Four early paintings

In the spring of 1967 I spent several months in Nessakouya, a Melanesian village in the Houailou Valley on the east coast of New Caledonia.

Valley Landscape, oil on cardboard, 12”x11”, 1967

While teaching art to children at the Protestant mission school, I made paintings of my own along the nearby Houailou River. Araucaria pines marked the site of the ancestral village, displaced by French settlers.

Riverside Trees, oil on cardboard, 11”x15”, 1967

Studying modern French literature, Proust and Rimbaud, and the Albers color course had left me inspired by Cezanne and Klee.My work adopted the participatory approach of the children in my class, who I asked to depict the activities of the village. My landscapes are phenomenological rather than optical.

Path, oil on cardboard, 14”x11”, 1967

I painted this collapsing structure at the end of a side path after the chief’s wife spontaneously bought me a can of peas from the itinerant merchant who brought his truck up and down the valley. I took it as a sign of inclusion, and thought of this spot as “my place” in the village.

Banana, oil on cardboard, 14”x10”, 1967

William Carlos Williams speaks of the need for Americans to connect to the “local”, to places to which they have the deepest psychological connection. Through the children I felt I established a personal engagement with Nessakouya, a connection I’ve sought to re-establish with places I work in California. Schools have been an important connection to my local landscapes.

Wayne Thiebaud

Wayne Thiebaud enriched the lives of countless students and colleagues during his long association with UC Davis, which he prolonged through teaching past his retirement (he last participated in an independent study group in 2012) and by supporting our visiting artists. His love of teaching and painting were a continuing inspiration. 

Rather than add more words of appreciation, I’d like to direct attention to a painting of his that extends the range of his desserts into the realm of visual consumption, embracing the sensory enjoyment of seeing that underlies all his painting.

Untitled (Rows of Glasses), 2000, oil on linen

 The constantly varied eye-glasses in this painting playfully transgress the standardized repetition of Pop Art: in their varied irregularity, each lens offers a distinctive landscape, collectively celebrating a multiplicity of gazes, a visual democracy.

 He probably painted it from memory; tensions between his training in commercial illustration and the demands of perceptual painting constantly stimulated such experiments. Here, he elevates us above the table top, evading the perceptual conventions of perspective, onto a plane of imagination (is the lower blue zone the vertical edge of the table or a design decision?). 

 Always skeptical of grandiose claims for “art”, Wayne once commented that art would indeed save the world - not with “heroic gestures” but with “nuances of fact.” I wish we could talk more about all this.

Collage, 1965 - 2000

My art study started with the Josef Albers color class, which opened my eyes to painting as a visual medium - considering the effect of one color on its neighbor rather than just making pictures.  Visually, I was especially intrigued by the so-called Bezold effect, illustrated here, where the lighter and darker squares change the background color and open up layers in space. It inspired my interest in Cézanne and in Paul Klee, whose improvisation and interest in children’s art resonates with my later interest in parks, recreational sites  and schoolyards. I’ve always liked to use compartments and internal frames.

Bezold study 1965

Later, at the New York Studio School, I developed an expanded approach to collage under abstract expressionist George McNeil, who taught us Hans Hofmann’s process of abstracting perceptual space, encouraging free improvisation from the model in the studio. We worked with paint and colored paper, culminating in the emergence of figures from the expressive field. Meanwhile, I was also working outdoors from everyday landscapes, following Cézanne.

Figure 1973

I began combining work from observation with collage. 

Riverside window 1979

Frustrated by the grays and browns that tended to dominate my observational paintings, I made up colored paper in the studio and applied it to drawings on small panels, depicting scenes I had painted outdoors in colors I generated on my own. I tried to combine collage with my Cézannesque outdoor oil paintings. I drew images from my paintings onto small wood panels and filled them in with pasted colored papers made up in the studio. I wanted color more like Matisse and made up colors I wanted to see, rather than trying to imitate the subdued browns and grays of everyday landscapes. The color constructions with simple planes reminded me of early Renaissance paintings.

Large Landscape 1980

I moved to Maine in 1980 for my partner’s teaching job at Colby College. Living in Maine, I was inspired by Marsden Hartley and Alfred Stieglitz’s idea of the local, of American artists applying European modernism to local scenes.

Waterville 1981

This was made a few years later in New York, which I conceived as more gray, and related to Mondrian’s overall space in his plus/minus compositions, like Pier and Ocean, that aren’t completely abstract – I preserved the underlying drawing as way to focus on details, to keep grounded in a specific local place – in this case a view towards Grant’s Tomb - following the idea of Stieglitz, who saw value in the way the local links us to memories and subconscious associations. 

New York Window 1989

 Back in Maine here, I’m using color like Hans Hofmann but with a real landscape, Mt. Philip, near Rome, Maine. Still linked to the specific with drawn details, overlaid with paint and collage – the drawing dates from 1989 but collaging and painting weren’t finished until 1994.

Mount Philip 1989-1994

In 2000 we moved to California, where I had to adjust to a very different local landscape of suburban subdivisions. Trying to cope with the new environment, I went back to the Bezold effect, but this time on a larger scale, envisioning a combination of Albers with Hofmann. The Bezold effect has increasingly come to pervade my perceptually based work, in association with my attraction to public spaces like parks and playgrounds – the social permeating the personal.

Borders 2010

This comes from a series in 2010 I entitled Field and Frame, based on art historian Meyer Schapiro’s analysis of visual signs as flat, bounded, material fields. Here I go back to the compartments of the early Albers studies, but am now beginning to combine the Bezold effect with observed landscapes – assuming a more distanced perspective on myself as I work.

Field and Frame 2010

 I was thinking back to Paul Klee and his involvement with children’s art in this image of Birch Lane, my son’s elementary school – inspired by his free play with grids to combine structured security with improvisation. The Bezold effect functions like a surgical suture, fracturing the unified conventional view.

Birch Lane 2010

 I found in public spaces a context for this combination of formal play with actual sites. Here I’m going further into parks and recreation. There’s a ball field and a circular track where I go to run. I began thinking more about our process of perception – what do we really see? My interest shifted from the literal subject to how it’s encountered by our shifting attention – a sort of self-awareness inspired by the social setting of a public space. I came to think of this approach as “social perception”.

Corner 2016

This is a large, multi-panel piece – about 6 by 9 feet. I wanted to explore the way we map the everyday spaces of our neighborhood, developing a personal attachment to places we’re familiar with. I took a cinematic approach, going out and painting houses and yards every day and posting them on my studio wall so I could edit them – rearranging the panels and adding colored paper in the Hans Hofmann manner to create an overall image. It’s a sort of psychogeography, recapitulating the way we become at home in everyday places.

Davis Neighborhood 2006

Beginning in 2008, my work from the local landscape expanded to the Pacific Island of New Caledonia, where I had taught art in the rural village of Nessakouya as an undergraduate in 1966-67. Documenting its changing configuration, I looked for patterns of community, “community. spaces”. This work, painted on site with collage added in the studio, depicts a new “community house” set up by the Melanesian villagers in an effort to foster social contacts among members of rival clans.

Maison commune 2012

This piece collages together images from New Caledonia and Davis to link two “villages”. It combines photographs with paintings, trying to embrace the range of our visual interactions with the world, including what’s internalized in memory or absorbed from media.

Red Exterior 2016

This collage combines photos of Davis at night and garden drawings made by a Melanesian villager. Darkness, the context of dreams, fosters a condensation of images.

Black Abstraction 2016

There’s further compression in this piece from 2016 – eight small frames in a 4 by 3 foot rectangle. They record a circuit of the park where I run – benches, baseball field, butterflies from a collection I made as a child and still keep in the studio. I’m inspired by undefined spaces open to memory and reflection, which are harder and harder to find – like the neighborhood field where I used to collect insects. Circles become important as I continue to think about the 360-degree field of vision - what we really experience in a landscape rather than “see” in the limited one-point perspective of the camera. One section of this park contains a circle of stones that connects to the zodiac but also provides some bike jumps for kids.

Garden Grid 2016

Three years ago I started to use a video camera – literally engaging with cinematic vision to embrace the entire 360-degree field. I draw from the video as it plays, still using drawing to ground things in everyday places, but allowing video to open up my focus – I like how video artist Peter Campus talks about “durational perception”. Video links my work to the media realm. 

Video Diptych 2019

Drawing from the video, my attention jumps from one focal area to another as it does in our normal seeing. And what happens in between? If the Bezold effect creates sutures in the field, now I’m dealing with actual gaps. I use the color grid to fill in the intervening spaces, incorporating their unnoticed, unconscious content while supplying the overall vertical/horizontal framework, based in gravity, that we use for orientation.

Four-part collage 2020

This recent 4-part landscape combines elements from videos with disparate sections of colored paper. I like experimental film and seek a sense of narrative through collage that’s not explicit, an overall feeling rather than a visual document. The frames zoom in and out; the lower right becomes a close-up. The juxtaposition of frames implies movement through time, as in a comic. 

Pillars 2020

Collage has always dealt with the fragmentation of modern life, offering glimpses of unity . It brings out the abstraction inherent in lived experience. l try to endow this collage experience with the weight of Cézanne’s enduring forms. 

Putting pressure on color

Having written recently about Late Monet as well as Wayne Thiebaud, I’ve become more aware of how my own work from perception - using “my own eyes”, as Diana Thater puts it - has led me to push against the constraints of painting from observation - using separate frames to enlarge the compositions and to expand their centralized view - but particularly to address the problem of color and my over-riding impulse to enhance its resonance; this seems to be the goal, to insist on the value of color in itself, not just as an agent of description. This seems to happen in Thiebaud’s use of “halation” and simultaneous contrast, and Monet, of course, reached a similar point in his late work.

Having gone back to paint very simply from looking at the park I’ve painted for years, I find myself entering the world of my collages, as the colors become more insistent and define a particular resonance; at that point rather than continue working on the rendering of objects, I’ve decided to add colored squares to the composition - violating some unspoken rule I’d always had about the sanctity of the visual field I perceive, but to extend my development of color orchestration in the painting. I realize that my early urge to add collage to my acrylic paintings might reflect a similar desire to “bring color forward”, to achieve the “three dimensional opticality” Greenberg found in both Pollock and Monet.

Everyday Spaces

Jonathan Crary writes of the loss of "everyday" spaces, parts of life outside the domain of institutional organization; these are spaces I've cultivated in my work in efforts to lend them artistic interest. As these spaces contract, I see my interest in the Bezold Effect - which creates seams within the visual field - and the fluidity of video as efforts to grasp the disappearing realm of freedom in daily experience. The video drawings are open-ended - multiple versions can be juxtaposed, while their constant movement encourages an improvisatory mode of drawing, allowing fragments to emerge from the envelope of space and time. Light - color - remains an overall organizing force, sometimes generalized yet also focused in the solitary patches that embody what Matisse called "a moment in the life of the artist".

Video Drawings

My investigation of the visual field concerns the process of focus by which we explore it; I've used video as a way to recreate the flow of perceptual awareness that generates our impression of a unified visual field. In the process I consider the video itself a sort of surrogate for my own body and its spatial awareness. Given that much of the visual field is actually "not seen" in our process of constantly shifting focus, I use color, observed on site and generated in the studio, to lend it material presence.These color grids can function as frames, which enable me to focus on selected visual sensations in drawing, or to select an area to represent the visual field as a whole. I'm intrigued by the "overall" field, even as I know it is unrepresentable.

Vision and Touch - Objective and Subjective?

Reading Daniel Butterly's The Architecture of Vision, an argument for painting as composing with spaces rather than rendering objects, I'm fascinated by how it runs counter to the dominant anti-opticality of most twentieth-century art. Using a method of geometric projection that expands on Renaissance perspective by introducing a separate space for each eye, Butterly grounds vision in mathematical objectivity, endowing it with rational authority - a notion of visual truth opposed to the subjective procedures of Pollock or the irony of Duchamp.

My own intuitive procedure has increasingly relied on touch - applying pieces of paper to drawings and acrylics, and modeling in clay, as though sensing some inadequacy in the methods of impressionistic painting; I struggle with an awareness of the visual field as immersive and mostly out of focus. I rely on relations of contiguity, as though feeling my way through the spaces around me. I turn to translating my collages into oil paintings, as though to reaffirm their structure by touching the colored patches again.

It's in this context that Butterly's geometric projection opens new possibilities. Just as Peter Campus found the video camera a "surrogate eye", offering an objective monitor to the roving vision of corporeal perception, his "reference form" offers a dialogue between rational construction and intuitive exploration. It has the additional advantage of being highly compatible with Photoshop, which I've also utilized to lend abstract structure to my landscape collages by extracting selected colors.

In a similar way, Cezanne struggled to establish a broader framework for Impressionism, which rooted the painter in his local subject, in the intimate tactility of paint on canvas -  just as American poet Charles Olson believed his deep engagement with local history, in the network of contiguous places in Gloucester, would lead to a poetry of larger scale. Such ambitious visions may not be within our grasp, but we can gesture towards them by creating a dialogue between objective and subjective fields - between the overall objective view we need to orient ourselves and the more intimate one we explore with shifting attention.

Classical Vernacular, acrylic collage edited in Photoshop, dimensions variable, 2016

Daylight

Photographers like Robert Adams have stripped away the grandiosity of the American West, avoiding the rhetoric of the American landscape tradition. Adams eschews the grandiose and spectacular in favor of the modest and mundane. He abandons the urge to dominate and accepts what is, trusting to the democratic virtue of everyday light to redeem the landscape for art. He quotes cinematographer Raoul Coutard: "Daylight has an inhuman faculty for always being perfect."

Adams accepts on his own terms the challenge of developing new forms for new landscapes - and its corollary, the process of defining himself as an American.

Robert Adams, Colorado Springs, Colorado,  1969

American-Pacific Spaces

 Java's volcanoes have shaped global climate for millennia, but this year it's the island's extreme fire season that portends drastic effects, a new geopolitical era.

In Call Me Ishmael, Charles Olson coins the term "Pacific man" to express the American push to the West. Olson talks of American space, or SPACE as he writes it, and all the economic and social tensions it entails, as encapsulated in Herman Melville's whaling ship. Some "ride" this space, he notes, while others "dig in".

Meridel Rubenstein, a photographer based in Santa Fe, who teaches in Singapore while working to reclaim marshes in Iraq, is one who rides. Her photos of Indonesian volcanoes link global conditions to an American tradition of landscape documentation that extends back to nineteenth-century geological surveys, incorporating along the way the "local" as envisioned by  Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz. O'Keeffe and Stieglitz, like Olson himself, seem to both "ride" and "dig in."

Like them, Rubenstein endows her photo documentation with an urgent sense of mission. She engages physically with her subjects, from printing on aluminum or on paper made from tree bark,  to managing water resources on the Euphrates. Rubenstein wrestles with the ideological energy of American space - aiming to harness its expansive impulse to a global vision of spirituality. There's both white and black magic in the mirror-like surfaces of her prints.

Stieglitz inspired artists to define America and themselves by immersion in the "local", appealing to an innocent embrace of the New World and its promise of fresh vision through the new medium of photography. But the "local", which Rubenstein extends to her work in Iraq, demands a grounding in the troubled history of the land, as writers like Olson and William Carlos Williams understood.

Olson observes that, for Melville, the root of our ambitions lies not in democracy but in the will to overwhelm nature. For him, the White Whale is more accurate than Whitman's Leaves of Grass -  "Because it is America, all her space, the malice, the root."

Meridel Rubenstein, Mt. Toba Volcanic Ash, 74,000 years old, found in Malaysia, 2010, archival pigment on aluminum

Visual Field

"Visual field" calls up the idea of a camera viewfinder, a rectangular format, but the visual field is all around us.

I like poet Charles Olson's "composition by field", which applies his sense of new American painting to the linear convention of poetry. Painting is no longer just the depiction of a subject but an organization of the overall space before us.

The Impressionists broke up the enclosed contours of objects. The Bauhaus School developed the grid as a field for invention, and Hans Hofmann opened up the field to rhythmic improvisation, to the emergence of new configurations.

Henri Matisse, Red Studio, 1910