Abstract Musings

Tomorrow evening in my weekly Tuesday evening painting workshop we’ll be pushing paint around with the goal of creating what I'd like to call delocalized beauty. 

Delocalized (adj.): 1. To remove from a native or usual locality; 2. To broaden the range or scope of.

Modern art generally dispenses with the conventionally beautiful as unreal, uncourageous, outdated, superficial, sentimental, and an impediment to doing what modern art is supposed to do: Wake people up. Beauty as Western art has known it flees from tough-guy talk like that.

So we'll use a floral theme to try to get the jump on it.  We are going to let go of figuration (the element of image) and paint the feeling of appreciating flowers rather than painting the flowers themselves. 

My own abstract floral, "All the Sweet Tints," a 14" x 30 " floral abstract (the allusion is to a garden, actually)

“I want to express my feelings rather than illustrate them," said Jackson Pollock.

Is abstract art, then, about feeling? Were the abstract expressionists like Pollock just painting their feelings? No, they were also hurling themselves against a wall that Pablo Picasso had built right in middle of Western Art. After Cubism, where could "important" painting go? 

Jackson Pollock, Mural, 1943

They discovered new territories and how to get there; their work further widened the definition of art's possibilities, insisting, like the Cubists and the post-Impressionists and the Impressionists before them, that art could and should accommodate more than the conventionally beautiful and the serene, making room for big ideas about civilization, time, eternity, powerful forces of natural energy, and the relationship between the human psyche and the universe at large. Most art history books talk about all this in terms of the formal pictorial elements and the history of Western art, giving ordinary viewers of art very little to go on. 

The Swan, Ryan Cobourn, from a series incorporating classical mythology

How can we, tomorrow night, credibly present the feeling of seeing flowers without painting the flowers? 

I like Brooklyn painter Ryan Cobourn's answer. In this essay/interview he discusses the WHY of what he does and also incidentally hints at the how (I think you learn more from getting the "why" of what artists do than you do from the "how" in any case.)

I like what he says about illusionistic painting (realism) vs. what he does when he removes the representational image but leaves in shapes and colors that, to him, are associated with and suggest - allude to - the subject.


"In abstract painting you don’t have illusion—like illusion of space—but you have allusion. Allusion is way more interesting to me than anything else.” - Ryan Cobourn

This distinction strikes me as analogous to that between prose (illusion) and poetry (allusion). It’s what I like about Eric Aho’s recent landscapes too.

For me, paintings like these have an extra dimension of pathos and significance; because of how they're painted, they also allude to the act of painting itself - the very human need to explore perception and our relationship to nature by scratching our little images out on the wall of history.

I also think the work of a different Ryan, Ryan Coleman, has something relevant to say about our purposes this week (abstraction with floral motif). 

Season of Light, Ryan Coleman

Untitled (Commission for the Ritz-Carleton Wash. D.C.)

This painterly work is lush with the colors, textures, and above all the feelings associated with flowers and plant life - all without painting an image of a single leaf or petal. 

Perhaps you think some of this contemporary work doesn’t get much beyond the "Ab/Ex" guys, de Kooning, Pollock or Frankenthaller… 

.... should that matter? No, you say? Perhaps you’re very right. Just as it wouldn't matter if you're painting landscapes and not "going beyond" Aldro Hibbard. Yet, this was very important to the Ab/Ex guys - they did what they did specifically to "get beyond" the precedents set by the artists that immediately preceded them. Can we have it both ways?

To me, most of these paintings work just as well as much of what I see out there and in many cases much better. What do you think? 

Ryan Coleman, Limey

A lot of people, even painters, look at art like this and, because it puzzles them since it doesn't look like or do what they assume art is supposed to, they say “meh - my kid could do that.” But painting effective abstract art is probably more difficult than painting realistically; it demands that the artist approach all of the basic tools and techniques of painting with a super high degree of knowledge and sensitivity to their inherent properties and their raw emotional value.

At any rate, learning something of the language of abstraction cannot but help you as a painter, for I firmly believe you DO need both, the language of realism and that of abstraction, in your toolbox.

I also believe it’s not that some folks just “know what they like,” as they say, but rather that, in many cases, they really just like what they know. The general public didn’t really understand or like the French Impressionists as they do now until after at least 1950. By analogy, that would put the beginning of mainstream appreciation for abstract expressionism at about 2035. I'm convinced that we're well on our way.

Ryan Coleman

Return of the Vanishing Spectacular Landscape

Last month, one of the world's most important exhibitions for contemporary art commissioned a stunning installation that brought a new immediacy to the questions surrounding the nature and function of the landscape genre in the 21st century.

The work, titled Fatigues, 2012, by British artist Tacita Dean, consisted of six unframed blackboard panels containing images of mountains in Afghanistan exquisitely rendered in white chalk. The floor-to-celing panels were suspended around a two-story staircase of ornate, antiquated design. It was commissioned by the dOCUMENTA 13 exhibition and installed in a former finance building in Kassel, Germany.

Tacita Dean's Fatigues, 2012, for dOCUMENTA 13.

The title I take to refer both to the fatigues worn by soldiers in the war-torn region and to the contemporary art world's disinterest in anything that smacks of traditional Nature-glorifying picture-making in the grand Romantic manner exemplified by the outsize panoramas of the Hudson River School. When nineteenth-century landscapists Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt, or Frederick Church exhibited their majestic renditions of the American wilderness, crowds lined up as if for a blockbuster movie. A small group would be let into the exhibition space, and the silk curtains would be drawn back from an enormous canvas to breathless, admiring exhalations. Fatigues was defyingly reminiscent of such dramatic presentations.

Frederick Church's Heart of the Andes as exhibited in New York City in 1864.

But Dean's work has less to do with the sublime grandeur of transcendent Nature than with the nature of landscape painting and art in general. As documented in photographs proliferating online, her panels deny the traditional function of the work of art as a window opening onto a convincing illusion. Instead of the referential (or reverential) colors of oil paint, these landscapes are drawn in black and white with ordinary schoolhouse chalk. (Though just how ordinary white chalk is anymore in these days of digital whiteboards and video projectors is questionable in itself, I suppose).

The stark whiteness of floating peaks and glaciers and amorphous forms and textures suggesting ice and stone project in unnatural contrast to the ghostly deeps of the surrounding space. Some of the panels contain only traces of line, suggesting the movement of rivers, snow, and the interaction of these elements with sunlight. 

I'd be willing to bet that viewing the work in its intended setting was thrilling. Even in the National Gallery, where there's a whole room devoted to Cole's "Stages of Life" series, you don't get to walk up and down between enormous landscapes as if inside a movie.

In fact, Dean's installation began as a Middle-Eastern film project that failed when she returned from Kabul to find her footage spoiled by technical flaws. Best known as a photographer and filmmaker, Dean began drawing in chalk after painting out the backgrounds of photographs, at first using white gouache, and later using black chalkboard paint.

Dean's use of Afghanistan as her subject adds another ripple to the experience. Like the audience for landscape in the nineteenth century, we are "touring" a natural phenomenon charged with meaning. But these are disembodied images, oddly adrift, otherworldly ghosts of a topography that would be beautiful, even sublime, were it permissible or possible to see it free of the inescapable psychological-historical-political  context in which it's framed.

The use of chalk on blackboard panels, an inherently unstable medium (chalkboards are meant to be erased), suggests to me something of nostalgia, the fragility of experience and immateriality of place, as well as the instability and precariousness of our threatened - and actually vanishing - natural world. The incongruous hand-railings with their Victorian metalwork hint at humanity's at times equally frail structures (not excluding the late nineteenth century's short-lived surge of spiritual naturalism).

Paradoxically, even though the absence of colors other than black and white could be intended to undermine landscape's habit of referring to an actual world "out there," here the white chalk is actually quite appropriate for representing the snowy terrain of the subject matter. At every turn, this work contradicts our assumptions, opening in at least two directions: it speaks both to the emotions and to the intellect, and in doing so, raises anew the "question" of landscape painting in the 21st century.

Dean explicitly disrupts landscape painting's referentiality with scrawled handwriting.

That is to say, despite the "meta" aspects of this work, the images carry resonance in themselves, beyond their ostensible purpose as pointers toward a conceptual formulation. And yet, because of the installation's stacked, "surround-sound" arrangement, one views the images from an unsettling point that suggests both distance and proximity. Fatigues works as splendid draughtsmanship, evocative referentiality, political statement, and postmodern conceptualism all at the same time. 

I find the whole thing fascinating for its boldness and depth of thought, its strangeness and its scale, and above all for its unlikely re-invigoration of the experience of landscape in the grand manner.

There's a page with clear, higher-res images of the entire installation right here.

Landscape Painting As Exploration

Yesterday I told my weekly Wednesday night students to turn their easels toward the window and paint the view from the studio, which happened to offer stray clouds drifting across a silvery evening sky above the industrial skyline of Lowell Mass: slate-gray rooftops, yellow-gray warehouses, re-sided duplexes and apartment houses. 

View of Haarlem, Van Ruisdael, 1670s. NOT the view from my studio. 

My students rose admirably to the challenge of responding directly in paint to what they saw. It seemed to me that everybody got some very good painting out of it, and of course the experience of painting from life like that, as the light changes and the colors shift, is invaluable for an understanding of what painting is. It's the moment when you have to fall back on your own intuitions to select your subject from the vast choices you're given.

Houses on a Hill, Cezanne, c. 1880.

I told them later that painting "from the hip" like that offers an opportunity to test one's innate interests and strengths - what worked? Was it something to do with a particular color or color combination? An evocative mood? Paint handling - hints of expressive technique? It's a chance to suspend judgment and find out where the act of painting wants to lead you. 

The Seine at Pecq, Maurice de Vlaminick, 1905.

I think it's most important to recognize one's interests and one's strengths and to figure out how to "play to" them in your work, which can also mean downplaying other aspects of the craft to foreground one's intent. Technique is important, so is valuing one's perception of the world (and one's beliefs about art) and developing a personal language of image, line, mass, color, composition, paint handling, everything. This is what YOUR art is all about. And ultimately, THAT is what's going to matter to you over time as well as what people will respond to in your paintings. 

Does that make sense?

At the beginning, I think, the way to fall in love with painting is to get away from critical judgment about what you might be doing "right" or "wrong" (by what and whose standards, for heaven's sake, right?!). In the end, after all the training, all the absorption of technique and tradition, all the talk and critical thinking, when there's a brush in your hand, maybe "you just go on your nerve," like poet Frank O'Hara said; act first, from intuition and emotion, and then, after the dust clears, ask: What choices did you find yourself making - and why? 

Landscape by Stuart Shils, c. 2005.

For my part, right now I find I'm interested in expressing a moment of aesthetic experience encompassing broad gestures of color and paint and the "right" details for that painting. 

I think it's a worthy goal to assimilate and adapt as much technique and art history as one can learn. Guided by experience, it is the well from which one draws to discover what one's own work is "about," an important consideration, as friend and fellow landscape painter Donald Jurney is wont to insist. 


And of course, work can be "about" so many things - color, texture, humanity, redemption, damnation, pure emotion, tension, peace, light and shade, the curve of a shoreline, the age of an oak, the tentative character of saplings in spring, beauty, terror - indeed all "the joy and fear of existence."