I am very pleased that the renowned painter Robert Birmelin was able to join me for a telephone interview recently and thank him greatly for his time and involvement in sharing his history, process and thoughts on painting.

Robert Birmelin has long been painting highly personal, realist cityscapes, which he continues to explore through complex representational devices. Independent of photography, Birmelin constructs his detailed urban scenarios mentally. Placing himself in the role of pedestrian observer, he frames a street scene as a momentary perception: looking over people’s shoulders, for example, glimpsing events through their hair, or, in dramatic works from the ’80s, watching from between gargantuan fingers, through which we see streams of jostling figures. In the ’90s, he turned to psychologically dynamic interiors, introducing Magritte-like tropes–upside-down passages or interpolations in scale.” – From P. C. Smith’s review, “Robert Birmelin at Luise Ross” Art In America, February 2007

Robert Birmelin has works in collections in leading museums such as The Metropolitan Museum, New York, NY; The Museum of the City of New York; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Nagoaka, Japan; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; The Library of Congress; the Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of American Arts; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; the San Francisco Museum of Art; and National Academy of Design.

He is the recipient of many prestigious grants and awards including a Fulbright grant in 1960 followed by a Prix de Rome at the The American Academy in Rome in 1961. He has received Childe Hassam Fund Purchase Awards, American Institute of Arts and Letters in 1971,1976 and 1980; the Carnegie Prize for Painting, National Academy of Design in 1987; Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts, Rhode Island College in 1996, and the Altman Prize for Landscape Painting, National Academy of Design in 1999. He has had numerous solo shows at major galleries such as the Luise Ross Gallery, New York, NY, Peter Findlay Gallery, New York, NY, The Columbus Museum, Columbus, GA, Hackett-Freedman Gallery, San Francisco, Claude Bernard Gallery, New York, NY, Alpha Gallery, Boston, MA and showed his works during the 1960’s in the Stable Gallery, New York, NY.

Birmelin attended the Cooper Union and Skowhegan art schools and received B.F.A. and M.F.A. degrees from Yale University. A 1960 Fulbright grant followed by a Prix de Rome in 1961 enabled him to study for a year at the Slade School in London and to spend three years at the American Academy in Rome.

A realist with a fascination for existentialist literature, Birmelin is perhaps best known today for his panic-tinged New York crowd scenes. He draws his imagery from the disparate environments of New York City, where he teaches, and his summer home on Deer Isle, Maine. Birmelin controls visual experience through viewpoint: the panoramic sweep of his light-suffused landscapes provides the serenity of distance, while in the crowd scenes he crops images and truncates people at picture edges to create an immediacy that perfectly coincides with the compelling urgency of his subjects.

Virginia M. Mecklenburg Modern American Realism: The Sara Roby Foundation Collection (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press for the National Museum of American Art, 1987)”

It is not unusual to find that a relative or friend’s memory of a past event clashes with one’s own. Indeed, how often do two witnesses to the same crime contradict one another as to what really occurred? As an artist, I found myself seeking a visual structure that would be an active metaphor for such a state of mind – a structure continuous and spatially rich that initially seems to offer an uncomplicated, expected orientation and then self subverts, challenging the observer to recognize the claims of another equally visually insistent counter-reading. Our minds are restless, making choices, fluctuating between possibilities as we strive to interpret, to judge between contending truths. These paintings live in mid-thought, in the space of that uncertainty – an all too familiar space in a world of bewildering choice.” – Robert Birmelin talking about his work at the 2012 Winter Contemporary Show at Old Print Gallery

Larry Groff:     What were your early years like, and how did you decide to become a painter?

Robert Birmelin:      Like many kids, I always liked to draw and by good fortune, I had a very cultured and helpful high school teacher. Coming from a working class family in northern New Jersey, I wasn’t that clear about going to college. She told me about Cooper Union, I applied, was accepted and that made all the difference in the trajectory of my life. I attended 1951 to ’54.

A Subway Experience, 1966, Acrylic on canvas, 2 panels 79 1/4 x 137 x 17 1/2 inches

LG:      Their tuition was free back then, right?

RB:      Yes, it was free. They again have a plan for free tuition in ten years. They’re going to work toward it. I think that’s good. It’s a wonderful institution, and its founder and his idea about free education for working class New Yorkers was a noble one. When I was at Cooper, the Whitney Museum was on west 8th Street, near Cooper Union, and I became well acquainted with the art happening at the time such as de Kooning, Kline and the rest of the avant garde as well as Hopper and the Social realists. Also, our teachers at Cooper were oriented toward the Abstract Expressionist milieu.

I went to a meeting in the last year I was at Cooper and listened to a recruiting talk by Bernard Chaet, a faculty member at the Yale University Art School. Josef Albers had recently become head of the school and was in the process of changing its nature completly. I went to New Haven with seven other Cooper Union students to show our work. I remember vividly, it was the second turning point in my life. We went into an empty classroom and were asked to stand up against the wall and put your work in front of us on the floor.

We’re waiting around, and in comes Josef Albers, in a gray flannel suit with a yellow tie, shock of white hair, with his assistant. He looks around silently. Looks at the artwork around in the room, mostly drippy, expressionistic work, mine included. And he says, “Vell, who vill speak first?” Nobody said a word, and he looks at me and he says, “Vell, boy.” Extremely nervous, I tried to start talking about my work. I got about ten seconds into it, and he just cut me off and went into a five minute lecture about how New York painting was rotten, how he hated the drips and so forth.

I was devastated. Here I am, this 19-year-old kid, and just been blitzed by Josef Albers! He then looked at other Cooperites and left. So we’re all standing there, in a few moments he comes back in and he looked around the room at each person and then he pointed to me and said, “You.” then he points to two other people, “You and you, go see the secretary.” We were now students at Yale. Can you imagine that for an application process!

LG:      What a difference from today!

RB:      Anyway, that’s how I got there. At Yale, Bernard Chaet was a very important teacher, who later became a friend and advocate. I started drawing with him, and that was very constructive and important. But I had difficulty painting. Albers, in his talks and critiques, was very clear about what he was about, but I couldn’t adapt myself to it. So I fled, as students often do, to the print room and got very involved in making etchings. My enthusiasms were for Goya, Redon and Max Klinger among others. I made a series of etchings and I graduated in 1956 on that basis rather than painting. Those prints were the first works that I really felt were in my own voice. I graduated from Yale in ’56.

I had my BFA, but was tired of school. During that summer I was doing some commercial artwork in the city, probably not very well, and not well paid. I then got a draft notice to report in a couple months. I was drafted in January ’57 and I was in the Army for two years.

Northern City, 1974, Acrylic on canvas, 48 x 48 inches

LG:      Did you get a strong traditional figurative training?

RB:      I’d never painted from the figure; not at Cooper, not at Yale. It wasn’t available, though I’ve drawn from the figure a great deal. I had seen Edwin Dickinson’s paintings in the 12 Americans show at the Museum of Modern Art, sometime in the mid-’50s. I went to study with Dickinson for a couple of months at the Art Students’ League. He was a very interesting kind of man; through him I got an insight into tonal painting, about building a painting with patches of color rather than line. This was something I couldn’t have gotten from anywhere else.

LG:      Dickinson was such an amazing painter.

RB:      He was a marvelous exponent, not so much as a teacher. This had more to do with his painting–building a picture without line, with patches of tone and color. That was very important to learn for me, though I couldn’t use it immediately.

When I was finally discharged in January 1959 I was admitted back into Yale’s MFA program. During that year and a half I made prints, and very large drawings. For the final review of the year there were no formal exhibitions for students graduating, but rather you put your work up in an empty classroom and it was looked at by the faculty, then you took it down. I had made these very large black and white drawings, seven-foot drawings on very crummy photographic background paper. Bernard Chaet brought Eleanor Ward, owner of the Stable Gallery, in to view these drawings. In the 1950’s thru the 60’s, the Stable Gallery was the premiere avant garde gallery of that period. They showed the first Rauschenberg’s, Abstract expressionist painters and even early Warhol.

This would have been in April, May of 1960. In April I married Blair, my beautiful and smart wife, who has been my most loyal advocate and most perceptive critic ever since.

Eleanor Ward comes in and looks around and said, “I’d like give you show.” I was so naïve Larry. I thought, “Oh, that’s really nice.” Here’s somebody who’s running one of the best galleries in New York coming in to see this graduate student show and says, “Oh, I’d like to give you a show.”

I said “Yeah, that would be nice”. Then I thought, these drawings are all on crumby photographic background paper that tears every time I unroll it. When she left I carried them home and stuffed them in a garbage can.

LG:      Oh my goodness.

RB:      Blair and I got a positions teaching that summer at the Yale Norfolk Summer School. During the summer I painted a whole damn show in black acrylic on canvas, white canvas. It was a black and white show. I painted 15 big paintings in eight weeks, some good enough to exhibit. We got back home to New Jersey, my father helped me stretch them in the garage and we shipped them off to gallery in August. The gallery didn’t open until September, but they were stored. I had a Fulbright scholarship. Blair and I were scheduled to leave for England, the ship leaving at the end of August. We were on the boat, we’re going to London when the show went up in New York, it gets reviewed, and I thought, “Oh that’s really nice.” I was so naïve. It was a time to enter the scene… I should have been there. Right?

LG:      Sure, right.

RB:      I should have been meeting people, making contacts but that’s the way it is sometimes. When things come easily, sometimes you don’t know what’s going on. Well, I’ve had a history of lacking the entrepreneurial spirit.

Black and White Photo of first crowd painting. London, 1960-61, 54 x 84 inches, unfinished

LG:      So you received a Fulbright and the Prix de Rome in the early 60’s. How did that influence the directions you took after living in Rome and London?

RB:      We spent a year in London, where I started to paint. I felt released from the entire Yale environment. To start, I decided to paint colors they way I saw them rather than worry about color theories.

LG:      And you were at the Slade School there?

RB:      I was assigned to Slade school at the University of London. I drew from the model there a couple of times. They have this tutor system; I went to see my tutor, who turned out to be Andrew Forge, who later became the dean at Yale.

LG:      Was Coldstream also there at that time?

RB:      Yes, he was there but I had no contact with him. My tutor, Andrew Forge wasn’t that interested in Americans at that time. Frankly, he sort of brushed me off. I didn’t mind, because we’d found a rather nice apartment and I did a number of large paintings of crowds, the first crowd pictures I did. Also we traveled to the continent, Belgium, Netherlands, France and Spain. It was my first sight of the “real thing”, so different than the reproductions in art books. Later we also traveled in Germany, Switzerland and Austria and the Scandinavian countries.

Cityscape – The Stadium Alight, 1980-1981, Acrylic on canvas, 47 x 71 inches

LG:      What painters from art history did you see that have been most central to your concerns?

RB:      There are so many… a big Daumier exhibition was the first discovery we made after arriving in London. It made a lasting impression on me. To risk sounding like a laundry list, in no particular order I would say: Breughel, Goya, Rembrandt (particularly the etchings), Signorelli, Pontormo, Rosso Fiorentino, Degas, Caillebote, Piranesi, Max Beckmann, Picasso’s Analytical Cubism, Futurism, Magritte, and the early films of John Cassavetes (“Shadows”). And at certain moments Balthus and Bacon.

In the 60s, Balthus, Giacometti and Bacon were really the contemporary figurative artists that one tended to look to–painters for suggesting ways forward. Of course this was all set against the context of the dominance of abstract and Pop art.

In American art schools their work seemed to suggest a way to something else, something different, something more radical… Most certainly, the model of Balthus of rang through American figurative painting, in that period and later, probably sometimes in embarrassing ways

After London, I got a grant to go to the American Academy in Rome and we got to Rome in 1961. I was fortunate enough to continue there three years.

It was still a kind of Ivy League-ish kind of place. More weighted toward art historians, archaeologists, philologists, and so forth and so on, though, there were several painters, composers and writers–some very smart, interesting people. I took over Lennart Andersen’s studio as he was leaving. It was a big, beautiful studio on the second floor on the highest hill in Rome, with a skylight that had been built for mural painters.

LG:      Terrific.

RB:      It took me a long, long time to realize how I was lucky beyond belief. Anyway, I started to paint there. I painted a whole variety of paintings influenced by many sources; a little de Chirico, Cubism, Futurism Surrealism and even the emerging Pop Art. Of course we were also devouring the great historical works of Italy and the rest of Europe on our frequent travels. I was doing a lot of drawing. Drawing was, and is, a major part of my production, maybe the best part.

In the last years I was at Rome, I did several large paintings, six or seven foot paintings of different kinds of multiple figure situations and also some interiors. I was opening up as a painter in a way that I hadn’t before. That was good.

You asked me before about what influenced me; there are works that influence you, and there are other things that you just admire immensely. I’ve had certain reproductions of Pontormo, and Rosso Fiorentino, that had been up on my wall for years. Being in Italy and standing before them is so, moving and amazing. There are a couple of pictures by Rosso,” Moses and the Daughters of Jethro” and his phantasmagorical altarpiece in Volterra with their jagged forms, anti-naturalistic space and color dissonances that engaged me deeply.

Another case was Caravaggio’s “Seven Acts of Mercy in Naples. Do you happen to know it?

LG:      I’m afraid not.

RB:      Go ahead and look it up sometime. I’ve drawn it several times. It’s an impossible, impossible painting. It made me realize that certain works, which disregard existing canons, look like they have something “wrong” with them. But that “wrongness” gives that image its power.

There’s a painting, in the Metropolitan Museum, by Ludovico Carracci, it’s a dead Christ mourned by the Virgin, St. John, and saints. Every time I go to the Met I look at it. Christ’s broken, dead body is cradled by Mary and is painted in this painfully naturalistic way. But, all the other figures in the painting look like they come out of a different world. Was he experimenting? Perhaps… It’s disturbing. It’s the clash of two kinds of incompatible worlds. The tension between the two holds me every time I see it.

Seeing Max Beckmann Among Commuters Near Penn Station, (Large Version) Acrylic on canvas, 48 in x 78 inches, 2008

The City Crowd – Night (The Hat), 1980-1981, Acrylic on canvas, 48 x 72 inches

The Calling – In the Empire of the Night, 1986, Acrylic on canvas, 48 x 72 inches

LG:      I’m curious to hear more of your thoughts. Some painters I’ve talked to prefer to draw inspiration from the Early Renaissance painters, like Piero, as opposed to the Mannerists. It seems less common to have the same degree of connection with Mannerism. I’m curious if you have any thoughts about that.

RB:      I think it’s more about temperament. I’m drawn to works, which have certain kinds of tensions within them. Tensions not only formally, but psychologically as well. I’m drawn to works that have interior stresses and surprising interior dislocations. I think they often are located at key points in art history. Beyond that, these works correspond to an inclination in myself. Does that answer?

LG:      I’m curious because you often hear complaints about Mannerist painters being too bombastic and prefer things to be more sedate, detached. I often get suspicious and think, “Why not? It’s not just theatrics. It’s human to show feelings, even if they get carried away. I’m curious to hear another side of it. The Sienese painters, Piero and Giotto are admired for their relevance to modern aesthetics but other forms can be inspiring as well.

RB:      I know that, and I respect the remarkable achievements of the artists you’ve just been talking about. I love the Duccio Maesta Pieta. But … We’re all partisan, as an artist, I know I am a partisan. The works, which I respond to, are those that pose questions that I myself, would like to be able to answer.

LG:      I think I understand.

RB:      To just move out of Italy for a minute, Here’s another example; paintings by Albrecht Altdorfer–which I saw at a monastery in Austria–the Saint Sebastian paintings. These paintings are imprinted on my mind. I keep reproductions of them around. The spastic movements of figures, the claustrophobic landscape–I’ve made drawings from them and looked at them again and again.

Again, as a working artist–as someone making art, what resonates are works that you absolutely need in some way. Perhaps it is the kind of energy, the charge they communicate. I look at the Pieros, in Arezzo, they’re incredible, noble, wonderful things. I admire them, but I don’t… I can’t inhabit them quite the same way; it is my limitation.

I think each artist creates his own art history, one of affinities. The academic art history is one thing, but an individual artist’s art history is very different. It’s made up of a patchwork of answers to questions that you have within yourself.

Landscape – Homage to D.C. Friedrich, 1979 Acrylic on canvas 38 1/2 x 47 1/4 inches

There are many kinds of work I admire but there are a smaller number that have truly affected me. Again, talking about affinities, in the ’70s I did a lot of landscapes, invented landscapes. They were triggered by my coming across a book on Caspar David Friedrich. Of course, my landscapes were urban, the area around northern New Jersey; the meadowlands, the swamps, the highways and the remnants of industry. But in the back of my mind was Caspar David Friedrich painting of icebergs.

LG:      Some of those urban landscapes from then, the ones that I remember, I don’t have it right in front of me, but … They were just these amazing, this kind of almost aerial views of this huge areas of this sort of industrial landscape, and freeways, and amazing light, very, very dramatic scenes. How did you go about making them? Are these total inventions or did they come from something else?

Landscape for us, 1974, 48×73 inches, acrylic

Highway – Red City, 1981, Acrylic on canvas, 48 x 78 inches

RB:      I’ll tell you how it began. I was with my family, my wife and my two kids. We spent quite a few summers up on the Maine coast. At a certain point in the ’60s, I wanted to purify my sight. I went out on the beach every day and within a couple hundred-yard distances, I’d paint something. I painted little panels for a long time, and then bigger ones, just trying to get the light. Get the light, get the feel of it just as simply as possible.

But, after a while I began to imagine a city on the sandy, rocky water’s edge. I built a city into one of my Deer Isle paintings. I imagined it and that was the start of it. I began making them up. Of course my memories of the meadowlands, the oil refineries and the role that driving all my life in New Jersey’s tangle of highways played. There was a peculiar pleasure in making all this up. Getting the landscape started and then beginning to place buildings on it–here, there. Highways, how do they connect? Feeling like God, ‘I don’t want that building there. Let’s paint it out’–let’s move the road from here to there. Great fun.

LG:      Right, right.

Small Trash, 1986, Acrylic on canvas, 18 x 28 inches

Study for Trash c.1986, Acrylic on canvas, 20 x 28 inches

RB:      They’re completely fabricated in my own mind. And my own way of painting is that I begin very loosely and test locating elements loosely. I inevitably make a lot of changes as the painting grows.

LG:      Why did you stop painting these landscapes? You then went on to paint the street scenes, right? You never painted scenes like that again, as far as I know.

RB:      Yes that was through the ’60s and ’70s. I wanted to paint figures. I’d been painting these straight landscapes then on to do those invented landscapes. I wanted to paint figures but I didn’t know how to make them do the things I intuited must happen to be fresh and forceful.

But I learned from painting the rocks on the beach. I learned how I could place figures in depth–to think about how my eye tracked its way through the complex grouping.

City Crowd – Cop and Ear, Acrylic on canvas, 48 in x 96inches, 1981, Collection Metropolitan Museum of Art

Steps – The White Dog,  Acrylic on Canvas, 18 in x 24inches, 2004

Steps – Red Shoe, Acrylic on Canvas, 36 in x 48 inches, 2004

LG:      You often lead the viewer’s eye through your paintings in unexpected ways such as looking past busy street scene with vaporous, moving crowds to focus on one solid elements like a foot with a bright red shoe, a woman in the distance in sharp focus or a dog dragging a leash. It’s hard for me to think of another painter who consistently offers such visual surprises. What is the attraction of this for you?

RB:      I’m interested in movement, in the transient moment of noticing. In the eye as it selectively focuses within a changing, often overloaded environment.

LG:      Very interesting.

Act of Mercy, Acrylic on canvas, 32 in x 72 inches, 2007

The Calling – In the Empire of the Night, 1986 Acrylic on canvas 48 x 72 inches

RB:      I was looking at how people were being on the street. I made a lot of sketches outside. I mean, really scribbly stuff, you know? But, that I could take back and expand in drawings and later paintings. I wanted to convey not only that the people were out there before me, but they were surrounding me. That the viewer was, by implication, a participant in whatever was happening. Of course, very often on the street, you’re not always sure what’s happening. There can be anxiety, in participating.

One reason I bring some of the foreground figures are up so close, is to promote that sense of potential involvement.

One day, a friend of mine … Do you know the artist Paul Thek?

LG:      No, I’m afraid I don’t.

RB:      He is a hero of the gay counterculture. He was one of many from the generation of artists who died during the AIDS scourge in the late 80’s. He was also a wonderful innovative artist.

RB:      He’d been a classmate of mine at Cooper. He comes in the studio. I’m working on a mid-sized painting. He said, “excuse me but you should paint big.” I thought about it and started to paint a couple of these six by nine foot pictures, which was about as big as I could get out of my third-floor walk-up studio.
And they were better! We got into the ’80s when there was a revival of figurative painting. I produced an immense amount of work, and not by painting fast, either, because I’d spend a long time on a painting. I just spent a hell of a lot of time in the studio. My energy level was high.

The Large Election Rally, Acrylic on canvas, 48 in x 78 inches, 2008-09

LG:      How you go about starting your painting? Do you make a lot of preparatory studies or just dive right in?

RB:      I would have drawings and sketches, really planning out the layout. I’d begin very roughly and openly and change everything a lot in the process of painting. I moved figures from one side to the other, changed them from male to female, brought them forward, and pushed them back. I felt at that time, I could move everything around in the painting, all the time. That was from my heritage with the Abstract Expressionism I experienced as a very young student at Cooper.

The original drawing would usually be left pretty far behind. Somehow I wanted to exist in that invented space, to feel it physically as I worked.

LG:      Was surface much of a concern with that? You’re working in acrylic, so, would you build the surface up? Or would you scrape it down?

RB:      I would usually paint over it, or sometimes I’d just white out a section and repaint, or do whatever I had to do. I think a conservator would be appalled. But, it was a way I could work.

That whole series concluded in the early ’90s with several 7 by12 foot paintings that had four panels each. The four-panel idea was to more markedly express duration. The dislocations between the panels were sometimes slight, and sometimes major–suggesting a kind of flickering moments of noticing— noticing behind you, left, right, in front of you. Those are some of the best ones I’ve made,

Overpass, Acrylic on canvas, 90 in x 142 inches, 1990

Extreme Needs, 1989-1990 Acrylic on canvas 90 x 136 1/2 inches

RB:      I worked on the crowd pictures through the ’70s and up to the early 1990s. But things happen; life changes you.

 I had an, emergency bypass, nearly a heart attack, not quite, in ’93. I’d done these very large paintings, and probably was at the end of that cycle It gets you thinking when you’ve almost died, I began to think about my past, my family, my parents, the relationships between them and myself, and the people around me, my wife and family. I wanted to change, to but down the baggage and begin anew.

I had a talk with my sister about something that happened in our family when we were adolescents a very important thing. Her interpretation of what that event meant was completely opposite to mine. I was also wondering, how can there be those two views? How can there be this clash of opinions about what’s real within us all of the time.

We’re convinced we’re very good people, but we do bad things sometimes. But, we’re still convinced we’re good people. I wanted to find a way to suggest that double-ness, that inner restlessness of interpretation, contrary interpretations. That’s when I started to experiment with these interiors, many of which are double headed.

RB:      Nobody liked them. I pursued that for quite a while. A picture, which would always be irritating, would look initially quite right, but oops! It can’t work that way. When it’s reversed, the same thing happens. I wanted a picture to have an inner restlessness, which was parallel to the inner restlessness I feel myself about so many of my relationships. That was what ran through the ’90s.

LG:      You said people didn’t understand them? Or they just didn’t respond to them? They didn’t like the idea they were upside down?

The Letters, mid 1990s, 18 x 24 inches

The Suitcase, (reversible) Acrylic on canvas, 78 in x 60 inches, 1997

RB:      A few of my friends liked them, but in general, there was less response. Also, I happen to have had a series of dealers of different kinds who either retired, in one case died, got divorced, or moved back to Europe, I was afloat for a while then.

The Uprising, 2012 24×36”

Revolution and Sex, 2014 -16, 78×48 inches

LG:      How about the series of work that you did around the Occupy Wall Street Demonstrations. I’m curious. You could see the demonstrations out your studio window?

RB:      From around 2010 – 2012, there began all of these uprisings in the Middle East the Balkans and elsewhere, as well as demonstrations here in this country
I began to kind of think about that, but think about it from my position and the position of people I knew. We were watching from afar. We were watchers, not actors. That became key to it.

I made a number of paintings of crowds, demonstrations and uprisings seen from afar. Sometimes there was a fragment of a figure seen within the room, sometimes a photographer looking out. I was thinking about my own situation, and people I knew, their positions of separateness and privilege from these events–which were tearing apart other people’s lives. Even those events, which might be happening outside your window.

When Occupied Wall Street happened, I went down there several times to make sketches. I could use them as drawings but not as paintings, I couldn’t use them that directly. But, they sort of melded into the larger theme. As the drawings and paintings accumulated they began to suggest a narrative. The paintings began to fall in narrative sequences, not because I was planning it so much, but it just was naturally so. The crowd gathers. The crowd moves. The crowd encounters the power of the state one way or another. There’s tear gas. There’s some firing. Someone has fallen. The crowd surges back. The crowd retreats, leaving someone behind. The street is cleared by the military or police.

I sort of was playing that through, thinking of Egypt. Thinking of Libya. Thinking of the Wall Street, though that didn’t come to gunfire. Thinking about the racial problems that had plagued our country for a long time.

Watching it Happen, 2016 60×78 inches

The watcher. Who’s the watcher? The watcher, sometimes it’s just an arm. The watcher is you and I. The watcher is so many of us.

This is not agitprop art. It’s seen from a certain vantage point. Then, what was happening with these revolutions, in the Middle East, particularly, begun by idealistic democratically oriented young people, the way they turned into such, often, ugly things. There was betrayal within them. That’s ended, in most cases, with some kind of authoritarian government.

Then, trying to think about finding a form, finding the symbols, to suggest the change of the crowd from one state into another, into its own enemy.

A Walk in the City, Video showing Drawings by Robert Birmelin

I have hundreds of drawings. I have several big paintings, and mostly small ones. Those went from maybe 2012 to 2016, Then, in 2014 things happened in my family that have changed our lives, I was seldom in the studio or able to paint for a long time.

Study, Hand, C, 30 x 22 inches 2016

RB:      When I came back, it was different. I really haven’t been working on canvas or paintings, but I work on drawings and mixed media with color. I’ve done several series of works on paper. One is called Physical Contact. It’s really about sex. There’s also a series called Legs on 8th Avenue, which kind of pick up on the urban theme, in a different way.

There’s a whole series that I’m working on now, of fantastical landscapes, which was triggered by seeing an exhibition at the Met. of Hercules Seghers, a 17th century Dutch artist who I’ve always been very interested in. He has these peculiar etchings, which were often partly painted. He never saw the Alps as he lived in the Netherlands. But, he painted mountains. Often the mountains almost looked like the convoluted forms of a brain, oddly evoking both identifications.

Ordinary Lives – An Allegory, 48 in x 144 inches, Acrylic on canvas, 2008,

Workmen 1, The Last Shift (An Elegy), 2010, 48 x 78 inches

LG:      Some of today’s aspiring realist painters are very concerned with learning technique and compositional strategies as the best path to making great art. They often equate success with the level of detail and photographic exactitude. On the other hand trends in today’s art world can often seem to encourage the notion that skill is irrelevant and the idea is what is important. The wall text becomes more important than the artwork. Care to weigh in on this dilemma?

Skill is never irrelevant. There’s a lot of figurative painting that I don’t like at all. I don’t like this sort of licked over painting that just terrible to stinks of its photographic source.

I don’t use photographs; I prefer to generate stuff from drawing, and imagination… I always have. That seems like more fun. But, I know a lot of people who do use photographic sources, and some use this with profit. But, when your first reaction to a work is to think, “Gee, it looks just like a photographic. Look how detailed it is” That’s vulgar.

As I said earlier on, I’m a partisan, you know? In my heart of hearts, I think that you should either look at it or make it up. But, I recognize the world is bigger than my own individual belief.

Home, mid 1990s, 18×24

RB:      How to free the final product from its source, to embody rather than just illustrate the ones experience, that is the question, is the great challenge.
I want the painting to be a free zone that is continually open to discovery and change. That, for me, precludes the dependence on an exterior image, photographic image.

On the other hand, for instance, I respect Chuck Close’s work, he makes very interesting paintings. But, he’s very conscious of what he’s doing with the photographic image. He’s an abstract painter, who works with a certain source and transforms it at a certain distance. It’s an optical game. There is no predicting, what method an artist may employ to come up with remarkable, innovative work. I’m wedded to my own methods but recognize the infinite variability of artistic creation.

LG:      That’s good. Sounds like a much healthier outlook.

RB:      Everything is going on all the time. Usually, each of us, in our little cocoon, only sees a little section The beautiful, the horrible and everything in between is going on all of the time.. How to be true to your own experience is the adventure of being an artist

The post Interview with Robert Birmelin appeared first on Painting Perceptions.

Untitled, 32×38 inches, oil on canvas, 2017

Untitled, 34 x 28 in, 2016, oil/canvas
all images courtesy of Bookstein Projects

Susannah Phillips was raised in London and attended the Slade School of Fine Art in London. Her paintings have been in many solo and group exhibitions in London, New York and Provincetown, MA, and are included in numerous private collections. In 2014 and 2017, she was awarded the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation Residency. The artist lives and works in New York. She is represented by Bookstein Projects in NYC where there will be a solo exhibition of her work in January 11 – February 24, 2018. Susannah Phillips will be the JSS in Civita Master Class Guest-of-Honor in 2018 residence July 2nd to 23rd in Italy.

Beverly Acha wrote in December 2012 Art Critical review, Growing To Know A Place: Susannah Phillips and Landscape

“…The absence of representational details grants these landscapes an unexpected second life. They have the capacity to suddenly flip to abstraction, for a moment losing their pictorial depth. Yet the muted and succulently specific color always shifts the landscape back into view. The change in light from painting to painting is sophisticated, creating strong implications of volume and space between landmasses. As you walk through the gallery, the landscape progressively reveals more dimensionality, with variations in the height of mountains, the position of the sun, atmosphere, and time of day. Time intervals between paintings seem no more than 30 minutes or an hour, allowing the artist to slow time down to the point of capturing the closest thing to what we can understand as the present.

Phillips’ subjects, whether landscape or interior scenes, are transformed into vessels for explorations into light, volume, and form. Like Agnes Martin or Giorgio Morandi, her motifs seem to have emerged from a metaphysical search, from a need to infringe on the barrier between the concrete world and ourselves, to reach a point just beyond our grasp. These new paintings and drawings straddle a line between spirituality and philosophy as they begin to utter the unspeakable, the nature of time and the instability of reality and perception.” –– Beverly Acha

Lobster Lake I, 2008, oil on canvas, 24 x 18 in

Larry Groff: Thank you Susannah for your generosity with agreeing to this interview and for the time and attention with writing your responses to my questions.

Susannah Phillips: You’re welcome.

LG: What was growing up for you like and how did you decide to become a painter?

SP: I had a happy childhood despite having divorced parents, moving around and not really having a sense of belonging to any country. With my father, there were summers in Cape Cod with its artistic offerings. Otherwise, I grew up in London–I went to school at the French Lycee there–and Europe. Saw a lot of churches, frescoes, paintings, ruins. I spent one year in Athens when I was fourteen, and in the evenings we, my mother and I, would go into the Parthenon, walk around, have a picnic. There were no fences, gates or guards. That same year, I was taken to a Morandi show in Bologna, and that’s when I decided I wanted to paint. For me, Morandi was very approachable compared to what I’d seen before.

There are several painters in my family, father and sister included–it was on the cards to consider becoming one. And I was always encouraged to draw.

Untitled, 2007-08 30×40

Untitled, 2007-09 34×38

Untitled, 2010-12 34×38

LG: I understand that your mother’s first marriage was to Arshile Gorky and she was close to many famous painters such as De Kooning, and Matta. Was that something she talked about much and influenced you in some way?

SP: I’d say the only important influence on me of the Gorky connection then, was growing up with his paintings. Some sort of osmosis. I’m not aware of when I first noticed them. The negative side was that I felt my efforts were a bit insignificant, as I thought his paintings were so beautiful.

And yes, I did meet De Kooning and Matta, but mostly the painters who came through the house were European: Helion, Craxton, Ghika, Paolozzi, Cloclo Peploe, to name a few, some of whom became important to me for their encouragement and example.

Still Life, 2003 oil/canvas, 20 x 24 in

Still Life With Pink Cloth, 2007, oil on canvas, 30 x 22 in

Cupboard with Mirror, 2006-2008, oil/linen 42 x 32 in

LG: You went to art school at the Slade and studied with Coldstream and Uglow. What was that like for you?

SP: Disappointing. I was looking for some structure, but it was the 70’s and classes weren’t compulsory. I mostly worked where I was living at the time, except for using the life room quite a bit and the print department in the first year. I didn’t have much to do with Uglow, regrettably. Coldstream was always friendly and supportive. Apart from learning about printmaking, I felt I wasn’t taught much at the Slade (partly my fault for working outside the school), however I’m grateful for those four years because it allowed me to focus on painting. In a way I regret not having involved myself more in the school. I’m sure I missed out on things. But I still have one valuable Slade friend with whom I talk shop.

Untitled, 2001 30×22

Still Life with Saucer, 2000, oil on linen, 16 x 18 in

LG: What lessons did you learn from Coldstream that still resonate in some way with you today?

SP: Possibly my grey-leaning, restrained palette might have something to do with Coldstream? Or with the English weather. In fact, at the time I was at the Slade, I was still much more influenced by American 20th century painting and Picasso than by Coldstream. Colour, surface and shapes attracted me more than the palette and soft contours of his paintings.

LG: What did you do after finishing art school?

SP: Oddly enough, it never occurred to me to do a post-graduate course. Hard to remember why.

I went to New York for two years and took odd jobs and painted in my bed-sit, which at one time was in Georgio Cavallon’s house. Loved–still love–his whites and dry paint.

After a couple of years, I returned to London. In my early thirties, John Craxton got me my first show there, in the gallery that represented him. After that, I moved to Montreal, raised our son and painted for years in isolation, and now here I am, in NYC.

LG: Did you ever feel the need to rebel against what you learned in school in order to find your own voice?

SP: The Slade imposed little on its students in those days. There wasn’t much to rebel against.

Untitled, 2011 14×17

Untitled, 2008 9×23

Untitled, 2014 14×17

LG: What artists or art has been most significant to you and how you paint today?

SP: First there was Morandi, then I forgot about him and got interested in Spanish painters, Velazquez in particular, but also Titian, and many other early and late Renaissance painters. But at one point, quite late, in my thirties, I felt I was painting too many subjects at once and not developing as a painter, so I decided to focus only on still-life painting. Enter Augusto Torres, Braque, Cubism. I became more interested in composition and lost interest in recording everything in front of me. I looked at Derain for many years and, like everyone, I had many crushes: Cezanne, Manet, Matisse, Picasso, Poussin – all the obvious ones, even Guston. The list is long.

My interest in Augusto Torres, a more obscure crush, was in how he simplified, how he kept the geometry and structure in the composition and gave shadows importance. Lots of art and artists have influenced me. Even the Acropolis. Recently, I did a stint at the Albers Foundation, and during the following months, found a lot of rectangles appearing in my canvases.

Untitled, 2015 31×24

untitled, 2015, oil/canvas 26 x 18 in

LG: What more could you say about Morandi?

SP: As I said above, he was my first love. However, now I no longer look at or think very much about his work, although I’m always happy to see a few at a time and I would like to see more of his landscapes. I like the bunching up of his objects and his inclination to simplify. In fact, I think it’s time I looked at him again.

LG: I’ve heard you are friends with the painter Paul Resika, how would you say this friendship has influenced you?

SP: Paul is my brother-in-law (and friend), and he has been important to me. I’ve watched him for years in the studio. I took from him my habit of doing variations on a subject. I don’t seem to tire of working ad infinitum on many surfaces for one pictorial idea. I suppose I also got that from Morandi at the start.

Untitled, 2015 20×28

Untitled, 2014 11×14

Untitled, 2014 14×16

LG: Many of your paintings, especially your still life, seem less to do with describing actual things and more about the mystery and poetics in the relationship between those things. How do you go about setting up a still life and deciding what to paint?

SP: I don’t have a stable method. I’m sure what I do is pretty standard. Roughly, this is how I go about it.

I have an idea, an urge, for a composition–the kind of shapes, the mood–before I find the objects. The objects are usually chosen for formal reasons–the shapes and shapes of their shadows play a large part. Often the objects have been lying around for years, collected as props. I have a feeling about an object when I see it, I recognize in it something that I see already as a painted object.  Often the props are personal, for example I associate them with someone or they evoke a memory but It’s not important for me that the viewer be in on that. 

When the setup is ready–objects will shift in the making of the painting–I make drawings, and then painted versions.  These variations bounce off each other and, even though they tend to pile up unfinished, they help move things along. The first paintings are largely descriptive. I then go back to the original idea I had of the composition, and the objects become more an arrangement of shapes, nothing specific. By the time I am doing the later versions, I am no longer looking at the still life setup particularly. It’s in my head and in the studies. At this point I’m just making a painting.

Untitled, 2004 12×24

Yellow Box, 2004, oil on linen, 12 x 24 in.

Untitled, 2006-08 10×12

LG: What tells you it’s time to stop working on a painting?

SP: It varies. Sometimes I like the painting, so I stop. (This is when the next version might begin). I recognize something in it that feels right. Other times I go on forever, uncertain, the painting killed, revived, killed again. The ‘finish’ stage in painting when I used to paint more faithfully from observation, was easier to catch–the picture had something to match. When the pictures are left in the studio for a time, I always see something wrong and tend to fiddle.

Untitled, 2014 12×9

untitled, 2015, oil/canvas 10 x 12 in

untitled, 1994, oil/canvas 18 x 22 in

LG: Can you talk about how you use color in your work, do you restrict your colors in some way? What colors do you use most?

SP: I rarely use colours straight from the tube. I tend to mix them up. At some point, I discovered that Velazquez only used five colours–red, yellow, brown, black, white, so that’s what I picked. Big restriction. Sometimes I add a different colour, like turquoise, for example, but I have a hard time not mixing it out of existence. I do use ochre, burnt Sienna but no umbers. I love black, but I also make my own out of ultramarine and burnt sienna, or viridian and cadmium red deep, for example. I use Naples yellow pale, whites, cobalt blue, cerulean, manganese, cadmium yellows, oranges and green. I use the cadmiums mostly when I paint flesh.

I can’t work with too many alternatives. I wouldn’t know even how to choose other colours to add to my palette. The choice would seem arbitrary.

I love strong colors in other people’s paintings, but I am very drawn to murky gloom, twilight.

Slice of Light, 2011, 18 x 24 inches

Untitled, 2014 16×18

Allison, 10 x 10 inches, 2006

LG: What thoughts might you share with us about getting good colour in a painting?

SP: Not sure I know what you mean by good color. If you do, indeed, think I have good colour then having fewer colours would be my tip.

LG: What difference do you see in using colour derived from observation from colour that is completely invented?

SP: The important thing for me, whatever the source of the colour, be it observed or invented, it should work in the painting as a whole. I might drop the real colour of the object in favour of something I want instead; so, for example, a cloth that might be blue ends up being something quite else in the painting.

Landscape X, 2012, oil on canvas, 36 x 46 in

Landscape 5, 2012, oil/canvas 15 x 18 in

untitled, 2013, oil/canvas 14 x 17 in

LG: What role does observation play in your work?

SP: Everything I do is related to something out there, but I usually have an idea for a painting before knowing how the seen thing, the motif, can be used for making the painting .

In my landscapes, I work from drawings done on the spot. Back in the studio, I invent with the help of those drawings. In my recent cityscapes I can only seem to capture what’s out there by not looking (because there’s too much information). All my interiors are of places that are important to me and that I know well.

Untitled, 2008 11×14

Grey Interior, 2002-04, oil on linen, 28-1/4 x 24 in

Untitled, 2008 11×14

LG: What might be helpful to think about for a student wanting to avoid clutter in a painting?

SP: Simplify… take things out!

LG: What attracts you to painting representationally? Would making paintings that are completely abstract interest you?

SP: Although I am very drawn to abstract painting and grew up with it, I have never been able to make one. For now, I need something to hang on to for me to make what I’m doing feel less arbitrary. Limitless choices overwhelm me. Ditto colours.

LG: Have you spent much time in Italy before? What are you looking forward to doing there?

SP: I lived in Florence until the age of 5. Italian was my first language. Later there was a family house in Tuscany. It’s been decades since I have spent more than a few days there at a time, and then in cities only. Apart from looking forward to being with so many painters, I’m looking forward to three weeks on a hilltop.

Untitled, 2012 32×42

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Lois Dodd, Photo by Joe Ward

Lois Dodd has been painting her everyday surroundings for sixty years. Her current exhibition, from February 26 through April 4, 2015 at the Alexandre Gallery in NYC shows twenty-four recent small-scaled paintings that depict familiar motifs such as gardens, houses, interiors and views from windows. Dodd, now eighty-seven, is an iconic figure of the early New York Tenth Street art scene, along with her contemporaries, such as Alex Katz and Philip Pearlstein. The Alexandre Gallery has the current exhibition online as well as many earlier works for view that you can view from this link.

The late painter Will Barnet talked about Lois Dodd in an interview with Barbara O’Brien. (From the Kemper Museum catalog, Lois Dodd Catching the Light)

…”What she has is something that belongs to the language of painting that actually only a very few artists really understand and know about. She has that feeling that the flatness of the canvas, and the verticality or the horizontality has to be met in a certain dynamic way. And she can arrange her forms so that the verticals become alive in relationship to the horizontal. So there is a certain wedding of the two. And so her work has a structure that you miss in most painters. In other words, you have a feeling of solidity and that the forms really belong to each other, where they’re in the distance or in the front. They combine in such a way that they come together and form a whole picture, and that’s what is exciting about—one of the exciting things—Lois.” –Will Barnet

With a career that spans six decades, Dodd is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Academy of Design, and a past member of the board of governors for the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Among many honors, she recently was awarded the Benjamin West Clinedinist Memorial Medal in 2007 from the Artists’ Fellowship, Inc. and Cooper Union’s Augustus Saint-Gaudens Award for professional achievement in art in 2005. Her works can be found in museums, including the Portland Museum of Art, Maine and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri, among others.

The excellent catalog, Lois Dodd Catching the Light can be purchased from the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art from this link. This catalog is from her Kemper Museum retrospective where more than fifty paintings were shown from 1955 to 2010.

I wish to thank both Lois Dodd for agreeing to the phone conversation and for her time and thoughtfulness with answering my questions and to share her experience and ideas with our readers.
I would also like to thank Elizabeth O’Reilly for the many ways she helped make this possible.

Larry Groff:  Do you spend a lot of time looking and thinking about the subject before you start to paint?

Lois Dodd:  It’s more about what I see when I’m walking around looking for something. Then after that it a matter of what size I want to work with and the proportion it will fit into. Then I try to isolate something that would make a good painting, a good subject. I look through my pile of gessoed panels that are different sizes and different proportions. They are all rectangles or squares and I always take a few of those when I go out so I have a variety of panels to choose from because that is the first decision. If you’re looking at something you want to paint and it looks exciting, the lighting is good and then you have to decide what size what shape of a panel will it fit onto; you ask yourself, is it a horizontal thing or vertical or square. Those are the first choices.

LG:  How do you start a painting? Do you make studies or thumbnails first? Do you use a viewfinder of some sort?

LOIS DODD: I don’t really use a viewfinder but I can put my hands up to frame the view or something like that. I don’t make thumbnail sketches, I’m more interested in starting right on the panel. I start with thinned out yellow paint and draw with the brush. So it’s pretty minimal, general and not tight. You asked me if I scrape off, I don’t use a scraper but I don’t use heavy paint either I really paint rather thinly so we never get to the point where I can scrape. But if I don’t like what I’ve done I can rub it off with a rag with turpentine and rub it all around and then I have a nice colored ground to work into that I can use.

WINDOW CROSSPIECE 2014 oil on masonite 12 x 12 inches ©Lois Dodd, courtesy Alexandre Gallery, New York

TREE + SHADOW 2013 oil on masonite 20 x 12 inches ©Lois Dodd, courtesy Alexandre Gallery, New York

LG: When you find the motif that interests you; do you form the composition in your mind before you start? Or is it something that evolves from your prolonged looking at the thing?

LOIS DODD: I do see a geometric breakdown of space of the rectangle so it has an underlying geometric structure so that is pretty basic to what I’m looking at.

LG:  but the rest of it: the color scheme, the mood, the positions of things; they sort of evolve?

LOIS DODD: No, the position of things, that configuration, is what attracts me and what I find exciting to begin with, so I don’t move things around. They’re either already where I want them or I might get up and move my chair and easel, it might be a little better a couple feet this way or that way. What I’m looking at more or less dictates the composition. I don’t really take any liberties with the subject, if it’s no good to begin with, that’s it.

LG: Do you measure things to get everything right in terms of the relationships between things?

LOIS DODD: No, Did you see that film about that painter in Madrid, Antonio Lopez Garcia? Speaking of measuring?

LG: Victor Erice’s Dream of Light http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dream_of_Light

LOIS DODD: Yes, do you remember where he’s standing in front of the tree and marking where his feet are going to be and where the leaves are and all of that? I’m certainly not doing that but I’ll move few inches this way or that before I start if I don’t like what I’m getting at.  Standing or sitting down makes a big difference too.  Once my position is set it’s usually fine.

LG:  So it isn’t as important for you to pursue getting the underlying grid of horizontal and vertical geometric relationships? Is it more that you want to get the overall feeling or pictorial expression of the thing you first saw, your first impression of why you were attracted to the motif?

LOIS DODD: Yes. It’s the way the light is hitting the subject and is creating the composition. The big thing is my paintings are done in one sitting; partly because of the light and partly because of the weather. I can only be there a couple of hours because after that the light changes the whole composition. The sun will have moved and everything is different in two or three hours so my paintings needs to be done in that time.

3 BUSHEL BASKET + IRIS LEAVES 2014 oil on masonite 12 x 19 7/8 inches ©Lois Dodd, courtesy Alexandre Gallery, New York

BLAIR POND 2014 oil on masonite 15 x 15 7/8 inches ©Lois Dodd, courtesy Alexandre Gallery, New York

LG: Do you use larger brushes and smooth surfaces so you can work quickly and broadly?

LOIS DODD: My panels are up to 15 by 20 inches or smaller panels that are 12 by 18 or 12 by 12. I have a whole pile of gessoed panels, they’re not huge, 20 inches is largest I would go, as larger Masonite panels tend to warp or be weird. They aren’t reliable when they get too big. Once the painting is bigger I paint on linen.

LG: You also work on aluminum panels?

LOIS DODD: The little tiny ones are aluminum step flashing that you can get in the hardware store.

LG: Step flashing? I’m not familiar with that.

LOIS DODD: Step flashing is for putting flashing down the bottom of a chimney where it goes under the roofing material to keep water out. That’s what they’re made for and they come in these really small sizes. You can buy big bundles of the stuff for very little money.

LG:  What a great idea! Do you gesso these?

LOIS DODD: It’s a very good idea. I sand them like mad because I think they’re too smooth and then I gesso them.

LG: What kind of gesso do you use?

LOIS DODD: I use Liquitex usually. Step Flashings are very convenient when you see something and you’ve got 20 minutes. I do a lot of them at night when the moon is full.

TWO TREES, AFTERNOON LIGHT 2014 oil on masonite 18 3/4 x 8 5/8 inches ©Lois Dodd, courtesy Alexandre Gallery, New York

LG: You must simplify things a great deal to get everything in one sitting.

LOIS DODD: Of course, I’m not looking for details or surface description that’s for sure. But I am looking for the light, how it hits volumes. I am looking for the light and the color.

LG: Is what you’re looking at the main concern or do you also think about how other art might relate to your scene? For instance, if you were painting a scene and thought ‘this reminds me of an Arthur Dove painting’ or someone like that would you ever push it in that direction a little? Or does all that great art history in your head come through more intuitively?

LOIS DODD: I think so, sometimes you see things that are like somebody else’s painting so you stay away from it. Have you ever had that experience where you think, ‘oh my god this looks like something so-and-so would paint’? So I’m not painting it. It’s somebody else’s subject matter.

LG: Interesting. So you wouldn’t want to do your take on that subject?

LOIS DODD: Well, if you don’t notice that it’s someone else’s subject, definitely, you’re always doing your own take. Sometimes I see things that looks like other people’s paintings but that’s not interesting to me to begin with. It’s not for me.
INTERVIEW CONTINUES

NIGHT WINDOW – RED 1972 Oil on linen 66 x 36 inches ©Lois Dodd, courtesy Alexandre Gallery, New York

SNOW LIGHT – FEBRUARY 20 2014 oil on masonite 5/8 x 15 inches ©Lois Dodd, courtesy Alexandre Gallery, New York

PORCH ROOF SNOW PILE 2014 oil on masonite 20 x 14 inches ©Lois Dodd, courtesy Alexandre Gallery, New York

Double Windows ©Lois Dodd, courtesy Alexandre Gallery, New York

LG: What tends to grab you most as worthy subject for a painting? For instance you’ve painted windows for a long time.

LOIS DODD: That’s true; I’m still painting windows. This winter I’ve been doing a lot of painting out the window because of the weather and the window structure is so nice, you’ve got this perfect Mondrian construction there in front of you. Windows are a great device and are endlessly fascinating. I do go back to them from time to time.

LG: When you’re working on a painting is there a point that you arrive when you know this is exactly what you want and the painting is done or is it more like the time is up and this is what I’ve accomplished. Do you adjust it once back in your studio or do you not touch it? How do you determine when the painting is finished?

LOIS DODD: Usually when I put the last stroke down it’s done. There is nothing more to say; there is nothing more to put down. It’s pretty clear. It’s not a problem of when to stop; if I start dickering around with details I know that ok “you’ve gone over the top, now you got to stop”.

I was doing portraits for a couple of years of friends, they weren’t really portraits, I thought of them as heads. I wouldn’t want to promise anybody I could paint his or her portrait. In the process of doing that, I would work for a couple of hours and I would have my painting and I would think I could really perfect this now if I worked on it longer. But if I did that it would no longer be my painting, it would be fixing my painting. It would be repairing, trying to improve and that doesn’t really work. The minute I start doing that it starts taking apart or destroying what I already had to say. So it doesn’t work, for me. The work ethic is not a good ethic is what I’m trying to say.

REFLECTED LIGHT ON BRICK WALL, DECEMBER 2014 oil on masonite 18 x 15 3/4 inches ©Lois Dodd, courtesy Alexandre Gallery, New York

PORCH ROOF SNOW PILE 2014 oil on masonite 20 x 14 inches ©Lois Dodd, courtesy Alexandre Gallery, New York

LG: You qualify that by saying “for me”, another painter who might obsessively revise and repaint you might not have a problem with? You might still like their work?

LOIS DODD: Oh yes. Sure. I think it’s a mystery. Every artist works so differently out of something so different. It’s very hard to understand what even your best friends, what they’re doing and how they got their palette, and how they selected the color. The whole thing is always a big mystery. But you can certainly enjoy and appreciate what other people do. What I envy are people that ladle the paint on thickly and juicily. I see that and think that’s so gorgeous, just look at the paint quality. But here I am with my thin paint and the idea of putting on a second coat on my painting would ruin it. It would shut out the light. I get a certain amount of light that is coming back from the white gesso panel , it comes through the painting. If I go back and put more than one coat then you’re suddenly in the position of having to paint light into surfaces. It is a completely different process and that just doesn’t work for me.

LG: I’ve read you don’t like setting up still lifes and prefer to find things as they naturally occur. With this in mind I’m curious about your thoughts on Morandi. His carefully arranged still lifes have a pictorial genius that would seem to have many affinities with your work especially with regards to intimacy, simplicity and directness of organization. His landscapes could almost be considered found still lifes from nature.

Has his paintings ever been influential to you? What can you say about his work?

LOIS DODD: Morandi hasn’t been an influence on me but I love his painting; they’re wonderful, so amazing, they are surprises every time. I’ve looked at his landscapes and I think their influence is in keeping it flat, keeping it simple. That seems to be the message in his landscapes. All of his paintings are wonderful but he’s probably not the person who has been that influential to me.

LG: Who would be influential?

White Catastrophe ©Lois Dodd, courtesy Alexandre Gallery, New York

FORSYTHIA, APRIL 2007 oil on masonite 10 1/4 x 13 inches ©Lois Dodd, courtesy Alexandre Gallery, New York

WINTER SUNSET, BLAIR POND 2008 oil on linen 48 x 52 inches ©Lois Dodd, courtesy Alexandre Gallery, New York

LOIS DODD: That’s a good question. I look at all the American landscape painters but I probably look even more at the abstract landscape people. Like Arthur Dove and John Marin. I look at a lot of stuff. I don’t feel like I’m besotted with anybody that I would try to imitate what they do. I don’t think that is a good idea to be totally in love with so-and-so’s painting. No matter what you do, you have to make your own stuff. Influences are great but they’re not too useful really.

LG: But perhaps you would be influenced by the issues other painters were exploring? For instance, Cezanne, you might not be interested in painting like him but you might be interested in what he was thinking about?

LOIS DODD: I don’t know what he was thinking about. I have no idea what he was thinking about! (laughs) He definitely was an influence, especially when I was first out of art school. I think we all looked at Cezanne, he was perhaps the biggest influence for landscape. Between him and Picasso. When I graduated from art school Picasso was the big person who influenced everything that was going on. Back then there was Cezanne and Matisse. There are so many good painters. It was French painting that people looked at most. I remember the galleries uptown when I was in art school; the few galleries there were basically showing French impressionist paintings. The big move to open galleries came sometime in the fifties.

LG:    You were one of the founders of the influential Tanager Gallery, one of the first artist coop galleries around Tenth St. Alex Katz, Philip Pearlstein, Fred Mitchell, Lester Johnson were among the many artists who showed there. These galleries were influential as they gave opportunities for a wider variety of art to be seen than just what was seen in the more conservative 57^th street area galleries.

It must have been exciting with Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline and Milton Resnick having studios nearby and where many younger artists sought them out at the nearby Cedar Tavern. Alice Neel, Paul Georges, Lester Johnson, Al Held and many others were showing in the various other coop galleries that started there soon after yours. The art critic Harold Rosenberg, wrote in 1959, said that the purpose of the “the art colony on Tenth Street’ was to “transmute the ranks established by social class into a hierarchy based on talent or daring.”

I’m curious to hear what that time was like for you. Can you share a memory of one of your more influential meetings or events with some of the luminaries of that era?

LOIS DODD: As you say it was a very exciting time, we were running our own show, so to speak and made a gallery out of it. We first started on Fourth Street and were there about a year. It was a tiny place. Then a friend told us about a space on Tenth St that was bigger so we moved. Around the same time other galleries began opening. The Hansa Gallery opened and gradually the block filled up with galleries, even around the corner. There was a lot of going back and forth to the galleries and the activity of people going in and out and talking about the art. It was a very social scene for about ten years there, from 1952 to 62.

The Tanager was there from ’52 to ’62, other galleries came a little later and lasted longer. There is nothing there now; it is very close to where I live so I walk through that block every so often. It’s unbelievable how it has completely become another place.

PEELING DOOR 1999, 14 x 14 inches ©Lois Dodd, courtesy Alexandre Gallery, New York

Night Laundry ©Lois Dodd, courtesy Alexandre Gallery, New York

LG: How would you compare the co-op galleries that exist today in Chelsea with the original co-ops from back then?

LOIS DODD: We closed up after ten years because it looked like the galleries uptown were beginning to look at our generation of people. A number of the people that were a part of our group got themselves uptown galleries. We started asking why are we doing all this work, painting the floor, painting the walls, keeping the door open and tending to this place when it looked like the world was opening up and we could all get galleries for ourselves and not have to do all this work. So we closed up. But actually, newer co-ops opened within seven or eight years. I think the uptown gallery scene wasn’t all that great as it turned out and people did the co op galleries all over again.

The thing is there are never enough galleries and if you want to have a show and you know other people in the same situation you can try to do it yourself. That was an exciting time. People came there and talked about stuff. The artist’s club was nearby. We used to have openings on Friday nights and then people would tend to go to the club and hear the panels. So the whole thing was a real community effort.

The art world was smaller back then. In the end you knew every artist in New York City except maybe for the uptown-type people. That was a different world.

LG: The Cedar Tavern was nearby I’ve read, did you meet a lot of the personalities that went there, like de Kooning?

LOIS DODD: They had studios in the same block we had the gallery in. I never went to the Cedar Street Bar myself but we saw them in the galleries. All those people would visit.

LG: Were they open to talking to young painters?

LOIS DODD: Oh sure. Sure. Guston was around before he moved upstate. Franz Kline was there some. de Kooning moved out to the country at a certain point. At least before they became really famous. I think the trouble started when their paintings became worth real money and had uptown galleries and then the evils of jealousy and backbiting entered the picture. And you would see some people not being very happy about other people’s success and the like. But up to a point it was great.

It was always interesting but by ’62 we felt like we’ve done this long enough and we don’t need it anymore so we stopped then. But the next generation had the same problem, they again started a number of co-ops and their co-ops, interestingly enough, are still in existence over in Chelsea. The ones in Chelsea now started up probably in SoHo, The First Street Gallery was originally down at First Street on the Bowery. The Bowery gallery likewise, they were both down near Houston Street on the Bowery. They’ve been in existence a very long time. They started when the members were just out of art school and set up these places. Of course it’s been so long there are other people who are in these galleries now. There is still a real need for co-op galleries.

Shadow with Easel 2010 oil on linen 48 x 54 inches ©Lois Dodd, courtesy Alexandre Gallery, New York

“Nude Sniffing Red Flower” 2010 Oil on masonite, 18 x 20 inches (image courtesy of the National Academy)

EIGHT RED TULIPS 1980 oil on masonite 14 x 18 inches ©Lois Dodd, courtesy Alexandre Gallery, New York

LG: I was recently in Chelsea and saw many of the galleries. I came away thinking that a large percentage of the work I saw then seemed to have a commercial appeal, seemingly chosen for its marketability or because of fashion. But the co-op galleries this seemed less so. Maybe the paintings there had a more uneven quality but it didn’t have the same commercial appeal.

LOIS DODD: Yes, you’re absolutely right.

LG: I’m curious if you might have anything to say about that? Seems to me that great painting comes more from a freedom to experiment and being about the art rather than just how well will it sell.

LOIS DODD: Many of the galleries in Chelsea are there to be a business. What sells is what they are going to show. That’s something else and has another motivation.

LG: It’s sad though because so many of these sellable paintings have a kind of slickness that is off-putting.

LOIS DODD: Probably a lot of students go to art school with the thought that they can make a living doing art and if they get into that, maybe they can make a living for awhile, but then the fashion in art can change and things aren’t so certain. If you’re in it for the long haul, and get something out of it for yourself. Which is why we do it, then you’ll keep doing it. There are all kinds of art in this world. There is art and then there is painting. I sometimes think it’s split now. There is the “Artworld” that has all this really hot stuff and it isn’t all painting, in fact most of it isn’t painting. There is a lot of other kinds of stuff now. Then there is the world of painters who as always are a kind of medieval group doing their medieval thing and getting something out of it.

LG: I’ve often thought it would be a good idea to start a secessionist movement for painters to get out of the artworld! But people tell me I’m crazy

LOIS DODD: (laughs) There is the art world and there’s painting world and it is two different worlds I agree with you. It’s totally another thing.

LG: Well, it’s what we have so I guess we have to work with it.

LOIS DODD: It’s what we have. Exactly.

APPLE TREE (PRUNED) 2014 oil on masonite 16 x 17 inches ©Lois Dodd, courtesy Alexandre Gallery, New York

SNOW, TREE, WINDOW 2014 oil on masonite 15 5/8 x 11 inches ©Lois Dodd, courtesy Alexandre Gallery, New York

FEBRUARY SNOWSTORM 2014 oil on masonite 19 x 11 inches ©Lois Dodd, courtesy Alexandre Gallery, New York

LG: Many early Abstract Expressionists, such as de Kooning, Pollack, Kline and Rothko had strong traditional skills. How important is being able draw and paint representationally to the making of great art?

LOIS DODD: I don’t think it’s that important that you can draw and paint representationally to make great art. Think of all the great geometric art that exists in the world, the total abstract stuff that there is and it has nothing to do with representing the figure. I’m not so sure that that’s it. It still is a great thing to be studying. The fact of being able to do that is quite wonderful.

I think that sometimes people come out of art schools thinking that they are going to make a living maybe. Maybe that’s what the art schools are after now. They don’t even seem to teach the Bauhaus basic design stuff anymore. Which is what I was getting at Cooper Union when I attended there, they had a basic design course and it was based on the Bauhaus. You came out of school with a vocabulary about line, shape, form and color. All those thing have been separated out now so it is more difficult to study the vocabulary of art and put it together into a painting. The Bauhaus people invented this wonderfully useful thing to study, what, this visual vocabulary. Very good stuff, which I’m not sure is being taught as much anymore.

LG: From what I understand the emphasis is more on art theory.

LOIS DODD: Oh, we’re going to talk art now. Not do it, just talk about it. I’ve always wondered about that. I’m too much of a cave-woman type person to go for that. If you’re working with your hands, we’re hand-workers and you use your head too, of course, but you can’t just use your head; where’s the joy in that for a painter? I guess there is if you’re a theoretician and you’re going to write it down but then you’re a writer that’s not a painter. Maybe that’s an artist, maybe that’s what art is now, right? A discipline for theoreticians.

LG: Sometimes the explanatory text label is more important than the work itself.

LOIS DODD: Remember that period awhile ago, a short movement, where that kind of art was popular, what was that called? Where you just read the art that was on the wall.

LG: With like Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger and all those people?

LOIS DODD: Right.

THE YELLOW OUTHOUSE 1999, oil on masonite, 17 5/8 x 14 inches ©Lois Dodd, courtesy Alexandre Gallery, New York

PINK DIGITALIS 2014 oil on masonite 20 x 12 1/8 inches ©Lois Dodd, courtesy Alexandre Gallery, New York

RED MAPLE 2013 oil on masonite 15 x 15 inches ©Lois Dodd, courtesy Alexandre Gallery, New York

AFTERNOON MOON 2010 oil on masonite 10 x 12 inches

LG: I forget what it was called. I was never very interested in that. One thing you said a minute ago that caught my attention was the word joy.

LOIS DODD: I said that?

LG: (laughs) You said it the context of saying what is the joy in that… I think that is an important thing, there doesn’t seem to be as much interest in joy so much. Or beauty. It’s more about irony or heavy, grim, psycho-sexual, socio-political kinds of issues and there isn’t much room for beauty and joy. I suppose that would be consider passé or sentimental. The whole visual joy one gets from looking at good painting is lost. Is there any fix to that?

LOIS DODD: I don’t know either. Maybe it’s just how much of it you need as a person. Maybe it’s all very individual. Some people seem to get painting and some people don’t see it anyway, they could be surrounded by paintings and don’t really get it. Other people do. It’s an odd trait and it’s not universal. The trait of the visual thing of being able to relate the visual stuff in a way that seems to speak to you.

LG: Do you think that people get it naturally or do they have to study it first?

LOIS DODD: I think it is a natural thing, I remember once I had a painting and a woman who was passing by and saw the painting and really seemed to get it, a sudden reaction. Other people wouldn’t react at all. I think it’s almost physical.

LG: Sometimes I think people just don’t get enough exposure to learning about art in schools anymore, less exposure to art history in a meaningful way.

LOIS DODD: That’s probably true.

LG: But on the other hand people do naturally respond to great things. They see a great painting, like one of your paintings next to something like text art or video and it’s a totally different feeling. It might be intellectually engaging but it doesn’t give you that astonishment, that visual joy or magic.

Do you feel optimistic about painting? 

8 Nudes in the Garden 2009-10 oil on linen 25 x 80 inches ©Lois Dodd, courtesy Alexandre Gallery, New York

LOIS DODD: Yes, I do. Look at cave art. Human beings can’t stop doing it. There is always somebody making something. It could go through a low period maybe. No, I don’t think it dies. I don’t think it can. There are always a certain number of people who are just going to have to paint. They have to. I don’t see how it could die.

It’s funny, one time I was over at the Studio School and ran into a woman in the hallway who had just enrolled there and she said that she already had a degree but whatever school she went to they were up to the minute and it was all computers and she hadn’t had a chance to paint and she was dying to try to paint. So she came to the New York Studio School. There are people who just have to try it, have to get into it. I think it must be pretty basic stuff.

LG: It’s a good remedy for many of the world’s ills. It gives you a reason to live.

LOIS DODD: That’s true!

LG: Everything else takes on a secondary importance if you have a great painting you’re working on. Who cares if you have or don’t have all this stuff if you have a good painting?

LOIS DODD: It puts it all in proportion doesn’t it? It makes you able to face whatever it is better after you’ve had a painting session.

LG: Right! Absolutely. You can get all bent out of shape over the headlines in the newspaper but then think “there isn’t much I can do about that” but I do have my painting, I can do something about that. That makes for a great quality of life that can maybe make up for the fact nobody buys your paintings and you live like a homeless person…

LOIS DODD: Yes! Oh god… (laughs) hold on to that thought.

Figure with Clothesline ©Lois Dodd, courtesy Alexandre Gallery, New York

LG: You taught painting at Brooklyn College from 1971 to 1992. How much has what you taught to students affected your own painting and conversely to what extent do you try to teach your own approach to painting to the students?

LOIS DODD: I taught at Brooklyn College for 25 years. I didn’t try to teach my own approach to painting. It wasn’t convenient when your teaching in a college, for the most part we were in a room and I paint outside. There weren’t many opportunities to ask the students to go and buy setups like folding French easels and take them outside. I didn’t do that so it was a completely different experience in the classroom. However it was good, I enjoyed teaching. It was more to try and figure out what they needed not that they should learn to paint like me, which they weren’t going to anyway. They all had their own selves to work on. I wasn’t trying to push my approach. A few people really wanted to do that, a couple of the graduate students that are friends, who I paint with now.

LG: Like Elizabeth O’Reilly?

LOIS DODD: Yes, like Elizabeth. That’s where I met Elizabeth in the MFA program. There are people like that, who keeps in touch. But otherwise I didn’t want them all to be painting like me, that doesn’t seem like a good plan at all. In a way maybe you have more to teach when you teach somebody to paint exactly what you’re doing. Then they can reject it. I don’t know, it’s always been a question in my mind but it’s not my inclination to do that.

LG: What advice would you give a younger painter today?

LOIS DODD: Today there are artists and there are painters. They are two different things and you ought to understand that before you get into it. Artists are not limited to paint, the way painters are. They can do anything they want just about and call it art. It’s a big wide field. But painters are involved in this ancient craft that keeps going on. But I don’t know what advice I’d give anybody. It’s a hard thing to do. If you have to do it, you have to do it. That’s your problem you know? If you have to be a painter you’re going to get the satisfaction out of it that we all get out of it. And you’re going to get the frustration that we all get. And you’re going to have to figure out some other way to make a living. I guess my advice is to figure out some way to make a living.

LG: There are so many people who assume they’ll get a job teaching or something but it’s hard to do

LOIS DODD: There aren’t that many jobs. That’s hard to find.

LG:  They don’t always want to hire painters in the art programs either; they often prefer to hire ‘artists’.

LOIS DODD: Yes, Nowadays that is true. Right.

LG: I understand that for many schools the Studio time the students get is much less. They want to have more lectures and fit in more with the academic environment.

LOIS DODD: Right, they want to build up their brains.

LG: I imagine it’s more expensive, it’s likely cheaper to have an adjunct teacher lecturing than it is to fund a whole studio. I don’t know but what that’s going to mean. Before it was almost mandatory you had to go to art school on some level but now it seems such a dicey proposition to shell out 80 or 100 grand for art school and when you come out with such debt, and perhaps not even learning how to really paint on top of that!

LOIS DODD: I don’t know, it really is a strange time.

LG: Have you given workshops?

LOIS DODD: I was doing some up in Maine at Rock Garden Inns. There were people that would come there that wanted to paint outside. So I got invited. Every week they would have another artist come and paint with the people there. So I was doing that for a week in September. That was very enjoyable.

LG: Do you think people can really learn painting through that?

LOIS DODD: Usually they are older ladies who are doing it on their vacation or whatever. They are serious but they also have another life. They can’t dump that life to become a painter. There is no way for the people to give it all up to become painters. It’s a good question but I don’t know what’s going to happen. Whether people will just go study with other painters or maybe the schools will turn around and start going back.

People are still painting at places like the Studio School that is full of painters and drawers. Painting and Drawing that’s basically what they do. And there are some good ones there too. There are a few places but you’d have to know where they are and find yourself getting there.

Lois Dodd talking about her paintings in a 2007 video by Bill Maynes

Burning House, Lavender 2007 ©Lois Dodd, courtesy Alexandre Gallery, New York

GORDON LANE 1985, oil on masonite, 16 x 14 inches ©Lois Dodd, courtesy Alexandre Gallery, New York

Snow Covered Outcroppings, 1977, oil on masonite, 15 x 15 3/4 inches ©Lois Dodd, courtesy Alexandre Gallery, New York

courtesy Alexandre Gallery, New York

courtesy Alexandre Gallery, New York

The post Conversation with Lois Dodd appeared first on Painting Perceptions.

Ann Gale, Portrait with Orange Scarf, 14 x 11” oil on linen wrapped Masonite, 2014
image courtesy of the artist

I am honored that Ann Gale agreed to this telephone interview and thank her greatly for being so generous with her time and attention with sharing thoughts about her art and process.

Ann Gale is a leading American figurative painter living in Seattle. Her portraits were shown alongside other leading painters of the figure such as Lucian Freud, Nathan Oliveira and Alex Kanevsky in the 2011 exhibition “HEADS” curated by Peter Selz at her San Francisco Dolby Chadwick Gallery.

The JSS in Civita, (Civita Castellana, Italy) recently announced that Ann Gale will be the 2015 JSS in Civita Master Class Guest-of–Honor. Ms. Gale will be in residence July 13th to August 3th. Here is a link for more information on her workshop in Italy.

In a January 2013 review for Visual Art Source DeWitt Cheng wrote:

“…Gale’s paintings, which require months and even years to complete, are aggregations of thousands of brushstrokes (Cézanne’s colored oil-paint patches and Giacometti’s feathery, tremulous graphite contours come to mind) that alternate, depending on the viewer’s distance, angle of view and degree of focus, between heavily textured natural surfaces (bark, lichen) and sharply observed studies of atmosphere and anatomy. Look very closely, and a myriad of tiny abstractions spring into view, with every square inch graphically charged with energy.”

Another review in Art ltd. magazine by Richard Speer writes:

“…Gale paints the kind of visages and physiognomies you might expect to see beneath Seattle’s heavy gray skies: ashen, Zoloft-ready men and women hunched before muted, putty-colored backgrounds—and yet the artist enlivens her subjects via twinkly, impressionistic brushstrokes that pop and recede with Hofmann-like push/pull. This is Gale’s viewpoint and paradox: a scintillating technique deployed in the service of an enervating sense of desolation.”

…When the painting is finished, the images do not always resemble their subjects in the standard realist sense—which suits the artist just fine. “Likeness doesn’t drive the work at this point; accuracy does,” she explains. “But it’s not accuracy to the model; it’s accuracy to my perception, and that’s a very different thing.”

Her many prestigious accomplishments include a 2007 solo exhibition at the Portland Art Museum as well as the Falk Art Museum at the University of North Carolina in 2009. Gale received a Guggenheim fellowship in 2007 and a Washington Arts Council fellowship in 2006. Gale is currently Full Professor of Fine Arts at the University of Washington, Seattle and is represented by Dolby Chadwick Gallery in San Francisco where her solo exhibition in 2012 has a catalog which can be obtained from the gallery website. Ms. Gale is also represented by Prographica Gallery in Seattle and have a January exhibition at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects in NY.

Self Portrait with Red Grid 2012 oil on masonite, 14 x 11 inches
image courtesy of Dolby Chadwick and the artist

Larry Groff: Can you tell us a little about your early years and what influenced you to become a painter? I understand your mother was an artist. What was art school like for you?

Ann Gale: My mother is still painting, in fact I’ll call her today to see if she’s painting. Obviously that was very much an influence and support for me. It still is, it’s nice to have somebody to call me and ask “did you paint today?”

LG: What kind of painting does your mother make?

AG: She does watercolor landscapes. She worked in oils when I was young and I was allowed to draw all the time. If I was drawing I didn’t have to do my chores, which was excellent! I think it still works like that for me a little.

In school, I was fortunate to have art teachers that gave me instruction and time to work in school. They challenged me with different ideas to improve and go beyond what I was doing, even in grade school and middle school. I went to undergraduate school at Rhode Island College and I had great professors Sam Ames, a figurative painter, and Don Smith, an abstract painter. They had a way of teaching me to pay attention to a painting. I found undergraduate school very humbling. I began school thinking that I knew how to draw and soon realized I had a great deal to learn. I was so happy to get into Yale/Norfolk summer program. There, I was exposed to a very diverse group of students and faculty that opened up my idea of what painting could be, what the language was like. I felt kind of untethered. I didn’t know what to do there.

LG:  At Norfolk did you ever feel that there was a stigma or less support towards work done from observation or did that not seem to matter?

AG: No. Working from observation wasn’t stigmatized, but I also don’t think it had any authority. It was interesting to see the kinds of leveling of everything.

Graduate school was kind of similar, only bigger, more intense. William Bailey, Andrew Forge and Bernie Chaet were at Yale then. We talked more about painting than figuration. It really gave me a vocabulary for that discussion in my own studio practice – considering what I valued in the painting, not just in the picture. Andrew Forge once asked us to define our assumptions in painting. This is something I continue to think about.

LG: I’ve heard the critiques at Yale could often be very pointed, even brutal sometimes. Did you find that experience?

AG: Yes, I sometimes felt vulnerable and exposed. Often the critiques were difficult because they were saying something I was trying not to say to myself.

Portrait in Last Light, 2012 Oil on copper 12 x 9 inches
image courtesy of Dolby Chadwick and the artist

LG: What have been some of your most important influences that shaped how you paint today?

AG: I am very curious and sometimes obsessive about observation. It is very intense to just be close to somebody and to be looking at their face and down at their lap and being aware of their gravity and proximity. I have been influenced by painters who reveal the intense experience of observation in their work. One of the artists that I found and studied when I was an undergraduate, was Antonio Lopez Garcia. We went down to New York for his show.

LG: That was his earlier show in NYC in 1986 at his Marlborough Fine Art gallery.

AG: Right, I remember standing next to my teacher and him slapping me on the back, saying “breathe, you’re not breathing!” I had seen paintings that were accurate like photo-realism or work that was powerful, like Italian Baroque painting, but I hadn’t felt this before. I couldn’t forget it and it was intriguing that painting could do that. That it could pull me into it’s world. It had a very human sensation to it. I always wondered what is it that isn’t just information—he seems to have transcended that. I remember when that big catalog came out. I ordered it and sat on my doorstep every day waiting for the mailman, waiting for it to arrive.

LG: That’s an amazing book, The Rizzoli Catalog, it’s probably my favorite and most used artbook. Did you get to see his big show at the Boston MFA?

AG: No, I didn’t get to see the show in Boston. That was horrible to miss that show.

As an undergraduate my teachers showed me Edwin Dickinson’s work, which I found incredibly mysterious and intimate. I also found a little black and white catalog that included British figurative paintings. These painters weren’t as well known at the time, William Coldstream, Lucian Freud, Patrick George, Uglow, Kossoff… I was interested in how the process of perception was present in the work. It was almost like they were mapping their sensation. It reminded me of Giacometti. I became obsessed over that little group of paintings. And then when I was at Norfolk we went to visit the British Museum and I was taken by the back of the collar by one of the teachers and made to sit in front of Kossoff and the Auerbach – saying I should not leave until I sat there. I had seen these pieces in reproduction but it was important to see the touch and the way they seemingly transform, revealing the fleshiness of the paint. That doesn’t reproduce very well, that feeling that I really like about painting. To understand some things about a painting I needed to sit in front of it for some time. So those groups of representational paintings especially, really interested me in school and since.

LG: Is your painting dependent on the model being in front of you in the exact same position? How critical is working directly from life in your work in terms of trying to the sitter’s exact likeness, proportions, skin-tones and such?

AG: I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently. I think it has been changing in my work, how I think about it. I’m used to the tradition of working with the model, where I mark the model and the model tries to sit still in the same place. My studio used to look like a dance studio because I marked my feet where I was standing. It looked like these little shoe-prints everywhere. If I moved a couple of feet closer I would re-mark how everything would change relative to where I was standing. Recently I’ve had a couple of paintings and drawings where the model changed and I followed the change in my painting. I usually have the model in 3 hour sessions and about 2 hours into the session, the model looks different, they give up to gravity, they’re thinking about something else now. My attention seems clearer. There is something more honest in it. So I found myself following that adjustment a lot in my work. Even my own place, I would move in or out and that would change things in the painting. In a technical way, it can make a big muddy mess but it can keep it open. I had to reexamine these same proportions repeatedly. It wasn’t just measuring precision but the idea of re-measuring and re-finding something has become more interesting to me now. Also many of these paintings, the larger ones especially, have gone on for a very long time and sometimes people change. They have gotten ill or they’ve gotten well, their life circumstances have changed. It’s not something I want to ignore; it’s something I want to watch. It’s more truthful; things are constantly changing. When I’m willing to give up what I have, what I see in the painting feels more conscious, more alive.

LG: I remember once reading a quote from Edwin Dickinson, I think, that I something like “a painter should always be paying the model and not the other way around.”

AG: That is probably very good advice.

Rachel with Blue 48 x 42 inches 2012 oil on canvas
image courtesy of Dolby Chadwick and the artist

LG: I’m curious to hear more about your measuring and searching. Would you say measuring helps to free up the painting process; that searching for truth through measuring helps turn off the inclination to paint preconceived notions and helps to keep the painting open?

AG: Yes, The search becomes part of the subject of the painting. The figure is so familiar, it is challenging to see past prejudged ideals of the body and face. Measuring can provide an objective lens for perception.

LG: I find that so fascinating because it seems so counterintuitive that the more you search for accurate mark or tone could be more liberating than with loose, bravura-style brush work. That the actual observation and exactitude doesn’t have to be constraining, like with painters like Euan Uglow with his obsessive measuring, with all his little position marks on the wall.

Euan Uglow, Tension, 1992-3 22 1/4 x 18 5/8 inches
private collection

AG: I was able to see a less finished piece by Uglow a long time ago. It was of back-to-back women, it wasn’t a large painting. It looked like a little study with a very limited palette. I like how he was using that limitation to really ask a precise question about relative measuring.

LG: Your work seems different though, as if the measurement is on a whole other level. It’s not just about measuring; it goes beyond that in a way. Would you say that is true?

AG: There are different kinds of measuring. I have a broad definition of measuring. You used the term that it could be liberating. I think it is, it’s incredibly liberating if I let it take me somewhere. I think I was really struggling with color within figure/ground relationships. I then changed the way I was observing and measuring color. Instead of trying to achieve some correctness about the background or the part of the body, I tried to be accurate the light and how the color could find the light. I had to keep standing back and asking, “is that the color relationship or not?”—so it’s half-measuring and half-feeling because light is very much a sensation, much harder to measure in an objective way.

Robert with Gray Shirt 2012 Oil on masonite 14 x 11 inches
image courtesy of Dolby Chadwick and the artist

INTERVIEW CONTINUES

Rachel with White Robe 2011, oil on masonite, 14 x 11 inches
image courtesy of Dolby Chadwick and the artist

LG: Is there a point where the painting takes on a life of it’s own? Do you respond as much to what you are seeing in the painting as much as seeing on the model?

AG: I try to spend more time with the painting than with the model. Though I’m not always responding, actually putting paint on. Recently I’ve been drawing a lot from my painting. Sometimes I have to turn them to wall and not look at them for a while because I have them memorized, I can’t see them objectively anymore. I have a huge six foot by six foot rolling mirror in my studio and I can look at things through that and that’s helpful but then I just know it too well. But after I’m away from it for a time, I’ll go back and draw from it before the model comes.

LG: While looking at the painting, or the memory of the painting?

AG: Though I occasionally draw from memory, usually I am looking at the painting. I try to draw what I really see. Trying to objectively understand what’s going on in the painting, treating the painting like it’s the subject of the drawing, just drawing it, what I see—not what I may want it to be.

Lately, I’ve also been doing this after the model leaves. I have maybe a 20-minute ride from home and back. I try to use that time to digest what I’m thinking about in my painting. So at the end of the painting day I’ve been writing a little notes, because it feels like things are clearer just as the model is leaving, of what to pay attention to when I come back.

LG: You never really work on the painting when the model isn’t there in front of you?

AG: I do but it is more often editing or refining relationships, than putting things in. I might wipe areas out or scrape things together so that I have to deal with them again.

Portrait with Grid, 2014 oil on masonite 14×11″ 
image courtesy of Dolby Chadwick and the artist

Self Portrait with Blue Stripes, 2008 Oil on Masonite 14 x 11 Inches
image courtesy of Dolby Chadwick and the artist

LG: Do you scrape things down frequently and then build up or is your process more additive? Or is it half and half—additive and subtractive?

AG: It’s both. If I’m only adding paint everything gets very flat so I try to think about there being an inside where I can push a mark into the space of the painting. I admire the palpable sense of atmosphere in Edwin Dickenson’s paintings as he scraped and blurred spots of color with his little finger. Lately I feel like I want to pick marks up and slide other marks underneath but I haven’t figured out how yet. I often have to rebuild spatial intersections.

LG: I haven’t seen your paintings in real life only these higher resolution images give us a glimpse of what your surfaces must be like. I imagine there is a lot going into the building of those surfaces, with taking off and putting on and all kinds of fantastic maneuvers to make those surfaces.

AG: The surfaces are produced from the accumulation of measurements. Pushing areas together pulling apart, scraping and rebuilding. Some areas get dense but I don’t usually let them get too thick because that can hide some optical relationships.

Babs with Ribbons, 2005 Oil on masonite 14 x 11″
collection of the National Academy of Art and Design NY.

Peter with Stripes, 2013  Oil  14 x 11″
image courtesy of Dolby Chadwick and the artist

LG: How do you approach measuring when painting? Is the underlying grid important or do you prefer to do it all more by sight or feel? Do your marks result from measurement or relating forms to an underlying structure or grid? Some of the marks seem to have little to do with a grid and are more turbulent while others seem meditative. Is this something you can talk to us about?

AG: Some of it is very much about the grid, so I was happy to hear that word in your question. It’s always there in the rectangle, very present in my observation. I think it helps to measure against it. To see a gesture compared to a vertical is much more sensitive.

So I’ll follow a lot of those, like plum-lines and horizontals, through the picture to try to see the gesture of the figure, from the knees up through the body to the top of the head. I can get a long measurement with some of the grid lines and I do that a lot in my drawings too. Actually, it’s easier in drawings because I can pull that skinny little line through anything. I’m trying to learn that in my paintings.

Other things are not so much a grid but a linear movement where I’ll follow something that is like a ribbon through space. I think it’s the direction my eye is taking. I might go from the floor, over someone’s lap and into the background. I think of it as kind of a path through the painting and through the figure. I’ll repeat that several times, sometimes I’ll cover an area of the painting so that I can travel through the painting and avoid filling in, or getting stuck on some nameable object, a chair or a head.

As I’m observing, I’m trying not to follow the things with names, I’m trying to follow my way between them and through them. So I’m thinking of either that grid that hangs through everything or these other paths that are available that move through the figure and space.

LG: Why do you fragment the form and not paint it in continuous tones or broader tones?  Are you trying to paint the atmosphere around the head as much as the head itself?

AG: The fragmentation is the residue of repeatedly measuring with pieces of color. Sometimes when I look at a piece of color in space, near the figure on the wall, sometimes it almost feels like that color is almost pushing on the figure and sometimes it feels that it’s sliding behind it. I know where the wall is but I’m trying to look at what’s that little moment of color doing. I try to mark each piece of color relative to one or two other pieces of color. I’ll often find three pieces of color, forming a triangle in space that goes in and out of the figure. I’ll revisit and readjust them. This accumulates into the atmosphere of the painting.

LG: So with the shapes of your mark-making, you mentioned you might find a triangular shape of color that goes in and out of the figure. How do you determine those shapes? Is it more of an intuitive thing? What are your thoughts about your mark-making and what determines their shape or quality? 

AG: What determines what I pay attention to?

LG: Some of your marks seem very slow, careful and meditative and others seem more turbulent, gestural and less on a grid. So I’m curious how you determine the shape of these marks.

AG: I think I know what you mean. Some things I observe, I have to slow down and be very calculated and the mark would then do the same thing. I’ll add little, short marks will that are trying to tighten up some little calculation or comparison. Things like the gesture, trying to get the weight or the movement through space or any kind of bigger gestural comparison is more accurate if I’m doing it faster. Like a 30 second gesture drawing can sometimes be more accurate in terms of gesture than spending an hour on it.

LG: Right, that’s a good way of saying it.

AG: It’s necessary in my painting to make those big gestural movements.

Rachel, 2007 Oil on canvas 58 x 46 inches

2007 study for Rachel

LG: I love how you control the form openness, closing and opening the edges in and out with the background, we really can breathe the air in your paintings. I’m curious to hear about your edges. Do you manipulate edges with the knife or mix color on the canvas or do you mainly just mix on the palette and leave the brush stroke alone once applied?

AG: I mix my paint on the palette. I’ll put the color down and try to see if it looks different on the palette than it looks in the context of the painting. (I might ask myself) Is that right or does it need to be a little more intense or a little darker compared to some other color? I’ll mix a new version of the color on my palette. I don’t blend in the painting. But some of the marks get bent or pushed in because I’m measuring space. I have to let go of one thing to do another, sometimes I have to say to hell with the color for a little while because I need to consider how measure and manipulate the space. To do that I might need to manipulate the thickness of the mark or the clarity of the mark or edge.

LG: Is there anything that tends to give you the most trouble in a painting?

AG: I think getting something significant overall when I stand back. I don’t know what I would call it. Sometimes all the little parts that I’m working on any painting will be there, but then there’s a bigger more elusive relationship…

LG: Like with a color relationship?

AG: Certainly, sometimes I can get the little neighborhoods of color to work however the big ones will be difficult. Especially on a large painting I have a lot of little marks and so I struggle with standing back a lot I wish I had an eight foot brush I could paint with because I can’t see the whole painting while I’m painting. But it’s also the representation, does it feel like something is in there, is there a consciousness, an intensity of moment inside the painting. That’s not just something I can put in. I have to keep paying attention to the whole and remember to question that. That’s why I’ll often do a lot of little drawings of the painting. Something has to work on a larger scale in the painting and that’s difficult.

LG: In an earlier interview you said:  “I started to look at people in terms of their color environment and the presence had to do a lot with not just the local color of themselves but what color they seemed in a certain situation”. Does this play a role in getting unity in your paintings? What might you share with regard to unity and harmony in painting?

AG: I started to think about the phenomena of color when I had this wonderful model with a pale yellow skin. And it seemed like she had almost a purple shadow going down her torso but when I tried to paint it, it wasn’t purple at all even though it seemed purple. I had to get everything in the painting to have kind of golden hue. I could then see that the purple was really just a bit less gold color than the other colors. This was a great learning experience. I may easily name what an individual color is but the phenomena of the color, what the color feels like, requires a sensitivity to the larger context.

LG: So you build the whole painting around making the sensation of that color happen?

AG: Often that will be a key, a measurement that I will keep going back to and so it’s a way of unifying the painting. And a way of getting one presence that goes through the whole painting. In a sense, the gesture of color.

“Space Between” oil on mylar, 14 x 11” 2012
images courtesy of the artist

Gary, oil on canvas 48 x 42” 2005
collection of Portland Art Museum

Cézanne is reported to have said:

“Art which does not have emotion as its principle is not an art…Emotion is the principle, the beginning and the end, the craft, the objective, the execution is in the middle.”

LG: Would you say that painting from life is as much about optics as the experience of being in a place and connecting with the thing you are painting?

AG: I admire work that is about optics and work that is more concerned with emotion.  But with me, in terms of optics, there is kind of emotional or psychological connection that I am pursuing.

LG: Right, some painters may worry about risking sentimentality, that emotionalism might detract from the formal concerns and prefer a detachment in their work. Your paintings seem to have a good balance between the formal and the humanistic. Your work seems to go beyond the optical experience. Can you speak about that?

AG: I think being precise with the formal language brings specificity and weight to the subject, emotional or whatever the subject may be. Though we can speak about these concepts separately, in a painting I think of them together. During the adjustment of the figure, the space and the light itself becomes an emotional character. While there is a precision to the measuring, there is also an intimacy that is revealed and equally crucial to the process. Though the figures are abstracted through this process, they are not neutralized as subjects.

LG: Can you tell us something about the role your relationship with the sitter plays? Are these people you know? Would you say you are also trying to evoke an emotional presence in the paint? Do you start the painting with this thought in mind or does the painting have to evolve on it’s own terms?

AG: It starts in different ways. It can start with a memory. I’ve painted some models for many years and have spent a lot of time with them and so now have specific memories of them and I will do the painting to deal with that memory. Sometimes it refers more to another person that they remind me of, or an older memory of someone else. But often it transforms into something else because of the immediacy of what I’m actually looking at. And so it becomes this conversation between what I’ve started with and what I’m observing in the moment.

Often it has to do with the light. As the quality of light changes through the year, it transforms the emotional character of the painting. I struggle with how to continue. Lately I’ve been very interested in taking that leap and following the observation wherever it’s going. If I can be open to that, it might give me a fresh eye, like “I haven’t seen this before, or I haven’t noticed this feeling about this person before.” So the painting will show me something that I’m lucky to see and I’ll grab onto that. The emotional character of the people is a tangle of things they remind me of and how they’re changing in front of me.

LG: Would you say these things that remind you of something causes you to transcend the specifics of that sitter to something more universal or beyond that person?

AG: Usually it’s something more intimate, something may remind me of the way my father sat, one of those emotional characters in my life. That memory helps me pay attention to the sitter more acutely.

Peter Turning, 2013 Oil on linen on covered masonite 14 x 11 inches
image courtesy of Dolby Chadwick and the artist

Peter 14 x 11 inches graphite on paper
2014 image courtesy of the artist

LG: What do you think about figurative painting today? Who are some people that excite you most and why?

AG: My studio is filled with a lot of catalogs and books and cards on the wall. It doesn’t seem to matter if it is new. I also don’t just look at figurative painters, I really admire Jake Berthot’s paintings and drawings, as well as Stuart Shils paintings, Alex Kanevsky – Alex has a space that feels like a strange dream or memory, Sangram Majumdar has such beautiful color, color as subject, he understands color. I think some sculptors are interesting, especially the way they draw, like Rachael Whiteread. Her drawings are really sensitive and beautiful and Marlene Dumas is making some very powerful paintings.

LG: You will be teaching this summer in Italy at the JSS summer program in Civita where many students will be painting outdoor landscapes – any thoughts on how teaching painting the figure will differ from the landscape? Or do you think that is even an issue?

AG:  It’s mostly perceptual painting. So with just those two words there is plenty to talk about. What is it you think you are seeing and how are you building the painting. I love looking at landscape painting. I often look at landscape paintings for a sense of the whole. I feel there can be a sense of whole, like an epiphany, I feel like I can understand the whole thing in a landscape.

I’m looking forward to discussing landscape paintings because it’s something I look at a lot. We will have many common things such as light, space, mark and paint. I’m really looking forward to seeing the light in Italy again. I haven’t painted over there in awhile. The last time it shook up my palette, making me realize I had a lot of color habits that I didn’t even know I had. Painting in such a different climate, it really taught me a lot.

LG: I imagine painting indoors and outdoors would be a significant difference too in terms of your palette.

AG: That’s a hard thing to learn too, to be efficient and have studio or painting habits that will work. Actually right before we talked I was meeting with a graduate student who I just sent out in the rain to paint. You have to figure out a way to do it. I admire that about landscape painters, they figure out a way. Deciding what they really need to bring with them and how to get it done. There is something great about alla prima painting too. It makes you decide on your priorities, what do you really need to resolve before you walk away. It’s good to be faced with those questions.

LG:  Do you plan on painting landscape yourself? Are you bringing your painting supplies? 

AG: I hope so, I’m not sure what the set up is yet. All I know is that it can be hot.

LG: Sometimes it can be, but if you get up early and find shade it’s not bad.

AG: I will probably bring some supplies and I will be traveling after the program’s over with my family. I’m sure I will at least do some drawing and studies.

LG: The JSS has so many terrific excursions to see all the great museums, churches and places. My favorite is the Morandi Museum in Bologna, just fabulous.

AG: Just that would be worth the trip.

Robert with Skylight, 2012 Oil on canvas 54 x 44″ 
image courtesy of Dolby Chadwick and the artist

Self Portrait with Headband, 2007 Oil on linen on masonite 14 x 11 inches
image courtesy of Dolby Chadwick and the artist

LG: What qualities do you think a great painting teacher should have?

AG: I’ve learned the hard way that I can’t really tell my students a lot or force them to understand. I’ve learned to take my time.  I’m a better teacher when I’m asking them a pertinent question, one that gets them to look at the painting for the answer. Even in a beginning class I’m a better teacher when I’m getting them to be their own critic. I’m giving them the questions to ask of their work, so they can better critique their paintings. So they can make decisions that aren’t just for technical reasons, something bigger than that. Sometimes it’s hard to take that time, when I’m in a hurry I’m tempted to give them the easier answer and show them a way to fix something but I don’t think that’s being a good teacher. I have to take my time and ask questions that will make them really consider their paintings.

LG: When is your next show? Where can we see your work?

AG: My first show at the Steve Harvey this coming January. I’m very excited about my first show with Steve Harvey, I’m crossing my fingers. I admire the painters he shows. The following year I have a show at the Dolby Chadwick in San Francisco.

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