Open Museum

Marc Trujillo: North American Purgatory

2011-10-30T14:07:00.000-04:00

Los Angeles based artist Marc Trujillo, whose first solo show at Hirshl and Adler opens on November 3rd, paints what he calls the "shared spaces of the everyday." He is attracted to "non-destinations," familiar places where vast expanses of concrete or linoleum numb the senses. "I'm captivated by the middle ground," Trujillo explains, "the purgatory of the world we've made and share as North Americans."

Marc Trujillo, "5901 Douglas Avenue," 2010, 11.5" x 19.5," oil on panel

Trujillo sees what he calls "visual potential" in mundane subject matter: big box stores, and fast food meals. Painting with a moral seriousness reminiscent of Chardin or Vermeer, Trujillo finds poetry in the gap between ubiquity and invisibility. He evokes both shame and awe in what he records, and uses formal intelligence to make the two conflicting emotions balance.

Marc Trujillo

Q and A: John Seed Interviews Marc Trujillo:

JS: Tell me something about fast food as subject matter; what are you seeing and thinking when you paint, for example, a KFC meal?

MT: I believe Auden's statement about poetry being the precise expression of mixed feelings. So what interests me about painting these is how I love them and hate them, just like with the more panoramic paintings I have a mix of awe and shame about them that makes me interested in painting them. I'm from a square state and have had a lot of fast food growing up, so it can be comforting and when I'm in the mood I can enjoy it, but them again it's a little disgusting and low grade. I didn't want to paint a KFC meal as a seen from the side: "still life as landscape." I wanted the viewer looking straight down at it; it's your meal.

Also, I wouldn't normally order the corn on the cob but it comes wrapped in foil which I wanted to paint, so my motives were also visual when I was ordering this meal.

Marc Trujillo, "Meal #2," 2011, 13.5" x 17," oil on panel

JS: Who are some artists that have influenced you? Where can we see their influence in their work?

MT: My main influences are Vermeer, Velasquez, and Rembrandt.

My paintings are fundamentally synthetic in nature, and represent not only the experience of direct observation, but also an appreciation and awareness of paintings and painters of the past. I swipe strategies to see what works for me.

When I see Vermeer's 'View of Delft' for example, my first reaction is emotional, followed by a desire to analyze what makes it a great painting. The scale is perfect, substantial but not imposing, so when I'm not sure what size a painting should be I'll use the 38" height of 'View of Delft' as a starting point and set the width of the painting according to my needs for the composition. Vermeer had to construct his moment and he took liberties -- in the reflections in the water for example -- with physics to get the moment he wanted for the painting.

The light in 'View of Delft' is very convincing; light is how you sell the fiction of the painting as a real moment. The artificial light in the spaces I paint is very different from the light in the old master paintings I admire, but my interest in conveying it clearly is the same.

Also Vermeer uses the vanishing point in 'Milkmaid' over her hand pouring the milk to help imbue a private moment with meaning -- the opposite of the kind of moments I tend to show and I'll invert his compositional strategy -- so in the parking garage painting for example, there's nothing under the vanishing point but concrete.

Marc Trujillo, "5711 Sepulveda Boulevard," 2010, 30" x 62," oil on canvas

JS: Is it fair to call your work documentary? What is your intention when you show us the kinds of generic places and spaces that you favor?

MT: It would be a misreading to call them documentary. They're real places, but I do a lot to them so that they could be anywhere; no palm trees for example. I'm from New Mexico so to me a palm tree says vacation or movie happy ending. Showing people things that can be part of their fantasy lives is a good definition of pornography. I want the painting to have a chance to be more of an experience than the actual place so that's one reason I pick places people don't go to be there. If I painted the Himalayas then the painting would function more like a postcard that reminds the viewer of someplace they would rather be.

The paintings are the acid test for all of the ideas I have going into them. Making the paintings is what defines the area of investigation for me, as opposed to starting with an idea and executing it. So my ritual is a cycle; looking at great paintings to define painting for myself, looking at the world to see what I think might make an interesting painting as I've come to understand and define it, and testing all of this by making the paintings themselves, which starts the process of investigation all over again.

The locations in the paintings are non-destinations, particularly North American kinds of nowhere, at once ubiquitous and yet largely unseen. These places give me the slightly sinking feeling that I know I'm somewhere, but not really there, present in an absent sort of way. In the mix of shame and awe that I feel, I am inspired by the potential for painting what I'm experiencing in the moment.

JS: What else should viewers understand about your work?

MT: I think the big thing that people misunderstand is that they see the paintings as being "Photorealistic." My paintings are built on drawings as opposed to being painted from photographs. In order to sort out how I want to convey what I'm experiencing in these spaces, I need to draw.

Marc Trujillo, 2nd preparatory drawing for 5711 Sepulveda Boulevard

For me making is thinking. This stage is vital as it's where I test the potential for painting a given situation; clearing an isle to keep the deep space open, changing the proportions of the space slightly and leaving in only the elements that convey my interest in the space and the figures that occupy it.

Marc Trujillo
November 3rd - December 3rd 2011
Hirschl and Adler Modern
Opening Reception -Thursday, November 3rd, 5:30 to 7:30 pm
730 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10019

F. Scott Hess: In Transit

2011-10-26T21:36:00.001-04:00

Self-Portrait as a Masterpiece of Creation, 2011
oil on aluminum panel
30 × 24 inches

It must be exhilarating to be F. Scott Hess: he seems to have reached a point where his brush can take him just about anywhere he wants to go. The varied subjects, and hybrid realities of Hess’ recent paintings make them appear eclectic when seen together, but that just scratches the surface. His works actually have a tremendous psychological unity. They have sprung from the mind of an artist who is recycling and blending the richness of his actual life and infusing it with cultural memory and imaginative vigor.

Seriously, to be able to wake up in the morning, sip some coffee and think to yourself “Today, I feel like painting five female ballet students in leotards tossing the bloodless, hulking corpse of the French academic artist Bouguereau out a third floor window in La Rochelle.” Then, if you are Scott, you just head to the studio and make this whim explicit, riveting, credible and even slightly funny.

The Death of William Adolphe Bouguereau, 2011
oil on aluminum panel
24 × 36 inches

The painting mentioned above, “The Death of William Adolphe Bouguereau", is, among other things, a sly revenge fantasy. “I don’t care much for the content of Bouguereau’s work,” Hess acknowledges, “but the man can paint soft female flesh better than I ever will.” It is worth pointing out that in talking about a dead artist in the present tense, as if he is still alive, Hess has given us all a clue to the vitality of the forces and images – past, present, real and painted – that he can draw on. Most art historians have already tossed Bouguereau out the metaphorical window decades ago, but Hess clearly enjoyed doing it on his own terms, with humor.

Not only does Hess, project his fantasies onto the canvas with shocking technical aplomb, and a healthy dose of catharsis, he generally manages the complicate things a bit. In the case of “Bouguereau” the blue and white tones of the artist’s corpse play off the red drapery used the carry him to the window, and evoke the red, white and blue of the French flag. “But it was totally subconscious on my part…” says Hess about the apparent coincidence. That may be true, but what a well stocked subconscious Hess has.

In the past year or two Hess has dredged up references – consciously and unconsciously – from the Bible, Velasquez, Persian poetry, Bellini, Watteau, Sigmund Freud, the experiences of child-rearing, and the experience of being a child. Somehow, all of these things have been internalized, even sorted. “I generally just paint what I see when I’m not looking,” Hess comments.

"Art history, popular culture, literature, and the subconscious all simmer together in Scott's skull," observes his friend and fellow artist Peter Zokosky. “Scott's mental salad bar has more choices than anyone's, and he always comes away with something amazing.” The mental salad bar that Zokosky refers to is also well stocked with life experiences and travel.

In the artists own words: “I’ve been caught after sundown on the dangerous Zabol-Zahedan smugglers road where Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan meet, eaten a small yellow dog in southern China, and lived in an Anarchist-vegetarian-nudist commune in the Midwest. I’ve had coffee with spies and terrorists, lived over the back fence from the Pope, and witnessed the birth of both of my daughters.” Witnessing and experiencing are themes that Hess often strives to balance in his works.

Suzie Q, 2011
oil on aluminum panel
48 × 36 inches

In “Suzie Q,” a 2011 painting, a group of older men avidly stare at a nearly nude woman performing Cirque de Soleil style in a suspended metal hoop. If you stand in front of it for a few minutes you’ll find yourself staring at the woman too, then staring at those who stare. Yes, you are a voyeur. One of the things that Hess does is to let anyone who is strong enough take part in fantasy worlds that he provokes and evokes, and unashamed voyeurism is one of the pleasures he offers. If you aren’t convinced of this, have a look at Scott’s tiny panel painting “Morning Glory” and then get back to me.

The Colonel’s Daughter, 2006
oil on canvas
32 × 40 inches

When you view “The Colonel’s Daughter,” an emotionally complicated painting, you will again want to stare. Depending on your gender, and what you find attractive, you may also want to protect her, cover her up, or have your way with her. Like many of Hess’ best works “The Colonel’s Daughter” will arouse both your imagination and your id: it's the artist’s way of including you.

Mud Riot, 2011

oil on aluminum panel

12 × 16 inches

Hess likes subjects that allegorize violence and chaos. To put it another way, he has a dark romantic side. “Mud Riot” seems to borrow from Antonio Pollaiuolo’s 15th century engraving of ten male nudes slaughtering each other with axes, swords and spears, but Hess slyly bogs his battle down in calf-high mud. Even with their ancient weapons they seem familiar: are they our congressmen?

The Wave, 2010

oil on aluminum panel

36 × 48 inches

In “The Wave” water cascades through a window, but the woman it engulfs seems exhilarated. War and disaster, Hess seems to say, are both, among other things, universal human experiences. They are also transitions. They are also both darkly humorous, if you are a connoisseur of the human comedy. One of the things you have to appreciate about Scott Hess is that he doesn’t just study or comment on the human situation. Without hesitation or condescension he will portray himself in the midst of it.

Hess includes himself and one of his daughters in “Oblation,” a painting in which the pouring of water suggests an offering. Scott stands, shielding his eyes from the sunset, acknowledging his place in this particular cycle. Raising a child to adulthood takes a major portion of your life,” he comments, “or drains it out of you.”

In his “Self-Portrait as a Masterpiece of Creation,” Hess plays fair by posing nude himself behind the verso of a blank canvas. Lucien Freud and Frida Kahlo, present in the form of reproductions of their self-portraits, provide additional fuel for the theme of artist’s using the self-portrait as a vehicle for the insecurities of both the artist and the viewer. Hess is interested in Lacanian Gaze, the idea of a painting being a mirror that reflects back the viewer's own thoughts, and elicits the anxious realization that he or she can also be viewed. “In a way,” he says “I think the blank panel represents that, and also a deliberate lack of guidance on my part.”

Dark Horse, 2011

oil on aluminum panel

36 × 48 inches

“Dark Horse,” a recent oil that Hess is very fond of, depicts a nude woman clutching the reins of a black stallion charging through a snow covered birch forest. Yes, it has a connection to the tale of Lady Godiva, but it also is an essay on opposing forces: a black horse in a white forest, warm human flesh in frigid weather; motion in a still place. The rider is perhaps being chased, but there is a smile on her lips. Hess used some of Eadweard Muybridge’s classic stop action photos of horses to develop the running steed, and perhaps there is a visual pun in its “frozen” pose. It is a painting of extremes, balanced by poetry.

“I get along easily with everyone,” says Hess, “but always seem to unintentionally insult people during raucous intellectual debates.” It is an honest aside, coming from a man whose art can be both engaging and disturbing. Hess has a talent for conjuring up paintings that are challenging hybrids of the mythical, the historical, the allegorical and the universal. His works are imaginative fiction, each one a journey right to the edge of what might actually be true.

F. Scott Hess: In Transit
Koplin Del Rio
6031 Washington Blvd., Culver City, CA 90232
Exhibition Dates: October 29 - December 22, 2011
Reception for the Artist: Saturday, October 29, 5-8pm

John Frame: The Intuitive

2011-03-25T13:47:00.007-04:00

"Fine art is that in which the hand, the head, and the heart of man go together"

- John Ruskin

On the opening day of "Three Fragments of a Lost Tale: Sculpture and Story by John Frame," on view through June 20th at the Huntington Museum and Gardens, I emerged from the darkly lit Boone Gallery into the bookstore to find a nicely dressed older woman looking at me expectantly. "Are YOU the artist?" she asked.

Artist John Frame Installing Characters from his "Lost Tale" at the Huntington Library
Photo: Carey Haskell

I told her I wasn't, and then pointed her towards Frame, who was outside, chatting with a few friends. If I hadn't already been introduced to Frame I probably would have also been scanning the crowd wondering "where is the artist?" The most striking thing about John Frame is that he doesn't have any of the tics, eccentricities or affectations that often mark artistic personalities. He fit right into the crowd.

An amiable man with handsome, patrician features, Frame could have passed for a San Marino attorney previewing the show, or perhaps an Occidental professor there for the white wine. Relaxed in conversation, and more interested in others than he is in himself, Frame comes across as man who is utterly comfortable in his skin. That is where it gets interesting.

Frame's ability to negotiate the real world -- the outside world -- is the flip side of his mastery of his own inner universe. Inside the Huntington's Boone Gallery are 35 completed characters, multiple sets and a working theatrical stage that have been hewn from Frame's imagination over the past five years. Committed to the idea that intuition is to always be respected, the artist's images are things that he guides into being without asking just what they are. The results are challengingly mysterious, and the approach leaves Frame utterly at peace with himself.

"I have to follow the lead of the work," he says.

"I think of Frame as a sort of mystic," says his friend, painter Jon Swihart. Frame's exhibition, says Swihart, is "...so ethereal, haunting and captivating, that while viewing it, I had the sense that nothing of the outside world mattered."

John Frame has been making sculpture in Southern California since the early 1980s, and has been taking his time in letting his ideas and methods evolve. "I'm 60," he comments, "and considering the alternative, not bothered by it."

Frame left Los Angeles in 2001 and re-settled in Wrightwood where he found a certain distance and quiet he had been craving. "I have a very removed life by today's standards," he says. In Wrightwood Frame busied himself with a number of commissions that needed finishing. He was also very involved in preparing for a retrospective being planned by the Long Beach Museum of Art; "Enigma Variations: The Sculpture of John Frame, 1980 to 2005."

The Long Beach show was a big moment for Frame, and also a kind of hinge. When it was over some Frame found himself artistically stuck until he sat up in bed one night at 2 AM, jolted awake by the idea of having his figures move. "It came as a single download," Frame told the LA Times. "It was all the characters, it was dialogue, it was sets, it was plot, it was story line -- everything, it was all there."

Dr. Jessica Todd Smith, the Huntington's Chief Curator of American Art, had seen the Long Beach show in 2005 and felt a connection to the work. Frame, in turn has long been fascinated by the Huntington's rare holdings of works by the English poet and visionary William Blake (1757-1827). When Frame made an exhibition proposal to Smith and her colleague John Murdoch in 2008 -- which included not only sculpted figures, but stop-motion film in which they came to life -- everything clicked.

"It made perfect sense," says Smith. To celebrate Frame's affection for William Blake, Smith also arranged for a show that runs concurrently: "Born to Endless Night: Paintings, Drawings, and Prints by William Blake Selected by John Frame." Presented in the Works on Paper Room of the Huntington Art Gallery, "Endless Night" -- for which Frame wrote the exhibition labels -- provides fresh insights about Blake, and also about just what Frame admires in his works.

"Through imagination," writes Frame about Blake, " he believed you accessed the Divine; in the act of creation you realized your purpose as a human being." Commenting on one Blake painting, "Hecate or the Night of Enitharmon's Joy", Frame notes: "...the symbolism remains completely mysterious to me, and is richer because of that mystery."

That quote says something about Blake, but it may say even more about Frame. He hangs on to mystery, and the richness it evokes, as best he can. "He has a deep reluctance to be too literal," says Jessica Smith.

In order to develop a checklist for "Three Fragments," Frame had to be prodded into naming some of his characters. "We curators are bean counters," Smith says self-deprecatingly. Still, out of respect for Frame's artistic process the figures on display at the Huntington have no individual labels. That seems fitting, since the exhibition represents a way station on an artistic journey of indeterminate length and destination.

The cast of his films is enchantingly odd. Many of the figures have features resembling those of wooden marionettes or dilapidated toys. Some are recognizably human, some are animal/human hybrids. When I asked Frame about his aesthetic influences, I was interested to find that many of them were literary:

"The most important things that have affected me long-term, aside from the writings of Shakespeare, are the works of other great authors like Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Emily Dickinson. The filmmakers Bergman, Kurosawa, Tarkovsky, and Fellini radically transformed my world when I was younger. It has probably been classical music, however, that most consistently fed me over the last 20 years or so."

I also asked Frame if there was anything in his upbringing that might have played a role in cultivating such an expansive imaginative range:

Grew up in a fairly backward Southern California household. My Texas-born father had only a third grade education and worked for the Santa Fe Railroad as a sheet metal guy. Not too much sticks out that would be very interesting. Went to work on the local dairy farm at 15 and have been working ever since. Moved 38 times between leaving my childhood home and the house we now live in.

One of Frame's motivations seems to be reclaiming the authenticity of the individual imagination. Among other things, it is a personal spiritual quest -- this is something he has in common with William Blake -- and he has an attraction to spiritual images that are untainted by religious orthodoxies.

For that reason, there is more than a hint of the occult in some of the rites, rituals and passages that have begun to appear in his films. One woman who visited the Huntington show later told Frame that she detected "...themes of seeking and seeing, burden, loss, damage, madness, wholeness, enlightenment, inhumanity, cycles, rebirth, controlled and controller - just to name a few."

Working in his 500 square foot Wrightwood studio, Frame carves, assembles, animates and even writes the scores for his developing films. John's wife Laura has contributed a great deal of sewing, and moral support for her husband's project. "My family is the best thing about my life," says Frame.

His youngest daughter Lily is a classical harpist who helps out with sewing and embroidery. Her husband, Johnny Coffeen edits Frame's films and created a short documentary about Frame's project which can be viewed at the Huntington. Ashley, his middle daughter, is a teacher and photographer who shot some of the images in the Huntington catalog and is credited "Ashley Fennell". Katherine, Frame's oldest daughter, is a speech pathologist and freelance editor. She reviewed and made changes to all of the text relating to the project including the catalog and the text panels currently on view with the Blake exhibition.

Devoting himself to film has created a few new, unique problems. One of the practical ones is that Frame, who has in the past supported himself by selling sculpture, has created a body of work that can't be sold. Fortunately, some of the photos he has taken of his cast are themselves works of art -- a selection of them are on view at the Huntington -- and the proceeds from the sale of photo editions will hopefully keep the lights on in Frame's studio.

When I asked Frame about any possible Hollywood connections, he was very reticent: Frame won't be the next Tim Burton anytime soon. Frame's primary responsibility is to his intuition, and to the world of images that it continues to conjure up. Whatever happens next, commercially, professionally and artistically, Frame will have to follow the lead of intuition, his muse.

"Like all truly great artists," comments Jon Swihart, " John has become so creatively empowered by inspiration that his work transcends what mere human intellect is capable of."

"My sense is that we are somewhere in mid-stream," Frame says of his ongoing project. "From the very beginning, it has been a gift."

Andy Warhol and Marshall McLuhan: The Artist and the Sociologist

2011-03-18T21:58:00.001-04:00

A friend recently asked me what I think of Andy Warhol. Without hesitating, I replied that I don't care for Andy Warhol's art. Noting my friend's surprise I added that I do think Warhol was a genius, but not as an artist. I think of him as a genius in the field of sociology.

Later, as I searched the internet to find out if there were others who shared my view, I found no evidence of anyone else referring to Warhol as a sociologist. I did, however, find many references to the fact that he is a divisive figure:

"Depending on your point of view, Andy Warhol is the greatest American artist of the second half of the 20th century or a corrupter of art who destroyed painting and took us down the slippery slope of postmodernism."

- David Dalton

Andy Warhol "Self-Portrait," at the Warhol Museum: Photo © Anthony Cain

If I had to choose between those two views "corrupter of art" works best for me. I find many of Warhol's works chilling, and feel that his legacy has been largely negative. If, as David Dalton implies, there are many others out there who share that view, we haven't done much to dampen the art market's enthusiasm for Warhol's works.

As far as the art market is concerned, Warhol's reputation is solid gold. In fact, the dollar values of Andy Warhol's signature works have done exactly what gold has done: they have risen in reaction world fiscal instability.

When things are uncertain, the market seems to say, Warhol will outperform other investments. In a blog on the anniversary of the artist's death -- "The Top Ten Andy Warhol Prices" -- blogger Marion Maneker notes that seven of the top ten Warhol prices were achieved after the financial crash of 2008. The Warhol record of $100 million, achieved in a private sale for a photo-silkscreen image of Elvis Presley, repeated 8 times, occurred in October 2008, the same month that the world's financial crisis took off.

I don't see artistic merit supporting the gilded price range for Warhol's works. Personally, when Warhol stopped painting and began using photo-silkscreens as the basis of his imagery he lost me. There is something in the connection between the brain, the hand, the brush, and the canvas that I find essential to painting. So, Warhol in my mind made paintings without painting. Call me a reactionary, but Warhol cheated.

In my view Warhol's prices are tied to the fact that works of art have become financial instruments whose value is pegged to an artist's fame. Buying a Warhol celebrity portrait is analogous to buying a very, very expensive baseball card. A 1914 Baltimore News Babe Ruth rookie card is just a piece of cardboard with a printed image, but a good one might bring half a million dollars. A 1914 Chicago Federals Joe Tinker card, also a piece of cardboard, can be yours for about $200.00. Has anyone ever heard of Joe Tinker?

Fame gives items what I call a "relic value" and buying them makes collectors feel close to the fame of those they are associated with. The idea of relic value derives from the fact that Medieval collectors would pay quite a tidy sum for relics, i.e. an alleged finger-bone from Saint John the Baptist, a famous and much revered saint.

No other artist of the 20th century understood fame quite the way Warhol did: like a dead saint, he seems to have a firm grip on it even from the grave. Warhol depicted famous people, cultivated friendships with famous people, became famous, and in the context of our current society, achieved immortality. Quite a trick, don't you think?

Warhol's genius lay in his understanding of religion and sociology. In particular, the ideas that he intuited -- or borrowed -- about the changing role of art in a media society were devastatingly right. His grasp of the sociological changes going on around him informed his decisions to choose image over content and to speed up his production of works through mechanical methods.

He assumed -- correctly -- that more and more people were coming to share his abbreviated idea of what made a good painting, commenting: "My idea of a good picture is one that's in focus and of a famous person."

Warhol deserves credit for his insights, but so does the sociologist and media theorist Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) who Warhol once referred to as an "Honorary Muse." Studying the two men's ideas side by side is a fascinating exercise.

Andy Warhol and Marshall McLuhan: Photomontage by Photofunia.com

Warhol and McLuhan barely knew each other, but they certainly did know of each other.

McLuhan's groundbreaking book "The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man" was published in 1951, a year before Warhol had his first New York exhibition. It is hard to believe that Warhol, who had been working in advertising, hadn't at least heard of the book, which described in depth how film posters, comic books, advertisements and magazine covers exerted their persuasive powers.

McLuhan was known for his aphorisms, and many of them are dead-ringers in terms of mirroring Warhol's social and aesthetic observations. Warhol's famous quip that everyone would have "15 minutes of fame" in the future is believed to have been paraphrased from McLuhan. Another famous quote "Art is what you can get away with," has been attributed to both men, and there seems to be no agreement about who said it or who said it first.

It is interesting to note that in the mid-60s after Warhol and McLuhan did briefly meet, McLuhan later commented that Warhol was a "rube." Do I sense some competitiveness there?

Art historian Gregory Battcock, gives Warhol the edge:

"Warhol was, during the sixties, a visual Marshall McLuhan. Though more profound than McLuhan and more a person of his time, Warhol correctly foresaw the end of painting and became its executioner."

So, Battcock views Warhol as predicting the end of painting. What, one has to wonder was "killing" it? Mass media -- movies television and magazines -- all played a role, but art's real usurper, at least in Marshall McLuhan's view, was advertising.

"Advertising" declared McLuhan, "is the greatest art form of the 20th century." Warhol, of course, began his career as a commercial illustrator, and some of his earliest Pop works are deadpan copies of advertisements. Advertising in the 20th century did what religious art had done in the 13th century: it used its imagery and authority to create images that helped focus mass desires and beliefs. Of course, if you believe as I do that capitalism is a religion, the parallels are clear.

McLuhan who converted to Roman Catholicism, and Warhol, who was raised Catholic, were both very aware that the mass culture of the late 20th century was supplanting religion. In McLuhan's view, electronic mass media worked against the private and the metaphysical:

"Christianity definitely supports the idea of a private, independent metaphysical substance of the self. Where technologies supply no cultural basis for this individual, then Christianity is in for trouble."

He had that right.

Warhol's portraits, which critic Robert Hughes says stripped the idea of portraiture down to its "bare chassis" lacked any shred of the metaphysical. Complexity, in the form on allegory, iconography, or philosophical speculation, wasn't necessary in a media society. Just the bare specter of celebrity, processed mechancially, was all that many of Warhol's key images relied on. A passive aggressive artist if ever there was one, Warhol understood the chilling unquestioned authority of fame as well as any dictator.

Andy Warhol and Vladamir Putin: Photomontage by Photofunia.com

Marshall McLuhan says that "One of the effects of living with electric information is that we live habitually in a state of information overload." What Warhol, in turn, understood about fame is that it cuts down the number of people we have to be interested in to a manageable number. Celebrities are the town characters in our "Global Village" -- to use McLuhan's phrase -- and they replace the saints of earlier centuries.

Andy Warhol once said that Pop art was about "liking things." I have always found that quote ingenuous: in my view Warhol's choices of subject matter tended towards parody. Yes, he was fascinated by Marilyn Monroe's power as a celebrity/goddess, but the silkscreen images he created after her death make Monroe appear clownlike. This wouldn't surprise Marshall McLuhan who believed that "Antipathy, dissimilarity of views, hate, contempt, can accompany true love."

Warhol Marilyn by caksy, on Flickr

One of Warhol's most enduring revelations was that in a media society, connoisseurship is doomed. In a society with an all powerful, highly persuasive media, careful informed distinctions weren't necessary when choosing what to buy. All that people needed, however much money they had, were the right brands.

"What's great about this country," Warhol once said, " is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest." In today's global society plutocrats seem to be replacing aristocrats, and Warhol seems dead on that the world's taste has flattened. What does it take to become an art collector? Lots and lots of money, and if you need taste there are still advisers who will rent you theirs for a fee.

Of course, in the Warholian view, even the art advisers will be gone in a few decades: "Some day everybody will just think what they want to think, and everybody will probably be thinking alike; that seems to be what is happening."

The more I read Warhol's thoughts and predictions, the more strongly I feel that his legacy has been damaging. Using his strategies -- let others make your art, become a social figure, and do everything you can to manipulate your audience -- a host of other artists have transformed whatever fame they have managed into dollars.

Although you don't often see all these names on the same list, I think of Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, Mark Kostabi and Thomas Kinkade as second-generation Warholians. In the third generation you get Mr. Brainwash.

On the other hand, the more I read about Marshall McLuhan, the more impressed I am by his wisdom. He comes across as a complex and highly original thinker, as compared to Warhol who was a highly effective borrower of ideas. In fact, one of my favorite McLuhan quotes seems to be a warning for the future, where, as predicted by Warhol, where everyone will "think alike:"

"A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding."

Insight? Understanding? Those are essential qualities for a portrait painter, and perhaps McLuhan would have made a fine one. He and Andy Warhol should have switched jobs.

Marshall McLuhan: Photomontage by Photofunia.com

Jerome Witkin: Painting History, Memory and Fantasy

2010-11-29T22:03:00.001-05:00

Jerome Witkin: Vincent Van Gogh and Death, 1987

Mixed Media Drawing, 84 x 48 inches

"Let's not forget that small emotions are the great captains of our lives."
-- Vincent Van Gogh, in a letter to his brother Theo

The painter Jerome Witkin -- a vivid conversationalist -- tells a great story. "Painters are quiet in their studio," he comments, "so naturally they like to talk when they aren't working." Here is one particularly remarkable story that Witkin, 72, told me when I called him to talk about the exhibition of his paintings and drawings on view at Riverside City College through December 7th:

When I was a boy, newly interested in art, my mother took me to the Metropolitan Museum. We looked around the lobby, and when we discovered that there were no art classes being offered, my mother lost interest. I begged her, I wanted to see something, so she let me go upstairs alone. The Met then wasn't like it was now: it was like a big warehouse for scholars.

When I got to one dark room filled with paintings I heard a tapping sound, like a cane on the floor. I was fearful, somebody was coming towards me. This guy came up to me -- he had polished shoes -- he put his walking stick on my sternum and pushed me down.

He told me 'Dirty little boys like you should not be in museums like this.'

Years later I realized who that man was: James Rorimer the director of the museum."

When Witkin told me that story, I couldn't help but notice how passionately he was re-living the emotions of that moment as he told it. Certainly, it is a story he has told many times in the more than 60 years since the actual event, and stories re-told over time tend to lose accuracy over time. They become personal myths, and even the most objective man will forget, alter, or heighten the details of history.

In telling me the story, Witkin wasn't just telling me about something that actually happened. He was also telling me an emotional truth: that what he felt while growing up still has tremendous force. He is an outsider, still feeling the fragility of his place in the art world, and in the world in general. No wonder that empathy -- for victims of the Holocaust, for those suffering with AIDS, for the disenfranchised -- is the basis of many of his most compelling paintings.

Jerome Witkin, of course, isn't a documentary artist. His images, like his conversations, are, deeply felt, and emotions matter more to him than objective facts. His intention is to be honest, but his honestly is about the passions of his life, and his empathy for others. Emotions are essential to Witkin: everything else is theater, and can and should be tweaked for dramatic effect.

When I took a group of community college students to the RCC Quad Gallery to visit Witkin's show, several of them were spellbound by a large mixed-media drawing: "Vincent and Van Gogh and Death." It is a riveting drawing, and when I spoke with him Witkin told me about how he managed to "hit the bullseye" and give the work its emotional charge.

Van Gogh was a real man, and Witkin respects that: he has been poring over Van Gogh's letters and paying rapt attention to the realities of the man's life. Witkin reminded me, for example, that Van Gogh was the second "Vincent" born to his parents, and that he lived with the strangeness of having the same name as his dead younger brother.

Witkin's staged the Van Gogh drawing in his studio, and the model who posed from him was a young man who felt right. A young man with "a red beard and intent eyes," Witkin mentioned to me that his model's real career was working with troubled teenagers. Sounding like a film director, Witkin related just what he had wanted the model to express for him:

"He (Vincent) is fighting his own sense of the weariness of life... questioning his purpose... always thinking about death."

Noting that "modeling is a performance" Witkin went on to tell that it "was a lucky day" when he had the Van Gogh drawing. "His hands were so strong," he says of the model, who sprawled on the floor next to a 45 automatic in a structure that Witkin says is set up "a bit like a confessional." Looking in at his model, in the dark, constructed space engulfed in the light of his studio, Witkin managed to draft an image that is both hallucinatory and emotionally credible.

Detail of "Vincent Van Gogh and Death"

The real Van Gogh shot himself outside -- a botched job that left him lingering for days -- but Witkin's Van Gogh despairs indoors. In some ways, Witkin reminds me of the director Oliver Stone: he will tell you a story that rocks you to the core, but you have to remember that what you are looking at is "art." The skull that Witkin's "Van Gogh" peers at is real, but its purpose in being there is to make the painting a "vanitas" which is a tradition that references the history of art.

Jerome Witkin: Pensione Ichino, 1997

Oil on Canvas (Three Panels) 53 x 120 inches

Witkin's three part painting "Pensione Ichino" also references art history: its triptych format originally was developed for Late Medieval altarpieces. That said, the storyline of the "Pensione" canvasses is secular and deeply personal. It started, says Witkin, when a still-life setup sparked his memory. "Let's make a game of this," he thought as his ideas began to coalesce.

First came an orange plastic bag and a box, then a plaster cast of a woman's body, then a lace glove, all illuminated by a clamp lamp. The lace glove became a trigger that brought back a series of memories that in turn triggered the artist's memory of a brief love affair he had as a young man.

Jerome Witkin: Pensione Ichino, 1997, Left Panel

As a 20 year old Witkin won a Pulitzer fellowship to study in Europe, and in Florence he stayed in the Pensione of an Italian widow, "Old Lady Ichino." Her pensione had a great location -- right across from the Palazzo Pitti -- but the old lady wouldn't serve dinner to you unless you spoke Italian. Witkin also remembers that it was impossible to date Italian girls: their protective family members guarded them too closely. He did meet a lovely French photography student, "a hot deal," and in the second panel of "Pensione Ichino" she appears, a stunning apparition who reveals herself as she lifts a negligee over her head. She was, Wiktin remembers, a woman who enjoyed being looked at.

The artist is also present in the center panel, but only by implication. His shirt and tie hang on a chair in the painting, but Witkin is also very much there in the role of the artist/onlooker, conjuring up a real woman's memory amidst the studio props. Her sensuality and tangibility come across as a kind of paradox. "Witkin's subjects seem, if anything, overly immersed in the clutter of lived reality," says writer Joel Sheesley.

Jerome Witkin: Pensione Ichino, 1997, Center Panel

The love affair didn't last long, and after a short trip to Paris there was a breakup. Witkin remembers being miserable afterward, feeling the lows after the high of the affair. Love, and the emotions that go with it are another prevailing theme in Witkin's life and art. In 1986 he wrote: "Love and its folly; its non-being hurts me. Yet this is what I want to paint about. The wanting of love, the giving of it. Love as a healer. Without it one dries up."

Jerome Witkin: Pensione Ichino, 1997, Right Panel

In the third and final panel a young man -- a surrogate for the young Witkin -- slips the lace glove onto his hand. It is a moment of sensuality recalled and also an angry moment. When I spoke to Witkin he pointed out that the painting handling surrounding the figure was raw and somewhat violent. "Putting the hand through the glove," he explained, "has to do with destroying the memory, doing away with it." The memory of his lover is also suggested by the plaster torso, now just a reflection in the oval mirror.

"Pensione Ichino" is about the evocation of a memory, and ultimately about the artist's need to control and even destroy that memory. The emotions he evokes in the process are strong and specific: so strong that it is tempting to call Witkin an Expressionist. The problem with that label is that Witkin has much more control of his emotional range -- and his drafting -- than most Expressionist artists. His effects and images are refined and calculated, and if anything he thinks more like a playwright than a painter. Calling "Pensione Ichino" a "drama in three acts" isn't far off the mark.

Syracuse University is now organizing a 40 year retrospective of Witkin's work, tentatively slated to open in 2012. The "dirty little boy" who was once pushed to the floor of the Metropolitan Museum by its director is now seen as a leading representational painter. Critic Donald Kuspit says "Indeed, there are few painters working today who have as consummate and vivid a sense of the human drama, in all its personal and social complexity, as Witkin does."

At one point in our conversation Witkin mentioned to me that a few years back he received an award from the director of the Metropolitan -- not the one who had confronted him, but a later one -- and that he managed to control himself and not tell the director to "Fuck off." Listening, I wasn't sure if I really believed everything Witkin had told me about the incident, but I had become totally convinced of his brilliance as a storyteller. His art is a masterful blend of history, memory and fantasy.

The forty minutes we spent on the phone went very quickly, and Witkin gave me a great deal to think about. Looking over my notes later, one comment stood out for me. "When you make a work of art," Witkin told me, "you don't know where it will end up." Coming from a man who understands that emotions drive our lives, our institutions and ultimately, history past and present, I took that thought to heart.

Exhibition Information:

"Jerome Witkin: American Master"
November 1 through December 7

The Quad Gallery, Riverside City
4800 Magnolia Ave., Quad 140
Riverside, CA 92506
Gallery Hours: Mon-Fri 10AM to 3PM, Thursday Nights 5:30 to 8:30 PM
951 222-8358

The work of Jerome Witkin appears courtesy of Jack Rutberg Fine Arts

Mari Lyons: Every Object Rightly Seen

2010-10-22T14:49:00.001-04:00

Mari Lyons in her Woodstock studio

Mari Lyons turned 75 last week. She has been painting for more than 60 years, but says that she is still struggling to be free of certain habits. "In my studio I have paintings that go back to the 50's," Lyons explains. "I can't help but come to painting with an accumulation: you can never get rid of yourself."

It is a very modest self-assessment by an artist who, in truth, creates paintings that radiate a constant joy of discovery. "Almost everything in Ms. Lyons's paintings is animated, excited, and alive," says critic Lance Esplund.

Praise from friends doesn't seem to affect Lyons, who is unassuming in general. Although she paints passionately, she knows her own limits well. Writing about her current series "Sunsets/Hillsides" she says "I have worked on this motif on and off for nearly a decade and I cannot grasp its infinite complexities."

One of Lyons's favorite quotes comes from Ralph Waldo Emerson: "Every object rightly seen unlocks a quality of the soul" Lately, she has been looking out the three windows of her Woodstock studio, trying to "unlock" the secrets of her hillside. Even though she feels that her view isn't monumental -- "a modest forest of ash, hemlock, and pine" -- she is devoted to it. "Its just as hard and impossible to know a hillside as it is a person," she observes wisely.

Mari Lyons, Sunset Allegretto, oil on canvas, 36.5" x 49", 2009

"Sunsets/Hillsides" is about her meditation on the metaphorical potential of the landscape, and also about a kind of conversation with Paul Cezanne, an artist she discovered when she was 20. Of course, by that time she had already been painting for more than 7 years, and had more than a passing acquaintance with modern art and artists. Her education as an artist started early and has never really ended.

By age 13 her father was taking her Saturday drawing classes at the the California School of Fine Arts in Oakland. "Still and Rothko were there," Lyons recalls, but she mainly remembers an encouraging instructor named William Brown. She drew the model for 4 to 5 hours at a stretch, a remarkable thing for a 13 year old to be doing, especially in the late 40's.

At 15 Lyons took a summer painting class at Mills College taught by Max Beckmann, the German Expressionist who came to teach in the US after WW II. "It was a motley group,"Lyons remembers,"older women with canvas boards, some not very serious painters, and then one or two serious students," one of whom was the Bay Area artist Nathan Oliveira.

Beckmann, who spoke little English, barely noticed Lyons -- "Gut Kinder" was the only comment she remembers -- but he and his art made an indelible impression on her. When he showed his works to the class at the end of the term the symbolism escaped her, but the power and intensity of the works, their "truth," was unforgettable.

The following summer Lyons studied with Fletcher Martin, a representational artist who had been an artist/correspondent for Life Magazine. Martin was very encouraging, telling Lyons that she was "The best student he ever had." Later, he gave her a more patronizing compliment: Lyons remembers bristling when he called her "A significant woman painter."

When she attended Bard College, 90 miles north of New York, Lyons studied with Stefan Hirsch, a German emigre who had once created a controversial WPA mural depicting an allegorical figure of "Justice" as being mixed-race. She also took classes with Louis Schanker -- an abstract printmaker once called a "radical among radicals" -- and Ludwig Sander, an abstract artist friendly with Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline.

Lyons also spent six or seven months in Paris where she studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumiere, at L'Atelier Fernand Leger, and also at the Atelier 17 of famed painter/printmaker Stanley William Hayter. Although postwar Paris and its great museums made a great impression on her, Lyons recounts that she often felt "intimidated and lonely" in Europe.

After receiving an MFA in painting from Cranbrook in l958, Lyons, now married, moved to Ann Arbor, where her husband Nick was finishing a PhD. In four and a half years the couple had four children -- the first is Paul, named after Paul Cezanne -- but somehow Mari managed to have a one woman show at the Forsythe Gallery. After moving to New York City in 1961 Mari kept a studio in the corner of her bedroom, and regularly drew from the model with upper west-side artist friends.

It has been a rich, busy life, and Lyons has been the subject of over a dozen one-person shows in New York alone. "A lot happened in the intervening years," Lyons reflects, "but I always painted." That is an understatement: Lyons's eccentric and vivid depictions of nudes, cityscapes, landscapes, still-lives, and interiors have caused critic Jed Perl to remark that she "has staked her claim as the complete painter, the master of every genre."

Mari Lyons, Exploding Cherry Tree, oil on canvas, 30" x 31", 2009

Since her husband Nick sold his publishing business, Lyons has been spending more time in Woodstock, where the landscape motif has called to her off and on. Writing in the New Republic about Lyon's 2008 exhibition, Jed Perl noted the "unabashed color," and "buttery seduction" of her landscape canvases. He felt that the show was "more than anything else, about color becoming light."

The landscapes of the "Sunsets/Hillsides" certainly are about light, and also about joy. "When you are connected, you feel a joy in seizing some aspect of the real world," Lyons says. Using color in "patch-like juxtapositions, derived from Cezanne's color modulations," her painting "Exploding Cherry Tree" achieves an exuberance tempered by a net-like interlace of dark strokes.

Although she has consistently worked as a representational painter, Lyons doesn't mind letting her work veer towards abstraction. "The question of whether they are realistic or abstract is irrelevant," she says. One of the values she seems to have absorbed from Cezanne is that there is an inherent abstract order to be gleaned from nature.

When her show opens at the First Street Gallery in New York on November 2nd, Lyons hopes that those who view the show will share her "joy of discovery." Of course, she says gently, "No two people feel the same." It is a sage observation by an artist who doesn't pursue fixed meanings or try to impose them on herself or others. Searching, not finding is her strong point.

Mari Lyons explains her constant curiosity this way: "I'm mainly striving to go deeper into the mysteries and challenges of an art that is always elusive." Elusive they may be, but moments of connection, joy, and spirit flicker brightly through the branches of the painted trees on her painted hillsides.

All images courtesy of the artist and First Street Gallery, New York

Rod Penner: Rust on Poles, Crumbling Asphalt, Light Hitting the Grass

2010-10-16T20:06:00.003-04:00

"I'm interested in the look of things and the quality of being there, a moment that is completely frozen with all the variety of textures; rust on poles, crumbling asphalt, light hitting the grass. The finished paintings should evoke contrasting responses of melancholy and warmth, desolation and serenity -- everything that is small town America." -- Rod Penner

Rod Penner hardly stands out in Marble Falls, Texas, a town of about 5,000 residents, 40 miles northwest of Austin. "I'm somewhat of a recluse," the artist comments. Generally speaking, Penner likes it that way. Since Marble Falls is mainly known for hunting, fishing, and drag boat racing, it isn't too hard for an artist to stay under the radar.

In New York, it is a different story. When his exhibition of "minis" -- six inch square hyper-realist paintings -- opens at OK Harris Works of Art in New York on October 23rd, Penner will be the center of attention, a situation he finds vaguely uncomfortable. Fortunately, his paintings are the real attention getters. His six inch square vignettes of small town Texas command a retail price of $8,500 each.

Rod Penner, "Clayton Dry Cleaners," Acrylic on Panel, 6 x 6 inches, 2010

Rod Penner, "Bait Shop," Acrylic on Panel, 6 x 6 inches, 2010

To put it another way, Penner's retail price is $34,000 per square foot. That is more than the median household income in Marble Falls, which is $30,800. Remarkably, what sells so well in New York is precisely the fact that Penner has captured "melancholy and warmth, desolation and serenity," in a way that many of his collectors feel characterized the small towns where they started out.

Penner, who jokingly refers to himself as "America's favorite Mennonite Photo-realist" grew up in a tight-knit family Vancouver, British Columbia. His father, uncles, brothers and cousins all worked or still work in the construction trade. His parents, who noticed that he liked to draw were supportive of his developing interest in art, and his father bought him art supplies. He met his wife Debbie, a native Texan, in his late teens, and they married in 1986 when Rod was 21 and briefly moved to Canada.

Building on methods he had learned in college, Rod began to experiment with Hyper-realist painting techniques. Not entirely satisfied by Photo-realist paintings that he had seen in person -- they looked much rougher than they had in art magazines -- Penner tried to take his technique further, in an even more exacting direction.

In 1988 the Penners moved to Richmond, Texas. Penner's first images of Texas reflect the sense of isolation and strangeness he experienced there. "When I first moved to Texas it was like another planet," says Penner. It was "alien, the weather, the landscape: I didn't know what to make of it." Still, he was determined to find his subject matter close by: neighboring towns like Sealy and Clifton gave him austere, characteristically American images to work from.

For an artist tremendously interested in texture and detail, the dilapidated state of the buildings he photographed and then painted gave him his poetry and his visual interest. Peeling paint, cracked asphalt and weeds breaking through pavement interest Penner the way that light reflected on water interested Monet. "I could never paint new buildings," he comments.

The somber, elegiac tone of his early Texas paintings reflects a number of things: his wife's grief over the loss of a brother, the "Last Picture Show" vibe of small town Texas, and Penner's own sober view of life. Then, in 1991, the same year that Penner signed on to show his work at OK Harris, his youngest brother died in a plane crash. Two deaths -- that of his brother-in-law and his brother -- made indelible impacts that Penner feels affect his world view, and his work, to this day.

Rod Penner, "Pink House with Big Wheels," Acrylic on Canvas, 36 x 54 inches, 1992

People don't appear in his paintings, but their parked pickup trucks and their children's big wheels scattered on the front lawn remind us that they are missing. With fierce objectivity, Penner paints portraits of Texas small town life without ever showing us a single human face.

Penner's work ethic is very strong: it has to be, as he is the sole supporter for his wife a homemaker, and for five children. He is up most mornings by 4:30 for some early painting, and perhaps a walk. After breakfast he is usually back in the studio until 5.

His method of painting is methodical and systematic. Working from photos that have often been adjusted in photoshop, he paints a small, defined area each day. When working on his "minis," which are six inches square, he typically needs 7 to 10 days, which means that he is painting at the rate of a few square inches each day. Larger paintings can take up to four months to complete.

He rarely goes back and corrects his previous day's work. Penner, in this respect, is a little like an Italian fresco artist of the Renaissance who covered a single square of plaster each day, calling it his "giornata" or day's work.

The ingredients for his paintings are shockingly simple: acrylic paint and water, applied on small panels, or on wet-sanded canvas for larger works.

Penner doesn't mind being called a "Photo-realist" but comments that if anything his works are "Photo-realism in HD." People familiar with his paintings note that he goes beyond his subject matter, and manages to infuse very strong feelings into his work.

"He is a master technician, "says painter Leonard Koscianski, " but he is more than that. His paintings are actually quite expressive. There is a significant difference between his photos and the paintings he creates from them."

Penner's dealer, Ethan Karp admires the revelatory aspect of Penner's images, noting that "They encourage the viewer to look at painting, landscape and subject with a sense of objective discovery, and deliver a revelatory moment of clarity and startled awareness."

Rod Penner, "Snoball," Acrylic on Panel, 6 x 6 inches, 2010
Penner's recent art seems a bit more optimistic than it did 20 years ago. Pictures like "Snoball," which portrays a snow-cone shack with a yellow topped cone is softened by his gentle sense of humor: it is almost a "Pop" painting. The gentle rivulets of water in front of the shack suggest something melting, a wry comment.

It turns out that Texas is a great place to raise a family, and the hill country landscape around Marble Falls, where the Penners have lived since 2002, is actually quite beautiful. Life at the moment is very good for the Penner family, and his online photo album is full of snaps of Arkansas river rafting, fishing trips, and football games. Austin is less than an hour away when big city pleasures are in order.

Rod and Debbie Penner have begun to collect some modest Hudson River School paintings, and Rod is building a new studio. Both are luxuries they could have hardly imagined when they started their lives together. "We are blessed," Penner acknowledges.

When New York collectors pay big money for one of Penner's painting they are getting a piece of Americana. Hard working, and dead on honest, Penner and his paintings take us back to places and values that somehow look more and more attractive and endearing over time. Penner's paintings don't just tell us about desolation and melancholy. They also have some things to say about grit, candor and endurance: American virtues.

Penner's choice of style is also looking prescient, as the art world is paying more attention to photo-realist and hyper-realist art. "There appears to currently be a growing awareness and appreciation of hyper-realist painting as a substantial and acquirable art form," says Ethan Karp.

According to Wikipedia, Marble Falls has produced three "notable" citizens: a rancher, a 2nd place winner on "Nashville Star," and an Olympic sprinter. Another listing needs to be added:

Rod Penner: A Hyper-realist artist known for his painstakingly honest depictions of small Texas towns.

A David Park Drawing: A Gift

2010-10-11T22:35:00.000-04:00

David Park: Head of Lydia, 1953, oil on canvas, 25" x 24"Image courtesy of Helen Park Bigelow, Natalie Park Schutz, and Hackett | Mill, San Francisco.

"I think of painting -- in fact all the arts -- as a sort of extension of human life. The very same things that we value most, the ideals of humanity, are the properties of the arts." --David Park, 1959

In the Spring of 1978 I saw a retrospective of works by David Park (1911-1960) at the Oakland Museum. At the time, I was in my third year of college, a recently declared art major. More than any exhibition I had seen before, or any I have seen since, the Park exhibition spoke to me. "This is what art should be," I decided, "and I have found an artist I want to emulate."

I must have said something along those lines in the letter I wrote shortly thereafter to Mrs. Lydia Park Moore, Park's widow, now re-married. She wasn't hard to find: many of the paintings at Oakland were listed as belonging to "Mr. and Mrs. Roy Moore, Santa Barbara, California," and they were listed in the phone book. I don't remember exactly what I wrote, but I certainly did my best to tell Mrs. Moore about what I loved in Park's paintings, and I also asked if there was something small -- maybe a drawing -- that I could purchase.

For the past 32 years the letter she wrote to me in reply has served as my bookmark for the David Park catalog I brought home from Oakland. Written in a clear hand in blue ballpoint on elegant stationary, here is what it says:

May 3, 1978

Dear John Seed,

In a day or two I shall send you a "studio drawing" by David Park. A gift, no purchase!

When I read your letter I was very moved. If an artist, or any human being for that matter, can give another individual encouragement, hope, a desire to believe in his own work, then the whole effort is worth while.

If you are ever in Santa Barbara please come and see us. We have a few paintings here which are not exhibited very often, and you might like to see.

Sincerely,

Lydia Park Moore

About a week later a manila envelope arrived at my college PO Box. Mrs. Moore hadn't packed it with any great care, and it came out of the envelope a bit rumpled. When I later mentioned this to Park's daughter Helen Bigelow, she recalled that her father wasn't too formal about packing art either. "David once mailed me a small oil painting wrapped up in brown paper with string," she recalled.

The top edge of the drawing had been torn out of a spiral drawing pad, the paper was slightly yellowed, and it had no signature. Still, there it was: an original work by David Park, and a rather powerful one.

David Park "Studio Drawing," c. 1957, ink & pencil on paper, approx. 17 1/4" x 13 3/4"
Image courtesy of Helen Park Bigelow, Natalie Park Schutz, and Hackett | Mill, San Francisco.

Park, who is credited with founding the "Bay Area Figurative School," was a painter who felt a strong connection to the human figure. He was something of a rebel in insisting on painting the figure when most American modernists were practicing abstraction.

His late works portray the figure with powerful calligraphic brushstrokes that sometimes verge on caricature. The drawing that Mrs. Moore sent to me was a study of a female nude, executed mainly with a brush and India ink.

Her face was composed of a welter of dark strokes, with pools of ink for eye-sockets. Her body was rotund and maternal, the body of a contemporary Venus of Willendorf. Powerfully lit, she leans on something -- a stand with a robe? -- supported by blunt strong toes and tree-trunk legs. By no means a conventional beauty, she seemed to be some kind of archetypal woman charged with magic.

Of course, that was how I felt about her. If Park, who died of cancer in 1960, had been alive to chat with me, he might have said "That is simply a studio study of a large model I did in the late 50s."

I was working part time at a frame store, and I built the frame for the Park myself, using a heavy walnut molding that had some bulk to it. For the next ten years, it was always the first thing I hung up when I moved, and in my student years that was often.

In the summer of 1978 I followed up on Lydia Moore's invitation and a friend and I visited her home on Santa Tomas Lane in Montecito. She and her husband Roy Moore were very welcoming, and I enjoyed seeing the small handful of Park paintings she still owned including his last major oil "The Cellist." I remember Lydia Park Moore as being warm, just a bit scattered, and very proud of her first husband David's legacy.

I knew from having read and re-read my David Park catalog that Lydia Park had gone back to work in the early 50s, giving David what he gratefully called the "Lydia Park Fellowship" which allowed him to devote himself to painting. What he achieved as an artist had a lot to do with the devotion and support that she had provided.

For most of 1978 and until my graduation in 1979 most of my paintings looked like poor David Parks. I was heavy handed with my paint, and used broad cheap brushes from Standard Brands to apply my oil paint. In some ways my paintings were a success, as looking at Park loosened me up and took my paintings in a more emotional direction.

On the other hand, I didn't have the skills or experience in drawing to create the kinds of wonderful shorthand and sense of space that I admired in Park's late oils. I gradually realized that Park's works had a maturity about them, and as a young artist I would need to be very, very patient if I wanted to paint anything that came close to Park.

By graduation I owned four Park drawings. I had found that there was a large folio of them downstairs at Maxwell Galleries on Sutter Street, and the prices were low. I remember that one drawing of two figures on a beach was priced at $200 but I talked my way into a 20 dollar discount and got it for $180, paid in installments.

One of results of my interest in David Park was that I was determined to study painting with his remaining peers. In my undergraduate years I had studied with Nathan Oliveira and Frank Lobdell. Frank, in particular, remembered Park well and told me that he had helped carry buckets of paint scrapings from Park's studio during his final illness. Through a friend I was able to meet Richard Diebekorn, but when I visited his home in Santa Monica we mainly talked about Mark Rothko: Park didn't come up.

In 1981 I entered the MA program in painting at UC Berkeley, where Park had once taught. One day after class I saw Joan Brown, who had been one of his protégés, loading something into her car. She must have been in a hurry because when I walked over and tried to strike up a conversation, asking her "What was David Park like?" She gave me a one-word answer: "Sarcastic."

I learned more from Elmer Bischoff who told me quite a bit about Park's methods and ideas. He had been part of the group of artists who had drawn the figure together with Park at the California School of the Arts. When Bischoff came to my studio one evening for a group critique, he studied my Park drawing soberly. "Where," he asked me "did you get this?"

By time I finished grad school my paintings look much less like David Park paintings. I rarely painted the figure, and I had found my own idiosyncratic way of applying paint. Park would have approved. He once told his friend and biographer Paul Mills: "As you grow older, it dawns on you that you are yourself -- that your job is not to force yourself into a style, but to do what you want."

In 1989 I got a call from Paul Thiebaud, a young art dealer just beginning his partnership with veteran dealer Charles Campbell. He offered me a sum for my Park drawings that I found breathtaking, and I met him at the home of his father, artist Wayne Thiebaud to drop them off. In his father's studio he casually wrote me a five-figure check. After signing it, he asked me, as an afterthought: "What did you pay for these?" He was a bit shocked by my answer.

In the years since I sold my drawings prices for original works by David Park have risen as fast as CEO pay. A few years ago a single Park painting from his 1959 New York show sold for $2.7 million. What would Lydia Park, who had struggled to pay the $195 inheritance tax on her husband's estate after his death, have thought of that? I like to keep in mind that there was a time that works by Park were given as gifts, sent in rumpled manila envelopes or wrapped in brown paper, tied in string.

The money that I received for my Park drawings gave me the cash to turn a small one-room weekend cabin in the high desert into a real retreat with a bathroom and extra bedroom. When I sold it 9 years later I was used every penny from the sale of the cabin to pay the heavy costs involved in the adoption of my oldest daughter.

Still, I am embarrassed now by having sold the drawing that was once given to me as a gift. I wish I had it hanging in my office now as I write. I tried contacting Paul Thiebaud and asking about it not long ago, but he had no recollection of whom he had sold it to. A few months ago I read that Paul had died, of cancer, at age 49, just like David Park.

The drawing may be gone, but Lydia Park Moore's generosity has remained on my mind. I learned more about her when I read her daughter Helen Park Bigelow's excellent memoir "David Park, Painter: Nothing Held Back." It is an honest book that told me more about Park's struggles, his family, and what he was attempting to do in his art. I know for a fact that part of Park's achievement is owed to his wife who had most certainly given him "...encouragement, hope, a desire to believe in his own work."

Michael C. McMillen: Every Dream is New

2010-10-06T09:46:00.002-04:00

Michael C. McMillen: Photo by Ari Young

Michael McMillen is a visual artist in the very broadest sense, careful to avoid narrowly defining just what it is he does. "The medium has to be in service of the idea," he told an audience of students at Art Center College of Design in 2005.

McMillen's shifting and overlapping job descriptions -- sculptor, installation artist, printmaker, cultural anthropologist -- reflect the fact that he is a searcher, never quite sure what he is looking for, always hoping to be amazed by what he comes across. An leading edge baby boomer -- he was born in 1946 -- his childhood was marked by a curiosity about the artifacts of postwar California.

Raised mainly by his grandparents, McMillen was surrounded from an early age by things older than he was: elderly people, antique furnishings, objects that had seen better days. Being older, his grandparents also tended to let him roam. Some of McMillen's childhood memories involve pulling a wagon down the alleyway near his their house, collecting junk that he would later organize and create stories about. Since many of neighbors were veterans of WWII, or had worked for Douglas Aircraft in Santa Monica, McMillen often found items that conveyed the faded poetry of war and industry.

His imaginative drive also reflects the influence of his father, an actor who also worked as a scenic artist. Eventually McMillen Sr. worked for Channel 11, and Michael would visit him there. Walking among the sets, which he realized looked very different on television, got him thinking about the artifice and "duality" of media images. While attending Santa Monica City College he decided to become an artist: an epiphany that he says came to him like a "snap of a finger."

After earning his MFA at UCLA McMillen promptly gained attention for his mixed-media sculptures and constructed environments. "Like films," wrote one commentator, "McMillen's fastidiously constructed works function as portals into other worlds..." While building his reputation as an artist McMillen also did odd jobs in the film industry, creating props and special effects for "Blade Runner" and "Close Encounters of the Third Kind."

Since winning the LA County Museum's "New Talent Award" and landing NEA Artist's Fellowship, both in 1978, McMillen's career has never faltered. His groundbreaking 1981 installation "Central Meridian (The Garage)" featured the cluttered interior of a 60's garage/workshop/catacomb, complete with the rusting bones of a Dodge Dart. Doug Harvey, writing for the LA Weekly, says that the piece "...remains one of the most subtle, poetic and experiential critiques of the institutional art environment ever devised."

Over the years, McMillen's interests as an artist have remained remarkably consistent. Deeply aware of the evocative power of things, he has been accumulating and re-assembling "objects of interest" -- some would call them detritus -- all his life. While building his stellar reputation as an artist, an inevitable by product has been a growing storage problem.

"I have an exotic collection of materials, artifacts, gee-gaws and what-nots" says McMillen. "To avoid unnecessary clutter, I have a simple rule: If I haven't used it in 30 years, I discard it."

One of the results of being "awash with stuff" has been a deepening exploration with film. This new direction has allowed McMillen to both literally recycle some of the physical raw material he has accumulated and also to recycle some of the overarching ideas of his career. He has been tinkering with film since 2003, and his 2007 installation/exhibition "Speed's Place" at the UnMuseum of the Contemporary Arts Museum of Cincinnati, included projections of his digital films.

Michael C. McMillen: One of the three short trailers for "Speed's Place."

His current exhibition "Lighthouse" at LA Louver Gallery doesn't literally include a lighthouse. The title, McMillen explains, "... is both metaphoric and a bit literal," as the installation includes a looped screening of his new short film "Quotidian Man" which projected onto the billboard of the "Hotel New Empire," a kind of tilting film set raised on a catafalque of stilts over a tray of water.

A precarious flophouse with a questionable past it is both a sculpture and a metaphor. Adding the element of the billboard/movie screen is McMillen's way of priming the image to receive an even richer set of suggestions. The billboard may also be a nod to the late painter James Doolin's "Psychic," a 1998 oil of a blank signboard hovering above a row of LA stores.

McMillen's films are reminiscent of old films, and nostalgia -- he has great affection for the days when movie magic wasn't so seamless -- is one of their key ingredients. Paradoxically, the poetry of nostalgia recycled creates something fresh and dreamlike. "Every dream is new: we don't know where they are going," McMillen points out. Spooky mirages, grainy and full of surprises, McMillen's films somehow feel inevitable, as if he has been making them all his life.

In a sense, he has. Working with history makes him feel fresh, like a child again.

Michael C. McMillen is a man who is fascinated by the past, but who isn't the least bit jaded. His imagination flickers brightly, like a Tesla coil in a monster movie.

Michael Mc Millen Artist's Statement for "Lighthouse."

The illusions of permanence and perfection are recurring themes in my work.

I use architectural references as a metaphoric language to express and reveal this
continuous state of flux and entropy.

The viewer's memory and sense of reality are subtly subverted by the use of altered scale and the fabrication of elements that are both familiar and strangely dystopian.

With the advances in digital motion picture technology, I have been able to integrate time based images into my installations. The movies blend and combine a multitude of varied images from our popular culture into personal dream-like narratives that animate and transport the viewer into unexpected realms.

Below: a short video by Michael C. McMillen

LA Louver Gallery will present a screening of Michael McMillen's digital movies on Saturday, October 9th, from 11am to 2 pm.

To RSVP for the screenings, please email info@lalouver.com or call (310) 822-4955

John Nava: The Timelessness of Now

2010-10-03T17:12:00.000-04:00

John Nava: Digital Output for the "Trojan Family Tapestry" (Detail)

In 1988, artist John Nava, who had just turned 40, told William Wilson of the Los Angeles Times that he was "looking for a way to paint the figure seriously in the 20th Century." Twenty-two years later, a decade into the 21st century, Nava is indeed creating figurative art of great seriousness, but there is a twist. His monumental depiction of a procession of 21 life-sized figures, now on view at USC's new Tutor Campus Center isn't a painting: it is a tapestry.

Nava's engagement in tapestry began in 1999 when he was commissioned to create 3 cycles of tapestries for the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles. Tapestry was initially chosen for acoustic reasons, but once the project got rolling Nava found other advantages. With a tight 3 year timeline he could paint figure studies, have them composed and compiled in Photoshop and then email the images to Belgium, where digital technology facilitated rapid production of the actual tapestries. Nava had also discovered a medium that was both sensuous and at the same time able to render subtle detail.

Besides alerting Nava to tapestry as a medium, the cathedral project connected him with a 2,000 year lineage of traditions and values surrounding the creation of religious art. Depicting the figure in a "serious" way was now more than just a goal: it was a requirement. Challenged to create timeless images for a contemporary audience, Nava had to answer a profound question. How could he express the ancient idea of sainthood and do so in a way that made sense for the 21st century?

His answer, three cycles of images portraying 135 saints and "blesseds" -- females and males of all ages, races, occupations and vocations from all over the world -- expresses to the cathedral's diverse visitors the idea that "a saint could look like me." It was a powerful theme, and it continues to resonate in Nava's recent works, both religious and secular. Nava says that "humanity, consolation and redemption" are the most important themes of his commissioned works.

After completing the cathedral project in 2003, Nava continued to work with tapestry. His 2006 exhibition at Sullivan-Goss Gallery in Santa Barbara, titled "Neo-Icons" -- a title meant as a rebuke to "Neo-Cons" -- featured tapestries and paintings of fresh-faced adolescent Americans.

Presented in a straight-forward manner designed to emphasize their innocence, each young man and woman depicted wears a t-shirt with a slogan decrying America's post 9/11 policies and actions. In the accompanying catalog essay Mr. Nava did not mince words when describing what he viewed as the "breathtaking arrogance, exceeded only by stunning incompetence" of the Bush/Cheney administration. One memorable tapestry from the show is of a young woman with straight blonde hair who faces the viewer with some apparent shyness. Her blue t-shirt says, simply "America Tortures."

Image by John Nava, 2006 | Jacquard Tapestry | 114 x 77 inches

After the gallery received nearly 100 phone calls, some threatening, Mr. Nava attended the opening with a bodyguard. He also caught the attention of Dr. Laura Schlessinger, who mentioned the exhibition in her weekly Santa Barbara newspaper column, slamming Nava for being part of an "anti-democratic" force that she characterized as "the greatest danger to world peace ever."

Ironically, the outcry caused by "Neo-Icons" points out one of Nava's greatest strengths as an artist, a strength that is readily apparent in his 22 foot square "Trojan Family Tapestry." Deeply knowledgeable about history, Nava takes the "long view" of art and history, but doesn't shy away from the particulars that define individuality and temporality. His USC tapestry features a procession of figures that emulates the reliefs of the Roman Ara Pacis of 80 AD, but at the same time features an image of a young man distractedly talking on his cellphone.

Each of the tapestry's 21 figures is an individual portrait of a member of the USC campus community; USC President Emeritus Steven Sample, alumni donor Ron Tutor, swimmer Rebecca Soni, and football player David Buehler, and 17 others. Each is beautifully individualized, but at the same time part of a flow that joins them together in time.

Woven near Bruges, Belgium, using cotton, wool and silk fibers, the tapestry also features a rich ground that Nava calls a "mosaic of texts." Among the included texts -- all taken from USC Library holdings -- are a 13th century Koran, a Mayan codice, an 1807 Japanese manuscript on the life of fisherman, and a page from the Nuremberg Chronicles. All of those texts, and many others, float in a field of binary code.

The wide range of historical and aesthetic sources quoted by the work create a kind of tension, something the artist fully intended. As Selma Holo, the Director of the USC Fisher Museum of Art points out, the tapestry makes "a point about the tension between the universal language of art and the moment." On the one hand, it seems fair to call Nava a traditionalist, but that assumption weakens if one considers his knack for contemporaneous details and images, and his fusion of traditional and new media. "Nava's art is always evolving and a unique blend of opposites; age-old tradition and cutting-edge technology," says his friend and fellow artist Jon Swihart.

The use of tapestry as a medium also adds to the feeling of timelessness that adds weight to the more particular and documentary aspects of the work. As Holo points out, most contemporary tapestries are reproductive, meaning that they are copies of recognizable works. A case in point would be the tapestry of Picasso's "Guernica" at the United Nations building in New York, commissioned by Nelson Rockefeller 16 years after Picasso unveiled the original mural. Nava, on the other hand, sees tapestry as a powerful medium for original contemporary works. That makes him one of a handful of artists re-inventing a medium that most art historians feel died 400 years ago.

Dr. Steven Sample, who recently retired after 20 years as the President of USC, is seen on the left side of the tapestry, walking alongside alumni donor Ron Tutor, taking part in the procession the way the donors might have in a medieval religious image. Sample, who Selma Holo credits with leading USC into the ranks of America's finest academic institutions, was standing in front of the installed tapestry recently when Nava asked him if he recognized himself.

"I recognize the University" Sample replied: a wonderful validation of Nava's achievement.

John Nava, 2010, The Trojan Family Tapestry: Detail of Figures.

John Nava has done something very rare in the field of contemporary art, offering a timeless portrayal of individuals in a democracy, moving forward together, bound to each other by mutual respect. It is worth noting that in the "Trojan Family Tapestry" the college president and the donor follow the students, acknowledging that they are the ones who will take this particular moment of time into the future.

John Nava will be speaking at an "Art Grand Opening" at USC's Tutor Campus Center on the evening of September 30th.

John Nava (Photo: Donna Granata)

Q and A with John Nava:

JS: Can you tell me just a bit about the influences behind your USC tapestry?

JN: For me the solution to depicting a "world" -- or perhaps more precisely a culture or human/societal milieu -- was the image of the frieze. The frieze of figures in passage within an environment was used by the Egyptians, famously by the Greeks in the Parthenon frieze and so on. I was particularly thinking about the frescoes of Piero della Francesca in Arezzo. In all these examples there is a certain formal, non-documentary realist aspect to the image. It has a "pageant" quality and is meant to be read, not as a "slice of life" scene but as a metaphor about the processes and timeless meaning of the life of the subject society.

At USC I was trying to show not only the grand, over-arching role of the university in civilization but also the ongoing process of perennial engagement and interaction with generations of students as they move through academe. Hence the juxtaposition of the students and the field of texts.

JS: You told the USC news service that you want the tapestry to reflect the "interior preoccupations and attitudes typical of all generations of students." Can you expand on that?

JN: I always think that the situation of students is hard to surpass -- they're young, beautiful and bright and get spend their time studying really grand and profound matters with fantastic scholars. However, as I remember from my days teaching, the kids themselves are not walking around in blissful awe but are, instead, wrapped up in all the adventures of this amazing period in their own lives with all the soap opera that often goes with it. So I wanted to get this quality as opposed to depicting them as bunch solemn medieval monks in procession weighted down by their intellectual labors.

JS: Did you also try to say anything particular about the current generation of students?

JN: I think that to make something "timeless" it is, perhaps paradoxically, necessary to be very observant and humanly true in the images of the figures. When we see a face in a toga on a wall in Pompey or another in a robe in a Flemish painting and it has that human truth we recognize it immediately and the ages that separate us from that work dissolve. And that recognition gives the image gravity and reality --we get it and we believe it.

So if I had done a similar group of figures from USC in the 1930's there would have been many of the same types peculiar to that school -- the football player, the cheerleaders, the band members and the kids in casual dress of time. But they would not have looked like they look now -- our time puts its own unique stamp on their appearance just as the classic texts they are seen with is saturated with binary code so typical of our age. But if the portraits were good and not stylized in some way to make them seem dated we would still connect with those figures and hopefully recognize them as a reflection of ourselves.

Courbet the Trout: Matisse the Goldfish

2010-10-03T17:11:00.001-04:00

Gustave Courbet, The Trout, 1872
Oil on canvas, 21 5/8 x 35 in (55 x 89 cm), Kunsthaus, Zurich

"Fish, I love you and respect you very much. But I will kill you dead before this day ends."

- Ernest Hemingway "The Old Man and the Sea

I recently came across three of Courbet's trout paintings on the Facebook page of Brooklyn painter Kyle Staver. Staver, who notes that "Courbet's Trout are as tragic as the last act of King Lear," has a keen eye for what French artists meant to say with their fish.

She also has a great feeling for contrast, and she offered one up in the same post. "Matisse's Goldfish" Staver notes, "conjure languid dreaminess and introspection." Her insightful comments triggered my imagination and the contrasts began to take shape.

Matisse's "Goldfish and Palette," now on display at MoMA in the exhibition "Matisse: Radical Invention 1913-17," is the work of an artist who methodically screened out the world. Courbet, a heroic, brash man relished confrontation and engagement. The two artists were so different -- in their aesthetics and in their masculinity -- that looking at their work side by side is both a jarring and revealing exercise.

Above: Details from paintings by Courbet and Matisse

In January of 1912 Matisse traveled to Morocco, remaining there and painting, mostly in Tangier, until April. As art historian Jack Flam has written "Matisse appears to have been impressed by the fact that goldfish were objects of contemplation in Morocco." Apparently, goldfish in bowls were common in Moroccan opium dens which he visited. Whether Matisse inhaled or not, the languid visual pleasure of it all mesmerized him, and when he returned to Paris he installed a goldfish bowl in his studio.

Looking at Matisse's many paintings of goldfish, it is obvious that they the fish in the bowl were a great decorative item: flashing bits of living color to be stared at in an interior. Interiors, of course were crucially important to Matisse, a man who craved domestic order and carefully orchestrated aesthetic satisfaction.

In "Goldfish and Pallette" the interior has been abstracted: purged of descriptive details like many other Matisse canvasses of the period. The interior tones of gray and black, colors Courbet would have appreciated, set off the sharp orange of the goldfish. The canvas is an exploration of the world seen through a willful, imaginative intellect.

In some respects the goldfish may serve as an allegory of the artist's experience. Matisse's friend, the painter Jean Puy felt this way, once writing "I can easily imagine a valiant goldfish who takes intense delight in all the rainbow colours and forms visible through the distorting form of his glass bowl..." Matisse's wife, whose job it was to keep the world from intruding into his peace, reportedly called her husband "The Goldfish" from time to time.

Henri Matisse. Goldfish and Palette, 1914-15,
Oil on canvas, 57 ¾ x 44 ¼" (146.5 x 112.4 cm)
MOMA, New York. Gift and Bequest of Florene M. Schoenborn and Samuel A. Marx
© 2010 Succession H. Matisse/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Matisse's dedication to art was his way of keeping his mind off the world's problems: he painted his "Goldfish with Pallette" during the brutal opening years of World War I. In 1943 when his wife and daughter were arrested by the German Gestapo for acts of resistance, he distracted himself by making lithographs to execute Baudelaire's "Les Fleurs du Mal."

Ultimately, Matisse's natural disengagement became a great asset. After a 1941 surgery for abdominal cancer gutted him and confined him to bed he created some of his most joyful works. Working in a suite of seaside hotel rooms -- his goldfish bowl -- physical pain and infirmity left his acute aesthetic sensibility intact, even enhanced.

If Matisse was a goldfish, Courbet was a trout: a wild, rugged river fish, brushing against rocks, swimming against the current.

Courbet, who had grown up in Ornans near the Swiss border always saw himself as a man of the country, strongly aware of nature. His art depicted on nature unvarnished, channeled truthfully by an objective brush. A "man's man" he was the Ernest Hemingway of painters.

A non-conformist who had turned down the cross of the Legion of Honor when it was offered to him by Napolean III, Courbet was an anarchist/socialist in his politics. In 1871 he spent six months in prison -- where he suffered from severe hemorrhoids -- for having advocated the demolition of the Vendome Column during the short-lived Paris Commune. "As much a hunter as a painter..." according to one early biographer, Courbet found solace in fishing after his release.

Courbet's 1872 canvas of a dying trout, bleeding at the gills, still on the hook, is painted in an unflinching realist style. Signed on the lower left in red oil paint, it is also inscribed with the Latin phrase "vinculis faciebat: (made in bondage)"

Just what Courbet was referring to is unclear. A weary man who would die five years later of alcohol related disease, perhaps he had come to see life itself as bondage, death as release. Courbet didn't shy away from death: he respected and confronted it. He seems to have had what the mythologist Joseph Campbell would call an atonement relationship with the trout, defeating it while respecting it. His painting both displays the sturdy fish both his trophy, but offers it immortality as well. Put another way, Courbet painted the fish as a form of apology.

Courbet prided himself in resisting the containment of culture in any form. He asked that "When I am dead, let it be said of me: 'He belonged to no school, to no church, to no institution, to no academy, least of all to any regime except the regime of liberty."

Matisse was a cultivated man who was comfortable in urban culture: an aesthete and a Parisian. He liked his nature refined, constrained and abstracted. He didn't share Courbet's need to conquer and subdue nature, but instead identified with it:

"When we speak of nature it is wrong to forget that we are ourselves a part of nature. We ought to view ourselves with the same curiosity and openness with which we study a tree, the sky or a thought, because we too are linked to the entire universe."

Courbet and Matisse were very different men; one a tragic Loue river trout, the other an elegant goldfish. What they shared was a profound sense of life's suffering. One of them swam against the current all his life until he was hooked. The other circled in his bowl content, peering out at the shimmering rainbows projected by the life outside.

Carl Jung says that water represents the unconscious. Following that idea, there is one more striking contrast that Courbet's trout and Matisse's goldfish can suggest. Courbet at the end of his life was a fish out of water. For just a moment, bloody and defeated, he transcended his own mind and courageously viewed life for all it its full terror and glory. Matisse, a goldfish swimming in the water of his own subconscious, came to know and control his own mind, a brave act of a very different kind.

Click to view video below:
Henri Matisse: Goldfish and Palette, Courtesy of MOMA Multimedia

I Don't Deconstruct

2010-09-14T19:32:00.002-04:00

Image courtesy of "Artoons" by Pablo Helguera

Several years ago I was invited to lunch by the faculty of a large college. They wanted to talk about how we could encourage students from the small college where I teach to transfer to their institution. The meeting started out cordially enough, but I almost choked on my chicken salad when one professor made the following stern pronouncement: "If your students don't deconstruct, don't send them here."

In the awkward silence that followed I realized that I was essentially the bastard at a family reunion. After all, I don't deconstruct myself, even though I do have some vague ideas about what the word means. How, I wondered, would I make it through dessert without letting on that I wasn't dedicated to Derrida or fluent in Foucault?

If I slipped up, I might ruin the future of some of my students who would be tainted by their connection to me: the charlatan who didn't teach them how to deconstruct.

Image courtesy of "Artoons" by Pablo Helguera

When I was in college -- the late 70s -- my studio art professors said next to nothing about theory, but they had quite a bit to say about spontaneity. After all, being spontaneous meant being unconstrained, an appealing idea at the time. It also provided a connection to the revolution in American painting that had been brought on by Jackson Pollock, the action painter. That revolution had hardened into an academy, and the academy spawned academics.

Because "Action Painting" had prevailed in the 1950's when they were young artists, my teachers felt connected to the idea that every brushstroke was a kind of liberating gesture, and drips were the tangible symbols of freedom. One of my friends actually remembers a critique from that era where each painting was judged in terms of having "good drips" or "bad drips."

Ironically, we were learning that we had to be "free," but learning to be free meant conforming to the values of the dominant style.

Image courtesy of "Artoons" by Pablo Helguera

The idea of that drip-based critique seems laughable now, but each generation of artists, professors and students seems to develop its own set of rigid rules and values. By the time I became a professor myself, in the mid-80s, freedom and spontaneity had been banished, along with technical skill. Technical skill had, of course, been discredited by the generation of artists that embraced freedom and spontaneity.

Postmodern theory, an intellectual approach to art making, had taken over. If you could handle it, you could be part of what was next.

When I taught art history at Art Center in Pasadena I would look over the student gallery and notice something that concerned me. Students with strong traditional rendering skills were majoring in Illustration, while students in Fine Arts made works that required intellectual theory. Some of them may have had skill, but they generally hid it to avoid being sent to the Illustration Department, a demotion in rank.

Being able to "deconstruct" requires speaking and understanding a certain type of language, and subscribing to certain intellectual theories. People who are comfortable deconstructing converse in a language I call "artspeak." Artspeak is -- for contemporary artists, curators and critics -- what Latin was for Medieval priests: an esoteric language that separates and elevates.

I was recently reading an exhibition review on the Saatchi Online website, which opened with this sentence: "Cordy Ryman manipulates and reconstitutes an inherited visual language, defining himself in relation to it."

That is artspeak. Reading it, I felt that I had learned very little about Cordy Ryman or his art. Instead I felt that I was about to read a review that tried to justify an artist's work with words that had little real connection to it.

I am a big believer in pluralism, and am convinced that very compelling works of art can be made without conforming to any style or way of thinking. In my view there is terrific work to be found everywhere. When I first heard the phrase "Let 1,000 flowers bloom," I felt that it expressed an affection for pluralism, and I repeated the saying fairly often.

Later, I learned that the quote had come from Chairman Mao, who historians generally hold responsible for not just the Cultural Revolution but the murder and death of over 50 million Chinese. Add to that, Mao had talked about a hundred flowers, not one thousand:

"Letting a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend is the policy for promoting progress in the arts and the sciences and a flourishing socialist culture in our land."

Authoritarians, I have come to realize, sometimes pose as populists. Interestingly, Postmodernism is often associated with a "plurality of styles," something that more authoritarian academics seem to have forgotten.

So, I don't talk about 1,000 flowers blooming any more, but I do take an interest in all forms and styles of art. I have seen plenty of Postmodern art that I appreciate, even if I am not conversant in the language that often accompanies it.

It does seem to me that the artists Donald Kuspit calls "New Old Masters" haven't been written about as much or as well in the past decade as they should have been. Maybe that is because artspeak doesn't apply very well to their work, which consistently demonstrates high levels of skill.

Skill, which is about practice and the mastery of techniques over time, doesn't deconstruct well. It also connects to long standing values and traditions, something that can cause problems for artists who want to be part of a vanguard.

All in all, my intention is to write about works of art and artists simply because I like them. The human being behind every work of art interests me quite a bit, but the categories, schools of thought and doctrines that they might be connected to really don't. I take the approach that the Dalai Lama suggests, looking for what I have in common with people -- and artists -- before I consider how we might differ in our views.

I actually made it through the luncheon pretty well once I composed myself. After dessert I noticed a "construction" that had been left from an earlier critique, and I knew just what to say: "The overtly lyrical variations of scale create a plastic ontology of form."

I may not deconstruct, but I am a pretty good mimic; a weed who knows how to look like a flower.

I keep in mind that over the long haul all styles are period styles. Each style is a carefully cultivated garden that a new chairman will want to uproot when the next Cultural Revolution comes along.

Leonard Koscianski: Fierceness is Useful

2010-09-07T17:37:00.001-04:00

Leonard Koscianski

Painter Leonard Koscianski turned 58 in April, and a fair amount of water has flowed under the bridge of his life. There have been losses along the way, including a son and a first marriage, but his art is burning brightly. When his solo exhibition, which Koscianski feels is his "most visceral show ever," opens at OK Harris Works of Art on September 11th he will unveil a suite of paintings that have the clarity of waking nightmares.

Featuring dogs and birds that clash in a nocturnal landscape, the paintings are fierce, polished and intense. Intensity, a family trait, is the engine that drives Koscianski's life and art. Raised by a father who was a self-employed attorney and a mother who became an energetic fashion designer late in life, Koscianski witnessed the power of drive early on.

With his three surviving children now young adults, the energy Leonard used to pour into parenting now goes elsewhere. He starts each day at dawn, taking his coonhound "Scout" on a 5 mile run through the streets of Annapolis. Painting begins by 9, followed by lunch at 1:30. Amazingly, his lunch -- a peanut butter sandwich, potato chips and an apple -- has not varied in 30 years.

At 2:15 Koscianski is back in the studio, refreshed and ready to exert all the physical and mental energy he can muster, battling with his paintings into the evening. When I asked Koscianski about his palette and color choices he told me that he "sweats color." No wonder his finished paintings gleam with ferocity, a quality that the artist wants his viewers to recognize, fear and value.

"Fierceness is in all of us," he observes, "It erupts from the depths of our animal brain. As we mature we learn to control it... when uncontrolled it can destroy us. Reaching any difficult goal requires a certain amount of inner fierceness."

In an effort to channel his own ferocity Koscianski has built a career as an iconoclastic artist, guarding the integrity of his art while attempting to stifle his own ego. Seen another way, Koscianski is a very civilized man with a highly developed wariness about the potential for violence in both the real world and in the inner world of his imagination. The studio is where he struggles to forge a balance between the two.

As an undergraduate, Koscianski first studied art history and architecture. The architect and futurist Buckminster Fuller was one memorable professor: art historian Gabriel Weisberg, a specialist in 19th century French art, was another. Later, as an art student at the Cleveland Institute of art Koscianski was hired by Museum Director Sherman Lee to paint copies of old masters on Sunday afternoons. He made 17 copies this way, an invaluable experience.

The experience of copying old masters, and the influence of two books, "Beyond Modern Sculpture" and "The Structure of Art," both by Jack Burnham, rescued him from what he calls "the clutches of doctrinaire Modernism."

By the time he found himself in the MFA program in painting at UC Davis, Koscianski already knew that his heroes were mainly 19th century artists. The Swiss symbolist Arnold Bocklin, the oddball Romantic Henry Fuseli, and the sculptor Alfred Bayre -- who famously depicted a jaguar devouring a hare -- were among those who fascinated him. Clash and conflict is also a feature of Kosacianski's all time favorite painting: Raphael's "St. George and the Dragon," in Washington's National Gallery.

While at Davis, Koscianski served as a teaching assistant for the famously good-natured Wayne Thiebaud. Following Thiebaud's lead, Koscianski made vague attempts at "Pop" art, but the style didn't suit him.

"I made still life paintings that were strongly influenced by him," Koscianski recalls, "but his were light and humorous while mine were dark and threatening."

Leonard Koscianski "Pliers," 1979, pastel on paper, 40" x 30"

Koscianski did paint one landscape painting in grad school, but it wasn't until he was teaching at the University of Tennessee that animals began to appear. Dogs, pigs and sheep began to "people" his landscapes from that era, and dogs especially have been recurring images ever since. The settings tended to be the edge of nature where it collides with civilization, specifically suburban civilization. Growing up in Cleveland, "a town of small suburban houses," had left lingering stage sets in Koscianski's mind.

Leonard Koscianski "Suburbia," Oil on canvas, 48″x 66″, 2001
Private Collection

In "Suburbia," a 2001 oil, a stray dog with its head lowered approaches a solitary figure, distracted the by the light of a television. Although the painting carries potentially straight-forward symbolism -- animal violence can find you when you aren't looking -- Koscianski has always made it clear that he doesn't give his paintings specific meanings. That job belongs to the viewer.

"You project your experience," Koscianski insists, the meaning of his paintings is "...never meant to be fixed."

As a result, viewers have to cope with the moral ambiguity of Koscianski's imagery. Dogs, so often seen as images of loyalty -- man's best friend -- are feral and bloodthirsty in his work. Similarly, the birds of prey in his recent paintings might strike some as a militant, terrifying images, while others would recognize them as the mascot of their high school football team. Standing in front of one of Koscianski's animal paintings tends to bring up the question of whether the viewer should feel attacked or defended.

Leonard Koscianski "Man's Best Friend," Oil on canvas, 40″x6″, 2005
Private Collection

Not surprisingly, Koscianski has been told that the creatures in his paintings have reminded people of their attorneys, or their former spouses. Commenting on the fact that his New York exhibition will open on September 11th, he acknowledges that his works will likely be seen as alluding to the "fierceness" of the terrorists attacks 9 years before, and to the wars that followed. It is a connection he is aware of, but not one that he specifically set out to reference.

Leonard Koscianski "Animal and Other," 2010, oil on canvas, 46" x 64"
Courtesy of OK Harris Works of Art

The tensions of Koscianski's paintings are the same tensions that the Romantic artists he admires also struggled with. He seems to have taken to heart William Blake's famous advice to young artists:"Seek out those images that constitute the wild..." When Blake gave that advice, he was asking artists to search for the grand forces that had upset the appearance of order that earlier culture had struggled to erect. Those forces, as the Romantics and those who followed them increasingly argued, came from deep inside.

Leonard Koscianski, an artist who read stories to his children every night while they were growing up, understands that the mind is where history is made. His job, as he sees it, is to remind us of the struggles that go on there. In Koscianski's mind the dog and the bird both seem quite fierce, but they are evenly matched.

Jon Swihart: Jean-Leon Gerome Is His Master

2010-08-12T15:34:00.001-04:00

Artist Jon Swihart holds Gerome's "The Gulf of Aqaba," an 1897 oil on canvas

Jon Swihart, a Santa Monica artist known for his highly refined figurative paintings, has a genuine obsession with the artist Jean-Leon Gerome (1824-1904). In revering Gerome, a largely forgotten 19th century French academician, Swihart has chosen an obscure master who most contemporary critics feel was a reactionary of the worst sort. As Swihart's friend and fellow artist Peter Zokosky notes: "When Jon discovered Gerome, he couldn't have found a more out-of-fashion artist, so you know the connection has to be real."

In his review of "The Spectacular Art of Jean-Leon Gerome," on view at the Getty Center in Los Angeles through September 20th, LA Times critic Christopher Knight casts Gerome as a wrong-headed artist, a lingering academician in a world tilting towards modernism who "didn't have a clue."

Knight, who discounts the illusionism and technical virtuosity that made Gerome famous in his own time goes on to remind his readers that "From Manet to Cezanne, every artist we revere today was on the other side of Gerome's fight." Gerome was indeed a vehement opponent of the Impressionists who refused to attend a memorial for Manet in 1884. After all, Gerome felt that Manet, a pioneering Impressionist, had "...chosen to be the apostle of decadent fashion, the art of the fragment..."

Just how did Swihart, a Californian born 50 years after Gerome's death, manage to choose such an iron-clad reactionary as his artistic role model? The answer begins with a tragedy.

Jon Swihart's parents were both Sunday painters, so art was around him from an early age. He was part of a happy family until the late 1960s when his mother became seriously ill. When she died in 1970 the family was "destroyed" and in short order Swihart's two older brothers were drafted into military service. What had once been a warm family home felt deserted and sad. Swihart, then 15, began to spend many hours in his room alone, and at the Santa Monica library where he lost himself in art books. Art gave him a feeling of being connected to his mother -- and to his grieving father -- and provided a distraction he desperately needed.

The images that attracted him most were by 18th and 19th century artists. JMW Turner and Claude Lorrain were briefly favorites, but one day a catalog of an exhibition by Gerome appeared. How the catalog, published in 1972 by the Dayton Art Institute, made its way into the Santa Monica library is something Swihart wonders about to this day. From the frontispiece on he was hooked: Gerome's remote, burnished images engaged him, spoke to him. The artist's subjects -- slave auctions, Muezzins calling from minarets, nude statues coming to life to kiss their creators, triumphant gladiators -- were heady stuff for a teenager from Santa Monica.

His art was "...different, exotic, strange, photographic, perverse," Swihart recalls. Those very qualities had once made Gerome and his equally popular peer Bouguereau the best known, and wealthiest artists in France. The two academicians, stars of state sanctioned salons, were enemies of the avant-garde, emboldened public acclaim and financial success. Bouguereau, who the modernist Matisse famously studied with, and despised, once bragged that "Every time I piss I lose five francs."

Remarks like that helped put the nails in the art historical coffins of the late 19th century academics, who were seen a few decades later as colonialist pimps, chauvinists, and aristocratic lackeys. The Impressionists, once outcasts, became the heroes of the middle-class whose lives they celebrated with glowing patches of complimentary color. Both characterizations were flawed, but over time they stuck.

Gerome, whose father-in-law art dealer Adolphe Goupil was a marketing genius, became wealthy by having reproductions of his work mass marketed. During his lifetime Gerome's works were printed in every size, from playing card size on up, and for the right price he even made copies of his own works. Over time the overexposure of Gerome's work has been one of the factors in the decline of his reputation with critics and art historians. Not surprisingly at least one commentator has noted that "The similarities to (Thomas) Kinkade especially are almost endless."

At the time he discovered the Gerome, Jon Swihart certainly had no concerns about the man's tainted place in art history: he was a figure to be idolized. Poring over and re-reading the Gerome catalog endless times, he noticed that one of the authors was a "Gerald Ackerman." He was shocked to find that Mr. Ackerman was professor of art history at Pomona College, just an hour away. Mustering up his courage he called Ackerman on the phone, and that phone call initiated a 28 year friendship based on a shared fascination.

When he entered Cal State Northridge, Swihart took his first art classes and found only one instructor, a photo-realist named Bruce Everett, who was sympathetic to his singular approach. Swihart, was already an unorthodox figure, who quietly noted that most other students and many of the instructors "simply couldn't draw." Abstract painting was the academy of the moment.

Everett watched Swihart, a shy student at first, develop a series of paintings based on rituals and situations gleaned from Renaissance paintings. Often mistakenly viewed as religious paintings, Swihart's Northridge works helped him make friends with other students who often posed for him. They also allowed him to display both his wry sense of humor and an agnostic fascination with the drawing power of rites and religious symbolism.

Jon Swihart "Untitled," 1980, oil on panel, 11 x 16 inches

As Bruce Everett recalls, after a certain point he had little left to teach Swihart, who was already very much a connoisseur, a man charting his own course. After completing college, earning a BA in 1979 and an MA in 1982, both in art, Swihart was moving against the grain of the contemporary art world. Despite his diplomas he was to some degree a self-taught artist whose most important lessons had come from conversations with a living art historian and a dead French academician.

In 1988 Swihart was selected to live and work at Claude Monet's newly restored home and gardens in Giverny, France. Spending nine months in France, which Swihart recalls as the "greatest period of his life," he spent his free time "Geromeing," seeking out every trace of the artist he could find. On his first day in Paris, Swihart visited Gerome's tomb in the Montmartre Cemetary.

There, he found that the cast of "Sorrow," a grieving figure that Gerome had made in response to the death of his son Jean in 1891 had been removed from the grave site. It had been covered with pigeon shit after an overpass had been erected overhead some years before. He also worked hard to locate the site of Gerome's studio, which had been destroyed in a World War II bombing raid. Pigeon shit, bombing raids and hostile critics, it turns out, had all taken their toll on the legacy of the artist Swihart so deeply admired.

There is tremendous irony in the fact that an artist living in Monet's home spent so much time researching the life of the "sword and sandals" painter who had scorned Impressionism. The paintings Swihart made while in France -- sober, precise landscapes with leaden skies -- have none of the vivid colors or excited brushwork that living in Monet's home might have inspired in another artist. During his time in France, and on a second trip five years later, Swihart tracked down and traded stories with the descendants of Gerome's three daughters, located and took photos of his homes, and amassed a "treasure trove" of material.

A selection of Gerome drawings on view in Jon Swihart's home

Today, Jon Swihart lives and paints in the same home that he grew up in, surrounded by his Gerome treasure trove which now includes 3 oils, 13 drawings, 3 bronzes, 65 or so letters, and a number of original photos of the artist. Also on display at Swihart's home -- which feels like a boutique museum -- are his own works, a painting by Gerome's son-in-law Aime Morot, an oil by Ernest Meissonier, and a bust of Gerome by Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux. A partial list of other items on display -- antique casts, Russian icons, Gladiator helmets and a reproduction of a 3.2 million year old human skull -- gives some idea of Swihart's collecting impulses.

Paintings and bronzes by Gerome and Aime Morot on display in Jon Swihart's Dining Room

Swihart has also been collecting friends. Once a month his backyard fills up with artists, art historians and anyone else who cares to come, for a potluck barbeque followed by a guest lecture by one of Jon's art world friends. Sometimes there is entertainment as well. Towards the end of one potluck a few years ago a group of fire-spitters imported from the Venice Boardwalk literally stopped traffic in front of Swihart's house. It was a spectacle that Gerome would have admired.

He also would have admired Swihart's recent paintings: callipygian female nudes, with no traces of visible brushwork. They are the artistic descendants of the statue who came to life in Gerome's "Pygmalion" and the alabaster-skinned women who stood on the block in his "Slave Auctions." Swihart, over time, has been able to create figures of jaw-dropping smoothness that have a hint of immortality about them.

Swihart, modestly enough, is careful to state that he is "not even close" to his master, and is reticent to compare his abilities to Gerome's.

Jon Swihart, "Nude with Chair," 2009, oil on canvas, 11 1/2 x 15 1/2 inches

On August 21st, Jon and his friends will gather at his home to honor Gerald Ackerman who will be celebrating his 82nd birthday. Ackerman, who is credited by the curators of the Getty Gerome exhibition with "nearly single-handedly" keeping Gerome scholarship alive for the past 30 years, will be speaking about the Getty exhibition and about Gerome's work. Jon Swihart, who has seen the show at the Getty seven times already, says it is "tremendous" and that nearly every work on display shows the artist at his best.

At the Getty bookstore, "Reconsidering Gerome," a book of ten essays meant to help scrape the critical pigeon shit off of Gerome's reputation, is on sale for $27.50. However, the store will not be carrying a unique item that Jon Swihart says is the very first thing he would grab if his house caught on fire.

It is an uncanny object: A Gerome "Action Figure" created by Peter Zokosky as a recent birthday gift for Jon Swihart. If art history had gone differently, maybe factories in China would be cranking these dolls out, and aspiring young artists across the world would be playing with them, setting them up at plastic easels and offering them tiny baguettes and molded wine bottles. It would be a world where prodigies would be called "Mini-Geromes," not "Mini-Monets."

A Jean-Leon Gerome "Action Figure" created by Peter Zokosky

Swihart says that when the figure was first presented to him, he freaked out a bit: he had a Pygmalion moment when for a split second the figure seemed almost alive. There, staring at him from behind a cellophane window was the reincarnation of his "master," the man who in artistic terms gave him "everything."

As strange as it sounds, Gerome really is a living presence in Swihart's life. There simply wasn't anyone alive who could teach him what he needed to know. "Jon's a great painter," says Peter Zokosky, "and he learned most of what he knows from Gerome." Somehow, across the barriers of time and public opinion, they reached out to each other and started a very intense conversation that isn't over yet.

Having that connection has remained essential, giving Swihart a critical anchor while the art world hems and haws, annointing new idols and dispensing with previous ones. Peter Zokosky puts it this way:"The academy never goes away, it just shifts, and there's always an approved academic style: today the academy loves Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons."

Towards the end of his career Gerome softened his views on Impressionism, stating that "...it was not so bad as I thought". Perhaps Gerome wasn't so bad as we thought either. Just the printed images of his paintings on a catalog page were enough to soften a young man's grief and lead him towards his future.

Author's Note:

Jon Swihart will be giving a "Point of View" talk at the Getty Center, on Saturday, September 11th. Sign-up begins at 1:00 p.m. at the Museum Information Desk. Free; no reservations required.

Links:

Getty Exhibition: The Spectacular Art of Jean-Leon Geromewww.jonswihart.com

All images courtesy of Jon Swihart

San Diego's Art Community Loses its Voice: Art Critic Robert Pincus

2010-06-25T17:30:00.003-04:00

Robert L. Pincus

After the news got out last week that Robert L. Pincus, the books editor and art critic at the San Diego Union Tribune, had been laid off, his Facebook wall was jammed with dozens of postings that both vented outrage and paid tribute.

"If there was an Art Flag in San Diego it's been lowered down today by the Union-Tribune letting go of our highly cherished and needed visual art voice -- Robert Pincus!"

- Nilly Gill

"If the public wanted intellectual depth and analysis, we just lost about 3/4 of it with your departure. It'll take decades to recover it."

- Roger Showly

The outpouring of respect meant a lot to Pincus, one of more than 30 staffers let go in a restructuring intended to give the Union-Tribune a "greater business focus." Of course, there were probably some people in San Diego who were quietly pleased: strong critics like Pincus have their enemies as well. After Pincus made a few choice remarks about artist Thomas Kinkade in a 2004 review some very sharp letters to the editor appeared to rebuke him:

"Obviously (art critic) Robert L. Pincus is one of the elite critics that doesn't have a clue."

- Norman L. Steiner.

"I take issue with Pincus' article. His choice of words illustrates a bias and disregard for facts. As owners of Thomas Kinkade Signature Galleries here in San Diego County, my wife and I have been proud to be associated with Kinkade and his artwork for more than 10 years."

- Mike and Linda Koligman

Pincus, who probably didn't actually mind being called "elite," has more than 30 years of experience in writing about art. His first reviews appeared in Art Week in 1979. By 1981, while he worked towards a dual PhD in English and Art History, he was writing art reviews for the Los Angeles Times. In March of 1985 he became the staff art critic for the San Diego Union, which became the Union-Tribune after a merger in 1992. On the side, he has contributed to national art publications including Art in America and Artforum, and for 12 years he has taught a course titled "Thinking Critically About Art" at the University of San Diego.

All told, Pincus has been the senior art critic for the San Diego region for 25 years, fulfilling the task the the Union entrusted him with when he was hired: to raise the bar on the written coverage of San Diego's art scene. When I asked Pincus what he had attempted to accomplish over the years, he put it this way:

"My ambition was to write criticism that was informed and accessible, to cover the scene from struggling galleries to the major museums. One of the things that lured me away from the academy was the pleasure of discovering emerging artists and championing their work in my writing, both locally and beyond. I also felt it was important to write about the institutions: their collecting activities, the quality of their curating and their history. I think this connects art to readers. Nor did I ignore public art: chastising bad projects and praising the great works that were created for UCSD's Stuart Collection."

Playing that role, over 25 years, Pincus brought constant recognition to the burgeoning art scene in San Diego. Ironically, just a few days before he was laid off, Pincus concluded his review of "Here Not There: San Diego Art now" by writing "It would seem that the era of San Diego artists as under-recognized is about to end."

It is tragic to realize that if Pincus is correct, his position was eliminated after he played a key role in bringing that very recognition to worthy artists and institutions.

In response to a flood of complaints he received after Pincus' layoff was announced, Jeff Light, the beleaguered editor of the Union-Tribune tried to reassure the community that arts coverage would indeed continue. In an email response to the concerns that came his way he stated:

" ...you should know that we have no plans to eliminate coverage of either the visual arts or of books. We will increase the presence of visual arts coverage in our Sunday Arts section. You should see, over time, more of what is happening at our museums and galleries, and hear more from the artists and curators themselves."

In other words, Robert Pincus won't be there to interpret, add context and screen out the hype.

To be fair to Jeff Light, the deciding factor in taking the UT through its seventh round of staff reductions was declining revenues. Just ten years ago, a job at the Union-Tribune was a prize that offered a future of steady employment: some longtime columnists used to joke that a job there was the equivalent of a "velvet coffin."

The internet and the Great Recession have changed that. After letting go of Pincus and other veteran staff members, the Union-Tribune announced that new positions for Junior Staff Writers, to be paid $36k per year, would be created. These low level staffers, "Under supervision, will research and write news and straight forward short stories with low level of complexity."

Other newspapers under financial pressure are also making tough calls, and Pincus isn't the first art critic to go. Sheila Farr of the Seattle Times took a buyout in late 2008, Alan Artner of the Chicago Tribune was let go in April 2009, and David Bonetti, art critic for the St. Louis Post Dispatch took a "voluntary layoff" last September.

In some respects, bloggers are taking up where critics have left off, but their qualifications are varied, and the pay ranges from nothing to next to nothing. In San Diego, at least one website, VoiceofSanDiego.com, is looking to hire an arts blogger. The job description for the position makes it clear that enthusiasm and familiarity with technology are desired, but that "previous arts experience is NOT a prerequisite."

San Diego, a city of 1.3 million people, home to more than 20 galleries and museums now has no senior art critic. Some would argue that it no longer has a real newspaper. Hugh Davies, whose position -- The David C. Copley Director and CEO of the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego -- carries the name of the man who sold the Union-Tribune last year after 8 decades of ownership, offered this tribute to Robert Pincus:

"For over 20 years, Robert Pincus has been a first-rate critic -- fair, intelligent and well-informed -- and he deserves great credit for the maturation of the art and museum world in San Diego. His departure from the paper is a huge loss to the visual arts community here. Support from our city's newspaper in the form of information but, more importantly, informed criticism is vital to San Diego's future growth and improvement as a vibrant cultural destination."

Davies' comments offer people who care about the arts something sobering to reflect on. What is being lost in San Diego, and in other cities, is the authority, erudition, and experience of local critics. Of course, with his credentials, Robert Pincus will likely find another job somewhere else, in teaching, writing or editing. He also has a few book ideas.

In the meantime, the Union-Tribune will have to work hard to convince its remaining readers that it cares about the arts. Gwen Gomez, who posted her thoughts on Robert Pincus' Facebook page, won't be holding her breath: "Our subscription to the UT is canceled."

Author's Note: In a recent "tweet" James Rainey of the LA times reports that Book agent Sandra Dijkstra has called for a boycott of San Diego Union Tribune if it does not reverse the termination of arts/book writer Robert Pincus.

A community forum addressing the Union Tribune's future coverage of books, arts and culture will be held at Warwick's Books, 7812 Girard Ave., La Jolla, on Friday June 9th from 7 to 9 PM. Panel members will include Jeff Light of the Union-Tribune, Robert Pincus, MCASD Director Hugh Davies, and Debra Ginsberg. For more information, please contact Susan McBeth: warwicksevents@yahoo.com

Don't Fear These Oil Rigs: They are Just Works of Art

2010-06-14T21:12:00.001-04:00

Artist Elyse Pignolet contemplates two sculptures she created with her husband, Sandow Birk

Southern California artist Sandow Birk is known for creating works of art that deal with unlikely and unsettling issues. His eclectic subjects, which have included inner city violence, war, politics, prisons, skateboarding and surfing, have gained him a reputation as being both "fascinating and unpredictable." Never timid when it comes to fusing ideas, Birk has demonstrated a knack for developing images that are challengingly ironic. One ongoing project, for example, is an American Qur'an.

Birk and his wife Elyse, also a socially conscious artist, have been collaborating on several projects in the past few years, including a powerful pair of oil platform sculptures made of objects found while beach-combing in Southern California. Completed a year before the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, they were initially meant by the couple to be read as looming, industrial presences, and also to make a sardonic comment on just what kind of flotsam and jetsam is washing up from the Pacific these days. In the wake of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, they now seem at least a bit more sinister than before.

In an email interview, I asked Birk how the two sculptures, ironically titled "California Dreaming," came about, and what they were meant to say. I also learned more about Elyse and Sandow's most recent collaboration, now on view at the Laguna Art Museum.

Above: a closeup view of the two "California Dreaming" Oil Platform sculptures

Q and A: John Seed interviews Sandow Birk

JS: I understand that the "California Dreaming" sculptures were made in collaboration with Elyse Pignolet. Tell me more about your collaboration.

SB: Elyse Pignolet is an artist and now my wife. Over the past decade we've collaborated on several things, from large scale public murals to our puppet film adaptation of "Dante's Inferno" and including an installation now up at the Laguna Art Museum. So collaborating with her comes easily. Usually we discuss ideas and work them out conceptually, and then we work together fabricating and building things. Since she has a background in ceramics and I'm mostly a painter, our skills combine pretty well.

JS: How did the sculptures come about?

SB: We both surf all around here in Southern California and at the local beaches we can see about five or six offshore oil platforms. In the past I've included them in paintings and drawings, and at some point we had the idea to make three-dimensional models of them. Using objects we collected on the beach - mostly plastic trash that washes up every day - seemed a perfect fit between form and function and content. And this was more than a year ago, long before the Gulf of Mexico BP disaster that's going on now.

The sculptures were initially shown at the Torrance Art Museum here in Los Angeles, then they were shown at the Mesa Art Center in show in Arizona, and most recently they're up at the Long Beach Museum of Art under consideration for the permanent collection there.

JS: Did the sculptures lead to the drawing titled "The Tempest?" What kinds of ideas, fears and sources are reflected by that image?

SB: Like I said, I had done several artworks that featured oil platforms because they're a part of my surfing experience here in L.A. There's actually one oil platform that has surfable waves in huge winter swells: Oil Platform ESTHER off of Seal Beach.

My drawing "The Tempest" is part of an ongoing series of large scale drawings. It was a continuation of my interest in the oil platforms as elements of industrialization in the urban surfing experience. Since I've spent so much time surfing near oil platforms in California, I didn't necessarily associate them with environmental disaster when I was making these artworks, but I saw them more as huge, ugly, looming factory like structures. With the recent events in the Gulf, obviously they have taken on an even more ominous sense of dread and disaster.

Sandow Birk "The Tempest"
2010. Sumi Ink, India Ink, Shoe Polish on Paper, 46" x 72".
Courtesy of Koplin del Rio Gallery, Los Angeles, and Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco

JS: Do you feel a bit prescient in having depicted oil rigs?

SB: I guess I sort of do, but I didn't think of it that much. But it is weird that I had done these works recently and then the oil platform caught fire in the Gulf. Its been a sort of slow growing disaster, from the first days of the fire, to the collapse, to the ever increasing estimates of oil flowing out and the ever increasing time passing and damage accruing.

In the past I had done a big series of paintings about inner city strife in Los Angeles, and just a couple of months after I had a big exhibition of them the riots broke out and lead to 4 days of unrest. At the time, people were saying my paintings had been prescient as well, so maybe I have a history of things like that tied to my artworks. Or maybe I just make works about social things that are so pressing they're about to explode.

JS: Do you have any comments you have about the BP spill?

SB: Well, I'm appalled and dismayed, obviously, at the inability of BP to get a handle on it, and at their constant assertions of estimated numbers that are increasing every time they make a statement. I wasn't aware that the potential for a disaster at this scale was even possible with an offshore oil platform. I can imagine that if the same thing happened of the California coast how devastating it would be, especially since the Pacific coast is so much more "open" ocean, in the sense that its more constantly moving with swells and storms and the beaches have much more wave activity - it seems like it would be much harder to protect the beaches and harder to clean up water at sea. It seems like it would be much worse and more out of control, which is very sobering to me, as someone who's at the beach almost every day.

JS: Tell me about your most recent collaboration, which I understand is included in a show of artist's "Shacks" at the Laguna Beach Museum of Art.

SB: Actually, Elyse Pignolet is doing a shack and I'm collaborating with her and assisting her. She's done a series of ceramic sculptures based on those elaborate chrome car rims, and we've done two miniature environments that go along with them, which are hidden inside the walls of the museum and only visible through peep holes in the walls.

Installation view of ceramics by Elyse Pignolet

Author's Note: The Long Beach Museum of art has just purchased the two "California Dreaming" sculptures for its permanent collection.

Links

SandowBirk.com

Elyse Pignolet

Artist's Shacks at the Laguna Art Museum

The Long Beach Museum of Art

Los Angeles Artist F. Scott Hess Walks the Tightrope

2010-06-03T14:34:00.006-04:00
F. Scott Hess, a painter whose works tend to magnify and reveal human frailties and failings, is a stable guy.

For the past 21 years he and his wife Gita have been living in Echo Park, just outside downtown Los Angeles, in a house that meanders up a steep hill. They have raised two daughters there, and when Scott hasn't been painting, he has been re-modeling and renovating a structure that came with plenty of flaws and quirks. The man who originally built the place, Scott tells me, had two main hobbies: construction and smoking marijuana.

As the structure's sober second owner, Scott has found that every time he peels off some drywall there are surprises, like supporting beams that were never nailed together. Bit by bit, he has located and repaired most of the problems, and the house now rests very securely above the Barrio meets Bohemia clamor of the neighborhood. Years of renovation - and years of paying down the mortgage - have resulted in a warm home that has grounded Scott's family and his in-laws, whose lives were turned upside down by the Iranian Revolution of 1979.

F. Scott Hess in his kitchen: a happy man
Photo by Jeff Doyle

The entry room, once a studio, is now a comfortable art-lined living room. A hallway leads up and back, past a book-lined study, to a dining area with windows that frame the view of a blooming fruit tree in a small courtyard. Over the years, the role of each room - and each level -- has been adjusted to create a kind of progression. The lower, front room is the welcoming public space, the dining room and kitchen are for entertaining friends and family, and the bedrooms are sequestered in the upper back section of the house.

As a recent dinner party was winding down, Scott mentioned to his guests that it was time to visit the studio, a small detached room at the top of the property. It took everyone about 60 seconds to stand up and trudge up the stairs for the visit. After all, when Scott Hess says "My private space is open to you," you know it won't be dull.

What a private space it is. The south wall is plastered with hundreds of art images, exhibition announcements and anything else that has gotten Scott's interest over the years. A host of oddities, some found, some manufactured, clutter the entry area. Part tree-house, part man-cave, part studio, part cabinet of curiosities, it is a place that feels very different than the house below.

There is no easel in the studio - there isn't much room for one - so Hess paints against the back wall. The first thing his guests saw when they entered was a striking work in progress: a painting of a man walking a tightrope. Tacked to the wall next to the image was a small poster of a Rococo painting, Watteau's "Gilles," which Scott later explained was source material for the tightrope walker. Although the man in the painting is roughly based on a neighbor, he is also something of a self-portrait. When I later asked Scott what the act of "balancing" stood for in the painting he replied:

"My sanity, my life, my reason for existence..."

"Gilles" by Antoine Watteau (left) provided the starting point for F. Scott Hess (foreground right) and his recent painting of a tightrope walker. In the photo Hess wears an oversized Confederate Army Uniform. Photo of F. Scott Hess by Marc Trujillo

Standing in his studio, facing his guests, Scott donned an over-sized felt Confederate Army jacket that is part of another ongoing project. Slated for exhibition at the Long Beach Museum of art in 2011, "The Paternal Suit: Heirlooms from the F. Scott Hess Family Foundation" will feature paintings, historical memorabilia and a host of other curiosities that Hess has been accumulating and inventing. Dealing with personal history, both real and invented, is another of Scott's balancing acts.

Hess has also been thinking hard about the way that family life shapes people. In his case the divorce of his parents when he was seven created a wound that art making has helped to address and heal. Thirty two years went by before he met his biological father again, and in the intervening years painting had provided the space where he speculated, fantasized and ranted about every aspect of what had happened, what might have happened, and what damage had and hadn't been done.

Once Scott had the jacket on his guests whipped out their iPhones and captured a very theatrical moment. In a coincidence that was both charming and un-nerving, he had become a kind of "Gilles" himself. In his studio, the Scott was a different man than the family guy who had baked lasagna for a dozen friends. The studio brings out his complex and vulnerable side.

This is the guy who has painted artists stealing Rembrandt paintings, women giving birth in the middle of nowhere, erotic disappointments, and girls watching looming fires. Come to think of it, the cast of characters in his oeuvre are the postmodern cousins of the Commedia dell Arte actors who surround the lonely figure of "Gilles." No wonder he feels the connection to Watteau.

Unlike many artists, Hess does not have a storage problem, as his works have consistently sold well over the years. Other than a few clunkers in his shed, his remaining paintings are with two dealers, Koplin Del Rio in Los Angeles, and Hirschl and Adler in New York. One major painting "The Colonel's Daughter" will be part of "Kink," a group show that opens in Los Angeles on June 5th. It used to hang on the wall of the artist's daughter Ava, who gave it up rather unhappily.

F. Scott Hess (b.1955)
The Colonel's Daughter, 2006
Oil on Canvas, 32 x 40 inches
Currently available at Koplin Del Rio Gallery, Los Angeles

"The Colonel's Daughter" deals with sex, a "complicated issue" that Hess has dealt with frankly for years. A reclining nude that updates the tradition established by Venetian artists 500 years ago, the woman in the picture puts men in an ambiguous situation. They are, in the artist's words "in the psychological position of either protector or rapist."

Hess feels that he couldn't paint a nude of this sort without an "edge" and in a sense this is a key to understanding what he does as an artist. During a 1993 trip to Iran, his art opened up and the "edge" sharpened, partly in response to having witnessed a society that was medieval in public, but obsessed with American porn and whiskey when the doors were locked. If the edge between your fears and fantasies isn't aired out, he realized, real madness will erupt. No wonder he practices the opening up of the private spaces in his home and in his life.

After the studio visit was over, Scott and his friends sat down for Persian cookies and conversation. Every now and then Scott takes out his digital cameras and snaps a few pictures, and I think a few people in the room were wondering if they might show up in his Commedia Dell Arte cast in the future.

If they do, they have nothing to worry about. F. Scott Hess may see the un-nailed joints in human behavior, but his goal is to fix them. He has done this for himself, and he may just do it for you too. As a younger artist his goal was to shock, but over the years he has become something of a handyman.

Links

"Kink: The Seduction of Art" at Koplin Del Rio Gallery

"The Colonel's Daughter"

The F. Scott Hess Museum at OpenMuseum.org

The Ghosts of Chairman Mao and Andy Warhol Haunt a Hong Kong Art Auction

2010-06-03T14:31:00.001-04:00

On Friday, May 29th, Christie's Hong Kong will auction 36 works of Asian Contemporary and Chinese 20th Century Art. Unless you pay close attention to Contemporary Asian Art you won't recognize the names of most of the artists included in the sale, such as Wang Yidong, Liao Chi Ch'un or Kim Dong Yoo.

There is, however, one name in the auction catalog very familiar to Westerners:

Andy Warhol.

Six of the ten Warhol prints of Chairman Mao offered by Christie's Hong Kong

Christie's is offering the suite of 10 silkscreen prints by Warhol as a single auction lot, in hopes of demonstrating a "dialogue" between Asian artists and Warhol. Christie's has emphasized this notion with a seamlessly produced video in which Chinese speaking and English speaking experts take turns discussing the auction lots.

Of course there is more than a cultural exchange at stake. After all, Warhol understood better than any artist of his generation the alchemy that could turn a square of canvas or a sheet of paper into a luxury item worth piles of cash. What living artist or auction house wouldn't want to "dialogue" about that process?

The subject of the Warhol prints is none other than Chairman Mao, who had become a media figure after Richard Nixon's meeting with him in 1972. Warhol understood that while Mao's actual political influence was fading, he was still an "icon" ready to have his reputation sanitized and transformed into a subject for a Capitalist art audience. An expert on mass culture if there ever was one, Warhol sensed that the propaganda image of Mao that he appropriated for his "Mao" series was no different from the head shots of celebrities that he had lifted from American magazines and newspapers.

The idea of fame, he realized, crosses cultures very nicely. Warhol also recognized that fame is a form of forgetting who someone really is, a necessary ingredient in depicting Chairman Mao. In a sense, the Mao images were also elegiac: Pop Art funeral portraits that would look very nice next to a coffin.

At the invitation of a friend, Warhol visited China in 1982, also stopping in Hong Kong to create portraits of society figures there. China fascinated Warhol, and China remains fascinated with him. Since Warhol executed his works in a studio he called "The Factory" he would be interested to know that mass-produced reproductions of his works can now be cheaply purchased on the streets of Dafen, China, where the artists are not nearly as well paid as Andy was.

An image of Mao in the style of Warhol (lower left) seen in Dafen, China.

Art produced by painting factories, for sale in Dafen, China.
Photos of Dafen by James Fallows for "The Atlantic"

Dafen, just northeast of Hong Kong, has been called a kind of sweat shop for artists. It is one of three Chinese "painting villages" that produce roughly 60% of the world's oil paintings. Dafen paintings, of course, are meant mainly for WalMart shoppers, while Warhol paintings are a favorite of billionaires.

In 2006 Hong Kong billionaire Richard Lau paid $17.4 million dollars for a 81 by 61 inch Warhol silk-screen painting of Mao. To put the price Lau paid in perspective, the art factories in Dafen produced about 4 million paintings in 2006, netting $36 million US dollars. Since then prices for Warhol paintings have risen while China's painting factories have felt the effects of the recession in the West.

In the upcoming sale, Christies has estimated that the group of prints on paper, from an edition of 50, will bring as much as $647k (US dollars). Given the current craze for Warhol on the auction market, the actual sale price should easily top one million dollars. Since China now has more billionaires than any other nation, perhaps a few will be on the phone to Christies, bidding for the images of the man who famously purged China's liberal bourgeoisie during the "Cultural Revolution."

If Warhol had been living in China during that period, he would have been sent to the provinces to grow turnips. Of course, that would have only happened if he had been lucky enough to live.

Capitalism, which is certainly thriving in China while it struggles in the West, is apparently ready to support a generation of elite artists. Kim Dong Yoo, whose painting "Marilyn Monroe vs. Marilyn Monroe" will be featured in the Christie's sale, might just become the "Korean Andy Warhol." OK, that is a scary thought.

Andy Warhol, if he were alive, would not be surprised to see Western culture and art so popular in Asia. In 1982, when Warhol was asked what he thought about China not having a McDonald's he commented:

"Oh, but it will. "

Chairman Mao, if he were alive, would find all of the art at Christie's, Western and Asian alike, quite decadent. In his "Little Red Book" Mao reminds us that:

"A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture..."

Who will remember Mao's words on May 29th? If anyone does, they will likely appreciate that Warhol's 10 prints give them a playing card Mao: a smiling clown in a variety of candy colors. They are the comic ghosts of a once powerful man, mass produced and pencil-signed, by a Western artist who carefully studied the transient nature of power and fame.

Warhol, who died in 1987, will also be ghost at the auction. A powerful spectre, his ideas have retained their power better than Mao's. He knew that in 2010, China would have McDonalds, and that art would be made in factories. The revolution is over, for now.

Authors Note: The set of 10 Warhol prints sold for $856k US.
Links:

Christie's Video Seminar: Asian Contemporary Art in the Global Market

Workshop of the world, fine arts division by James Fallows

Warhol in China: A video clip

Remembering Mao's Victims

Artist Julie Heffernan Paints an Allegorical World for Her Sons and Yours

2010-06-03T14:29:00.001-04:00

Julie Heffernan, Budding Boy 2010, oil on canvas, 78 x 65 inches

Preparing to send her older son off to college has gotten Julie Heffernan thinking hard about just what a young man needs these days. Of course, a mother who is a Yale educated painter married to a New York Sun theater critic is going to provide much more than a laptop and a futon from Target. A deeply intellectual and articulate artist, Heffernan is all about equipping the mind and the soul. They are, after all, the only tools that really matter.

Known for her allegory laden self-portraits, Heffernan's years of self reflection have come out the other side of middle age in the form of immense empathy for her two sons, and for young people in general. Playing the role of "a well-meaning older person," Heffernan has created a suite of paintings that fantasize a world that is meant to help furnish the dorm room of a young man's inner world.

The images, painted in a pastiche style reflecting the artist's engagement with Old Master paintings, take place in an allegorical landscape perfumed by dense vegetation and perhaps a whiff of opium. They are complex, dense paintings that reflect Heffernan's theatrical imagination: an imagination that art historian Kyle Culpit says scans the world through "...a decidedly feminist lens." Expertly picking up the technical tools and allegorical language of Northern Masters like Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Breughel, Heffernan manages to simultaneously secularize, feminize and pay homage to the artistic traditions they invented.

Although Heffernan began her series wanting to comment on the "bad" boys of the world who have screwed up government, climate, the economy and more, the paintings couldn't help becoming sweeter as the artist realized that being a mother gave her no other choice than being hopeful. "Let the 'bad' kids have the violent world of video games," Heffernan seems to say, "and I will give the good guys an enchanted forest of ideas where technology is irrelevant."

Julie Heffernan, Great Scout Leader III 2010, oil on canvas, 72 x 54 inches

In "Great Scout Leader III" a young man -- he could easily be a cousin of Botticelli's Venus -- lifts the peeled skin of a cityscape. His doting painter/mother has over-packed him for his allegorical journey, providing both a tool-belt stuffed with books and ropes, and also a latticed backpack inhabited by a bestiary of creatures and hung with icons. He does have a dagger -- just in case -- but there is very little threat implicit in his surroundings. The painting is oddly sweet and confident, and the young man seems calmly ready to manage the considerable complexity surrounding him. In fact, he is meant to thrive in complexity, and he will do so in concert with nature and with his own spirit.

Heffernan's art stands out: not just for its engaged optimism, but also for its pure visual richness. She hasn't held anything back in this show: not surprising for a painter who has no tolerance for art that "impoverishes the eye while purporting to appeal to the mind." Heffernan, whose personal imaginative process -- she calls it image screening -- gives her work tremendous density, is a visionary with more than a few things to tell us. It is that visionary quality, and her impulse to find symbolic expression for moral issues that again remind us of her artistic kinship with Bosch.

Of course, it is hard to know exactly how actual young men will respond to Heffernan's "Boys." In fact, when Heffernan spoke at the San Francisco Art Institute earlier this year, a student asked her what he own son thought of the imagery in her recent paintings and she realized she hadn't talked with him about that.

My bet is that he is very used to his mother's views and ideas, although if he puts up one of her exhibition announcements in his dorm room there may be some explaining to do. The way I imagine it, on Parent's Day, Julie Heffernan's son will introduce her to his freshman roommate. While gently rolling his eyes, he will say, with genuine affection:

"I'd like you to meet my mother, Hieronymus Bosch. "

Q and A: John Seed Interviews Julie Heffernan

JS:

Do the paintings in "Boy, O Boy" connect to your experiences as the mother of two sons?

JH:

They do connect, but I only realized that late in the process of painting them. I started out thinking that the paintings of the boys were going to be about all the "bad" boys out there messing up our world/climate/government/economy, which I wanted to rant about in this body of work.

In the course of making the work, however, and as my understanding of the paintings grew, the focus switched away from "bad" boys and became instead about transitions; how are we dealing with the transition from cultural adolescence to an imposed maturity as we face dire questions about our future as a nation? As a fossil-fuel powered economy to one that is still being defined?

What do we need to give up and take on in order both to bring wisdom and provide a toolkit for those who are going to be leading us into that future -- people moving out into the world, people starting off, and specifically, my boy going off to college?

In my mind I became a sort of well-meaning older person trying to impart wisdom to youth, knowing full well that they have their own tools, but wanting to heap on more, knowing that what we sneak into our kid's backpacks might come in handy for them someday.

Implicit within this is Dave Hickey's idea that art can argue for things, using the tools of creating beauty as its rhetoric: the rhetoric of persuasion. What I'm arguing for is recognition that, for a youth culture, there is wisdom to be found in the old: in Old Masters, in old parents, in old stories, in children getting older themselves.

JS:

Can you tell me a thing or two about some allegories that are present in the paintings? What can you tell me, for example, about the peeled, rolled soil that the boy stands on in "Great Scout Leader III?"

JH:

That started out, during the "bad" boy phase of the painting, as a gigantic animal skin, with the flesh still on it, bloody and fatty underneath the fur. But it wasn't working and that was because the boy wasn't a brute after all. So, the rolled soil became the skin of the earth that the boy is holding up, showing us what's inside: rocks falling, roots and darkness.

JS:

What can you tell me about the many icons, emblems and personal images that crop up in the show?

JH:

I keep finding myself creating "brains" or "minds" in my work, like the blossoming tree with structures and stuff crammed into it. In earlier work, there was an exploding chandelier as a mind on fire, bursting into flame.

In this body of work the mind manifests itself in "Self-Portrait as Big World" and "Self-Portrait as Tree House" as multiple rooms inside of miniature worlds: the world as a big ball or a tree. Some of the icons in the tree include a room with many kings, a room with a seesaw where a mouse is heavier than two boulders, a room with a man falling back in an armchair while boulders rain down on him, a room with a gigantic ball of fruit and tiny figures crawling around it, a room of animal mayhem.

In "Self-Portrait Moving Out" there is a landscape with pathways -- shoots and ladders I call them -- that take the eye up: to worlds within the canopies of trees where nesting birds reside. Or plunge you down where you stumble over boulders and other obstacles in your way. Two figures are hauling a massive heap of belongings across a rope ladder that is failing. Some of the belongings include large letters that spell "HELL" or "HELP" ("Hell," by the way, also means "light" in German).

In "Self-Portrait Setting Up Camp" I'm imagining re-making the world where the only people who exist are the Builders, the Buriers, the Mothers, the Healers, the Story-tellers, the Fishers, the Dreamers and the Growers. The trees are bedecked with billboard size copies of paintings that have given me wisdom in my life. Others are there for protection from the sun. The space is constructed as a gigantic spiral. As we end we begin again.

JS:

Is your show hopeful in terms of your feelings about the future of young men?

JH:

I can only be hopeful; I have no other choice since I chose to have kids.

When we have children we're forced to examine our choices and think altruistically. It would be immoral in a sense to create more imagery that contributes to the view that humans are worthless and ridiculous. One of the functions of adulthood is to model alternative behavior based on moral decision-making. The avant-garde, in its despair, decided that the only truth about humankind is that we are absurd. We needed to look at that at the time, and now, I think, we need to look at something else.
We are absurd, true, but we are also capable of wisdom, fine distinctions, altruism, generosity and hope. I do believe that art disconnects something important within itself when it allies itself to non-makers: artists concerned with concept alone and not the secrets revealed in the act of making. I think it's time for art to grow up. I know that every young person I've worked with has within him or herself a B.S. meter that has no truck with art that impoverishes the eye while purporting to appeal to the mind alone.

When is A Nude OK on Facebook?

2010-05-25T15:39:00.011-04:00

Painter Dan Sprick Got Caught in the
Uncertainty Over Nudity on Facebook

by John Seed

Note: this article also appeared on HuffingtonPost.com

Daniel Sprick, "Female Figure, Pregnant," 2010
36 x 24 inches, oil on panel

Last month, after posting several recent paintings of nude female figures to his Facebook page, Daniel Sprick, an artist who lives in Glenwood Springs, Colorado, got a surprise in his e-mail box. It was a warning from Facebook, notifying him that several images, including a recent oil painting of a pregnant woman, had been removed from his profile for violating the site's policies. After feeling upset "...for about 60 seconds" Sprick came to the realization that Facebook simply was not right place to display his recent figure paintings. The artist moved on promptly, setting up an online exhibition of his nudes at OpenMuseum.org, a site that offers artists and viewers social networking features.

Daniel Sprick "Self Portrait," 2010 24 x 18 inches, oil on panel

Sprick is a realist artist whose range of subjects -- still life paintings, landscapes and nudes -- is in fact utterly traditional. Add to that, his technique is academic and highly polished, to the point that many of his oil paintings appear close to photography. His stellar resume includes a one-man exhibition at the Denver Art Museum in 1999, and his paintings are in collections that include the National Museum of American Art at the Smithsonian, the Colorado State Capitol building and the United States Court of Appeals in Denver. That said, his nudes were not welcome on Facebook.

Why?

Facebook has gained a reputation as a site that is working hard to avoid some of the problems that others sites, including MySpace, have had with obscenity. When a Facebook user uploads photos to his or her profile, for example, they are asked the check a box certifying that the image is not pornographic. A search for the term "nudity" in Facebook's help section brings up a reminder that "Photos and videos containing nudity, drug use, or other graphic content are not allowed." Facebook employees respond to any reports of images that may violate these standards, and remove images deemed inappropriate. Keeping in mind that Facebook has many users under the age of 13, these policies seem appropriate and welcome.

For visual artists, this is where things seem to get murky. Sprick certainly does not consider his art obscene or pornographic. In depicting nudes, as he has done in the past two years, he is following a tradition that is at the humanistic core of Western Art. When he added the selection of his nudes to his profile, he knew that they would be seen by his nearly 1500 Facebook friends, including his 80 year old mother-in-law and his daughter. Would it ever cross the mind of an artist that his academic nudes would shock people who had in fact "friended" him knowing he was a fine artist?

After hearing Sprick's story I contacted Facebook to find out more about their policy in regards to art and nudity. Simon Axten, a Facebook representative who responded to my questions, e-mailed me the following response:

"Our policy prohibits photos of actual nude people, not paintings or sculptures. We recognize that this policy might in some cases result in the removal of artistic works; however, it is designed to ensure Facebook remains a safe, secure and trusted environment for all users."

In other words, Facebook is really looking to delete offensive photos, not works of art. What may have happened, in Sprick's case is that his paintings, which appear nearly photographic, were not recognized as works of art. Also, someone at Facebook made the judgment call that his images were in some way offensive. Was it the blunt realism of his images, or perhaps the suggestion of a sullen mood on the part of the pregnant model? Part of the brilliance of Sprick's painting is that is gives us a bracing visual reality combined with powerful human emotions. In creating his works of art, Sprick pays close attention to the actual and the credible.

According to Simon Axten it is the idea of "actual nude people" that keeps the Facebook staff on their toes. Considering the shocking incident in which Emma Jones, a 24 year old Welsh teacher working in Abu Dhabi, committed suicide after nude photos of her were posted on Facebook by an unknown party, their vigilance is more than understandable. "Actual" people can be deeply threatened by nudity, especially when they lose control of the image of their own body. I have to wonder: did the fact that Jones was a European working in an Arab culture, where women are expected to carefully cover their bodies, add to the tension?

In this tense situation, is there still room for art? If I were to post a nude from an art history textbook -- maybe Michelangelo's "David" or Botticelli's "Venus" -- would Facebook need to pull that? Even though Michelangelo's "David" displays male frontal nudity, he is not an "actual nude" person per se, right?

Daniel Sprick's 2010 "Female Figure, Pregnant" compared with Van Eyck's "Eve" of 1432

Sprick wonders if maybe one of his Facebook "friends" reported his nude to Facebook. Would the same "friend" have been offended by Jan Van Eyck's 1432 depiction of a pregnant Eve in the Ghent Altarpiece? It has been public view in a church for over 500 years, but would it be suitable for Facebook? It is an oil painting of a nude pregnant woman, after all. She was one of the first female nudes to appear in the early Renaissance, and maybe the fact that she was embarrassed by her own nudity is one of the reasons she was acceptable in a painting.

In my view, Facebook isn't the problem. The problem is that digital technology has over-exposed the body, especially the sexualized body. With teens "sexting" cellphone photos to each other, and an estimated 28,000 viewers looking at internet porn every second, the dignity of the human body is being trashed. The fact that Facebook has to be so vigilant about nudity says something about the era we live in, and it isn't pretty.

The downside of this atmosphere of vigilance is that the work of a committed, highly skilled artist, depicting one of the most moving, beautiful subjects possible -- a pregnant woman -- got tossed out as a result. I have to wonder how much damage this vigilance is doing in other realms as educators, parents and others "protect" young people from the nude as it increasingly becomes tainted by the association with obscenity. There was a time when the nude was banished from sight, and it was called the Middle Ages.

No doubt about it, if our children want to see true obscenity, they will find a way to Google it when we are out of the room. If they do, and chances are they will, they will get a lesson in how the body can be stripped of its dignity. Will they, on the other hand encounter works of art that will let them see the nude figure through the eyes of accomplished artists? Will they come to understand the body the way it should be seen, as the ultimate reflection of humanity and beauty?

If their parents and teachers are doing a good job, and exposing young people to the right works of art as they develop, they will. Left to their own devices, they will see -- for better and for worse -- what the internet has to offer. On Facebook, the body is in an uncertain situation, and in my mind the art museum just became even more important. In the meantime, the staff at Facebook is struggling to determine what people, especially young people, should and shouldn't see. Facebook is also international, and issues across cultures must be hot as well.

My guess is that they are having a very tough time. They are dealing with uncertainly about the nude body and how it should be seen by society at large. Interestingly, that is exactly what artists like Daniel Sprick do.

Links:

DanielSprick.com

Daniel Sprick at Open Museum

John Seed on HuffingtonPost.com

Picasso's "Recession-Proof" Harem

2010-05-15T12:38:00.012-04:00

Picasso's "Recession-Proof" Harem

Who Was Bidding on Picasso's 1932 Painting of Marie-Thérèse Walter?

By John Seed
johnseed@gmail.com

Images used in accordance with Fair Use Copyright Law
Please do not copy or excerpt text without the author's permission

This Article also appears on Huffington Post

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)

Nude, Green Leaves and Bust

oil on canvas
63¾ x 51¼ in. (162 x 130 cm.)
Painted on 8 March 1932

When Pablo Picasso painted "Nude, Green Leaves and Bust" in March of 1932, he was on the verge of international fame. As his biographer John Richardson states, his June 1932 exhibition at the Galerie Georges Petit "...would have world-wide repercussions; and would establish Picasso as the greatest modern artist." Picasso, who had turned 50 in October of 1931, was at the peak of his artistic virility. He was also four years into an affair with a much younger woman who he had become his sexual servant and the muse for his art.

"Nude, Green Leaves and Bust" has a sadistic vibe, as do many of Picasso's other portraits of his young mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter. He had in fact asked her to read the memoirs of the Marquis de Sade. Walter, who hung herself in 1977, once told an interviewer that Picasso had enjoyed having total psychological power over her. It was a sacrifice she made for "art." Arianna Huffington, the author of "Picasso: Creator and Destroyer" says of Marie-Thérèse: "She was an object that he alone possessed, proof of his power and sexual magnetism."

"Nude," which Picasso's biographer John Richardson says "celebrates the feminine submissiveness," depicts a woman as a kind of obedient decorative motif set among potted philodendrons and a plate of apples. It also includes a second image of Marie-Thérèse in the form of a work of art: an alert classical bust. Lurking behind both images, the artist's magnified profile appears as a black-lined shadow on a blue curtain. The artist's phantom presence was meant to camoflage his participation in the affair, but it also suggests that he is in control of his love object. Riffing on an idea often used by Matisse, Picasso fantasizes himself a sultan, and Marie-Thérèse is an odalisque in his harem.

Detail of "Nude, Green Leaves and Bust" with Picasso's profile in blue

In a 1932 essay, the noted psychiatrist Carl Jung described Picasso's imagery as being similar to that of his schizophrenic patients. Writing about Picasso's work in general, he could have been discussing "Nude, Green Leaves and Bust" specifically when he wrote:

"The picture leaves one cold, or disturbs one by its paradoxical, unfeeling, and grotesque unconcern for the beholder."

When "Nude" sold for $106.5 million earlier this month, there were eight clients vying for the work, two of whom continued their tussle past the $88 million dollar mark. Picasso, by the way, liked a good struggle. He once commented that the sight of Marie-Thérèse and another mistress, Dora Maar, wrestling on his studio floor was "one of his choicest memories."

It is doubtful that any of the avid bidders was thinking about Picasso's infamous quip that "...to like my paintings, people really have to be masochists." It also seems doubtful that any of the bidders were women. Picasso's portraits of Marie-Thérèse seem to attract wealthy, powerful men like casino owner Steve Wynn who famously stumbled and put his elbow through "Le Rêve" another 1932 depiction of Marie-Thérèse Walter.

What the eight Christies bidders shared, on the same day that a panicked Dow Jones Index briefly fell 1,000 points, was the fantasy of owning an image of power that they hoped would transcend time and economics. Dealer Richard Feigin attributes the astonishing price to “...a lot of money going around. It doesn’t want to sit in currencies so it goes into art.” New York art dealer Guy Bennett commented that certain masterpieces are "Recession-Proof." Picasso's bubble is apparently not ready to burst, or so the dealers say.

It wasn't always that way. Picasso wasn't always such a cold man, and his works were not only available to the super-rich. At one point, Picasso's art dealt with life on the fringes, and was something that wouldn't sell at all.

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)

Frugal Repast, 1904

Etching, Plate: 46.2 x 37.8 cm

When Pablo Picasso etched "The Frugal Repast" in 1905, he couldn't afford a proper copper etching plate. Instead he worked on a used zinc plate, which still bore traces of a landscape image, scraping his lines with a sewing needle. Copies of the print, which depicts an emaciated blind man and his consort hovering over a some heels of bread and a cheap bottle of wine, were then offered for sale for a single gold franc, about five dollars. When none sold, the struggling artist gave them away to his friends.

To put it another way, the etching was "worthless" except as a work of art that communicated feelings to a group of intimates. What kind of feelings? The Museum of Modern Art, which now holds one of the original copies, reminds us on its website that:

"The "Frugal Repast" reveals the artist's feeling for humanity, especially for the poor and others on the fringes of society."

This empathy for others, which was an important aspect of Picasso's early work, faded as his fame grew. In 1913 the original plate of "Repast" was re-faced in steel, so a larger set of now valuable etchings could be printed. Somehow this seems a metaphor for the transformation that Picasso himself went through over time. As the demand for his work grew, the artist showed his steely side, becoming increasingly remote and detached. The story of his life and art has been well documented by John Richardson, whose most recent volume "A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932" tells the story of the artist's progress and transformation.

Coming back to 2010, something needs to be said about the imperial prices paid for modern works by Picasso and others in the past decade. Who were those anonymous bidders phoning into Christie's on May 4th?

Interestingly, Christie's recently reported that "... clients in the Middle East increased by 30% in 2009, the highest increase of any geographical region in 2009, followed by Greater China with 20%. On the evening when "Nude" was sold, Edward Dolman, the CEO of Christie's told the New York Times that “The market is much stronger than we expected, with depth of buying from Russia, China and the Middle East.”

In 2007, a record price in excess of $72 million dollars was paid for a Mark Rothko painting by Qatari Emir Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani. The painting now resides in a $300 million dollar museum in Qatar, designed by I. M. Pei. What would Rothko, a Russian born Jew and lifelong leftist, have to say about the display of his work in a nation that was cited by a U. S. State Department report on "Trafficking in Persons" as a country where laws against forced labor are "rarely enforced?" Hell, he wouldn't even allow his paintings to be hung in the Four Seasons Restaurant in New York.

If I had to make a guess, I would expect that "Nude, Green Leaves and Bust" will soon hang in the Middle East. If it does, would its theme of feminine submission raise any eyebrows? If anything, the "harem" vibe of the work may be one of the factors in the high price it realized. Just thinking about this work, painted on March 8th -- now International Women's Day -- hanging in a country that observes Shari'a law opens up a complex set of intrigues and issues. How would a Picasso nude be interpreted in a country where it takes the legal testimony of two women to equal that of one man?

Then again, there are still wealthy Americans who might have been bidding. Maybe Steven Cohen, the hedge fund billionaire who had planned to purchase Steve Wynn's Picasso before it was punctured might have been the winner. Or perhaps a Russian oligarch, flush with oil and gas revenues?

Speaking of Steve Wynn, it is worth mentioning what he said after reflecting on the he accidentally caused to "La Rêve:"

"My feeling was, It’s a picture, it’s my picture, we’ll fix it. Nobody got sick or died. It’s a picture. "

In an era when the world economy is increasingly fragile, Wynn's sentiment seems almost quaint. Keep in mind, the accident to his Picasso caused its planned sale for $135 million to be cancelled, and the repaired painting is now said to be worth only $95 million.

Paintings, it seems are "Recession-Proof" commodities in a world where people generally mean less and less. To paraphrase comedian and art collector Steve Martin, it is a world where "business associates" are even better to have than friends. Picasso apparently has some new ones, and they can pay well.

If and when the identity of Picasso's most recent buyer is revealed, it is very likely to be a man who values art more than he values people. Men of that sort may lurk behind a curtain, but we may still recognize their profile in the shadows. "Nude, Green Leaves and Bust" was painted during the Great Depression, another time when powerful men especially cherished their fantasies of dominance and control.

Links

Video of Christie's Bidding for "Nude, Green Leaves and Bust"

A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years (1917-1932)

Open Line with Cecily Herzig

2010-05-11T19:48:00.001-04:00

Dear Open Museum Followers,
I hope you will enjoy my 5 minute phone interview with artist Cecily Herzig.
John Seed

2010-05-10T12:28:00.005-04:00

The Following Review of Cecily Herzig's Exhibition at the Vermont Supreme Court appeared in the Vermont Art Zine in March of 2010. It appears here with the permission of author Theodore A. Hoppe.
Cecily Herzig at Supreme Court in Montpelier

By Theodore A. Hoppe

It might be easy to categorize Cecily Herzig, a cum laude graduate from Mount Holyoke College, as an illustrator of children's books in the vein of Suzette Barbier or Christine Benjamin. All have a marvelously playful style that displays an imaginative flow and uses a mix of images and words, but there is more complexity unfolding in Cecily Herzig’s artwork. In this exhibit entitled A Very Hungry Rabbit Should be Fed, Herzig is not simply telling a story, she is sharing what she hears and sees in a very personal way, including the perplexities a child might feel, and this leaves the viewer to figure out what happened.

"I wish for something" is repeated three times in one picture, like a short poem. What is wished for? I am content but will always miss you is the mysterious title of another. "There is no forever. What more can you ask for?" is another bit of wonder, as is "Please, please, please" tattooed into characters chasing one another. Like Alice Through the Looking-Glass, we are drawn to follow the rabbit, down the rabbit-hole, because "A very hungry rabbit should be fed." This is art that one needs to live with, to spend time with and not just look at, in order to uncover its secrets.

The works included in the exhibition employ a range of media – oils, prints, watercolors, and crayons. The Crayon Creature series started with sunny spheres and mischievous creatures, part bird part butterfly, inspired by a solar energy project Herzig's husband's was working on. They morphed into stranger characters, more frantic than scary, but always curious looking. At some point, these Crayonamundo pictures, which include collaborative efforts with her pre-school son, began incorporating a "stream of consciousness" type of text – random thoughts, lyrics from a song in the background, things said by her son, or ideas flowing from the imagination. The words and phrases add to the visual experience by creating an atmosphere to swim in.

There are only three oil paintings included in the exhibit, which is unfortunate. Herzig's oil paintings are her most thought-out works and display her artistic talents on a finer level. The watercolor, gouache, and ink pieces are the artist's most recent works. Written texts, absent from the oil paintings, have returned as well, but this time the phrases are longer, more involved, more like poetic verse. These newer pieces are a combination of the crayon series' style and the expressionist style of the oils. Now, the strange characters morph out of the impressions of the watercolor blotches. Asleep on a living pillow is a small community of smiles with eyes that evokes a "Where's Waldo" feel. Though she intended to paint some landscapes while on vacation in the Virgin Islands, the artist's paintings once again became a unique cast of characters: birds (Bad News for the Bird), an elephant (Elephant Hee Haw), Ticks, and other characters and scenarios that are beyond description, such as Lovely Little Shoes, & But 1st the Beauty Parlor. Is it possible to be puzzled and charmed at the same time?

Herzig approaches her art with a child-like understanding, not childish, but with an innocence and enthusiasm, with surprise and endless questions. She seems amazed by her ability to turn something so playful, whimsical, and personal into objects of importance.

Cecily Herzig is wholly original and defies labels. While there are signature elements to her work, her style is constantly evolving as she pushes her work forward. One gets the sense that this young artist has much more to show us.

Cecily Herzig's artwork will be on display at the Vermont Supreme Court until April 30, 2010. Gallery hours are Monday - Thursday, 8 - 4:30, Fridays 12:30-4:30 (closed April 2).

Images: Top to Bottom: A Very Hungry Rabbit Should be Fed, three oil paintings, watercolor detail

Links:

The Cecily Herzig Museum at Open Museum.org

Open Line with F. Scott Hess

2010-04-25T19:06:00.002-04:00

Dear Open Museum Followers,
I hope you will enjoy my 11 minute phone interview with artist F. Scott Hess, speaking about his 2006 painting "The Colonel's Daughter."
John Seed

Feral Venus

2010-04-25T17:42:00.045-04:00

Feral Venus

"The Colonel's Daughter" by F. Scott Hess is an Allegory of Beauty Gone Wild

By John Seed
johnseed@gmail.com

Posted: April 26, 2010
Images used for education purposes in accordance with Fair Use Copyright Law
Please do not copy or excerpt written contents without the author's permission

F. Scott Hess (b.1955)
The Colonel's Daughter, 2006
Oil on Canvas, 32 x 40 inches
Currently available at Koplin Del Rio Gallery, Los Angeles

Dear Reader,

If you can be very, very patient, this essay is eventually going to be about the painting "The Colonel's Daughter" by F. Scott Hess. Stay with me, and I will get around to it.
- John Seed

"The Reclining Nude," published in 2002 by Thames and Hudson, is a coffee table book devoted to a delectable topic. Co-authored by Lidia Guibert Ferrara, a Milanese graphic designer, and art historian Frances Borzello, the book is an attempt to create a visual survey of the vast range of forms and meanings that painters have given to the female nude in repose. Starting with the period of the Italian Renaissance, the book opens with sumptous color plates of canvasses by the elusive Venetian Giorgione and his randy student Titian. As the book goes on to demonstrate, nearly every major male figure painter for the next 500 years found a way to subject the supine female figure to his own particular aesthetic and erotic fantasies.

The last pages of the book feature a kinky Balthus canvas and the "brutalist" nudes of Stanley Spencer and Lucien Freud, one of the only living artists to be included. Also at the tail end of the tradition is "The Open Window" by F. Scott Hess, a Los Angeles artist who is very much alive, even after a leaky appendix scared the beJesus out of him last year. Scott has been laying the nude down quite a bit since his work took a new direction after a 1994 trip to Iran. Called a "Humanist Mannerist" by critic Donald Kuspit, Hess has one foot in the Old Master camp, and while his other stands in the muck of Post Modernism. To put it another way, his recent paintings are grounded in traditional technique, but their meanings are ambiguous and elusive.

It is, in fact, the air of ambiguity, that links Hess full-circle to Giorgione.

Speaking of Giorgione, it isn't surprising that a book compiled by a pair of Italians begins begins with his majestic "Sleeping Venus," considered to be the first notable reclining nude in Western painting. Giorgione's Venus evokes a dream woman who is herself dreaming. Her power comes from her creamy beauty, tinged with erotic suggestion, and also from her personification of classicism.

Giorgione (landscape completed by Titian)
"Sleeping Venus," c. 1510

42.7 x 69 inches

Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden
Keep in mind that it had only been 75 years since the female nude had re-appeared in Western art. She came in the form of Massacio's Eve, a grieving exile, ashamed of her nakedness, chased from paradise by a sword waving angel. More naked than nude, Massacio's Eve is a pathetic figure who hopes we will avert our eyes. Even knowing that the damned snake tricked her, we feel just terrible for her and recognize her nakedness as a badge of shame.

A Detail of Eve from Massacio's "Expulsion" c. 1425

By contrast, Giorgione's Venus is a nude. Just what makes a "nude" figure different from a naked one? In the words of Sir Kenneth Clark, the nude presents a "balanced, prosperous, and confident body: the body re-formed."

The "Sleeping Venus" is more than just re-formed: she is perfection. Most men will want her, and those who don't will at least want to plan her wardrobe.

It is not known if Giorgione painted her for himself or a client, and the image was unfinished when the artist died at the tender age of 33. Whoever it was meant for, "Sleeping Venus" would have hung very nicely in the alabaster pleasure chamber of the Duke of Ferrara, or in the palazzo of any other rake of the period. The "Sleeping Venus" may at some point have been covered with a velvet curtain meant to be drawn after dinner over cigars. When the curtains were drawn, any prudes in the room would find that their objections to the position of the hand of Venus would have been reminded that only a Humanist would collect images of a nude goddess. Scholarship, it seems, has always been the Trojan Horse that hides prurience.

Of course she isn't just meant as an erotic fantasy: the "Sleeping Venus" is also allegorical. She embodies the idealized virtues of the Republic of Venice, a city which liked to think of itself as a serenely beautiful woman. That of course was a distracting fantasy for Venetians to indulge in. The real city of Venice was an expensive theatre set that had been built over a fetid lagoon by slaves who drove pine trees into mud. Like the other Italian city states it was a patriarchy, but with no Pope nearby things got a little out of hand and the city employed thousands of prostitutes including high end courtesans.

An allegorical image of Venus like Giorgione's was a civilizing image: a bud of the Renaissance about to wake up into full bloom. She provided a kind of aesthetic perfume that masked the stench of a vital city. Being horizontal and vulnerable, men liked her much more than her iconographic cousin, the vertical and unassailable Virgin Mary. It is no wonder that after the "Sleeping Venus" Venetian art and culture was inspired to reach new heights. Twenty eight years after Giorgione's death Titian brought Venus indoors, woke her up, domesticated her, and placed a sleeping dog at her feet (Fido) to suggest fidelity and marriageability. Progress, of a sort, was being made.

Titian

"Venus of Urbino," c. 1538
47 x 65 inches
The Uffizi, Florence

The nude looked so fresh in the early 16th century: she had been gone from culture for a long time. This is definitely not the case in twenty-first century Los Angeles. From the fifties on Hugh Hefner made sure that American men faced a glut of horizontal fantasy women and gradually dispensed with the twin veneers of culture and art. The nude had moved from the private space of the palazzo to the public art gallery to the men's magazine and finally to the internet. In a culture where any latchkey kid can google up images that would have made Giorgione's hair stand what is left to say with and about the nude?

That is where Scott Hess comes into the picture. Like many of his artists in his circle, Hess believes that the human figure, both nude and clothed, still has plenty to say. The issue is that his emotionally fraught images like the "Colonel's Daughter" argue that if female beauty still has a place in our culture it is in a fragile, beleaguered position.

Giorgione and Hess: side by side comparison

In the early stages of developing his image Hess "wanted a nude sucking her thumb, under a slip or nightgown, and plunked down in the middle of thorny raspberry bushes." His model, Laura, whose father actually is a Colonel, let him sketch a number of poses before assuming a final posture that the artist describes as a "cross between the infantile and the erotic." With her knees bent, she is a restless, insomniac figure who fills the foreground of the final painting.

Donald Kuspit says that "Hess doesn’t have to be literally present to make his emotional conflicts and strong presence felt." In the "Colonel's Daughter" his male presence is implied not just by the foregrounding of the model, but also by proxy. The three men who appear in the background are involved in some kind of search. They may be hostile, they may be rescuers (who knows) or perhaps they are wondering if beauty has jumped off the cliff of culture.

A detail of "The Colonel's Daughter"

They men in the background of "The Colonel's Daughter" don't have to worry that beauty has committed suicide: not yet at least. She is still with us, but in very fragile shape, reverting to infancy and returning to mother earth to ask "Is there any chance I can just go back to Eden and start over?" Giorgione and Titian tried to bring Venus, the serene goddess of love back into the sphere of culture, and this is the result. Once again she is naked, not nude. As you have noticed, I see "The Colonel's Daughter" as a troubled heir to the tradition Giorgione invented, a "Feral Venus."

Hess lets us know that after 500 years in public the female nude has had a nervous collapse. What has Venus been through? A bad relationship? Sexual abuse? A career in entertainment? Hess leaves that open and we can decide as individuals what we think has gone on.

A "Girl Gone Wild" as cautionary tale she still gives off an erotic charge, but only a brute would act on that. Amazingly the "Colonel's Daughter" is a civilizing image, just like the "Sleeping Venus," but she makes us better by making us question our fantasies rather than letting us indulge in them.

500 years ago, beauty slept calmly in our presence, waiting to wake up and console us. If Hess has it right, she is worn out now and wants to go back to Mother Earth, the ex-wife of Culture, who has issues of her own. If you are a man, and if you should happen to find her, please be kind. Gently, ask her to put her robe back on and respect that she may be skittish about accepting masculine help.

F. Scott Hess, the father of two daughters must be thinking about this. Since I am raising three daughters, I will be too.

Links:

The F. Scott Hess Museum at OpenMuseum.org

The Reclining Nude at Amazon.com