Hyman Bloom’s The Anatomist was the first painting that I ever saw that had a remarkable and pro- found effect on my vision and way of thinking about what could be possible to do with a painting. I saw it at the Museum of Fine Arts in my first semester at Boston University, in their retrospective of his work Matters of Life and Death, which I truly wandered into without knowing what I was looking at.
I was alone and walked through the show without digesting what was going on at all, I paid attention to a few of the sketchbook pages of boxing men that were on display, but for some reason for the first five minutes or so I thought all of the paintings themselves were completely abstract because all I could see was their colors. The walls of the gallery were dark, in concert with the paintings. This about-face away from white walls allowed the image drawing in his paintings to sort of melt away while turning Bloom’s opulent colors into jewels.
When I arrived at The Anatomist, I was simply going through the motion of passing and glancing from one painting to the next when a hand suddenly appeared in the mess of the color picture. Of course, this hand had always been there, and Bloom’s work is, in actuality, exceedingly legible by any standard of abstraction.
However, once I noticed this hand, I raised my head and saw more hands, and one face, but the face was not attached to the hand, but a neon mass where hair should have been. It was a few moments before I was able to actually realize and digest that I was looking at a hand partially buried in the disemboweled abdomen of a cadaver. It was with this picture that I began to see paint- ing for the first time. And I loved it. It was no longer a laborious alternative to photography for me, not a mechanism to stylize images, but a method of altering existence and sensory perception.
Ultimately, that was a long-winded way of saying pay attention.
However, while I find myself straying nearly as far as I can from the arguably gloomy realm in which Bloom’s cadavers may reside, I believe that his work is foundational to my practice.
Nothing and All:
Painting, and the kind of perception that comes from within a painting, is very different from the perception of reality. The following is an excerpt that I think explains the crux of it all, while also not illuminating much. In a 1972 conversation with poet Clark Coolidge, while speaking about the “enigma” of creating the painted image, and in reference to the 1968 painting Paw:
“PG: What you start with is a kind of itch, a desire, a strong desire to see what you
imagine, or preimagine.... Just to see it! Like you might think: wouldn’t that be fantastic to see a hand eight feet long.
CC: Because it can’t be the way it is in your head.
PG: Exactly. Because the moment it gets into physical matter, when it gets onto the
picture plane, in this flat mysterious thing we call the plane...
CC: It’s all different.
PG: It’s all different. It gets warped and billowed and shrunken and pulled and...
CC: It’s a different physics.”*
The imagery that I have been occupied with is from my archive of memories and photographs. I choose to work with personal images because I feel that they cede agency to me that I may tamper with them in any way that the painting deems necessary. Call
me lowbrow, but I have always felt a much stronger connection to figurative painting and find much more enjoyment and fulfillment in constructing a shade of reality in the image. I have no interest in attempting to paint reality, but I also have no interest in painting completely removed from lived reality. I find that when there is a narrative mystery to an image or collection of painted images they have a foot in two worlds. The painting world, and reality. I would like to strongly emphasize the division between those two. And I find that paintings that cross step between the two worlds are the most engaging to me. The paintings that are reality-adjacent.
However, while I do have a strong devotion to figuration, I choose imagery as vessels to accomplish specific painting and optic goals for the viewer to enjoy, not narra- tive ones.
* Coolidge 186
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I will contend that though most of the paintings I have been making lately take place in the outdoors and feature people in various capacities, I would consider them
to be closer to conversation groups of figures or objects rather than landscape paintings or portraits. I find organic forms with variable shapes, like those of the body, plants, or outdoor landscapes, allow my hand agency to transmute them into the picture plane.
I prefer pictures that are in a vertical orientation, because, to me they operate similarly to seeing another person or body, rather than a window or viewpoint. I find
that a vertically oriented image works this way both in peripheral vision within a space, regardless of size, and especially when it becomes body-size or larger. Compressing the landscape itself into a vertical orientation also relegates it to a more geometric role, rather than an all-encompassing theme. While I do have an aspect of interest in the landscape, in people, and in animals or whatever the motif may be, I am more interested in how the landscapes can be used as a tool to construct color and mark situations, and how these figures can be used as an element within these compositions to imply the possibility of a narrative, though not to offer the viewer a complete one.†
At its core, I believe painting is an exercise in making what isn’t into what is. Fundamentally, it is a transformation of pigments and binders or whatever, else could be involved into an image that did not exist until all those things were combined. However, I am not very creative, so I need some kind of motif to measure when I am creating. I need some kind of tool so that the painting can tell me what is going on with it. Does the dog look like a dog... reality is what enters the studio, in one form or another, and becomes jumbled into varying states of banal simulacrum. When multiple simulacra are present- ed together and contextualize each other, they create a vibrational situation of their own reality adjacent to our own.
A painter who I think is near-perfect in the quality of being reality-adjacent and I am aware of the borderline blasphemous quality of this statement, is Albert York. Mr. York, I think, would be very offended if he read this. But I do hope he would know that it results from my ultimate admiration for his work. York first came on my radar whe a professor told me to look him up after seeing It’s Time to Go To Sleep, and I found one monograph of his work in the library. So, I have only seen images of his work in books, though the images were near life-size so I hope I got at least close to the real experience. Looking at the images, I felt as though I was looking at something exactly how I saw it in my mind’s eye. His paintings were exactly what my mind would show me when I thought, for instance: painting of a dog or, painting of a cow.
They are perfect and also humorous. His work traverses the chasm between the optics of memory and the different physics of the painted plane. However, where Guston’s Paw reaches back to some ancient type of memory, York’s catalog of images sits closer to somewhere within remembered history.
Coincidentally, similar to York, I have been making paintings on wood panels recently because the hardness of the surface allows for a secondary structure for the painting to resist, if I am considered the primary structure. When working on a lenient stretched surface, such as canvas or linen, there is more of a give, literally. Marks that are hard pressed expand the surface, and it contracts as the work is made. When working
on a rigid surface, the resistance allows me to apply a larger breadth of marks at different pressures. I am finding that the paint can be pressed into the surface, allowed to hover on top of it, or the surface can be allowed to have the same agency as the paint.
I believe that if I can’t paint something twice, then I didn’t really paint it in the first place. It must have come from some other liminal sphere I temporarily accessed, or
† This is something that I really need to work on because I get excited and share too much with visitors in my studio. If I have told you the stories behind any of my paintings - please forget it.
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something like that. This could be a vibration between a few colors, an internal light, or a shape situation. I work from an archive of images, and I usually make one or more small hand-sized versions of the motif, or several at once, in order to figure out which images allow the most room for conversation. If I find that the image dissolves to be manipulated, I will then make many versions in various sizes having a different technical conversation with each. I try to stop when I get near something new, that irreplicable liminal space, and then move on in an attempt to do it again. Around 2⁄3 of the time I fail. But that’s learning. I don’t really think that any painting is ever finished, but often the stopping point comes when I have learned something new.
For example, the image that I worked with the most repetitiously this year was that of a field of snow at night with a figure in a hat, and I believe that many of the paint- ings that came out of this are rather successful.
When I first approached this image, I was just looking to create an image that would be worthy of the expensive linen surface that had been given to me by Richard Raiselis. I wanted to create a painting that I could love enough to justify the cost of the material, so I chose a scene that I felt I would like when it was done no matter what. Also, there was almost no snow in Boston this year either so I felt like I was missing what made winter worthwhile.
This image was constructed completely from a memory, and I gave myself the task of trying to paint the snow at night and the sky, illuminated by the moon.
I do the line drawings under most of my paintings in burnt sienna so I created the whole picture in that color, then began painting over it all a few weeks later. Howev- er, what happened when I was using stiff-bristled brushes was that they cut through the underpainting, and allowed for the surface to glow through in the shadowed areas.
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In this image, I felt that I had come near achieving the simulacra of the memo- ry, while also creating an image whose abstract qualities also sustained it with the same weight. I decided to try and make a second version of this picture at the same size, to
be sure I could do it again. The second version of the painting failed because I couldn’t remember the exact technical specifications that went into creating the first, though I have made more pictures with variations on the same image because I feel that it is one that can breathe in abstract space.
When thought of in terms of a recording device, painting occupies a very different space, when compared to writing, or audiovisual situations, it is a much slower process, that allows for dwelling, questioning, and the opportunity to enter into and push against a kind of time loop. When creating a painting of a memory, using a photograph
or not, there is extended access to the elastic qualities of the realm of the memory storage unit. A snapshot, casual, non-composed photograph can be the impetus for accessing a memory, but the excessive amount of information held in that photograph often closes the potential of the time loop. I find that painting can elasticize the time loop, whether the painting is simulacra to a photographic source or not, the resulting simulacra of memory in painting, at its very best, has far more vibrational and potential energy than these types of photographic referents.
Here, I feel compelled to relate this body of work to Peter Doig, who seems to be the elephant in the room, or studio.
Doig says the painter is “always trying to find a way to describe what you’re seeing, because you’re often looking at the indescribable.”‡ While I have only seen replications of Mr. Doig’s pictures in books, in videos, or on the internet, from what I have
‡ Landscape Painting Now
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gleaned, Doig’s work emerges from his personal archive and uses the act of painting to delve into dreamlike collective memory, similar to Guston’s Paw or York’s cows. However, unlike Guston
and York, it is well-documented that almost all of Doig’s work emerges from photographic sources. However, Doig transforms the image from a photographic simulacrum to a unique painted experience. His practice is the result of a loving and symbiotic relationship with the photographic referent. I find that this transformation move creates an inherent romantic quality in much of Doig’s work that I admire, and I think that it relates, in both an antagonistic, but also favorable, way to Nicolas Bourriaud’s writing on Romanticism and the place of the sublime in the Anthropocene.
The concept of the Romantic Sublime relates to the magnificence-post-terror that humans feel in the presence of uncontrollable natural phenomena.§ For most of it’s existence, this concept was transmitted through the medium of painting. Most everyone who has spent any time with
the Western painting tradition is familiar with the particularly 19th century depictions of terrible
§ Bourriaud 12
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storms, the smallness of humans in the vast landscape, and the intensity of the lightning strike. Bourriaud writes on contemporary artmaking compared to this history and calls for “sublime... shorn of any romanticism.”¶ At face value, this is antithetical to work such as Doig’s, however, I believe that Doig’s work exists in a complementary fold that is just as important to contempo- rary audiences. While classic depictions of the sublime, especially those landscape paintings that Bourriaud stakes opposition to, seek to simulate that experience and present it to the viewer as truth, Doig’s landscapes do the something else, and find the romantic quality not in the didactic experience of the motif, but in the move into a painting world adjacent to reality. I believe that if there is one thing that Doig’s work does, it is open up a type of truth only found in painting, both of visual description, and the lived experiences shown in the images. This obscuration, while still focused on the figures in the landscape, moves the subject of the romanticism and the sublime experience from that of the natural world, to the process of seeing, remembering, and recording.
Bourriaud includes the work of Ambera Wellmann in his roster of New Sublime artists, citing their “myopic” view of the nature of bodily experience as an example of a human sublime. That a facet of the contemporary sublime is the result of self-indication and intimacy. Wellmann’s works are often unlocatable, inarguably landscapeless, and follow their own rules that emerge of a blending of representation and abstraction. Her work is the result of what Bourriaud calls “[plac- ing] the subject in a situation that exceeds all measure.”**
I believe that in a way, this kind of situation is the same enigma of the physical picture plane Guston spoke of. Bourriaud defines the social “contemporary sublime” as one that “draws on a terror that is all the more implacable as it is becoming more imminent... the sublime of a shrink- ing world.” While Wellmann’s world is a completely bodily one, specifically lacking the “outside,”
I find that the simulacra of the “outside,” can shrink the world in a similarly sunsettling manner. I believe that I believe that there is still room for romance within this conception of the sublime, and that painting is almost always an inherently romantic act, especially in the current age. To reduce experience, whether it be interpersonal or sublime, to a shrunken image and optical simulacrum.