Jerome Witkin January 2006 (photo from a flickr Syracuse University PhotoStream)

Painting Perceptions is incredibly fortunate to have talked at length with Jerome Witkin recently, thanks to Bill Murphy, who suggested the idea of an interview and helped me get in touch with Mr. Witkin. I’d again like to express my gratitude to Professor Witkin who was so incredibly generous to give up so much time to do this interview; sharing his rich experiences as well as discussing his current work, life and concerns. In addition to the text and images I have also made an audio podcast available so you can also listen to the interview, click on the podcast button at the end of the article.

Jerome Witkin was born in 1939 in Brooklyn, NY to a Jewish father and a Roman Catholic mother and has an identical twin brother, the renowned photographer, Joel Peter Witkin. His art talent’s blossomed early, winning art prizes and scholarships that allowed him to live and travel in Europe and who would meet and get know such leading painters such as Ben Shahn, Isabel Bishop, Giorgio Morandi, Jack Levine, Philip Guston, Willem deKooning, Alice Neel and many other important painters such as R.B. Kitaj – who is reported to have cited Witkin as “the greatest figurative painter in America.” Art historian Donald Kuspit, called Witkin’s works “dreams in the grand visionary manner of the Old Masters” . . . painted with the rhapsodic abandon of pure sensation . . . unequivocal masterpieces.” The art critic Kenneth Baker once stated that “Witkin’s only peer is Lucien Freud.” I’m usually skeptical of art critic’s declarations of someone being “America’s greatest figurative painter” and don’t give much more credibility than I would Joe’s Diner claiming they have “America’s Best Hotdogs” but in the case of Jerome Witkin there is no doubt in my mind he is worthy of such high praise. Perhaps what impresses me most with his painting is that he builds upon the rich tradition of narrative figure painting into grand works that are of our times. His paintings work on a multiplicity of levels of meaning, artistry and vision that speaks to the advanced painters and other people with great knowledgeable about art as well as people who know little about art but care deeply about life and the troubles we humans often find ourselves in.

Many works often explore issues of spirituality and inner landscapes – looking directly from his life experiences. One example involves his father who died at age fifty, after living several years homeless on the streets. In an effort to understand his father better he began to look at his Jewish history and in particular, the Holocaust. This resulted in a series of monumental works about the Holocaust done over a twenty-three years. Many of these images are shown later in this article, these paintings huge size and complexity makes it important to view them enlarged to get closer to viewing the full experience. Jerome Witkin has been a Professor of Painting at Syracuse University in Syracuse, New York since 1971. (as an aside, I have an interview planned next week with one of his former students, David Kassan) A terrific book as well as many articles in leading art magazines and newspapers have been written about him, I have put some links to a few of these at the end of this article.

Witkin’s works are found in the permanent collection of prominent museums around the world that include the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., and the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy.

Bridge 1973 24 x 22 inches Oil

Larry Groff:

Well, thanks again for agreeing to do this interview with me. I really appreciate it. There’s going to be a lot of painters who will really get a lot out of this, I’m sure.

I have basically about four, maybe five questions for you. The first question that I [have] was I was reading in your Life Lessons catalog, you had stated in there that in 1997, you asked yourself, What do I care about most? You went on to say that, “Improving the world is a noble and high desire; that human nature can be improved, and to do this requires constantly good actions: one-on-one, political doing justice.” How do I affect this, you asked yourself. Is my work really that strong? Is my presence as a teacher doing this?

How would you now answer these questions you asked of yourself back then?

Jerome Witkin:

Wow.

Larry Groff:

If you can. Speak to that however you want.

Jerome Witkin:

Well, let me think about that.

Larry Groff:

What do you care about most?

Kill-Joy, To the Passion of Kathe Kollwitz (Kreischerville Wall) detail 1975-76 74 x 79O inches Oil on Canvas
Please click for larger view (note: most all the rest of the images in this article have a larger view that MUST be clicked!)

Jerome Witkin:

That’s interesting. I mean, right now, I have to shift it to my son because he just went through a bone marrow transplant. He’s had two horrible years of really being very ill, and the transplant, actually, was successful. As to last Monday, he was engrafted 100 percentile and he’s getting now, on a daily basis, a maintenance situation that will go on for two more months. We spoke to him tonight.

I think there is something about life and art. I mean, if we didn’t have certain experiences with other people reflecting human nature gone wrong, or even human nature gone right, we’d have a background of trauma or background of somebody loving us where you love them back.

I think it’s a matter of how you survive certain situations and then what you do with your art. I mean, I think that’s a big problem. Because my son was so ill, and I knew that eventually he would be in a life and death situation, I made myself, this semester work in my class, and be as normal as possible.

I made myself get into a very large project in my studio which would be really challenging to me, only because I really wanted to be able to stay active. In my work I can forget almost everything. In terms of around me, I could absorb myself in it.

At the same time, my work, of late … About two years ago I began a picture about Dorothy Day (link to wikipedia page on Dorothy Day), because I was really interested—and I still am—in how one person affects society. And I did a painting of her which maybe is not my best painting ever, but I think I learned a lot from it. And I have that in my studio now. A finished thing with a lot of pretty good studies.

In reading about Dorothy Day, in her statements, and trying to formulate an image that would summarize her in gesture and action was a very deep challenge. All I know is that you do what you do, and you hope it makes sense and you hope it’s accessible. And I think that’s a very large issue, accessibility, and also being honest with where you find yourself in your interest and how to explore that.

The Act of Judith 1979-80 60 x48 inches Oil on Canvas

I also did, right after that, a very large thirty foot 5-panel painting about Martin Luther King and the destruction of the noose. And again, I had a lot of African-American  people pose for me along the way, and they were telling me things which I would never have realized without having a special demand on myself.

I learned from that. I put in twenty-five years, at least, in [paintings about -ed] the Holocaust, as a half-Jew myself; my father being Jewish. All that interest in why there is human suffering and how people survive that, as best they can, or make some sense of suffering.

I wanted to be involved with the [heroics] of King, who by the way I met very shortly to say hello, how are you, in front of a Baptist church in Baltimore when I was about twenty-five or twenty-four. I never thought I’d be making a picture about him or the civil rights situation, but you never know. You never know why you get involved.

Headstone Portrait Of Claudia Glass 1981 Triptych 78 x 53 inches Oil on Canvas

I also met John Lewis, who is now, of course, the aging congressman from Georgia. Again, when he was a very young guy, I was a young guy in my first teaching job. I’d never met, or talked with, an African American person about politics. We sat down in a classroom and I said, “What are you doing?” He was explaining things, and I was deeply impressed by this guy. He stays an impressive person to me to this day.

What I’m trying to say is I think that we’re stumbling into experiences, and though we must feel intuitively drawn to one or two or three of these experiences, along the way, and really delve into them, because I think all these life lessons are messages that are very valuable to us if we explore it.

More than any other painter, Wayne Thiebaud makes me smile when I see his work. He is not only one of the world’s greatest living painters but he also seems the best way to start the new year. There is an affirmation of life in his obvious joy of paint and color together with his masterly drawing makes his paintings unforgettable. At 88 he is still going strong, his recent work of beach scenes and landscapes show he is continuing to investigate and push his painting still further.
I recently saw the delightful show “Wayne Thiebaud: 70 years of Painting” at the Pasadena Museum of California Art (up until Jan. 31) I was in a great mood all week after seeing the incredible range of subjects and explorations painted over the past 70 years. There is an excellent book (printed in 2000) with very good reproductions: Wayne Thiebaud: A Paintings Retrospective from Amazon by Steven A. Nash and Adam Gopnik

Podcast with Wayne Thiebaud and Adam Gopnik

I found these two very good videos and a podcast with an excellent interview. Listening to him talking about his life and painting here has also been inspiring and gives some great food for thought. In particular, the podcast interview with Adam Gopnik ( art critic from the New Yorker magazine) (almost 1 hour) from KALW at the San Francisco Jewish Community Center was particularly engaging. If you haven’t yet heard this you are in for a treat.

Also, a good article by Ben Bamsey about his Wayne Thiebaud can be read in this ArtWorks Magazine article from fall 2009.

another interview with Wayne Thiebaud (with Colin Smith) The difference between a Wolf and a Dog.

Your more recent work, especially with the Wildfire series, your work takes on a more abstract, expressionist and darker tone. I can’t help but wonder what the underlying narrative is with these wildfire and ice flow paintings. I imagine them to be at least, in part, having ecological, as well as psychological overtones. I was hoping you could speak about that.

Eric Aho:
That’s a really good question, and one that I’m speaking a lot about, right now, as I’m meeting people in the gallery in New York. I was there over the weekend, and visitors wanted to know specifically about the wildfire paintings, if they’re about the California wildfires.

And, for the most part, they’re not. I’ve never witnessed a wildfire before. The series of fire paintings that are up and exhibited right now grow out of a single painting by Rembrandt, which is the Rest on the Flight into Egypt. It’s the group of figures around a bonfire, a campfire, with this really wonderful, warm, comforting light, with a full moon breaking over a ridgeline, a real dark, black, that space that one just can’t pass through. And beyond that ridge that is this gorgeous, crystal, silvery moonlight. I’ve just been fascinated by the contrast of those two sources, types of light

Rembrandt van Rijn Rest on the Flight into Egypt 1647 oil on canvas 13 x 18 inches

I tried to make that painting in my studio. I tried to copy that Rembrandt painting, both from memory and from little postcards, and it was just an absolute failure. I put that project aside for a little while.

And then one day, I’m driving out of town, running some errands, and the local farmer, just on the edge of town, is burning brush. It’s late in March, the moon is rising, and the smoke from the brushfire [is] mixing with the clouds. And in that mix I see that Rembrandt painting, right there. All of the conditions of it are so right.

I set up immediately, and I started making some paintings, on sight. Those small plein air canvases led me into a group of larger paintings, in the studio, of a contained brushfire. And when I had kind of worked through that, a little bit, I might have made six or eight 50 inch paintings, I then started imagining that fire, sort of just stepping out of its bounds, a little bit, and going out of control. It’s not overtaking the landscape, so much as kind of seeping into it.

And I realized that the paintings became more about imagination and about the course of imagination, than they were about actual fires. I used the fires as that classical reference to imagination, and I just ran with it.

Red Winter 2008 Oil on linen, 50 x 80 inches

It was also a way for me to create a personal metaphor for clearing the landscape, the classical landscape that I had been drawn to, and which t I had been painting myself. I literally burned it down. I didn’t know that when I was starting the project; but as I was in the middle of it, I realized these trees, these white birches and these other spruces that are toppling over are essentially like pillars of classicism that I’m trying to get beyond, or do something different with.

I’ve never experienced a wildfire, and I have tried very, very hard not to subject myself to any photographs on the subject. Of course it’s in the news, and it’s a very current issue in the news, certainly for everyone in California. I read the news, but I try not to look at the pictures.

Very recently, a friend sent me some jpegs — he had taken photographs of the Santa Barbara fires, on a trip of his last year — and I had five or six jpegs on the screen, and I scrolled through them. One of them was of an abandoned swimming pool, in this perfectly manicured, California — what comes to mind is a Hollywood-type home — modernist house, just a perfect existence. This pool, it’s abandoned and still lit, glowing green and right behind it, ten yards away, is this massive wildfire.

I saw that image, and I said, “Oh my gosh, that’s exactly the kind of contrast and extreme that I’m interested in approaching with my paintings.”

So, I closed up the email. I went upstairs into the studio the next day or that weekend, and I made a pool painting. It’s the first painting I’ve ever made, which I can say is made in response to a photograph. I changed the kidney-shaped pool to a rectangle, for my purposes, hoping to create a counterpoint to the ice cut painting.

California Wildfires Oil on Linen 48 x 52 inches

Because I was also thinking, Well, the black ice cut, has this black void, and I’ve made three of these now, and I hope to make a series of about ten. But then I realized, Well, why does the void have to be black? And in that pool painting, I realized that the void can be ethereal and light-filled, and the blackness can surround it.

So there’s something about the wilderness taking over this perfectly situated domestic symbol, the pool, which is also quite an American symbol, in some ways. So those are things that are presenting themselves right now. So the pool paintings really do have to do with the California wildfires, to a certain extent.
Just coincidentally, I was coming back from a trip to Colorado. This always amazes me, but I was sitting on the plane next to a young woman who was traveling to North Carolina, where we were switching planes, and we didn’t say much during the flight; but at fifteen minutes before landing, you have that inevitable conversation with your fellow passenger. And it turns out that she’s an urban planner, and her particular field of expertise is wildfire management. She’s a national expert on both wildfire prevention and wildfire planning. And she’s employed by the Florida state government at the moment.

She shared her thesis papers with me. They are a bit technical, beyond me really, but there’s a narrative that runs through them. I’m absolutely fascinated by them. So I have kind of opened up the lid on further investigation into the actuality of the wildfire. But like I said, they’re still about an experience of painting, particularly, and that gets to one of your previous questions of, the landscape as a point of departure.

LG
So, this is always a hard question to get into in depth, but, I just thought I would ask you, who [are] some of the past and contemporary landscape painters that most excite or influence you?

Eric Aho:
Well, that is a tough question. You specifically asked about landscape painters. I’m thinking, Well, gosh, I don’t know. Do I know any?

But I am primarily looking at figurative work. I’m obsessed with Rembrandt, obsessed with understanding and getting to that. From Rembrandt, I even get into the English painters, like Frank Auerbach and Lucian Freud, both of whom are heroes of mine; and Frank Auerbach, in particular. These people are in their eighties, now.

LG
Well, Auerbach did a number of landscapes, as I recall, right? I remember seeing some cityscape, landscape imagery …

Eric Aho:
Yes, right. And he is a particularly good example of the landscape that maintains that sort of fleshy, gritty, figurative human experience. They’re not pictures, so much, as they are things. [Laughing]

And then there’s the painter Jenny Saville. I think she is interesting. I’ve become really curious, lately, about Cecily Brown. She’s making paintings about figures having sex in the landscape, they are built out of a just some kind of mush of paint, but there’s something very joyous about them. There’s something very physical, very aggressive, very big; but naturalistic too, to a certain extent. I find that really interesting. In the end, however, they are formless.

You mentioned Antonio López Garcia. I was struck by the recent exhibition in Boston, sort of the way one’s struck by being in the presence of — well, one of my visits was with George Nick, and I said, “George,” I said, “I’m having a hard time taking all this in. I’m actually feeling a little bit queasy,” because I was having such a varied and excited response to it.

“Do you know why that’s happening?” he asked. “Because you’re in the presence of true genius.”

I think that’s undeniable, in his case. That’s very, very exciting.

A painter like Andrew Wyeth, everyone has such mixed feelings about him. I admire him. I know he passed away recently. I admire his commitment to his subject, and his commitment to both the landscape and his figurative subjects, immensely. He spent his entire life chronicling these places and these people. Like López Garcia, a deep, deep commitment to the slow development and slow unraveling of the painting process. But it’s Wyeth’s detail that I find excruciatingly hard to take, but I think underneath all that detail is an armature of abstraction that’s really exciting.

And for that reason, I see him standing back-to-back, in a way, with someone like Ellsworth Kelly, who is a minimalist, abstract painter. Where Wyeth is kind of an anti-intellectual, Kelly is definitely an intellectual in his work. But his abstraction, to me, grows out of a naturalistic and observed experience; a shadow on a wall, the edge of the curve of a plant — all of these things add up to his interest in abstraction.

So those are painters that I look at.

There’s a young Canadian painter. He’s kind of working in too much of a New York Chelsea kind of style right now, for my taste, but there’s something about his attitude toward the landscape that I find interesting. His name is Kim Dorland. He makes statements to the effect that he’s interested in the legacy of Tom Thompson.

Do you know Tom Thompson’s work, the Canadian painter?

LG
No, I don’t, or the name doesn’t ring a bell, anyway.

Eric Aho:
[A] painter who died very young, but worked from about 1907 to about 1917. Look him up. They are about the best examples of an expressionistic, plein air, direct experience painting ever to have been achieved.

Tom Thomson Canoe and lake, Algonquin Park 1913 oil on canvas laid on panel, 6 x 9 inches

Eric Aho:
I mean, so much of all my work has been built on the experience that Tom Thompson puts forward in his painting, and I say that unabashedly. I’ve tried to digest each and every one of his little paintings.

He painted in Algonquin Park, Canada just after Cézanne’s death, 1907 to 1917. [He] wasn’t fully aware of Cézanne — well, knew about Cézanne, might have seen some things in Toronto or Chicago — but for the most part, he was just working independently, without influence. And remarkable things happened, and his life was cut short by a canoeing accident.

So here’s a young painter (Dorland) who’s over influenced by fashion, but underneath that, I can still see that he’s got some solid core ideas, that are very exciting. But I think you’ll see what I mean if you look him up.

Kim Dorland.RIP Tom Thomson 2009

Then there are certainly slews of others. It’s a daunting list. I guess I look at so many things, and so many things excite me.

LG
In California, I was excited to hear there’s currently a big landscape show of Charles Burchfield’s work, watercolors, who I think is very interesting, I would think to you, because he also is painting outside, but had a number of interesting, abstract points of departure from his work outside.

Charles Burchfield For the beauty of the earth 1959 Watercolor and Charcoal 33 x 40 inches

Eric Aho:
He internalized that landscape so closely and so personally, and I’m very excited about that show. I’ll wait and see it when it gets to New York, unless I have a chance to get out to California in the next couple of months.

LG
Well, if we have any wildfires out here, you’re welcome to come paint.

Eric Aho:
[Laughing] That would be great.

And I’m also really excited because the gallery in New York represents the Burchfield estate …

Eric Aho:
… and they had a hand in organizing that show. Bridget Moore, the dealer hasn’t ever said this directly, but I like to believe that one of the reasons that I fit into that stable is that she sees I may have some relationship to the Burchfield attitude towards the landscape.

There are so many people working with the landscape in remarkable and varied ways, but Burchfield —but I feel so close to him, much the way that I do Tommy Thompson or Frank Auerbach. I think there’s something kindred in that attitude.

And coincidentally, Burchfield was also very much of a Fennophile — a lover of Finnish culture.

Eric Aho:
I spoke with Robert Gober about this, a little bit. He’s the curator for the Burchfield show at the Hammer Museum. And Gober wasn’t aware that Burchfield was so deeply enamored with Finnish culture from music, poetry and architecture, and also through meeting the Finns who lived in upstate New York, and who worked in the mines and various other industries.

He gathered a sense from the national music, from Sibelius, in particular, that the Finnish sense of nature, which is mysterious and engaged and full of imagination, in a way eerily similar to Burchfield’s own unique work..

LG:
I can see that.

Eric Aho:
So I would venture to guess that there’s a lot there that could be unearthed with a bit of research. His interest in the Finnish Culture gives me great insight into his work and his person.

LG:
Last question. Do you think landscape painters — or I should say, really, painters — can or should speak to the many environmental issues that confront us? Is this something that interests or concerns you at all?

Eric Aho:
Yes and no. A student asked me this question, after a lecture recently and I said, “You know, you would my ice paintings were about global warming, and the fire paintings were about the California wildfires, and the change in the environment, and the impact on the environment, and all this.”

And I said, “Well, I’m fully aware that all of that’s happening.” I read the news, and I pay attention to the changing — even the small aspects of change around me here — winters are a little bit different than they were fifteen years ago. I’m no scientist, and I’m certainly not an activist. I don’t think painting really is the vehicle for that, any longer.

I’m happy that the paintings of the wildfires may draw some attention, or draw some parallel to what’s going on in California, if it increases anyone’s awareness, I think that’s only a good thing. But I think other mediums now: film and video and photography are so much more immediate and digestible, publicly, that I think those are the greater mediums for activism and drawing public attention to these events.

Painting is such a quiet, long-term pursuit, it doesn’t function in quite the same way as it did for Daumier and Goya and artists like that; although, an artist like William Kentridge certainly has this tremendous activism in his work, and it carries a tremendous impact. But I dare say, his audience is still pretty limited to those who follow art.

So, yes, I think it’s important for the painter to reconcile his or her own personal feelings about that issue, and be fairly clear about it; that yes, I’m here to make a message in this body of work or in this painting or in my life’s work. There’s Leon Golub and Nancy Spero who are famous for that.

Or you just accept that you’re doing something very different, and it’s okay to be involved in purely formal concerns, even while California is burning to the ground.

Eric Aho Fire Three 2007 Oil on linen, 50 x 70 inches

LG:
Well, you look at an artist like Fairfield Porter, and his work seems about as apolitical as you can get, but yet, in his personal life, he was a flaming, radical environmentalist.

Eric Aho:
That’s right. That’s right.

LG:
I think he made a lot of contributions, financially, to groups and other parts of his time, but the painting didn’t seem to make sense to do that. Unless it was the earlier work he did, I suppose.

Eric Aho:
Well, I agree. I think it’s important to do what you can do. Some people contribute to political causes. I mean, we each have our philanthropic concerns we give to, or we don’t. And everyone’s free to make those decisions.

The paintings that I’m making, the ice and the fires, they’re about extremes of imagination, more than anything else, and I’m really interested in how far an individual or how far, particularly myself, I can push my imagination. What are my limits?

I’m not saying they’re very great. I’m just saying that I’m interested in that point that we can’t go beyond, in a way, and the fire and the ice mark those kind of lines that you can’t pass.

Hopefully, those keep expanding, for myself and an audience, but I am aware that we all have limitations, and certainly painting is about limitation.

Audio Podcast of interview (approx. 1 hour) – right click to save to hard drive

Interview with Eric Aho – Part One
Interview with Eric Aho – Part Two

Can you speak more about these thoughts? Actually, you just did, in many ways, but I’m particularly interested in the relying on stories part. That seems a part of your paintings as well, from what I’ve seen.

Eric Aho:
I remember saying something like that in relation to a group of paintings that followed one of my Fellowship Projects in Scandinavia.

LG:
I believe that was it, yes.

Eric Aho:
In the case of this project that I’m talking about, it was a historical path of both the glacial retreat, and how that created the landscape in Finland and Northern Scandinavia, as well as the history of World War II, where the occupying German forces retreated from Finland and engaged in what was called a scorched-earth policy.

They burned everything in front of them, and destroyed not only the towns, but also the harvestable, usable and beautiful landscape in front of them. They created a vast swath that coincidentally followed much the same path as the glacial drag. So there are two compounding histories: one natural and one human; both destructive but both regenerative, as well, or subsequently regenerative.

I guess I’ve always been interested in the narrative potential for painting. I’m much more interested in that than I am in spectacle, which is the art of just throwing the paint around and saying, “Well, here it is.” I’m much more interested in accomplishing something that has the weight of some human experience: whether it’s mine, just by sitting there on a hillside, observing and thinking about things such as that, or occasionally I get to encounter a farmer who has an anecdote or two about the land that he works on every day. I’ve often joked with some of these farmers that what I’m doing and what they’re doing isn’t that far removed, because we both are relying on the seasons and what’s dropped into our laps in terms of reaping the harvest, so to speak.

But placing myself in those scenarios really taught me that, the more that I, as a painter and as an individual am connected to the work that I’m doing, the very process that I’m engaged in, that belief, if you will, is transferred to the viewers, to the audience. I don’t need to have a wall-text that tells you X and such anecdote that some crazy Finnish farmer told me, because I’m not interested in that kind of journalism.

But I do know that, the story I learned — and I might tell you, incidentally, in an interview, or I might tell a friend at dinner or something — that, that kind of engagement, though, becomes compressed into the painting, and it adds to my belief and connection to it.

I think so much of what we do is based on a belief and a kind of confidence. We have to believe what we do matters, because if you’re tentative and hesitant in the painting, it shows through. Now there are certainly painters who make delicate and tentative paintings, but I’m talking about something very different. I’m talking about the propulsion of that inner experience, and letting the painting, then, have its own life.

So those stories aren’t told directly by the painting. I have a recent painting in the show that’s up in New York now, of a hole cut in the ice with antique ice cutting equipment. It tells numerous stories, if one wanted to investigate. It talks about ice harvesting in rural New England. It talks about the Finnish sauna culture; the cooling hole after the hot steam bath. It references Gustave Courbet and Kasimir Malevich and Ellsworth Kelly and even Andrew Wyeth. So those kind of stories become compounded in a singular, visual image. In that case, it’s a very simple and austere painting, but it actually has more storyline in it than anything else.

Ice Cut 2008 oil on linen 50 x 70 inches

LG:
You had some sort of personal connection to the ice harvesting with your family, as I recall.

Eric Aho:
That’s right. Well, it was pretty common for rural families, in the 19th century, and then up until about World War II, to be involved in ice harvesting. My father grew up in a very large, a very tight Finnish community in Western Massachusetts, and he told us many tales about that life; but most notably, really, is his experience harvesting ice in the winters. It would be cut and then loaded on trains, and sent to Boston, or Worcester, or wherever it ended up going.

In a way I couldn’t have imagined, this became the story that he told just a few hours before he died. He was reliving the scale of events and the experience. You’re talking about the sound of the steam locomotives and the smell of the wet wool and the numb fingers and the Finnish language in the air, and the smell of coffee; and of course, then, the frightening whir of the saw and the cracking of the ice — I mean, things like that created an imprint on this ten-year-old boy, that he carried with him for his entire life.

They were the kind of stories as kids, when we would say, “Oh, gosh, Dad, no, not again. We don’t need to hear that again.” But he was insistent upon it. I think everybody has an uncle or a relative who just can’t stop on a few subjects. But many, many years later, I realized that this was an image that I need to make for myself, since I no longer have that experience, or I don’t have that experience as a person. We have a refrigerator.

Eric Aho:
So I don’t need to cut the ice other than to maintain some connection to what’s not here any more.

When I made that painting, I realized the other paintings I had been making of the big views weren’t very personal, even though I was sitting on this hill: a gorgeous landscape, a hill in New Hampshire, which was my childhood home, looking into Vermont, which is now my adult home, and I would try to imagine that there was some kind of autobiography happening there — but not really — in the end, it just became a beautiful view.

But a painting like this just showed me what I need to start getting at, I think, and I’ve been painting for twenty years. So it was kind of surprising that now, twenty years later, I just feel like I’m getting started, like what we were saying earlier, when we just started the phone call, about we’re just scratching the surface. It’s both really exciting and a little frustrating that after twenty years, I’m just scratching the surface.

But I think George Nick would say the same thing, after painting for close to sixty years.

LG:
Well, there’s always the famous old saw of, on Michelangelo’s deathbed, of crying and moaning that if only he could have painted good enough — he was worried he wasn’t going to get into heaven, or something.

Eric Aho:
[Laughing] Right. I think they have a special elevator for painters who can really paint.

Orange Conveyor 2007 oil on linen 42 x 76 inches

LG:
You received a Fulbright Scholarship which enabled you to paint in Finland, where you have roots. Is your amazing painting, the Black Ice on the North Sea, that’s in your current show, is this from that time there? Can you talk more about what it was like to be there, in Finland, painting? Or that whole experience?

Eric Aho:
That Fulbright year led into, oh, fifteen subsequent years of painting and traveling to Finland to paint, to exhibit; to teach, and conduct a parallel life over there for a good many years, which I don’t do, quite as much now, with my two kids and family and work keeping me here. It’s been a year-and-a-half, two years, now, since I’ve been over.

Black Ice on the North Sea no. 3 2009 Oil on linen, 10 x 12 inches

The painting you’re asking about here, the Black Ice on the North Sea, is painted in my studio, and it is part of a group of paintings that are really about memories of the furthest, remotest places I’ve ever traveled to, as a way to satisfy my wanderlust, which I’m not able to really, like I said, participate in right now.

So I can go to the studio, and I can imagine and remember the ice, shearing up in front of me on a spectacularly, cold day — not a snow-covered landscape, but rather an ice-covered landscape in that kind of black January there. The areas around the North Sea and the Baltic don’t get much snow, but they get bitterly cold, and when the wind whips up, the ice freezes on the rocks, and just starts shearing up, and really over the course of an hour, an entirely new sort of landscape can form.

I didn’t paint that particular experience. I just happened to be walking along the coast, at that point, but it’s something that stuck with me, and there it turns up in a painting, and a series of little paintings — there are three little paintings in succession that follow the building of the ice along the coast.

They have little bits of Caspar David Friedrich and Emil Nolde mixed into that memory. We all carry these paintings around in our heads that are crucial to us, and once in a while, they really become part of the mix, not in any kind of homage, or in any kind of reference, but they just really become part of it, the attitude or the momentum of that painting continue to infuse itself in the current work.

So that specific painting was really about transporting myself back to some other place. I’ve made a real point, over fifteen years or so, of traveling exhaustively around Scandinavia. I’ve traveled most of the Norwegian Arctic coastline into Western Russian Siberia, and pretty much throughout all of Finland; I mean, these little remote villages that even the Finns don’t bother going to, I find the remote fascinating.

Quarry Seen as an Iceberg 2007 oil on linen 62 x 80 inches

There’s a great culture of landscape painting throughout Scandinavia, and in particular, Finland, growing out of the 19th century and that search for national identities, which a number of countries in Northern Europe and also then, a little bit later, the United States after the Civil War, found that they relied on the landscape to help create a kind of collective consciousness among its people, from Frederick Church and Albert Bierdstadt — well, starting with Thomas Cole, this group of painters in America give us the ideas of the landscape, and in many ways, the way we see America today, come from some of those artists.

And so, it’s still very vital and very much alive, and it’s exciting to be — it’s similar to something of an outpost, too. It’s not like sitting on a hill in Italy that has been painted for centuries by artists of great reputation. It’s relatively unknown and not really cared about. So, there’s a little bit of freedom in that.

But specifically, it’s my cultural heritage, and there’s again something personal in that, that I find some way of connecting.

Audio Podcast of interview (approx. 1 hour) – right click to save to hard drive

Interview with Eric Aho – Part One
Interview with Eric Aho – Part Three

I am pleased to offer this lengthy interview with Eric Aho, a major artist working with the contemporary landscape. Eric has a show that just opened at the DC Moore Gallery in NYC from October 8 to November 7, 2009. Eric received his BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art in 1988 (where I got to know him as a fellow student) He finished his postgraduate studies at the Institute of Art and Design in Lahti, Finland. He currently lives in Vermont with his family.

This past month he was elected National Academician of the National Academy. Eric has also received a Fulbright Scholarship in 1991 that allowed him to live and paint for years in his family’s native Finland. Additionally, he received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant in 1994. Eric has show in museum exhibitions including the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Connecticut, the National Academy Museum in New York City, the Fitchburg Art Museum in Massachusetts, the Fleming Museum at the University of Vermont and the Hood Museum at Dartmouth College.

For many years Eric painted plein air landscape as well as larger studio works that drew inspiration, in part, from observational studies. His uniquely inventive and expressive style often shows affinities with a wide range of artists such as Gustave Courbet and the premier coup painting of Edwin Dickinson as well as the abstract expressionist painting of Willem de Kooning or minimalist paintings of Ellsworth Kelly. He has graciously given up his time and attention to this interview and I thank him profusely. There is a catalog with an essay by Bonnie Costello of his current show available from the DC Moore website.

Please note there are some slight edits to the written text of the interview from the podcast version, also please note that all the images can be viewed at a larger size if you click on them (which is different from what is usually seen here) You can download the podcast or listen to it from the bottom of this page.

Eric Aho Blasted Tree 2008 Oil on Linen 50 x 70 inches

Larry Groff:
Eric, can you say a few words about your background? I understand that years ago, your focus was more on printmaking. Can you say something about how your printmaking, specifically your monotypes, has influenced your painting?

Eric Aho:
That’s a good question. It’s really come to the forefront lately, in the past couple of years, as I’ve been, in a way, stepping out of direct plein air experience in the landscape [and] going into a more memory and experience-based approach to the landscape..

I’ve had to resort to things that have been sort of packed away in those mental bags, for a while, which was the printmaking, that I was essentially brought up on at my undergraduate — as you know, at the Massachusetts College of Art, I was a printmaking major. I worked on etchings there, and lithography: I mean, all the techniques; but I really found the monotype to be the most suitable, and suited for painterly purposes, although I hadn’t yet started painting, at that point.

But I put the printmaking down for about ten years, and pursued painting on canvas; oil paint, outdoors, for the most part.

Eric Aho Copper Field Suite XXIV 2006 Monotype 22 x 41 inches

LG:
Can I just ask you how you chose to go into painting outside?

Eric Aho:
It’s kind of a funny story. I was enrolled in the graduate program at the Massachusetts College of Art, and I left after one year, not finishing my degree. I took a teaching job at a small arts-oriented high school in Vermont, called The Putney School. I was going to be teaching painting, and I had never painted. [Laughing]

I had used black and white paint, and some umber paint, to essentially make wet, tonal drawings, but after working on a number of these — I remember George Nick in passing — he was never my teacher, specifically, but he would often come around.

I’d be working on these tonal, brown and white, wet canvases I thought they were paintings, you see. I thought they were really about painting. And he looked at them, scratched his chin and said, “So, when are you going to start painting?” And then he walked out of the room.

So three weeks of work just fell away, and I thought, What the heck have I been doing? And it really wasn’t until fairly recently, that I fully understood what he was talking about, in terms of the magic and the plasticity of oil paint, and what can be done with it; and, specifically then, with color. So that’s another matter, altogether.

But I had never really painted, and I took this job to teach painting, and said, Well, how hard can it be? So I showed up to this boarding school in rural Vermont in July, and my classes started in September, I had two months to start working.

By the end of those two months, I had some twenty or thirty little paintings, and I was kind of on a roll, just stumbling my way along. The questions I brought to my class on the first day were essentially the questions that were at hand to me, at that very moment: questions about temperature, and scale, and how do you connect to where you’re living, and how do you investigate with this particular medium? How do you answer those questions, and build a parallel world?

My students, actually, turned out to be far more experienced than I was, as a painter, but my head had already been in the world of making things for several years, since coming out of school.

It was an interesting experience, that was; and I feel like those habits that I developed there, I still use today: thinking and responding quickly and succinctly is sort of my approach, and I try not to second-guess myself.

And the print, the monotype, really helps underscore all of that. It’s a tremendously rapid-fire and immediate process, or it can be. Of course, the accident that one can almost always expect is part of the excitement of it, and it’s fun to carry over that into painting — the search for the unexpected, in a way; of finding ways of setting up accidents for yourself, so that technique doesn’t become overemphasized in the process of making the painting.

Late Squall, the Connecticut Oil on Linen 60 x 70 inches

LG:
So, you said, initially, your monotypes have particularly influenced your more recent body of work, where it’s perhaps more coming from memory and from other sources than direct observation.

Eric Aho:
That’s right. Specifically in the last two years, I’ve developed an exchange between my work in monotype and my work in my painting studio, where every couple of months or so, I’ll go into the print shop and kick around some ideas. Ideas can unfold much quicker in the monoprint process than they can in the painting studio.

It’s like a sketchbook, in a way, of getting ideas out of my head, and in a way finding out which ones are viable and which ones are just not worthy of pursuing right now; then I can come back into the studio, charged up by that experience.

So I’ve had pretty good luck at going back and forth like that, for the past couple of years. I should think about it a little bit more, but I think in many ways, the printmaking has really pushed my painting along quite considerably. I’ve been paying more attention to it lately

Soft Evening Sky, Ballyglass Oil on Linen 24 x 24 inches

LG:
What role does painting from observation play in your work? In your plein air work, what size is typical for you? What type of reference material, if any, do you use in your larger paintings? What difference, if any, do you see in your work when you paint directly from life versus painting from memory, studies or photos?

Eric Aho:
Well, I think now that I’m coming to terms with not painting from direct observation any longer, or at least, direct observation for the majority of my work — I’m still drawn to go outside.

But for twenty years, it had become my daily habit of packing my bag, loading up the van and going out to X, Y or Z spot, depending on the day or season or type of weather. That instinct is still in the bone right now, so when the clouds are breaking and the light is really crisp, it’s kind of hard to reconcile that loss, that change, that shift, and to then go into the studio. But there’s something about that tension that’s exciting.

Strangely enough, the work that I’m doing in the studio relies so heavily on very close observation, because I’m not looking at grand vistas, anymore, and more pastoral landscapes, like I had done in these views over the river. I’m actually looking down, more at my feet, into the river. – The Saxton’s River, which I’ve been watching freeze and thaw in successive winters now for the past few years.

There’s something about taking the recognizable details of the landscape; those being the trees and the hills and ridges, [and] just focusing on the immediate constructions of chaos and order of the shapes before me. I have to develop a particular accuracy around those blues and greens and yellows and strange occurrences of pink in the ice, and I have to be able to translate that in a very real way back in the studio.

My big studio projects usually start with one or two small studies from life, and then that will set me off for a couple of weeks in the studio. I’ll have enough information to work from.

Typically when I work outside, I’m working on canvases that range from 10 x 12 inches to 30 x 36 inches to, on occasion, something that’s 50 x 70 inches. The biggest paintings require a little bit more planning. The weather has to be suited. It can’t be windy. I’m not going sailing. I’m not interested in sailing.

Small Puritan Oil on Linen 30 x 36 inches

LG:
Did you see the Antonio López Garcia show at the MFA?

Eric Aho:
I did. I saw it several times.

LG:
They had a great photo of him and one of his big — it looked like 50 x 90 inch or bigger — paintings up on a hillside there, and he had it all tied down with cables and everything. It really impressed me.

Eric Aho:
I know. That’s impressive. That is a commitment beyond human, I think. It’s an exhilarating feeling to be out there with any size canvas; but essentially to be able to take the studio outside, which is the attitude that I’ve adopted, where, I don’t really have a studio setup. My painting bag and the few tubs that I have that have various paints in them, and my mediums, and things like that — I take that into the studio from the outside.

I bring the outside in, and I take the studio outside. I’ve tried to create this seamless experience, back and forth, so even the work that’s done outside has the feeling of something that could be accomplished in the studio, that it’s not so directly tied to this painting was done outdoors, in a response. There’s really no way to tell where it was done, or how it was done. It just occurs.

That’s been fun. That’s especially challenging when you’re working in the studio, then. How do you really make it feel like it’s a direct response to nature? I think it still can be, but I think memory can offer that direct response, and if you’re really paying attention to how things are observed and understood — at least that’s my goal.

LG:
Peter Campion, in an essay on your website said, “When Aho paints the world in front of him he doesn’t represent it so much as he confronts it.” How important is the specific view of the landscape you’re painting, or is the landscape more of a point of departure to explore formal painting concerns, or perhaps, inner landscapes, as well?

Eric Aho:
I’m not sure if one is more important than the other. These days, when I pick a spot in the woods, or I pick a sight at the river or in the quarry that I painted a couple of summers ago, I’m looking for some kind of totality of experience — where the pieces of the puzzle don’t align themselves so easily and where the sense of light and time is in some constant stasis.

Several years ago, I experimented with making paintings that were done over successive sessions, like from 1:30 in the afternoon until 3:00, and then I would stop the painting and come back to it the next day, and try to really focus on that specific time. But eventually that way of working kind of fell away, mostly because I just couldn’t ever get out at the same time again. There are too many variables, other life variables that came in.

But I realized that I could focus on a piece of the landscape and make a comprehensive experience from it. It could be the light from the morning on one side of the painting, and the light from the afternoon on the other side of the painting — but those two opposite times of day would just add up to the experience of an entire day in the painting, it would have a fullness to it.

I can’t remember the specific piece — I think it’s at the Hillstead Museum in Connecticut — but it’s a Monet painting of one of the haystacks, and it has shadows going in two different directions. So he was aware of that, too, and possibly just, in a way, having fun with messing around with nature. But on the other hand, the result is that it creates a dynamic fullness to a painting.

But that idea of the landscape, as this sort of jumping off point, or point of departure, I should say, I think it is really important. It seems to me so perfectly suited to the material of paint and the act of painting: that there’s a slow pace of change, that there’s a weight , and veils of thinness in the landscape that are direct parallels to the medium of paint itself.
And then there’s the weight of implied figuration. Such as the figure in the forest, of the viewer: the painter, the viewer, \ all present at the same time sharing this experience.

One of my goals recently has been to try to make the painting experience an essential equivalent of that natural experience. And to do that, I have to both look really really closely, and pay attention in a very formal, very particular way, in a response; and then I have to also rely on memory and invention, almost in equal parts.

That’s a little bit of the seesaw that I’m riding. It’s a lot of fun, and I don’t ever really know where the painting will end up.

Ice House No. 6 Oil on canvas 22 x 24 inches

Audio Podcast of interview (approx. 1 hour) – right click to save to hard drive

Interview with Eric Aho – Part Two
Interview with Eric Aho – Part Three

Interview with George Nick Part Six, On the Trojan Horse and thoughts on Teaching

Larry Groff:
In your last show at the Gallery Naga, I heard you say that the still life of the painted horse in drapery, as being the strongest painting in the show. “It is a wonderful, intense and mysterious painting to me, but I’m not sure I understand it.” You titled it, The Trojan Horse, and I wonder if the title has some significance.

There was a couple of other still lives that seem related, with the exquisite color, and amazing paint surface, almost sculpted. I was hoping you could say more about this painting.

George Nick:
There was a goal in that painting. The goal in that painting — I felt that the realization that we talk of earlier — I never felt that anything I had ever done was pushed through to the final degree, both emotionally and intellectually. I was satisfied with the drawing of it, the shape of it, the tone of it, how it fit in with the rest of the painting — all that kind of stuff — intellectually, and that I really liked it emotionally.

No painting I’ve ever done was completely done that way. As a matter of fact, this one was not done that way. I only got the horse, I didn’t get the background, I couldn’t carry it out, all the way, but I worked on that painting every day for three months, and my wife felt that I was never going to do another painting the rest of my life, and she worried about me.

But the thing is that I did get resolutions that I never got before, and I felt, that’s why I keep pushing the paint these days, is that I find as I keep going, the painting doesn’t go downhill, it’s going up, it’s getting better.

I want it better, and it’s feeding me, so I keep doing this process. That was part of that very complicated process, and I couldn’t keep doing that, because I’d scream. I was screaming while I was doing it, but I wanted to do it. Somehow I set these goals at different times, and I succeed at what I’m aiming for, at the time. A simple goal like climbing a mountain.

I’m not sure why I can’t come up with one process to paint everything, but I have never ever — I keep on switching and jumping around. I think I’m doing the same thing, but I fit things closer to one side of my character, or the other side, and it sort of rounds itself out, I think

I titled it The Trojan Horse because there’s something romantic and mysterious about the title. I had this wooden horse, ever since I knew Dickinson, and I’ve been looking all this time, painted many times, and that’s all the paintings I did that I succeeded. I’m not sure I’ll paint it again. I certainly won’t paint it that way. But I knew the horse very well, and I think I achieved what I wanted, after looking at it all these years. I didn’t plan it that way, it’s just that it seems to have come out that way.

The title — there’s something strange about it, and there is something worrisome about
The Trojan Horse, and it has something that’s vaguely philosophic to do with life, I think. I like romantic titles like that.


George Nick Detail from the Trojan Horse

LG:
What about the drapery in the painting?

George Nick:
Oh, the drapery. Well, that was a rug. That’s a rug that we had gotten from Bulgaria that’s made out of goats hair. It’s not sewn, it’s pressed together, and we’ve had it for like thirty-five years. My wife doesn’t like it to be out, very much, because it sheds incessantly. [Laughing]

George Nick:
But I liked it, and it was sort of a compliment, in some sort of lyrical way, but a simplified lyrical way with the horse, and I liked them together, that’s all. I thought I worked out that very well. I think it’s a background with the stretchers, and so forth, that were done in about four minutes; but I left it at that. That’s all.

George Nick The Coded Process 15 Feb 2009 2009 oil on linen 30 x 20 inches

LG:
Last question. You’ve spent much of your career teaching, and have received widespread recognition for being a great educator. You have taught hundreds of students over the years to become better painters.

Today many schools seem to place more emphasis on conceptual matters, such as social or psychological messages in art, and much less emphasis on teaching traditional skills, of painting from observation.

With this in mind, what advice would you give today’s students, who are looking for the best possible education that prepares them for being a realist painter? Or can you give advice?

George Nick:
I’m from the Mediterranean, with a lot of history and heritage, and I’ve have a lot of false theatre and bravado, so I would attempt anything. And I would attempt to give advice, too.

The first thing — it’s more like thousands than hundreds of students, okay?

LG:
Okay.

George Nick:
Because I was figuring it out a few years ago, and I figured out I’d had about six to eight thousand students. I don’t know if I counted everybody. You see, the bravado comes out quickly.

LG:
Hey, you need the credit where it’s due.

George Nick:
Well, you’re not supposed to give it to yourself.

LG:
[Laughing] Well, you know I thought of doing that. I said, “Gee, I don’t know — hundreds, thousands,” but okay.

George Nick:
Well, school is a part of the world and the environment. If you look at the art magazines and businesses called galleries, and the promotions, and so forth, that go on, and you find that it has a flavor, and the flavor is what the schools imitate. So, I think they belong to the world probably more than I do. But I don’t criticize. I don’t feel one way or another about it. I think that anybody wants to, with the best possible education, prepare one for a real education.

There’s a couple of things. First, you find a teacher like Edward Dickinson, and secondly, you go to the museums and see who has done it — other people have done it — even who are both living today. I think by example, you learn a lot.

I think once Dickinson told me — I told him that, “I’m so glad that I’m studying with you, that I’m learning this stuff.”

He said, “Oh, well, you would figure it out yourself, but I probably save you five years,” he said, very casually.

George Nick Tribute to John Updike 26 Jan 2009 2009 oil on linen 38 x 32 inches

In retrospect, I think, more or less, it’s true. People figure out a lot by themselves. We get a few hints here and there, but it fits in with your genes and your desires and your needs, and so, you would work it out, one way or another. I don’t think we’re so separate or so unique. I think the talents are unique, but I think the mind and man, himself, is seeking the general things that are possible.

The impossible feat of making a three-dimensional image out of [a] two-dimensional surface is part in your genes, I think. I think there are enough people around still wanting to do that, that do it, and make art out of it, so it’s like people who make rugs. I think it’s in their genes. They have some talent that’s available, and they develop the skills because it’s of interest to them, and they see they can make something that pleases them, if they work at it.

To Interview with George Nick, Part One, On Edwin Dickinson
To Interview with George Nick, Part Two, On Fairfield Porter
To Interview with George Nick Part Three, On George Bellows
To Interview with George Nick Part Four, On Cezanne and color
To Interview with George Nick Part Five, On Drawing

Interview with George Nick, Part Five, On Drawing

Larry Groff:
You often spend a great deal of time on the drawing for your larger, more complex paintings, sometimes spending weeks before starting to paint.

Do you work out the compositions by looking through the viewfinder before you start drawing, or does the composition evolve during the drawing process? What aspects of your drawing particularly needs to be perfect, before you will start painting?

George Nick:
Well, I don’t know, I get hysterical about the drawing, sometimes. Foreshorten the ellipse of the wheel, or something like that. I’m embarrassed if I look at a painting, later on, and find a mistake in the painting. It can drive me crazy, so I don’t want any kind of stupidities to be visible to other people. That’s part of that.

And sometimes I just do a scribble that takes about four seconds, when I’m working on a bad painting: a horizontal line, a long clump …

Drawing varies. Generally, it’s a careful drawing, because everything I do these days, even though it’s a 20 x 30, which is small for me, is drawn pretty conscientiously, without details, but the large forms and large, important parts. And that means the correct angle, the right proportion, and it looks like a Rolls-Royce or a shack. It doesn’t look like Elizabeth Taylor, or something like that.

When I work in a big painting, I work it all out before I start, to one-quarter inch on the edge of a 40 x 60 has to be perfect. It’s figured out. I have arguments about what I want inside of it, how much, what angle, all this kind of stuff. I have to be confident, and that’s why I take so long for the drawing, because sometimes I change the drawing and move it around, and I change the composition, because as I’m drawing it, something doesn’t feel right.

So I’ve got a lot of things going on, before I commit myself, because I don’t treat these things lightly. Once I’ve started, it’s a big commitment to work on a big painting, because I know the work it takes. And if I’m not hot about it, it goes down the drain very quickly. So I feel myself out, at the same time, a lot of times, when on a longer one.

What it does, it’ll generally get me excited about what I’m going to be making — some of the colors, some of the reflections, some of the things here and there. I make notes, unconscious notes, in anticipation of the actual painting of it, after I get the drawing blocked out.


George Nick Memories of Caesar’s Forum 2008 oil on linen 40 x 50 inches

And I don’t feel so bad about it, because Bellotto, Canaletto’s nephew, I saw some drawings of his, and the drawings were simply amazing drawings. They were simply line drawings, with what I do, but with great elegance and great perfection, and it excited me a lot to see those, after I had been doing this for a long time.

And I said, “Well, it’s okay to do that,” because I was trained not to do any drawing. We would come in, and Dickinson would say at the model, standing there, “We’re doing a full, life-sized painting,” and he would say, “Let’s start the painting now from the right, little finger.” You had to be good to do that, you know. We were trained. We could do all these acrobatic kind of activities. It doesn’t mean anything, but it gave us a lot of confidence, that we could do that.

And generally, when I’m working small or fast I’ll just use my hand for a finder, xand I don’t care how it bends and turns and doesn’t quite work out. But when I’m doing a bigger one, I’m really balancing a lot of factors, and I want them in there, or I don’t want them in there, or this is going to do that, or that’s going to do this. I’ve got all these things moving in my brain.

I want to be at peace, or happy, because sometimes when I do a scribble of something I’m going to do a big painting of, and I see that — I don’t care what’s wrong, but if I see there’s a lot of life in it — and it’s wrong, it doesn’t bother me. It shows me that I’m excited by the painting, the subject, and it’s going to come well. I have these black magic ideas about painting, about things like that. I get the feeling, after I’ve done a good drawing, that it is going to be a good painting, a worthwhile event.

That’s the kind of thing I need, I’ve always needed, and I like it. I like to work that way. Then there are large areas that have no drawing in them at all, and I’m going to wing it, because I’m not going to fiddle around with leaves, and with reflections. I’m going to make that at the time, even though, after a while, I’ll be spending weeks on a couple of different shapes in those reflections. It’s enough to get me going, because they’re going to be in the right spot, and the drawing makes sure that I’m in the right place.

George Nick Grumman TBM Avenger 2006 oil on linen 40 x 60 inches

To Interview with George Nick, Part One, On Edwin Dickinson
To Interview with George Nick, Part Two, On Fairfield Porter
To Interview with George Nick Part Three, On George Bellows
To Interview with George Nick Part Four, On Cezanne and color
To Interview with George Nick Part Five, On Drawing
To Interview with George Nick Part Six, On The Trojan Horse and thoughts on Teaching

Interview with George Nick Part Four, On Cezanne and color

Larry Groff:
You’ve often talked about Cézanne in color. You said something like, “Painting from nature is not copying the object. It is realizing one’s sensations.”

Can you speak about how Cézanne has influenced your painting? In particular, I’m curious about what you think about Cézanne’s ideas on getting the right color sensations from nature.

George Nick:
Well, I don’t know if I agree with some of the things you’re saying. But you’ve asked, so, let’s go into it.

First of all, it begins with my training and this is such a superficial thing. His influence on me was when I start painting, I start with a blue wash. You know how all his paintings have a blue wash, how he starts drawing in blue, and the water colors stuck out blue? Well, that’s one way he’s influenced me. I refuse to start a painting with any other color.

LG:
Okay. I always wondered about that.

George Nick:
Well, I just thought it was as trivial as you can get, but it’s one of those things that stuck, that’s all.

He said, “Nature is not copying the object, it’s really realizing one’s sensations.” He also said that he’s painting his “little thrills.” Do you remember that one?

LG:
Yes.

George Nick:
Well, the combination is important, because what he’s getting from nature is how to draw, how to make form, how to make space, and how to make the generic quality of the subject. So, how do you make form? Well, you look at light and you make light and dark, and you get a good color.

But what’s shocking to me, always has been, is I think the only paintings he’s signed are the ones he considered he had finished, and there’s very few of those, that [are] signed. So I think everything he did was unfinished and in [the] process of development.

It’s like the painting that he did of Vollard. He did a portrait in the ’90s, I think, that took ninety-two sessions, and at the end of ninety-two sessions — I’m not sure I’m accurate with this, he asked Vollard if he would leave him his shirt and coat, so he could continue the painting.

So he continued it, and later on, when they were looking at the painting, he was talking to somebody, he said, “How do you like the painting?”

He said, “Well, there’s a spot on the shirt I like.”

CézannePortrait of Ambroise Vollard 1899 oil on canvas 39 x 32 inches

George Nick:
So talk about severity and unhappiness. I think he was never satisfied. That’s why he’s forever changing and trying to grow out of the bad, or unrealized paintings he was making all the time. I think he was improving.

The business about copying — that’s why I think he gets out of nature, is what he gets out of life — is to realize it, to realize that on canvas, you’ve got these fundamental problems that are three-dimensional versus two-dimensional, and how do you construct marks in color to construct a form convincingly, and make the big lie. So it’s realizing one’s sensations.

Well, I think this is where the thrill comes in. I think you realize a sensation when you try to get as honest as you can, and the painting is ugly, or the color is ugly, or the color is not working well enough. The form is not working well enough. I think when you get the color right, and you like it better, you succeed in both making the form and the space and the object.

So I think that’s what realizing one’s sensations means, is it’s all transcribed through your emotions and your intellect at the same time. You’re thinking, and you’re emoting, if there’s such a word.

And I’ve been thinking about that for a long term, and I always think about how to construct things, because I think from Delacroix he got the idea, and the Impressionists, how to apply paint; and then he got involved with studying nature and the application began to bend towards what he was looking at. So he got away from Impressionism and he got into a more personalized activity, which was at the same time, constructing the form, going with the form, and making it the object — which is kind of hard to talk about. I think that’s what he did.

Because the Pointillism was the more avant-garde method of painting, and a much colder method of painting, because it’s a system, like Seurat. But Seurat made it even crazier than the Impressionists, because he was more severe about it.

But I think Cézanne’s wiggly marks, really have a lot to do with his character, but also with the description of the trees and the spaces and the leaves and the rocks and the crevices, and all that kind of stuff.

If you look at the drawings, they’re really amazing. He’s really involved with making geometric forms out of organic forms, and he feels that geometric beauty is the way to describe the world. It’s like Scopas, the Greek sculptor, who was in that same kind of mode, and thinking like that.

If you look at his drawings, they’re really amazing. Everything has these curves. At no time that it doesn’t make a geometric form, no matter how wiggly he gets. There’s always some sort of rhythm to the curve. It falls into a geometry that’s very severe, and he transcribes all of nature that way.

LG:
Are you familiar with Erle Loran’s book, Cézanne’s Compositions?

George Nick:
Oh, God, is that the one that has all these arrows, and points out which way they’re moving, and all that stuff?

LG:
Well, it also has photographs he took in the 1920s of Cézanne’s motifs and compares paintings with the actual scenes…

George Nick:
And how they’re bent, how they’re leaning, right?

LG:
Right.

George Nick:
The paintings are. Well, I think it’s surprising. If you look at the way he started a painting, he would put one mark on one part of the painting, and another mark on another part of the painting, another mark, another part of the painting, and they’re all connected in the end, which is [an] amazing kind of three-dimensional chess.

I think he had an immense ability of absorbing the whole theme, and transcribing it, within his emotions. The painter that he painted early, with the long face — I forgot the name of that artist — there was a distortion to it, but it was distorted from the beginning. He added in this line, like when he did a building on the side of a road, and it’s leaning, and this and that. You look at the photograph, and the photograph doesn’t look like that. Why did he do that?

George Nick Over Pemigewasset River 1986 oil on linen 40 x 40 inches

George Nick:
I never could find an answer, why he did it. All I know is that he really did it, but he did it from the beginning, from the inception of putting down the first mark, because he controlled the whole scene. It’s a remarkable achievement, the way he made paintings.

How did all the paintings connect correctly? I think it’s phenomenal, that’s all. I’ve never been able to understand it. One of those geniuses, that thinks his own way, and that was the way that he sorted things out.

Now what was this last sentence? I’m curious what you think about Cézanne’s ideas on getting the right color sensations from nature? What does that mean? What do you mean by that, that he got the right color sensations from nature? How do you know they’re right? How do you know he got the right one?

LG:
Well, I guess, right for him. He talked a lot about wanting to get the correct color sensation of what he was seeing. He was struggling with that.

George Nick:
Well, you know what he’s doing? He’s putting a painting together. It has to be right in two ways: it has to be right because it has to be convincing, as being part of the object, and it has to be right in fitting together with the rest of the painting. So that’s another miracle.

So that’s what he means about being right. It has to work together, and colors have to help each other in the painting. So that’s what I think you’re suggesting, you’re talking about.

LG:
It also seems like it has to work for him; like say, Pissaro, painting along next to him, might get a very different color for the same thing, and they would both be right, for each painter.

George Nick:
Well, I don’t know if he felt that Pissaro was right, but I don’t know if he ever felt that he was right, that he was aiming for something that was trying to be honest.

LG:
Right. Honest is probably a better word than right.

George Nick:
Yes, they’re both sensations in nature. Yes, being honest.

LG:
The colors in your paintings seem dead-on, very specific and carefully observed. You’ve said in the past you would go to great lengths, returning day after day, over many sittings, to get the exact color, never settling for an approximation.

Your friend, the late John Updike, said of your color, “He omits without giving an effect of omission. His attention, like a quietly singing shuttle, collects harmonious patches of surprisingly true color – color with a clear conscience.”

Can you speak to the importance of this integrity, in getting the right color in your work?

George Nick:
Using the words, right color, again. I really don’t like that phrase.

LG:
Which phrase?

George Nick:
Right color. Because I struggled for a long time …

LG:
Ah. I should say good color. I can change it to good color. It’s not too late.

George Nick Approaching Storm 2002 oil on linen 40 x 60 inches

George Nick:
Well, whatever. No, you said that, and I’m talking about it, that’s all.

This is what I feel about being dead-on. Once I was painting this house outside, for about a couple of weeks, and this little boy came up to me, and said, “How come you’re not painting the color of the house?”

So I thought that his eye, from a little kid, can see that I’m not using the same color or the correct color or the right color. So what am I doing? I’m trying to make a painting. I don’t intentionally go about it; it just keeps moving that way.

I think Dickinson said once, that if you can make a color in a day, you’re doing pretty well. That’s pretty good. It’s not an easy job.

It’s the same thing [when] Stravinsky said to the border guard in 1914 at the Swiss Border when they asked him “What’s your profession?” He said he’s an inventor.

George Nick:
And then he called his son later. His son said, “Why did you say that?”

He said, “Well, I invent sounds. That’s what I do.”

I feel the same way about invention. I have to find a new color every day. I find a new relationship every day. It means something, to be honest with my feelings, and not being bored; but in finding something that is carefully observed through observation is leading me to making a worthwhile effort, by being exact.

If it isn’t exact, it’s positive. It states itself like it’s light. It doesn’t mean it is light. It’s like I tell my students, sometimes, “Make believe you know what you’re doing, and that confidence brings out something that gives you a lot of energy, and a lot of gusto, and a lot of action.”

You’ve said an Impressionist goes to great lengths to get the exact color, never settling for an approximate. Well, I think I cheated a very few times, and I think we’re going to talk later about the horse painting, and it will come out there what I really think about the color.

But about Updike, I don’t understand. He had very kind words to say about me, but I still don’t understand the business of conscience. I think he felt that I was trying to hold up with integrity of an idea of how to get about — maybe, I think — that’s how he attributes this to a conscience, a good conscience or something.

That’s why the integrity seems to be important. I change a color to make it better. It is only better if it is closer to what I fitted in the painting and was to the object. My painting concerns stimulation of nature, and nature gives out a lot of things. It’s like Cézanne saying, “There’s nothing to paint in the world. It’s all gray.” And it is. There’s ugly, awful stuff out there. How do you make a painting out of it?

I think you have to dig pretty deep in these things, without making monochromatic nonsense, and having color as an important function of the painting, an important part of expression.

To Interview with George Nick, Part One, On Edwin Dickinson
To Interview with George Nick, Part Two, On Fairfield Porter
To Interview with George Nick Part Three, On George Bellows
To Interview with George Nick Part Four, On Cezanne and color
To Interview with George Nick Part Five, On Drawing
To Interview with George Nick Part Six, On The Trojan Horse and thoughts on Teaching

Interview with George Nick Part Three, On George Bellows

Larry Groff:
You’ve expressed affinity with the Ashcan School of Painters, such as George Bellows. What aspect of this work interests you the most? Is there such a thing as Neo-Ashcan, and if so, would you be a part of it?

George Nick:
Well, first of all, I don’t think George Bellows is part of the Ashcan School. I think there were several others that were considered that group.

I love George Bellows a lot, and I like the Ashcan School, but I don’t think they’re affiliated. I think they’re about the same time. He was not a typical — they all did these scenes of the Third Avenue Elevated, and the people in the backyards with wash, and all this kind of stuff. Drinking in bars — all this local genre kind of painting.

Bellows didn’t do any of that. He did some really wonderful landscapes. He did some wonderful portraits and he did these series of making public art for a name for himself, about the fighters and things like that, and portraits of his daughter. That was his classical period.

I think he’s really a fine artist, and I’m really impressed with the smaller ones he did of lakes or little views of Maine or something like this. Very inventive, very emotional, very tied in with the idea of expression. He’s not in any school. I’m not a joiner, so I wouldn’t be a part of anything like that.

But those are some of the things about Bellows that I liked a lot. I missed getting a book of his, because $140 was a lot for a small book. I thought about it twice; by the time I thought that I should get it — it was a book in black and white of a lot of his landscapes. And I missed that, and I don’t even know how to find it now.

George Nick:
But there’s some beautiful things that I’ve seen him do, beautiful things, and of different styles, because he was changing his styles while he was growing. But he died early, in his forties. I think he is a major American painter. There was so much life in him.

George Bellows The Lone Tenement 1909 oil on canvas 36 x 48 inches

There’s like one painting — I think it’s at the National Gallery — of the view of New York from building the tunnel or a bridge, or something like this, in the snow. It’s a really remarkable, crude, evocative painting. It’s very raw, and it’s very vigorous, at the same time. I think he’s one of most dangerous, inventive painters of the period.

LG:
In that painting that’s in the National Gallery, that you were just describing, that was all done in the studio from studies, or memory?

George Nick:
No, I don’t think so. I think those are done on the spot.

LG:
It really looks that way, but it just seemed like it was so large, it would have been very difficult.

George Nick:
What do you mean? I’ve worked outside on a 50 x 80 inch canvas.

LG:
Well, I know, I guess thinking of all the people, and the horses and the snow.

George Nick:
Well, he’s away from that. I’m sure nobody paid any attention to him. I mean, it’s a cold, winter’s day and they’re working. Nobody’s sitting around on a hot summer’s day having lunch. They were all working. So, he was working, too. They didn’t pay any attention to him, I don’t think.

LG:
It’s an amazing painting.

George Nick:
Isn’t it?

LG:
It’s one of my all-time favorites.


George Nick Ponte Caqvour Roma 2005 oil on linen

George Nick:
Right, that’s one of the reasons I like him so much. If you keep looking around, I found a painting up — I forgot where we were. We were coming through Maine, and we stopped off [in] a little town, where there was this college it was Colby College, and they had an art collection, and in that — oh, they had a roomful of Alex Katz that somebody had given to the school. They built this wing for Alex Katz.

But around the corner was this little painting of a couple of waves, almost in black and white, and it was the most beautiful thing I saw. It was a Bellows.

George Nick:
It’s wonderful to see that. Seeing that water was unbelievable; I mean, unbelievable painting. The solidity of water on a gray day, falling wave — a falling wave, that’s all it was. A small painting, maybe about 16 x 20 or something like that. And it was one of the most powerful things I’ve ever seen.

(note to readers, I was unable to find this exact painting from Colby College – if anyone has a link to this image or know its current location, please contact me and I will try to include it in this article)

LG:
Excellent. Do you have anything else that you want to say about George Bellows? Or your work in relation to his? What inspired you from seeing his work?

George Nick:
His work is good.

LG:
There you go. That’s a connection.

To Interview with George Nick, Part One, On Edwin Dickinson
To Interview with George Nick, Part Two, On Fairfield Porter
To Interview with George Nick Part Three, On George Bellows
To Interview with George Nick Part Four, On Cezanne and color
To Interview with George Nick Part Five, On Drawing
To Interview with George Nick Part Six, On The Trojan Horse and thoughts on Teaching

George Nick hardly needs an introduction; he is one of the most respected contemporary realist painters working today. George Nick’s work is included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Hirschhorn Museum; and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., as well as many other important collections. He shows at the Gallery Naga in Boston and shows in many other leading galleries in New York and around the world.

He paints exclusively from observation, often works on large scale paintings either from his truck studio or directly outside. If you are curious about his background and more information about his approach to painting there is an excellent essay on GeorgeNick.com, En Route with George Nick by Christopher Chippendale, which gives a biographical sketch as well as insight into his art. There are also other essays there by other art critics and writers, including an essay by John Updike and an interview with John Arthur. Additionally, his website has much of his work starting from the early 60’s up to his current work. George Nick has lived in the Boston area since the late 1960’s and taught at the Massachusetts College of Art for over 30 years. I studied under him in the mid-80’s and he has been a mentor and friend since that time.

I asked George if he might agree to an interview for Painting Perceptions and needless to say I was delighted when he agreed. This generosity of his time is typical for him as over the years he has gone out of his way to help countless painters move forward with their vision, skills, careers and lives.

Since the interview was long I decided to break it up into sections to make the reading more manageable. Please note, for this interview I made the images clickable, unlike the rest of the blog, so that you can see the larger images. I’ve also made a “podcast” audio recording version available here for people who would also like to listen to the interview away from their computer. George and I did edit the interview slightly for greater clarity, so there are a few differences from the written to the audio version (the audio podcast is slightly over an hour long).

Part One, On Edwin Dickinson

Edwin Dickinson teaching at the Art Students League 1954 photo by Denver Lindley, from Edwin Dickinson, Dreams and Realities

Larry Groff:
You studied with Edwin Dickinson at the Art Students League in the late 1950s. What was it like to study with him? Is there any one thing that he said, or some aspect of his teaching, that was most influential to you?

George Nick:
Well, first of all, it was wonderful to study under him, because he was very intelligent, very thoughtful and a sensitive person. He was careful dealing with people. He never pushed his ideas on anyone at all, ever, and that was really surprising.

Little by little it came out, when he was talking to you, if you wanted to do this, you should do it this way, that would always begin something like that, “Is this what you want? Maybe I can help you with this.”

He had a lot of things that he did. There isn’t any one thing. There was an attitude that he had, that was the most influential for me, was that he believed in what he was doing, and that is what he taught. He knew how to look and he told you what he knew. He just had a very good character.

[He] passed on information at the time it was necessary. He never talked too much, and he wouldn’t cover many things, but he covered what was important at the time, and let you soak it in, absorb it, and see how you dealt with it.

He would wander in, late in the morning, after we’d started painting. We would have one model, one pose for all semester. If you wanted to study as much as you want, you could paint it. If you wanted to paint another figure, you just went from another angle.

We had drawing classes, once in a while. They were like three-minute drawing classes, but you had to draw one curve or one part of the body, and he would correct that. He’d just walk around and see one line, what part of the body it was. He’d figure out, if you could draw that, you could draw anything. Drawing, to him, was very crucial. He always said, “Drawing is how high by how wide by what angle. Everything is that, and if you can do that, you can draw anything.”

The things about aesthetics, I always felt that he wasn’t teaching. I always felt he wasn’t teaching about art; I felt he was teaching about mechanics. He would never give opinions of other artists or anything like that, or about art. He just talked about how to see something, how to make it and how to mix; how to clean your palette.

I remember when I invited him to Yale after I hadn’t seen him for a couple of years, and we could invite anybody, and I invited him. He was very proud to come there. I remember Janet Fish was very annoyed with him. All he did was tell her how to clean her palette.

LG:
So did she then start cleaning it properly?

George Nick:
I never knew what happened after that. I know she complained about that, and that’s the only comment I got from anybody who had him critique them, as he went around.


George Nick Sheet with Apple 1959 oil on linen 40×20 inches

LG:
Did he give a slide talk at Yale?

George Nick:
No, he gave a talk that nobody understood. I didn’t even know what he was talking about. It was very weird. At one point, some fellow raised his hand and interrupted him. He didn’t yell at him; he put his hand up. He turned up and looked at him, Dickinson looked at him, and he said to Dickinson, “Can you tell us what art is?”

He sort of got a glazed look on his face. For about a minute, everybody was waiting around and waiting around He sort of ignored the question, then went on talking. After about ten minutes, the same fellow put up his hand, and said to him, “Does that mean you’re not going to tell us what art is about?”

George Nick:

So he was pushed into a corner. After, again, another minute — we didn’t know what was going to happen next — he said, “Art is the organization of shapes.” Everybody waited for him to continue; but there was nothing else after that, and that was it. He tried to get as fundamental as possible, and be true about it, real about it.

LG:
Good for him. Do you think he’d be able to get away with that today?

George Nick:
He would get away with anything. He had a wonderful air about him, and he was very confident. I had him first in night class, at Brooklyn Museum Art School, and there was one girl that wanted him to teach her how to paint like Renoir. And so, he went over there, and taught her how to paint like Renoir.

LG:
Really.

George Nick:
It must have been something — the way I looked, or something like this — I was a young turk. I was in the corner, and he came over to me, and said, “George, there’s room for everybody in this world,” in this sweet way, of course. I never forgot that. It never helped me, but, I never forgot that.

Another one — it was a like a truck driver, or something like that — made fun of him because he had a beard. Nobody wore beards then, in the ’50s. And he said, “If I had a quarter for all the time I’ve been picked at because of the beard, I’d be rich,” he said.

He was always easy-going. He loved students and he always came in happy.

Edwin Dickinson Self Portrait, 1954 1954 oil on canvas 26×24 inches

LG:
You wouldn’t think by looking at his self-portraits.

George Nick:
Well, I think he’s being theatrical. Don’t you think?

LG:
Did he dress rather eccentrically?

George Nick:
No. Well, he had a jacket on, and he had dungarees on, and he had a tie that was like an artist’s tie; tied together. He told me he bought it at an Army Navy Store in 1917 for seventeen cents. Things like that.

I mean, they were always poor, until he had a couple of shows, near the end of his career, and then the museums bought his work.

Once when we were there, they exhibited all his paintings at the same time, the Modern Museum of Art, the Whitney and the Metropolitan. They exhibited them, and the students asked, “Why don’t we go together, with the class and you, to see the paintings?”

He said, “Of course. I’ll do anything that you like.”

He spoke in an old English. I asked him once why he spoke so wonderfully, and he said, “Well, my father was a preacher.” And he spoke like that.

George Nick:
Once I asked him — before I get on with that other story — every time he gave a crit, I would stop painting and listen to him, because he was always saying something pertinent about the students paintings. So, I would listen.

Once I asked him, “How did you ever learn to teach?”

He said, “You know, when I was given my first job, I never taught before. I didn’t know what to do, so the day before, when I was out painting, after I was through painting, I recited to myself what I had done.”

And that’s how he started teaching.

Edwin Dickinson The Fossil Hunters 1926-28 oil on canvas 96 x 73 inches

George Nick:
Anyway, there are other stories that have nothing to do with art, except that it had to do with his attitude towards not divulging anything personal about his painting.

In one painting that had a nude, and rippling water: there’s some sort of a hole in the steps and something falling through it. There’s some sails, draped. He was telling us that the water, he spent a long time in drawing a perspective drawing of the rippling, elliptical waves of water coming out — that something had fallen in the water and was making waves, little ripples.

Of that painting, he said, “One critic, wrote about this painting, that, that was either a flower or a hot coal falling through.” We went to look at it, and when we turned around, he had walked away. That was all he was going to tell us about his painting.

There was another large painting — I’ve forgotten what it is — it had these two big vases, pitchers, and they were very different in tonality and a little different in color. He said, “You see, this one was painted outside of Buffalo and this one outside of Cape Cod. Do you see that?”

And we all said, “Yeah, sure.” One couldn’t see any difference.

LG:
Do you have anything else to say?

George Nick:
I don’t know if I could explain it, but he was a wonderful teacher, because he said things I wanted to learn, wanted to know. I think I remembered a lot of the things that were very important to me, and I taught them for over forty years from these things that he taught us: how to squint, how to draw, how to mix colors, how to recognize warm and cool, how to apply paint and how to see and how to analyze what we saw.

He taught us to apply paint with our fingers. The paintings I have in my studio, the early paintings I have are all painted from the side of my little finger, except for a couple of parts that need brushwork, very sharp brushwork. The whole thing’s painted from ….

So I learned a form of aesthetics from him about the quality of paintings.

LG:
Did he have you use a knife a lot?

George Nick:
Oh, we did use knives. We did everything. It wasn’t a lot. Everything was a tool, and everything was necessary at a time when you wanted it and needed it. But now I mostly use one big brush.

To Interview with George Nick, Part Two, On Fairfield Porter
To Interview with George Nick Part Three, On George Bellows
To Interview with George Nick Part Four, On Cezanne and color
To Interview with George Nick Part Five, On Drawing
To Interview with George Nick Part Six, On The Trojan Horse and thoughts on Teaching