And / Also: Improvisation in Abstract Art

Jill Christian
Advisor: Barry Schwabsky
Group 3 – Paper 4
1 November 2010

And / Also: Improvisation in Abstract Art

“The painter no longer approached his easel with an image in his mind; he went up to it with material in hand to do something to that other piece of material in front of him. The image would be the results of this encounter" (Rosenberg 589).

As Harold Rosenberg articulated in his 1952 essay, “The American Action Painters,”  for many Abstract Expressionist painters in the 1940s and 1950s [1] (particularly those painters who were working gesturally) the idea of painting as an act was fundamental to their painting process.  This painting act was to unfold spontaneously and intuitively, allowing the subconscious of the artist to be revealed on the canvas through the interaction of the artist with the materials.  Key to this approach, was a particular way of beginning:  without a preconceived idea (or with at most a skeletal motif or image).  By suppressing rational thought (the idea), the painting would then become a unique expression of the individual artist’s psyche.  Although Rosenberg’s writings expressed concepts that would prove too dogmatic and extreme (for painters) if followed to their ultimate conclusions (i.e., dispensing with the painting object [2]),  the approach of letting a painting emerge in an intuitive way through the act of painting remains a valid and innovative practice, which can be compared to musical and theatrical improvisation.

One problem with Rosenberg’s notion of painting as pure action is that painting is a language built out of of the use of certain materials -- an essential one being paint -- and a vocabulary that is visual.  The limits of a medium and its formal language can be extended: materials can be borrowed from other mediums such as writing, sound, sculpture, drawing, etc.  Still, painting is primarily visual, and it communicates through the very things Rosenberg says can be dispensed with: “form, color, composition, drawing” (pg).  A painter who wants chooses to stay within painting as a medium, would not wish to dispense with “all” formal elements, no more than a musician would want to dispose of sound.  They may even want to expand on the formal elements available to them.

Nevertheless, acknowledging Rosenberg’s ideas gives the artistic process at least equal weight with formal considerations, and recognizes the idiosyncratic and individual nature of expression.  In particular, although Rosenberg does not address improvisation specifically [3], improvisation allows for the acceptance of history and tradition, but leaves open and embraces the possibility of innovation through creatively combining, borrowing, and playing with established idioms (Improvisation, Smith).

Artists who continue to paint with an “expressionistic” sensibility frequently use improvisation in order to invent.   Rather than approach the canvas with a specific image in mind, they engage in a complex process of drawing upon their technical skills, their visual memory, and their muscle memory, in a way that is very similar to musical improvisation.  The “in the moment” process of improvisation is only possible through a mastery of visual language (Inprovisation, Smith), rather than its denial as Rosenberg implies.  It involves a deep understanding of the process in which one is engaged (Improvisation, Smith).

Improvisation acknowledges, unlike the Surrealist’s notion of Automatism, the role of technical skill and conscious decision-making.  Hazel Smith in Improvisation, Hypermedia and the Arts Since 1945 discusses the difference between automatism and improvisation saying:
Automatism was a form of improvisation, though its practitioners tended to describe it in a somewhat romantic and idealistic way, as a direct route to the unconscious. In addition, automatism clearly attempted to minimize the control and interactivity of which improvisation is capable (12).

First generation Abstract Expressionists such as Willem de Kooning and Jackson Polock,  were highly trained in the visual language of painting, and frequently used a kind of visual improvisation to generate new ideas and compositions.   Leigh Bullard Weisblat, describing Willem de Kooning’s process, said:

To avoid a preconceived idea or subject, he sometimes began randomly, painting a word or number. He also adapted the concepts of collage by making paper drawings that he tore up and placed on the surface of the work... After each spontaneous gesture de Kooning deliberated over the fresh strokes, incorporating free associations in the compositions but never letting go of conscious control (143).

Similarly, in discussing Jackson Pollock’s painting of Mural, Arthur C. Danto says, “one imagines that each move suggested the next, and bit by bit some form began to emerge. It would have been inconsistent with the methodology of creative automatism to prepare sketches or studies, as Pollock acknowledges in his speech at the beginning of the film” [Namuth’s film] (Danto).  Yet Danto points out that compositional intentionality emerges in the clear orientation of the final compositions, indicating an adherence to the directionality convention of easel painting. (Danto) [4]


Similarly, Joan Mitchell, a second generation Abstract Expressionist, talks about how the beginning of her paintings originate in a “memory of a feeling” or “remembered landscapes that involve my feelings” (Barris).  Mitchell uses the languages of color and gesture to express a personal, intuitive vision (Barris).  In a 1986 interview, Yves Michaud asks Mitchell what she wants from a painting.  Mitchell responds:  “.... I don’t set out to achieve a specific thing, perhaps to catch motion or to catch a feeling....My painting is not an allegory or a story. It is more like a poem” (Mitchell 33).  She talks about the painting being in control and allowing the process to determine what happens next: “I am ‘no hands,’ the painting is telling me what to do” (Mitchell 34).  At the same time, Mitchell was very aware of and converse in pictorial language of painting.  She says,  “I was so and still I am in such adulation of great painters. If you study a Matisse, the way paint is put on and the way he puts on white, that’s painting technique. I wanted to put on paint like Matisse. I worked hard at that a very long time ago” (Mitchell 34).  Mitchell had internalized and incorporated a pictorial language that she then could use to create innovative, intuitive, gestural compositions.

Similar strategies of improvisation and allowing a painting to “emerge” can be seen in a contemporary painter such as Charline Von Heyl.  Although working in an entirely different style than the Abstract Expressionists, Von Heyl talks about content and subject unfolding during the painting process and claims she never begins with an idea (Kaneda 83).[5]  In a 2010 interview with Shirley Kaneda in Bomb Magazine, Von Heyl talks about how an intuitive process enables her to escape the dilemma of abstract painting as design.  She says, “As long as I know what I’m doing, I design.... I can get beyond it only in the unknown...I don’t want to make the painting, I want the painting to invent itself and surprise me.  That surprise is the surplus value that makes it all worth it for me“(Kaneda 85).  Asked how she begins a painting, Von Heyl tells Kaneda:

I just start them. Here’s a white canvas, and I’m going to put something on it.... It’s completely intuitive. A color, a movement, whatever. Very much depending on the mood du jour.  It’s like a writer putting the white sheet in and starting to write something. You know that you are going to transform it and transform it, but you just have to start somehow. (83)

This strategy is similar to those used by de Kooning, Pollock, and Mitchell, and seems to trust in the process of improvisation to generate new and dynamic paintings though the dialog of the painter with the materials[6].

Improvisation is composing on the fly.  It requires deep understanding of an idiom or style so that elements can be combined in original ways (Improvisation, Smith).  It also requires the artist to “be in the moment.” Smith says, “This fusion of ‘awareness’ and ‘understanding’ brings the practitioner to the point where he can act with a range of options that best fit the situation, even if he has never experienced a similar situation.”   Although Abstract Expressionist painters believed in the idea of automatism, and Rosenberg’s writings focused on the idea of action, which would take precedence over formal elements, aspects of both of these concerns are resolved through improvisation.  The benefit of improvisation, as opposed to “pure action” or the “subconscious” of automatism,  is its adaptability and innovative potential.  Improvisation encourages innovation since it “opens up the idea of adding and combining elements from different idioms and styles and conventions” (Smith 12).  It allows for individual expression in the context of a formal history[7] without necessarily becoming to pastiche[9].  It does not require the suppression of the conscious nor the rejection of formal language.  Rosenberg said, “What was to go on the canvas was not a picture, but an event.”  Another way to look at it is that the painting is both a picture and an event.  And for certain abstract painters, one that is improvised.

Works Cited


“Abstract Art.”  The Grove Art Series: From Expressionism to Post-Modernism. Ed. Jane Turner. London: Macmillan Reference Ltd., 2000. 2-13. Print.

“Art Informel.” The Grove Art Series: From Expressionism to Post-Modernism. Ed. Jane Turner. London: Macmillan Reference Ltd., 2000. 53-55. Print.

Landfield, Ronnie et al.  Artist Talk. American Painterly Abstraction: 7 Painters. LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe New Mexico. October 30, 2010.

LewAllen Galleries. American Painterly Abstraction: 7 Painters. October 29-December 12, 2010. Santa Fe, NM: LewAllen Galleries, 2010. Print.

Barris, Roann.  “Abstraction and the Figure in the Second Half of the 20th Century.” Online Paper.  Radford University Museum. Web. 25 October 2010.

Danto, Arthur C. “Pollock and the Drip.” The Nation. 7 Jan. 1999. n. pag. Web. .  25 Oct. 2010.

“Improvisation.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 1 Nov. 2010. Web. 1 Nov. 2010.

Kaneda, Shirley. “Charline Von Heyl.” Bomb Magazine. 113. Fall 2010. 80-87. Print.
 
Mitchell, Joan. “Joan Mitchell: Interview with Yves Michaud (1986).” Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings.  Ed. Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. 31-34. Web. 

Rosenberg, Harold.  “The American Action Painters.” Art in Theory: 1900-2000.  2nd Ed. Ed. Charles 
Harrison and Paul Wood.  Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2008. 589-592. Print.

Smith, Hazel and R.T. Dean. Improvisation, Hypermedia and the Arts Since 1945. The Netherlands: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1997. Web.

Weisblat, Leigh Bullard. The Scribner Encylopedia of American Lives: 1997-1999. Vol. 5. Ed. Kenneth T. Jackson, Karen Markoe, Arnie Markoe. New York: Charles Schribner’s Sons, 2002. p. 142-145. Web.

Wood, Paul. Varieties of Modernism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004.

Footnotes

[1] Abstract Expressionism, Art informel, and related movements, “shared several characteristics: an emphasis on impulsiveness and spontaneity that rejected predetermined composition and that frequently equated drawing with painting; a concentration on the individual mark or ‘tache’, as opposed to the straight line or carefully circumscribed shape; a concern for the expressive potential of paint and its textured or optical effect; and a sense of immediacy in the execution. Qualities of freshness and urgency led to a physical awareness of the artist’s contact with the picture surface and the act of painting itself, manifested in the USA by action painting" (“Abstract Art”/Grove Art).

[2] This was suggested to me by Barry Schwabsky in e-mail correspondence: “Mary McCarthy to Harold Rosenberg: ‘You can't hang an event on the wall.’”  Rosenberg, in “The American Action Painters,” discussing the “special motive” for “extinguishing the object” says that it was motivated by the desire to make the act, and what is revealed through the act as primary, or more important than the object (either within the painting, or taken to its extreme, the object itself).  (Rosenberg 589).  Rosenberg says that the American painting is not “pure”....”The apples weren’t brushed off the table in order to make room for perfect relations of space and color. They had to go so that nothing would get in the way of the act of painting.  In this gesturing with materials the aesthetic, too, has been subordinated.  Form, colour, composition, drawing, are auxiliaries, any one of which -- or practically all, as has been attempted logically, with unpainted canvases -- can be dispensed with.  What matters always is the revelation contained in the act” (590).

[3] I have not fully read all of Rosenberg’s major essays, but I am not aware of him directly addressing the idea of improvisation.

[4] In his Jan. 7, 1999 essay in The Nation, “Pollock and the Drip,” Arthur C. Danto uses a painting by Joan Mitchell (Ladybug) as a jumping off point to talk about the use of the drip.  He says that for the Abstract Expressionists, “The drips affirmed that paint has an expressive life of its own, that it is not a passive paste to be moved where the artist wants it to be moved but possesses a fluid energy over which the painter endeavors to exercise control. The act of painting then is like a match between two opposed wills, like the act of taming tigers. The internal drama of Mitchell’s painting derives from the way she uses paint’s propensity to drip to her own advantage by taming it with over-strokes of pigment through which she displays her own discipline and power” (Danto).  He talks about how the drip had become “theatricalized.”  He claims that Pollock’s work was all about controlling the drip.  That as an adherent to the concept of psychic automatism, it was necessary for the paint to obey the “active artistic power.”  Pollock isn’t so much as drip as calligraphy -- and the painting is layed flat, preventing “drips”.  In comparison, Mitchell worked vertically -- her paintings imply a top and a bottom.   In Pollock “the painting... internally determines which edge is top and which is bottom...allowing paint to drip removes that ambiguity.”

[5] Von Heyl said, “I’m certainly not interested in depicting anything, but neither am I interested in abstraction for its own sake (Kaneda 83).”  She talks about coming from an environment where painting was approached in an ironic way (Polke, Kippenberger, Oehlen)  --- “heavily male, very jokey, and ironic stance toward painting. Anarchistic and also quite arrogant (Kaneda 83).”

[6] Charline von Heyl says, “To think and to write about painting is also a possibility to reinvestigate and redefine the basics, which each generation should do (Kaneda 84).”

[7] On October 30, 2010, I attended an artist talk for the exhibit “American Painterly Abstraction: 7 Painters” at the LewAllen Galleries in Santa Fe, New Mexico.  The exhibit   highlights a small group of paintings done in the 1960s to 1980s by a group of New York painters who struggled with abstract painting in the wake of Abstract Expressionism.
 
In the talk, Ronnie Landfield talks about how, starting out as a painter in the 1960s, he found his roots in Abstract Expressionism: “Pollock taught me how to paint and put the canvas flat on the ground; Hoffman taught me about hard and soft, about space.  Noland taught me about color as language, and Matisse taught me the language of the surface. into his own as a painter.”  He describes how he had a moment of revelation during a studio visit with Stephen Green from the Art Student’s League, when Green asked him, “Do you want to be a second or fifteenth generation Abstract Expressionist painter?”   And he realized that his work had become a pastiche; derivative [Landfield is speaking about the idea of finding one’s idiosyncratic voice, which requires a deeper exploration of one’s beliefs, values, attitudes, sensibilities, and expression].  Committed to painting, the answer was not to abandon the medium, but to revisit how one was using the idiom or style, and find a way to make these one’s own, rather than reiterating the gestures of the previous generation absent an exploration of one’s own particular sensibility.

The brochure essay for this exhibition states that this group of artists “perceived that the dense, agitated Abstract Expressionist aesthetic had devolved, from what once had been an authentic record of an artist’s intensive immersion in the painterly process, into what was quickly becoming a studied and standardized mannerism.”  According to the essay, “They responded resolutely and with significant visual innovation that often included a new sense of openness and clarity as key compositional innovations within this historically important aesthetic.”  In the exhibition, one can see an artist like Joan Snyder finding new, and idiosyncratic ways to explore the gesture and the drip (see Vertical Strokes with White Ground, 1969.)  An artist like Peter Young explored his interest in the oriental and spontaneous writing.  Bill Pettett, at first emulating AbEx, talks about his “responsibility” for coming up with their own aesthetic.  These artist used the language of Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism in new, improvised ways: applying paint without the brush using sticks, spray guns, squeegees, pours, stains.  But primarily their interests were in the intuitive, the expressive, and mostly the materials of paint.  Some of the language I heard during the artist talk echoes that used by Rosenberg (and one can assume Rosenberg wasn’t just inventing, but was reflecting language in use in the studios he visited in the 1950s and 1960s).  Bill Pettet says that he “liked the idea of stepping into ‘an arena’ of the canvas.”  Landfield talks about wanting to depict an inner truth based on sense and perception rather than “what I think I see”.  Asked about how he gets ideas, Landfield responded:  “The innovation comes from your life. Initial impulse, passion drives you to paint... but responds to the muse of the moment.  Primarily it is language of surface, color, finding a way to get paint on canvas in a way that relates to what I am seeing now -- expressive art has to communicate.”   Young said, “You have to make it new, yet nothing is new.  I don’t trust the intellect. It takes a period of meditation...repressing thought.  Then things will well up....inspiration, intuition.”  On behalf of her late husband, Dan Christiansen’s wife spoke about how Dan talked about having to trust in the eye.  That it’s a distillation. Artists see and look at a lot of art. You begin to differentiate. When creating, this all informs you and the work (Landfield).


[8]    The entry for Improvisation on Wikipedia has a short definition of improvisation:  “Improvisation is the practice of acting, singing, talking and reacting, of making and creating, in the moment and in response to the stimulus of one's immediate environment and inner feelings. This can result in the invention of new thought patterns, new practices, new structures or symbols, and/or new ways to act. This invention cycle occurs most effectively when the practitioner has a thorough intuitive and technical understanding of the necessary skills and concerns within the improvised domain. Improvisation can be thought of as an "on the spot" or "off the cuff" spontaneous activity” .

[9]    Pastiche is considered a “hodgepodge of styles”.   There is a negative connotation to pastiche, which may or may not be deserved.  On the one hand, it can be viewed as innovative, on the other hand it can be seen as a “dead language” and “without humor” as described by Frederic Jameson in “Postmodernism and Consumer Society.”  (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pastiche).

Paper 3: Development of the Grid in the Work of Louise Fishman and Joan Snyder

Jill Christian
Advisor: Barry Schwabsky
Group 3 – Paper 3
5 October 2010


"The grid is an emblem of modernity by being just that: the form that is ubiquitous in the art of our century....." – Rosalind E. Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths


Development of the grid in the work of Louise Fishman and Joan Snyder

In her 1978 essay, "Grids," Rosalind Krauss puzzles over the ubiquity of the grid in modern art, saying, “It is not just the sheer number of careers that have been devoted to the exploration of the grid that is impressive, but the fact that never could exploration have chosen less fertile ground. As the experience of Mondrian amply demonstrates, development is precisely what the grid resists (Krauss 9).”

Though the grid may “resist” development, it has proven to be productive ground for artists who have used the grid as a structure and as a convention to adapt to their own expressive requirements. Louise Fishman and Joan Snyder are two artists who have used the grid extensively over the course of their careers in ways that demonstrate the developmental and narrative potential of the grid.

Fishman and Snyder were born a year apart in 1939 and 1940 respectively and both came of age artistically during the in the late 1960s and 1970s. Fishman completed an MFA in 1965 and Snyder in 1966. They each moved to New York and were greatly influenced by New York School Abstract Expressionist and Minimalist trends.

The late 1960s and early 1970s, when Fishman and Snyder were finding their “voices” as painters, critical attention was primarily focused on minimalism and conceptual art – painting had been declared “dead” (Cohen). At the same time, both artists were active in the feminist groups, and were looking for new vocabularies and experimenting with alternative materials (David Cohen).

Although Fishman was strongly influence by the Abstract Expressionist who immediately preceded her, in the 1960s her work was primarily grid-based, influenced in part by Minimalists such as Sol Lewitt, and she was linked with Pattern paintings. But by 1970, she was looking for a new vocabulary that was outside of what she saw as the male-dominated minimalist structure.

By 1970 she was cutting up her grid paintings and reconstruction them “into works that sometimes assumed the form of wordless, stitched-and-stapled canvas books; or sometimes she would punch holes in the canvas and thread rope through the holes to create a tactile grid (Deitcher).” An example of this type of work is Fishman’s “Untitled” of 1971 (fig. 1).

Fig. 1 Louise Fishman, "Untitled", 1971 ©Louise Fishman.


In this piece, Fishman subverts the notion of the hard-edged grid by joining together strips of unevenly edged, acrylic-coated canvas. Rather than creating a grid structure in paint on the canvas surface, she has loosely sewn a raw, uneven grid using string. The work becomes an object resembling a book, or quilt. At the same time, this work displays many of the elements that her later gestural abstract paintings would show. Although roughly and imprecisely cut, the canvas strips are subtly organized in gradations of blues and grays, which create a sense of varying spatial depths. Where the strips meet, shadows of at the edges create a vertical linear grid. The brownish string overlays the canvas strips in a horizontal pattern, with knots connecting the strips at regular intervals. Both the linear element of the string in front of the canvas, and the color relationships of the cool receding strips and the warmer string/line on top creates another layer of space.

During this same time period, Joan Snyder was also reconsidering her relationship to minimalism and expressionism through the grid (Bui). In a Brooklyn Museum online biography, Snyder is quoted as saying, “I was slowly developing a language with which I could speak and communicate....I remember wanting more from Color Field painting and not being moved by Minimal art, which was mostly sculpture at the time. These were the works I was challenging--to have more in a painting, not less; to show the anatomy of a painting, the different layers as it was being made, the process (Brooklyn Museum).”

Although like Fishman, Snyder was reacting to the trends of that time [it was “in the air”, she said (Bui)], Snyder describes how her use of the grid came out her work as a teacher, seeing the children’s painting on lined paper, and an epiphany she had looking at how her paint had formed drips on the tongue and groove wall in her studio (Bui) . “...So I started incorporating the drips on the grids....But it was a structure for me to either destroy on the way to making the painting or stay within like a musical staff, providing order (Bui)”


Fig. 2 Joan Snyder, "Summer Orange", 1970, oil, acrylic, and spray enamel on canvas, 42" x 96, ©Joan Snyder

The result of her explorations were her early stroke paintings on a gridded surface, such as Summer Orange (1970). In this painting, the underlying horizontal
grid is visible. On top of the grid, Snyder lays out lush, vibrant strokes of varying shades of orange, red, yellow and purple. Drips are allowed to transgress the borders of the lines in which the stroke lays. The strokes are also organized in four vertical groupings, each with its own character and energy, determined by color, length and integrity of the stroke, and adherence or deviation from the horizontal.

In the essay “Joan Snyder: The Geography of the Surface”, Jenni Sorkin writes, “While seemingly resistant to Minimalism, Snyder’s incorporation of the grid belies an interest in the placement of a framing device within her compositions....What began as an intervention has evolved into a signature inclusion (Herrera 64).” Following the stroke paintings, Snyder continued to develop and play with the grid, using it as an armature on which to include more and more varied strokes and materials. In a recent painting like Brooklyn 2010, though the grid is still sensed compositionally, as are the strokes, the materiality of the surface has taken over, and the grid structure is filled with paint, found plant materials, and fabrics.


Fig. 3 Joan Snyder, "Brooklyn 2010", 2010. acrylic, pastel, burlap, fabric, herbs, rosebuds on linen, 54" x 72", ©Joan Snyder

Fishman, like Snyder, continued to use the grid as an armature when she returned to gestural abstract painting in the 1980s. In a 2002 LA Times interview, Fishman said, "As soon as it became clear I had gone through that evolution, I decided to use the materials and techniques that I had rejected....I invented painting again in its classical form. I decided I wanted to embrace it. I got yards of fresh linen and had it stretched. I allowed myself to immerse myself in the beauty of oil paint. It was very exciting for me. (Drohojowski-Philp)". In Fishman’s later work, the grid is covered, intersected, troweled over, and overlaid with gestural calligraphic marks. Yet, in spite of the density of the paint and multiple layers, a space is created by the overlaying of marks and push-pull of warm and cool colors, for example in the 2008 painting, Gorgeous Green.

Fig. 4. Louise Fishman, "Gorgeous Green", 2008, oil on jute, 24.25"x32", ©Louise Fishman.

Although both Snyder and Fishman may have initially explored the grid in a reaction to minimalist art of their early career, each have made the language of the grid their own, expanding upon its possibilities, and asserting it or suppressing it as required by the needs of their painting. Both artists adopted the grid as a way to respond to the abstract art that immediately preceded them and the painting that was happening at the time they were developing their own voices and vocabularies in the 1960s and 1970s. The adoption of the grid, a traditional modernist structure, allowed each artist an armature which propelled their thinking about painting process, materials, and history. Rather than impeding their development, or locking them into stagnant repetition, Snyder and Fishman continue to explore and expand the ways their process and materials interact with the grid structure both have relied upon throughout their careers.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brooklyn Museum. Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art: Feminist Art Base: Louise Fishman. Biographical entry. .

Bui, Phong. “In Conversation: Joan Snyder with Phong Bui.” The Brooklyn Rail. Sept. 2008. Web. 27 Sept. 2010. .

Butler, Sharon. “ArtSeen: Louise Fishman.” The Brooklyn Rail. May 2009. Web. 27 Sept. 2010. .

Brooklyn Museum, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art: Feminist Art Base: Joan Snyder. Web. 30 Sept. 2010. .

Cohen, Cora. “Louise Fishman.” Bomb 37, Fall 1991. Web. 27 Sept. 2010. .

Cohen, David. "High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting, 1967-1975." Art Critical.15 February 2007. (version appeared in the New York Sun, 15 Feb 2007 under title “Painting When Painting Was Dead”. Exhibit at the National Academy Museum, New York, February 15-April 22, 2007. (accessed 9/30/10.) .

Deitcher, David. “Vitruvian Woman.” Web. 29 September 2010. .

Drohojowski-Philp, Hunter. “On a Journey Begun Again Many Times: Louise Fishman's work has long mirrored her evolving political and spiritual outlook.” Los Angeles Times. 14 April 2002. Web. 27 Sept. 2010. .

Herrera, Hayden. Joan Snyder. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2005. Print.

Krauss, Rosalind E. The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths. Cambridge: The M.I.T. Press, 1985. Print.

Paper 3 - Crisis as Catalyst: Alfred Leslie’s and Frank Stella’s Turn Toward Caravaggio

Jill Christian
Advisor: Deborah Davidson
Group 2 – Paper 3
2 May 2010

Crisis as Catalyst: Alfred Leslie’s and Frank Stella’s Turn Toward Caravaggio

In his book Working Space Frank Stella discussed how he hoped to use his engagement with an analysis of Caravaggio’s and other Baroque painters’ handling of painted pictorial space to reinvigorate his own painting (and controversially, to also lead the way to a reinvigoration of abstract painting in general). Reading Stella’s Working Space, I began to think about other artists who may have been influenced by looking towards the past, specifically to Caravaggio and other Baroque painters. I found not only Stella, but also Alfred Leslie. Both artists looked back to Caravaggio. Why did these two artists (as well as others) turn to styles and historical periods so different than their own?

After achieving success as an abstract expressionist in the 1950s, by 1962 Alfred Leslie had abandoned abstraction for figuration. Frank Stella abandoned hard-edged minimalism for an expressionistic, three-dimensional, and curvilinear form of abstraction. Both attribute their change to a type of crisis: a belief that a kind of “dead-end” had been reached, both in their own work and associated with the style in which they were working. And, interestingly, both discuss Caravaggio and the Baroque as a major influences in their development and reinvigoration of their painting.

Ten years apart in age, both Leslie (b. 1927) and Stella (b. 1936) were painting in times (1960s and 1970s) when the styles in which they were working—and the act of painting itself—were being questioned and challenged. David Elliott in the catalogue essay for Leslie’s 2007 show, “The Radical Theatre of Alfred Leslie”, said, “by the end of the 1960s, vanguard painting had limited itself terribly, by following a prescription first articulated by Clement Greenberg in his essay ‘American-Type Painting (1955-58)’.” For Leslie, the crisis was the canonization of abstract expressionism, particularly in the United States. In a 1985 interview with Stephen Westfall in Art In America Leslie said, “the adversarial position of 20th-century painting, which was what so attracted me in 1946, seemed to have disappeared by 1960.” In a later interview with Alexi Worth in The Sienese Shredder, Leslie said, “And don’t forget, this was the time when (Ab-Ex) painting had become totally acceptable. The sense of challenge was diminishing. For me, it as the beginning of the transition. I said to myself, you can be a painter but a lousy artist. Or you can be an artist, but not be a painter. So I said, What am I?”

Leslie also experienced a personal crises about the same time he began moving towards the figure: a 1966 fire destroyed the contents of his studio – paintings, drawings, films, writing, notes, and his good friend, Frank O’Hara, was killed in an accident. To Westfall, he said that it was a turning point. He “decided to consolidate my energies into painting. I wanted to restore the practice of painting which I felt was slipping away (Elliott 8).” Leslie began a series of paintings about O’Hara’s death ("The Killing Cycle") that he would work on for over 14 years. Leslie used a new Caravaggio-like painting style (Hoban), which included theatrical and dramatic compositions and heavy use of chiaroscuro. “In the months following the fire, Leslie began to relate the personal losses that he had witnessed to what he perceived as the erosion of painting’s traditional values…Leslie resolved to merge cinematic ideas and theatrical method into his paintings, which he referred to as painted stories and, in the process, to reestablish the narrative qualities of the Western painting tradition, citing David and Caravaggio, among others as models (Elliott 10).”

Likewise, Stella experienced a similar stylistic crisis as he was making his transition away from hard-edged minimalism. Minimalism seemed to have nowhere left to go – the pictorial surface had “been flattened and emptied of figures, subject matter and illusionistic space (Smith)”. Composition was based on geometric rules, and “minimalist orthodoxy was stern in its prohibition of discernible feeling (Kramer)”. Early in his career, Stella enthusiastically embraced minimalism’s principles. He rejected the past, figuration, and abstract expressionism, saying, "if something's used up, something's done, something's over with, what's the point of getting involved with it? (Kramer).” However, Stella began to react to “the large element of boredom” that minimalism was generating (Kramer). Stella said, “Something about the essential differences between the imagery and intentions of abstract painting and those of representational painting makes it very hard for us to relate abstraction to the past. This same difference makes it hard for us to look to the future. We seem to be enmeshed in a difficult present (Stella 1).”
There was a feeling that there was a need to open up painting and save it from the formalism promoted by Greenberg (and widely accepted) which had limited the practice of painting. “The conventions that modernists disdained the most were those of traditional European oil painting, the accomplishments of roughly four hundred years…all of which used illusionistic space to create pictorial narratives (Elliott 10).” It was these traditional conventions that helped transform Leslie’s and Stella’s practices. In fact, employing them became a radical gesture. “Leslies’ vocal championing of a return to figuration and especially his promotion of Baroque and Neo-Classical artists as role models tended to cast him as a conservative crackpot (Elliott 14).”

Talking about his shift from abstraction to figuration, Alfred Leslie said, "There was a point at which I realized that if my work was to develop and evolve, and if I was to mature as an artist, these figurative ideas could not be ignored, even though following them could seem to imply that I would be turning my back on the twentieth century, turning my back on my abstract achievement". Leslie, like Stella and many others, asserted that all painting is essentially abstract (Sachs Samet).” Likewise, Stella asks, “can there be abstraction without some kind of figuration? Can there be art with only two-dimensional depiction? The answer to the first question is probably no, because art, even when limited to line and plane, will yield shape, and the shape itself becomes the figuration. The answer to the second is probably yes—there can be art with only two-dimensional depiction, if we are not too fussy (Stella 79).”

Neither Leslie nor Stella saw their stylistic metamorphosis as a contradiction. Both recognized the continuity between figuration and abstraction, and between the present and the past. In their own work, there was a logic, and they did not see their transformation as incompatible with their earlier work. In Leslie’s case, he maintained in his figurative paintings the formal qualities of abstract expressionism: “materiality, directness, and scale (Cohen).” Stella for his part brought to his minimalistic, flat abstraction the three-dimensionality and gestural energy he saw Caravaggio and the “old masters”.

An opening up of mediums and styles and a free appropriation of the past and the present is a primary feature of post-modernism. There is also a line of thought that associates some post-modern positions as “Neo-Baroque”. “Whereas Modernists constantly strived for new methods and modes of expression that broke cleanly from the past, Neo-Baroque (and Postmodern) artists have sought to incorporate or reflect upon the past (Wacker 4). In this respect, and in both Stella and Leslie could be considered as both post-modern and Neo-Baroque. Investigating and appropriating aspects of past painting, and in particular the painting of the “old masters” such as Caravaggio, allowed both Leslie and Stella to push their investigations in a way that referring to and responding to painting of their own time never could have done. By engaging in a dialogue with the past, both painters re-invigorated their work and escaped the dead-end they perceived in their early (and successful) work. As Stella said, “we have now had over 110 years of abstraction, and it hasn’t turned out to be a dead end. It hasn’t turned out to be limited…Abstraction is just as challenging as ever (Ayers interview).”

Bibliography
Cohen, David. “The Radical Theater of Alfred Leslie.” Art Critical / The New York Sun. Web. 25 April 2010. .
Elliott, David. “The Radical Theatre of Alfred Leslie.” Catalog essay from the exhibition 22 March – 21 April 2007. New York: Ameringer Yohe Fine Art. 2007. Web. 25 April 2010.
Haber, John. “Alfred Leslie: 1951-1962.” Web. 26 April 2010. .
Hughes, Robert. “Art: The Grand Maximalist.” Time Magazine. 02 Nov. 1987. Web. 26 April 2010. .
Kalina, Richard. “The Right Moves: Alfred Leslie in the Fifties”. Art in America April 2005. Web.
Kramer, Hilton. “It’s Ugly, Drafty, Ghastly: Stella’s Work in a Garage.” The New York Observer. 27 Jan. 2002.) Web. 25 April 2010. .
Sachs Samet, Jennifer. “The Artist Who Had To Start Over.” The New York Sun. 18 April 2007. Web. 25 April 2010. .
Smith, Roberta. “It’s Not Dry Yet.” The New York Times. 26 March 2010. Web. 28 March 28 2010. (
Stella, Frank. Working Space. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986. Print.
Stella, Frank. Interview by Robert Ayers. “A Sky filled with Shooting Stars: Robert Ayers in conversation with Frank Stella. Web. 09 April 2010. .
Trespeuch, Helene. “Frank Stella: The Baroque to the Rescue of Abstract Art? The Reception of Frank Stella in France Since 1975.” In Baroque Tendencies in Contemporary Art, Kelly A. Wacker, ed. Newcastle United Kingdom: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 2007. Print.
Wacker, Kelly A. Baroque Tendencies in Contemporary Art. In Baroque Tendencies in Contemporary Art, Kelly A. Wacker, ed. Newcastle United Kingdom: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 2007.
Westfall, Stephen. “Then And Now: Six of the New York School Look Back.” Art in America 73 (June 1985). P. 113.
Worth, Alexi. “Octopussarianism: Ten Alfred Leslie Years. The Sienese Shredder #2. 2008 Web. 28 April 2010. .

Research Paper - "The Subject Is the Object"

Jill Christian
Advisor: Laurel Sparks
Research Paper
6 November 2009

The Subject Is the Object

“You get bored with yourself and say, ‘what is it that I am interested in?’”
–Mary Heilmann, Interview, Art:21

This week I attended a graduate painting review at the University of New Mexico. The painting student Leslie Ayers presented paintings that were luscious, painterly large-scaled abstractions of interior spaces, with skewed perspectives and overlapping lines reminiscent of recent work by Amy Sillman. During the talk, Ayers was asked, “Is using the space simply a way that you can even make the painting at all?” While Ayers talked about wanting to create a space that can be inhabitable while expressing her particular fascination with the light and geometry of interior spaces, her painting seemed to be about the push and pull of space and color –- bringing you in enough (through perspective and color relationships) visually to engage your interest, yet halting your entrance through your unexpected encounter with a shifted plane, an opaque object, or advancing color. Although she understood her process as intuitive, she began her paintings with one-inch by one-inch thumbnail sketches, which she then blew up to letter size using a xerox machine. Her palette and grid-like structure of the compositions belied a logic and formal decision-making process that seemed more studied than intuitive and emotional. Was her subject matter a necessary and idiosyncratic springboard for painterly exploration rather than the true subject matter of her painting? Or both?

Listening to her presentation and the conversation of the student and faculty, I thought more about the question of subject matter in abstract painting and how painters use reference material to inform their work –- and to what degree it matters that these reference materials are visible to the viewer in the final work. How subject matter can serve as a scaffold, a jumping off point, or a way of disciplining or restraining the work with a project or question.

I’ve been thinking about subject matter and restraint during this semester because I encountered a severe block in my painting process when it was suggested that I shift to a different kind of reference material. My mentor suggested that I was taking on too much –- too much historical references; too much reference to images taken from books and magazines and combined together. That this all-overness is exacerbating the all-overness of my painting and preventing me from exploring basic concepts like the creation of visual space through push-pull, warm-cool, contouring, and size contrasts.

In my last paper, I discussed works by two minimalist artists, Udo Noger and David Brice. I was asked if there was something that these two artists have that I want for my own work. I think that what I responded to most in their work was a focus that allowed their paintings to explore a particular thing through a sort of project. I have begun researching how several abstract artists have used subject matter in their process as an aspect of focus; and ultimately as an expression of their particular interests. While painting in and of itself can be seductive, eventually, as Mary Heilmann said in an Art21 interview, “You get bored with yourself and say, ‘what is it that I am interested in?’.”

Mark Rosenthal discusses the dilemma of early abstractionists, in terms of Kandinsky’s questions, “What should replace the missing object?” He argues that this is the “crux of the dilemma for all abstractionists” and that “from the start, abstractionists needed to define their position with regard to subject matter, with each artist proposing his or her own solution” (Rosenthal 36). In spite of the formalism seemingly inherent in abstract painting, the subject has not gone away, and how a particular artist approaches subject matter is as important as (and influences) formal and process considerations. Amy Sillman echoes this sentiment in a Hammer lecture associated with the exhibition Oranges and Sardines, saying that “everything is absolutely idiosyncratic”.

Cecily Brown is one artist who relies on specific subject matter to create figurative, gestural abstractions. In her interview with Lari Pittman included in the 2008 exhibit catalog for the exhibit, Cecily Brown, she states that she begins with specific imagery in mind. “When I’m painting, I think figurally. I’ve started calling my paintings abstract narratives, because almost everyone who sees them says, ‘Oh, they’re so abstract.’ But when I’m making them, I need to know what it is that I’m painting; it has to be something very specific“ (Dore 28). Like many abstract artists, she expresses a certain degree of ambivalence about whether the viewer needs to know the sources of the work in order to fully experience the work. Brown says, “I don’t know whether I’ll indicate the subject in the title of these recent paintings or just not worry if nobody else sees the goat, or the flying monkey, or the tent, or whatever it is, and accept the subject as simply necessary to me in order to make a painting” (Dore 28). And perhaps knowing would lessen the visual experience of the viewer. Brown, for example, says that she frequently uses the shape of a tent as a beginning structure, but it serves more as an armature than an interpretable symbol within the world of the painting.

Merging and mixing sources is a frequently used strategy for many contemporary abstract painters. Brown suggests that it is the way she merges her sources into visual imagery that is what interests her: “I’m lost without having some kind of imagery from the outside world. But there’s never just one source. It’s the fusing of references that makes something new. And not just still visual images, but books, music, movies, TV -- they all help” (Dore 28). For Brown, the interest lies in creating something that doesn’t exist outside of the world of the painting, but which can take on life in her own mind -– and in the minds of her viewers. She defines a successful painting as one that is visually compelling enough that it “continues to review itself” over time. To her the importance lies in the creation of associations that stir memories –- "like daydreaming," she says (Dore 28).

Like Brown, Charline von Heyl talks about her method of abstraction as a desire to create something visually new and beyond the existing visual world. (Bell 93).
Whereas Brown seems to build up a multitude of images on the verge of recognition, von Heyl engages in a process of covering up. Von Heyl “would begin with a motif or image, and proceed to destroy it through a process of over-painting, until its origins were no longer recognizable and the activity of painting itself became the organizing principle for the canvas’s composition”(Bell 94). Unlike Brown, von Heyl claims that she does not have a pre-conceived idea when she begins a painting (although one could argue that a motif or image inherently carries ideas) and does not make studies. Instead she allows “the works to be determined rather by the decisions that arise in the process of their making” (Bell 95). However, von Heyl separately produces collage on paper, printmaking, and has created at least one artist book. If not explicitly translated into her paintings, it seems likely that these activities inform her subject matter.

Working in a very different and more “old-fashioned” (as she calls it) way is Amy Sillman. Sillman has pulled subject matter from the landscape and the figure, saying that she is interested in exploring the space between abstraction and figuration. Sillman’s work created for the exhibit, Third Person Singular, is based on very specific subject matter: drawings of couples in their environments. She chose the subject, not only to create a “exploration” for herself to “build a new vocabulary for form”, but also because of her interest in the built in psychological tension of couples. Like Brown and Heilman, she engages in a rearranging and working over of the original imagery. After drawing the couples from life, Sillman recreated drawings from memory. Describing her process in a the Hirshorn podcast, A Conversation with Amy Sillman, Sillman says:

I would try to redraw them. I thought those drawings were very funny because they were kind of distorted. And then the distortions made it really obvious that those drawings from memory were the real meat. Because they were the things that were linked to the obvious process of abstraction, but also draining the kind of boring content away and putting more interesting content in. Making it go from an act of perception to an act of imagination.

For Sillman, though the work could not exist without the original subject matter, the interest lies in peeling away the particular of the subject matter that do not add to the imaginative interpretation of the subject, leaving those things that specifically interest and are peculiar to Sillman’s vision.

In the documentary film, Alice Neal, Alice Neal talks about her own figurative work and its relationship to abstract expressionism, which was the overriding style as she began her career. She says, “The human brain is incapable of inventing something they haven’t seen.” Similarly, Gary Garrels in the introductory essay to Oranges and Sardines says, “Painting as a physical phenomenon retains linkages to material existence, to the visceral, obdurate, and fragile characteristics of life. It reflects the body and mind, tied up into on indivisible knot (13). Brown, von Heyl, Sillman – as well as Leslie Ayers – are not so much making up something completely new, but by working with a range of subject matter creating new connections and ways of depicting, and thus seeing our world (the physical and psychological. These abstract artists all use their subject matter as a starting point, whether that is an interior architectural space, a motif, or a couple in relationship, and from there through manipulation, distortion, augmentation, and destruction create new visual realities that allow themselves and the viewers to see in a new way. As Brown says, a painting can create “an unpredictable situation where one sensation leads to another, so that looking at it becomes a complex and layered experience. I think the absence of fixed meaning is liberating” (Dore 29). In a strange way, such intense exploration of a particular subject matter can create new aesthetic and emotional experiences beyond the original meaning or source.

Works cited
Art:21 online video - Mary Heilmann http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/mary-heilmann/
A Conversation with Amy Sillman (podcast), http://hirshhorn.si.edu/dynamic/podcasts/podcast_66.m4a

Bell, Kirsty. “It’s Own Reality.” Frieze, May 2009, p 92-97.

Dore, Ashton. Cecily Brown. New York: Rizzoli International Publications Inc, 2008. Print

Garrels, Gary. Oranges and Sardines: Conversations on Abstract Painting (exhibition catalog). Los Angeles: Hammer Museum, 2008. Print.

Rosenthal, Mark. Abstraction in the Twentieth Century: Total Risk, Freedom, Discipline. New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1996. Print.

Residency Summary #1

Here is the summary for the first residency (just e-mailed off to my advisor today).

Jill Christian
Residency Summary - June 2009 - Group 1
Advisor: Laurel Sparks

The themes of this first residency are: increase my vocabulary, simplify, do a lot of painting. The main formal issues I need to work on for this semester are to vary my mark-making, refine my color, and explore spacial relationships. More open-ended questions were about my subject matter. As an abstract painter, what is it that I am trying to express and communicate? What is it that compels me to make this particular kind of painting? This semester my goal is to select a handful of the ideas for shaking up my current process and to explore color and mark-making. I approach my paintings intuitively, and I believe the discipline I impose will help me grow my understanding of the processes I use and that through working I will discover my subject matter.

My first group crit was with Michael Newman. He felt that the paintings are generic in that they show a “certain facility within already established limits.” This feedback was challenging for me to consider objectively and rattled me a bit. At the same time, it is important for me to separate myself from the work during the evaluation process (as separate from the painting of it). I believe this assessment is valid, and I need to think about what makes the work generic and how I might change this through interrogating my process and what interests me about my source materials.

Tony Apesos agreed in that my painting vocabulary feels “circumscribed” (I interpret this as meaning I’m using a limited, narrowly restricted mark-making vocabulary). He said that there is a way that I’m painting that reminds him a bit of Cecily Brown; maybe de Kooning. It’s not bad, but the important question is what do I do with that and where do I go next?

Mark-making
Tony thought that my paintings seem to be about an overlay of mark in “a kind of thicket of paint” and how that creates a sense of space. If the mark is the subject, I should explore varying my marks (1).

While I got positive feedback about my sense of color and the energy of my gesture, the feeling was that I should explore restraint. In other words, I should be more deliberate and selective, not only in mark-making but in color and composition. There is an all-over quality (and maybe a “horror vacui”*see note) that can be confusing and end up being a “knot of color” with no place for the eye to rest. The massed marks were most successful where thin and fat co-exist, with things escaping out of the edges.

Suggestions for pushing my mark-making included:

• Try oils (2).
• Push the size of the strokes. Get big house brushes, squeegees. Try really small brushes. Think about those two things next to each other.
• Vary the type of mark-making. There’s a lot of thick stuff going on. Try more subtle applications, through glazes and other methods.
• Spend a month on one canvas. See what happens to the energy of the piece. See what happens if you use panel and you don’t have the give.

Process
I start a painting by selecting a photograph or sketch and draw right on the canvas with paint, usually with the primary color I want, and then rough the composition in with bigger shapes. At the same time, I begin to build up brush strokes. I was asked if I’d thought of further abstracting the photos I use as source material. For example, overlay the photo with velum to obscure the image -- “dumb it down” to force me to start big rather than with lines.

I stop the painting when it’s the end of that session in the studio -- when some other commitment makes me stop, or I run out of energy. I struggle to maintain the same energy and perspective when I try to go back in on a different day. I was asked to consider setting specific time constraints for a painting, for example, give myself a half hour to do one painting. Another day carve out six hours and stay with the painting -- no matter what. Laurel said to look for an uncomfortable place to stop.

• Set up arbitrary rules to break habits and expand vocabulary. Use a timer.
• Start opposite my convention.
• Experiment with proportions, distortion, asymmetry.
• Journal. Track my states of mind and emotions as I am painting
• Spend a month on a single piece. See how that varies the energy over time.

Color
As with my mark-making, I need to be more definitive in my color choices. Using only my intuitive sense of color inhibits the development of a larger color vocabulary. The paintings with a narrower color range read better, and the group felt that I would benefit from using more grays and mixing more. Heather thought that the colors are all very “high” and sweet. It was suggested that the high color might be the result of working in acrylics and not using wet on wet techniques(3). I also got feedback that the palette was borderline “pretty” and that there are too many jewel tones competing. I need to pay attention to variation within a color and the overall tone of the color range. A lot of color washes out to peach, and I should look at how colors can be used to create illusion and depth, since a lot of my paintings read as flat. Jan asked me to think about what compels my palette.

Color recommendations included:
• The paintings are chalky (through the use of white). Try transparency/glazing instead of using white to mix lighter colors. Create translucency.
• Look at the Golden website color mixing section. Do color exercises (e.g., paint with a “dead palette”: Venetian red, yellow, ochre, black, white). Use some "school" ideas such as the use of complementary colors to achieve push/pull. Look at how Hans Hoffman does this.
• Fully research and work with value relationships of one color.
• Make my own “Pantone forecasts” to develop my color sensibility. Pick colors I see off the street, etc.
• Look at art just for the color palette.

Format
It was suggested that I reconsider my use of standard size formats. I seem to be hitting the edge of the canvas and the paintings feel like they want to go beyond the borders of the canvas. I was told that it feels like my full body is involved. When I paint, the physical energy of my body to energizes the brush on the canvas, and I like to move while I paint, which I would like to maintain. Body position might be an issue and it was suggested that I change things so that I have to change my body position.

Recommendations included:
• Work larger.
• Open up the format. Work in three formats and do 3-4 paintings in each: just off square horizontal, vertical, and square.
• RJ suggested that when choosing size, I first consider the context of my subject, rather than get a bunch of 40x40s and start painting. The size is a huge way of how we experience the painting.
• Put the canvas on the floor see if it changes my engagement with the work.

Composition / Space
In the context of my mark-making and color, I received a lot of feedback about how space is or is not created in my paintings. There was an overall sense that my paintings sit on the surface and need more depth. A number of people wanted there to be more locations for the viewer to enter and they were most engaged where there is contrast, figure-ground, and spacial relations. The mark-heavy paintings seemed to hold the viewer on the surface.

I feel that the suggestions about mark, color, and format will help me work with this. I feel the biggest impact will come from me following the suggestion to spend more time returning to the same canvas -- going back, simplifying, and making decisions. My studio practice this semester will include longer sessions and multiple sessions. I want to explore how I feel about spacial issues: am I working figure-ground? Am I working with attmosphere? What is form and what is gesture? Do gestures become form?

Observations and recommendations included:

• Imagine the surface as a stage with different ways to enter. How do I want the viewer to experience coming in out and around? Colors and lines can be characters and have a presence. Think about the way a color shape sits in relationship to other characters.
• Make bolder decisions (see Philip Guston, Cecily Brown).
• Use a viewfinder to look at compositions as I am working.
• Play with the ambiguity of what is closer and further away in the picture plane.

Content / Decision making
Tony asked me “What are these paintings about for you?” He said that if I am making a mark, I am making decisions. That content helps you decide which marks to make and how to make them. Also, you can’t know if you’re done with a painting without some kind of criteria in mind. In the critique, my group talked about how the criteria for what you do usually comes from content, or something that you are trying to express – the thing that is giving you the push to make the painting, even if it not visible(4).Similarly, a lot of discussion in the Critical Theory One seminar was about an artist needing a bigger reason to paint than mere self-expression.

In my artist statement I say that I am expressing emotion and energy that I see and feel in response to something I am looking at. It might be something in the landscape or my environment, a figure, or a photograph. When I spoke to Melissa Kulig, she summarized my process saying, “So you’re referencing something and you’re wildly abstracting it and you’re trying to express your interpretation of the thing -- something different than the original -- that being…?” The answer to the question, “what is it that is different from the original” is what I need to explore this and future semesters by thinking more concisely about what it is that I am trying to express. One suggestion was for me to document and journal about my process, and I believe this will help me be more self-aware and clarify what about painting is important to me.

Suggestions for exploration were:

• Explore my “oddness” as opposed to my generic/gestural style.
• Reproduce paintings. Study paintings. Put my work in dialog with the history of painting. For example, notice how Titian uses a particular color. Set up tasks.
• Try to render an illusionistic still life and then obstruct it. Go into it, over it, and through it.
• Think what it would be like to look from the inside of something out instead of outside in.
• Nourish my interests outside of painting. Feed the soul, do outside reading, and let it seep in and percolate. Readi about nature, Emerson, Thoreau, Transcendentalists.
• Discover my “taste” and where my taste comes from. Identify artists who I like. Identify artists who I don’t like and figure out what gets under my skin.
• Do a lot more painting. Develop a daily practice.

Summary
This semester I am going to focus on what I am putting in to my paintings – the marks, the color, the tools, and the process. I believe that discovering what my paintings are about will come through exploring my process, pushing my use of formal painting elements, journaling, and paying attention to what interests me. As part of that discovery, it was suggested that I explore the “lineage” of the artists that I look at and research this semester.

Note: horror vacui. The fear of empty spaces (cenophobia) is the filling of the entire surface of an artwork with detail (see wikipedia).

Artists to research
• Amy Sillman (esp. First Person Singular. Look at range of marks and space.
• Josh Smith (look at for collage, lush lines)
• Charline von Heyl
• Jacqueline Humphries
• Mary Heilmann (for nuance)
• Elizabeth Neel
• Albert Oehlen
• Cecily Brown
• Philip Guston
• Rodin (figurative watercolors)
• Turner (Slave Ship)
• Francis Bacon
• Marlene Dumas (painting of her daughter)
• Barbara Takenaga (for her use of movement, depth using a limited vocabulary)
• Elinor Carucci’s portrait of Cecily Brown (art andcommerce.com)
• Late Picasso (John Richardson’s Picasso biography, 17th c. portraiture, Catalog for Picasso: Mosqueteros show at Gagosian)
• Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell, late de Kooning
• Brice Marden
• Terry Winters

Reading list
David Batchelor, Chromophobia
Briony Fer, On Abstract Art
Gary Garrels Oranges and Sardines
Yve-Alain Bois, Painting as Model
Vicky Perry, Abstract Painting Concepts and Techniques (for vocabulary)
Barry Schwabsky, Vitamin P: New Perspectives in Painting
Raphael Rubenstein, Provisional Painting. Art in America, May 2009
“Parkett” (www.parkettart.com)

Other recommended reading
Klaus Kertess (curated the Whitney Biennial)
Maurice Tuchmann, et al. The Impact of Chaim Soutine (1893-1943): de Kooning, Pollock, Dubuffet, Bacon
Margaret Livin, Vision and Art: The Biology of Seeing
John Hyman, The Objective Eye
Karsten Harries, Meaning of Modern Art (SPEP)
John Berger, Ways of Seeing
James Elkins, The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing
Gerhard Richter, The Daily Practice of Painting: Writings 1960-1993
Barry Schwabsky, Alison Gingeras, The Triumph of Painting, The Saatchi Gallery
Merlo Ponti, Phenomenology of Perceptions
Frank Stella, Working Space
Steven Pressfield, The War of Art
Harold Rosenberg, The American Action Painters” (1952 essay, out of print)
Maurice Tuchmann, et al. The Impact of Chaim Soutine (1893-1943): De Kooning, Pollock, Dubuffet, Bacon
Hans Hoffman (Small book, on moving in and out of space. Search for the Real?)

Footnotes
(1) In the small group critique on June 21, we discussed mark-making. Tony Apesos asked, “what happens when mark contradicts meaning?” He went on, saying that we like pictures; more than real things, in a different way. The way the objectness of a painting separates us from imageness of the picture—the flicker between image and object. It’s there and not there at the same time. Mark making both shows us the thing we are looking at – it describes the form – and at the same time pushes us away and establishes the materiality of the painting. There’s a tension of creating the image within the structure that’s containing it. Tony talked about how 16th century Venetian painting does both: there’s richness of paint and richness of imagery. They were experimenting with paint for the first time. And, Tintoreto and the others were training their audience how to appreciate this new type of painting.

(2) Tony Apesos thought I would like the mark-making possibilities of oil. When acrylic dries through evaporation, the mark relaxes and actually loses volume. Oil expands as it dries and absorbs oxygen. He thought that would be a difference I might like. Impastos will stay crisper. But it would require some changes in strategy like working more paintings at once because I won’t be able to pile up paint. I’d need to wait in order to do wet over dry. But, it would allow me to do something I’m not doing, which is wet on wet. If I stick with acrylic, look at Golden retarders; open acrylics.

(3) A number of people (RJ, Heather, Brenda, Tony) suggested trying oils. (Laurel says maybe not). The idea was that oil would allow me to mix on the canvas. It would slow down my decisions.

(4) Tony said that it’s important to distinguish what you are trying to express from what gets communicated. They are not the same thing. What we express is not necessarily what the viewer sees. As artists the only thing we can really care about is expressing. The viewer cares about communication. If as an artist you start caring about communication, that is when you start doing propaganda or kitsch.