James Balla: Into the blue again

James Balla;"a stone at the end of a stick"(2012)oil on panel;24" x 24"

James Balla's show Into the blue again at the Provincetown Art Association Museum(PAAM) this summer of 2013 is a retrospective, and as such represents several different bodies of work as well as a transition in recent years from non-objective to objective imagery.

James Balla: Into the blue again

Through all of this the one constant that jumps out at the viewer is the square, the square painting surface, and this choice creates balance, which casts an aura of contemplative calm over the entire exhibition. An aura of contemplative calm that reveals at closer examination the other constant, the curious artist, the inexorable inquiry into and examination of form and meaning and materials, all against the undeniable backdrop of a little spit of land curling out into the awesome expanse of infinite sky and ocean.

James Balla: Into the blue again

Few artist have made the transition successfully from the void of abstraction back to more solid ground of figuration, as this move is generally viewed as a betrayal and neither "side" ends up embracing/trusting the change. This is silly of course, but such are the vagaries of politics, even in the arts. Commitment is everything.

James Balla: Into the blue again

Balla seems to have eluded this problem with remarkable agility, so much so that it wasn't a problem at all, but an evolution, like fish walking out onto dry land. In his own way he followed Guston's footsteps back out of the ooze. So much so that the objective imagery likewise came out the other side into something akin to a comic book reality.

James Balla established a certain tone in his earlier abstract work. The drip paintings(1996) for example had a smart and appropriately referential quality; he wasn't inventing or reinventing or even exploring this well trodden action painting technique, but instead appropriating it the way one might choose a plaid for a decorative motif. The result was a very successful and subtly jarring body of abstract work that behaved like nature; you didn't know if you should be drinking beer or wine in front of it.

James Balla monotypes

Before that the stripe monotypes(1994) pushed back and forth, up and down, against the idea of object vs space in a quiet struggle, quasi dialogue that questioned what is real in the spirit of Hans Hofmann, while all the time affirming a horizon over and over again.

The Source(1992); 48 x 48"; oil on canvas

The fractured irregular grids from 1992 that had created a cubist house of mirrors of almost Hitchcockian proportions eventually gave way to oil on linen canvasses of organic forms(Wings of Silence;1995)that seemed to fall from that grid, the same way that they had relaxed into tides of simple bands acting like nature's striations in the earlier mono types which proceeded them.

James Balla 

Soul in Flight((1997); 50 x 50"; asphaltum, shellac on linen

On the other hand the asphaltum paintings(1997) really did experiment with materials that could make something unpredictable happen. These paintings went somewhere with an emotional edge. They got under your skin. They were dark, scraping the outer reaches of mortality.

James Balla is always probing those relationships, flirting with the grid, luxuriating in pattern, paying attention to what paint and mark and color and texture can do. Paying attention to it all.

Untitled(2003); 15 x 15"; oil enamel on mylar

The body of work that followed the asphaltum canvasses channelled that energy back into a more grounded and even literal reference to the forces of nature. These works of oil enamel on mylar took that step onto dry land, but they remained as elusive as the abstractions. Elemental. Ethereal. Evocative. They took another step, another look, at the drama of nature unfolding all around him, swirling all around him, that cosmos of life and death of which we are all just a speck.

James Balla: Into the blue again

James Balla locates us squarely in those shoes. He invites us to lose ourselves the way he surrenders to its majesty. In the end this is the real constant in his work, and the square just represents at once the perfect symbol and vehicle of his universal vision.

The next body of work took the next logical step. These drawings of ovals, like stones or eggs, recall the abstract drawings Guston did in the early 60s to try to get his hands on something solid after the "Monet" spatial paintings he was doing along with Resnick and Mitchell in the 50s. Balla was nailing down the simplest of something real, concrete, in these elegant and disciplined realizations of solid ground.

James Balla; B-3(2009)oil on linen; 42" x 42"

Eventually he established that ground and it quite literally evolved into a figure ground which led to the flower power paintings of 2009. These fun and funny paintings are not the flip betrayal of pure and serious abstract painting any more than Guston's light bulb paintings were some dive off the deep end.

Balla is so steady and considered on his path, so profoundly intellectually, emotionally and spiritually dialed in that he spares us the insecure machinations of the ego that struts and flexes its muscles. These are generous paintings that after everything life throws at us gift us joy, gift us flowers, gift us flower power! They scatter a hypnotic random pattern of pinwheel, propellor flowers spinning into color and space. They set us soaring and free!

Ominous, alone...(2012);24 x 24"; oil paint on panel 

And then in 2012 came the clouds, the ultimate in soaring and free, and he was back Into the Blue Again. Clouds unmistakably cartoon-like in their character, unabashedly cartoon-like in their character. Again, without the least demonstration, he was brave again. He gave us something new again; he stuck out his neck again. And again he gifted us something cosmic to lift us up, to restore us.

Wings of Silence(1995) 30 x 30”; oil on linen

At the beginning of this exhibition James Balla welcomes us with a drawing, a self-portrait from the late 70's. It seems almost out of place, like why would he put it there? But as always, he had his reasons. Very good reasons. The self-portrait indeed welcomes us, but it also reminds us that all of this work is human, made by a thinking feeling human being, vulnerable like the rest of us. It says, here I am, this is what I do, this is what I see, this is what I love, this is what means something to me. Enjoy it. With a smile. With wonder.

James Balla: Into the blue again

That is the thing about this retrospective, the dots connect, the bodies of work create a sequence, they follow each other, segueing sensibly in every sense of the word. The puzzle that is this artist's work all fits together, all adds up, quietly, calmly, like a thoroughly uncanny master plan. Like a vision. Like an architect. Like a creator. Like a poet adding it all up. The song of life according to James Balla.

Addison Parks
Truro

James Balla: Into the blue again

James Balla: Into the blue again runs through August 11, 2013


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Make Art, Be Happy

"I've been absolutely terrified every moment of my life, and I've never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do."
Georgia O'Keeffe




Wouldn't it be nice if being a free spirit didn't mean you were a flake, the same way that it would be nice if having a mind of your own was considered a good thing.

It is not worth dwelling on why being a free spirit in this world is a freakish thing, or why someone would complain that a child has a mind of their own like it is a bad thing. Still, why would anyone possibly deny a free spirit or mind of one's own to anyone?

But it's true. Furthermore, a free spirit, and this is really sad, is something we generally apply to a woman. "She was such a free spirit!" Read "flake!" Someone who hears voices or dances in the wind. But what you've really got is free and spirit connected, and what could be better than that? It sounds almost redundant. So what about men?




I fully understand that if you haven't got everyone on board, the pyramids don't get built. Maybe free spirits represent the decline of Western Civilization. Maybe more than maybe. Maybe it is like that state of mankind in that distant future in The Time Machine: people who don't care enough so save their own lives. But I don't think so. I think free spirits just might care more.




It would seem that the term artist is synonymous with free spirit. That this accounts for the freak factor where artists are concerned. But consider this: most artists learn how to invest in themselves, most artists pay for the privilege of being an artist: they rent studio space, they pay for expensive materials, they carve out time; and that should tell you something.

In a world where everyone else wants to spend other people's money, artists spend their own time and money doing something they believe in that makes life worth believing in. So for all those who think that artists are some kind of degenerate, free loading freaks, think again.




The sad fact is that the guilt and shame for doing something gratifying and worthwhile like making art, while others are filling a slot, undermines the creative commitment. Guilt and shame make us second guess ourselves; why should we be allowed to be free in a world that enslaves everyone?

Furthermore what follows in guilt and shame's wake is the pressure to succeed with either fame or fortune or both, to legitimize doing something so impractical and non-essential like making art, as if fame and fortune had anything to do with making art, and were a measure of anything but themselves.




Not unlike in A Beautiful Mind, if artists could leave fame and fortune sitting alone at the bar, and just be happy with making art, then they would preserve both their freedom and their spirit, and be truly happy!

As Kipling would suggest, treat those two imposters, success and failure, the same. Just make art and be happy!

Addison Parks
Truro
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The Lift!

Gino Severini

It is a well-known and well-worn myth that artists live a life of struggle. Why? And is it true?

Here is the deal. It is the nature of things. The yin yang, the polemic, the night and day of it all. When we talk about the glass half empty we are reminded the it is not so much about the facts, because the glass is both half empty and half full, but how we choose to look at them. How we choose to look at things is a powerful thing, so powerful in fact that we fight over the right to say which is which. Just look at the conflict tearing the Arab world apart. Or the one over the unborn child. We want to be able to say whether the glass is half full or half empty. We want to be able to control the value that that represents on so many levels.

Politics.

Alberto Giacometti

The art world is both political and well beyond politics. Politically the usual stuff happens with who's on top, who gets to decide, etc, etc. But in order for that to happen you have to have people devoting themselves to art: artists.

Gino Severini

If I have learned one thing about art, and life through art, is that in art you can make things better. That maybe that is the whole point! In a million ways!

Serge Poliakoff

That is why the whole artist struggle thing is just glass half empty. The full half is making things better, making things wonderful!

Serge Poliakoff

How can anyone deny the truth of this. Whatever struggle Van Gogh suffered, art was not only the good part, it was the great part. It made his life awesome.

Gino Severini

Now does every artist suffer from not getting enough love for their work?

Andre Derain

Only if they are looking for love in all the wrong places! Only if they doubt their own love. Only if the love they don't get makes them doubt their own love.

Gino Severini

Love is all around us!

Stepanova

The artist learns early that they have the power to create, to make something from nothing, to bring order to chaos, to bring freedom to order, to bring light to darkness, to bring color, to bring life, to bring perfection, and harmony, and inspiration, and revelation, and peace.

Stepanova and Rodchenko

Is struggle built into that, of course. We wouldn't prize it if there wasn't. As they say: if it was easy...

Andre Derain

So just remember when you think about giving up on art, that it isn't art that let you down. Art smiles upon you. Art is always there to lift you up!

Stepanova and Popova

Addison Parks
Spring Hill

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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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