Second Semester Summary

Johannes Vermeer: Woman Holding a Balance - 1664

Gerard ter Borch: Lady Seated Holding a Wine Glass - 1665

Semester Summary

Group 2 to 3 Transition

June, 2010 – January, 2011

Regardless of a program of study, consultants, tutors, teachers, mentors and what have you – an artist's education relies a great deal upon self-assurance. One's ability to move ahead in the learning process (or learn at all, for that matter) becomes greatly impacted by circumstance and daily life as it is lived. Clarity is often needed to gain insight, but such lucidity is routinely unattainable, a seeming luxury item. So it was for me this semester.

As predictable and cliché as it may seem, I spent a great deal of this second semester in what I felt was a sophomore slump. It may stand to reason that since I ended the first one on such a confident high that I had set myself up for a downturn. Sure enough, the first research paper showed my overeagerness up to a harsh light, as I delivered an over-reaching, near-incoherent pastiche of ideas that never meshed. I received a proper upbraiding over this, which was no doubt necessary. However, I never fully recovered my self-belief regarding my research and writing. A good case in point is in how the following essay came together – that is – the Rackstraw Downes show review. It goes without saying that I have become a huge admirer of the man and his work (more on this later), and one would think that a rigorous study of his oeuvre would yield a fluid, gratifying writing experience. Instead, a hyper-awareness of my predisposition to over-write kept any flow at bay. I wrote insecurely, with a huge degree of self-skepticism. It didn't matter that that piece turned out “acceptable” (as it was deemed), I had lost confidence, and frankly, I felt rather crestfallen about the whole thing. A sense of detachment from the program began to seep into my state of mind.

How do you learn in this situation? How can you process new input and make sense of it when you are already riddled with looming doubt? And, for me, as a painter, how could I create anything feeling like this? Well, the first thing I found out was how not to handle the situation. Better judgment in fetters, I allowed this situation to place undo strain on personal and professional relationships. This only served to splice my problems together, forming a tragic loop. This may seem self-evident, but it is slow in coming when you are inside these predicaments: When you become so sure of weaknesses, you begin to concretize failure into inexorability. It dawned upon me that I was placing an overbalanced import on the academic side of things and losing sight of my primary goal – making paintings. So then, I needed to set the scales aright by directing my focus towards my painting goals.

I consider myself extraordinarily fortunate to have had Emily Eveleth as my mentor this past semester. Her quiet, thoughtful approach was much appreciated and very much needed. As her oil paintings involve not only large imagery, but definitive impasted passages of mark-making, she fully supported my foray into this technique. As I'd stated in my last residency summary, the most common observation of my work was that the surface was too even. Some felt that it did not engage their vision with tactility, while others noted that my sleight-of-hand style of neoclassical manipulation failed to acknowledge the medium's natural properties. As much as Emily could reveal to me in her studio, and as much as I understood the information – coming back to my workspace and applying proper technique was something else entirely. It very much felt like experimenting. I wasn't afraid of failure in this case, oddly enough. Perhaps my mastery of “clean” technique in a medium that is inherently messy (try putting your coat or bag down in a BFA painting studio, and you'll see what I mean), allowed me to understand that in order to get a definitive mark, all I had to do was leave it alone. But, would my eyes accept it?

One difficulty that became rather evident was scale. I began a 48” x 60” canvas in order to break new ground in this area. This is not necessarily “big” in the world of painting, but it's not exactly small, either – and honestly, it was big to me. The subject matter lent itself to a greater scale and, in hindsight, could have been executed even larger, promoting greater visual impact. However, the technical challenge of engineering this size painting consumed a great deal of time. I was truly in a “learning-as-you-go” mode. As the painting neared completion, I was very concerned about the time frame.* It was unacceptable to take this long, as it was eating into the time needed to complete other works. My intention to use other media (enamel, to be exact) on this large work had to be set aside. I would have to experiment with materials and facture on a more reasonable scale.

The notion of experimenting with new media was still very strong, and an earlier attempt using roofing tar and rustproofing enamel was fairly successful. While wearing chemical-resistant gloves I applied broad applications of tar. By thinning it right on the canvas with mineral spirits, I found that I could control this unwieldy-looking medium with my fingers. The addition of enamel required speed and good planning. Designated areas had to be free and clear of the tar for the enamel to not only stick, but also, the drying time is so fast with enamel, with tar forever workable, the two needed complete segregation. It took weeks for the tar to really set up, and any contact with mineral/petroleum spirits would re-activate it easily. Varnishing was dicey. And my last piece for the semester was a full digression from this: charcoal on Mylar. Dry and delicate, the black dust skated across the surface, held only by the frosted veneer on the polyester sheet. The surface is eminently re-workable, as the 3 millimeter Mylar can be erased over and over without textural compromise. In fact, the oils from my hands and fingers left more telling marks. But even these could be effaced with no trace.

My push into new techniques in traditional oil came about in three medium-sized works. Two of these pieces play off the contrast of impasto and the “licked finish” of illusionistic painting. The third is an exercise in directional brushwork throughout, using visual reference material that would generally call for smooth, blended paint. Something interesting happened in terms of my vision: When the heavy marks were applied, it became difficult to “see,” and I had to not only back far away from the work with each mark, I had to take pictures with my cell phone every so often in order to “unsee” the marks and make sure something was taking shape. Truly, it was something that I had to get used to.

None of this formal technique, however, would take hold properly if I didn't make a point of applying reading, research and theory together in the conceptual execution of the imagery. The suggested motifs of concepting had been proposed at the end of the last residency. One was figurative, specifically – nude self-portraiture. The other was the exploration of quotidian objects along more ambiguous, yet dynamic directions. Despite all the attention paid to the nude self-portrait I'd shown in the June residency, Atelier 2010, I didn't feel like the theme for its own sake was a realm that I could really sink my teeth into. Plus, it seemed too weighted with sociopolitical concerns, which, for good or ill, is something upon which contemporary viewers can get really hung up. This seemed a bit stifling in the face of needing to experiment. Topically, I realized that non-figurative concepts would better serve my needs at this time. I tried to pull a little more from the vernacular in terms of iconography, playing with composition, palette and point-of-view. Also, as mentioned earlier, paint facture, unusual media, and mark-making played a significant factor. The ideas themselves range quite a bit – from a contemporary prod at the Sublime to visual metaphors of painting itself. However, I have found that presenting a visual “straight reading,” especially after exploring the bald specificity of much of Mark Tansey's art, is detrimental to the work. I believe I have made some gains into new and open ground in this respect, as I am trying to allow for multifacteted interpretations of the work according to the viewer's discretion. Sure, there is intentionality, but it is not meant to be fully cogent nor empirically understood. If the latter ideas were my primary purpose, then the "vectors would meet.”**

Interestingly, Rackstraw Downes seemed almost omnipresent in the periphery of everything I did this semester. He factored in conventionally as the Parrish Museum show was the direct subject of my second research essay, as stated. However, this traveling show ended up in my local museum not a week ago, and I had been counting the days of its arrival since I had learned of its winter destination. In the interim, I visited the Aldrich Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut and found a room dedicated to a specific triptych of Downes', replete with cases full of preparatory sketches and journal entries. Needless to say, this man's work ethic, technical prowess, willingness to improve, and persistence of vision (pun apropos) is something to which I should truly aspire. He sets the bar high in many respects. It would serve me well to hold onto this aspiration and inspiration not just for the duration of the MFA program, but deep into the future of my artistic life.

* The notion of time and effort came up in a more concrete fashion when I read a recent article by James Elkins, “Are Artists Bored By Their Work?” (posted December 15th, 2010 on the Huffington Post website, huffingtonpost.com). Elkins explores the marked difference in the time it took to create representational works (citing many Baroque pieces) versus works in the Modernist era. The slant of the essay moves towards the hypothesis that artists who work/had worked in realistic styles became bored by the amount of time and effort required. This is interesting, but I found this passage to be far more engaging: “The relatively short amount of time modern and contemporary artists spend on individual artworks cannot be explained by the fact that we're no longer interested in realistic depictions...” Perhaps in a time when consumption and processing of information is faster and more disposable than it's ever been, I feel that, as an artist, I might want to reflect that notion back to the contemporary and perhaps turn it on its head. Elkins tells that Arthur Danto warned of Elkins' near-fetishizing of “slow looking” in reference to a previous essay. I contend that perhaps there is no greater gift to give than “slow looking” in this age of micro-instant gratification. And this could be engendered by engaging in and embracing “slow painting.”

** This term is co-opted from a segment (13:00 – 15:00) of Vincent Desiderio's presentation at the Art Institute Boston's Art Talks, January, 2010. Desiderio offers a comparative look at the work of Johannes Vermeer versus that of Gerard ter Borch. Their paintings use similar iconography indicating similar thematics, however, Desiderio feels that there is a markedly different result due to the execution of Vermeer's technical narrative. In ter Borch, Desiderio describes the intent of the painter as “vectors of visual thought” moving into the “vortex” (or thematic center) of the work, but ending at a specific, predetermined meaning. A Vermeer, on the other hand, starts with seemingly comparable intentions (using equivalent Dutch iconography), but “the vectors miss” as they come to the thematic center. Desiderio submits that this action serves to amplify different and varied associations regarding definitive meaning in the work. In his estimation, this is what makes for great painting.

Painting People (selections)

Michaël Borremans: "Four Fairies" (2003)

Chuck Close: "Self Portrait" (2004)

Jenny Saville: "Reflective Flesh" (2002-03)

Borremans, Close, Saville: Selections From
"Painting People – Figure Painting Today" by Charlotte Mullins

The strange cycle of painting in modern history – its rise to intellectual prominence, its self-reflective deconstruction, its disappearance, and its subtle return to the discourse – can be tracked most effectively through the subject of the human figure. From Picasso's cubistic treatment of the female form in Les Demoiselles d'Avignon to Barnett Newman's “zips” as minimalist signifiers for the figure in works like Vir Heroicus Sublimis (Man Heroic and Sublime), the painted representation of people has cycled through innumerable permutations for the sake of advancing the meta-narratives of artistic progress.

The very existence of this book and other contemporary tomes (e.g. Vitamin P and Painting Today) demonstrates a new vitality in painting. The circular argument of painting's demise has become a closed circuit, obscure, and relegated to the past. Now is the time in which the familiar and resonant subject of the figure can be re-investigated using a familiar medium. Just like people, painting has survived despite the vagaries of time and the meandering nature of theoretical crises.

Painting People features nearly seventy artists whose representational painting styles range from classical realism (John Currin), to graphically flattened forms (Laylah Ali), to the boldly expressionistic (Cecily Brown). I will be narrowing this rich field down to a selection of three, the choices reflecting (to a degree) a formal resemblance to my own painting sensibilities. But even within this tighter parameter, the range is diverse.

Jenny Saville (b. 1970) uses oil paint as her primary medium, but it could be argued that it is flesh itself that forms the scope of her work. The paintings featured in Painting People are Reflective Flesh (2002-03), Entry (2004-05) and Stare (2004-05). Ranging from 7 to 10 feet in height, the sheer scale of these works clogs the viewer's vision with impasted, energetic marks of fleshy tints. The array of skin tones moves jarringly from subtle grays to blood reds to shocking blues across the surface of her canvases. Saville's mark-making is strong and highly directional, building form in broad passages using large brushes. But a great variety and vitality is maintained as she often changes the viscosity of her paint mid-form, adding oil as if it were sebum leaking from overactive pores. Abutting the harder marks, she may slide tone into tone in a slippery passage using a dripping mixture. The resulting effect manifests a tension akin to that of living tissue.

The earliest of these works, Reflective Flesh, depicts the artist herself, nude and barely contained by the framework of the canvas. Her figure is surrounded by mirrored surfaces, so we see multiple views of the figure with cubistically repeating body parts filling the entire canvas with flesh. This “de-centralizing” of the body destabilizes what is compositionally central in the painting, and that is the openly displayed female genitalia. But even this is destabilized with a kind of sensorial overload, as the mirrored surface upon which the artist squats doubles the view of her vagina. This control Saville exerts over our gaze is underscored not only by her deft, directional mark-making, but also by the gaze of the artist-as-subject, as her eyes confront the viewer directly. The phallo-centric notions of a woman on display, engendered in painting history by such works as Courbet's Origin of the World, are fully subverted in this bravura piece by successfully re-appropriating the controlling gaze of the painting patriarchy. This period of work served as an establishing point for Saville, as she understood the historical baggage that came with being a woman who paints. Taking control of her own work through re-engineering painting's male-oriented traditions allowed her to find freedom within her chosen medium. “The ideas, for me, wouldn't be as strong without using the traditions of painting as an institution” (Saville 7:10).

Working at a similar scale to Saville, but with a nearly opposite formal and conceptual quality is the painter Chuck Close (b. 1940). Close works exclusively with the portrait as his subject matter, the head generally cropped at the shoulders. Along with self-portraiture, his sitters mainly consist of family members, fellow artists and curators – people with whom he has had personal and/or professional relationships. Painting People features two oil paintings from 2004-2005 – Self Portrait, and Andres II, the latter bearing the visage of the artist Andres Serrano. The photorealistic style of Close's work is consistently represented through three-plus decades, but the formal tactics that he brings to the canvas are ever-changing. Over the years, Close has moved from tri-toned acrylic paint and airbrush to paper collage, to ink thumbprints, to oils – and is currently working with daguerrotypes and tapestries. Relying solely on photo-reference, he uses varying forms of grid systems, reiterating the mechanical accuracy of the photo in paint. This imitation of the photo is not intended to copy, but to recontextualize the flattened reproduction into an object of illusion. Close professes his affection for this particular charm of paint media in an interview with Charlie Rose: “[Painting] transcends physical reality... it's a magical window built out of colored dirt” (10:00-10:45).

In Self Portrait, and Andres II, we see Close's grid-work very distinctly, the difference being that the painting of Serrano shows the grid tilted at a forty-five degree angle. The large scale of these works, at close range, reveals a highly controlled handling of paint. Kaleidoscopic marks of muted (for Serrano) or complementary (for the self-portrait) color render self-contained mini-abstracts within their grid-form confinements. Facial recognition at this level of study is impossible. But, as Lisa Yuskavage notes, “...your work, like most good work, is full of contradictions. It implies intimacy, yet, in order to look at each painting, you are forced to step way back” (33). It is only at a distance that a likeness can be seen and, in fact, an extraordinary level of facial detail is made manifest. In this way, Close is controlling the experience of the viewer, putting them in an odd position to confront the subjects on a proximal level of privacy with which only the artist is familiar. His didactic, formal tendencies seem perhaps counterintuitive as tools to create such compelling personas on the canvas. Yet, instead, those constructive elements foster the illusion, turning the physicality of the optical around on us.

The figural works of Michaël Borremans (b. 1963) feature an austere palette and spartan compositions. People depicted in his paintings seem very non-contemporary and their attire suggests they may be transplanted denizens from the 1930s and '40s. The artist also employs the use of stock and/or found photography for his figures, and plays this up with washed-out skin tones and soft-edged brushwork. With this general schema, Borremans removes the figure not only from contemporary associations, but also disallows the viewer from imposing any individuality upon them. They have become almost purely symbolic – mere signifiers for “a figure.” Fully cognizant of painting's historical connotations – that it is not only a medium, but a channel of discourse between a painter and the history of painting – Borremans uses the symbolic quality of subject and paint to foster the idea that paintings are indeed objects. But for all these formalities, the strange displacement of spaces, subjects and atmospherics moves the work out of its seeming stillness, suggesting a kind of tableau vivant. So then, a dichotomy arises through the embedded atemporality: despite their object-ness, they can theoretically move in real-time. Borremans states that “[paintings] are mental things, they’re not objects. They have this mental vibration, and they are here now. A painting is always now” (Ribas 2).

The selections One and Four Fairies shows female figures in contemplative poses, enveloped by their dun-colored environments. One depicts a lone woman in a half-length profile, her head and hands evoking the only substantiality in the painting. Her white blouse is diaphanous, transparent through to the briskly painted ground – a brown and gray reminiscent of a late Mark Rothko. She is still: her head bent with eyes downcast, luminous in a light gray expanse, while her clenched hands at rest in the umber lower third of the canvas. Four Fairies has a very similar feel, but the canvas as well as their upper torsos are divided by an inky block of paint. The four women also look to their hands, their gestures suggesting a half-engagement in some menial, factory-like task. Yet there is a sense that they are also contemplating this dark, horizontal obelisk into which they are thrust. Its surface is minimally reflective, however, its solidity is called into question. Runnels of paint cascade downward from the dark form, dripping onto the nearly raw canvas directly below. The environments in both these works are more paint than defined space. Is it all fictive? “Fairies” are out of folklore – so is Borremans couching his work in the realm of the unreal? “Borremans draws an intellectual line between art and reality, but then he takes a truth about painting and treats it as a truth about life. A painted figure will only ever be paint, it will never capture the individual essence of some person, place, thing or time” (Ribas 2). His human figures contemplate their meaninglessness in a seemingly meaningless world in an effort to find resolution. Can this desire be realized? Ambiguity implies a directive: the viewer is held responsible to answer this question.

List of Works Cited:

Close, Chuck. Interview by Charlie Rose. PBS. WNET, New York, March 13, 2007. Televison.

Glueck, Grace. “Of A Woman's Body Both Subject and Object” New York Times December 6, 1996. p. C29. Print

Prater, Elizabeth “Michaël Borremans – A Victim of His Situation.” The Ember January 7, 2010: n.pag. Web. Nov. 2010.

Ribas, João. “Michaël Borremans – the AI Interview.” Art Info March 14, 2006: 1-3. Web. Nov. 2010.

Saville, Jenny. Interview by Elaine C. Smith. “Smith and Saville” Arts and Parts S01 E01. STV. Pacific Quay, Scotland, October 20, 1996. Television.

Yuskavage, Lisa. “Chuck Close.” BOMB 52 (Summer 1995): 30-35. Print.