Martin Mugar's LIGHTING OUT FOR TERRITORY

This winter the artist Martin Mugar went about curating a group show of five painters that opens this Friday at the Kimball Jenkins Galleries in Concord, New Hampshire. Along with his own work he has pulled together the works of four other artists with whom he has shared the challenge facing every abstract painter in New England for more than the last half century, and who represent on some level or another a place where so many abstract artists in general find themselves these days. He has organized this labor of love and passion thanks to the special help of the artist Ryan Linehan, the director of The Kimball Jenkins Galleries and Art Center.

Like some small band of dwarves off to reclaim The Lonely Mountain, or a team of super heroes charged with upholding truth, beauty, and the Modernist Way, he has brought us together, and we are with him. He has been cutting his way through the daunting briar patch that is postmodernism. Making sense of it all. Lighting Out For Territory. This is his quest, and like him, we are all believers. Indeed, we have all bet our lives on this endeavor.  Susan Carr, Paul Pollaro, Jason Travers, and myself, Addison Parks, have gratefully joined Martin Mugar for LOFT. Here is his story.

Martin Mugar, 2014, oil & wax, 50" x 41"

L I G H T I N G  O U T  F O R
  T E R R I T O R Y

March 9 - April 30, 2015

Opening Reception: Friday, March 13th, 5 - 7pm

Kimball Jenkins Galleries

By Martin Mugar

When the artists in this exhibit exchanged emails with ideas for the show’s title, I had hoped to push a concept involving “topos”, the Greek root of the word topology. I have always had affection for ancient Greek words that embody concepts about the shape of existence such as “logos” or “aletheia”. In taxonomy Latin is used to provide distinct forms, for philosophy Greek provides distinct concepts. When thinking about Paul Pollaro’s work some years ago the word Chthonic, which means “hidden under the earth,” came to mind as a way to encapsulate what his work is about. He liked it. It may be a fallacy in this post-modern world to fall back on words, which evoke essences. But it provides a ground for our thinking; in short a topology, a place to stand on (understanding). So be it. I am not post-modern.

Paul Pollaro, Candela Orange - Graphed Limb (New Cave Painting)
 2014-2015, 84" x 82" Oil and Tar on Panel

“Topos” didn’t go far in discussion especially when I suggested it should replace painting as the noun to underpin the show. No! We are painters seemed to be the consensus and that was that. I wasn’t going to force the issue. In any case I agree, we are painters first and come out of the world of painting. In our search for a title, I recalled from my high school days the line spoken by Huck Finn at the end of the “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” that he wanted to “light out for the Territory.” The context was that American Civilization as it was shaped and defined by slavery pre-civil war was pretty murky and Huck thought he needed to flee somewhere to try out new options. That phrase is embodied in American Westerns, which are often set in the unincorporated territories of the West, where conflicting interests were not easily adjudicated as laws were either non-existent or unenforceable. It dawned on me I had injected the notion of “topos” through the backdoor. Territory is derived from terra and is probably the latinate word for “topos”. Artists are always nagged by a need to move out to some new terrain, to not stay put. The “the” before territory got dropped along the way, but that worked as well since artists are not moving out into a specific place but their own psychic plot of ground. Huck’s words struck a chord and stuck.

Martin Mugar, 2014, oil and wax

There is a mixture of buoyancy and alacrity in the phrase. There is also a sense of sneaking off, shirking one’s duties. Both aspects apply to the artists in this show; impatience with the status quo of art, and a letting go of the topics we were told in school were the only route for a serious painter. The artists in this show are New Englanders by choice or by birth, a part of the country known as being overly civilized and cerebral. Tell anybody west of the Mississippi that you come from New England and they will call you an abolitionist or expect you to wear a three-piece suit. I heard from a carpenter who works winters in Arkansas that they like to hire Yankees down there as foremen. They are good taskmasters. We are hard on ourselves too, our own taskmasters. The artists in this show inhabit the same rugged inner psychological terrain as the New England poets such as Dickinson, Frost, Stevens, Eliot, Lowell. Or artists like Hopper, Hartley, Marin.

Susan Carr, 2009, Chilled green,hot pink love, 10 x 9 

The original impetus for this show came from a message on Facebook informing me that my painting accepted for the annual “Off the Wall” show at the Danforth Museum last June was hung side by side with Susan Carr’s work. The message said it was a fortuitous pairing as both of us work our paint heavily off the surface. I recalled her name from a show curated by Addison Parks in the late Nineties at Crieger-Dane in Boston called “Severed Ear(the poetry of abstraction)” that brought together the work of New York artists such as Richard Tuttle, Milton Resnick, Joan Snyder, Bill Jensen, and Leon Polk Smith with Boston artists such as Tim Nichols, Susan Carr, Addison Parks and myself. I went on to Facebook to look up Susan’s work. I could see immediately why we were put side by side. A love of paint, but more than that, an impulsion of the paint to reach out as though pushed by some energy not constrained by logic. Chthonic seemed to apply here, except it was more the thrust of molten lava than the earth itself.

To select the rest of the participants was not difficult. We are all painters, a distinction that makes a difference these days and moreover we all are in our own way artists who want to put back together what was torn asunder in painting over the last fifty years. We don’t ignore the ideas that motivated that deconstruction but work with them. There is a paring down of art to bare essences in the Greenbergian ethos of painting. And it extends to the point where artists start taking the very material and ground of the painting apart. Where does it end? The work of Kelley, Stella, Ryman, Tuttle and Richter, artists I’d like to label as artists of the ‘bare minimum,’ informs our painting. They provide us with the iconic shapes and notions of canvas as sculpture set free by their research into the underpinnings of painting. But our plan is to do something different to them.

Jason Travers, Corot's Field, oil on panels

So Huck Finn has to light out for new territory, out from the concentration camps of the slave states. Among the artists in this show there is a conviction that the terrain of Modernism that they grew up in, admired, studied and accepted is not the endgame for painting and not to be rehashed ad nauseam. All that was jettisoned from Minimalism: earthiness, anxiety, passion, affection, mystery, magic, surprise, place and space the so-called attributes of the real which were somehow secondary to concepts and ideas come back to haunt the work of these artists. I once seemed perplexed about how personal experience came to inform artwork. You spend time in nature, you move in it, dig in it, touch it smell it, but where and how does it feed into the painting. Addison said it does unbeknownst to you. It is absorbed through your pores, the accumulation of days and nights inhaling the smells of autumn and one day haptically without forcing the issue it pops up in your work. You just let go and it does its magic. The touch and feel of being in the world rejected by the bright lights of logic come back to haunt these painters.

Jason Travers, Flotsam, oil on panels

Jason Travers turns “the bare minimum” into a question: ”Is that all there is?” Can this earlier generation of artists proclaim once and for all that an aesthetic broken into parts should be the last statement of painting? For Travers working inside this tradition on panels of pure color or value, each panel becomes an event created patiently over time of endless strokes and marks like someone scratching to escape their enclosure, or insisting that the analytic event that takes apart is important but not more than the abiding presence of the human touch. The multiple panels and the foregrounding of texture are his acceptance and participation in the thinking of the “bare minimum” but at the same time the 19th century of Turner or is it Ryder pops up in certain panels of Travers paintings in part as nostalgia for a bygone world but hints with the slow time of the hand and touch at new notions of time and terrain to light out for. But in the true spirit of a Modernist he raises more questions than he answers.

Addison Parks, 2015, Gate, oil on canvas, 14 x 11

Addison Parks uses the tradition of abstraction literally as a background for a foregrounded gestural event yet more recently he has foregrounded the abstract pattern. He acknowledges its role in giving to pure colors an iconic force. However, he learned personally from Tuttle’s evolution as an artist that breaking down has to be followed by putting back together. Tuttle, himself, was as much a maker as a deconstructionist: But what forces us to put things back together is life itself. Parks’s work asks in the end: are we just scientists working isolated in our studio/laboratory? If we are alive to nature, our family and those around us in the larger community, then our art must reflect the constant merging and rearranging of our relationships. His works are events, transitory moments of meaning where things fall into place. But any arrangement no matter how ecstatic implies that true to life in the end it can only be transitory.

Addison Parks, 2015, Lea, oil on linen, 24 x 18

In a recent blog post I discussed the possibility of painting jumping out of the “enframent” of technology. The word was coined by Heidegger to describe the domination of technology over our thinking about the world. If one accepts the premise that much of modern art has been enframed by the methodological notion of providing simple shapes that are easily recognizable (Husserl’s eidetic reductions), then the question could arise: how can you get back to the garden where all the reductive parts find their whole again. I discussed this issue in relation to my work and came up with the notion of waiting. Painting not as a power play but as an opening up to possibility. When I began this body of work now in its 15th year, I started not from reduction but multiplicity, a field of colors. All that has initiated change in the work has come about from questions such as: What happens when you use a frosting applicator to create a gesture with volume and smooth surfaces? What happens when you use letters instead of individual marks? The answer to this last question has thrust my painting into the earth/world dichotomy, that Heidegger established, moving it from the earth side of the equation to world side.

Paul Pollaro, A Light of Dark - Hyperbolic and Elliptical Graph,
 2015, Oil and Tar on Panel,  80" x 75"  

Paul Pollaro’s work is in part about the dark light of nature. Not the optical light that lights the world but the energy that radiates from rocks and plants, something that you can pick up with infrared cameras. He has succeeded in pushing the envelope of physicality but most recently the work turned on him in a most unpredictable way. Like Travers and Parks the self-awareness of the paintings presence and language comes from the artists of the “bare minimum” and in particular Richter the master of paint as paint and the canvas as sculptural presence. In his latest work the dichotomy of nature and culture meet in a way that has allowed him to engage the same earth/world dichotomy found in my work. It asks the question: are the abstract constructs of the mind also nature?

Susan Carr, 2012, Summertime, 10 x 8

In a blog post I wrote about the French painter Jean Helion, I drew a parallel between his prison camp experience in Germany in WW11 that reduced him to a raw unit of labor(arbeit macht frei) and the abstraction that he rejected after the war. All he could think about besides trying to survive during his confinement was the vibrancy of life in Paris. When he escaped and came back to Paris, he abandoned abstraction and embraced figuration in the form of paintings of people in urban settings. I thought of a parallel evolution in style in the work of Stella and Held who abandoned the minimalist trope of their early work to embark in their later years on multifaceted paintings, where there was a complex relation between the parts and the whole. Jean Helion was subjected to a physical and emotional “minimalism” by the Nazi’s. Was the minimalism of abstract art a sort of scientific asceticism in some way parallel to the emotional oppression of life in prison camp? The essence of this show speaks to the primacy of life in the creative process and the topography of time that does not try to crush the spirit but opens up islands to the stream. To borrow the title of Addison Parks’s novel: ”Love and Art, in that order.”

The Kimball Jenkins Galleries are located on the Kimball Jenkins Estate at 266 Main St in Concord, New Hampshire. Contact Director Ryan Linehan for further information at:

Ryan Linehan 
Director of Operations & Education 
Kimball Jenkins Estate 
Kimball Jenkins School of Art 

266 Main St, Concord, NH, 03301
603.225.3932

rlinehan@kimballjenkins.com

Artist Notes: Martin Mugar

...the paintings are a revelation. You seem to have unleashed something, clearly. Literally. Literally literally. Unblocked. I am sorry that there are people in your life who are now in the next that aren't here to see this. They would have been thrilled. The work you were doing before had plenty of virtues, but these are different. They have a different voice. Voices. They are going to be heard. Perhaps they can communicate to the other side. Perhaps they are from the other side. Who is to say what you are channelling, but whatever it is, it is alive!

"They were being painted around the time of my mother's passing. They are another voice, you are right. I remember working on an application to be a scholar of the house and my poor friend Joe Knight was helping me with my application. I came up with the phrase which is not original(I just came across it recently) that I wanted to use but he did not like it: "You don't know what you know until you allow it to be known." I guess the other work was setting the table for this." - Martin Mugar

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Revisited: Into Bess: The Paintings of Forrest Bess

I published this piece almost exactly 33 years ago after spending many months holed up in my apartment on Central Park West studying the archives and works of Forrest Bess thanks to the Betty Parsons Gallery and its director Jack Tilton. In fact it was probably exactly 33 years ago that I biked down to the modest offices of ARTS Magazine in midtown to hand deliver my manuscript and place it on the desk of my editor Richard Martin. I didn't trust the US Postal Service with my blood, sweat, and tears.

Writing this piece was all I did until I thought it might make me crazy. I ate, drank, and slept Forrest Bess. I had his Polaroids on my wall along with his paintings. I had his letters, heartbreaking, crazy, disturbing, strewn about my room. I was like some crazed FBI investigator. Trying to get to the bottom of Forrest Bess, going down his rabbit hole, through his looking glass, sitting down to his tea party, and then trying to get home.

Nothing had been written about him at the time. In recent years he has gained quite a following. I was embarrassed, maybe diffident, that what I had written would not stand up to the recent craze and fuss. I got that weird silence from people who thought that they had discovered him first. The fight to ignore the facts. Pretend. Like someone telling you about some place that they had discovered and the awkwardness that follows when you tell them that you had lived there for a long time, long ago. I make no claims of discovery, but I lived in that place long ago. In Forrest Bess. And I have had a painting of his all this time, traveling with me through two marriages and the divorce in between. Maybe the only painting I actually bought as a young man.

I can't reread my stuff. And of course it causes problems. Typos. Errors. Roughness. I had not reread this piece in a very long time. It has some typos, some problems. BUT... It actually holds up. It is true to him and the work, and in the way that I write, it is like the work. He painted in a very workman like manner, and I wrote it the same way. Matter of fact. No fuss. About the work. And I kept his life out of it, respecting his privacy. I stand by it. I think it remains an excellent primer for anyone interested in his work. Enjoy.




Forrest Bess, Number 14, 1951, Oil on canvas, 9 x 10",
Courtesy Betty Parsons Gallery




Forrest Bess, Number 51, 1951, Oil on canvas, 8 x 10'',
Courtesy Betty Parsons Gallery




Forrest Bess, Number 40, 1949, Oil on canvas, 8 x 12'',
Courtesy Betty Parsons Gallery


INTO BESS: The Paintings of Forrest Bess

by addison parks

ARTS Magazine; March 1982, p.140-141

Forrest Bess painted inspired images which, like the call of a bird, could be sensed in their entirety; gritty little paintings getting at something inexpressible, whose power and meaning were unmistakable but whose content was incomprehensible, even for him. How this could happen is partly due to their origin in the unconscious and partly to their abstract form. The particular meaning of each, though apparent, could only be fully comprehended by someone who was predisposed toward intuition as well as reason, and toward feeling as well as sensation; someone who saw the entire fabric of his life of which each experience (inspiration) was only a point. Bess was neither. He was a divided person, obsessed in a search for wholeness,and convinced that his paintings held the answer. They may well have, but there is little evidence to suggest that he found it, there or anywhere else. Instead, his paintings are wonderful and revelatory in and of themselves; that Bess had other plans for them must not interfere with our personal involvement with them. He considered himself a research painter, and he wanted to bridge medicine and art. His paintings, however, were better than his ideas, and fortunately they are what has survived.

Why we can grasp Bess' images without being conscious of uncertain or even imprecise meaning is the result of their unfettered form. Bess saw these images on the inside of his eyelids, recorded them, reflected on them, and experimented with them just as he first saw them. Whether they were visions, hallucinations, or psychic impressions, it suits our purposes to call them inspired images. The notion of inspiration locates at least that point of recognition of a controlling force (source) outside the conscious mind, and tells us something about the nature of his kind of painting.
Bess recognized his inspired images, felt their power, and made no effort toward any urgent explanation. He knew that they must come from his unconscious since his conscious mind did not invent them. Any deviations or embellishments reduced their power, so he did not alter them. Instead he put them down in plain terms, in paint.

What kind of images were they? Odd is one way of describing them, and this oddness draws in the viewer like a magnet draws metal. They are marvelous in the way that a heretofore unseen kind of insect or rock can be. Indeed, this is one of their powers: they are marvelous to discover. So marvelous that we might be inclined to forsake them once they become familiar. But if we look into them, like a flame, they look back into us.

They are additive by nature and raw. Color and shape are laid out and left alone. The only modulations of paint occur when gradations are necessary to project the third dimension, or marbling to undulate the plane, or the use of thickness and texture to suggest surface distinction. Otherwise the paint is never worked to correct, build, or add history to the object. Bess did not labor to refine a picture. He did not aim his colors to be pleasing; on the contrary, black and white were often present to keep it strong and plain. Bess was devoted to beauty, but it was an internal beauty which he sought and trusted.

The space of the Bess image moves like a lawless dream. This kind of space is called conceptual because it can be flat, deep, massive, upside-down, bird's-eye, and backwards all at the same time. It answers to form and not to gravity. It is a look through the looking glass into a world that was more vast and exciting than that sleeping world Bess found around him. From these open plains he gave pasture to images which filtered up into his eyelids. If his paintings were to him a key to his infinite and primordial unconscious, they are keyholes for us, views into the interior where few go.

Bess did not let his paintings paint themselves, letting the unconscious flow ally with paint, hand, and eye to give color and shape to whatever whispered in his ear. Instead, he let his inspirations paint his paintings for him, giving complete control over to the prescriptions of his unconscious. He had no choice, and given the alternatives, they were at least the one thing he could trust. He could feel sure of something that burned such a strong impression in his imagination. Bess had an inspiration, and he didn't have to fret about it. It was there, he saw it, and he painted it, much in the same way a still life or landscape painter might attempt to be true to nature. The difference is that these were private images, internal and original. Forrest Bess painted original images. He also starved.

The actual form of Bess' images is at once multiple and single; it points to a unified experience (inspiration) made up of distinct component parts. None of these parts takes on the identity of the inspiration as symbol or otherwise, but instead bonds together in an overlap to become the visual reality of that inspiration.
While the color and shape are reduced and clearly defined, the work is not reductive and does not anticipate Minimalism. It is not about its physical structure, for its physical structure, or of its physical structure. Although nothing is or can be, this does not pretend to be. To look for the anatomy here is to look to the inspiration. If, however, this work was to appear minimal, or even symbolic, psychic, primitive, or medieval, that would be the result of the viewer's personal inclination. Outwardly, the work might appear any of these things, but with intuition they fall outside the true identity of the work.

If the word primitive, and this work has been called primitive, has any real meaning, it certainly does not apply here. Although the application of paint is simple, the painting dimensions are small, and the style is untutored and un-showman-like, these are only the by-products of his particular restraints in favor of clear and emphatic results. Indeed, it is clear that Bess' intentions aimed inwardly and not at any outward demonstration of ability, talent, or skill. Their book-size (intimate) dimensions must have seemed especially strange during the Fifties, when painters chose to aggrandize their state of being with large dimensions. Any painterly invention in Bess' work resulted only from necessity; any virtue was reserved for the state of being which bore the image, not for technical or sleight-of-hand painting methods which might make impressive magic of the physical product.

From the determined integrity of his work it is apparent that he found his reward in the continued growth and experience of his goals and his art. He wanted to be in part a savior of sorts, to bear the strange and wonderful fruits of the pioneer. His motives are hard to doubt; yet his other concerns, like his outward attempt to reconcile his own disturbed sexuality, leading finally to an operation intended to produce a working hermaphroditic state, were bizarre enough to cast a shadow over anything he touched. Like every pioneer he experienced doubts, and like a fanatic he overcompensated for them.
However, as a result of repeated testimony (his letters to his dealer), much of his work escaped his fanaticism. He explicitly maintained that he was true to his inspirations.

Bess' images have been said to be of a symbolic nature, meaning that their components were symbols. On occasion he did use symbols, but these were in his weakest paintings, dominated by his unbalanced ideas, and not possessed of the fresh intensity of the eyelid paintings. To call the eyelid paintings symbolic, even loosely, is wrong. Loosely, all things are symbolic. Otherwise, symbols are parts of a system of communication, either universal or related to a particular group. They are an expression of outwardness that has nothing to do with Bess' inspired work. Symbols, even psychic ones, assume an identity that is common, separable, and transferable. Bess' inspired images are none of these things. It is useless to approach the works as though they had symbols which, under proper analysis, could reveal the latent meaning of each painting. As any systematic effort of this or any other sort would always fall short, the attempt only leads to misapprehension. Only by intuition, a sympathy of being, can we grasp this work in its entirety. Ironically, this has always been the nature of aesthetics. Ironic, because Bess never considered himself an artist.

Because Bess maintained the strictest devotion to his images, and preserved the purity of their form in the clearest terms, we can penetrate the essence of these inscrutable inspirations through this act of intuition. While this is naturally achieved sensorily at first, our next movement occurs in almost a state of hypnosis (the flame) as we see the entire image at once and our intuition of it takes hold, whereupon at some point our feelings can act and be acted upon. Then, finally, the recognition of our feelings emerges upon reflection. These inspirations that Bess saw, and felt the power and meaning of, are ours as well through this direct sympathy with them. They are each so different, each one offered up as a lone revelation, that they are like orphans, even in their appearance. They are, however, also siblings, and thus it is also likely that only as the united family will they make any comprehensive revelation possible. Only then might they speak with the deep shared spirit in all of us. And yet even this is uncertain.

It has been advised that should we need to dominate, person or animal, we should avoid looking into the heart of their eyes. Whether tiger or terrible enemy, snake or someone who serves us, looking into their eyes opens the channel back into ours, and if they look into ours they will see us as we are: fearful, vulnerable, in short, imperfect. They will see us for the untrue and undeserving masters we are and we will be naked before them. Such is the case with art, and with the paintings of Forrest Bess. If we look into them, they will look back into us, and our masks will fall away-and we will behold the miraculous underside of life, and Forrest Bess.

Artist Notes: Brett Baker

These are wonderful paintings! Thatched. Thatcher. Channeling Monet haystacks, van Gogh wheat. Great texture, the troughs of paint, furrowed, loaded, the way they build, the way they break free, shifting the narrative from north south east west and slanting toward a horizon. Marching. Beating out rhythms. African drums. Really sumptuous and beautiful to behold. Fields and forests of color like embers.They have something of the atheist about them, the atheist that is also a stargazer, and therefore maybe more believer than believer. It also comes through in the paint. Each stroke a kind of hopeful order, making room for deviations, an affirmation in a crazy mixed-up world.

- Artdealmagazine




"Your observations beautifully describe the kind of poetry I hope for in a painting. So glad it comes through - even over the internet. Also, an atheist/stargazer trying to create a hopeful order pretty much describes me to a tee.

...Porfirio DiDonna is a favorite painter of mine. I saw many shows of his work at Nielsen when I lived in Boston. Not sure how often you get down to NY but thought I'd mention that I have a show coming up in late Feb at Elizabeth Harris Gallery. There will be a Porfirio DiDonna show there as well, in April I think."

Brett Baker

MARGRIT LEWCZUK: Being and Nothingness and the Infinity Game

Margrit Lewczuk Untitled (2012) 60 x 48

There is an awe. Awesome. Transcendent painting that becomes all things! Nothing less will do. A kaleidoscope of Godhead! A microscope of cosmic eye blinking back at us. At once pleasure and pain, haunting and fun. Easter Island, Coney Island, the Island of Dr Moreau! The island of Lemnos. The third eye, the third world, around third base heading home, and back to the womb. A duet of pairs, a minuet of symmetry, a dizzying ballet of balance and centering and equilibrium.

Margrit Lewczuk, Connie’s Dream, (2006) Acrylic on linen, 60 x 48″
 Green & Purple, (2008) Acrylic on linen, 60 x 48″

Margrit Lewczuk paints monuments. To some being. To some Beingness. Like some extraterrestrial landing strip, like crop circles from space, with deafening sound, she reaches out. Encircling us. Embracing us. Hypnotizing us. Matisse as Svengali. Brancusi as painter. We find ourselves at her gate. Let go and she takes us in. The great mother. The Buddha. The unanswerable. The nothingness.

Margrit Lewczuk Begin (2011) 60 x 48 

Lewzcuk plays the infinity game. Yin Yang. Lemniscate. Möbius strip. Cassini's curve. Bernoulli's curve. Watt's curve. The devil's curve. The ouroboros. The aura. The oracle. The round sound(Om). A world within worlds. Archetypal. Algebraic. Alchemical. Ancient.

Margrit Lewczuk, Angel (2012) 60x48 Acrylic on Linen

Margrit Lewczuk, Journey (2011) 60x48 Acrylic on Linen

Cyclical. Cycladic. Cross cultural. Chrysalis. Cross hairs. Across time. The Egyptian Scarab. The Roman Millennium. The Latin Cross.  The Lotus. The birth. The rebirth. The transformation. The transcendence. Space and time. The hour glass. The butterfly. The Omega.

Margrit Lewczuk Untitled 11 x 13 inches

Margrit Lewczuk is that butterfly. Her paintings are those butterflies. Her avatars. Flapping their wings before us. The smack down simplicity of it all. The eternal mystery of it all. The space odyssey of it all. The all. The one. The ME, WE.

Addison Parks

Spring Hill, 2015

Margrit Lewczuk Me,We, curated by Suzy Spence for The Gallery @1GAP

Opening Reception :Saturday January 17, 6 - 8PM 1 Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn

Richard Meier On Prospect Park The Gallery@1GAP

Richard Tuttle: Art and the Beauty at the Bottom of Things

Loose Leaf Notebook Drawing, Box 16, Group 6: Drawing 8

by Richard Tuttle

10″x 8″

watercolor on notebook paper

1980-1982

When I first met Richard Tuttle in 1977, he cautioned me about getting too excited about the fact that we shared similar ideas about life in general, and art in particular. I was in my early 20s and he was in his early 30s at the time. I had never met anyone like him. The things he talked about were just the things that stirred in me, and nobody ever talked about those things, nobody, except maybe my artist mother when I was a boy in Rome.

People, teachers, artists, adults, were always talking about getting ahead in the "world," about technique, about appearances, about success, about making it, about whether things worked. To me this was superficial stuff. Stuff not worth anything. Certainly not worth living for. Or making art for. Or dying for.

I think the Tuttle I met and got to know then was in a funny place, and maybe so was I. He could see that in me. I could see that in him. He warned me not to get too excited about what we were in so much agreement about. He said that recognizing ones own dimension in others was a form of narcissism. But I couldn't help it. I saw it differently. What I saw was a shared vision. What I saw was not a mirror, but a fellow traveller, a kindred spirit, a sign that I was not crazy or alone because of the things I thought and felt and believed. What I saw was an affirmation.

Richard Tuttle (b. 1941) 

False Nexus #11 

signed 'Richard Tuttle' (on the reverse) 

watercolor and pencil on paper in artist's frame 

12 5/8 x 15¾ x 1 5/8in. (32.1 x 40 x 4.1cm.) 

Executed in 1991 

We had nothing else in common. I had been raised in Europe, with European tastes and sensibilities. He was from New Jersey, and mentored by the likes of Betty Parsons, Ellsworth Kelly and Tony Smith. We didn't like the same things. But what we shared was something more important to both of us, something neither of us was shy about.

The way he talked about it was inquiry. He had inquires. He was somewhat clumsy and self-conscious with language. He had to be. He wanted to make it his own. I cared less about that part. That was his pride, not mine. Pride was the thing that he was wrestling with at that time. He was consumed by it. It was where he was, and where he was coming from. The one-person show at the Whitney. The one he had. The one that changed everything. The one that hung over his head like the black cloud he imagined hanging over mine. Everything was pride or of pride or about pride.

Giorgio Morandi (1963) watercolor on paper

No, what he called inquiry I called getting to the bottom of things. That was what interested me. For lack of a better word, call it curiosity. Curiosity was what we had in common. Neither of us were interested in what made things tick or work per se, but what was true. That was all. The results for each of us were quite different because in all other regards we were quite different. We had different make-ups and dispositions and affections, but we were both curious about the stuff at the bottom of life and art.

And yes, that informed our work. Just differently. Tuttle chided me for being guided by beauty, and teased me by calling me the "beautiful Addison Parks." But I grew up on Via Margutta in Rome, and he grew up in New Jersey. I trusted beauty, but as a product of sturdy Yankee stock, he did not.

Beauty meant something divine to me. Divine insight and consideration and inspiration of form, of shape and color, of harmony and tension, of light and texture and mark. Beauty was the instrument of truth and goodness and hope and feeling and dreams and life. It was a vessel and a vehicle and beacon of all that was worth living for. To Tuttle beauty was skin deep. It was all "they" cared about. Beauty was the gulf between us. Beauty was the wedge that drove us apart.

Richard Tuttle

Drawing: watercolor on paper

 8 in. x 10 1/2 

Date: 1980 – 1982

Richard Tuttle was uncomfortable, even angry with anything that smacked of beauty, and as a consequence was always a little angry with me. We were both intuitives. But he begrudged me credit for knowing the difference between the beauty he hated and the beauty he secretly loved, the beauty that came from the heart, instead of from pride. He wanted to change the name. He wanted no confusion. He wanted to be clear. The only beauty that mattered came from some place good inside. I could not have agreed more.

In those days Richard Tuttle lived like a hillbilly, as he liked to say, in a little ramshackled walk-up on Eleventh Avenue with slanting wood floors and stacks of paper and clutter and the occasional priceless Japanese tea bowl lodged on a shelf. This was the man I knew in the late 70s. When he showed me this delicate watercolor of his of such heartbreaking beauty and I said as much, that to me it was so beautiful, he might as well have struck me, because that was what he had felt I had done to him.

He told me that it was pain. That that was what his little watercolor was. I can still see it. But he could see and feel only his own pain. It was the greater pain of course. He knew nothing of mine. He saw only the "beautiful Addison Parks." Not someone who had suffered the death of those dearest, torn from family and loved ones at an early age, constant loss and life-threatening abuse, cruelty, danger, even torture, someone who by some miracle survived being tossed around for as long as he could remember. Someone who by some miracle had found safe harbor in the embrace of art.

Georgia O’Keeffe, Untitled (Abstraction/Portrait of Paul Strand), 1917

Watercolor on paper, 12 x 8 7/8 in. (30.5 x 22.5 cm)

Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, New Mexico Gift, The Burnett Foundation

Copyright, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum/Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York

One of my regrets from that time in New York was when I was in the dealer Joan Washburn's office and she was looking at some my paintings and behind her was a Georgia O'Keeffe abstract watercolor that I could have bought for about a year's rent. It was called "Headache."

A few years later Milan Kundera published "The Unbearable Lightness of Being." Soutine had once painted a side of beef in his studio in Paris until it rotted and stank and spilled blood under the door and drove Chagall to run out of the building screaming that he had been murdered or had killed himself.

CHAIM SOUTINE, CARCASS OF  BEEF (1925)

Rembrandt had painted that side of beef before him. Michelangelo had sculpted a dying slave of such exquisite beauty that it was love incarnate. Giotto took our breath away with frescoes of a dying Christ. Goya seemed to squeeze pain not paint from a tube. An artist working today like Joan Snyder seems to paint in blood clawed by her fingers. Art has never been a stranger to pain, no, quite the contrary, it has always been its friend.

Joan Snyder, The Fall With Other Things in Mind, 2009, Oil, 

acrylic, papier mache, cloth, seeds, dried flower, 

and herbs on linen, Courtesy Betty Cuningham

And it has always been a gross myth about the "suffering artist," as though being an artist caused suffering. The truth is quite different. Human beings suffer mightily, alone, behind masks, beneath charades, behind facades modest or mansion, inside new cars, on big yachts, in the glare of bright lights, or under a bridge, in shadow's caress. Art is curious about the suffering. Art gives refuge to the suffering. And beauty by no means discriminates against suffering; indeed, it gives it sanctuary. It gives it light. It keeps us together.

I have no idea what Tuttle is like now. What we had in common was a profound curiosity about life through the lens of art. But there is this other thing. Something Tuttle despised. Art love. He despised it like art beauty. No, there was this other thing he warned me about. Art love. There was something pitiful about those artists who professed love. Like they were weak. Like weak like the way "nice guys finished last."

And I was an art lover. Pitiful. Guilty as charged. Yes, it is a dog eat dog world, dog eat dog art world, a kill or be killed art world, and art lovers finish last. I was an art lover, and Richard Tuttle was something else; he was an art predator, and more power to him. But that is a story for another day.

Addison Parks

Spring Hill, 2015

This essay is one in a series of writings on Richard Tuttle relating the author's experiences with the artist from the years 1977 to 1987. 

ART ARKS

Richard Tuttle at Tate Modern

Richard Tuttle once talked to me about the power of force and resistance. The way he put it was that the closer you got to complete blackness, the more it became all about white. That the more you talked about hope, the more it was about despair. Ultimately the message was all about balance. Ultimately the message was: don't overcompensate.

I tend to overcompensate sometimes. If there is no explanation, I error on the side of over explaining. If there is no appreciation, I error on the side of over appreciation. I can't risk more of the less.

Richard Tuttle at Tate Modern

I live in New England. The seat of less is more. There is no art here. Which might help to explain places like MASS MoCA and the ICA. Bigger and bigger places for art that make people smaller and smaller.

ICA in Boston

They are this huge overcompensation. Huge. They shout from the inside of their fortresses, "even if you don't care about art, well we do!" And the region just shouts back louder: "we don't care." In which case Noah decides that "we are going to need a bigger boat" and they build it. And these arks just sit alone in the landscape.

Which was why I was surprised when some museum people that visited Bow Street recently to see Nina Nielsen's paintings kept remarking how much they liked it. Really liked it. A funky little low ceilinged guerrilla theater of a gallery in a little tear-down of a shack on a rural road. Apparently they were relieved to be able to be intimate with art; exhausted by their own overcompensation. Funny.

Addison Parks, Bow Street

bow street

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Artist notes: Jack Frankfurter

I couldn't get to the computer very often because I was so busy for the last few days. The important item is that I have prepared a large canvas and have laid out a complicated drawing. In correcting the charcoal drawing I discovered that I may have chewed off more than I can digest. If after another attempt tomorrow to get volumes in multiple perspectives right I fail, I`m not giving up but will wipe the canvas and try something less challenging.

Jack Frankfurter, Rome

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Location:Rome, Italy

IF NOTHING ELSE; how nice to paint

This one thought has been floating around in my brain since I read that the late poet Mark Strand's mother was a painter.



How nice to paint.



I have always felt this way. No matter what. No matter if I was in the glaring spotlight or in complete and utter darkness.



How nice to paint, and I suppose, by extension, how nice to be a painter.

You see, it dawned on me, like a brick to the head, that when I read that Strand's mother was a painter, that that was all that mattered. It didn't matter if she was a famous painter, or even a good painter. I just thought, how nice for him, how nice for her.



This goes along with what I have said before, that anything worth doing is actually worth doing badly, contrary to the popular aphorism. There are things in this world that are worth doing no matter how badly you do them.



How nice to paint.



I have always tried to spread this idea. I did it while teaching at RISD alongside other instructors who felt entitled to act as gatekeepers, to save the world from bad painting. As though they had either the right or the wisdom to discourage and even crush the dreams of young people.



How nice to paint.



Painting gives you a way to connect to the world. It inspires you to look. To see. To see colors. To see shapes. To see light. To see connections. To enjoy clarity. To enjoy ambiguity. It inspires you to put colors and shapes side by side. It inspires you to look really hard. To see what makes something what it is. To remember. To share those memories. To look inside. To share what can't be seen.



How nice to paint.



Painting invites us to see why one person looks the way they do, how they felt, how they made us feel(a recent trip to the Frick restored my appreciation of portraiture).



Painting gives us a way to share what matters to us. Do you see what I see? Do you feel what I feel? Do you think what I think?



How nice to paint.



Painting, like bicycling, is a more than the sum of the parts proposition. On a bicycle you may get where you are going, but it is the wind in your face and the sense of flight that makes it special. You won't find that anywhere in the spokes or the pedals or the handlebars. It is beyond the parts. So is painting.



Ultimately, as my old art history teacher, James Kettlewell, tried to tell me, it is not about paint. Like bicycling, it is where it takes you. It is not the finger but where it points. You could say that painting is more than the sum of the arts.



How nice to paint.



I remember as a boy in Rome when my mother's boyfriend, who was an aspiring opera singer, went off to see the maestro, a man who would decide if he would, as my mother put it, sing or sell ties. I knew that that was wrong even as a child.



How nice to sing.



I remember when a friend of mine decided to try his hand at being an art dealer, saying that he wanted to rid the world of bad art, even bad art by artists he deemed worthy. Because even great artists let bad examples of their work leave the studio! Again, as though he had the right or wisdom. As though he could not sleep until he had saved the world. As though bad painting was a personal affront to his very being, to the very gods.



How nice to paint.






I did my best as an art writer to encourage every artist about which I wrote. And for every time that I failed I am eternally sorry. I was mean to Jake Berthot in print. Sorry Jake. Very sorry. I was mean to Richard Merkin. Sorry Richard. They did nothing wrong. Quite the opposite.

How nice to paint.



As a curator I have placed the work of students alongside their teachers with great success. Outsiders alongside insiders with great success. Somebodies alongside nobodies with great success. Excellent rose food.



How nice to paint.



There is a rivalrous sickness in the world. Brother against brother. Sister against sister. Painter against painter. Parents pit their children against each other. Parents pit themselves against their children. Teachers pit their students against each other. And they pit themselves against their students. This is worse than mean. This is the worst kind of failure. Spite. Laziness. A failure of imagination. Of courage. A failure to encourage each individual, to respect the right of each individual to explore and fulfill their own lives.



I am both astounded and saddened by this sickness. To turn everything into a competition ostensibly to produce results. Sadly Somerset Maugham and Gore Vidal, two writers I once enjoyed and admired, are both credited for saying something along the lines that it is not only important to succeed, it is also important that others should fail, especially friends.



I say.



If you paint, if you are a painter, hold your ground; you have arrived. Keep faith and hope by your side. And keep your ego busy doing place settings or some such so that it doesn't interfere with the job at hand. And, of course, always remember what brought you. Never forget the love. The joy!



How nice to paint.




Addison Parks, Spring Hill, 2014






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Martin Mugar: The Pastorale

Martin Mugar at the Bromfield Gallery, 2013

Is it possible that our own expectations are what cloud our vision, that life is never what it seems because what we want gets in the way? This struggle is at the core of Martin Mugar's work; this struggle is the mighty challenge that he has taken on, and that in turn explains the kind of challenge that the viewer faces when confronted with his paintings.

Martin Mugar's work is only "not what it seems" because of our expectations. We expect that pastel candy-like surfaces that appear like a large confection are sweet and decorative. We might eschew the sugar rush, the diabetic coma, the sick stomach. Or we might dismiss the pleasantries, the overall decorativeness, the unbridled optimism, the quiet pastorale.

What is truth could pass for irony, but it is not. It is us. We are not up to the challenge. Martin Mugar's work is a mountain we cannot climb. It is too high.

But the truth is simpler still. Mugar is interested in light, in mortality, in the universe. If you see this, you see his work. It is anything but sweet. It is anything but decorative. It takes on our largest and most frightening questions.

Martin Mugar at the Bromfield Gallery, 2013

And it does so rather ingeniously. Mugar finds a way of dialoguing with these questions by not getting caught up in paint in the traditional sense. He is a painter, and isn't it nice just to paint. But this isn't about paint anymore; it is about something more, so he has come up with a material vehicle for his expression that removes that distraction from the experience, that frees the work from that misdirection.

Yes, this is about something more. So instead of sensuous oil paint at the end of a brush, he applies his wax and pigment concoction with a tool that is, yes, something a pastry chef might use. But again, this is no pastry.

Pastels don't interest him per se. But in order to get as much light into the work as possible he loads up white to achieve this, reducing the colors he needs to direct his narrative, his conversation with the almighty, to the palest possible terms while still retaining their "color." Optically that is the effect, the dissolve, just like color dots in offset printing, they become neutralized at a distance, merging, coming together, coalescing, losing themselves in the light that they all miraculously generate. Think white light. Think Turner, think Monet, not Ben&Jerry's.

Light is not just the means to his ends, it is his beach, his sandbox; where he lives and breathes. Where he plays! Where he expounds. Where he wrestles with God.

Martin Mugar at Bow Street 2009

Subtlety and sublimation are the twin engines of his ship. His twin masts. And his sweet perfume. His surprising quiet strength. Lilac. Rose. Jasmine. Gardenia. Violet. The colors of smell. The smell of good things. Making the best of things. Wasn't one of his paintings titled "My Mother's Dress." Isn't it all about the smells. Memory. The dream that slips and slides, and slips away.

This is where he lives. Somewhere between the scent of the garden and the silvery reflections out on the waters near the New Hampshire shore, where he makes sense of it all, makes art of it all. Somewhere between the birth and loss of a child. Somewhere between life and death. And maybe somewhere beyond. This is the stuff of his paintings. This is his story.

Martin Mugar, 2012, oil and wax on wood

These are "what does it all mean" paintings. Maybe sometimes "what the hell" paintings that have something of Job about them. "What the hell do you want from me" paintings. "Fighting for the light" paintings. Is it ironic that what he does to liberate his paintings, and us, might end up getting in the way? That we can't get past his invention. Like the sound of Frankie Valli's falsetto voice.

Perhaps. But if we want to get up where the air is fresh and sweet, we have to make the climb. That's the thing. The worst thing that you could say about Martin Mugar's paintings is that they belong in a museum, the only place where we can possibly have the time and space to understand them.

That said,  we don't have to understand them.  We can climb as high as we like.  We can have fun, because they can be fun too, and sweet, and even silly. Joyful. Of course. Absolutely.

Addison Parks, Spring Hill, 2014

Detail:from the painting behind him in the top photo

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