has or is to have beyond the screen of the phone, the iPad or the laptop. How these images can and will appear in the world is a huge unknown for me but of course I’ve began to print them to see what they are about as objects. I’m sitting here now in a room surrounded by many prints about 14 x 14 inches of different kinds of light table images, window collages.

I’m just not really sure yet what to do with these whether they need to be seen as printed photographs on Diebond, or presented on light tables hung on the wall, whether they need to be done as windows in public space, or whatever, I don’t yet know. This is a huge shift from how I thought for a very long time as a painter and so it’s requiring time to make steps into something new. Yes, I can imagine doing things on gallery windows, but I’m thinking more in terms of large light screens regardless of what some people have told me about that being cheesy. I think it’s really best not to listen too much to other people because it will often undermine one’s own thoughts.

sitting quietly waiting for woodpeckers

The post Stuart Shils, Part One – On Recent Work appeared first on Painting Perceptions.

Ying Li, Writing the City, 2016 oil on linen 72 x 48 in.

I’m honored and very pleased to have interviewed the distinguished painter Ying Li with an audio podcast that you can listen from the links below.

The above image links to download the audio podcast to your computer
The play control below is for the Streaming Version

The edited, written version below of our skype conversation was made just prior to the start of her solo exhibition at the Haverford College titled Geographies, which is up until October 7 when it moves to the Sordoni Art Gallery, Wilkes University, October 25–December 18. This exhibition includes more than 100 paintings and drawings that Ying Li has done over the past four years.

Geographies, Installation Shot

Ying Li was born in Beijing, China, and graduated from Anhui Teachers University in 1977 before immigrating to the United States in 1983. Her numerous one-person exhibitions include those at the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture, Lohin Geduld Gallery, Elizabeth Harris Gallery, The Painter Center and Bowery Gallery (all New York City), and in college and university galleries at Dartmouth, Swarthmore, Haverford, Bryn Mawr, the College of Staten Island and the Big Town Gallery, Vermont. Her work has also appeared in numerous group exhibitions, including those at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, The National Academy Museum, Tibor de Nagy Gallery, Lori Bookstein Fine Art, Kouros Gallery, and Hood Museum of Art.

She is the recipient of Henry Ward Ranger Fund Purchase Award, Edwin Palmer Memorial Prize for painting from the National Academy Museum, Donald Jay Gordon Visiting Artist and Lecturer, Swarthmore College, McMillian Stewart Visiting Critic, Maryland Institute College of Art and Artist-in-Residence, Dartmouth College. Her other Residential Fellowships include: Centro Incontri Umani Ascona, Switzerland; Valparaiso Foundation, Spain; Tilting Recreation and Cultural Society, Fogo Island, Newfoundland; and Chateau Rochefort-en-Terre, France. Li’s work has been reviewed in numerous publications including The New York Times, The New Yorker, Art Forum, Art in America, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The New York Sun, New York Press, Cover, Artcritical.com and Hyperallergic.com. Ying Li is Professor of Fine Arts and Department Chair, Haverford College, PA

“…In the last century, perception and abstract construction were so convincingly severed by modernism that a natural integration of the two now feels nearly beyond reach. Language and ideas have replaced seeing as the primary impetus for much of today’s abstract painting, while many of today’s figurative canvases too eagerly declare their abstract formal achievements.

Through her simultaneous sensitivity to material and motif, Li unites the tradition of perceptual painting with the language of Abstract Expressionism, perhaps better than any painter working today. Her paintings return a fullness to the art, reconnecting to a painterly lineage that includes Pissarro, de Staël, Soutine, Van Gogh, and Monticelli – a tradition of painters for whom physical and visual sensation are one and the same.” – Brett Baker,  Painter’s Table, May 2, 2014.

“My goal in painting is to capture nature, in both its toughness and vulnerability, and transmit all of its energy to the canvas. To this end I use intense colors, earthy textures and calligraphic lines, working in the zone where abstraction and representation shade into each other. My interests and training in Chinese painting and calligraphy lead me to a brushwork that is at once free and disciplined.

Color lies at the core of my painting process. I use it to convey mood and memory, and to express a particular sense of place and time. In my painting, color, line and plane interact, pushing each other until they reach a harmony, a unity. Like a jazz musician, I hear the lines of saxophone, bass and drums, each improvising in response to the others, swinging the piece forward. If and when these responses reach their climax, the painting is done.” Ying Li, 2015

LG: Thank you, for agreeing to do this interview, this will be a great opportunity for painters to find out more about you and your fabulous paintings. I’m a big admirer of your paintings and it has been exciting to me to get to spend so much time looking at your work while preparing for this interview.

Rosy Dawn
2010, oil/linen, 14×18″

Rhone River (Fog Lifting) 2015 oil on linen 16 x 16

YL: Thank you for the chance to talk. I’ve read many of the interviews on your site. You interviewed wonderful painters, and many of them I know, they are my friends. You often don’t get to read what painters think about painting, so this is great.

LG: I read that you had first started making pictures as a way to cope with life after you were, in China, forcibly removed from your junior high school to work on a work farm in a rural area during the Chinese culture revolution. This must have been an incredibly difficult time for you, and I was wondering if there’s anything you can tell us about your early experience as a painter and as a teacher in China, that helped shape you today, your work today. Was it reaction to that? Where are you coming from? Please tell us what you can about your past.

YL: Okay. I was born in Beijing, China, the capital of China, a huge city. I see myself as a city girl, maybe that’s part of the reason now I love New York so much. When I was in elementary school, I think I was in second grade, my father was sent to a college in Anhui Province, in the city of Hefei, which is the capital of the province. He was a scholar of Russian literature. When the relationship between China and Russia fell off, these experts were sent to different places in the country. That’s how we ended up in Anhui Province. Then, after that, the Cultural Revolution started and he was arrested one night. We were all sleeping and the people came in and took him away. From that moment on, for ten years, he was in a labor camp. I didn’t see him. He never talked about his experience in the camp, even after he came back home ten years later.

For me, of course it was a huge shock, literally, the next morning, people just stopped talking to you, even looking at you.

LG: Incredible! You’re mother was still there, or?

YL: My dad passed away, my mom is still in Hefei.

LG: I see, I meant were you living with your mother then?

YL: At that time, yeah, but soon after that, I was sent to countryside. This was my first year of junior high. Literally I didn’t have any high school education, because I got sent straight to the countryside to work with the peasants. I was not a rare case. There were so many people, especially in academia and any kind of educational institutions, had background not politically correct. Being sent to work on the farm so young, I lived with a group of students and I was the youngest, I was just lost. At the same time, you had to struggle to make a living, to grow your own food. Right away you had to earn all those credits so you could trade them with food. You really had to work hard.

For me, to be with other students, that was life saving. I always liked to draw, to doodle and paint when I was a kid. This was a huge advantage because at that time, they needed people to make propaganda paintings in the village, painting revolutionary slogans, or a simple portrait of peasants, workers, and soldiers, that kind of propaganda work. I got a chance to do those and that was a big break in a miserable life. You got your hands on very limited material you could play with, and then you got a day off from the farm to work on those, that was great when you had a chance like that.

LG: Did you make your own compositions with that or did you have to follow guidelines?

YL: No, they’re totally copied.

LG: Copying from other artworks?

YL: Oh yeah. Totally. There were very strict instructions, exactly what the image should look like. Pretty much, you just blow them up, put it on the wall of official building in the village walls. I worked in the countryside for five and a half years, in two places. I broke my leg at the first place, it was in the mountains where it was very hard to get around if you had physical problems. I couldn’t get any medical treatment, so my leg got worse. Finally, they sent me to another village in a flatter land, that was also closer to the city. However at the time, we couldn’t get anybody in the hospital to get treatment, because the hospitals had closed and the doctors were sent to countryside to get “reeducated” by working with the peasants, during the Barefoot Doctor campaign.

LG: I’ve read about that.

YL:  I then got sent back to the city because they just couldn’t take care of the situation with my leg. This was miserable, but at the same time, it was like magic, because in the city I was able to start to get serious about studying art. I found a very good painter, an official painter, who I studied with privately. Basically, I just drew. I drew anatomy; I drew every bone in the book. I drew all those all night long. Then, the schools started to reopen in ’74, I desperately wanted to go to college to study art. But then I found out I was not even qualified to apply because my father’s so called “anti-revolutionary crimes”, background. I was totally desperate and I found where they gave all the tests. I went there and I just drew.

The professor who was conducting the exam didn’t say anything. Later on, he fought for me, to get me into the college. That’s really the first big break I had in my whole life. I was in college. It was just heavenly. Even though our study in art was interrupted by spending so much time doing political stuff, like for a whole semester we went to the factory to work alongside the workers. Then, military training, learn how to shoot, learn how to march. But I just loved being in the college and painting. I couldn’t paint enough. I just wanted to paint.

Thanks to the communist system, if you got into college at that time, the school covered your food and it was free tuition. And, you got some art materials you could use. Thank God I did not paint thickly, like now, otherwise I would have only enough paint for one painting and that’s it! I just painted. I did get criticized for painting too much and for not showing enough responsibility being a politically correct citizen.

LG: Wow, how crazy!

YL: About three years passed, Mao died, and so the whole political situation changed. At that time, I graduated and another miracle happened, they kept me in the college and I started to teach right after I graduated. I was in an art community. At the time you couldn’t just say, “I want to go here, I want to go there.” The government stationed you in the place they wanted you to be. Right away I started teaching in the university, the same department, for 6 years before I came to United States. At that time we did a lot of commission work. The commission work is not like here, you get paid. You’re a government employee, all your work belonged to the party.

Also, at that time, all the artwork would be thoroughly examined by the party. If the work couldn’t pass political inspection, then it could not be accepted and shown.

LG: Did they just judge it by political content, or by aesthetic as well?

Ying Li, The Graduates, 1977 or 78, approx. 3×5 feet

YL: Both. Aesthetically it was in a Russian/French academy tradition. It’s very much representational in a totally non-representational way. You had to paint a perfect image if there is a politically correct character in the work. If it’s the enemy, they always looked grey and blue. You can’t make them with red cheeks. There was a code, how to paint certain things.

LG: Right.

YL: In that way, it’s actually very non-representational. We trained in college, in a very academic way, just drew big plaster casts , with hard pencils. At the time, I enjoyed doing that because I was really making things. Also, it’s a very clear and simple thing to do. Either you did it right, or you did it wrong, very clear. Of course, I was not satisfied. I love color, and I love emotional impact, but at that time, there’s no putting yourself there.

LG: Were you ever able to talk with other people in private about your dissatisfaction, or did you just keep your mouth shut?

YL: Basically, I was happy. The fact that I was painting made me very happy. Also, growing up in China you are used to being told what to do. So here, it’s very clear assignment, you do like this, you make it look like that. I was able to do all those and get a kind of satisfaction. Besides those works, in private, we did portraits of friends, and still life. Painted some flowers, landscape. It was a happy time, especially compared with what I went through in the countryside.

Ying Li, Jiuhua Mountain, 18 x 21” 1979

LG: Sure.

YL: Also, I was surrounded by people who had similar interests.

LG: You met your husband there, and then you eventually came to the United States, right?

YL: Yeah.

LG: Was it through him that you came to the United States? How did you get here?

YL: I met my future husband, Michael Gasster, who was a scholar of Modern Chinese History. He was not Chinese. He was a native New Yorker. Had a big nose. Very cool guy. We met on top of Yellow Mountain, where I was painting. It was like magic. At that time, foreigners were not allowed to be in that area. He spoke beautiful Chinese, and somehow, he got around. That’s how we met. We started to write, and then he came back. We couldn’t live together in China, so if we wanted to be together, I had to come to the States. We decided to get married and I started to apply. You have to apply to get married. You had to get permission from your department, from your university, from the Secretary of the party in your school, and from my parents. Can you imagine? I was in my late 20s. Then our case had to go through the foreign affairs office in Beijing, different levels of bureaucracy. We didn’t know if we could get permission, but we got it. That’s how I came to the States.

[See image gallery at paintingperceptions.com]

LG: You then moved to New York and attended Parson’s School of Design for your graduate studies, where you studied with Leland Bell.

YL: I’d like to mention my first impressions of New York City, which was the physical look of the city. I landed in Newark, and we drove towards to the city at sunset. It was like a miracle. I never saw that volume of electricity in my whole life. At that time in China, everything at that hour would just go dark, eight o’clock in the evening. I was like, wow! incredible.

LG: I can imagine.

The City, 2014-16 68 x 38

City, Night and Day, 2014-16 40 x 30

YL: Also, of course the skyline of the Manhattan. Then the second day, I went to MoMA. That was the first time I got to see Matisse, Picasso, Andre Derain, Giacometti. I didn’t know Giacometti or Derain. I heard the names, I saw reproduction of Picasso, because he was a communist for a short period. China considered him as a friend, so we could see some reproductions.

I saw Bonnard, that first trip, I remember seeing that Cézanne’s The Bather. The single figure, the boy on the beach. My tears just ran down. I read these names in a foreign magazine way back, but to see them for the first time, just wow! It was like a dream come true. That evening we went to the jazz club Sweet Basil, to see Abdullah Ibrahim, a South African jazz pianist.

LG: Previously known as Dollar Brand.

YL: Dollar Brand, you know him!

LG: He’s great, I’ve seen him too.

YL: I remember him playing a piece called African River. Wow. First time I heard that music live. Michael, gave me two tapes after we just met; One of Bill Evans, and the other was Nina Simone. That’s the first time I heard jazz. Then the second day after I arrived in New York, I heard Dollar Brand in person. I thought, “this is a good life.” It’s just amazing.

LG: I can picture your smile then.

YL: Yeah, it’s just incredible. I still remember those moments, so fresh; Maybe that’s why going to museums and seeing these paintings hanging on the wall–for me it’s such a special thing. I had that so late in my life. I didn’t have what is common here,to go to a museum as a student with your art teacher and class. I didn’t have any of that.

Also, another thing I wanted to say was, seeing the de Kooning Retrospective, in the fall of ‘83 at the Whitney. That was the first time I saw de Kooning, I didn’t know who he was. I remember his paintings of women in that show; they had a whole wall of these women. They just knocked me out. How could you paint a person, a woman like that? It was such a door opening. It was like giving you permission.

Also, when you look the painting surface, it was totally different from what I had seen or painted before. When I was in China, I was never satisfied by what I was painting. But I didn’t know what I really wanted to paint like. When I experienced those things, it’s just like, wow, flashing all the time. But very soon after all those excitements I was lost. I didn’t know what to do with my own work. I didn’t know how to paint. It felt like I just didn’t know how to paint anymore. Despite my studying for years and that I had taught for six years before I came here.

I thought I have to study more. We looked at a couple of schools. I liked Parsons right away purely because I could just ride a bike from where we live. We lived in Chelsea. I thought, that’s great–only five minutes to get there and just start painting. Turned out these three professors I studied with, Leland Bell, Paul Resika and John Heliker were so great. They were very different kind of painters with very different personalities. Their concerns in art also very different. I learned from them all.

I think Leland made most impact on me, because he introduced me so much. Friday’s were best, that was when he came in to show slides. It was still slides back then. He brought in the slide box and put in the tray and just projects one after another. From Etruscan sculptures, Fayum portraits, Titian, to Piet Mondrian, André Derain, Courbet and Jean Hélion. Leland was very big on French painting.

He was clear about what he wants, there’s no compromise for him, it’s good or not good. Some people criticize him for that. There is no in between. He really set the bar high. It’s not like you just do what you want. I don’t think he was much interested in seeing or talking about student works. He wanted talk about the great paintings. He was most energized when he was in a museum in front of a painting he loved. he gave you the whole world about the painting. I remember those moments so clearly, when Leland made some comments, it would just click, I knew I was on the right track.

Sunflowers, 40 x 30 inches, 1990

LG: Was it hard to let go of your previous way of doing things?

YL: Not really. I knew I didn’t like what I had been painted. When I came here, I brought very few things with me from the past. I soon started to paint very physically. I painted standing, moving back and forth, a very physical process for me. That’s very different from how it had been in China. I felt liberated Also, I got good response about my work from my professors and classmates. My painting changed naturally and I wanted to keep going. That’s Parson’s.

Fogo Harbor, Towards Our Lady of the Snows Church, 2008, oil/canvas, 30×30″

Cranberry Island, Red Rock Point #3, 2014, oil/canvas, 22×28”

Alaska (Valley) 2011, oil/canvas, 16×20″

LG: You primarily paint now from observation outdoors.

YL: Yes.

LG: What keeps you tied to observation? Why not just paint in the studio where there are fewer distractions? Can you explain how your work might change if you didn’t paint something you were looking at?

YL: Your relationship with the motif is very different in outdoor painting. When you’re out there and inside of it, you are only a tiny part of your surroundings, that kind of perspective and scale is so different. It’s not like something right in front of you, as in a still life. I like being part of the scene, being there. I love that sensation when I’m out there.

I think my Chinese background kicks in somewhere here. In Chinese philosophy people and nature are one. When you see those classical Chinese landscape paintings there are often a little person somewhere in there, but they are so tiny compared with the huge mountains. A little scholar on a donkey crossing a little bridge with huge chunks of mountains right behind him, things like that.

Also there’s no previously set focus, that is the another important thing.  For example if a model posing, he or she usually is your focus. You deal with the relationships of all the other elements with this person. When you’re outside painting it’s like wow! What am I going to do? Where to start? What to choose? Right away you’re just thrown into this chaos and light changes so quickly, you have to make your decision constantly and quick. I love that kind of challenge. I react better and it keeps me on my toes.

I never felt I didn’t know what to do when I’m out there because right away I jump into the painting. In the studio sometimes took me forever to get started. I could just sit there, stuff myself with snacks, listen to music and flip through some art books, but when I’m outside, it’s boom! Right into the game.

Ascona, What the Buddha Sees (Light) 2015, oil/linen, 24×18″

Ascona, What the Buddha Sees (Valley) 2015, oil/linen, 24×18″

Ascona, What the Buddha Sees #3 (Garden), 2015, oil/linen, 24×18″

YL: I love that feeling. I like the changes and the unexpected distractions, because they keep me alert and sharp. I think of painting landscape similar as the jazz musicians playing together. They make decisions in a split second and improvise instinctively to what the other guys are playing. they listen and react to each other and get things going.

To me, painting landscape outside is a lot like that; it opens doors. I love the change and instability, they help me to make decisions about what’s next. I once painted with Lois Dodd in Vermont. She pulled out this little palette, squeezed little tiny dabs of paint on the palette and then pulled out this little stool and in a few second she started to paint. The sky started to get dark, There was a storm coming. I started to hurry and packing things up…she just sat there and kept painting and then she said to me don’t worry it will pass. It passed. Things like that happen all the time when you’re out there.

These things keep me surprised and make the work more personal and fresh, and not systematized.

LG: That’s a good point. When you’re painting outside is there a balance between what you’re looking at out in nature and then in your painting? Is there a point when you say okay I’ve gotten enough from looking now I need to focus more on the painting? How does that work for you?

YL: I think these two are really one thing; they’re so tied together, looking out and then looking in on the canvas. I try to make that switch as short as possible so I can put down my reaction at that second because that moment quickly goes away and change into my old habits or something else.

Every painting comes out differently. Sometimes I stay in more representational manner because I feel I really got the character or something right there. Or the painting just works. However most times I don’t trust that feeling, I try to get past that point and dig harder into the painting, to find what it is really about.  At a certain point the painting gets muddy and flat and I hit a wall. It bounces back instead of going deeper. Sometimes I find I am just repeating my own paintings. I have to paint through those moments, and look harder, I find the solution is always out there, the looking part leads to the clue.

Telluride #10, 2015, oil/linen, 20×20”

Telluride #1, 2015, oil/linen, 16×12”

LG: Would you say the looking helps you to get out of yourself more and you become like you said part of nature almost? You know that you’re not so self absorbed and less likely to repeat yourself or use cliché.

YL: Right, and also I find when I work longer in the piece I get less self conscious. So then things start to happen or things become unfamiliar, the painting looks odd and out of control, but that’s kind of a good sign. That means I’m somewhere different.

Philip Guston once said:

“When you’re in the studio painting, there are a lot of people in there with you – your teachers, friends, painters from history, critics… and one by one if you’re really painting, they walk out. And if you’re really painting YOU walk out.”

LG: Frank Auerbach said something similar when he said in an interview “The whole business of painting is very much to do with forgetting oneself and being able to act instinctively.”

YL: Right! Also forgetting what you think nature should look like.

The Last Tree, 2015, oil/canvas, 20×16”

The Old Pine Tree Struck by Lightning, 2015 oil on linen 30 x 24 in.

LG: Are you more interested in painting the experience of being in nature over painting a description of what you see? Or is it both? Can you say something more about what that means for you?

YL: I think it’s totally both. The description part of each place totally affects how I see. That’s why my travel to different places is so important for me, when I am in a new environment my perception is sharpened.

The mountains in Switzerland and Telluride are so different. I think my paintings show those differences. That’s part of being in nature, being in different places. Of course they are two different things. Being in nature, that’s a much bigger framework than just being in the place. Being in nature is like you’re out there. I was talking before about the experience of painting outside and being just a little part of the immensity of nature. Of course being in a different place, your senses react differently.

The description, I don’t quite understand the word description. Okay let’s say we paint what we see. That seeing part is so much to do with one’s mind-state. For example I was in Switzerland two times and in Cranberry Island a few times and the paintings came out totally different each time from the previous times. It’s not like I wanted to do that, they just react so totally different. I saw different things looking at the same piece of water. These two things are so together.

The sensation of being in nature and in that particular environment and time I am painting definitely influence how I see and how I approach to that painting. For example, there is a painting titled “Ascona Valley” in my current show at Haverford College, made in the summer of 2015 under an exceptionally scorching July sun in Ascona. I was painting at the top of the hill and felt the whole valley, including myself, was melting under that heat I was experiencing. That painting is definitely more about the feeling of melting than describing the houses and roads in the valley.

Ascona Valley, 30 x 24 inches, 2015

LG: Personality and mood certainly makes for a big difference. You get five painters in front of a scene, even the same five painters two weeks later; they’re all going to be very different paintings. Sometimes painters paint more about what they want the scene to look like than what they see, but everyone’s personality leads them to focus on different aspects of the scene. Painters find what is essential to the scene for them. Clearly your painting of a place will be completely different than Richard Estes, Rackstraw Downes, or Lois Dodd. When you talk about you’re painting your experience of being in nature I just find that so intriguing because so few people say that. They usually talk about responding to what they’re seeing. It’s really more in a way about the experience, your personal experience being there. No one really cares about all the leaves in the try they want to see what is your vision, your feelings, and your summation of the tree as a picture.

YL: Yeah, also I think the description comes in like, let’s say each time you painted the same thing and your focus and thinking are different so what you’re painting there, it’s very different. There’s not just one kind of description, even for the same person. It could be the same day. There’s so much to do with your experience as a person at that time to the place and to what you see.

LG: I recently came across this quote from Jean Hélion that I thought might interest you.

“…a picture can function, can live in itself wherever it has been inspired, whatever may be laterally or accidentally evoked or reminded by it. Painting is a summing-up, has always been a summing-up, of a spirit-activity through sight. Sight taken as a material, as a fact, consistent. Subjects have been borrowed, or followed, or invented, to nourish sight, to develop it, to build it.”
…“Painting makes nature more visible than photography; if representation has been abandoned it is because the proper reality of the picture can develop much further when discharged of the need to represent, because optical reality is an endless field, as endless as nature itself, but directly permeable for intelligence.” Jean Hélion Seurat as a Predecessor in his Double Rhythm, Writings about Painting

LG: Would you be able to say something about how Hélion says painting is a summing up, and it has always been a summing up of a spirit activity through sight. Also that painting makes nature more visible in a way than photography. I’m curious if you had anything to say about that?

YL: The first one the summing up, that is so true. It is accumulation of so many different things, layers of different paintings built up into one painting. I think time and process are everything in painting. They make the summing up possible. The process can be hours, days, months or years, spending on this one piece. That kind of experience is so different from seeing something and then click. That’s a totally different experience. Painting is also a summing up of your history, your understanding about everything, your personality, your handwriting, your touch, and something you saw. A painting you just saw in a museum, might suddenly appears right here in front of you when you are working on your own painting. Or something you didn’t like in your previous paintings, you decide not to go there. All these kind of experience and decision-makings occur during the process, it’s complicated. That’s why talking about paintings is so hard. How this happens is complicated and mysterious. Why not like this instead of that?

Painting makes nature more visible. There are two parts. First of all, physically, painting is related to the physical look of nature. Even the materials we use come straight from earth. That kind of direct connection. Also the surface of painting, it doesn’t matter what kind of surface; there is surface. Take a white painting with no image in it, just white paint, here is a surface painted by a human hand. The painting, in a way, becomes a piece of nature.

Montecastello Sky #1, 2005, oil/linen, 14×18″

LG: That’s why it’s so important for people to go to museums and galleries to see the work for real and not just on their computers.

YL: I know I was just talking to my students about the difference. I had them sign up to do copies and variations of master paintings. One student chose El Greco, first they needed to paint a copy as close to the original as possible It come out didn’t look anything like El Greco. I said to go to PMA, take a look what it looks like, how he painted that, imagine what kind of brush he used, What is the palette? So the student came back and said oh it looked totally different. Of course it looks totally different. The surface. Because painting really becomes an object, It has a life, a life given through the hand of the artist. It is not a 2D flat surface any more.

LG:    I’m curious if your approach to painting might have some relation to Taoism, especially with regard to its appreciation of nature and abstract forms of beauty.

YL:    I don’t want to just repeat clichés and such about Taoism, but I will say when I think about Taoism I think about jazz. I think about how looking for harmony along with how you try to lose yourself. Sometimes jazz musicians who’ve never played together, perhaps after a band member gets sick and they call in someone new, with no sheet music and maybe even a piece the new musician never played.

You just jump into it to see what will happen, and then you start to make some sense of it, to find harmony with this thing. To me this improvisational flow is like what I’m doing with my painting and I can relate it to the best parts of Taoism. To “go along”, to “just be.” To get loosened up, not be judgmental and enjoy being part of nature.

LG:    Does traditional Chinese calligraphy influence your painting?

YL:    Totally. That’s a major thing I’m looking and thinking about now. I started studying Chinese calligraphy in the first grade, I think it was even before the first grade because in China at that time, your calligraphy shows if a child is educated or not. It’s part of who you are. My parents were very encouraging with calligraphy and the arts. I remember our apartment back then there wasn’t a particular space I could do that so in the summertime they set up a little table and chair along with the paper and ink and I would sit under a tree and just practice calligraphy. I loved it. Later I studied Chinese calligraphy and painting in college where it was part of the requirements along with Western painting.

At that time in college I was bored because the calligraphy teacher, who was in his seventies at the time, with yellow fingers and teeth from smoking his whole life, he also smelled really bad. He would ask us to do the same stroke, over and over, for the entire class, the same stroke, nothing else. The whole semester with just making different strokes and dots. I tried to escape this class as much as I could. I thought, “This is so boring, it’s like painting with soy sauce.” At that time I wanted to express myself more with color.

But now, thinking back, it was very important to me, for how I paint these days. In Chinese painting, every line you put down, how you start and end a line; it has its own eternity. It is complete. It’s not just busily filling the canvas, brushing on the paint. Each stroke emphasizes meaning, poetry and expression.

Rose Petal from Alhambra, 2009, oil/canvas, 12×12″

I also studied with an old Chinese calligraphy master after I came to the United States. People would bring him old paintings and calligraphy for him to evaluate, to see if the work was a fake or not. He was a real authority on that. He would sit there and say “Ah, open!” The Chinese paintings, either hanging or hand scroll, would only begin to be unrolled, when he would say “Stop, it’s real.”

The person would ask “What are you talking about? You haven’t seen the thing.”

He said, “I don’t need to see the whole thing, I’ve seen the hands.” Just like that. He was right. It’s amazing, how much the lines tell you about the hand, the touch. There’s so much in those lines. So to me, more and more I think about that. When I paint, it’s not just from the wrists and fingers, it’s your entire body. Sometimes when I can feel a painting isn’t going right, it’s like my whole body feels awkward.

Calligraphy is so important. And I probably wouldn’t say this ten years ago, because I was too shy to say that. I was told not to think about the brushwork or the surface when I was painting. Instead I should concentrate on the forms, on the color relationship, the formal concerns. Get the structure right. But now I also think about how the paint is put down.

LG:    With your setup, do you work with the canvas vertically or do you have it lying flat? I ask because I am imagining calligraphy as being done with the paper or the support lying flat.

YL:    Sometimes I do just put it on the ground, and start to do things and put it back and take it down. I do a lot of these and switch around. I work with it on an easel, a Stanrite tripod easel. I never use French easel because they’re so clumsy and heavy, I’m always having trouble with those legs. I accidentally kick it and something collapses. Also you can’t easily carry big tubes of paint with those. I love how the tripod easels are so sturdy. But it’s very hard to find this model of the Stanrite easel now. I also have a backpack to carry my big tubes of paint and supplies.

LG:    That makes a lot of sense. Please tell us about how you go about starting a painting?

YL:    I don’t start a painting using any particular system; they all start differently. Usually something hits me, like how the light or something gives me an idea for the structure or the motif. I might find one thing in front of me that I’ll respond to, put something down to just get started. I paint directly on the canvas, I don’t make sketches or draw beforehand at all. I do try to be very faithful to what I’m looking at right at the beginning; but the number one concern is the structure. Try to get the structure for the painting to feel right.

The initial idea always changes. Once the paint gets on the canvas I am also responding to the paint as well as what I am painting. I use different kind of brushes, or whatever I can grab. This also can totally change the feeling of the structure. After getting into the painting I start to see different things and problems. The painting feeds you with all these problems, so you have to quickly make decisions, just a few minutes can take you somewhere else. I make a lot changes during the process, keep things open.

LG:    When you start painting do you use a very thin, wash or do you just go right in with a loaded brush, use lots of paint? Or is each painting different?

Ying Li’s palette

Close up of Ying Li’s palette

YL:    With paint, I try to keep my materials as simple as possible. I use a classical medium. Paint thinner, stand oil and linseed oil. Actually I use very little medium now. I try to keep the material simple because I paint so thickly. I don’t want to have any complications. Straight paint is the best solution.

LG:    What kind of paint do you use?

YL:    I use whatever on sale.

LG:    Painting thickly like you do would certainly make the expense an important concern.

YL:    Whenever I sell a painting the first thing I buy is a bunch of paint. I use paints like Utrecht, Gamblin, also Lukas. I like them for certain purpose. Lukas is thinner and more fluid, which helps when I sometimes draw with squeezing the tube of paint right on the canvas. I use Winsor & Newton. I always buy the big sized tubes. I used to use Williamsburg when Carl Plansky was still around, he would give me a big discount but you can’t get it now. No more.

LG:    Williamsburg’s pretty expensive for the large tubes.

YL:    I know! And their small tubes are like one squeeze and that’s it! Once a while I indulge myself with the Old Holland. But I’m often reluctant to use such expensive paints. More often than not they just stay there in my bag and I go straight back to my Utrecht.

LG:    I can relate. I once heard someone say, that with students it’s very important to use as good and expensive paint as you can afford to buy. But when you’re a master, you use the cheapest paint you can get because you know what to do with it; you know enough about its properties to be able to use it effectively. Handle its weaknesses and strengths, like with tinting strength. A master knows how to make good color regardless.

YL:    You know Lennart Anderson used Utrecht. I saw him painting at Montecastello, in his bags all these Utrecht tubes. I said “Leonard, you use Utrecht?” “Why not,” he said, “it’s good paint.”

LG:    I think Stuart Shils also uses whatever finds that’s affordable and decent. Of course many abstract expressionists like de Kooning used house paint.

YL:    I also try all different brands. I’m so not-fussy about paint.

LG:    Your paintings, they’re usually done alla prima? All in one session or do you work over multiple sessions?

YL:    I work both ways. Some finished in one session and for some I’ll go back to the same spot, paint over multiple sessions and also I keep working on them in my studio. Sometime I’ll change it into a totally different thing if it just didn’t work out. But painting from looking always plays a huge part.

LG:    How important is privacy for you, when you’re painting outdoors? Are you able to ignore onlookers, so they don’t influence your work? I know for me, if I’m out painting and someone is watching me, it often messes with my head and I don’t as free to paint or experiment out of the fear of being judged or something. Do you ever feel like that? Especially when painting with a more abstract orientation.

YL:    Not really. I can shut people off when I am painting. A few days ago we had  open session at the school and I drew with students, for three hours I didn’t say a thing. At the end, a student said “Are you OK? Are you OK?” I replied “When I’m working, I like to be left alone.” It’s not therapy.

When I’m out there, I don’t mind onlookers. The privacy really is not issue for me. I guess because I grew up in a place where there’s no privacy, not even at work. I can ignore whatever. When people try to make conversation I just said “I’m working.” Or I just don’t respond. And they look at me and say “What a crazy person.”

LG:    That’s a good defense. You’ve talked a lot about jazz. Do you listen to music when you’re painting? Or would that interfere with the musicality of your own painting?

YL:    Yeah. Music is a tricky thing. I listen to music in my studio before I start, sort of a transition, put me in the right place mentally. Separate from whatever before. Music’s so seductive. I find that if I paint while listening to music the painting can start to look better than what it actually is. Sometimes I turn on music, perhaps a Beethoven string quartet and emotionally you’re so involved, the painting seems amazing. But then the next day, I’ll look the painting and wonder what was I thinking, it’s so flat! Music is a tricky thing. All kinds of sentimental ideas kick in, and you start to see things that aren’t there. Also, when I’m outside I never listen to music because I love hearing the sounds around me, they are a part of the whole experience; an important part of what that painting is about.

LG:    That’s a great way of thinking about it.

LG: There is a US premiere of the composer Curtis Cacioppo new piano sonata, which is inspired by your artwork, to be performed September 21. There’s also a video made by John Thornton, which is made along with your artwork. I was hoping you could tell us a little more about this.

YL: Curt Cacioppo is a composer and music professor at Haverford College, he teaches composition and piano. He himself is a fabulous pianist, and his music is very much grounded in the classical Western music, but at the same time, all different kinds of things going on there, very contemporary, but at the same time, you feel the foundation there. Sort of like, the kind of a painting I like, you know?

I always love his music, and he likes my work very much. then we did collaborative work. I did a bunch of CD covers for him. He composed this piece titled Synaesthesis literally looking at a video of my paintings he called the interior of my paintings. The images in the video are close-ups of the surface of my paintings, they look like valleys and little caves make of paint.

LG: Interesting.

YL: Yeah, just sort of like you’re travel in it. Also, this piece, this video shows some our collaboration. I was painting, and he was playing the music, and I was drawing him. One drawing will be in this show. It’s a sketch of him playing piano. I thought it was pretty good. Looked just like him.

LG: Have you been back to China since you moved here? Have you ever gone there to paint?

YL: Yeah. Not that regular. My mother’s still there, and of course I love to see her, to see my friends, but I rather go to Europe to paint. I somehow, I just cannot paint in China. I guess there’s too much baggage on my shoulders.

LG: Is there many people doing landscape painting there now? Like contemporary outdoor painting?

YL: I don’t really follow it. I mean, I feel like I’m so removed from it. I do see landscape paintings. Also, the Chinese painters, their landscape paintings, it’s very different from what the classical Chinese paintings are, but at the same time, the elements is still there, the brushwork and the control. The control is such a big part in Chinese painting and calligraphy, but at the same time, how to free yourself from that. I’ve always been interested in that kind of process and evolution. Being very controlled in a limited, narrow window and then how you can come out of that. Quite amazing.

LG: Did you see the Frank Auerbach show? In London?

YL: Yes, I did! For a period, when I was at Parsons, his paintings were very inspiring. I was obsessed with his work and Giacometti, however now, his work feels more remote to me.

I haven’t look at his work for quite a long time, but I did see this show. To me, he is a great painter, his devotion, his obsession, and his single-mindedness. There are many paintings in this show are very powerful. However I’m not as crazy about his landscapes. I think these portraits, those heads, they’re incredibly powerful. They’re transformative. there’s so much about what being a human is about.

Those early work, I thought they are just great. They’re very powerful. They’re so packed with emotion, physicality and the struggle.

Leon Kossoff is another one. In a way, I feel Leon Kossoff’s work is even more personal. I feel like he’s more connected with his motif.

LG: I would think Stanley Lewis would be somebody who you might feel connected to.

YL: Oh yes! We are great friends. I have so much respect to his work and to him, as a painter and a person. He is a great person to be around. We taught at Chautauqua Institute at the same time and I saw the way he worked. I thought, I paint pretty hard, I work hard, but when you see him, it’s, oh, I’m immature.

LG: Oh no. Why, what does he do that’s so different?

YL:  It’s not so much that it’s different. It’s more about his intensity and focus. Every morning, he gets up at 5:00. Then he just stuffs some cereal in his mouth then just disappeared right down to the basement, where his studio was. Then he started to work, He sits in a little shed he built himself. Actually, he offered to teach me how to build the shed so I can carry around wherever I go to paint. Then he’d just sit there, on a stool with his canvas right there, and his little tiny brushes, he just goes on painting for hours, hours, and hours. Then, in the evening, I think he was just so exhausted that he fell asleep on the rocking chair, like at 7:30 or 8:00.

LG: Amazing.

YL: The next day he gets up at the same time and does the same thing, next day, same thing. Seeing that dedication and intensity is so inspiring.

LG: Well, your work is very inspiring to me to look at, and hearing you talk as well. Congratulations on your show…and thank you again for doing this interview, and it was a real pleasure and honor to have the chance to talk with you.

YL: Thank you.

YL: I’m going back to Telluride, Colorado this, actually, in couple of weeks. I will be teaching a workshop, and I love that place. It’s just great for painting, and I love people there. Last fall I was there, I had a great time. Some of the paintings I did there are in this show at Haverford. I teach a workshop and also paint. Also, I would love to go back to Rome. My dream, the current dream will be stay in Rome for at least a month, just paint on the street, you know? See what happen.

LG: Maybe you’ll paint in the forum there. Would that interest you? In the ruins?

YL: I can paint anything. I had this moment yesterday where I walked out of my office and there was a bunch of cars next to the most boring looking building in the whole world, then there were these giant old trees back there. Somehow, just for a moment, I started to see a painting. I thought, “Oh. I could just paint it right here,” you know? It really doesn’t matter.

LG:  Do you live in New York, or in Pennsylvania?

YL: I’m in my office at Haverford College in Pennsylvania. When I’m not teaching here, I go back to Manhatten. Also I’ve been working on these cityscapes from Michael’s window.

Image from the Blurb Book – Ying Li: From Michael’s Window

click link to view or purchase the blurb book – Ying Li: From Michael’s Window by Ying Li

LG: It was a very impressive display to see all of that. That must have been a very important piece for you to work through all of this after your husband’s passing.

YL: It’s just so awful. Painting in his study really helped me to get going, keep going.. I have so many paintings I want to do from that window.

Image links to download the audio podcast to your computer

Streaming version

The post Interview with Ying Li appeared first on Painting Perceptions.