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Artist Statement

 

The Vitality Of The First Mark: An Artist’s Statement

A good painting, faithful to the dream that gave it birth, must be produced like a world.
Charles Baudelaire

 

I spent this past summer making art in a small Umbrian village in central Italy. For six weeks I became entirely devoted to painting under the influence of the rich traditions of Italian art and European modernism as conveyed by a number of Yale graduates who have devoted much of their lives to painting. Early in the session I was making work that I felt exhibited my versatility in areas of painting and drawing. At the same time that I patiently copied a Caravaggio I was making impasto studies of abstracted cityscapes on little wood panels. It did not occur to me then that I was showing off as I leapt around from surface to surface, because vaguely quoting the moves of famous artists had always been enough to impress people in the past. I have always had a talent for impersonations, whether it be duplicating the voice of my father or dashing off a Kandinsky look-alike on canvas; the act of becoming another has never been too difficult for me. Since this talent had always been met with praise I learned early on how to use it for my benefit. So arriving in Italy during my twenty-first year was like the entrance of an old acrobat into the roar of the circus rink: without a doubt in his mind about the nature of the task.


The program in Italy was set up to have two critiques for the six week duration, the first taking place at the end of the third week and the second one at the end of the sixth week. On the afternoon of the first critique I laid out my work on the sunny patio in anticipation of the response I might receive from the distinguished faculty. I felt confident about the work I had completed, especially about a larger painting of a Madonna and child. For this work I had abandoned a steadfast duty to drawing and favored a more decorative and patterned expression. With De Kooning and the endlessly repeated motif of Madonna and child of Italian painting fresh in my mind, I made this with the hopes of presenting an honest depiction as to who I was as an artist. I was trying to be completely sincere with this painting, preferring joyous patterning to complicated investigations of space. There was a severe flatness to areas of the picture, particularly in moments of the naively drawn dress and in certain unarticulated areas of the background. I felt I did not need to articulate space in an illusionist manner in order for the painting to be effective. I did not mind if the drawing resembled that of a child’s, because the color looked good and the mood of the formal arrangement felt right.


Looking back I realize that making this painting was an act of rebellion against the very notions of painting that the school sought to uphold. As people gathered around my work, the lead instructor sat on a nearby cinder block with a puzzled countenance marking his ruddy complexion. He then commented on the apparent success of the drawings (which were all completed under the guidance of drawing instructors) and the obvious and complete failure of the paintings. I was shocked! He continued by observing that I had an obvious talent for mimicry that he observed in my paintings, which was not necessarily a good thing. He thought that instead of making art about my experience with nature I was trying to duplicate others experiences of observation when I worked. He especially disliked my Madonna and child painting for this aspect. Conveyed with dramatic language and shrewd analogies I was advised to proceed in the manner that marked my drawings, which was pointed out as one of extreme sensitivity to the observed subject. Balthus was brought up as a potential kindred painter. The instructor said: “You know how those unfinished Balthus drawings that look as if they are finished because they are so delicately handled, well, proceed in that manner, because you are not a fifties abstract painter.”


This advice caused me a great deal of reflection and frustration. Being told when I take a more conservative approach to painting that I am a better artist does not leave much room for the reasons I began to paint in the first place; which is the expressive outlet of painting which resists rules and the mundane hierarchies of life. I have always been drawn to the fifties abstract painters because they were able to make very intelligent pictures with a kind of contemporary vigor that traditional painting lacks. The wildness of De Kooning is instinctively much more desirable than the calm beauty of Corot. Instead of making invented architectonic images I was instructed to pursue a perceptual response in my workings from nature. In fact, this approach was suggested to just about everyone that session due to the inevitable result of working in a program under an authority figure with certain preferences of taste.
This collision that I experienced in Italy between what came instinctively to me as an artist and what the establishment promoted was a good lesson in the history of art. In his book “Air Guitar” Dave Hickey writes lucidly about the art historical lineage of the relationship between academic and outsider art:
“So, in general, we might say that these anti-academic styles prioritize complexity over simplicity, pattern over form, repetition over composition, feminine over masculine, and the fractal, the differential, and the chaotic over Euclidean order”…”They elevate concepts of externalized consciousness over constructions of the alienated, interior self. They are literally and figuratively “outside” styles. Decorative and Demotic, they resist institutional appropriation and always have.”
Though I was mimicking the surface aspects of work more anchored in an academic tradition my work would be considered outsider if visually analyzed. My Madonna painting was a chaotic arrangement that favored pattern over form and resisted all the rules of the academy. I was not aware of this, but the harsh response I received began my speculation about the meaning of this experience. Though conflicted as I was about the response I received from the faculty about my work, I have always understood the need for a challenging set of mentors for the necessary development of myself as an artist. In the words of an old drawing teacher of mine: “Artists are made, not born.” Though I had my period of anger and digression, by the end of the sixth week of the program I had grown to love painting outdoors in the Umbrian landscape. I had surrendered to the conventions of the academy that I was involved with, and began to love what the whole thing stood for. This specific camp of painters had an intense nostalgia for art of the past. There was little talk in the program of artists after the year 1940. Under the guidance of these guys I became quickly aware of how distasteful most paintings looked after 1940. Color seemed way too jacked up in contemporary painting, and all eloquence and poetry seemed to have vanished from art in America. My own work focused primarily on the landscape towards the end of my session in Umbria.


In the morning light I would drag my gear out to a secluded spot and paint the cool green of olive trees against ocher-washed fields and sky. I was after subtle harmonies of tone and color and subject matter that would align my work with the glorious tradition of landscape painting in the Italian countryside. Many of my favorite artists: Ingres, Corot, and Degas, had journeyed to Italy at some point in their careers to work from the landscape. The only problem with getting too settled into this mode of working was, as one of my instructors so rightly questioned: “What is going to happen when we have to go back? Our group had been working and learning in a vacuum of culture that had little relation to the world that we all lived in. It makes sense to give students an experience in Italy that they would certainly not be able to discover back in the United States; but there was very little talk about how what we were doing was out of fashion in the current art world. Very few of these kinds of questions were discussed, so upon my arrival back in the States I was very confused as to which direction I was to proceed in as a serious young artist.


Leaving Italy, I felt as if I had come from back in time and was plopped down in the futuristic disintegrating culture of America. Leaving the secluded majesty of an Umbrian village, my first encounter with my home culture was at the airport in Rome. I was getting on an air train that would take me to the terminal for my flight when I realized the retired quarterback for the San Francisco Forty-niners, Joe Montana, was sitting two seats away. I began listening to the conversation he was having with an older woman when I heard him say: “And then the guy says, hey! I don’t speak English”. Who knows what Joe was really talking about, but looking back, that moment seems to have foreshadowed everything about making the transition from a secluded art utopia back into the sweaty dilapidation of ordinary life. Once I was back in College, I initially felt a real distance from the artistic endeavors of my fellow students. The people who I had met in Italy along with all the painting talk was sorely missed in this new environment. The structure of college seemed only to interrupt my progression to becoming an artist. There were feelings of guilt about the amount of money being spent for me to be in school when my attitude towards it was ultimately negative. In Dave Hickey’s “Unbreak My Heart, An Overture” he comments his experience with the paradoxical nature of the university: “It finally dawned on me that in this place that we set aside to nurture culture and study its workings, culture didn’t work.” In the bureaucratic structure of college there is little room for the pursuit of painting. But despite this reality I felt the need to finish my degree and get over these feelings of estrangement. I knew I was not in the right place for where I was internally but I wanted to make the best of a situation and take the good that it could offer me although it might be unrelated to painting.
One of the students at the program in Italy was a young man named Ben who was very intense about his work. He played the role of an outlaw aesthete, a touch of the tortured artist and a lot of attitude. But his work was phenomenal! His favorite painter was Balthus and he worked a little too much in the vein of the “master”, but he possessed a unique passion for his work that is rarely seen in people. Balthus painted a world that always hovered just above the ground. He was not much of a surrealist, but his poetic expressions of lazy adolescence and erotic silence always possess a childlike wonder. During the entire time in Italy Ben only completed two paintings. At night when I was finishing cleaning up I would enter his abandoned studio and see the new phases of his work. His space was very organized and had an air of intense deliberation. Brushes were laid out in the order of there size, and the only thing that graced the walls was a small reproduction of a Raphael portrait. One sensed a sincere timelessness about his studio, with the simple necessities and small pencil studies one could almost teleport the whole room back to the time of the Renaissance. Although this was the case, his work did not stop with a nostalgia for lost times and traditions, it was very contemporary in its notions of color and space. Ben was a natural painter and in my own development as a painter an important person to have met, because here was a young guy with an insane passion like myself.


Back in school at St. Mary’s I felt the need to play a similar role as Ben had played during the program in Umbria. So I spent the first semester of my SMP working on a single large painting. I loved the way he was able to ignore everyone and everything else and just follow his intuition about his paintings. This initial large picture that I made went through countless pictorial changes. I began with the drive to make a painting which had a surface that resembled crumbling fresco walls. I conceptualized a scene of a woman sitting on a pier and looking out at sea. Painting painstakingly from my head without any visual aids, I strove to create a beautiful invented image. It was very demanding and slightly maddening at times. Using water-based oil paints I was able to rub out seemingly dry areas of the painting with a wet rag to render certain desired effects. I was involved in a process that is similar to the way that Willem de Kooning worked. De Kooning was constantly re-working his pictures in an endless fight between will and fate. In a 1958 interview with Thomas B. Hess, an editor and champion of de Kooning’s work, the artist remarked: “I was reading Kierkegaard and I came across the phrase ‘To be purified is to will one thing.’ It made me sick.” De kooning was always after complications that would challenge the work before him and he wanted to put many things together. He was once quoted saying: “ I want to paint like Ingres and Soutine at the same time.” In his early work, which has influenced my own work the most, the finished picture does not necessarily mean the finished “figure” or other illusionist conventions. His emphasis on the fundamental abstract quality of the picture plane always interrupts his images. In “Seated Figure” from 1940 the figures right shoulder is completely sanded out into the background. The left arm disappears into a turquoise floor in the distance. The fleeting result leaves a haunting and fresh dimension to the figure in the ambiguous environment. These exciting innovations are what I find particularly striking about the early work.


At one point in the saga of this initial painting I realized that I was playing the role of a painter rather than really painting. I was not risking enough as I inched my way through typical figurative imagery that had historical security in its acceptance. In a sense, I did not believe in myself as an artist because I felt that I was not good enough. If I could operate under the acceptable imagery of a giant like De Kooning I could make out okay, but I was not free. I felt in a difficult rut at this point. I thought back to the remarks made by the faculty at the program in Italy about my talent for mimicry. After much thought, my solution to this dilemma was to prepare a fresh palette and paint right over the top of my image. It was frightening to paint so loosely over something so rigidly composed for so long but it was also a very freeing experience. A figure began to emerge in the center of the canvas and for the first time I felt like I was really painting and open to every move I was making before my eyes. This was the breakthrough moment in this picture.


I began working very intensely on the renewed image in this work of a man intertwined with a woman in an ambiguously spaced room. I was thinking a lot about De Kooning when I painted this. His early mannequin-like portraits and self-portraits are loaded with very interesting formal maneuvers. But I felt at the same time liberated from his imagery because this was entirely my own. It was honest influence at this point rather than mimicry. His one painting that mine quotes quite literally is one from 1940 titled “Seated Figure”. De Kooning and Gorky were sandpapering the pigment around this time and that partly explains the visible under-painting in areas of the picture. “Seated Figure” is a beautiful painting that exaggerates forms to produce strange results. The ephemeral quality to the image creates a beautiful sensation of movement throughout the picture plane; the forms really feel alive and distinct. In these early paintings figures move in and out of the wildly constructed spaces they inhabit. The indecisiveness of the final result creates a mood of uncertainty, which characterized this painter’s generation.


Color became a crucial problem as I reworked my big painting. I wanted to paint using a modernist color scheme and leave everything fairly rough and tangential, but I also wanted a harmonious relation of color and every area of the picture functioning with a discreet visual purpose. Over Thanksgiving break I worked relentlessly to hone the image to something of my liking. My big painting was an important one for my artistic development. By using almost no visual aids I was forced to really get deeply involved with painting issues that I had to think my way out of. Drawing issues along with composition and color all had to come from my own invention and this process was quite a test of my endurance as an artist. The picture went through countless alterations before I arrived at the finished image.


My extremely self-conscious approach to making paintings can be summed up by a mantra of “nothing works unless it works for me in the moment”. I am constantly reacting to the marks I make. If I screw up the picture then the idea is finished and I have to pursue another direction. It is less expressive to calculatedly compose images and have to stay tied to those images. It seems that artists would only do that if they had to meet a deadline. Otherwise, experimenting is one of the great joys of making images. With my invented work I am constantly waiting for a surprise to occur in the picture that might lead it in another direction. A way of making surprises happen is by temporarily checking out of a conscious manner of composing and letting the subconscious come through. This is where my method of working is closest to the realm of action painting. When the canvas is no longer a window and becomes an arena in which the artist acts the artist can no longer have a conscious say in what is occurring. Pure action painting in theory has been very rarely practiced by painters. Artists like Arshile Gorky and Franz Kline who are called “action painters” engaged in a creative process where they self-consciously reacted to marks made in moments of spontaneous unconscious action. Ignorant viewers look at the dashing vitality of a Kline or a De Kooning and simultaneously apply the phrase “action painting” to them, creating a false mythology about what these artists were doing. A quote that I have always remembered delivered by the artist Francis Bacon went something like this: “When you finish painting a wall you cannot see any of the marks that made up the finished wall, but when you make that first brushstroke on the wall there is a certain vitality to the stroke which will get destroyed when the wall is finished.” Keeping the vitality of that first mark in the finished picture is the difference between a house painter and painter. In my work I hope to unify the vitality of the spontaneous mark with the intelligence of the finished wall.


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