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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Baker House, 50″x60″, oil, 2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Black Swan, 45×79, 2011-2012

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

Pleven Epopee 1877 Panorama interior. A 360 circular painting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

painting of Miller House video

Work in Progress

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

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

Ward House, 57×92, 2012, oil

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

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

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

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

Front Steps, 38″ x 47″, 2009

Foyer and Staircase, 44″ x 63″, 2009

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

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

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

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

Bottom Landing, 46″ x 67″, 2010

Review by Thaddeus Radell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Review by Thaddeus Radell

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

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

Larry Groff: How important is observation to your work?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Norcia Periferia Oil on panel 7″ x 9″

Castellucio Oil on panel 7″ x 9″

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

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

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

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

Bagnoregio Oil on panel 12″ x 15″

Castellucio 2 Oil on panel 7″ x 9″

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Cowpasture River, Bath County, Virginia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pilistri Oil on panel 12″ x 15″

In the Valdichiana Oil on panel 12″ x 7″

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

Click on the above image for a larger version.

The Fulbright Triptych, detail 1

The Fulbright Triptych, detail 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interview with John Dubrow

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

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

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

XG: Can you tell me how that canvas evolved?

Sketch from iPad Courtesy of John Dubrow

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

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

Courtesy of John Dubrow

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

Courtesy of John Dubrow

This is two months later.

Courtesy of John Dubrow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XG: What is it about Masolino you responded to?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XG: What do you mean by “dialogue”?

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

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

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

XG: Is it lonely?

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

XG: And you have an audience.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

excerpt from the Lori Bookstein Fine Art Press Release:
 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

………

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

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

Guest Review by Thaddeus Radell

 
Philip Guston (1913-1980) is heralded today as an icon of pure painting. This fact is all the more poignant, as by 1970 he was actively scorned by critics and most artists as an iconoclast defying the New York School.
 
In that last remarkable and reclusive decade of his life Guston insisted on a more direct visual communication with the viewer that prompted his return to figuration. Powerful, poetically charged images emerged from milling ideas and memories together with quotidian observation of objects that ceaselessly surrounded him: books, clocks, paint, canvases, boots, cigarettes.
 
As Maurice Denis remarked, ‘We should remember that a picture…is essentially a flat surface covered with colours arranged in a particular pattern.’ And so Guston harnessed a dense and sumptuous Courbet-esque language of paint into equally dense and sumptuous imagery that continues to entrance, disturb and delight the contemporary viewer. In the end, sequestered in his Woodstock studio, mindful of, but not in any way bowed, by popular opinion, Guston simply did, and did extremely well, what painters do: paint.

The Philip Guston exhibition now on view at the David McKee Gallery is an inspiring, if problematic, offering from one of the most pictorially demanding and ‘image-ridden’ painters of the second half of the last century. The current exhibition marks the centennial of his birth and seemingly celebrates the artist’s rebirth into figuration. All of the works, except the impressive The Year (1964), date from the late period during which Guston began to draw and paint single objects in a highly condensed manner. His boldly colored figurative narratives are solidly removed from the subtle tonal resonances established in his mid-career abstractions. The Year remains a resilient and potent statement of Guston’s ability to address key issues of the New York School while enigmatically retaining and nourishing a commitment to simple, massive forms that are, quite obviously, figuration.

The exhibition, however, chooses to focus, (and rightly so this viewer believes), on that last decade or so of the artist’s life. These, and not the tonal studies in abstraction, are what define Guston as pictorially demanding. The painting chosen to welcome the visitor into the Centennial is Dawn, from 1970. Exquisitely, deceptively, warm and delightful in terms of color, Dawn is actively rife with Guston’s dark symbolism of Klansmen, severed legs, industry and nails. Together, the color and the content cement the image into a painting of top quality. And the splendid invention of the scumbled grey car! Sadly, therein lies the first tremor of fallibility in simple visual cohesiveness and dynamics that, not infrequently, plagues this exhibition. Are the Klansmen actually supposed to be driving the car? Every other shape and form, no matter how abstractly conceived, has an appropriate and specific space and light relative to everything else in the picture. The car, however, wonderful and exuberant in itself, fails to establish a credible space. Was that the point? The discrepancy between the two? Taken separately, the car is a wonder of understatement and the Klansmen are of a darkly lighthearted clarity that only Guston could achieve. Yet the gravity of this pictorial stumbling is only magnified by its dominant position and, in the end, disappoints.

Philip Guston Dawn, 1970 oil on canvas 67 x 108 inches (from McKee Gallery - larger image available)

The exhibition has been hung with great care and refinement and continues to eloquently alter smaller scale works with such monuments as To J.S. (1977) and Discipline (1976). To J.S. is a superlative work, one that clearly defines Guston as remarkable painter. Here, not only is the content of the picture compelling and haunting in the broad context of our shared social consciousness, but the soundness of its construction has echoes of the great Henri Rousseau. Every form issues from an inscrutable and unnerving precision of weight and position. This necessity of form is further heightened by what James Elkins describes as the alchemy of painting, that state of hypostasis, where ‘one has the feeling that something as dead as paint might be deeply alive’ (Elkins, What Painting Is), the transformation of paint into a higher, spiritual substance. A few feet away, Discipline, on the contrary, stands alongside To J.S.’s profound skill and soulfulness as an embarrassing younger brother. Painted a year prior, the marching legs, those wonderfully nuanced, ubiquitous tones of Guston red, are now enslaved and, quite literally, beaten. The over-statement of fist, club and dripping blood is devastating to the overall integrity of the picture. The solemn march of limbs against a Spanish black would have thrilled with suggestion and left the viewer visually nourished, overwhelmed and disturbed. Bergman as opposed to Tarantino.

On the opposite side of the gallery are hung three major works that decidedly reinforce these disturbing, yet humanly problematic inconsistencies. Waking Up (1975), while perhaps not quite as visually succinct as the Met’s Stationary Figure (1973), is a striking example of Guston’s masterful ability to comprehensively orchestrate shapes into a haunting image. The energy that arcades back and forth across the canvas from the staring eye and drooping cigarette to the last set of upturned boots and the feet that brake against the far edge of the canvas is hypnotic. Everything, from the red sea pressing the figure into the bed to the chalky nightmare visions that animate the living black space that dawns around the head, is finely crafted and felt.

Waking Up is braced between Alfie in Small Town (1979) and The Canvas (1973), two works that aggressively dispute Guston’s legacy. Canvas argues for the bold, well-staged visionary impact that represents the artist’s main strengths, if in, perhaps, an overly reductive context. Here again is testimony of an extraordinary sense of design. The almost impossible balance of damp grey bricks that support the weight of the hefty rose of a one-eyed canvas, framed by a settled black shadow and against a bed of pallid, luminous grey is simple, austere and powerful. Alfie in Small Town, on the contrary, though absolutely luscious in terms of clear and well-staged tones of color, comes off as being so silly that it is truly difficult to look at. Swallowing the reference to comics is no anecdote to such heartless and condescending image-making.

Philip Guston To J.S., 1977 oil on canvas 68 x 104 inches (from McKee Gallery - larger image available)

In the smaller room at the rear of the gallery are several truly wonderful smaller works in delightful dialogue. Unfortunately dominated by the far less interesting Musa (1975), whose clumsy compositional simplicity over-rides the potential of its content, these works further testify to Guston as able colorist. Of particular vibrancy is Untitled (1979) and it is interesting to note how a small-ish painting (48 x 42”) of impeccable, unusual color harmonies and defiant compositional impact can outflank a much larger and domineering format such as Musa. In Untitled, the accordion-like pummeling of the central green is remarkably, inexplicably grounded by a black shadow over a sickly pale and fascinatingly acid green sea. More conservative coloristically as a picture, Forms on Rock Ledge (1979) offers a classic Guston muddling of symbols and forms that in a lesser painter’s hands might simply constitute visual inarticulateness. However, Guston can be adept with instilling an essentially complacent, centralized composition with force and enigma. Here he dispels any queries into possible pictorial complacency by the insertion an intelligent and very odd and unexpected horizontal form in the upper right quadrant.

The exhibition also harbors a host of smaller works on paper or panel, in charcoal, acrylic, gouache and oil. There are several visually stunning works, such as Untitled 1980, a profoundly rich acrylic on paper whose simplicity is majestic. Several duets are offered, such as Shoes (1972) and Untitled (Shoe) 1968 as well as Book (1968) and Untitled (Book) 1968. Here again, there is a dissonance that is somewhat disconcerting. The sheer quest of the starkly isolated form within the format exalts the image in Book, whereas its counterpart, Untitled (Book) is too insistent, too reduced a form to truly hold and engage the viewer. Likewise, the plurality of forms and complexity of construction of Shoes renders the forthright Untitled (Shoe) weak and uninspired by comparison.

A century after his birth, Guston does remain, assuredly, a major player in the history of American painting. His harnessing of a troubled past into a coherent and poignant body of work is poetry itself. Stumble he does, yet he endures as a full-throated assertion of the inherent dignity and acute relevance of the painted image.

Philip Guston Waking Up, 1975 oil on canvas 67 x 129 inches(from McKee Gallery - larger image available)

The current exhibition at David McKee Gallery continues through April 20th.

(editor note: Painting Perceptions would like to thank Thaddeus Radell for his generosity in sharing this review. Thaddeus Radell is a painter and sculptor living in NYC. More information can be found on his website.

Lucy grew up in the Berkshires in Massachusetts and studied painting at the University of Pennsylvania with John Moore and with Nicolas Carone at the former International School of Art in Italy. Here she also studied with Ruggero Savinio, Jake Berthot, John Lees, Ying Li and Dan Gustin. She received a post-graduate grant to paint in Italy in 2000 and decided to stay. I would like to thank Lucy MacGillis for taking the time to write such thoughtful words to my email questions to her. I am impressed not only by the success of so many brillant paintings but also that despite our down economy she has made a successful career and life for herself doing what she loves, being a painter. Grier Horne’s blog article about Lucy MacGillis quoted her; “I saw a lot of my colleagues going into frustrating teaching jobs and the like, in order to pay the bills and they suffer as artists. You need time to think things through and a lot of time to produce a body of work. I live really simply and try to keep it that way.”

Larry Groff: Can you tell us a little about your background? What made you decide to be a painter?

Lucy MacGillis I’ve been living in Italy for 13 years now. I grew up in the Berkshires in western Massachusetts and studied painting at the University of Pennsylvania and here in Italy at the International School of Art.

I remember going on an elementary school field trip to the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown… there happens to be a Piero della Francesca, Madonna col Bambino e Quattro Angeli there. The museum provided us with robes made exactly like the ones that the Madonna and angels are wearing in the painting, I got to be the white one on the left. This experience enchanted me at the time, and to this day Piero della Francesca is important to me as a painter. I live about an hour from Arezzo where his incredible cycle of frescoes representing the Legend of the Cross is, and I go there frequently. I fell in love with painting while studying at Nick Carone’s International School of Art in Italy and struggling to paint the vast panorama of the Tiber Valley. Even then I loved everything about painting, how difficult is, the smell of it, the names of the colors…rosso pozzuoli! Brilliant Yellow Extra Pale! Davy’s Grey…I was covered in paint.

Being a painter has allowed me to follow the light, the weather, my moods, being inside with a still life when it is windy, outside drawing in a piazza when it is sunny but cold, preparing the surfaces on the darkest days. During the golden hours of the summer, I need to be painting in that light, I don’t want to be doing anything else.

Muri 3 52×52″ oil on canvas 2010

Astoncolle, Mezzogiorno 30″ x 30″ oil on linen 2012

Il Pollaio 16.5″ x 23.5″ oil on muslin panel 2011

San Romualdo, sole 8.5″ x 13″ oil on primed handmade paper on wood 2012

LG: I’ve read that William Bailey has a studio near where you live in Italy and has played a role in your painting life. You have also studied with the late Nicolas Carone who founded the International School of Art in Italy and is also located in Montecastello. Can you tell us something about how your involvement with them was influential?

LM: At the art school in Montecastello there was an open studio night and Nick Carone came into my little studio followed by an entourage of
teachers. I had painted a small 10×8″ landscape and he went nuts over it “thats it!”. Moments like that pushed me and I painted more and more. Nick’s presence gave an amazing energy to the school. We would sit in the piazza until late at night listening to his stories, stories about painting, his colleagues, life, women…it was important for us to sit and listen, to be humbled by such a great artist.

When I moved to Italy definitively in 2000, I had a ’69 Vespa that I would drive up to his studio on.. he would talk about metaphysics, we would look at the shapes in the clouds and on the stones. I would ride back to town with this rush of adrenaline to work. Looking back now I realize how generous he was, spending so many hours with young artists.

Bill Bailey is a kindred spirit. In a critique in 2000, he looked at a still life of a white enamel pitcher I had painted. I thought it was complete…he said, I know that pitcher, and you need to go back and look at it again, keep looking. He was right. In my work today I still look, I’m still learning to see more.

Both Bill and Nick created these wonderful studios in Umbria, hidden in the hills. Visiting these places I learned a great deal about creating a studio…a sacred place where you can concentrate, walk away from your painting into a field, not be disturbed, where you can become completely absorbed by your work.

Il Vicolo 7.5″ x 10″ oil on paper 2011

La Cinquecento 20″ x 20″ oil on linen 2011

Montecastello 16×16″ oil on linen on wood 2009

LG: You’ve been living near Montecastello di Vibio in Umbria, Italy since you got out of school in 2000. Since then you’ve restored an old farmhouse on a hilltop complete with a fabulous studio. What’s it like to live in paradise? Was it difficult to move from the US to Italy?

LM: I restored an old farmhouse with a small olive grove here in Umbria where I live with my son Vito who is now 6. I live in a place that continually inspires me. I restored it attempting to respect the Umbrian tradition and its humble character. It is surrounded by an original cobblestone piazzetta. These field stones reflect light up at the house. The floors are made of handmade terracotta tiles from Citta della Pieve. Outside there is a wide stone bench which is ideal for lying on and looking up into the almond tree.

I think painters need to be alone, so much of what happens at the easel is related to what you’re dealing with around that. I’m learning to be quite stubborn about my solitude. Even in the moments when I can’t be painting, I see compositions everywhere…the golden hour makes even the industrial zone look glorious. Jody Joseph, a great painter and friend who comes often to this area to paint, marvels at how she nearly drives off the road looking at the compositions that she sees in the rear view mirror driving around this part of umbria. That’s how it is, everywhere you turn, there is a painting.

I painted the interior walls of my home and studio in the traditional style using lime and earth pigments to make paint. Even in the bathroom I look at dark grey walls and their relationship to a white towel, to the stone. By the time I stand before my easel, having taken Vito to school in my ’66 Fiat Cinquecento, gone to the bar for an espresso, bought the newspaper, I’m “carica”, charged, so ready to paint.

I came to Italy after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania, I had received a University Scholars grant to return to Italy… I had a backpack full of paint and planned to return to the States when I’d run out of money. Meanwhile my paintings began to sell back in the U.S., so I stayed. I learned Italian quickly. Aside from my love for Italy, the art, Fellini and the rest, for a self-employed artist it made sense to be in Italy then, here I was covered by the social health system and didn’t need another job to support myself. It wasn’t always easy at the beginning, looking at the series of still life I painted in Todi in 2000, I realize how lonely it was then before I found the friends I have today. Sometimes in the winter a thick fog fills the valley and the landscape is swallowed up for weeks at a time and the dark stone streets of the villages are quite gloomy.

photo by Dee Purdy

photo by Dee Purdy

photo by Dee Purdy

see more great photos of Lucy MacGillis’ home and studio from the photographer Dee Purdy’s blog: she had us at hello

La Primavera 2012 50 x 60″ oil on linen

Febbraio 8×8″ oil on linen 2013

LG: How has living in Italy influenced you as a painter? Has being away from NYC artworld helped or hindered your growth as a painter? I see that you are giving a 2 day workshop in Stockbridge Ma at the IS183 school this summer as well as Vienna and Germany. (for more info see this link)

LM: I’m grateful for the distance I have from the New York art world…I’m generally not comfortable around the business of art…Nick talked about the ’50s and ’60s in New York.. it sounded
wonderful then, he said it was the artists who made the artist then, not the galleries and critics.. I figure if I’m doing anything worthwhile, New York will find me. Here I can just draw and paint and get lost in my work.

At the same time there is just so much great art to see in central Italy. A few days ago I was looking at the vibrant frescoes by Benozzo Gozzoli in Montefalco, the Orvieto duomo, the Lorenzettis in Siena, oh it just goes on and on.

Over the past 13 years here in Italy I’ve found a wonderful group of artists, I’m not totally isolated, we look at each other’s work, see shows in Rome and central Europe, but in my daily routine I have the solitude I thrive on. I do enjoy visiting New York when I return to the States each year. I’m in touch with some great artists from that world, such as John Lees and Jake Berthot…when I’m in the city I visit the Betty Cuningham Gallery to see what they’ve been up to. The itch to paint doesn’t really hit me until I drive out of the airport in Rome and see that light.

My life is holistic here. Vito and I go for walks in the olive groves around the house, we make treasure hunts, collect pine cones. I make my own olive oil, eat good food enjoy local wines.

Now I do teach these brief seminars, I love watching people beginning to paint, watching the struggle, discovering painters. I started teaching when some local women asked to me to hold a class. Despite their living a half an hour from the Giottos in Assisi and Piero in Arezzo, they had no art history, no idea, they were blank slates. However having lived all their lives in these hills they have an innate sense of the color, and from the get-go they see and mix these earth colors so much more accurately than many of the New York painters who come through Umbria. This summer I’ll be teaching at the IS183 in Stockbridge, Mass. again, a wonderful old building in a great community of artists. I enjoy returning to the States on brief trips, but I am always longing to return to Italy.

Vito 14″ x 12″ oil on linen 2012

Il Terrazzo 30″ x 30″ oil on canvas 2011

Due Case       8.5″ x 11″       oil on primed paper on wood 2012

LG: I’m curious if you were able to see the Giorgio Morandi’s Landscapes exhibition “Morandi, l’essenza del paesaggio” at the Fondazione Ferrero in Alba, Italy in 2011? I’m curious to hear what you might have to say about his painting in relation to your own work.

LM: I first saw Morandi’s work on a trip to Bologna in 1999, the museum has this magical quality. It must be one of the quietest public places in Italy. The show in Alba included some landscapes that I hadn’t seen before. There was one from 1942 that I just fell in love with. Morandi was quoted saying that he loved painting the landscapes more than the still life, you can see that in these nearly abstract landscapes from around 1941 with these flat skies that look like lakes on a map. So simple, then you stand out there with your easel and try to simplify all that green and you realize how complex his paintings really are. Nick talked about meeting Morandi at the Venice Biennale,and his reaction to Pollock. What I so admire about Morandi is what he didn’t paint. He just kept on painting what he saw amidst all that political and artistic turmoil.

Gli Ulivi 8″ x 20″ oil on linen 2012

Via Fornaci 12″ x 20″ oil on linen panel 2012

La Mattina 8″ x 7.5″ oil on muslin panel 2010

LG: How important is observation to your work?

LM: I always paint from life. In the landscape I remove and add where it works best for the painting, but I’m out there. The experience of being physically in the landscape I’m painting is important, the heat, the smells, the sounds of the nearby sheep, the train’s distant horn, the light. I’m convinced that it all plays into the feel of the painting and I react to all this. There is so much to see and the longer you look the more you find. I look for shapes, I forget what object I’m painting, just look and mix and put paint down. Both Jake and John Lees have left New York for the country, they observe the
woods and streams near their studios. There is something to be said for becoming so familiar with the rhythm of your surroundings…I look out at the panorama from my studio and am so profoundly in tune to the small seasonal shifts.

Lately I’ve also been working a good deal from the figure. I love listening to models while I observe them… how the planes of the face shift as a person poses, as they grow more relaxed, as the music changes. I listen to good music while I paint inside, lots of jazz, Nina Simone, Carlos Gardel, Vinicio Caposella, Maria Callas, depends on the day.

Terra Umbra 38×48″ oil on canvas 2009

San Gaspare 52″ x 52″ oil on linen 2012

LG: Can you speak about your painting process. Do you limit your palette? I’ve read where you have used the Italian Earth colors such as what Williamsburg makes. What makes these types of paint valuable to you? What else might be of interest about your technique or approach to painting?

LM: When I teach I limit the palette to a basic earth palette. I do use some Williamsburg paint but here in Italy I have access to Maimeri’s Terre Grezze which have a great Rosso di Ercolano, Rosso di Venezia and Terre Verde Antica di Verona. These paints have a good thick consistency and I love using the palette knife with them. When I’m working in my studio I use a lot of paint I make on my own and I do use some cadmium orange and red. In Florence I find beautiful pigments at Zecchi and grind these with cold pressed linseed oil to make my own thick paint. I also use some marble dust from Carrara. I stretch my own surfaces and prepare the linen with rabbit skin glue. The process is all part of it, touching these materials, using my physical strength to stretch the linen tight, reflecting on what I will paint on this dimension, watching the surface tighten, sanding it down, I become familiar with it, I prepare the composition in my mind.

I draw everyday, on whatever I can find. I’m delighted that my son has the same habit, although he usually draws ships. As I begin to paint I plot out the composition with the brush, play with it, remove it, again and again until it works. Jake Berthot helped me a great deal with this part of the painting, being patient with it, finding rhythm, duality, pushing it as far as I could.

La Tempesta 8.5″ x 11″ oil on paper on wood 2011

Arrivederci e Grazie 20″ x 19″ oil on linen 2011

L’Inno Nazionale II 24″ x 20″ oil on canvas 2011

Natura Morta al’Aperto 20″ x 20″ oil on muslin panel 2011

LG: Your broad, expressive paint handling tells us that you’re interested more in engaging the paint surface and creating abstract structures than mere description. In particular, your color harmonies very satisfying. Do you arrive at these color decisions quickly? Would you say you’re a slow or fast painter?

LM: Well I suppose I ought to be a fast painter, when I’m slow I lose it.
I like to simplify what I see, push it into abstraction. I make marks with the palette knife or a large flat brush. I scrape down a lot, mix strange greys, mixing compliments. I look for the darkest and lightest points in the painting and try to keep the color in key with them. Catherine Kehoe lays down these bold planes, her portraits rock. I’m always trying to paint looser, to let the paint be, to let go sooner. I work on some paintings for months, others just happen in a couple of sittings. I enjoy the faster paintings most..see I’m painting this very sort of picturesque landscape here, I don’t want to make pretty paintings, so I’m looking at planes and color and trying not too get too hung up with insignificant details.

Have you looked at Ruggero Savinio’s paintings? His figures have this wonderful presence, he observes them but somehow gets at the soul rather than physical likeness. He knows the figures in his paintings, they are his family, you sense that. I learn a lot from looking at his work.

LG: What’s the most exciting part of painting for you?

LM: There is the point where I become so immersed in painting, total self-abandonment. Where I’m in this sort of hypnosis of looking, mixing, looking and laying down marks. I was recently working on a portrait and the model asked if he could photograph me because I make such a “strana espressione” strange facial expression while I paint. Of course that killed the moment but I guess I was really in it then.

LG: How do you know when the painting is finished? How important is keeping the painting “fresh”?

LM: There is a point when I physically cannot do anything more to the painting. It is done. At that point its probably overdone, I should walk away from them sooner, at a medium-rare moment, when the marks are sufficient. I’m trying to preserve the transparency, let the ground show, or if I’m painting over old paintings which I absolutely love doing, have parts of the previous one peek through.

Limoni Amalfitani 20×19″ oil on canvas 2010

Il Salaiolo 18″ x 27″ oil on linen 2012

Sandali di Vito 52″ x 52″ oil on linen 2012

Sant’Ubaldo 20″ x 32″ oil on linen

L’estate 20×20″ oil on linen on wood 2012

La Ciotolina 28×24 oil on canvas 2008

Astoncolle I 24×28″ oil on canvas 2010

click here for a high resolution view

By Xico Greenwald

(Painting Perceptions thanks Xico Greenwald for his generosity in allowing us to print his review here.)
 

The Frick Collection owns four panels by Piero della Francesca: a full-length portrait of St. John The Evangelist in a flowing red robe; two small, gilded panels of an Augustinian Nun and an Augustinian Friar; and a small, gilded crucifixion scene. These four works have been identified as parts of the Sant’Agostino altarpiece, a commission Piero della Francesca received in 1454 for a church in his hometown of Sansepolcro.
 
One hundred years after the completion of the altarpiece, the paintings were disassembled and the various components scattered throughout Europe. In Piero della Francesca in America, now on view at The Frick Collection, guest curator Nathan Silver has attempted to recreate the original Sant’Agostino altarpiece, borrowing two additional panels, one from the National Gallery in Washington – an amusing, small picture of St. Apollonia holding a tooth with a pair of pliers – and a full-length panel of Saint Augustine himself, on loan from Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga in Lisbon. The only other known panels from the Sant’Agostino altarpiece, depictions of St. Nicholas in Milan and St. Michael in London, are not included in this exhibit.
 
Hanging alongside the Piero della Francesca works in the oval gallery at the Frick is a computer-generated image with all eight panels arranged in a virtual rendering of the Sant’Agostino altarpiece. The glaring absence here is the altar’s empty centerpiece – a work which has been lost. Ostensibly in an effort to fill that void, Mr. Silver has borrowed “Virgin and Child Enthroned with Four Angels,” a magnificent painting, from the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in the Berkshires. This is a special loan, for it rarely leaves the Clark, and it is as spectacular a painting as has ever come to New York City.
 

One of Sterling Clark’s earliest major art acquisitions, this masterpiece is an often-overlooked work by Piero. In “Virgin and Child Enthroned with Four Angels,” Mary sits in the center of the painting, subtly larger than the four angels surrounding her, the scale-difference giving her quiet grandeur. Holding a flower in her right hand and with the baby Jesus on her left knee, Mary has a classical poise. Her garments fall naturalistically down over her form, like an ancient monument to Hera.

And, as if to underline Piero della Francesca’s sense of order, her robe folds into a perfect circle at the base of the throne along the central vertical axis of the painting, giving the artwork a sense of supernatural symmetry and composure. Though crowded with figures, the space in this painting breathes easily and a pearlescent delicacy of color adds to the visual delight. The painting of St. Augustine, on loan from its home in Portugal, is also a marvel of virtuosity; the Bishop’s miter and mantel, covered in images of biblical scenes, is, on its own, almost as full of imagery as an altarpiece.

In Italy the Piero pilgrimage is well trodden by the artist’s many admirers. Aldous Huxley, in a 1925 collection of travel essays, identified Piero della Frencesca’s Resurrection in Sansepolcro as “the best painting in the world.” Since then, artists and art historians, including Roger Fry, Kenneth Clark, Philip Guston and John Pope Hennessy, have happily trekked through Tuscany and Umbria, from Perugia to Arezzo to Sansepolcro to Urbino, from Rimini up to Milan, all just to stand in front of this early renaissance master’s otherworldly creations.

We here in New York can now enjoy the first-ever American exhibit devoted exclusively to the work of this artist. With precious few Piero della Francesca works in the world – only about twenty – to have seven paintings under one roof makes this a remarkable opportunity. ‘Piero della Francesca in America’, on view through May 19, 2013 at The Frick Collection, 1 East 70th Street, 212-288-0700, www.frick.org

By Xico Greenwald
(Again, Painting Perceptions would like to thank Xico for his generosity for this review.)

The University of Amsterdam art scholar and specialist in the Italian Renaissance, Machtelt Israëls, give a 54 minute video lecture partnered with the Frick Museum (from Foro TV) with the title: “Piero at Home: The Art of Piero della Francesca” She also edited the 2009 book on the early 15th century Siena painter, Sassetta; “Sassetta: The Borgo San Sepolcro Altarpiece” available at Sassetta: The Borgo San Sepolcro Altarpiece (Villa I Tatti) 2 volume set (please note that purchase of this book from this link to Amazon helps support this site.)

Piero at Home: The Art of Piero della Francesca from The Frick Collection on FORA.tv

John David Wissler is a Pennsylvannia based painter who shows at the Lancaster Galleries and the Islesford Artists Gallery of Little Cranberry Island, Maine.. I’d like to thank him for taking the time to answer my questions about his fabulous landscapes. John David Wissler attended Kutztown University for his BFA and Parsons School of Design for his MFA in 1989, where he studied with Paul Resika, who in turn had studied with Hans Hofmann. Plein Air Magazine in its December 2012 issue had a terrific article about him and his Friday Painting group, Contemporary Ideas about Surface and Spaces which you can read from the link.

LG: You got your MFA from the Parsons School of Design and have studied with an impressive list of painters including Leland Bell, Paul Resika, and Larry Rivers. Please tell us something about your evolution as a painter and what has lead you to become the painter you are today.

JDW: First, I want to thank you for asking me to do this interview with you Larry, I am honored.

This is a great question! Early on, I was a bit of a perfectionist (perhaps the poster child). I wanted to be in control of it all. I drew and rendered everything, seeing all the details as important and painted some very pleasing, pretty, dead paintings! My high school art teacher, Faith Lang, and later my friend, professor and artist George Sorrels, opened the door for me to see great painting. This was the beginning of painting for me. In Claude, Corot, Inness, Cezanne, and Matisse, I saw moving spaces, full of air! Color that moved my eye, that took chances and was never static. I realized I was not happy painting how I was taught. I needed to begin to move the paint, free myself from the rules. Explore; push myself to move beyond what was comfortable to me, to see! I began to consider building and creating the tension between shape and color, Opening the picture plain in a dynamic way. This can be heightened color and value or subtle. It is truly about building relationships on the picture plane that create believable space. No longer was I only interested in the surface of things, but more.

As Corot said in his great letter to his friend Stevens Graham “Clouds that stand still are not clouds, motion, activity, life, yes, life is what we want…life!” This is something I try to bring to all my work, open air or studio invention. I am not at all interested in making narrative painting, but, my painting is an honest reflection of my life through paint. I don’t expect the viewer to “get “this. I enjoy when someone tells me a story about what they see, how they relate to my painting. When someone does get it, that is very satisfying for me.

(Ed note: Anyone wishing to read the full text of Corot’s letter to Stevens Graham can do so from this link to Google ebook, Elbert Hubbard’s Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists – page 20 (scroll down) Corot

Above Lancaster 12x12inches oil on panel

Sunrise on the Western Way from Great Cranberry

Light Fall 11×12 oil on panel

My Friend 7×6 inches oil on panel

I have been blessed with mentors and friends, along the way, who have reinforced my passion for the pursuit, seeing, reacting, studying, observing and painting. Seeing the line that connects great painting, not in the art historical way, but how it (painting) relates to the picture plain, how it relates to life and the poetry of it. Paul Resika, Leland Bell, John Heliker and Larry Rivers are great painters, fine examples of this philosophy. It was wonderful to study with these artists. ( also the artists that used to visit the Parsons studio, Nell Blaine, Lennart Anderson and Albert Kresch to name a few) Each of them had very strong opinions about the art world and painting, all gifted teachers, painters, and friends. They freely shared their passion for painting, their work ethic, one painting leading to the next, never being truly satisfied with the last…this is how I work as well. They sharpened my eye to look critically at other work and learn from it.

I also have a group of friends who share these thoughts and challenges. We call ourselves the “Friday Friends” Eric Golias, William Kocher and Michael Allen are the core of this group. We paint outside together. We have great art conversation about paint, it is good! (I do miss the argument and critique of my New York days) You know, all of these people, these experiences and painting have made me who I am. They are all part of this evolution, as you call it. Of coarse it is, in the end, about the painting. You can talk all you want, but until you put paint on the canvas, it means nothing. I like your word evolution as well, for it continues.

Near the Beginning 12×16 inches oil on panel

Sending 12×12 oil on panel

LG: Have you always primarily painted landscapes? Do you only work alla prima from life? Why wouldn’t you want to return to a spot over multiple sessions at the same time of day and weather conditions?

JDW: I have always had a passion for the landscape; it allows me to express who I am. I love painting it, it feeds my soul. I have painted the figure and still life , these paintings are for me. I mainly show my landscape. Painting outdoors is where I learn my language; I can go back to the studio; reflect on my experience and use my memory of place to work on paintings. I tend to use whatever means I have to create a painting. If it is alla prima from life or a painting that may take a year in the studio, one leads to the next. I do love the quality of alla prima painting, that beautiful fresh mark, the rhythm of the brush, mark of the knife, man that can be so seductive. Like Rouault or Constable I want the (studio) work to maintain the immediacy of mark, reveled struggle and sense of atmosphere (sometimes Constable lost this in his studio painting). Yes alla prima. Yes, go back to the same place multiple times. Yes, scrape out when it doesn’t work. It is about the rectangle, when it is working that is what leads me. I will say this; direct observation is paramount to what I do, as is invention and memory.

LG: The response to quickly changing light in outdoor, alla prima painting often creates an urgency that makes for vigorous,emotionally charged paint handling. You are putting yourself on the line to try and “get it right” – both in terms of capturing your moment before the motif as well as meeting the needs of the painting.

Do you ever feel when viewing similar loose and vigorous painting handling created in the relative calm of a studio environment, especially with intentional paint-drips and the like, seem less authentic somehow? Would you paint a still-life or scene from memory the same way as you do with your outdoor work ?

JDW: Ah yes, the challenge invigorates me! I believe painting from life will always take me down unexpected roads, both literally and figuratively. Nature is full of surprise and change, it is never the same. I hope I never impose my habits on it. “Getting it right” That is not at all about recording it (the motif) but using it as inspiration. Sure I want a sense of place; I want believable space and atmosphere. Corot found his muse in Italy, his light, and spent his life painting. He used this muse (his observed invention) it to create beautiful works that take us on unexpected journeys. It never became a crutch or the easy way out, but a pursuit that took him his whole life.

To the second part of your question, I have seen paintings that are bad, flat, no relationships that move the eye, and yet are very decorative with paint – drips and scrapes etc. In good painting, all of that is necessary. It opens space, creates movement, weather it is finished like Van Eyck or Vermeer or finished like Bonnard or Diebenkorn, the painting works! Beware of formula, learning a method can take you to a certain level of painting, but use these as spring boards for your own experimentation. Often the more decorative surface oriented painting is technically good but they stop there (and are bad painting). A good painter takes it further makes it their own, creating relationships that work.

We Three 8×9 oil on panel

LG: Sunsets and moving clouds are so ephemeral, they would seem to activate memory as much as vision. Isn’t invention just as important as observation in this situation? With that in mind – what makes it so difficult to recreate this experience in the studio? For instance, why couldn’t you just witness a sunset and then return to the studio and paint it from memory and invention? What might be missing for you?

JDW: Morning light and evening light, my favorite times of day to paint! Memory and invention are important! They are important to the distillation of your language of painting to its essential. Albert Kresch is a great painter who dose this so well also Paul Resika. They have both painted open air for over 40 years or more and have gained that language, that simplification, free from constraint. They have the ability to use the motif to improve it! Both of these painters could be riding the wave of their past, instead they are creating that wave! I hope when I am in my 80’s I am still pushing this envelope!

I like your “activate memory as much as vision” used in your question. That is what happens, more or less, both out doors and in the studio. In the end though, the painting takes over, the poetry of life, experience reflected through vigorous observation. Both invention and observation challenge me. In the studio I am somewhat free from the motif, now the brush can take me there, unless I begin to take control again and it begins to grind to a halt! It is the instant stimulus of nature, the unexpected, that I miss in the studio. The brush and the act of painting can replace this when all is going well.

LG: Do you work out the idea for the painting beforehand with drawing? At what point do you decide what the painting will be about?

JDW: My sketchbook is ever with me, in my car, as I walk, in the museum. The French easel is in the trunk of my car, with panels and prepared paper. I return to old places and find new, working on the same ideas over years. It is a constant process for me, discovering, rediscovering, it is never the same, nature is never the same. I am always working out my idea!? One of the folks who lives on Great Cranberry Island told me how they invited the artist Emily Nelligan to work on their shoreline rather than where she always works. Her response was, “it is never the same”, she didn’t need to go there. I agree.

LG: You recently were awarded a residency at the Heliker-LaHotan Foundation on Cranberry Island in Maine, where many painters with a connection to modernist painting have lived or worked. Artists such as Rockwell Kent, Jamie Wyeth, Gretna Campbell, Louis Finkelstein and Emily Nelligan are just a few of the luminaries who’ve been enchanted with this place. Can you tell us something about your experience there?

JDW: I was a resident at the Heliker-LaHotan Foundation on Great Cranberry Island Maine in 2009; I have been back there six times since then. Most recently, 2012, I was a resident at the Borgo Finocchieto in Tuscany Italy.

Great Cranberry, a gift, a gift! The Foundation is a wonderful place. You live in the house and studios where John Heliker and Robert LaHotan painted and lived, sharing them with other creative folks. The Foundation is led by Patricia Bailey who isa painter, and old friend of Jack Heliker.

I have fallen in love with this Island. Indeed there have been many artists who have found inspiration here Emily Nelligan and Ashley Bryan are the last of the older generation (arrived on the island in late 40’s early 50’s) to still walk the shores of both great and little Cranberry. I believe Nelligan is the muse. Her paintings (I refuse to call them drawings) are beyond my words. She is the rock, the tree, the sky. Man; she makes you want to paint! My experience on Cranberry, is not easy to talk about, I do so love the place. I am not finished painting it, not recording it, but painting it. Sharing it with my friends and family is important to me as well. The Island and the paintings have profoundly affected all of my work. All I can say is look at my paintings.

The Borgo and Italy, what a place Tuscany is, very difficult to paint! A landscape I have never seen before. I loved the challenge. Just being immersed in all the history, great painting is everywhere.

I shared this place with my good friend Eric Golias, John Goodrich and his wife Jenny and Barbara Kassel and her husband Jed Fry. We all had a fantastic time. I painted like a mad man. You see when I go to a new place; I see it through painting. I believe I will go back. Italy is beautiful. Cranberry…I must go back, it feeds my soul.

LG: How do you feel about the increased attention and popularity of Plein air painting today with mainstream America? Doesn’t marketing saturation become antithetical to the poetics of good painting. Is this something that concerns you?

JDW: Ah the reality of being a painter today with all these artists around. I have never thought of myself as a plein air painter, I am a painter. I am not concerned with the mainstream (I am a bit of a hermit). The new culture of Plein air painters are doing something very different from what I am doing. I am not interested in what they are doing, unless it is good! Look at Ruysdael, Corot, Monet, Bonnard, and Anderson; they are the plein air painters I look at. They are the folks I want to be on the wall with.