Barge for an Evening Bird, (DETAIL) 9 3/4 x 81 7/8 inches, 2010, oil on wood panel

Please note: several images in this interview link to a “zoomify” viewer where clicking the image allows you to zoom and pan, much the same way one uses google maps. You also have the ability to enlarge the viewing area to fill the browser window with button on the right-most part of the toolbar below the image)

About a year ago I saw several of Michael Tompkins’ paintings during a visit to the Paul Thiebaud Gallery in San Francisco. His long horizontal still lifes in particular captivated my attention with his tour de force of relentless geometric arrangements of artbooks, bottles, and fruit as well as empty paper towel tubes, Melita coffee filter box, bug spray, ropes, and tree branches that go beyond formalist structure to renew our faith in the power of painting to astonish us.

What is remarkable about these paintings isn’t just the amazing technical skills in achieving these monumental structures but in how he makes it seem like it’s all such great fun. There is musicality in how intervals of placement, color notes and scale juxtapositions along the relentless horizontal and vertical thrusts that seem to mash up Bach fugues and Phillip Glass with Spike Jones and Captain Beefheart. Perhaps most of all I was enchanted by his color. The delights of color here isn’t just for it’s descriptive pitch accuracy, or even for the many satisfying moments where you feel the rightness of the sensations of one color plane vibrating against another. What got me most was the magic of feeling I was listening in on conversations between color groupings—how the reds and blues seemed to be speaking (or perhaps singing) in slightly different dialects of the same paint language, some mute or just whispering, other maniacally chatty, muttering or even yelling bloody murder—all which keeps your eye moving back and forth trying to figure out what it all means.

Many of his extremely long horizontal still lifes are titled “barges”. One definition of a barge “is a long flat-bottomed boat for carrying freight, typically on canals and rivers, either under its own power or towed by another.” I was struck with an idea that perhaps these barges could be powered by the viewer as well as the painter, like the interactivity involved in the reading of a poem. Fueled by the movements of eye and brain, slowly towing the these barge-poems down dendritic canals to berth in the ports for unforgettable images.

In the 2004 Paul Thiebaud Gallery catalog essay James Housefield wrote:

“In Tompkins’ art, things nestle into place as if they were bodies moving through space. Like rush hour travelers, the objects compress, cluster, separate, and congregate anew. As objects from one painting reappear in another, they shed the qualities of things and acquire the qualities of actors upon a stage. In Tompkins’ world, these objects take charge of the lives that are their own.

These are paintings about the craft of painting. They are, equally, about the labor and the pleasures of the artist’s studio. Yet they are also always about the pleasures that the visible world offers to us all. Tompkins’ art offers precisely crafted vistas into the poetry of things.”

From the 2004 Paul Thiebaud Gallery catalog – Michael Tompkins Painting: 1986-2004 by James Housefield

I was thrilled that Michael agreed to this interview and would like to thank him greatly for taking the time out of his busy schedule and for the thoughtfulness of his answers.

Michael Tompkins lives in Berkeley, CA and is represented by the Paul Thiebaud Gallery, San Francisco, CA. He studied at the University of California, Davis, CA (1983 MFA in Painting, 1981 BA in Painting) He received the National Endowment for the Arts, Individual Artist Fellowship in Painting and the American Academy and Institute of Arts & Letters, Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award in 1989 Additionally he received the National Endowment for the Arts, Individual Artist Fellowship in Painting in 1987.

Larry Groff: You studied with Wayne Thiebaud when you were in school at UC Davis in the early 80’s. Can you tell us what it was like to study with him? I’ve heard he often works more from invention and memory. Was observational painting encouraged then?

Michael Tompkins: I arrived in Davis in late ’78. There was a very unlikely, very lively atmosphere there, generated by a faculty who were all hired when they were young by one guy with pretty good judgement. It was a new department in the early sixties at what had been the agricultural annex of UC Berkeley. Wayne was joined by Robert Arneson, Roy de Forest, Manuel Neri, William Wiley and a number of others with lesser names but equal talent. Funk was the lingua franca, and fit the farm field location like a glove. The overriding rule seemed to be “work a lot but don’t take yourself too seriously”. We did a lot of paintings on brown butcher paper and made a lot of trips to the landfill, but it did produce artists like Bruce Nauman, Deborah Butterfield and Nancy Rubin.

I’m saying all of this to provide context to your question about Wayne Thiebaud. I think if you want to understand him as an artist and teacher, that context is key. He’s a very sophisticated, highly intelligent, educated and articulate guy. But if he springs from Chardin, Corot and Morandi (he does, all three), then he’s equally grounded in George Herriman, ‘Ramblin Jack Elliott and the Great Basin.

Yes, we worked from observation in his classes, but I should say that he taught almost exclusively beginning classes. I’d arrived there from a junior college where I’d had all of those but he let me repeat them, multiple times, for no credit. I think he felt, and still does, that lots of good things happen in among basic issues; describe a plane or the meeting of two planes (think of Bruce Nauman’s videos of his studio corner), ride up and down the calibrated scales of color and value or find the physical sensuality of light and shadow. All of this was put into a very workmanlike regime, where he introduced each project and expected everyone to do it the same way, separated only by degrees of success. We were learning a craft, learning conventions, with plenty of room among the rules for accident and discovery. But. I remember some very serious lecture demonstrations like one about Picasso, where he drew on the board the hyphens, commas and hash marks of analytical cubism and its shifting planes, all very entrancing, with the final half circles completing the ears of a cartoon Koala bear climbing a tree.

Arrangement with Ships, (DETAIL-click for full image) 9 1/2 x 64 inches 2009 oil on wood panel

View from Citrona Farms (DETAIL) 14 x 138 inches, 1993, Oil on Panel

LG: You used to make panoramic landscapes, often from invention and sometimes incorporate still life into your landscapes. What was it like for you in your early years as a painter?

MT: As a student, until my last year of graduate school I painted abstractly. I studied and imitated Richard Diebenkorn’s work, particularly the Ocean Park paintings. I worked summers as a carpenter and made big painting/drawings using chalk snap lines on canvas, stained with watery washes. Red, yellow, blue and the white of the canvas. Eventually I lost the thread and took up traditional figure painting, using myself and Grace (my wife) as subjects, always naked, just simple exersizes in rendering a subject. After a few years I started looking for more anonymous subjects, so tried plein air landscape painting. A series of teaching jobs with long commutes didn’t leave much time for outings, but I had come up with a rudimentary understanding of light and atmosphere. My chance for observation was on those commutes, and I was often moved by segments of the drive. working from memory in studies, then on panels,I tried to recreate the experience of a landscape as seen through a car window, a passage through time of segments woven together with a continuous vantage point. The idea worked with the flatness of the Central Valley. When we moved to the industrial fringes of the Bay Area I changed subjects again, this time to the refineries near our house. I thought they were beautiful, as if Morandi’s cans and tall necked bottles could give off Turner’s steams and Whistler’s vapors on sunburnt hillsides. The formats were conventional rectangles. Something from the Valley landscapes persisted though. I really liked the idea that a painting could imply a narrative by its own shape, and be composed in time frome one end to the other and back again, with passages like music of density and openness. I tried to apply still life to it, with objects on a plywood shelf arranged in sparse intervals. That was about twenty years ago.

I think your question implied something about viability and survival as well, and of course that’s more complicated. The bare facts are that I taught for about seven years after graduating, and at the end of that period I got a series of grants, all based on the landscape paintings, that enabled me to paint continuously enough to generate a living from the studio. Grace has been a professor of painting and drawing at CSU for almost thirty years, and we’ve been working side by side in our studios since we were undergraduates.

LG: Is there any one thing that has been most important to you? Something more than anything else that has made you the painter you are today?

MT: No, not one big thing. I think it’s more a cumulative series of people, ideas and experience that shape us. Some more important than others, no doubt, but I wouldn’t single out one in particular.

Black Vase, Pool Ball, and The Remains of The Day, 1993 Oil on Panel. 18 x 18 inches

Barge,(DETAIL) 9 x 62 inches, 1998, Oil on Panel

Container, 18 x 21 inches Oil on panel 2001

Container, 18 x 24 inches 1999

LG: I’ve read that your love and study of both Italian and Northern early renaissance painters such as Piero Della Francesca and Hans Memling has been formative influence on your work. Can you tell us something about how these painters influence your still lifes?

MT: I had a really terrific teacher in Junior College who, when talking about the idea of influences, suggested that being influenced was a very healthy thing, but we shouldn’t stop there. We should, in his words “go to the source”. So as a student when I was enthralled with Diebenkorn, a deeper study would point to Matisse, Bonnard, and then their sources. When I was painting the figure I was really drawn to Gregory Gillespie and Phillip Guston, both of whom drew heavily on sources in the early renaissance, Guston from Piero, and Gillespie from Carlo Crivelli. I’ve never connected with Crivelli but found, like most of us, a mountain in Piero. In ’92 Grace and I bartered for a house in Gubbio for an extended stay. By pure luck it happened to be the 500th anniversary of Piero’s death, so as many works as could be assembled from around the world were brought right nearby; to Arrezzo, Sansepulchro, Monterchi, and especially Urbino, where, among his paintings were his mathematical treatises, pages opened with illustrational drawings and calculations. For me it illustrated a very human notion that we could devise or discern some kind of order in a wildy, kaleidoscopic world. His sense of order had such dignity! But I also found a very singular sense of time in Piero, that long, extended, almost infinite moment, like one that John Cage describes between the end of one note and the beginning of another in music. I found a lot of magic in paintings whose characteristics might otherwise be described as stiff or wooden, but were really operating with a powerful inner pulse.

I’ve found parallel sensations looking at the early Flemish painters, especially Van der Weyden, Memling and Petrus Christus.

I’ve used, or tried to use, a lot of aspects of this very old language for my own aims. I make small worlds out of very recognizable objects, carefully rendered so that their physicality can be believed. But I treat them also in a way that they would never be encountered in the physical world, partly in the attempt to slow them down. Everything is rendered as if every part of every object is always at eye level, so like the earlier landscapes there is a continuous vantage point. Everything is in roughly equal focus, without heirarchy, inviting a further look at a lot of junctures that might otherwise play more supporting roles. In a Memling for instance, I’m equally drawn to the tiny landscapes in his portraits as I am to the sitter. It’s a visual experience that asks me to hang around a while. I also use a kind of artificial ordering or collecting of objects, partly echoing the architectural settings that Piero found useful for his stories, like the Flaggelation picture in Urbino or especially the meeting of Sheba and Solomon in Arrezzo.

Cutter, 7 1/2 x 5 1/2 inches watercolor on paper 2008

Beer, Pear, Glue, 7 x 8 inches watercolor on paper 2013

Tin Can, 6 1/4 x 8 inches oil on paper 2010

LG: Morandi still lifes are painted stylistically very different than yours but many of the issues he’s involved with are echoed in your work. In particular, I’m fascinated by the spatial tensions and ambiguity in your work. Is Morandi someone you think much about?

MT: Wayne Thiebaud was, and is a great admirer of Morandi’s work and spoke about it with a lot of passion and reverance to us as students. It was contageous. I remember an episode of the old TV show “Barney Miller” where Dietrich is going on, passionately, about the Chekovian interplay between Curley and Moe in the Three Stooges. One of the other detectives walks in and says how he likes the episodes with Shemp. Deitrich then looks away and says “I see we have nothing further to discuss”. I guess that’s how I feel about any artist who says they don’t get Morandi. Thankfully that doesn’t happen often. My two cents on the subject is, among other attributes, I find his work to be a combination of extraordinary skill and extraordinary humility. And yes, those marvelous spacial ambiguities are one of many things I’ve tried to cop from him.

LG: How long does it take you to set up your still life? Do you establish a careful drawing first or do you paint very loosely and then gradually refine?

MT: The still lifes from the 90′s had relatively few objects in them so took only a day or so to set up. More recent things may have 80 or 90 objects so maybe a week. I do start with a careful drawing, trying to get things into scale with each other mostly, and that takes another week for an eight foot painting. I paint on wood with 6-8 coats of gesso because once I start painting, things inevitably don’t work, so I’ll sand sections out and restart. The initial drawing is still useful though as I try to calibrate the size of things, one to the other.

LG: Is the set up in the studio the same as is ultimately seen in the finished painting or does it change dramatically over the course of painting?

MT: I can’t recall a painting ever remaining the same composition from start to finish. There are always subtractions and additions, sometimes major overhauls, sometimes after a few months I sand the whole thing out and try something new.

LG: Are you faithful to the setup or is it more just a point of departure – how important is observation throughout the painting process?

MT: I’m faithful to the setup in degrees. Sometimes I paint things in that aren’t in the setup at all, like landscapes or portraits or copied portions of paintings I’ve been looking at. I generally eliminate the printed labeling on cans, boxes and bottles, and I have to invent, or at least extrapolate the appearance of things because I just don’t see everything straight on that way. I nudge something about what I see into an artificial system.

Arrangement With Horse and Rider,(DETAIL-click for full image) 10 x 48 inches Oil on Panel 2010

and a Bowler in the Trees,(DETAIL-click for full image) 9 1/2 x 87 inches 2011, Oil on Panel

untitled (Sledgehammer)(DETAIL-click for full image) 41 x 11 1/2 inches, 2007, Oil on Paper

LG: Please tell us something about your process in painting. Do you generally build up the painting in a layered, indirect manner or do you work more directly? Any special palette or method of working other painters might find of interest?

MT: I work in a way that’s pointed towards opacity at the end with a very even surface, so I start with a very simplified first layer that looks like a watercolor, brushy and teansparent. That gets sanded to a ghost image then a second pass is made, with a little more indication of light and local color. That gets sanded again, changes made and gradual refinement on to a fourth or fifth layer. Sounds laborious but with thrills along the way. In slow motion.

My pallette is pretty broad. Because I use so little paint, I indulge in lots of variations of color, with a section for umber/sienna/ochre, and separate areas of reds, yellows, blues and greens. I’m not partial to any brands, though I really like some more recent efforts by American companies. I use cheap brushes.

Studio, outside

Studio, inside

LG: You must have a huge studio. I’ve read that you often have multiple setups going on in the same time. How do you manage having such long horizontal still lifes? Why do they hold such interest for you?

MT: On the contrary, I have a small studio that my brothers built for us.I have a shelf on one wall with a worktable I made specifically for the long paintings. The panels lie flat on the table and I made a little arm rest thing that glides above the surface, keeping my hand steady and helping me draw and paint straight lines. It’s a very low tech mechanical aid, made of some 2×4′s and some leftover baseboard trim, but it works. A miracle I think.

As for maintaining interest, I guess if I wasn’t interested I’d be in more trouble than I already am. But I’ve decided I need to do these very specific paintings, and I haven’t found any shortcuts, and my desire to see each one through is enough. I also find that many of the strongest pleasures (and greatest disappointments) are at the end. I think it’s my ridiculous good fortune to get up every morning, make it through the rosebushes to my studio and do some version of what painters do, even if mine take more time than some. I deal with the flow of ideas in sketchbooks, studies, drawings, watercolors and oil paintings on paper. Things that are faster and have their own unique pleasures. I’m always interested.

Atlas(DETAIL-click for full image)38 x 19 inches oil on panel

Barge with Yellow Rope(DETAIL-click for full image)9 x 85 inches oil on panel

Books, Block and Tackle (DETAIL-click for full image) 47 x 11 inches, 2007, Oil on Wood Panel

LG: In many of your paintings there is an interesting compression of the space, like you were viewing everything from a great distance using binoculars. This accentuates the horizontal and verticals in the picture. Often we see your objects frontally with no perspective orthogonals. Why in our post-modern era is maintaining “the integrity of the picture plane” still so important?

MT: I want there to be tension and play between the illusion of objects in space and devices that conspire against that. For instance, taking a cylinder, like a soup can, and painting it as seen straight on, as a rectangle, flattens it, but using another device, like light or reflection that reasserts its cylindrical nature, is at least a little unsettling. It’s a plea to spend some time there if only to figure it out. I do it on a broader scale by gathering many objects into a single, usually rectangular shape, like the cubes that crushed cars become. It’s one thing and everything. It’s an extremely artificial, ridiculous imposition of order on what is a kaleidoscope of shape and pattern. It’s the same with the internal geometry you noted, verticals and horizontals, posts and beams. It’s a caprice that tries to hold what’s inside of it at bay.

My feeling about the now post-postmodern era is that it’s a great time to be an artist. It’s the great age of pluralism where everything is in play, and where notions of picture planes and other systems can be mixed and matched and all muddied up at the service of peculiar visual experiences. I don’t know that I’d deem anything irrelevant.

Tower (DETAIL-click for full image) 55 1/2 x 10 1/2 inches 2007 Oil on Panel

Green Spool (DETAIL-click for full image) 7 x 62 inches 2010 Oil on paper

Pavane (DETAIL-click for full image) 8 x 48 inches 2008 oil on wood panel

LG: You seem attracted to the color of everyday American life – stuff you see on the shelves at CVS or ACE hardware. The poetics of your painting is played out with the color conversations and geometry. The precision is your forms emphasize the flat colors against each other. The call and response of colors and their shapes to each other keeps our eyes moving through the picture. What words could you share with us about the color in your work?

MT: Yes, the paintings are depicting pretty mundane things. A pair of pliers. A can of corn. I’ve often titled them Barges, thinking of the craft that lugs our cargo around. Cleopatra had her version. These are mine. I don’t go around looking for objects to paint, I practically trip over them. I may as well put them to work, as stand ins for comedy, tragedy, sensuality. If I look hard enough I’ll always find something there. I’m in a long line of artists working those mines. I know I’m not interested in a critique of consumerism or political tomes. I’m embracing these things, and if they’re successful the only irony would be that they could transcend their own identities and become systems of color as you described, or honored guests at their own ball, or perform a pavanne on a plywood shelf.

The way that color functions is staged and premeditated. I look for and sometimes find after the fact, harmonies and echoes of shape and color that are either played up or down. Paintings tell us what thet want that way. I thought your comment about the color of American life was interesting. I don’t know that I’ve ever thought of it in precisely that way but I can say that after being in Italy for a while I came home with the clarity that I wasn’t Italian, and that there was something deep in the soul of Morandi’s paintings that was very very Italian, from particular color harmonies to the tempo of his brush. If such a thing as American color happens here it’s probably because I haven’t thought of it and haven’t tried to control it.

Spool and Mogadishu (DETAIL-click for full image) dimensions unknown, 2009 oil on paper

LG: Your still life objects don’t evoke nostalgic associations but they’re not just mundane objects with only formal purposes either. You invite the viewers to create their own poetry and narratives out of stuff more likely to found in a recycle bin than the ye olde curio shop. What are some of the things most important to you in regard to subject matter and narrative? Why paint the stuff you do?

MT: You may have answered the first part of your question better than I could, along with some comments I’ve already made. I would only add that if these things ever do work, they’ll say the same thing we all want to say, that I was alive here and now and it felt something like this, or this, or this. I select objects democratically and ask that they stand up straight and play a part. One thing and everything. It’s an arrogant aspiration but worth a try.

Detergent, Glue, Towel-Roll 3 1/2 x 4 1/2 inches watercolor on paper 2013

Windex 5 1/2 x 10 inches watercolor on paper 2013

Mater 1979-2012 Oil on Canvas 20 x 20 inches – image courtesy of the Betty Cuningham Gallery

Review by Thaddeus Radell

In John Lees’ current exhibition at the Betty Cunningham Gallery, the broad orchestration of intoxicatingly layered texture, ineffable nuances of color and spectral imagery combines to create an overwhelming presence of physical Beauty. Such Beauty, so impeccably and consistently constructed, its cultivation so apparent, soon becomes, in fact, disturbing. The undeviating articulation of high aesthetics becomes suspect, the surfaces redundant, even complacent. Yet, to Lees’ credit, once the initial visually stunning impact of the Beautiful has receded into this rather dogged ritual of exquisite, painterly palimpsest, and then allowed a second, more sustained viewing, the truly electrifying and poignant aspect of this exhibition emerges.

As Kenneth Clark surmised in his book Looking at Pictures, every encounter with a work of art can be seen as initiated by some sort of visual impact.  That moment elicits an intellectual or emotional response, which consequently either engages, palls or leaves the viewer indifferent. In the case of these works, the impact is not derived from the notional subject of any given piece. Indeed those subjects initially read as quite monosyllabic and pale when compared to the complex and luxuriant phrasing of the paint itself. Lees’ strength appears to be in his sublime process of building time-hewn incrustations of richly layered paint into surfaces that define expressive, luminous and delectable paint application. To cite a single example, in Lake (2004-2013), a curved horizon of densely lustrous caput mortem shields a scurried flotsam and jetsam of softy radiant semitones. Here Lees couples his sensuous handling of paint with an acutely cerebral discernment of warm and cool color harmonies to adroitly caress the form.

Each piece in this exhibition hovers within close parameters of this refined and succulent ‘painterly’ aesthetic. Unfortunately, as mentioned above, the viewer’s interest in such overt Beauty is difficult to sustain and soon subject to wane, visually deafened by the alchemical sirens of Pigment and Oil. Discovering flattened tubes of paint buried in the surfaces is equally disconcerting, adding to a growing impression of a certain textural gratuitousness. William Corbett’s catalog description of Lee’s methods confirms that indeed Lees includes old palettes and studio floor-hardened paper as supports for his work. As David Cohen concludes, in an insightful 2008 review in the New York Sun, ‘the emotionally wrought sense of labor-intensity and devotion, in other words, is particularly achieved rather in the way a framer or cabinetmaker distresses wood to get an antique look.’ And thus the Beauty of this work is disturbing, both for its unnerving consistency, and for its seeming affectation.

Even more disturbing, however, is the fact that despite these grievous sins, this exhibition remains powerful, evocative, emotionally compelling, and, yes, beautiful.

It is, in fact, at this critical point of the spectator’s visual saturation that this work begins to awaken through the belated recognition of its topic. Philip Rawson, in his fine book, Drawing, describes the topic of a drawing as having two aspects. “First is the tenor, which promotes the extension of forms into space; second is the special meaning enclosed in the topic.” He then continues, “the meaning lies not in the tenor, but in how it is treated,” and “the point is that the topic of the work is something in which…a special numinous power is felt to reside.” The point here is that, for Rawson, art cannot consist merely of the tenor, or structural development of form. ‘The tenor is…the bare skeleton of the visual idea which can provoke us if we are artists to project on to it, or if we are spectators to accept the projection of, the imagery and visual ideas into which is condensed our experience of what it is to BE.’ The implanting of such an ontological context within his work is what elevates Lees’ efforts to another plane. Contemplating the belabored surfaces of his work, just before Tedium lifts its baleful head from the splatters, scrapes and blisters of those enigmatic caput mortems and soulful dusky greens, the topic of the work rouses itself from seeming single-mindedness to become a revelatory, numinous projectile directly on target: the target being the inner cradle of the viewer’s visual memory with its myriad emotional associations.

The tenor of Lee’ images vary, yet are all quite direct and, indeed, simple. A field, a stream, a bathtub, an angel from the Cloisters, a man in an armchair, a portrait, a clown. Such simplicity of subject is deceptive and allows this initial thundering of the physical to dominate, and indeed usurp the meaning inherent in these enigmatic works. Once one allows the topic of these images to swell beyond the painted surface, or rather, once one allows the virtuosic nature of the paint to become more than surface, the meaning of the assorted notional references becomes the real dialectic. Not that either the process used to create these images is unimportant or that the inherent meaning of these images could be equally well expressed in another manner. Indeed one cannot possibly imagine such a static composition of a bathtub yielding so evocative an image without such a rigorous and nuanced use of surface. Lees’ surface reveals itself as an exceptionally potent and exquisitely engineered, lusty conduit of a meaning that is so elusive, so rarefied that one cannot help but feel elevated into a state of grace.

Within this captivating exhibition, five paintings are of particular, numinous scope: Courtyard, 1986-2013; Man Sitting in an Armchair, -2013; Mater, 1979-2012; Clown (Beachwood Canyon), 2001-2012; and Dilly Dally, 2011.

Courtyard 1986-2013 Oil on Canvas 10 1/2 x 14 1/2 inches – image courtesy of the Betty Cuningham Gallery

Courtyard, presented in an alcove all to itself, is one of daunting beauty. The imposed cloistering of the hanging is echoed in the scene itself, a view of a deserted courtyard with a small collection of ponderous, silent forms. One-point perspective is blatantly enhanced by an elliptical cropping of the format and both pictorial devices serve to funnel the composition towards an enigmatic monument of some sort. This disconcerting, sentimental, even rabid, manipulation of the viewer’s regard toward the monument is eventually, and quietly, overcome by two poetically brilliant moments. The first, just behind and to the right of the monument, is simply an olive tree stated with a simple, symbolic beauty reminiscent of the Italian Primitives. The second, by far the more intriguing and simply pregnant with implied meaning, is a dimly lit passageway that leads off to the left of the picture. The mysterious luminosity of this suggested passageway with its low, top-lit wall and grey-shrouded tree offers infinite seed for meditation. The intelligence of this picture is palpable, its beauty resilient.

Mater is a portrait of the artist’ mother that frames her head tight into the format, a close-up that would normally account for a pronounced degree of observed detail. Instead, Lees offers the viewer an image as furtive, yet present, as the ghostly passageway in Courtyard. Importantly, the form of the head remains solid, despite the sullen merging of any given contour into the indefinite surrounding space. Here the weight of the paint is less beautiful, though no less expressive, shimmering as it does like silver beneath the peeling of a chipped tin ceiling.

Clown (Beachwood Canyon), 2001-2012 Oil on canvas 16 x 10 inches

Clown (Beachwood Canyon) is a haunting image where Lees has moved beyond observation, portraiture or memory associations into what critic Benjamin Genocchio expressed as the ‘visionary.’ Here the clown, with all its echoes of Watteau, Derain, Picasso, and even Cezanne, is conceived of as an artist, the painter himself. Lees’ excruciatingly refulgent technique, now fed a more intuitively inspired narrative, brings to birth an image of startling gravitas.

Dilly Dally, 2011 Oil on panel 12 x 6 3/4 inches – image courtesy of the Betty Cuningham Gallery

In Dilly Dally, Lees demonstrates an uncanny ability to elevate, through this relatively benign method of processed paint, a nostalgic scrap from his past into an image of surprising depth and a certain endearing poignancy. Corbett cites Lees’ masterly ability to process his ‘thoroughly American vulgarity’ into images that sustain and enrich the viewer. Indeed, Dilly Dally is derived from an early TV character. Yet despite the caricatural proportions and attire, this small panel reads as a soulful and radiant embodiment of childhood.

Man Sitting in Armchair (Blue Lamp), 2012 Oil on canvas 15 1/4 x 14 inches – image courtesy of the Betty Cuningham Gallery

Finally, on exhibit are three versions of a man seated in an armchair, all of which resound with deep feeling, compassion and a distinct sense of loss. Of the three, Man Seated in an Armchair (Blue Lamp) is by far the most refined and indeed is perhaps the most haunting and mesmerizing image in the entire exhibit. Surging from the recklessly exquisite paint, the deep wells of numinous undertones in other works are now fully breeched and brought into a quietly disturbing, palpable presence. The somber, anecdotal tenor of a man sitting in an armchair is endowed with an enigmatic, metaphysical weight that stops the viewer in his tracks.

This chance to witness the construction of the numinous on such an elevated scale is not to be missed.

Lee’s exhibition at the Betty Cunningham Gallery runs through June 22^nd.

by Thaddeus Radell

Certain Densities is showing at the George Caleb Bingham Gallery, University of Missouri from June 3 – August 19, 2013. features paintings by Matthew Ballou, Barry Gealt, David Gracie, Melanie Johnson, Ken Kewley, Rachael McHan, Rachael Pease, Emil Robinson, and Megan Schaffer.

Thoughts on Surface an essay by Natalie Shelly and Certain Densities, Uncertain Visions, Two Asides Regarding Perceptual Painting by Matthew Ballou are essays from the catalog to this show that were generously offered to readers of Painting Perceptions.

Thoughts on Surface

By Natalie Shelly

Abundance surrounds us. Food, housing, love, education; all of these things we quickly calculate when we reflect on the plentifulness of our lives and the way in which we meet our universal needs. While plenty is never as universal as we would like, the typical ways in which we categorize and quantify abundance do not have to place a limit on how we find and fully experience our world. Though our birthplaces, ages, and surroundings may differ, we all collectively share a world of color, light, and language and a tangibility of life through touch and experience. Life and the surfaces it presents to us become a way of knowing and a vehicle from which we build meaning.

David Gracie untitled (skin) oil on panel 15.75 x 19.75 inches

Amazingly, touch remains the earliest sense we acquire and our original educator in constructing the knowledge of who we are and where we come from. We come to understand our world through the skin and surfaces we encounter. It is through this reaching to know and to perceive that we gain our reality – one that is gifted to us, not through immediacy or total comprehension at first, but instead one of wonderment that is woven by gradual acquisition. The soft warmth and pressure of skin, the cold shock of ice, and the tooth of stone – all of these surfaces teach us and we become their record keepers. This continuous collecting begins in the womb and never ceases.

Most often, our acts of recording go unnoticed and are done instinctively. Our fingertips, our eyes, and even tools we hold in our hands become receptors for feeling and learning the history held by a surface. This haptic mapping that we establish so early in life is built through an exchange with surface. It inspires in us a confidence, one that both classifies and demystifies. New places and objects call us back to what we have known, what we have touched, and what we recognize as being understood and familiar. Touch activates a reverie of return in each of us.

Surface can also excite imagination and help to reveal truths. Just as the beginning of a story can quietly introduce stage and character, surface, while uniquely descriptive, is just that – the surface, the start, the outside of things. This exterior forms a liminal edge, a transition between what is living or what is static and what lies beneath.

These thresholds we encounter in life are diverse and carry a beauty in their complexity and function. Skin holds and envelops tissue and bone to support our bodies, while the surface of paper, canvas, or clay can serve as an illusionistic plane from which artists may render a world and an experience. Each type of barrier is precious, fragile, and necessary. When studied, surfaces and the interiors they protect can illuminate what was once scientifically unknown or misunderstood by society. Yet, equally as important is the revelation and felt experience caused by a surface that holds the graceful stroke of a line or the layered translucency of color. Whether we are makers, explorers, or perceptual participants, it is the looking, touching, and recording of surface that can elicit moments that exist beyond the simple summarization of words. These moments, regardless of whether they dwell in the concrete or the mystical, are gracious in what they reveal to the self.

There is an abundance that surrounds us in this world. It is below our feet, wrapping our bodies, and constantly in grasp of our eyes and our hands. Surface, while general in what it may categorize, remains an offering of experience – a silent witness to origin, process, and potential.

Matthew Ballou, Teachers, oil on panel, 24 inches in diameter

Matthew Ballou, Resonators, oil on panel, 14 inches in diameter

Certain Densities, Uncertain Visions – Two Asides Regarding Perceptual Painting

by Matthew Ballou

“Appearances reach us through the eye, and the eye—whether we speak with the psychologist or the embryologist—is part of the brain and therefore inextricably involved in mysterious cerebral operations. Thus nature presents every generation … with a unique and unrepeated facet of appearance. The encroaching archaism of old photographs is only the latest instance of an endless succession in which every new mode of natural representation eventually resigns its claim to co-identity with natural appearance. And if appearances are thus unstable in the human eye, their representation in art is not a matter of mechanical reproduction but of progressive revelation.” – Leo Steinberg

Although quite varied in manner and approach, a number of the works in this exhibition evidence a determined sensitivity to the painted surface as an aesthetic and formal reality. This embrace of surface is necessary, as all paintings come down to the particular arrangement of pigments on a (usually) two-dimensional plane. Painted surfaces are always progressively revealed; they always manifest over some period of time and through some process of engagement. Surface could be defined as a zone of incidence where nuanced sight and kinesthetic touch come together. The artist’s apprehension of space, light, form, and movement presents itself as a haptic environment in the painted object. This arena is of huge significance to perceptually-minded painters.

Creating an illusion of things is of only partial importance when it comes to the fact of the painted surface. Subjectivity, shifting focus, and temporality are also vital as indicators of life, sensation, and thought in the artwork. These ephemeral aspects of creative effort become embedded, and they shape the painting’s meaning just as surely as any material or formal fact might. Therefore the densities of this exhibition’s title refer not only to paint but also to lived experience.

Barry Gealt, Waterfall II, oil on panel, 12 x 9.75 inches

Barry Gealt, Detail – Waterfall II

Barry Gealt, Waterfall III, oil on panel, 12 x 9.75 inches

The densities these surfaces support are certain in the sense that they are resolutely made. However, they are also certain in that they are particular and specifically sought-out. These surfaces are a realm of peculiar notations drawn together to form a united structure combining sight, touch, and contemplation in an evocative way. This rich atmosphere is a unique aspect of what art has always offered makers and viewers. The works live as artifacts of experience, as discursive objects that both reveal and conceal their own making. Thus, the paintings are not meant to function as closed events. Instead, they are participatory and relational. Their surfaces offer an exchange with the audience that inspires reciprocity and active viewing.

“When the limits of the depictable in nature suddenly recede before the searching gaze, when earlier works come to seem inadequately representative of truth, then the artist’s power multiplies… Every picture is to some degree a value judgment, since you cannot represent a thing without proclaiming it worthwhile… But natural fact can be purely apprehended only where the human mind has first endowed it with the status of reality. Only then is the act of seeing backed by a passion…”
- Leo Steinberg

A perceptual approach to painting is not synonymous with rote observation. Perception is a harrowing experience, fraught with lightning-strike insight and rabbit-hole tunnel vision. Perceptualists recognize that their sight is subjective, the result of influence and pressure, and extremely sensitive to suggestion and conceit. They know that building a picture from their own shifting apprehension of the environment around them is not a linear matter. The most banal thing may become charged with transcendence through a concerted effort of contemplation. Likewise, the most sacred object may be reduced to the realm of prosaic commonality via determined focus on other concerns. In each instance a keen awareness of sight may be obtained without limiting the painting to an exercise that terminates in simply achieving an image. Perception is more than the act of seeing, just as listening is more than the act of hearing. Perceptual painters are aiming to experience more – and present more in their work – than seeing and translating sight, no matter how honorable an end that may be. Verisimilitude is only one aspect of representational art. Other aims may take precedence in any particular painting.

Achieving a distinctively felt sense of the seen in a work may actually involve the most rigorous abstraction, the most intense formal play. Indeed, it requires artists to go far beyond just transferring identifiable things (objects, landscapes, people) from the three-dimensional realm into the two-dimensional realm. This is because representation often involves counterintuitive understandings of time and awareness, proportion and relationships, memory and history, among many other factors. Representation is an accumulation of such multiplicities. A representational picture will not always look representational, but it will always communicate beyond appearances.

Ken Kewley- To the studio, acrylic on Paper Mounted on Panel, 8 x 8 inches

Ken Kewley- Side Yard, acrylic on Paper Mounted on Panel, 8 x 8 inches

To arrive at a picture that embodies representation artists may have to forgo depictive, clear tropes in favor of the kind of digressions that so often permeate our sensations. The visual dynamics of sight are far more complex than simple transcription of accurate features, textures or shapes. They are the result of complex neurobiology and social conventions interacting with the idiosyncratic ways each of us has learned to see. How viewers comprehend a picture is intimately connected to the previous experiences of sight they have had, how they have interpreted those past experiences, and what vast range of factors (physical, emotional, cultural, religious, etc.) have influenced those experiences. The perceptual painter, incredibly, attempts to build pictures with all of these various elements in play. That is why Cezanne’s apples are not just apples and why Heidegger and Meyer Schapiro can argue about Van Gogh’s boots. An artist concerned with channeling being-ness and experience will never settle for illustrative mimesis. With great honor for appearances, the perceptualist reaches beyond them.

So it is that many of the images you find in this exhibition are cumulative estimations exploring potential states of experience rather than final products of confident certainty. Perceptual painting rests on a constructed visual logic that has little to do with direct visual facts. It incorporates tangential awareness into the acts of apprehension, asking much of both the artist and the viewer. When you look at the paintings, see beyond appearances into the subjective realms these artists have created. In paying attention to what others have contemplated, we participate in something far deeper and more intimately human than mere imitation could ever provide. Mine your own personal history of sight and trade literal, certain readings for evocative and relational ones. Perhaps you will perceive the reveries these artists have felt, grasp the “progressive revelation” they have suggested, and notice the poetic understanding embedded in your own alchemical vision.

These things are, after all, part of what paintings were always meant to do.

“The aesthetic is the making formal of epiphany. There is a ‘shining through’.
- George Steiner

Emil Robinson- Mirror Life, oil on Panel, 22 x 18 inches (note: the linked larger view is a detail)

Melanie Johnson, Paper Planes,(detail) oil and acrylic on linen, 20 x 16 inches

When Peri Schwartz was asked in an earlier interview by Harryet Candee “What is your dearest motto, philosophy, or message for yourself?” Peri Schwartz answered: “This quote from Willa Catha keeps me going:

“Every artist knows that there is no such thing as “freedom” in art. The first thing an artist does when he begins a new work is to lay down the barriers and limitations; he decides upon a certain composition, a certain key, a certain relation of creatures or objects to each other. He is never free, and the more splendid his imagination, the more intense his feeling, the farther he goes from general truth and general emotion.

Nobody can paint the sun. or sunlight. He can only paint the tricks that shadows play with it, or what it does to forms. He cannot even paint those relations of light and shade – he can only paint some emotion they give him, some man-made arrangement of them that happens to give him personal delight – a conception of clouds over distant mesas (or over the towers of St. Sulpice) that makes one nerve in him thrill and tremble. At bottom all he can give you is the thrill of his own poor little nerve – the projection in paint of a fleeting pleasure in a certain combination of form and color as temporary and almost as physical as a taste on the tongue.”
– Willa Cather, Light on Adobe Walls

Peri Schwartz is currently having a show of new watercolors and drawings at the garvey|simon art access gallery in NYC ( May 15 – June 15, 2013) This show’s press release states that Peri Schwartz:

“is not exactly a still life painter. She builds abstractions out of real forms. The objects do not inform the work as much as the artist informs the objects. Schwartz does not merely paint or draw what she sees; she first creates what she wants to see until it is there, and then she puts brush to canvas, charcoal to paper. She uses glass bottles filled with colored oils for their translucency and layers these vessels in front of each other until the desired hue or opacity emerges, and then she paints it. If she knows she wants a particular shot of color in her work, she will bring it in. She will physically paint an object the color she wants and work it into her composition if needed.

The work is rigorously formal yet never stiff; the surfaces have a loose brushwork and casual air that make them very inviting. The steely charcoal and ink drawings on Mylar are bold and almost architectural. Drawn with a confident stroke, towers of books lean on and support each other; traces of grid marks define the picture plane, and then disappear – forcing the eye to jump to the next landing spot. The drawings are punctuated with dark and light shifts that keep the gaze zipping back and forth.”

Peri Schwartz has exhibited her work extensively for the last 30 years, and can be found in the permanent collections of institutions including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Corcoran Gallery of Art, DC; Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, MA; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; The British Museum, London; The Arkansas Arts Center, Little Rock; Biblioteque Nationale de France, Paris; New York Public Library; and the Yale University Art Gallery. She received her B.F.A. from Boston University in 1973 and her MFA from Queens College in 1975. She is represented by a number of galleries including garvey|simon art access, NYC, Gallery Naga, Boston, Page Bond Gallery, Richmond, and Gerald Peters, Santa Fe.

Interview by Cody Upton in Peri’s Studio in New Rochelle, NY February 26, 2013

(ed. note: Cody Upton is a writer who lives in New York City)

Cody:   When did you first start using the grid?

Peri:   In art school, the practice of looking at a painting and dividing it into a grid was introduced as a compositional device. Later, when I was doing self?portraits, I had to get my body in the same position every day. I was working from life, in front of a mirror, and I started to mark lines on the wall behind me so that I would know where to position my head and arm. Soon I included the lines in the painting. They became part of the composition.

Cody:   What made you decide to put the grid lines in the composition?

Peri:   I was holding up a ruler and looking at those straight lines and I guess it just seemed natural to put them in.

Cody:   Did you put them in initially as guides?

Peri:   Probably. I still see the grid as a guide, in a way.

Cody:   But then it also became something more?

Peri:   Yes. Everything is more interesting with the grid. The objects take on more weight, more appeal because they are in this space of verticals and horizontals. If I was going to work on a composition and the grid was not in it, it wouldn’t hold any interest for me. I like seeing the intervals of blank space. That’s a musical concept. You have the quiet of a white shape and then you have sound.

Cody:   How faithful are you to the things you paint?

Peri:   I am religious. That bottle is the prosaic reality that I’m trying to reproduce. The fun is in finding the right organization.

Cody:   So if you want to paint a bigger bottle, you get a bigger bottle, or you move the bottle closer?

Peri:   Exactly.

Cody:   And if you want to change the color of that board, you paint over it with a different color?

Peri:   Right.

Cody:   When you paint the board red, do you use the same red paint on the canvas itself?

Peri:   No, that’s a cheap paint that I get at the paint store. They’re Benjamin Moore colors. I look at the color charts to see which ones I want.

Cody:   And what about the books? Have you ever painted the cover of one a different color?

Peri:   No. That I haven’t done. But I’ve rejected a lot of books because of their color. I go to Strand and pick out books for their covers, not necessarily because I want to read them. They’re props. I just got this new book, this beautiful blue book. Isn’t it gorgeous?

Cody:   It’s turquoise.

Peri:   I was so excited to find this. I had all these beautiful oranges and reds but my palette had become too warm in the foreground. This blue connects well with the color of the tabletop.

Cody:   So it’s almost like putting a puzzle together.

Peri:   It is.

Cody:   How long did it take to set up this particular composition?

Peri:   It took several weeks but it isn’t like I set it up and then begin drawing. I keep making adjustments. It is never really done.

Cody:   You know, I only just realized that you produce the grid physically on the objects you paint.

Peri:   Right. I think that’s probably unusual. I don’t think it’s common to draw the grid on the books, the tables, the walls, on everything.

Cody:   Do you think your compositions change because the grid is actually on the things that you’re drawing or painting, as opposed to just on the paper or the canvas?

Peri:   No. The grid is a fluid thing. I’ve learned, that when you paint over something that is good, the new version is often even better, because you let the old layer come through. A lot of my painting is about what’s underneath. It’s not just a one-shot thing. I’m not interested in the Frank Stella shape. I like the Diebenkorn shape, with its feeling of layers, of color upon color. It’s not just a block outline. It’s a shape that’s shifting.

Cody:   From the point that you lay down the first piece of tape or the first line of charcoal to create your grid, to when you actually start drawing, how much time passes?

Peri:   It’s more of a back and forth. I start drawing, and then I put down some of the grid lines on the wall. It’s a lot of sitting down at the easel and saying, “Wait a minute, I need this or I need that.”

Cody:   Is painting always the end result? Do your drawings always lead to painting?

Peri:   No, they don’t. I love to draw. In this instance, I started a drawing and thought I wanted to do a painting of it. I ordered the canvas but in the interim, I got to the point where I said, ‘Oh boy, I really do love to draw. Maybe I want this to be a print.’ I started talking to Maurice Sanchez, who is a lithographer, and he introduced me to Mylar. He uses Mylar instead of a stone to make lithographs. Once I started working on Mylar, which has such a creamy translucence, I completely forgot about doing the painting. I was happy to just draw. I drew for months, but eventually I got to the point where I wanted to paint again. I wanted to deal with color.

Cody:   Do you ever draw in color?

Peri:   Well, I just did a series of watercolors, and I have worked in pastel, but I love black and white.

Bottles &Jars #9, watercolor on paper, 2012, 15 x 22 inches

Studio #15, 2013, ink and charcoal on mylar 40 x 36 inches

Studio #13, 2012, Ink and charcoal on mylar, 30 1/2 x 28 inches

Cody:   Wasn’t it Maurice Sanchez who introduced you to watercolor? He said that you needed to work out the colors that you wanted in your lithograph in watercolors, which led to you doing a whole series.

Peri:   It was great switching to watercolors. The red is different in watercolor than it is in oil painting or in monotypes. It has a great, delicious redness to it. You also have to think about the white of the paper. In general, I’m conscious of that anyway, but you become very sensitive to any little bit of white that’s poking through, and you have to ask, ‘Do I want that white or not?’ So you’re using a different part of your brain. That’s really important, particularly since I stick with the same subject for many years. To introduce a new medium is useful, inspiring, and motivating. It gets you going again. You see everything in a different way.

Bottles & Jars XII 2011 20×30 Oil

Cody:   You forwarded me an Igor Stravinsky quote that was important to you. It says: ‘Composing for me is putting into an order a certain number of interval relationships. The faculty of creating is never given to us all by itself. It always goes hand in hand with the gift of observation. The least accident holds his interest and guides his operations. One does not contrive an accident, one observes it to draw inspiration there from.’

Peri:   That perfectly encapsulates how I feel. The intervals are the grid, which is all that empty space. You need empty space. And then sometimes accidents happen, and you say, ‘Wait a minute, that half an inch to the left seems a little more interesting. I’m going to use that.’ That accident is what it’s about.  The one thing I don’t want a painting to look like when it’s finished is finished. I want it to be an open question. Things shouldn’t look like they’re exactly where they’re supposed to be. The composition shouldn’t feel stagnant.

Bottles & Jars XXI 2011 22×36 Oil

Bottles & Jars XVI 2011 22×36 Oil

Cody:   So how do you know when a work is finished?

Peri:   When I begin to say, ‘I’ve had enough of this.’ Sometimes I come into my studio and say, ‘This works!’ It’s like a surprise.

I never think of the grid as a restriction. I see it as an enhancement. It contains my work in some way, but ultimately gives me freedom. And then there is the fact that I want to work from life. That’s another restriction. It’s so important to me to have those pieces in front me.

Cody:   Why is that?

Peri:   In art school, I loved working from a model. Anytime they said invent something, I never found that exciting. In one drawing class, we had to light ourselves up from below. It was such a great problem. I had never drawn myself with light coming from below. I saw this whole new world, but it was from life. It was a concept that we were imposing on life, and then we went from there.

Studio XVIII 2007 56×44

Studio VIII 2005 62×40

Studio XXIII 2010 60×38

Cody:  When you paint what is actually in front of you, do you make decisions about how to abstract it?

Peri:   I do. But it’s more like note taking. That’s a red shape, that’s a yellow shape, rather than that’s a particular object.

Cody:   You said perspective isn’t really something you think about because the grid makes everything into a flat surface. It seems that in itself is a form of abstraction.

Peri:   Yes. I want to make these exquisite, organized things that sit on the edge of abstraction. My paintings are realistic—you do get a sense of space—but they are also abstract.

Cody:   What subject do you think you’ll work on next?

Peri:   I don’t think there is a next. This is next. We’re in it.

Peri Schwartz: studio video

Self-portrait 2009 monotype 36×21

Self-portrait 2003 charcoal 23×16

Larry Groff: What interests you most about painting panoramas – what is your attraction to painting an expanded field of view?

Matthew Lopas: The conventional viewfinder produces wonderful compositions, but it is always at a distance from the viewer. I find its frame limiting and alienating. In fact, our field of vision is much wider than the perspectival conventions originating in the Renaissance. My images are truer to the actual experience of what it is like to be in the world rather than to look at the world. A radically expanded field of view enables a profound intimacy with the real act of looking and creates an unmediated gaze of empathic seeing. This fills me with wonder, joy, and catharsis.
 

Several years ago I started a painting outside on my deck. I stood very close to the outside wall of my house and started to paint a panorama. As I proceeded I realized that the house “distorted” into a radically curved shape. I had never seen or done this. It made me queasy. The composition seemed unbalanced. So I moved further away from the house so the curves were minimized. The image appeared more conventionally level and plumb. The painting turned out well, but it is not nearly as exciting as the work I have done that does not fear reality as it is actually seen. The distortions seen in curvilinear space can be upsetting to a mind dominated by conventional perspectival paradigms. It took me a little while before I was able to leave conventional perspective behind.
 

The understanding of how we perceive reality that the viewfinder creates is false. It has helped create many great works of art, but it can act like a set of horse blinders. A Hopper room feels as if it is a million miles away, and if you could walk into one of his images, you would never escape. A Vermeer is so silent and filled with a spiritual light that to enter it would be sacrilege. A Leland Bell is so level and plumb that it represents more of a frieze than an actual visual experience of space. These are great painters, but I seek to paint a world that is alive with the living gaze of a human who moves, breaths, and loves to look and feel
 
I first began thinking of creating images that more closely reflect the way we truly see while studying Van Gogh’s Room at Arles. I noticed how much closer the frame of his image was to him than other painters that I emulated, such as Vermeer or Hopper. I moved to a deeper level of engagement in this issue when I began looking at panoramic images.

Miller House, 56″x102″, 2012-13, oil (private collection)

Although tableaus have been around since the Middle Ages, the conventional panorama was invented by Robert Barker in 1787. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclorama) Barker actually patented his design of a 360 degree, cylindrical, building sized panoramic painting called cycloramas. I go beyond these historic panoramas, however, by traveling at least 360 in the vertical, as well as the horizontal, directions. In essence I create “global panoramas”. After research, I realized my artistic aims had more in common with 2d map projections of the globe than viewfinder based images. My study of these map projections gave me a deeper understanding of what I was trying to do and pushed my work to another level.

Maps of the globe are diverse, and surprisingly dynamic in their application. The various map projections of the globe are generated with mathematical rigor but also distort and tessellate with creative choice. Most flat maps of our globe have the North Pole at the “top” of our planet and a very distorted Greenland, which is a construction based on social convention. A cylindrical projection can just as easily have a vertical equator as a horizontal one… a map of our world constructed with a different equator produces a totally different set of distortions.

The Pierce quincuncial projection shows how a map (or painting) can tessellate infinitely in all directions. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peirce_quincuncial_projection) When studying these maps, I realized I could tessellate space within my painting. I could record the shift in the direction of my gaze around the surrounding space and seamlessly paint the same object in the same actual location in different places within the same painting. This understanding guided my eye as I measured the space within the work. It led me to arrive at unexpected compositions. If you look at my most recent piece, Miller House, it may be surprising to learn that there is actually only one red light in the room. I spun around more than once so I could paint it twice at different times. I was excited by the relationship I saw to the medieval practice of incorporating events from different times in the same image. The compression of narrative time in a rigorously measured painting allows for a deeper engagement with the space depicted, for example, beautiful light from different moments can be painted in the same picture.

Baker House, 50″x60″, oil, 2012

LG: You started a Facebook group Painting 360 – Contemporary Variations of the Painted Panorama features a diverse range of contemporary painters who embrace some aspect of panoramic painting. Rackstraw Downes is likely one of the most recognized names and embraced painting expanded views early on. Who do you consider the most important painters of this genre and who are your most important influences and inspirations?

ML: I started Painting 360 to network with artists interested in this topic. I envision one day creating a travelling group show or a conference of some sort.

Downes has always been one of my favorite painters. He helped open up the possibility of doing something besides painting only what was directly in front of me. The wording of the title of his famous article Turning the Head in Empirical Space (in the book, Rackstraw Downes – ed.) is a lesson in and of itself. I am very interested in what happens when I allow myself to turn my head as I paint. Certain lines in nature, for example the side of a building, are, in fact, straight, yet when rigorously measured they curve visually. Painting as you turn your head increases this curve. The subtle and interesting question posed to me by Downes’ work is: What happens if this visual curve is painted as a straight line? Realizing that other elements must “distort” to compensate (much as Greenland triples in size on a flat map) gave me the creative freedom to rigorously distort based on intuitively inspired measurement. The basic idea is, if you stretch one thing in an image, it drags other things along with it.

The next artists build upon the historic cycloramic genre by working in the global panoramic mode. The artist Jacqueline Lima is a New York painter of panospheres. These are paintings actually on spheres. Onecan capture the entire field of view (360 in all directions) with absolutely no distortion using this method. Lima paints gorgeous spherical landscapes and cityscapes. She is also an innovative thinker about curvilinear space. I invited Lima to visit Hendrix College last year. She gave an incredible demonstration on how to actually mark all the longitude and latitude lines in a room as preparation for painting a panosphere. She showed that setting up a sphereical viewfinder is as really pretty simple.

Artists Rorik Smith and Marcia Clark are engaging practitioners of the global panoramic genre. They can be seen on Painting 360. Smith resides in North Wales and has a great understanding of map projections asthey relate to representational painting. We have traded many emails regarding the creative possibilities of the form. Clark, a New York painter, has made many innovative shaped paintings of the entire field of view. She clearly points out the fact that we do not experience the world mediated by a rectangle.

Living Room with Sculpture, oil on canvas, 37″ x 62″, 2009

LG: Who do you consider the most important painters of this genre?

ML: The most interesting contemporary practitioners of the cycloramic form are Sanford Wurmfeld and Yadegar Asisi. Wurmfeld is a New York painter who makes huge abstract cycloramas that have stunningly immersive color (series of lectures by him on youTube). He builds on the work of Albers. He currently has a retrospective at Hunter College. Asisi is a German digital painter who does formally conventional cycloramas only on a gigantic scale. They can be many stories tall. Historically cycloramas often have nationalistic agendas. Asisi brings a more critical eye to bear. Both are interesting cyclorama painters, but haven’t had much direct influence on me.

Sanford Wurmfeld and Yadegar Asisi, Panometer, Asisi Factory: Dresden 1756

LG: and who are your most important influences and inspirations?

ML: I have already mentioned Van Gogh, Vermeer, and Hopper. I love the quiet firelight in De La Tour as well. For years I did paintings of fire lit interiors. Pollock is my definition of good paint handling. He moves paint with total fluidity. I love to look at painting, but I no longer feel the need to search for artists to take something from. Any great painting, no matter the style or time it was made, is an inspiration. I just showed my students some Soutine images. Wow. Great.

LG: What is the relation of your work to panoramic photography?

ML: Panoramic photography has existed since the dawn of photography and is currently everywhere. You see it in webpages for hotels. You can stitch panoramas together on your phone. You can turn videos that pan in panoramic stills. 360 degree virtual spaces can be seen on Google maps. First person shooter video games move the player through a 360 degree virtual space. What is interesting about this is that people do not seem to understand that the conceptual framework for this is not based on some computer magic, but rather on direct observation of the entire field of vision as we see it. Photographers, mapmakers, mathematicians, game designers all know that one can take all (or nearly all) the visual information that can be seen from a single point and stretch it out on a flat surface or put it inside or on a real or virtual globe.

My relation to these mechanical means of mapping the 360 degrees of perception is the same as any perceptual painter’s relation to conventional photography. Photography lacks the materiality of paint. Photography does not allow for the movement of the arm as is makes beautiful measured marks. Composition in photography is based on a design that eye sees, not the movement of the arm. Photography has less to do with the body in this way. Photography can distort space with wonderful accuracy, but not with the kind of empathy that a painting can. A painter has to understand every detail that is painted. Photography shows all the irrelevant detail within its field of view. Paintings eliminate the clutter. I love photography. But it is not painting.

Black Swan, 45×79, 2011-2012

Pleven Epopee 1877 Panorama exterior from the 21st International Panorama Conference in Pleven, Bulgaria

Pleven Epopee 1877 Panorama interior. A 360 circular painting.

LG: You attended the 21st International Panorama Conference in Pleven, Bulgaria where speakers from all over the world discussed various aspects about panoramas. There are panoramic photos of the conference you took using an iPhone. Can you tell us something about what this was like?

ML: The IPC conferences (http://panoramapainting.com) are very interesting and have been an incredible learning experience for me. In Pleven we visited a Soviet style cyclorama that is a monument to Bulgarian independence from Turkey. It is a socialist realist image of an historic battle. The mayor of Pleven and the head of the national assembly welcomed us, so the whole thing was a little surreal to this American. Papers were given on topics ranging from the history of lost cycloramas, media history, virtual reality, and contemporary cycloramas in the United States, Turkey, and China. I gave a talk titled “Reinventing the Panorama through Perceptual Painting”.

Attendees at the conference had previously understood the panorama from academic, historic, or photographic perspectives. They had never seen it from inside the act of looking and painting. In my talk I told the story of how I moved from viewfinder based images to the global panorama, and shared the moment in the process of painting Ward House; I realized I could turn the painting over, turn myself around, and keep working with perceptual ease. The discussion that ensued concerned the ability to actually see the world from a global panoramic point of view. They pointed out many types of lenses and tools that had been historically used to measure this phenomenon, which further deepened my understanding of what I was up to.

The first conference I went to was at the Gettysburg cyclorama in Pennsylvania in 2011. I learned that cycloramas were travelling building sized cylindrical paintings that were the movies of their day. Similarly to many Hudson River school paintings, they functioned as entertainment and propaganda. Cycloramas were incredibly popular. The paintings are usually at least two stories tall, viewed from a large central raised platform, illuminated by natural light, and some had a diorama element in the foreground. If the diorama element is right, the transition to the painted surface is seamless and akin to the transition from low to high relief in a good bas-relief. The sense of space created in a well done cyclorama is nothing short of spectacular. Gettysburg is a must see for any painter. There is definitely a kitsch element to the cycloramas that I have seen. Gettysburg, for example, has a light show designed to give the effect time passing. And Pleven has the stolid seriousness typical of socialist realism. But the experience of immersion they offer is truly mesmerizing.

Sconces, oil on canvas, 35″ x 65″, 2009
 

LG: Your painting seems to embrace rather than suppress the parallax distortions seen in some camera panoramic views or curved mirror and fisheye lens. You use these distortions for expressive and compositional intent. Can you tell us something about how you go about creating the drawing for your paintings? I know you paint from observation but do you use a photographic means for working out the drawing and mapping how you will maneuver through the space? Or do you work it all out through direct observation using a viewfinder?

ML: I embrace the “distortions” that occur naturally with a wide field of view; the similarity to images produced by a camera lens is incidental. I discovered the bending of the visual field using the same tools that all perceptual painters use – measuring lines, locations, and sizes with my thumb or paintbrush. The only unconventional thing I do is to discard the edges of a viewfinder in favor of a 360-degree view. No lenses beyond the one in the eye are used. The distortions seen are as “real” and as visible as the more commonly understood distortions of conventional perspective. Conventional perspective depicts objects that are farther away as smaller. This is a distortion of their true size.
 

One way I show my students curvilinear space is to do a very small drawing of the easel in front of them in the middle of a large sheet of paper. When they then build the drawing out in all directions their eyes and pencils are confronted with visual reality unmediated by a viewfinder.
 

I start a painting in a similar way. I use a very large piece of upstretched canvass that is rolled up on either side and clipped to a four by four foot board. I set up on site and paint something very small, roughly in the middle, based on visual interest and the direction I want to travel in the space. Arriving at the point where I could be comfortable with the resulting distortions involve a series of perceptualdiscoveries and giving up the grip of the all-dominating grid. My heroes: Vermeer, Vuillard, Mondrian, Balthus, Hopper, and Leland Bell; based their images on the level and plum world of Cartesian space. I had to jettison the compositional strategies they taught me. I now think of composition in terms of how the eye moves over the surface and through the space, rather than how flat shapes can form a spatially active design within a rectangle. Conventional “balance” is discarded. I love the way elements can be distorted and yet still remain consistent to actual measurement.

painting of Miller House video

Work in Progress

LG: Your paintings tend to be quite large for working onsite. This must pose difficulty when painting in people’s homes, standing on their stairway, etc. How do you deal with seeing the motif and your painting at the same time? How do you keep from getting wet paint on their nice carpets and expensive upholstery! Looking at your easel it seems like you have some sort of scrolling mechanism to unfurl the area of the painting needed to be worked on, how exactly does this work? How do you see parts of the painting in relation to each other when covered up like this? Does this create difficulties with unifying the painting when you’re unable to see the painting as a whole?

 
ML: Painting like this presents many logistical challenges. Getting an easel to stand up on a staircase took a bit of thinking through but an adjustable tripod easel solved the problem. I use drop cloths that I fold to fit perfectly to the angle I am working on for the day. I cover things that might get paint splashed on them. I uncover them only for as long as I need to. I was a house painter for a short time after grad school and got used to never touching anything because I was sure to get paint on it. Despite training myself to be finicky as I move though a space, years of practice enable me to maintain the freedom to enjoy the sheer pleasure of loosely moving paint on canvas.
 
My paintings are often too big to be fully unrolled in the spot I am working. A six-foot painting simply will not fit on a staircase. Thus my process involves working on the image in separate parts as I turn and unroll and reroll the canvas. I overlap areas as I work so that the piece does not degrade into segregated parts. Most importantly, I do not plan the composition with a viewfinder based thumbnail sketch.Instead, I take risks as I let the image suggest distortions and tessellations.
 
Periodically in the process I put the piece up on a big wall and look at it. This helps me to know where I am going as I work from life later. In the end I work it as a whole from memory and the information within the image itself. It is said that the first four lines of any painting are the edges. But they can also be the last four lines. I determine the edges of the painting as I work and stretch it when it is done. This makes the process flexible and open ended. This methodology allows me to avoid compositions constructed by synthesizing historical precedents and create compositions that don’t conform to conventional strategies
 

Ward House, 57×92, 2012, oil

LG: Why interiors and not outdoors? What makes you choose these particular rooms and views to paint?

ML: I have painted many landscapes, especially in Chicago, my home town. Landscapes, however, can’t be inhabited in the same way as interiors are. Paintings of interior spaces embody a human presence and depict places that viewers project themselves into, or imagine others moving around inside. Landscape paintings can make the human presence seem small. Nevertheless, I do look for interiors that have some of the qualities of landscapes. I love the clouds in a landscape. So I try to find an interior that has something you can look up at. I look for spaces that are complex and have many facets within them. I look for a room with doors, and windows with views, or passages into other places. This helps me create images that embody the multi-faceted and often dichotomous nature of our internal lives.
 
I have painted many pictures of my home in Arkansas, but when my father died in 2007, I was moved to go back to his house and paint my childhood home. The experience was a creative bomb. I worked with an emotional intensity and intimacy with the space that was unprecedented for me. After that I searched for places that have intense memory, even if it is someone else’s memories. They must have a human presence that I can understand and empathize with.

LG: Do you think painting on site influences how you paint?

ML: There is simply nothing like working from direct observation. The world presents an organic visual complexity, almost a chaos, which one simply cannot invent. If you look hard enough, you will find infinite colors in a simple white wall. Looking at nature is continually surprising and sustaining.
 
I cannot paint just anywhere that is visually interesting. Public places have visual complexity that could theoretically make an absorbing image, but they don’t have the sense of personal individual memory that interests me. I need to feel a real connection with the place I paint. That is why I search for places that remind me of the ornate home I grew up in. I search for a place that represents a certain sense of longing for something lost, for something I can never go back to, like my childhood home, a sense of mortality.
 
In his Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard calls our first house a “nest for the imagination.” The house one grows up in forms the structure for the way spaces should be. All other places are measured against your original house. I try to tap in to that kind of profound relationship to the place I paint. I look for places that I feel I was born knowing.
 

Front Steps, 38″ x 47″, 2009

Foyer and Staircase, 44″ x 63″, 2009

LG: Would you paint differently if you were working in the privacy of your own studio where you also didn’t have to worry about getting in the way or time constraints?

 
ML: I always work in places where people welcome me and I have no time constraints. Without that basic freedom I cannot work.
 
Formerly I made paintings of spaces I constructed in my studio. I’ve also done numerous paintings of totally invented places. Neither was satisfying to me. A constructed or imagined space always seems artificial or forced. The specific relations between objects have no chaos or randomness. The painting intervals become static. The images tend to be simple and dull.
 
LG: There is a fast, loose and expressive quality to your brushwork that sometimes seems to run contrary to the difficult drawing challenges you set for yourself. Why do you choose this approach as opposed to a slower, more precise approach seen in someone like Rackstraw Downes?
 
ML: Well, of course, the precision of painting is not in a neat brushstroke, but rather in the exact relationships between strokes. Knowing this is one thing, but making paintings based on it is an entirely different matter. Right out of Yale I made paintings with very thick, loose, wet masses of paint. The luscious paint dominated the simple compositions. Needing more precision, I began to do meticulously rendered large drawings that served as the basis for precise glazed studio paintings. They became mannered as I lost the direct input of working from observation. It has taken years of intense work to get to the point where I can move paint with freedom and still maintain drawing accuracy.
 
I paint what I love to look at, and try to be at the absolute edge of my skills and conceptual understanding. The love of what I do, combined with the sheer difficulty and challenge of what I paint, creates urgency in the brush. My brushwork is a result the mix of formal ambition and intense visual desire.
 
LG: Extreme expanded views, especially with dramatic curvilinear distortions or fragmentation of the view runs contrary to the quiet divisions of space and balance one sees in more classically composed paintings where horizontal and vertical divisions and how they relate to the painting edges are critical. Do you think expanded views risks interfering with the quiet visual contemplation of light, color and geometry as might be seen with Vuillard’s interiors?

ML:
The “distortions” do risk becoming distracting mannerisms. I seek to balance that danger with beautiful paint and by providing opportunities for reverie in many moments of quiet contemplation within the image. The detail shots show these small moments a bit better. I love Vuillard and hope the meditative moments in my pictures are reminiscent of his.
 
The light within the paintings is delicate and ephemeral like Vuillard. The image gently envelops the viewer as the eye wanders through the piece. I personally remember the paintings in a floating dream state.
 
I love classical geometry and compositional strategies such as the golden mean, the repoussoir, or the rule of thirds, nevertheless, I seek a non-programmatic organic structure that can be more surprising and thus more stimulating. The golden-mean spiral in a nautilus shell, and the exotic labyrinthine fractals seen in a lightning strike are both great! But I prefer to paint the more unexpected geometry.

 
LG: What are your most important concerns with regard to composition in your work? What do you want the viewer to experience? ?
 
ML: I want the viewer to empathize with human quality of the space, to feel the condition of being in one place and letting the imagination wander through memory or reverie to another place. My compositions embody the full point of view of an observer, allowing them to wander off the edges of the painting. The viewer can see how a space is actually seen and felt by two eyes in a body not mediated by a viewfinder.
 
We are more than just a single idea or thought so cannot be represented entirely by a single simple place. We are an active labyrinth of memory, imagination, desire, and adaptive intelligence. I want my pictures to reflect this.

Bottom Landing, 46″ x 67″, 2010

Review by Thaddeus Radell

Anthony Fisher paints as if his life depends on it. Trite as that may sound, there are few exhibitions of contemporary painters that give such evidence of the will to paint. In his current show at Galerie Mourlot, Fisher’s work explodes into view.

Immediately upon entering the intimate, almost delicate space of the gallery, one is confronted by three imposing portraits that work so well together, that so resolutely support each other, they seem assuredly to have been conceived as a triptych. All three works are large monumental heads of the same model. Furthering the effect of a triptych, the central panel consists of a frontal pose and the two side panels offer opposing profiles. Again, all three works have a similar, if not exact, pose. The artist did not, however, conceive of them as a triptych; the pictures assumed this exciting and spirited order only upon the gallery installation. Fisher works many studies, both drawing and painting, and these portraits are culled from the broad base of this effort. The overall energy that the three pieces hurl at the viewer would almost be excessive if it were not for the sitter’s pose itself. Eyes shut, head slightly tilted, hands joined with interlaced fingers, the pose is peaceful, solemn and devout. The ambitious scale of the heads is powerfully answered by the gnarled invention of the hands, which indeed may fuse into one knot of tense yet fluid paint, as In Night Supplicant. Here the hands become an arthritic stump catapulting small staccato notes of blue up and under the chin, miraculously supporting the cantilever of the head. The image of a man praying of course brings to mind the early drawings of Van Gogh of men in prayer. The tactility born of Fisher’s interaction with the paint itself is not without echoes of Van Gogh, and in the broader context of an artist extending feeling and meaning into paint, the parallel continues.

The religious and spiritual overtone of pose is all the more pronounced in its contrast with the massive scale of the head and hands that have been slashed, pasted and seemingly dragged and bitten from paint into life.

Fisher’s palette is subdued and limited to rich earth tones, blacks and a few robust blues. Applied with alacrity, the planes of color slam into and onto each other and indeed risk becoming somewhat visually claustrophobic, at times almost suffocating the form. However, these are intelligent paintings and Fisher is a master of his craft. The adroit placement of subtle harmonies of blue alleviates the accumulation of stacked planes of umbers. In Night Supplicant, blues engage in full-throated tones that silhouette and forcibly prompt the diversity of the earthy head tones into monumentality. By contrast, in Penitent, the blues are reduced to a minimum, keeping the painting alive and breathing through an almost maddeningly exquisite placement:  a ragged sliver along the jaw, a droplet above the ear, a collar-bone/river defining the landscape behind, fantastic opposing braces of cool relief sucking the arms into the format. This is solid, expressive, fine-tuned painting.

If in a truly visceral sense these paintings engage us, their insistence on a spiritual, or, in the artist’s words, metaphysical sense, is what separates them and elevates them above the rabble of contemporary efforts in painting. “My goal is to elicit an emanation from my ‘sitter’ of the interior life; to allude to the unconscious, the realm of feeling behind our actions.” Fisher is an intense man, expressing himself both in conversation and through his art in a forthright, unabashedly emotive manner. His devotion to the interior life, his overt assertion that what matters is not only the physical representation of form but its meaning, is critical to understanding his art and its relevance. Fisher brings to mind Jacques Maritain’s contention that “an artist is a man before being an artist.” And this, I believe, is the central core and power of this work. By committing himself to meaning, as opposed to limiting himself to the physicality and strictly formal aspects of pictorial representation, Fisher raises the bar. In no way dispossessing himself of the sanctity of painting, with all its inherent visual principles, he reveals himself as a deeply introspective man. A man who paints. And paints well.

This conscious pursuit of feeling and meaning is even more intriguing for its dependence upon observation. Upon first viewing, these works could easily be interpreted as completely synthetic constructions conceived entirely by memory, imagination or some sort of narrative conception. Though Fisher does indeed use memory, he is essentially an artist devoted to direct observation, whether that entails following the decomposition of slabs of meat on a table, working from a live model or relentlessly studying a life-cast he had made of his favorite model and set up in his studio. That observation informs his work is witnessed by the solid drawing and the sculptural establishment of the planes describing the head or hands. The soundness of these planes is only surpassed by their intuitive diversity of shape and tone. The presence of a sitter is clear, yet elevated to a heightened poignancy through the insistence on working through the physical to a more profound representation of the psyche.

The exhibition continues with compelling works on paper, both minor studies and large, fully developed drawings that reaffirm the artist’s consumptive pursuit of his theme. The motif of head and entwined hands never reads as repetitive or contrived throughout the exhibition. Each piece is a unique inquiry, a basis for new pictorial revelation. The effect of such a gathering of similarly conceived compositions expounding piety, or at the very least, a splendid spirituality, is so moving that it transforms the Galerie Mourlot into a sort of chapel, and one is almost prompted into a state of meditation. The most intriguing of these works on paper are, like the oils, large and imposing. Portrait with Hands Clasped is underscored by a poetic sensitivity of line. Drawn in an Old Master sanguine tone, the line gathers weight and suppleness through its interaction with a scumbled white under-painting that the artist engages to erase and rework his drawing. Of special interest is The Alchemist. The only major work exhibited that adds the motif of a stack of books beneath the praying figure, the configuration becomes naturally intriguing and that new potentiality of meaning is encouraged by the title. The alchemy of transforming matter into spirit is Fisher’s strength and his exhibition at Galerie Mourlot a welcome sanctuary for those of us praying to the same solemn gods of Painting and Drawing.

Anthony Fisher’s exhibition, Recent Work, continues at Galerie Mourlot, 8 79^th St, until May 14^th.

Review by Thaddeus Radell

I enjoyed meeting Frank Hobbs in Civita, Italy last summer where he gave a slide talk during his visit to the JSS summer Italy program. I’ve also enjoyed following his writings on painting and drawing on his blog I was very pleased that he agreed to this email interview and would like to thank him for taking the time to share his thoughts, experience and art with Painting Perceptions.

Frank Hobbs is a Professor of Art and teachs painting and drawing at the Ohio Wesleyan University. Hobbs is a recipient of fellowships and grants by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the Virginia Commission for the Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. His work has been shown in the American Embassies of Ankara, Turkey, Phnom Penh, Cambodia, and Bermuda, and is included in numerous corporate and private collections in America and abroad. He is represented by the Reynolds Gallery in Richmond, Virginia and several others.

Larry Groff: How important is observation to your work?

Frank Hobbs: Everything starts with sensation, doesn’t it? Our physical contact with the world is the most private and intimate experiences we have, but we overlook it, or depreciate it because it’s so familiar. In working from observation there is this struggle to reclaim some of the lost wonder and innocence of perception that allows you to really see and experience things, as they say in Zen, in their “suchness.” Most people, artists included, are more interested in opinionating. I’m deeply suspicious of my own opinions. That’s what I’m fleeing from when I paint. Degas said the only way forward is to accept that you know absolutely nothing about anything. From that position there’s nothing you can do but ask questions.

Working from observation is where I think I first started to get traction as a student, because it put a missile to my whole youthful preoccupation with “style” and got me involved with a more complex reality than I could fabricate from my own head. Bischoff talks about how nature led him out of the “cooked up artificialities of abstract art.” That was my path as well. My artistic identity then just congealed around the practice, particularly painting outdoors. Landscape is the juggernaut that I have kept pushing forward for several decades now.

Abandoned Factory: Steel Cylinders, oil on panel, 16″ x 20″, 2013

Abandoned Factory Near Poppi (Italy), oil on canvas, 16″ x 20″, 2013

Cylinders and Cubes – South Columbus oil on canvas 20″ x 16″, 2011
 

LG: Can you tell us something interesting about your background? Where did you study and which painters have most influenced you?

FH: As an undergraduate I studied at Virginia Tech and later got my MFA at American University in Washington, DC. My teachers at Tech were in their 30s when I was there. I think the most important thing I got from them was a belief in the vocation of painting as a way to live my life, and a confidence in my own resources. My teachers at American were older and helped me to begin answering the questions I found myself asking about how painting works as a representational medium.

Ray Kass at Virginia Tech was an important mentor to me, and still is to this day. It took me several years and a lot of growing up to realize just how important he was in shaping my outlook as a painter. Ray put my young nose in the paint, so to speak. His teaching planted the seeds of a certain formal awareness of the language that I’ve never lost, even though I moved away from abstraction toward representation. I still think like an abstract painter.

There was a group of us at Tech who used to tag along with Ray to New York to help him transport work to his gallery. He would have us around to meet some of his artist friends in New York and see their studios. Marjorie Portnow and Susan Shatter were two contemporary painters who had an impact on me in terms of shaping my view of what it means to be a painter. At that age you read between the lines and get an idea of how this thing, this being an artist, is done. That demonstration was a lot more powerful than lectures or slide talks.

One year out of college, I had an encounter with Wayne Thiebaud that was monumental, again thanks to Ray Kass. For many years Ray had been building the Mountain Lake Workshop program, his vision for a trans-disciplinary approach to art criticism, studio workshops, and experiments with group collaboration. Greenberg, Donald Kuspit, Suzy Gablik and other notables came through. John Cage was a frequent guest. These symposia were held at the Mountain Lake Hotel, where incidentally the film Dirty Dancing was made, near Virginia Tech. Ray brought Thiebaud in to do a four-day landscape workshop. We got to watch him paint a beautiful small study from the porch. I’ve never forgotten it. My path has intersected with that painting three times since then. First when I watched him paint it. Second, when I shared wall space with it in a big retrospective of Virginia landscape painting at the Virginia Historical Society, and third, strangely enough, in Bologna, Italy, two years ago at the Morandi museum which paired Thiebaud’s paintings with Morandi’s.

Several things about Thiebaud made a lasting impact. First, I guess I expected him to be a flamboyant, loud sort of character, based on his colorful, cheeky paintings. I imagined him making a grand entrance, like some sort of modern Oscar Wilde. In fact he was incredibly ordinary, humble, almost self-effacing. He was the last to be taken in by his own celebrity. At a slide talk he said, “You already know what my work looks like. I want to talk about paintings that I love.” The paintings he admired were the second shock: Rembrandt, Chardin, and other “brown” painters, long dead. He spoke with great love of these and other masters, and he also talked about his values as a teacher of art; that you need these fundamental disciplines of drawing, of wrestling with your own perceptions and the struggling with the difficulties of representing what you see. He required his students to do a six-hour rendering of a single egg with an H pencil! I was hungry for that kind of discipline.

Another thing I remember, a remark he made that was like a bomb blast to my youthful delusions about the issue of originality. He said, “Everything I do I stole from someone else, and if you’re not careful I’ll steal from you!” That sort of gracious self-deprecation and humility is not well-taken in American culture, especially these days when there’s this frenzy of self-promotion aided by technology.

The final thing that impressed me about Thiebaud was his generosity toward other artists. There was a massive critique at the end of the workshop that began after dinner, around 8, and stretched way past midnight into the wee hours. I was only 23 and I’d just done some of my first landscapes so you can imagine my trepidations about having the master cast his eye on my stuff. When my turn finally came the room was almost empty. Thiebaud looked at my little studies – he must have been exhausted at that point. Long silence. I was tempted to pack up my paintings and run! Finally he spoke – something about my paintings being “an eye-wash from Cubist sensibilities…” I don’t even remember what he said. I only remember that he didn’t hate them, and that was enough. I think these encounters with painters were as pivotal in my education as anything I learned in class.

At some level I think we are all self-taught; we develop a nose for what speaks directly to our needs. I’ve come under the gravitational pull of so many great painters over the years and learned different things. Vuillard, his self-portrait, the one with the red beard, really taught me how to paint. That kind of thinking still underpins how I see.

Another pivotal event for me as a student was seeing the huge Edward Hopper retrospective at the Whitney in 1979. The work from his student years – the palette knife studies from Maine and the small paintings he did in Paris – really blew me away. Maybe I identified with that work because I was about the same age, and it gave me a gauge of my own development and what I still needed to learn. Mostly I think it was the connection, like Thiebaud was, to these seemingly lost disciplines of seeing; of perceptual painting. I also was amazed by the honesty of his urban landscapes, which opened my eyes to the aesthetic possibilities of my own environment. That’s when I began to paint the old urban industrial center of my hometown, Lynchburg, VA. Since that time I have had a quote from Henry James tacked to my studio wall: “Take what there is, and use it, without waiting forever in vain for the preconceived—to dig deep into the actual and get something out of that — this doubtless is the right way to live.” You don’t need any special subject matter to get started. Painting becomes more about the quality of your own consciousness than a strategy for depicting something, or “expressing yourself.”

Vestige: Cement Factory Pilons, oil on canvas, 14″ x 18,” 2013

Steel Containers, oil on canvas, 22″ x 30,” 2012

Rust Belt Elegy, South Columbus, oil on canvas, 18″ x 14,” 2013

LG: Many times you make painting seem like great fun. Your blog has a recent post, “Vestiges” which examines your attraction to the decaying industrial landscape and how painting it involves more than just formal interests. You quote from a student saying “These are the places we sought out as children to play in; places where there are no adults.” You then remark; “I haven’t stopped thinking about that since. Play, as every child knows, is the most serious work there is.”

Your selection of what to paint along with the paint handling and color decisions gives us a glimpse into your experience out in the landscape, your joys and struggles. What gets you the most excited about painting outside? What gives you the greatest pleasure in your painting and what do you need in order to get to that place?

FH: I’m glad to know that my paintings have that effect. Frankly, it’s a mystery to me why that should be so. They give me hell when I’m painting them! I suppose art creates an illusion of effortlessness and freedom. Only the artist knows what it’s cost in terms of sheer work and frustration. The joy and struggle you mention is the great roller coaster ride of painting, isn’t it? It scares the hell out of you while you’re on it, but later you think, damn! that was fun; let’s go back and do it again

What gets me excited about painting outdoors? Aside from the occasion to enjoy the sunshine and a good cigar, I think that it’s the sense of potential discovery when I leave the house. To go out the door with no preconception of what you will eventually spend your day involved in may seem like madness to a business mind, but that’s what I love about it. When I drive off in my car, or walk off with my backpack, there’s this sense that anything can happen. Painting outdoors is a little like painting from the model. It kind of removes the whole onus of what to paint. You don’t have to know until you start.

On site, the first things that I respond to are space and light. I really am an abstract painter, I think; or a frustrated musician. Rhythm is more important to me than the particular inventory of things. I love to discover how things connect visually; to find the “liasons” between things, to borrow Lennart Anderson’s term. A searching attitude is important because it allows for the emergence of something new, a transformation of the familiar fragmented reality into something that’s greater than the sum of its parts. A great painting is not just a picture, it’s really a model of how the universe is put together: one energy differentiated into all these seemingly disparate, yet dependent, parts. You see it in Morandi’s table top games, in Corot’s oil studies, and especially in Vuillard’s interiors from the 1890s. Could anything be more thrilling than to make a 14 x 18-inch model of the universe?

Norcia Periferia Oil on panel 7″ x 9″

Castellucio Oil on panel 7″ x 9″

LG: You’ve traveled and painted in Italy and lived in Tuscany, Italy for some time.
Can you tell us a little about how your experience there has influenced your work?

FH: Ironically, my eyes were mostly on French and American painting until graduate school. It was at American University that Italy first began impinging on my consciousness. Robert D’Arista, my teacher there, once said, slyly, “Only Italians can draw the figure correctly. The rest of you will just have to do the best you can.” We laughed, but he got my attention. I first encountered the Macchiaioli through Jack Boul, another of my mentors, whom he’d seen and been influenced by when he was stationed in Italy in the army. And also on the faculty at American was Norma Broude who at that time was completing her wonderful book on the Macchiaioli. D’Arista would often speak of Piero, or Masaccio, always in the present tense. (That’s the difference between artists and art historians, I think. Artists never die.) He told the graduate students once, as if to warn us of the difficulties that lay ahead, “When you leave here and go out to teach, you will show your students this painting of Masaccio (The Tribute Money), with this old man sticking his finger in the mouth of a fish, and you will have to convince your students that THIS is the stuff of which great art is made…”

To this day the Italian painters who mean the most to me are not the flashy celebrities of the high renaissance or baroque, but the anonymous medieval craftsmen, and the early proto-renaissance masters, like Giotto, Masaccio, or Sienese masters like Sasseta, who were still struggling with this new consciousness of space, light and form. The Caracci brothers ruined Italian painting as far as I’m concerned. Their conceited spawn are still alive and well today all over the globe. In my own concerns as a painter I still feel very close in spirit to the Macchiaioli painters, Giovanni Fattori, Silvestro Lega, Giuseppe Abbati, in particular, and at the same time I draw inspiration from the modern Italian painters like Sironi (despite his ties to Mussolini), Fausto Pirandello, and Marino Marini. But Morandi is the one for whom I feel the deepest, and most abiding reverence and awe.

As fate would have it, Tuscany and Umbria have become a second home and that’s where I do most of my painting. I’ve traveled widely in those regions over the years but there’s still so much of Italy I haven’t seen. As a painter I have always had a stronger desire to return, and go deeper into familiar places than to constantly run off in search of new, exotic experiences. That’s how my home state of Virginia always was to me as a subject for painting, and that’s how Tuscany and Umbria have been to me. I think you have to experience a place deeply in order to get past the obvious exoticisms that captivate tourists. If there’s been any consistent thread in my work, or in my concerns as a painter all these years, it’s been this relationship to the familiar, everyday realities; for me this is the geode I have to crack. That’s Morandi’s great lesson to us all. Your life’s work lies in the courtyard just outside your house.

Bagnoregio Oil on panel 12″ x 15″

Castellucio 2 Oil on panel 7″ x 9″

Nino Costa, “Campagna,” circa 1855, oil on wood, 11 x 24 cm.

Giuseppe Abbati, “Il pittore Stanislao Pointeau,” 1868, oil on wood, 35 x 21 cm.

LG: You once posted an album of mostly small pictures from the I Macchiaioli, group of 19th century Italian painters active in Tuscany. In the comments there a great discussion started about the differences between small paintings from life and large studio works like what we see in Constable and Corot. You talked about how many of the studies made by the I Macchiaioli felt refreshingly honest and free of mannerism and artifice whereas their larger history paintings were less interesting.

How important is being free of mannerism and artifice in your own work? What suggestions would you offer for a painter wanting to avoid cliche?

FH: My first piece of advice would be: stop looking at how-to-paint art magazines. What they’re selling is a kind of certainty that avoids the central problem of a painting, which is to find your way to the particular form that expresses your unique experience. Anything else and you’ve only got a souvenir, like one those products of the street painters in Florence who crank out the same views of the Ponte Vecchio for the tourists. I’m talking mostly about “technique,” a word I loathe, by the way, not subject matter. Cliche subject matter is another issue altogether. Depending on who you ask, we’re all guilty of committing that. I’ve actually met museum curators of contemporary art who think the whole genre of landscape is dead and done. (The spirit of Clement Greenberg lives on!!!) I try to avoid the kind of absolute pronouncements that some teachers are driven to, such as “Don’t paint cats!” etc. I used to think barns were cliche until I saw Wolf Kahn’s early paintings. I don’t think there’s any subject so cliche that a brilliant painter couldn’t crack it open and get it to be something new and vital again. It’s what you do with it, and what you bring to it. As my OWU colleague Jim Krehbiel once told a student who wanted to make an image of some flowers, “If you’re going to do flowers, you’d better kick some butt with those flowers!”

Attitude is everything. When you approach painting, as Hawthorne advised, as a “problem,” not a “picture,” it’s a very different game. You bring your knowledge and experience to the problem, but you allow fresh observation to inform your actions and take you where it will without some clear pre-conceived idea of how it will turn out. The making is what makes your intention clear. I know that’s anathema to a certain mindset, but that’s actually the hope and expectation that I always have when I start a painting. If I were clever enough to devise some good mannerisms I might be tempted, but I’m not that facile. Nothing that I did yesterday seems to work today. Ben Summerford, another important mentor of mine at American, said something that took me many years to understand. He said, “Talent paints whatever it desires; genius paints what it can.” For years I thought he’d gotten it backwards. I wanted to be able to paint whatever I wanted; who doesn’t want that kind of ego-gratification? In the end, you find that you can paint well only what is really yours to paint. It’s very counterintuitive that genius would actually depend on that limitation and not on absolute freedom, but I think it’s true.

The Cowpasture River, Bath County, Virginia

Vestige: Cement Factory, oil on canvas, 14″ x 18,” 2013

Ultimately, worrying too much about whether one is committing cliches or mannerisms is a waste of energy. You just have to do your work wholeheartedly and with no ulterior motive. Find where your emotion resides and follow it. Too many painters today are always looking over their shoulder to see who’s watching. Emerson’s great advice was to “gnaw your own bone.” The challenge of course is to find your bone. A mannerist period such as ours wants to hand you the bone. It takes a certain disgust with the tepid bath of pop culture to spur a search for something that’s personal and authentic for you. Deal with your own life is what I tell students. Back to Morandi again. Look out the window, or at the corner of your room. What does it tell you about who you are and where you’ve come? Anyone’s life is complex and strange enough to provide compelling material for art if only we attend to it. Unfortunately that’s what has become so difficult to do these days. We’re always looking for the hyper-link out of the present moment to something else we imagine will be better.

As for artifice, I’m not sure it’s the same thing as mannerism. I think any painter who works from observation must be consciously involved, and in love with, the essential fictiveness of the art form – the intrinsic energies of color, shape, line, proportion and so forth. Annie Dillard’s question to a student who asked her if she thought he could be a writer was: “Do you like sentences?” Like all languages, you don’t just express your thoughts; the language shapes your thought. The picture plane teaches the painter to think in terms of two-dimensional relationships in nature where most people, without that artifice, see only depth and “roundness.” I think that’s what Paul Klee meant by saying that the artist “must conform himself to the paintbox.” Conforming to the paintbox is the first step in learning to paint.

Cleveland: The Flats, oil on panel, 24″ x 30,” 2013

Green Bridge Over the Ohio River oil on canvas 36″ x 48″ 2011

Drawbridge, oil on panel, 14″ x 18,” 2013

LG: I enjoyed the article you wrote for your paintingOWU blog, “Making your mark”
where you talked about the brush and “how something as simple as one’s attitude toward this ubiquitous tool can have such a profound effect on one’s art.” This article contrasted commonly seen student’s neglected, massacred brushes with the past Japanese artists where; “A good brush, in the hands of a Hokusai or a Yoshitoshi was an extension of the body itself – a conduit, or a gateway between the invisible and the visible.”

I love my well-cared for brushes and want to believe in this spiritual connection and reverence to one’s craft. However this belief is challenged when confronted with stunning, brilliant paintings, such as those by Francis Bacon or Anselm Kiefer, where conventional notions of brushwork and technique seem irrelevant.

How can the slovenly make such great paintings? Can’t a broom or crapped-up brush also be delicate and lyrical? Isn’t our bodies just the mind’s brush and conduit between the seen and unseen?

FH: First, I would make an important distinction between the kind of consciousness about tools and materials that a Keiffer or Bacon, or any great painter, has, and the carelessness and neglect that I was taking to task in that article. Keiffer and Bacon, to me, aren’t “slovenly,” nor is any great painter. To be slovenly is to be careless, to be without awareness. I actually have a lot of “crapped-up” brushes that I use in my monotypes so it’s not necessarily the innate perfection of the brush that’s important; just the awareness of its potentialities and having a basic “gratitude” to the tools. Bevin Engman, a wonderful painter I met while I was a visiting artist at Colby College in Maine, makes her wonderful paintings using only scraps of cardboard, but she does it with an exquisite understanding of the tool and what it can do for her. There’s a story I love about a student of Dickinson who was fussing around with a sable brush until Dickinson ordered him to paint with a scrap of wood that was lying on the floor. In the end it’s the right color in the right spot, not fancy brushwork, that makes the painting work.

Silo and Rails, Delaware, Ohio oil on canvas 48″ x 36″ 2011

The Ohio River from Athens County, Ohio, Winter oil on canvas 36″ x 96″ 2011
LG: Outside the universities and the larger urban art centers, the plein air painting “movement” of regional painters has become increasing popular. It’s encouraging to see renewed interest in outdoor painting. It helps give teaching income to established painters and perhaps a wider group of potential collectors. However, the popular nature of plein air movement seems a double-edged sword; more people now care about landscape painting but on the other hand the work often suffers from being geared toward mass consumption.

The deluge of email marketing to painters soliciting workshops such as learning secrets from the masters, plein air contests, and plethora of other marketing ploys for plein air painters sometimes seems to be turning landscape painting more into a sporting, competitive activity and less of an artistic or spiritual/personal exploration of nature.

With this in mind, what thoughts can you share with us about the health of contemporary landscape painting?

FH: The appeal of painting outdoors is not hard to understand and I’ve certainly benefited as a teacher of classes and workshops, but I have very mixed feelings about this current fad, as you obviously do. I keep thinking, who invited all these people to the party? I would rather make a trip to the dentist than participate in one of those “paint-outs.” What sensitive, self-respecting artist could go for that? Some of my best friends actually do these things. I just don’t get that clubby, herd mentality at all. Can you imagine Cezanne doing such a thing? He’d probably kill someone! As despondent as painting makes me sometimes, why would I want to stand shoulder to shoulder, rubbing french easels with a bunch of strangers, especially strangers who define the purposes of painting very differently from the way the great masters saw it; all these dutiful imbibers of how-to-paint books and videos and workshop gurus, coming armed to the contest with their techniques and recipes. As the “good book” says, they have their reward. As far as I’m concerned the orgy of “plein air” painting today, and all the marketing of specialized boxes and gear, painting holidays, and events, just seems to trivialize what is, to me, a very personal, introspective and sacred practice.

Lake Trasimeno from Isola Maggiore, oil on panel, 16″ x 24,” 2013

Pilistri Oil on panel 12″ x 15″

In the Valdichiana Oil on panel 12″ x 7″

Cowpasture River, Winter (VA), oil on canvas, 42″ x 54,” 2013

LG: I’m very concerned about environmental issues such as climate change. Hurricane Sandy directly affected many painters in NYC; flood damage effected conservative, archival oil paintings and edgy post-modernist installations alike. Most artists will be hit with increasingly greater economic and personal hardship related to global warming in the near future.

Most painters understand that politics and art mix together like oil and water but isn’t there a point when the threats outweigh other concerns? Aren’t we living in a time when old rules no longer apply? Painters like Goya, Kollowitz, Picasso, Diego Rivera, Leon Golub and many others successfully merged formal painting concerns with humanistic concerns. Post-modernism rebels against modernist notions that art must stay inside strict formal boundaries. However when it comes to observational painting there is a curious paradox; I feel deeply connected to the natural world but disconnected to doing something to protect it.

Do you think it makes any sense for landscape painters to address issues that aren’t strictly formal and visual?

FH: If a landscape painter feels moved to turn his painting into a position paper on the environment that’s up to him. I feel strongly that whatever a painting does, or whatever purpose it serves, if it doesn’t achieve it through sensitive manipulation of visual, formal means, it ceases to be painting and instead becomes some curious form of text, propaganda, or pornography. That’s why painters work so hard for so long trying to understand color and the material nature of the media we use. Still, I can only speak for myself. I think there’s room for all sorts of motives and ideas in art. If someone has a particular genius for addressing environmental concerns and raising consciousness about it through art, I applaud that. Personally I’d rather write my congressman, or use social networking to raise consciousness, or take personal actions to minimize my impact on the environment than try to use my art as a political axe. Painting, for me, is a religious practice. Why would I want to mix it up with politics.

I went through the typical crisis of conscience that a lot of young painters feel about the seemingly self-serving nature of painting, but I got over it. Just think of what we’d have lost if Morandi had put aside his obsessions and painted anti-fascist paintings. What if Corot had decided that landscapes weren’t an appropriate response to the social problems of his day? We’re always asking what purpose art serves in society. We forget that Monet painted his giant water lilly paintings with WWI raging across Europe. Can problems get any bigger than that? Millions of people flock to museums to drink in Monet’s vision, or bask in the color rays of Van Gogh’s vision. Cynically we might say that it’s because the museums have turned artists into celebrities and profit from their marketing, but I still believe that it’s the unique power of those paintings, the color, the vision of the artist worked out in the physical material of the painting that fills a spiritual hunger that’s as real, and as important as the body’s need for food.

I think I’ve come to an even more radical assertion, however. I would argue that it’s actually the form, and not just the content, that is the political act. However seemingly innocuous or politically neutral they may appear in terms of subject matter, great paintings change how we see things, how we regard ourselves and our relations to the world and each other; a Matisse interior no less than, or possibly even more so than Picasso’s Guernica. Those altered perceptions are as much at work when we vote and push for social change as our more consciously held political opinions. Didn’t Cezanne say, “With an apple I will revolutionize Paris.”

So, in answer to your question, I would say that, at least for me, it makes no sense, as a landscape painter, to consciously try to program my work to raise political, ecological, or social issues. I wouldn’t even know how to do that. I’m still learning how to mix colors! I think Einstein himself said something to the effect that we’ve created problems from a level of consciousness which is incapable of solving them. Only a higher consciousness will be able to “imagine” its way out of those problems. At the end of the day, I believe that great painters, and artists of all types, are the visionaries that push the evolution of human consciousness forward. The feeling, intuitive Self – the subconscious, the unconscious, call it whatever you will – is where the higher truth is grasped, not the opinionating, ego-centric mind.

LG: What are you working on now? Any shows or events coming up for you?

FH: Teaching takes a lot of my time these days but at this time in my time of life nothing could be more rewarding than working with serious students. As for my paintings, since moving to Ohio I’ve had to come to terms with a completely different kind of landscape. For most of my life the Virginia landscape of my childhood has loomed large in my work. I never realized how strongly my identity was wrapped up in my feelings for that landscape, my friends and family, and my ancestry there that goes back practically to Jamestown. In many ways it’s been liberating to deal with a landscape that doesn’t evoke these primordial feelings. I’ve been working on a series of industrial ruins that I stumbled across coming back from a Thanksgiving break in Virginia, down in the southern part of Ohio along the Ohio River. I’ve also rediscoverd casein paint and have been working with that. This summer and fall I have my first sabbatical, ever, and am looking forward to seeing more of Europe and England and working on some new paintings for a show that I will have at the University of South Carolina next year.

Simon Dinnerstein is a Brooklyn-based painter and graphic artist. He has a B.A. in history from the City College of New York, and continued his studies in painting and drawing at the Brooklyn Museum Art School.  Dinnerstein is a recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship to Germany, the Rome Prize for living and working in Italy at the American Academy in Rome, a Louis Comfort Tiffany Grant, the Ingram Merrill Award for Painting, a New York State Foundation for the Arts Grant, and three Childe Hassam Purchase Awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has been represented in New York by Staempfli Gallery and ACA Galleries.  His work is included in numerous private and public collections. To learn more about Simon Dinnerstein and view other examples of his work, visit his website here.

Simon Dinnerstein’s work is marked by a strong graphic line used in the service of a geometric and patterned ordering of visual information, harkening back to his start as a printmaker. Later work moves toward silvery tones, his people not so much flesh and blood as fantastical glowing constructions of mother-of-pearl. In still-lifes and figure paintings, drapery twirls and undulates, more active and aggressive than the ephemeral, lounging women, fruit, or flowers, passively presented for consumption. Dinnerstein’s work holds a tension between observation and construction, between delicacy of tone and rigidity of structure.

I am conducting this interview with Mr. Dinnerstein on the occasion of the showing of his large, early painting, The Fulbright Triptych, in the German Consulate in New York City. The painting will be on display at the Consulate through March 31^st, 2014, at 871 United Nations Plaza, First Avenue and 49th Street. It is open Monday through Friday, from 9 am to 5 pm. I also had the pleasure of reading Daniel Slager’s 2011 edited volume The Suspension of Time: Reflections on Simon Dinnerstein and The Fulbright Triptych, which contains forty-five essays by a wide variety of authors, such as Jhumpa Lahiri, Edward Sullivan, Thomas Messer, George Staempfli, Guy Davenport, Juliette Aristides, Anthony Doerr, George Crumb, and John Turturro, written in response to their viewing of The Fulbright Triptych. I refer to quotes from this book at various times throughout our discussion.

Before diving into the discussion, I would like to share, in his own words, Simon’s remarkable account of the situation surrounding the purchase of The Fulbright Triptych.

I came back from my year on a Fulbright Grant to Germany in 1971 with my Triptych in its beginning stages.  The painting is 14 feet in width. I spent about a year working on it and the middle panel was about 2/3, possibly 3/4 complete. Unfortunately, we then had quite a financial crisis and I absolutely couldn’t figure out how to support my family.  My daughter was an infant, perhaps 9 months old.  I don’t have a trust account or an inheritance and so I had no back up at all.

 

I remembered seeing Antonio López García’s exhibit at Staempfli Gallery and, in a kind of crazy, desperate act, put some photographs together and decided to go to this gallery.  I didn’t have an introduction and I literally walked in off the street.  It was the first gallery I had approached.  The gallery was very fancy, was located at Madison and East 77th Street and was on the second floor, so you had to know where it was, so to speak.  There I met Phillip Bruno, who was the assistant to George Staempfli, and whose role, I believe, was to ward people off.  I showed Phillip the photos and mentioned that I had seen an exhibit five years before of Antonio López García and thought that there was some common thread in my work with that of López.  Phillip looked through the images I presented and told me that he would like to show the images to George.  A few days later, I got a phone call, expressing their interest in coming to Brooklyn to see my work.  Brooklyn then wasn’t the same as Brooklyn now, which is clearly a very hot commodity. I think in 1973, Brooklyn was, for Staempfli, further away from upper Madison Avenue than Paris was.

 

In any event, both gentlemen (tall and imposing types) came to my apartment in Brooklyn and then to my studio, which was located in the nearby Sunset Park, a very working-class neighborhood.  They spent a good deal of time looking at the Triptych and literally didn’t say one word.  This went on for almost one half hour. Then George looked at me and said: “This is a great painting and I would like to own it.”  I was, to say the least, quite stunned and knocked off my feet.  I asked them what I could do, what did they mean, etc.  They put on their coats and walked down the stairs, and were on the street level, where they waived for a cab.  Phillip turned to me and said that I shouldn’t get in touch with them, they would contact me.

 

I called my wife right after and recounted the whole series of events to Renée.  I was quite dumbfounded. About four days went by and I received a very well written letter from George.  He told me that he and Phillip had been very impressed with my work, especially the large unfinished Triptych.  He then told me that he wanted to buy the work in its unfinished state.  He mentioned that this was probably a crazy idea but that he had a strong feeling about my work and very positive instincts about my finishing this painting.

 

He sent me a check every month (exactly on the First) for the next 2 years and then I had my first exhibit there.  So, this was quite an event…what one might call a deus ex machina.  A first class rescue…an eerie intervention.  And, it was chiefly due to Antonio López García’s exhibit. So, my admiration for López’s work, which is quite high, has also a very special personal dimension.  This is quite a fairy tale kind of story.  Somehow, I think that you can grasp its great significance.

The Fulbright Triptych, 1971-1974, oil on wood panels, 14 feet in width

Click on the above image for a larger version.

The Fulbright Triptych, detail 1

The Fulbright Triptych, detail 2

Elana Hagler:  Thank you for this opportunity to get to know you and your artwork better, Simon.  To me, your work embodies a Northern European and Germanic sensibility, one which embraces order and a certain sense of reserve that leans towards flatness and linear elements.  This is opposed to a more Italian/Mediterranean hot-blooded passion and fullness of form—the voluptuousness of Valori Plastici (“plastic values”).  Even though your later work definitely ventures into the erotic, it does so through a very patterned and linear lens.  How did your time in both Germany and Italy affect you stylistically?

Simon Dinnerstein:  I think you are right about the northern point of view, but I would also add to your characterization, an instinct toward a formal approach, an architectural sense of space, possibly leaning in the direction of abstraction in the creation of form.  For instance, there is the influence of such artists as Ingres, Piero, van der Weyden, Holbein, and George de la Tour.  There is certainly some direction that comes from Italy, in terms of volume, palpability of form and a caressing and sensual direction.  I can see this in works such as A and Portrait of A and Passage of the Moon.

A, 1992, conté crayon, colored pencil, pastel, 29 1/4 x 63 3/8 inches

I can see threads in my work that come from these enormously influential visits to Europe.  It’s hard to pin down, but there is some sense of Europe in the work.  Sometimes this influence is a coincidence, something I would have arrived at without the experience of my trips. At other times, there is a clear, recognizable influence of a particularly European point of view.  For instance, Anthony Clark, former director of European Painting at the Metropolitan Museum, after seeing my work in my studio at the American Academy in Rome, asked me if I knew the work of Stanley Spencer.  I had never heard of the artist, but shortly after the visit, I looked up Spencer and could see why this artist came to mind.  The same might be true for the Italian artist, Felice Casorati, who is very singular and intriguing.  Also, there is clearly a surreal side in these works, which come from surrealism and its European roots.  This interest in dream imagery and the real and unreal are manifest in the drawings Purple Haze and Night and even Passage of the Moon.

I read just recently of a new exhibit of the work of Dürer that opened in Washington.  Holland Cotter wrote of the influence of trips to Italy on Dürer’s work.  I hadn’t thought of this before, but I think this is true.  Dürer is a great favorite, a real hero of mine.

Studio Still Life, 1976, oil on wood panel, 48 x 63 inches

EH:  In her essay, your daughter Simone wrote, “My father’s primary interest in art is in its humanity.  He is not drawn to the surface of his subjects, to the rendering.  He is interested in the life of things….He isn’t concerned with the historical context of a painting, or the color theory behind it, or the iconography within it.”  Can you tell us more about what is meant by the “humanity” of paintings that so attracts you?

SD:  Simone’s comments here regarding “the life of things” are wonderfully perceptive.  If one could make an analogy between painting and writing, a really good writer brings us life and humanity in all of its many directions.  A male writer can inhabit and describe the life of a grandmother, a woman, a little girl, and a baby. He can, as well, present moods which are quite dark, marvelously light, strangely surreal, and dreamlike. He can be an apple, a pear, a pod from a sycamore tree, the last half inch of a pencil, an imploring and wistful dog. This ability to channel all of these divergent states, from the splendidness of the good to just plain poor or evil, is what is the humanity that is in art, whether it is painting or music or writing.  It seems to me that artists that are really good can elicit these forces, acting perhaps as conduits, to bring forth this humanity.

Perhaps the ‘lives of things’ is Kabbalah-like, that is, a search for the mystery and vibration below the surface.  It is the energy and vibration that resides within inert forms.  Possibly, this underside is the root of the humanity that we strive to evoke in art.  In any case, it’s what I am drawn to.

Red Pears, 1987, conté crayon, colored pencil, pastel, crayola, oil pastel, 5 1/2 x 6 3/8 inches

EH:  In the 1975 Catalogue Introduction to your first solo exhibition at Staempfli Gallery, George Staempfli writes that you recreate the subject “with intense realism, exactly the way [you see] it, without softening or embellishment, without artistic liberty.”  I do not agree with this take on your work.  I’ve already pointed out the linear quality of your art, and when I look at the cloth of your more recent work, in particular, it seems to undulate and take on a geometric, rhythmic life of its own.  I wonder to what extent the various formal manipulations you make are conscious or unconscious.

SD:  I understand what George Staempfli means, but in fact, the creation of art is much more complicated.  If one takes as an example the writing of Thomas Mann and one reads it quickly, it seems descriptive and naturalistic.  However, if you stop and think about Tonio Kröger or Death in Venice, for instance, the story is full of selections of information, the paring down of reality and multiple artistic decisions.  From my point of view, this concept of selectivity works incredibly well in fine art, if some larger architectural form, which might encompass space and composition, surrounds it.  Some kind of craziness or strangeness should also be present; perhaps an instinct for the irrational. The art then contains the signature of this individual or artist; it’s the DNA, the mysterious center.

Thus, we can see the weakness of rendering…we need it to convince the viewer, but the downside is that it is the part of the fine arts that can be taught…rather than the X that can’t be.  In a certain direction of figurative art there strikes me as a confusion between means and ends. The rendering is mistaken for art. Rendering should act as a window. It’s a means to find the mystery that is in the art.

Winter Apples, 1986, conté crayon, colored pencil, pastel, 18 7/8 x 28 1/8 inches

A slight aside.  Some of the viewers of my triptych comment on the many reproductions on the wall and ask if they are collaged.  Are they pasted on?  No, they are all painted.  And, yet, to my eye, the work doesn’t seem trompe l’oeil in character.  So, for instance in the works of artists such as Harnett and Peto, which depict a piece of paper or a tool on a wall, a pipe for smoking, the goal is to dazzle, to fool the eye by some bravura technique.  It’s very dramatic and eye-catching but where are we once we ‘get’ the image?  My sense is that the reproductions in the Triptych, though very illusionistic, move on a different track.  They act as portals, so we travel through the image to the other side or between the images, to ask why or Y?

EH:  In your interview in the book, referring to the Fulbright Triptych, you mention that the imagery came to you “at one shot in its totality.”  Is this different than the way your impulses for other artworks have taken form?  Could you tell us something about your process, from inception, through the middle game, to the fulfillment of an artwork?

SD:  To begin with, the vision of the Triptych came from a scene that was partially in front of me.  I found myself sitting in front of a window, working on an engraving.  I moved my chair back and saw this grouping of objects: the table, windows, reproductions, windows, landscape.  Compared to the completed painting, about half the objects on the table were present and half the reproductions on the wall.  I remember thinking that the scene would make for a fine painting, an image that I saw in color, as opposed to the black and white drawings I had been working on.  Right from the start, I saw the need for the composition to take the form of a triptych.  I imagined Renée in the left panel and myself in the right one. The actual architecture in the room wouldn’t have allowed for this much space.  My hunch was that the wings would push the viewer’s eye out to the periphery.  Furthermore, the wings appeared in my imagination to be somewhat warmer than the middle panel. Thus, I reasoned, the dialogue between the middle and the wings would create a new temperature and conversation.  Initially, I saw the Triptych all of a piece in its entirety, certainly some type of strange eidetic way of seeing.  In my mind’s eye, the total width of the painting was a quite astonishing 14 feet.  Looking back, it seems mind-boggling that I thought that I had the abilities to execute this vision.

My daughter, Simone, wasn’t born at this point and the plan was for Renée to be holding something else.  There are no studies for the piece.  I ordered the panel, which is virtually 80 x 80 inches. I primed and gessoed it and just started drawing.  I drew it directly in fine lines with a rapidograph pen.  When I finished the drawing, all of the elements were drawn out on a large ivory white panel.  It was crated, sent with us on the ship, the S.S. Rotterdam, and delivered to our Brooklyn apartment.

For many of my larger works I do have at least one or more studies.  The studies give me a sense of the scale, the space and composition. I try to concentrate on the composition first. When all is said and done the stronger the composition is, the more eye-catching the painting is.  I usually work on a ground, which might be a gray-green or a purple-grey, etc.  I prefer the ground to be interesting, but mottled in tone.  I like letting it show or breathe through.  The Triptych, conversely, used a high key white ground.

For me, I think the images are the strongest when you can visualize them.  There are some changes, of course, but when the image stretches onto your eye and pulls at you, even if it is a very odd or strange image, the work has more frisson to it, some extra mysterious karma.  It calls you.

In Sleep, 1983, conté crayon, colored pencil, pastel, 33 1/2 x 59 1/8 inches

EH:  In your letter to William Hull, the director of Penn State’s Art Museum, you mention the concepts of “seeing” vs. “perceiving.”  Specifically, you talk about “seeing closely—seeing significantly vs. seeing closely and not seeing at all.”  Could you elaborate?

SD:  In some sense, perhaps in the most transcendent way, the Triptych is about consciousness and perception.  It’s about the way visual imagery frames our references to life.  It follows then that the more we see the more conscious we are.  I am not sure if consciousness can be measured or how we would communicate information about this state of mind.  A recent article in the Atlantic, by Joshua Lang, dealt with anesthesia as a part of a range which was defined as consciousness.  The essay spoke about the doctor’s need to measure consciousness to determine if the anesthesia was actually working.  My hunch is that consciousness varies greatly among people.  So, how do we understand things? It is through the degree of visualizing and thus being there, that leads to a hyper-conscious state.  So, if one keeps with this line of thinking, it would seem to me that many people look and see, but don’t perceive.  Or, putting it another way, their practice of looking is casual and fuzzy.  So, we could say that the Triptych deals with this issue:  instruments for measuring and perceiving, reproductions, all set up for us to find our way, to discover who we are.  Many years later, it occurred to me that some mysterious connection existed between aspects of the painting and Dürer’s Melancholia.  It was years after the completion of the Triptych that this thought occurred to me.

Your question is mixed in my brain with the experience of a recent visit to the German Consulate to meet some guests who have been invited to see The Fulbright Triptych. If one was paranoid, (and Jewish?) would the wish for a high level of consciousness be tied to Germany and the Holocaust?  If I was living in Germany in 1942, would a great degree of consciousness have saved me or did it matter at all? Is surviving just a matter of luck and fate?

Joel’s Shoes, 1974-1975, oil on wood panel, 64 x 48 inches

EH:  In the interview, you describe The Fulbright Triptych as “the intimate depiction of a family, as ‘idea,’ and as pinpointed and ‘held’ in time, living together and striving to understand and ‘get at’ what is ‘out there.’”  I can definitely relate to this very strongly.  My daughter is two years old right now…just a touch older than Simone was when you competed the painting.  Counting my four-year-old son and my husband, there are four of us that form this unit that is struggling to define itself in relation to the outside world, which counterintuitively seems to be getting more mysterious as we experience more of it.  What are the ways in which family and art intersect for you?

SD:  I don’t think I have consciously thought of this notion.  You put this very well.  Yet, I suppose the answer really is in the painting.  The art historian Albert Boime titled his essay Simon Dinnerstein’s Family Romance.  There certainly is something to this notion.  Possibly it’s a way that we fall back on this world of family to protect ourselves and make sense of what is out there.  We create a reality, a smaller reality, which helps us to understand or deal with the larger one.  I suppose in the Triptych one could say that the visual information, the visual baggage, is helping this individual and family to define itself.  Thus, there are multiple realities.  There probably or surely is some objective reality to begin with.   Then, there is some sense of a family and their particular take on reality. Then there exists the incredible variations of, and between, families with their differing takes on reality.  Even further, in the latter case, there is the idea that the reality depicted in the Triptych exists just at one point in time.  It is fluid and changing.  That is why the varying reproductions that were chosen would be different now. Possibly they would have started to change within 6 months after the completion of the Triptych.  We aren’t still-lifes (or still lives!).

Roman Afternoon, 1977, oil on wood panel, 48 1/4 x 68 1/4 inches

How to make sense of all of these simultaneous realities?  The answer seems to point in the direction of, curiously, greater consciousness and increased humility. This notion is reiterated in the reproduction of the small quote in the Triptych’s middle panel which can be seen next to the aerogramme:

And to the question which of our worlds will then be the world, there

is no answer.  For the answer would have to be given in a language, and

a language must be rooted in some collection of forms of life, and

every particular form of life could be other than it is.

-Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

 

French Pears, 1987, conté crayon, colored pencil, pastel, 19 7/8 x 33 3/4 inches

EH:  Later in the interview, you refer to “the belief that paint can yield ‘spirit.’”  I would love to hear more about that.

SD:  Even though there seems to be somewhat of a return to the figurative tradition, I have the overriding sense that the great forces that once put human beings at the center of art have been somehow disconnected from the centrality of art.  From a critical and ‘with it’ standpoint, figurative art has taken quite a hit in the last 50 years.  The centrality of the human being in the fine arts just isn’t there.  My guess is that Picasso and Matisse, revolutionaries in mind and paint, would concede this point.  If one visits a highly touted contemporary museum today, one can go from room to room and not see an image of a human being.  A year ago I attended a meeting at the National Academy in New York. Members of the organization gathered to vote on prospective nominees. I was struck by the prevalence of the same point of view that I see when visiting museums.  At the meeting, various artist members got up to speak about their prospective nominees. The projecting of slides of the nominees work preceded this presentation.  After a very sad two hours of this, I found myself remarking to an artist friend, “What happened to the human being?  I didn’t see any sign of life (human, that is) in 96% of these presentations.”

Duet, 1990, conté crayon, colored pencil, pastel, 32 5/8 x 69 1/2 inches

I am very interested in this humanity, a living humanity that I described before. When I choose to find art that depicts the full measure of a human being, I find myself turning to the world of film.  Here, also, the concern isn’t over riding, but nevertheless it is there.  For instance, the recent Michael Hanneke film Amour is clearly an example of a really deep work of art about the human spirit.

So, I would like to hold out the possibility that there are instances where paint (and also charcoal, carbon, etc.) will somehow reach past the medium and reveal spirit.  Here, a number of artists come to mind:  Balthus, Lucian Freud, Antonio López García, Anselm Kiefer, George Tooker, Gregory Gillespie, Edwin Dickinson, Lennart Anderson, Magdalena Abakanowicz, Ron Mueck, El Anatsui.   Somehow, they have broken through and gone past the paint to find the window to spirit.  And this spirit isn’t mushy or sentimental or illustrative: it’s modern, tough-minded, committed and human.

EH:  One tends to think of painters as building up to a monumental work—you started off with one.  After such an undertaking, and the remarkable story of its purchase and the subsequent patronage of the Staempfli Gallery, what was it like to get back to daily work in the studio?

SD:  In a long career connected with the fine arts, one can see clearly that there is a certain ebb and flow.  Sometimes things go in a much more excited way. With a particular work, one becomes obsessively involved and committed.  Sometimes things are quieter, but the commitment is there.  Something about the Triptych always seemed as if it was a painting located in a fairy tale.  The conception of the work seemed extraordinarily lucky.

Such a large painting, appearing in such a magical way, all of a piece, without a single study, was quite an extraordinary experience for me.  George Staempfli’s purchase of the work, in its unfinished state, had all the workings of a deux ex machina, right out of some Greek play.  The painting’s origin in post-war Germany, of all places, is extremely counterintuitive.  Many of these events placed an incredible pressure on me to somehow get this painting to be extra, to be extraordinary, to push it and create an extreme and extra committed work of art.  I think some of this pushed aspect seems to me to be cemented into the fabric of the painting.  When one is under such pressure, you are really too worked up to enjoy (whatever that word means) what you are doing.  You are nervous, running on adrenalin and full of doubt.  Can I actually put this all together and realize this vision?

Passage of the Moon, 1998, oil and gold leaf on wood panel, 47 1/2 x 67 1/2 inches

There are a number of other examples of works which have had similar tensions and demands – In Sleep, Night, At the Still Point, Purple Haze, Solaris, where there is something special or perhaps eerie going on. You aren’t quite in control; it’s not quite rational.  You feel a shiver and some surreal jolt.  Someone is holding your hand as you work, leading you along.  You couldn’t possibly have thought of this idea on your own.

I think the important thing to understand is that pictures have different heartbeats and motivations.  Perhaps some are akin to novels, some metaphysical, some visionary, some short stories, and of course there are poems, diary jottings and personal notes.  I think the artist should listen for some vibration and make sure that he or she is listening hard.  The Fulbright Triptych at 14 feet is just the right size and A Carnation for Simone at 6 inches is just the right size.  I have seen a good many paintings that are just blown up to over-size dimensions, to give them a greater sense of their ( not so weighty) presence.

A Carnation for Simone, 1982, oil on wood panel, 4 3/8 x 6 3/8 inches

EH:  I’ve been enjoying picking quotes of yours from the book on which I want to hear you elaborate further.  You talk about “really looking at something, and through that intense looking, we are becoming who we are.  We are becoming ourselves.  We are becoming the best of ourselves that we can be.”  Now, this deeply resonates with me, and, I’m sure, with many of our readers here at Painting Perceptions.  How do you believe that the act of intense observation is linked to self-actualization?

SD:  I think that one of the things that drove me in the direction of the fine arts in the first place is that I seem to have a very finely tuned visual memory.  For some reason, once I see a painting or drawing I can remember it.  The same is true of faces and things.  So, I am prejudiced about looking and seeing.  I am particularly interested in the eye and consciousness.  I even gravitate to focusing on the depiction of the eye in portraits, say of Rembrandt, Van Gogh, van Eyck.

Glorioso Daisies, 1987, conté crayon, colored pencil, pastel, 37 1/2 x 27 1/2 inches

Until fairly recently, I never realized how great were the varieties of eyesight, both looking outward and inward.   I remember reading a quote from Van Gogh where he remarked that the human eye was more interesting to him than a cathedral.  I guess what he meant was that the eye is so small and yet it is so much greater in scale than one of those imposing European cathedrals.  A chance conversation with my cousin, a chess whiz, revealed that when he plays chess, based on the notations in the newspaper, he doesn’t visualize the pieces at all.  In fact, he remarked that he has difficulty picturing anything.  I asked him about his mother and father, that is, could he dial up an image of them in his mind and the answer was that he couldn’t.

So, I guess, unlike my chess-playing cousin, I am prejudiced toward the visual.  In a certain way, therefore, being an observer is all we have, pushing us to figure out what is “out there.”  So, I have the clear sense that the better we see, the more we are conscious and the more we are becoming who we are.  Intense seeing means that we are living hard, that we are really taking it in, that we are getting our money’s worth, here in this game on Planet Earth.

Mid-Summer, 1987, conté crayon, colored pencil, pastel, 36 1/2 x 51 3/4 inches

Rome Beauties, 1985, conté crayon, colored pencil, pastel, 20 x 25 inches

Mums in Winter Light, 1986, conté crayon, colored pencil, pastel, 25 1/8 x 33 7/8 inches

Interview with John Dubrow

by Xico Greenwald
 
John Dubrow has been making ambitious figurative paintings of New York City scenes since he moved to Brooklyn in the mid-1980s. His light-filled canvases are often years in the making—ragged, impastoed surfaces the result of the high standard Dubrow holds himself to. With a mid-career retrospective at the Demuth Museum in Lancaster, PA, on view through May 19^th, and John Dubrow: Recent Work at Lori Bookstein Fine Art in New York, on view through April 20^th, John Dubrow met with me in his Tribeca studio to discuss his recent work.

Xico Greenwald: You mentioned when we last spoke that there was one painting in your current show at Lori Bookstein that you worked on for a long time, an especially challenging painting. Working through the difficulties in that one canvas, you told me, ultimately helped you resolve the other pieces in your show.

John Dubrow: The vertical playground painting, Standing Playground, Early Summer, 2012-2013. That’s the one with a female figure in the center and you’re looking down. That canvas ended up driving a lot of my other work.

XG: Can you tell me how that canvas evolved?

Sketch from iPad Courtesy of John Dubrow

JD: I started that vertical painting with my iPad sketch one day at the playground.

Then, with only the idea of a central figure, I blocked out the scene. This is from the first day of painting.

Courtesy of John Dubrow

Then I thought, okay, I’m going to populate this thing. I’ve no idea how. I just began throwing figures in, both making them up and observing on site. Going everyday. So this is a few days later.

Courtesy of John Dubrow

This is two months later.

Courtesy of John Dubrow

XG: But working like this, your painting changing so drastically, so often, do you never become attached to any one image? How do you know how to proceed in your work with no specific vision in mind?

JD: I’m waiting to get attached. As I get new ideas, I rework my painting. At points along the way I become attached to certain moments, different figure moments in the painting, and those are the things I start building on. It’s just an improvisation and until something locks in and I start building off that one moment, everything is up for grabs. There is usually a moment that is not necessarily held on to but that I can start building from.

A key moment happened in this painting two or three months into it, when, standing at the playground with my iPad, I saw a pair of orange pants walk by. I’m drawing all this stuff and all of a sudden I think ‘those orange pants are a perfect way to get you off of the central figure.’

Huge challenge to figure out these formal issues and, in a way, it’s the reason that I paint. For me the challenge of this particular painting was having a central figure that we lock down on visually. How do you then get off the central figure into the rest of the painting? I began throwing in elements around the playground to force your eye off of the central figure. The orange pants did that. But as soon as I put the orange pants in there I needed to find a way to get you off the orange pants. So I just began to systematically push you from focal point to focal point.

XG: So when you were laying out the scene that first day, all you knew was there would be a central figure.

JD: Yes. And, after struggling on this painting for a while, I actually thought I had lost the picture. Then a turning point came when, months later, I saw the Masolino Baptistery in Castiglione Olona, Italy. I realized this playground scene is basically a baptism and I put in this John the Baptist figure, here in red with his arm raised.

Standing Playground, Early Summer, 2012-2013 Oil on linen 72 x 60 inches Courtesy of John Dubrow

XG: What is it about Masolino you responded to?

JD: Masolino paints relief-like, flattened form with areas of deep space. Unlike Masaccio, Masolino, through a combination of patterning and naturalism, had an almost Gothic sensibility, just a hint of volume. Which is what I’ve been trying to do- have this thing where form is not fully articulated. The Baptism fresco, in particular, was as close to my own intentions in Standing Playground, Early Summer as I could imagine.

Whether it’s Christ or John the Baptist or the Madonna, in Early Renaissance painting there’s a hierarchy in those paintings. Before this playground canvas I had never had a streetscape with a central focus on one figure. My cityscapes and multiple figure compositions are about moving through space, the figures are locations to get to, colors and shapes, some with more importance than others, but, ultimately, parts of a scene. But I held onto the challenge of hierarchy here.

XG: And Masolino’s Baptism frescoes helped you with that?

JD: Yes. When you walk into that little chapel there’s a lot of activity but no doubt what is going on. All the activity relates back in some way to the central figure.

…And the way the space in Masolino collapses is insane.

XG: But that doesn’t happen in your painting.

JD: The space in my paintings doesn’t collapse. I would say that’s the most important thing to me- believable space made through color…. and the idea of compressing the space and expanding the space at the same time.

XG: I want to ask you about your choice of subject matter. For a few years, because of personal circumstances, you would sometimes accompany kids to the playground. Is that how you generally choose what you’re going to paint, freely incorporating your personal life into your artwork?

JD: Yes. It’s random events in my life. Wandering by a place that I might have wandered by a hundred times before and I look up and see something; I recognize a painting of mine.

With the playground paintings it took me a long time to understand the heart of the playground: the incredible movement of the place, things going on everywhere. So at first it was just a sort of landscape with intricate little forms of the children playing in the sandbox. As I kept going I realized there was more to it, pockets of activity, discrete from each other but combining into a big symphony of some sort, more true to contemporary life.

XG: What’s the role of art history in your work?

JD: I feel like this is my history. My goal is to somehow take my life, what I’m experiencing, and place it into this tradition with other artists from the past. Of course I want my paintings to be freestanding. But I also want them to be part of a dialogue. It’s a very personal, almost a spiritual engagement. For me this personal dialogue that takes place in my studio is the driving force behind my painting. And it wouldn’t be enough to just want to paint pictures of contemporary life.

XG: What do you mean by “dialogue”?

JD: Well because of Cezanne, I’m reading Titian and Rubens in a very different way. Because of Matisse I see Giotto through the lens of a 20^th century artist. Every time a painter really sort of nails something, they enter into the dialogue and things begin to line up in a different formation. We see the world differently. I’m a person who, by being deeply committed to certain elements of the past, is trying to carry this conversation forward into the present. And it might not be a part of the contemporary conversation…

XG: It is not part of the contemporary conversation. And the people who you are conversing with are all dead.

JD: Yea. It’s for crazy people, this endeavor.

XG: Is it lonely?

JD: No. Never. I’m deeply tied into these people. Nothing lonely about it.

XG: And you have an audience.

JD: I think people respond to art that’s uncorrupted. So any interest that I have from the outside world is probably as much to do with that as anything. It doesn’t matter to me how long my paintings take, how many hours go into it. I may have to rip the painting open for years. And I think that there is something that gets into the work because of that, an intimacy that comes from my engagement.

In my show up now at Lori Bookstein, as the deadline for the show approached, the paintings underwent radical changes. With every piece in the show there was a dramatic ripping apart at the end. One more time going full bore as though it was the very beginning of the painting. It is really a ‘fuck you’ moment.

XG: Well surely at times, with a deadline pressing down on you, that process of “ripping apart” your work at the end results in bad paintings.

JD: Guston said a painting comes together in half-an-hour and you have to wait for that half-an-hour. And in my experience it is also the ‘half-an-hour’ in the end. But it’s a year or two years or three years getting me to that place where I understand so intimately the structure of the painting and I’m so confident that if, in the very last moment, I rip the shit out of it, that I can bring it back together in an interesting way.

It happened in that big vertical playground painting we’ve been discussing. I had this ‘fuck you’ moment three days before it was to be picked up for the exhibit. I began drawing into the central figure with ochre on this lavender shirt, reformulating the central figure. And then I began shifting things and taking out other figures in a complete frenzy and then… that was it.

I’m trying to get intensity, maximum engagement, in the very end of the painting. I’m trying to get it to have sparks.

XG: But weren’t there times earlier in the development of Standing Playground, Early Summer when the painting looked resolved? When it could have been finished?

JD: Julius Hatofsky, a teacher of mine in graduate school, would work on his paintings for ten years. He used to say painting is like taking a bus ride through the city. You can get off at any point. But if you keep riding the bus you’ll see some really interesting stuff. And if you take it all the way to the end of the line and then take it back you’ll see a lot more interesting stuff. So, it’s up to you when you get off. And it seems sometimes like I could work on a painting forever. You do one thing and a whole new world opens up and why hold on to the old image when you’ve got this new world to explore? For me it’s just an exploration in change.

More information about John Dubrow’s work can be found at his website and at Lori Bookstein Fine Art

More information about Xico Greenwald’s work can be found at xicogreenwald.com

Editors Note: Xico also wrote the March 14th review in the New York Sun, Long Looking in Lancaster, of John Dubrow’s current retrospective at the Demuth Museum in Lancaster, PA.

excerpt from the Lori Bookstein Fine Art Press Release:
 

John Dubrow was born in 1958 in Salem, Massachusetts. He received a BFA and MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute (1979-83), where he studied painting under Bruce McGaw and Julius Hatofsky. Since 1983, Dubrow has been based in New York City. His paintings are included in several public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Dubois Institute at Harvard University, the Hilton Hotels Corporation and the National Academy of Design. He is the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, the National Academy of Design’s Truman Prize and Carnegie Prize and the Port Authority World Views Project at the World Trade Center.

Catherine Murphy at Peter Freeman Inc, April 2013 from Gorky's Granddaughter on Vimeo.

 
Fascinating video by Zachary Keeting who interviews Catherine Murphy for the Gorky’s Granddaughter blog. Catherine Murphy talks about her recent work currently showing at the Peter Freeman Gallery (3/14 – 4/27/13) Great video footage of her paintings which show the paintings close up and asks many thoughtful questions.
 
Excerpt from the Peter Freeman, Inc press release for the show:

Murphy’s newest paintings and drawings show a profound interest in depicting common surroundings that usually escape our notice but nevertheless influence our perception: a pile of dust, a hole in the ground, or the stains found on a wall shift views usually unseen to become images that demand our full attention. Murphy does not work from photographs but, instead, directly from objects staged in her studio to recreate mental images drawn from memory and dreams. Her practice requires intense dedication to each work, a prolonged process that can take months, sometimes even years. The choice between drawing or painting is, as the artist explains, determined by the subject itself, giving painting and drawing the same importance within the artist’s oeuvre.

A lively and engaging interview with Catherine Murphy from Bombsite.com

A couple of my favorite of the many unforgettable quotes from this 1995 interview:
 

Catherine Murphy: That’s also the way figurative painters have skirted around the issue of being figurative painters. They have said, “Really, I’m an abstract painter, and this is how I’m going to let you know it. I’m going to paint the same egg for the next thirty years, so finally after thirty years you’ll understand that the egg wasn’t really that important. It was the form that was important.” And that’s exactly what I don’t want to do. An apple on a table is an apple on a fucking table. That’s its reality. I know that’s not very fashionable philosophically to have the reading of something be the something that it is. And it is the something that it is—but it’s very much more as well.

………

CM There was, and there wasn’t. I was such a big loud girl that I did very well at Pratt. We were taught the language of Picasso, and I’m very grateful for that. Cezanne allowed me to break up the canvas geometrically. I made representational paintings that were very loose, that looked influenced by the California painters. It was very gradual. I finally decided to commit to depicting what I saw. Planes in their proper place in space. I wanted to say, “Let’s see that happens when I take away the veil.” I also loved work like Robert Smithson’s and Robert Mangold’s. But I thought they had nothing to do with my paintings. Until finally I thought: Why wasn’t I allowing these influences into my paintings? And this voice in my head said, “Because they are the other people. The people who don’t like us.” I call that representational painting paranoia. Thinking that nobody likes us, so we’re not going to like anybody back. (laughter) And that’s all bullshit. Any painter who has any brains has no prejudice against one kind of painting or another.

 
please read the entire interview on Bomsite.com from this link…