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April 11, 2001
"I think [painting] is a way of making the connection between yourself and everything." -Fairfield Porter, 1968 (Spike, p. 8)
As an artist, my primary concern is to learn how to paint,
and to portray visual incidents effectively and efficiently. I
strive to become deeply involved with the medium, and to develop
and master a personal language of representation. My tendency
towards representative painting comes out of a fascination or
psychological involvement with the subject. Indeed, it is a way
for me to feel connected to the world around me. At the same time,
painting from life allows me to experiment with formal language
in painting without preoccupation over a conceptual goal. I would
like to paint without the pretense of emotional expression or
narrative. Other mediums and art forms are more suited to these
goals. Painting from life leads me to look hard at the physical
world, and then to decide how best to represent what I see. That
is the most basic intention of my work, and in this sense, I am
a realist painter with the goal of depicting a visual reality.
However, that reality is difficult to pinpoint precisely, and
it is up to the artist to decide exactly what he is representing.
Detail in a painting must often be sacrificed for the sake of
gesture. Gesture must be sacrificed for the sake of detail. If
the painter wants to portray a visual reality, he must decide
between movement and specificity.
There is an immediate sensation of 'nature', the purely visual
experience, that cannot be captured through a strict and fastidious
adherence to the details of a subject. Gesture and a coherent
spatial image, the qualities upon which a lifelike sensation depends,
are often lost as the specificity of rendering increases with
individual objects. On the one hand, objects must be simplified
for the sake of pictorial unity , often flattened into simple
geometric forms and regions of color. On the other hand, the recognizable
likeness holds a mysterious appeal. Alex Katz (1927- ) recognized
the need to find a compromise between likeness and simplification.
"It was as if he asked'how much detail does a realist painting
need to convey a convincing illusion?' And he has provided just
that amount, an amount sufficient to capture a sitter's distinctive
features, expression, and gesture" Katz himself said of likeness,
"Strangely enough, if you don't have a good likeness, you
don't have a good picture. That's up to a certain point You can
wreck a painting very easily if you get obsessive about likeness."
Fairfield Porter (1907-1975), writing as a critic, summarized
this realist attitude in the work of his friend, saying that "Katz
is a 'realist', meaning that you can recognize every detail in
his painting, and the whole too, though the whole takes precedence
and the detail may be only an area of color, in short, abstract."
(Sandler, p. 16-17, 19) In my paintings, I am consciously seeking
a balance between representation and simplification. I intend
both to represent the subject matter and create a unified composition.
My subject matters are often simple and personal. Really, the
subject matter only goes so far towards personal meaning for the
viewer. I have my friends sit for me whenever the opportunity
arises, and paint still lives of sentimental objects. My painting
Paper Cranes provides an example. Only a few close friends
might know what paper cranes mean to me, and why I might choose
to paint them, and this is fine. Actually, they have several meanings,
and their meaning has expanded for me in a few directions. They
are a kind of simple creative endeavor, not requiring any preparation
or materials aside from a sheet of paper. Yet the folded-paper
creations are exceptionally beautiful, and extremely difficult
to execute perfectly. So they are challenging and rewarding both
for the beginner and the expert. In my mind, this makes Origami
a sort of populist exercise. When I was in the first grade, I
used to take classes in Origami, and I had a number of books with
instructions on how to make quite a lot of things. I learned the
paper crane by heart. So there is a degree of nostalgic meaning
in that respect. Origami sits among my earliest endeavors into
artmaking. In another respect, paper cranes have served me as
vehicles to deliver secret messages. Of course, none of this is
obvious or even necessarily evident in the painting. The goal
is not to paint an explanation of the personal significance of
Origami. While they subjects are selected for being personally
meaningful, I do not expect the viewer to have the same relationship.
I tend to offer, especially in my portraits, a very deadpan description
of the subject. With the exception of Naomi and Bob, all
of my subjects are alone in their picture plane, and in every
figurative painting, the background has been reduced to a simple
field of color, or an invented room featuring only wall and floor.
One of the very first painters I looked at was Wayne Thiebaud,
and I learned this from him. Thiebaud completed a series of portraits
in the 1960s which were characterized by the absence of any specific
environment. Bikini, painted in 1964, is one such painting.
The model is thoroughly expressionless, and completely alone in
her picture plane. She has only a white background. The painting
becomes entirely about her, as she is the only thing in the painting
for it to be about. In the case of my own portraits, I have a
deep psychological and often very emotional involvement with the
sitters. They are my friends. I tend to make the paintings entirely
about them by eliminating everything else from the painting.
In my color choices, especially, the priority is harmony in the
painting itself, rather than likeness to the natural color of
the subject. The color of a painting should work with itself to
create a unified sensation of light and life, and to create a
believable space in which the represented subject exists. To this
end, color often becomes the focus of my attention while working.
Lightness takes precedence over likeness, and modeling is reduced
drastically in order to focus on color relationships. At some
point in every painting, I stop looking directly at the subject,
and work while considering only the painting itself. I use representation
as a springboard into the painting-a starting point from which
I explore and experiment with paint surface and color.
Simplification of form and composition is critical to this experimentation.
My painting, Stereo, provides an extreme example. The painting
is composed basically of three regions of color, one depicting
the floor, one depicting the wall, and one depicting the stereo
itself. A very few details have been brushed into the scene, and
these are mostly in the object itself, for the sake of having
a minimal likeness. Again, my decision making is informed by Katz,
who "recognized that in order for color to be felt visually
and emotionally, elements 'alien' to color had to be reduced,
above all, modeling, but also complicated drawing and textures."
(Sandler, p. 18) His 1967 painting Ada With Superb Lily exemplifies
this reduction. The fabric of the chair behind her has been simplified
to a plain of orange, to contrast with the uniform green background.
The only modeling is a stripe of light falling across the top
of the chair. Ada herself is represented with only a few major
regions, each one a different value of yellow orange. The lily
to her left is simplified to a similar degree, and painted in
the same orange tones, and sits on a green stem. All of the warm
oranges tend to project forward against the cool green. Katz is
establishing his space through a color relationship alone.
I wanted to make Stereo into a painting that is specifically
about color relationships, and to test Katz' approach for myself.
Using a palette composed almost entirely of full saturation spectrum
pigments and mixing from there, I painted over each region several
times, stopping once I had found a trio of colors that seemed
to create a feeling of light together. I used a lot of medium
to encourage the paint to be translucent, and allow some of each
layer to show through to the top. Colors where chosen not for
their similarity to the actual scene, but for how the helped the
sensation of light and physical presence in the painting.
The work of Fairfield Porter is becoming instrumental to my own
color sensibilities. He exemplifies notion of "harmonious"
color within the painting, which does not have to do, necessarily,
with real life. Porter, like Katz, is involved in reduction and
simplification into pools of color, though he does not reduce
so drastically as Katz, and his paintings are far more painterly.
Porter is primarily a landscape painter, and always works from
observation, painting the land near his family's summer home and
his friends. However, his "first allegiance" is to the
image. He said of his work, "What I think now is that it
doesn't matter what you paint. What matters is the painting."
(Spike, p. 9) The Garden Road, painted in 1962, appears
at a glance to be very naturalistic. However, upon close inspection,
the painting turns out to be made up of a few brushy areas of
blue- and yellow-greens, broken up only by the receding plain
of yellow in the background, and a few warm notes of very low-saturation
red. Though inspired by the light effect of a field viewed from
the woods at midday, Porter has exaggerated the few warm tones
within the scene in order to prevent the greens from overwhelming
his painting.
My interest in Porter has led me to begin experimenting with landscape.
Landscape provides a different sort of subject for the painter.
In both still-life painting and portraiture, the subject is arranged
by the artist to suit his intended composition. With landscape
painting, the artist has to be selective and really look for his
subject. He is not afforded the luxury of arranging what he paints.
This is a challenge that has drawn me to paint landscapes, along
with the realization that all of the painters I intend to emulate
have tackled the same subject, and developed a distinctive style
of representing the landscape. The landscapes I have painted are
small, and painted a la prima, in just a few hours each.
I paint them this way in order to complete a large number of them
very quickly, and get some experience with this sort of painting.
Landscapes offer a huge amount of visual information, and the
task of reducing them to two-dimensional representations is made
both more difficult and more interesting.
It is worth emphasizing that Stereo is an extreme example
of the reduction of forms down to regions of color, and a conscious
effort to take the idea to an extreme. Each painting is really
an experiment in and of itself. My own creative process is fueled
by passion for the act of painting and impulse, and an instinctive
sense of a goal. In fact, stated goals in painting have consistently
delivered me into frustration and disappointment. I find it more
productive to simply work and have an occasional unpredictable
success, then to retroactively examine what was done. As a result,
there may be a certain feeling of inconsistency to my paintings,
especially when compared to each other as individual works. Jake
has been left unfinished in places, and very flat looking. Again,
this is reduction at work, but I also intended to play thickly
painted passages against very thin ones, in the hopes that those
areas treated with a lot of paint would have a stronger visual
weight. I am often very fond of the underpainting, the first layer
of turpentine washes I use to establish composition. There is
an economy of mark-making at this stage that I find appealing,
with whole passages of value or form represented by only a few
fast brushstrokes. In Jake I wanted to try to take advantage
of that. However, in my still-life Paper Cranes, all
of the underpainting has been covered, and rendering has been
emphasized more than in any other of my recent paintings. When
held in direct comparison there is some incongruity, but this
is intentional. I am still very much a student of painting, and
I would like to continue experimenting with technique and degrees
of finish as long as I am making art. Each painting has an almost
boundless field of possibilities at its inception, even with the
simple intention of representing the physical world.
I intend, whenever I paint, to learn something about painting.
The act of painting, in and of itself, is complex enough to hold
my attention until I am beyond exhaustion. Realism gives me a
goal-a direction in which to take the painting-and frees me from
pretense of concept aside from simply looking and trying to reproduce,
as well as frees me from the frustration that often results with
a preconceived idea of what the painting should specifically look
like. Often, my paintings will come out the opposite of what I
expected, or intended. This is fine, and even something to enjoy.
Fairfield Porter said in correspondence that painting was neither
emotional nor cerebral. (Spike, p. 8) Instead, it exists as a
sort of meditation on vision, our primary sense to understand
the physical world. At the most basic level, this is what I intend
my paintings to be.
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Annotated Bibliography
This is the catalogue from a traveling Thiebaud retrospective that was at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC in April of 2001. The catalogue includes works from very early in his career, in the 1950s, through the year 2000. Biography and essays on Thiebaud's paintings are also included. 2) Sandler, Irving. Alex Katz: A Retrospective. 200 pages. New York. Harry N. Abrams, Inc. 1998. This is the catalogue published in conjunction with a 1998 retrospective of Katz' paintings. Again, the catalogue includes works from the painter's early career, beginning in the 1950s, and continues to pieces from 1997. The essay is interspersed throughout the plates, and discusses Katz as he relates to other New York painters, including his early move away from Abstract Expressionism through his influence on younger painters such as Elizabeth Peyton. 3) Spike, John T., Fairfield Porter: An American Classic. 320 pages. New York. Harry N. Abrams, Inc. 1992. A biography of Fairfield Porter, and collection of his paintings. The biography is written largely from primary sources, and includes numerous quotes regarding his work, his relationship to other artists, and his personal life. The author uses the narrative of his life to discuss the evolution of his painting and criticism. |