Comic Heaven

             ``I'm a little representational all the time. But when you're    
         painting out of your unconscious, figures are bound to 
           emerge.''  - Jackson Pollock

Marsden Hartley

I was speaking with a collector of Marsden Hartley's work recently and something they said took me by surprise. We were looking at a landscape of Hartley's and this collector remarked that Hartley's work was sad. And in saying that it was understood that Hartley was sad.

And I had to think about it, and in doing so Marsden Hartley's life flashed before my eyes, at least what I knew of it. Growing up in Ohio, then Maine, New York, Europe, New York again, PTown, Gloucester, Maine. He lost a lover to the war. He was always broke. The collector commented about how Hartley drove Stieglitz crazy with his money problems. Yes, there is that story about him auctioning off everything to raise money. About John Reed kicking him out of their flat in Ptown for being a slob. About him falling in love with some fisherman in a fisherman's family in Maine. Never finding a home. Never belonging. Yes, he was an American painter showing with the European avant-garde, being an abstractionist way ahead of the pack. But he always seemed lost.

Marsden Hartley

At one time I would have agreed; yes, Hartley once also struck me as sad. The way van Gogh might strike one as sad. But not anymore. I don't find sadness in his paintings anymore. I find love and peace. Serenity. I find beauty and a yearning for beauty that is heartbreaking in the most sublime manner. Maybe that says more about me.

Van Gogh

Obviously it does. But like van Gogh, I think what Hartley gives us in his paintings is such powerful emotion, such deep emotion, that that scares people.

Emotion gets that rap. When someone says that they are feeling really emotional, that's a bad thing. Negative. Negated. We all know this.

Civilized society is emotionally repressed. We have no freedom of emotional expression. None. It gets smacked down. It is like a fire that needs to be put out immediately before it can spread. Who knows where it could lead?

Marsden Hartley

There are not many opportunities in this world to live an emotional life. Art, however, is one of them. Marsden Hartley lived an emotional life. That is anything but sad. Sad is living a life free of emotion. Marsden Hartley made beautiful emotional art. Triumphant emotion art. It was profoundly happy in that. Yes, emotion is messy. Hartley was indeed a slob. But it is the John Reeds of this world that deserve our pity, not Hartley.

Art, and of course music, offers each of us emotional asylum. Either as the artist or the audience. It is why we turn to music and art.

Theater, film and literature do the same, but in a more literal even tangible way. Music and art tap into a level of emotion that we don't have to understand to appreciate.

Marsden Hartley

Abstraction took this mystery to a level we had never reached before, but I'm not going to get mixed up with aesthetics here. That's another story.

I'm interested in that way in which emotion experienced unimaginable heights, or depths, thanks to abstraction; I'm interested in the freedom that it offered, the escape from the literal and tangible. I'm interested in the ineffable. The place we don't know, or understand, but we nonetheless feel.

Marsden Hartley

This was the world of Marsden Hartley, and what is so interesting about this painter is that he came back from that edge, the void, the abyss of abstraction and kept painting, even though not abstractly. No one did that. No one came out the other side and could do figuratively what they had done abstractly,  only more so. Hartley did.

Philip Guston

Ok. Maybe Guston did too. That's it. But Hartley did it better, sorry. He was completely his own person. What they both had in common however, was the somewhat comic book character that their work took on. Uncanny similarity. Late Hartley and late Guston have that cartoonishness in common, and Guston must have had Hartley to thank for his salvation. Hartley must have shown him the way.

Max Beckmann

Dubuffet also comes to mind as well, but he was never really a serious abstractionist. The comic book character saved him from the void. De Kooning was much more subtle about it. He bounced back and forth. But you can probably thank the comic caricature for his survival as well. The yang to the yin of emotion. The balance. 

Milton Resnick

I remember when Bill Jensen told me he saw a comic face peering out of a painting he was working on in about 1981, and was confused and tempted by it. But he could not betray abstraction. Milton Resnick tried to come back with characters in his work, but they never made it into big paintings, not on the scale of his old ally in Monet's abyss, Guston.

Larry Deyab

Larry Deyab worked for both of those painters, and was their peer and friend, and he is a modern day Marsden Hartley, navigating that deep emotional place where freedom lives. Making great paintings too in that same utterly original and yes, strangely cartoonish manner. And d_d_dats all folks!

Addison Parks

Spring Hill

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Addison Parks Essay in Heide Hatry's NOT A ROSE

Heide Hatry; Spicula linguarum anitum; 2011

MEASURED IN ROSES

Mimosa, Hibiscus, Bougainvillea. The language of love. The language of sex. Of unfolding petals, of pistons and stamens and pollination. The language of life. Of beauty and art, of birth and death. Plant 12 inches apart. At least six hours of direct sun. Water regularly. Good drainage. Life can be measured in flowers. First marriage, Freesia. I once lived with a woman who was like one of those rare species that produces a single bloom in a year. Felt like an eternity! I learned that I like a woman who shows up everyday, like a pot of Geraniums! And I married her!

Shaker Heights. I was three and looking from the window of my baby blue bedroom. Steven our handyman’s bloodied body lay in the Hydrangea bushes down below as figures cut towards him across the lawn. A ruby red flashed and whirled in the failing light. At seven I was walking barefoot down a stoney road on the cliff of a Greek island with an Easter Lily in my hand and three small and ancient women in black crossed themselves as we passed. My mother explained that it was the flower of death. Waxy and almost fake in its perfection, I never thought of it as a flower again. More a trumpet of doom. At ten I sat with the Azaleas on the Spanish Steps while my mother cashed an alimony check at the American Express. We lived nearby on Via Margutta. The Oleander’s had flowers like little helicopters and my sister and I would launch them from our terrace.

Cut flowers. Roses. Cut the stems at an angle under water. Immerse them in cold water over night and they will last forever. Some people put them in their refrigerator when they go to bed. Same thing. They look good at every phase. From small and closed to past their glory and dried up. We had apricot colored ones above our bed when Stacey’s water broke at three in the morning. She did not scream “911!” but called the midwife and got out a shower curtain and placed it on our bed. I washed my hands about five times. The midwife never showed. Little Ecco was born quietly while her three brothers slept in their rooms. I always have plenty of cut flowers. My one vice. I’ve tried growing roses for cutting but can’t take them from the bush. 

When I was a young painter in New York I would regularly buy a half dozen or so roses from the buckets of street vendors and deliver them individually to my favorite people and girlfriends. It is an amazing thing to see someone’s face light up on the other end of a rose. I let them think they were the only ones. A harmless lie I thought at the time but my conscience told me otherwise. The language of deception. Title of first solo show in New York: Flowerheads.

Outside my living room window a Witch Hazel bush lives a mostly uneventful year. Then, as early as February, when color is all but forgotten and I have lost every hope that winter won’t last forever, it performs its brave magic: an amazing feat of delicate yellow blossoms that announce that commencement is at hand. Then Pansies and Primrose show up at nurseries and impatiently start the spring; they stand up to the snow and cold when the change of season is stubborn. Then the wait for Crocuses, Daffodils and Tulips begins. Forsythia! I’m pretty sure I could live inside the blossom of a Silver Magnolia. Lilacs make me savor their moment every year. Dogwoods are synonymous with deer and bring me peace. 

Impatiens work their butts off in the shade all summer and build a dome of blossoms well into the fall. Petunias cascade their velvet trumpets. Begonias are as varied as cuttlefish. Geraniums can stand the heat and go for a long time without water. Electric against the green. Cut them down and take them inside for the winter. There are no pedestrian flowers. Every flower is special, every flower awaits us. Weeds flower beautifully. Wild flowers are free. Even the dreaded Garlic Mustard looks quite charming. 

When I don’t feel well I see my garden inside myself and let the sun shine on it. I breathe it all in. The bees and the rabbits and the birds and butterflies join the Day Lilies and Delphinium and other flowers, and I feel better. Works every time. Flowers are the language of color. Having a flower garden is a vital luxury that strikes many people as a waste of space and water. Why not vegetables instead? With my gardens I can make paintings with living plants. Blues, yellows, oranges, reds, and violets; infinite color abounds. The energy of each feeds whatever that is inside me, be it soul and/or spirit. After my mother died, Stacey and I spread some of her ashes at the base of a Bougainvillea high up overlooking a bay on the island of St. Lucia. Her kind of flower, her kind of place.

Daisies and Black-eyed Susans bring me down to earth; they are so conversant in the language of sunshine. Morning Glories are just that. But go indoors and Japanese Peace Lilies are as advertised. Christmas Cactus gift us winter cheer. Paper Whites do the same and bring a thick perfume. They all sing to us. Sun Flowers, Orchids, Violets, Iris, Bleeding Hearts, Peonies! I love Peonies! So many kinds of flowers, all over the world, every day of the year!

I don’t do community work anymore. What I do instead is plant flowers by the road for people who walk or bike or drive by. It is what I give. The cause-minded friends I have laugh. They say Addison thinks flowers make a difference.

Addison Parks

Spring Hill

The author, age 7, Mykonos c. 1960

Measured In Roses was written in 2011 for Heide Hatry's book, Not A Rose, published by Charta in 2012, and launched at MoMA PS1 in 2013. 

Posing as a coffee-table book of flowers, Heide Hatry's Not a Rose turns the genre inside out with her realistic "flowers" created from the offal, genitalia and other parts of animals. Text contributions by 101 prominent intellectuals, writers and artists examine "the question of the flower" from a multiplicity of perspectives. 

Contributors include Giovanni Aloi, Jonathan Ames, Stephen T. Asma, John Baxter, Claudia Benthien, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Lou Boxer, Rudolph Borchardt, Virginia Braun, Kiene Brillenburg, Bazon Brook, Mary Caponegro, Mary Cappello, Dennis Choi, Steve Connor, Paul Craddock, Brenda Coultas, Karen Duve, Joanna Ebenstein, Ron Flemming, Jonathan Safran Foer, Peter Frank, Martin Gessmann, Bennett Gilbert, Thyrza Goodeve, Jonas Gretlein, Anthony Haden-Guest, Jessica Hagedorn, Donna Haraway, Glenn Harper, Laura Hatry, George Holton, Siri Hustvedt, Christine Isherwood, Meredith Jones, Paul Manfred Kaestner, Gavin Keeney, Robert Kelly, Richard Kostelanetz, Paula Lee, Lucy Lippard, Fiona Maazel, Alex Mackintosh, Richard Macksey, Charlotte Mandell, Wythe Marschall, JW McCormack, Askold Melnyczuk, Selena Millares, William Ian Miller, Lydia Millet, Kate Millett, Richard Milner, Svetlana Mintcheva, Hannah Monyer, Rick Moody, Glenn Most, Alexander Nagel, Addison Parks, Jennifer Peters, Donald Pfister, Steven Pinker, Liedeke Plate, George Quasha, Christopher Reiger, Avital Ronell, Stanley Rosen, Selah Saterstrom, Volker Schill, Thomas Schnalke, Jennifer Seaman Cook, Philip Selenko, Robert Shuster, Joel Simpson, Peter Singer, Justin E.H. Smith, Iris Smyles, Jennifer Steil, Lisa Paul Streitfeld, Joe Summer, Lisa Summer, Klaus Theweleit, Luisa Valenzuela, Dan Wechsler, Jim Woodburn, John Wronoski and Franz Wright.

RECENT PRESS for Not a Rose:

- THE BROOKLYN RAIL

- DLK COLLECTION 

- HUFFINGTON POST

- ARTEALLIMITE

- STRAND

- MoMA PS1

- MUSEE

- Art NEWS

EXHIBITIONS:

- HEIDE HATRY, NOT A ROSE: at  STUX Gallery (530 W 25th St. New York) May 23 - June 22, 2013.

- SKIN TRADE curated by Martha Wilson and Larry List at  P.P.O.W. Gallery (535 W 22th St. New York).  June 27 - JULY 27, 2013.

- MYKONOS BIENNALE: Mykonos (Greece)  June 21 - June 24, 2013.

Smiling Side: James Balla at PAAM

Jim Balla wonders. And wondering leads to wonderful. And wonderful leads to art. You see it when you see him. You see it when you see his work.

What is art but a delivery system? A syringe. A pill. A rifle. A Fed Ex truck. An ice cream truck. An ice cream cone! A sun! A cloud! A wonderful, wondering, wandering cloud!

Fortune smiled on Jim Balla. He left art school and New York behind and found his way to beaches and sunsets and Provincetown. He got to watch birds and waves and clouds all the time. He got live in Provincetown! He got to live! He got to be himself. To wonder about things. To wonder his way.

Art can be a tricky business. Being an artist can be a tricky business. Art is profoundly subjective. A lot of people hate that. They like to know. They walk around knowing. They want to be the boss, the boss of art. That is one of the problems of the art world; the tough survive, and you get a lot of tough art as a result.

You would have to say that Jim Balla is not one of those people, that they never got to him, that he is that guy whistling to himself when all about him everyone is in Hell. Even in Provincetown. Even in Paradise.

As a result every summer the one artist I look forward to seeing what he has been up to, what he has been wondering about all winter, is Jim Balla. His boyish curiosity brings out the boyish curiosity in me. The irony about all of this is that this state of innocence so essential to a good life and good art is not some kind of ignorance is bliss naïveté, it is really smart. Cheshire Cat smart. Jim Balla is whistling to himself and smiling.

The world bullies you to work, but you have to be smart enough to play. Life is short. Life is a gift. Live it. Jim Balla goes into his studio and finds a way to get to that place. This is what all artists do. They may act like they are curing cancer, solving crime, feeding the world, and funnily enough they are.

Behind closed doors they are in heaven. And they bring heaven to the rest of us. And Jim Balla brings it these days on a cloud. Or at least last summer he did. I can't wait to see what wonderful delivery system he has in store for us next summer.

Addison Parks

Spring Hill

The Provincetown Art Association Museum will be opening a retrospective of James Balla on June 28, 2013

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90% Return

Handel Evans

Most of what anyone does goes unappreciated. Just the way things are. This is not cause for lament. Couldn't be any other way. 90% of what we all do goes unnoticed. How could it be any other way? No one has a dedicated audience and fan base. 

This is difficult for artists because getting noticed, getting appreciated, getting recognition and attention would seem to be part of the equation of being an artist. Even though this is only half true,  we have been conditioned to believe it is the whole truth, which is a shame on so many levels.

Hope and faith are an artist's good friends. Self-pity is that worst of enemies that worms its way into our confidence and consciousness. What is unfortunate is that the 90% of what we do that goes unnoticed and unappreciated is just unacceptable for the idea of artist that we have invented. This is so much the case that the opposite has become true; that the artist's new twisted but real function is only to be noticed and appreciated. This is a travesty of gargantuan proportions! Why? Because the truth, the absolute truth, is that it is the artist's job, no, the artist's sole purpose and calling in life, is TO NOTICE AND APPRECIATE! Not the other way around! At the very least one can see that this is all backwards, that the work must come first, that the horse comes before the cart, that what is being celebrated counts for more than the celebration itself, that it is love and then art, in that order. The reality that the artist must compete for attention in order to succeed must never steel the sense of purpose and wonder that started it all.

That the artist has been led away, astray, by themselves and others is not just a shame, but the downfall, the impossible, the end. The artist's role is to see more and to document, celebrate, comment on what is seen.  Again, not the other way around.

The temptation is huge of course. The weak-minded need for adulation and a parade preys on our vanity and pride and insecurity. I remember when I was a boy of 10 in Rome and I had sold one of my favorite paintings at an outdoor art show to some American collectors who lived on our street, Via Margutta. I hadn't signed it on the front. I didn't want to because I knew it would ruin the painting by having any extraneous marks on the surface. The collectors encouraged me to be proud of my work and sign it boldly. The two of them puffed me up and convinced that 10 year old boy in a moment of uncertainty, so I did. Then they told me I should make it bolder. So I did that too. They said that thing people say and I heard so often, "for when you're famous!" I ruined the painting and let it get away. I wish I still had it. I had made it under the guidance of the Welsh painter Handel Evans(apparently almost everyone in Wales is an Evans, a Jones, or a Williams), who had taken me under his wing. What he taught me was immeasurable, and this painting had been a part of the process. It was about not just finding the painting in the painting, but "discovering" it. It was about the magic and meaning and adventure and hope that comes from that. About trusting the process, having faith in it, letting the painting come to you, letting the painting happen.

I had regretted what I had done to my Handel painting at that moment instantly, but I couldn't take it back.  It wasn't mine anymore. I wished I could have taken it back, all of it, but somehow I had been convinced that this was as it should be. Selling and being appreciated. Since that experience I never sign a painting on the front.  I sign works on paper in pencil with a date on the front because they get framed and when that happens you can't see the back anymore. Everything else I sign on the back.  

Nobody gets the appreciation that they so richly deserve. Not in this life. Were not supposed to. It isn't why we're here. It isn't what it's all about. Handel didn't get that appreciation. He never even knew that what he taught me has lasted a life-time. He also gave me my first set of paints at 9, and I've been painting ever since. He got me started painting murals and I still do over 50 years later. He was a great painter, who died in his mother's arms back in Wales after living all over the world. He died unsung and at a too young age. But he taught me to appreciate what happens, what has happened and what can happen. Handel Evans taught me to make lemonade when life gives you a lemon, as corny as that sounds. To make lemonade and love it!

Addison Parks

Spring Hill

Addison Parks, Via Margutta, 1964

My sister DD watching my paintings during Via Margutta
1964 Mostra D’Arte Dei Cento Pittori; Rome, Italy

90%

The way I figure it, people are like icebergs, 90% is beneath the surface. The 10% we encounter is something we can handle most of the time, but the other part, the part beneath the surface, can rip a hole in us from bow to stern. Fortunately the only time you're going to really encounter that 90% is through a medium called the arts, or, and this can really test anyone, on a long road trip.

The arts are the domain of the 90%. Painting, music, fiction, film, photography, etc. I recently watched a television show that while patchy, really plumbed some of the deep stuff, which was intriguing and surprising. The show, Da Vinci's Demons, is on some levels, crap, but in other ways it manages to really go off the charts in a way that gets under your skin and under the surface. It makes good use of surrealism and collage/montage/assemblage to stir up the unconscious, to strike at places dreams can only touch us.

The show pushes every boundary and button in ways that at once seem gratuitous and yet also strip life bare. It also has moments of illumination and poetry, like when Lorenzo rather eloquently appeals to Spain for her business, or puts on a performance of Boccaccio's Decameron to show off Florence.

Da Vinci is at his best as the inventor and free spirit, who like a dolphin racing against the bow of a ship, stitches his way through life arcing above and beneath the surface in a perfect arpeggio. The great thing about the show is that it follows da Vinci's lead as it takes us below the surface, into that 90%, back up for air, and then plunges us right back in.

More about the 90% to come.

Addison Parks, Spring Hill
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Gush

Joan Mitchell(1958), oil on canvas, 190 x180 cm

I was looking at the work of Joan Mitchell and wondering just what it was that made her more celebrated than a painter like Milton Resnick, who remains comparatively and relatively obscure, a painter's painter for the most part, despite the best efforts of his New York dealers Robert Miller, and later Cheim&Read, both of whom represented Mitchell as well. These two painters were both the fiercest, most individualistic, most "felt" abstractionists of the 1950s. Hard to think of many artists who packed more into every single stroke than them. Twombly, Guston, de Kooning, Pollock? Sure. Maybe. But mark for mark I'd put my money on Resnick and Mitchell. It is something you can't teach or fake. Like people who can't lie to save their lives.

Milton Resnick EAST IS THE PLACE(1959), Oil on Canvas

The interesting thing is that Resnick changed. That may be the difference. Mitchell never did. Not really. She never abandoned the mark. It was always the mark. It defined her as much as she defined it.

Milton Resnick(2010), Cheim and Read Catalogue, "The Elephant in the Room"  

Resnick went somewhere else as a painter in the 60s. He sought to redefine painting, for himself, and finally, for the rest of us. I remember when I was trying to go out with an art writer in New York in the very early 80s, probably 1980. She kept me guessing and instead steered me toward writing about the Resnick painters, him and his followers. I was willing to do that because it gave me a chance to court her. I wasn't buying Resnick's redefinition of painting and I made her keep explaining it. I was never truly convinced but I went along with it because the frustration it was causing her put my courtship in jeopardy.

Late Resnick, Cheim&Read

Just for the record, she never even let me in the batter's box, let alone to first base. She had a mission, and she was willing to lead me on to a point to get some print for the cause. I couldn't help feeling like some Jean-Paul Belmondo was smoking a cigarette waiting for her around a corner so she could be done with this stupid American boy. I did visit some of the cool-aid drinking Resnickites with her, who all painted pretty much like him. I even wrote about one of them. I still remember that art writer carefully and painfully explaining the whole Resnick thesis in her bare little lower East Side apartment. Showing me step by step how the idea was that Resnick and his followers brought the experience of the painting into the space in front of the picture plane. So instead of depth of field and then flat painting, we now had this new dimension, that like some hologram existed in between the viewer and the painting.

Milton Resnick, (1982) Straw Series, oil on board, 40 x 30

Of course this was where I had a problem, the relative space between the viewer and the painting surface. How far did these 3d paintings extend? Five feet? Thirty feet? I wonder how she felt when Resnick abandoned all of that? And the other Resnickites? What happened when he turned back? I get no pleasure from that. I was cheering them on, even if skeptical. Not happy to see them get hung out there. When confronted about his followers Resnick dismissed them. Said they weren't artists and it didn't matter. Like puppies in a bag tossed over a bridge, according to his friend and one time assistant Larry Deyab. That no real artist would be a follower. True. Still pretty harsh stuff if its true that that was how he felt about his disciples.

Mitchell 1956

Of course Mitchell might have been even harsher if that's possible. Foul mouthed, she once apparently asked an artist loudly at that artist's opening "whose blank she had to blank" to get the show. Strong stuff. But she found a way to stay true to her work to the end. Did she end up just imitating herself, at least part of the time, is that what happened? Is that what made her self-destruct in alcohol and cigarettes? Or was the painting the genuine thing in her life, the happy thing in an otherwise miserable life, like a modern day female Van Gogh. The comparisons stop there of course. She was never exactly poor. Quite the contrary. And she was very well connected and art world successful.

Milton Resnick, (1959) AS.2,  oil on canvas,  82 x 80

I liked Resnick's paintings from the 50s, what he rather dismissively called his "pretty" paintings. The individualism went out of his marks and paintings as a whole by the early 60's. They became collective. The marks became more and more subservient to the whole. The paintings became slabs. Almost colorless, unless you got up close. Even then there was some larger entity burying them.

 Joan Mitchell, 1980,  Cypress 

Mitchell just kept finding inspiration. Monet, van Gogh. Living in France. The same inspiration Resnick had long since moved on from, or discarded, or sublimated, or outright rejected.

Joan Mitchell, (1982) Buckwheat, oil on canvas, 87 x 78.8

Mitchell and her collectors have been rewarded for either staying behind or staying the course. Resnick is still waiting for the light to shine on him. Apparently he felt that Pop Art had ruined everything, especially for him. Resnick might have gladly shot Andy Warhol for that. He outlived both Warhol and Mitchell and never found justice. He might still be alive today but chose to end it all on his own terms in 2004.

Early Resnick, Cheim&Read

I always loved de Kooning. My theory is you follow your gush. What makes you gush? Is that your life? It is not a question of luck. More a question of conviction. What are you willing to sacrifice for your gush? Family, friends, money, security, comfort, children? De Kooning had the gush. Love and art. The gush of paint. The gush of form. The gush of life. Resnick had that in the 50s. Undeniable. Came and went after that in my opinion. Mitchell had it to the end. But who's keeping score?

Addison Parks, Spring Hill

Resnick, 1979 

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Being There: Martin Mugar's Fire

In the cold wintery gray of Boston, even as we approached the Bromfield Gallery on Harrison Ave, me and my friend, the painter Larry Deyab, were off to see Martin Mugar's new show, and we caught the bright warm glow of it from the outside and from way off. It was unmistakable. Like some mystical experience calling us. Some beacon of hope. It radiated this choir-of-angels light like some magic cave in the side of a stone mountain. Martin Mugar's work is like that. Elvish stuff. Again, magic.

Martin Mugar at Bromfield

As we got closer we could see him through the large windows, standing in the middle of his fire, in the flame of it, waiting for us at the center of the gallery, surrounded by his work. The wizard Martin Mugar. I've always said this about his work. That the energy, the light in it, combusts like some cold fusion machine, the particles circling around inside it until it reaches that critical mass and explodes. But some things have changed in the new work, and these changes have moved the experience along in a way that amplifies what we have come to expect from him.

Make no mistake, as physical as the work is, like sculpture almost, these paintings are a highly aesthetic, even spiritual epiphany from the word go. They are not, as they have sometimes been described in the media, a candy-coated, Willy Wonka pleasure ride, although the pleasure is there for sure, and physically they resemble taffy and chewing gum. That is their worldly form. It might be difficult to get beyond that for some, but when you get still with them, look at them, see them, listen to them, hear them, let them work their magic, well then, you get carried off into space, catapulted into the stars, like some hyperdrive, and will find yourself floating in some consciousness that is another world. The world of Martin Mugar. A rare world. A world like no other. 

And that is it. That is the true meaning of originality. The work takes you to a place that you have never been before. To a world with as much attention to detail and experience as our own. Some might accuse the work of being obsessive, as though he was gilding some lily. But his devotion to the work is the necessary attention paid to creating something complete, evolved, seen through in a way that doesn't just drop the viewer off on another planet, but makes sure that that aesthetic experience is sound and true. This is a vision. A generous vision. A loving vision. A lofty and masterful vision of great beauty and poetry and intelligence and feeling. 

Martin Mugar at Bromfield

The abstract nature of the work allows for that lofty vision. It is not candy land. It is that ultimate place of enlightenment and light. It is the climb to the top of the mountain. Each painting is a step. The thick waxy pastel paint couples together, compounds, like drops of water coming together to form a tsunami, diffusing, to flood the painting and the viewer in a symphony of music and light, to lift the viewer up like an El Greco into the ether, onto some higher plane, into the heavens. 

Larry Deyab, John Wronoski, and Martin Mugar at Bromfield

Standing there with Martin, surrounded by his paintings, was like standing in the flame. Another friend, the rare books dealer John Wronoski, joined us. We basked in the work. We stood and talked and it was as though we were in some ethereal turkish bath of fire. Healing while it danced around us. And Martin was happy. And why wouldn't he be? Everything he worked for was working,  for all of us, beautifully, like Swiss clock-work. All of that hard work. All of that hard seeing and sensitivity to the tint and temperature and hue and chroma and movement and juxtaposition and direction and correspondence of color, mark, texture and composition. It all came together. It all meant something. It all had a purpose, and we were all lucky enough to be there.  

Addison Parks

Spring Hill 2013

The Bromfield Gallery, Boston, Ma;  January 30 - February 23, 2013

No Guilt. No Shame in Art!

Hans Hofmann, courtesy of PBS.org

The following is part of a note I wrote to someone when they lamented that the digital images of their work failed to reveal the struggle. I hope it is worth sharing.


"I think it is clear that your paintings are the result of dialogue and some kind of journey. I prefer not to use the word struggle as it conjures up that old machismo that I think gives people a negative impression of painting. I like to say finding the painting in the painting.

Martin told me you were a fan of Leland Bell. I studied with Leland in 1975-76 and he was probably one of the most hands-on artists I ever worked with. I didn't share his distrust of a painting that comes too quickly though. I figure a painting takes as long as it takes. Minutes or years.

These days I tend toward years simply because I have really no interest in making another painting, just painting itself, so I watch them come and go out of the simple curiosity of where they will take me. When they come to a clearing that I want to know more about and think I can learn from, then I stop and let them be.

Presumably this is what we all do. After interviewing and writing about the arts and artists for over forty years I found that the overwhelming impression was that they didn't want it to get out that what they were doing was a good time, that in order to justify being an artist while everyone else was doing a job, they had to act like it was all this angst-ridden struggle and suffering, and when I got them to admit what a blast it was to be an artist, they felt betrayed.

It is like when you're in love, you have to keep it to yourself, because no one else is and they will hate you for it. That artists are in love is a stupidly disguised charade.

You don't have to look at Van Gogh or Hofmann or Matisse or Picasso very long to see that whatever else, they were in love with painting and that it was the love of their lives. Looks like the love of your life to me. I think Leland would have been a much happier guy if he had admitted that completely. No shame in love. No shame in art.

I tried to alleviate my students of that guilt as a teacher, and I try to do the same for my artist friends. Joan Snyder and Louise Fishman, painters I admire very much and used to know a little, seem stuck there and beyond redemption in this regard.  I got in a little trouble writing about both of them.

Makes me think of Camus's line about that there are two kinds of people, ones that are happy and ones that don't know it. Applies to artists too of course. But they have the third thing of never wanting anyone to know that they are happy."

I've just known too many artists that hang a "curing cancer" sign outside their studio door but behind those locked doors they are dancing around in their tutus with a brush in their hand. Sends a bad message to young artists. No guilt. No shame.

Addison Parks, Spring Hill, 2013

A Fine Line

Hans Hofmann

Some artists I know love to talk about tension in painting, and I find it annoying. We've all heard it. One suspects that it is the influence of artists like Hans Hofmann, maybe Albers, maybe Held. That it is Germanic. Aggressive. 

The function is clear enough. Life! But I always have the feeling that a lot of artists who thrive on tension spread the energy and maybe, spread the misery. Like people who can't sit still. 

Ultimately the question is what state does a work of art, let's say a painting, find itself in when it is finished? Has it run its race and then come to a stop? Does it come to rest? Or instead do we catch it in full stride? In action? Pose, pause, or freeze frame?

Seems to me this tension thing is yes, part of the physics of art, and yes, part of the physics of talking about art, either as a teacher, an artist, or a critic. Tension is the pulling force. One half of Hofmann's famous "push pull" in painting. A stick he used to beat his students, and his paintings to... life! And don't get me wrong, I love Hofmann. But seeing his work is probably instructional enough for me. I endured the Hofmann school of teaching from a student of his and that was plenty.

Hans Hofmann

At this point in my life I think I almost prefer Calder's contribution to the conversation a little more, since he was actually working with physics. His mobiles and stabiles found that fine line between rest and action which so many people like to call tension. They hung on that point. They lived on that point. 

Sandy Calder

And what was it really? Besides the pull of gravity? People will tell you that there is good stress and bad stress. They define it in terms of positive and negative stress. The first brings vitality, the second debility. Life/death. Maybe the difference between going for a run, and running for your life. Stress doesn't only play a major role in the physics of architecture, but the physics of all art as well. 

Tension is the same I suspect. Good tension and bad tension. Life/death. My complaint is that this distinction of good and bad tension is overlooked, and that tension is overrated as a result. When a painting comes to rest, when it is finished, we want it to be alive, not dead. I think too many artists confuse tension with life, and think that if there is tension then there is life. I think that what makes a painting alive is when it has light, and promise. These intangibles make a painting active. Active is the positive we like about promise. Granted, it is only a suggestion, but isn't that really all a painting is? A suggestion? Tension for the sake of tension is just tension. Instead it is the promise of something that creates positive tension. The promise of motion, action, change, even sound, that keeps us, holds us, even pulls us. Positive tension. 

Which brings me to stillness. The thing the tension folks can't achieve. Stillness is what we need to meditate, muse, dream, imagine, and think abstractly and in depth. In layers. Connecting dots, maybe an infinite number. In stillness we can imagine the possibilities. Infinite possibilities. A painting that sits still can point to those possibilities. Suggest those possibilities. Well beyond our reach. Tension pulls us back. Keeps us tethered. Keeps us on a string.

Calder with Nino Franchina, Rome

Addison Parks, Spring Hill, 2013