If you don't get it, you don't get it! The Subtle Art of Appreciation.

What is your greatest pleasure? Name it. Own it. A good novel? A walk in the park? A great meal? Having a family? Football? Ice cream? The beach? Golf? Gardening? Work? Art? Movies? Opera? Cats? Dogs?



Of course, my theory is that the more things you like the happier you are, and conversely, if you don't like anything the chances are that you are a miserable SOB. But that is another story.



This story is about a different aspect of the act of appreciation. It is about the subtle but startling realization that if you don't get something, the way not everyone "gets" cats, then well, you don't get to enjoy the pleasures having or knowing a cat can bring. If you don't like chocolate, then you miss out on all the happiness that chocolate can give you. And so on.



People make a mess of subjectivity. A complete mess. Yes, we are free to like what we like, or should be. It would be nice. Yes, apparently Tosca isn't for everyone. But most people take this privilege and turn it into a weapon. What they like becomes good, and what they don't like becomes bad. They objectify the subjective. It gives them power. The power to validate, and invalidate. What they care about is important, and what they don't care about is of no importance whatsoever.



And apparently invalidating things can be almost more fun than validating them. A practice often but perhaps incorrectly associated with adolescence. Yes, I have a friend who is at this point in his life an old man, but there is something of the 13 year old girl about him in the way that he petulantly dismisses things with a wave of his hand that more than anything probably just threaten him.



So here is the rub. All the fun you think that you are getting by dismissing things out of hand, for whatever reason; the opposite is true. You are cutting off your nose to spite your face. Indeed, this act of spite is the very act that deprives you of the pleasure of something. Anything.



I always like to say to someone when they tell me how much that they dislike something, "how nice, you really have something to look forward to," that once they truly discover and "get" that thing that they think they hate, they have endless pleasure in store for them, waiting for them, smiling in anticipation for them.



You see, appreciation is in fact its own reward! For example, when I was a young man I held a belief that was not my own, that Westerns were puerile, not worthy of my time. Even though I loved the movie Shane, that was the exception. I didn't "get" Westerns.



Then one afternoon, maybe I had the flu, maybe I didn't, I found myself watching a Gary Cooper Western on a little black and white TV in my bedroom on my family's farm in Virginia.



All of a sudden I got Westerns. Man in nature. Man versus nature. Man versus society. Man in space. The hero. The loner. The self-reliant. The free spirit. Man face to face with the universe. Man face to face with God!



Yes! All of a sudden I got Westerns, and then, I had all those Westerns to look forward to waiting for me. John Ford Westerns! John Wayne Westerns. Spaghetti Westerns! All of it!



I learned so much that day. Not just what a sympathetic actor Gary Cooper was. I learned that every prejudice I had wasn't just my loss, but that each one held a new promise. When you get something, you actually get it! Thank you Gary Cooper.


Addison Parks, Spring Hill




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THE FRICK: THE BEST FIVE MINUTES OF ART HISTORY ON THE PLANET

There are some wonderfully intimate art institutions the world over where you don't have to stand in long lines and fight big crowds to see some great art. The Gardner in Boston, the Courtauld in London, and the Phillips in Washington DC quickly come to mind. All favorites. But last week I rediscovered a old gem, my new favorite. My BMF! The Frick on Fifth and 70th next to the park in New York! 

I was in town to "give a talk" (read the "artist is present" in truth) during the Chelsea Art Walk for a show of my paintings at the Prince Street Gallery, and I wanted to give my family who had been sweet enough to join me a good reason to have made the trip. I decided on an old standby, the Frick, and no one was disappointed.

Right off the bat you turn a corner and get blasted out of the water with an excuse me, gee, before you even have time to think, an exquisite, shy as you please, on your left over a chair, right there before your eyes, no fanfare, no bullet proof glass or guards, just like, ho hum and by the way, a frickin Vermeer. It sets the tone. Pronto! Your day just got really good. You are in for a treat. Pinch yourself! You could turn around now and the four hour drive into Manhattan and the two rooms at the Plaza were worth it! A gorgeous frickin signature Vermeer! Not something you see every day! 

You pause, try not to shout at the top of your lungs about the pocket of light the artist welcomes into a private meeting between a gentleman and a lady seated at a table. Is he there to court her, or to plan a trip, or to arrest her? It is at once formal and incredibly personal. We invade a moment.

And then they're just showing off. Before you can even catch your breath there's another one! And then across the small hallway is a Bronzino, that is like oh my god, bring me to my knees, put every artist to shame, beautiful. A Bronzino so familiar to every art lover in the world you can't believe your eyes, and there it is, just you and it in what feels like the quietest dimly lit corridor. When Procol Harum wrote Nights in White Satin, they should have said black and green.

After that it just gets gaudy. El Greco. A Rembrandt self-portrait that haunted every artist from Manet and Goya to Bacon and Motherwell. Whose eyes rest at the edge of a forest, and peer into you like God. Nothing less. 

And a Reynold's portrait that has all a portrait could ask for in a stylish bit of contemporary pomp and circumstance with drama to boot, and a nod to both da Vinci and Michelangelo and its giddy patron all at once. Rivals Gainsborough and Whistler are every bit as much in play as well, and every bit his match. 

For while there are remarkable Turner landscapes and charming della Francescas, as well as a jaw dropping Chardin still-life, this is really all about portraits. The Gainsborough comes at you like an apparition through eons of time and space. The Whistlers seem to dwell in a realm of their own, where the laws of nature are different, where sound and light are muted, and everything takes place in a gaze.

Did I say five minutes? Take the afternoon, and spend it with a little Degas in a corner and just keep your mouth closed as you try not to gape, and failing to contain yourself, you fawn over his dancers in the hush of absolute intimacy with just the two of you, and some violin.

Addison Parks, Spring Hill, the end of July 2014

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ADDISON PARKS: Source Paintings at Prince Street

Addison Parks, Blue Burn, 2005, oil on canvas, 9 x 12 inches

Addison Parks's signature idiom is like the whorl of a fingerprint, wholly his own. Approaching, circling, swerving away, again approaching, patterns gather into shapes that stay in motion. His process is direct, unmediated by the brush, squeezed directly from tubes of paint, articulated with his fingers. He discovers high-keyed color harmonies more brilliant than those that exist in nature. Blue Burn is a firestorm of cold blues, swatches of a sooty black streaked with white fissures, and sparked by a small scratch of leaping yellow. His paintings arouse our haptic sense of tactile texture. As Jon Friedman once wrote about Parks, “[Natural] appearance has been shucked in order that the substance can be seized.” His exhibition in July at Prince Street Gallery in New York concentrates on Source Paintings, his new series from 2007 to the present. Parks summers in Truro." 

Christopher Busa, Provincetown Arts Magazine, Summer 2014

Installation photographs: Source Paintings by Addison Parks at Prince Street Gallery, 530 25th Street, Chelsea, NYC, July 8 - 26, 2014

Prince Street Gallery panorama shot of Source Paintings

Source Paintings by Addison Parks at Prince Street Gallery July 2014

Old Skies (2007),  Pass It On (2008-2009)

Source Paintings by Addison Parks at Prince Street Gallery

Prince Street Gallery; When Madame Has A Headache (2009)

Prince Street Gallery installation of Source Paintings by Addison Parks

Press Release

Prince Street Gallery Installation
Old Skies (2007) , Pass It on (2008-2009), Dragonfly (2012)

When Madame has a Headache (2009),
I'll Thank You For Not Ruining My Croissant (2014)

Prince Street Gallery Installation of Source Paintings by Addison Parks

Prince Street Gallery Installation of Source Paintings
Verse (2008-2010), Whale Song (2014), Wintersbeach (2014)

Whalesong (2014), Wintersbeach (2014), Viking Funeral (2014)

Duck&Weave (2014), Stations of the Crosstown Bus (2014)

Pass It On (2008-2009), Dragonfly (2012)

Prince Street Gallery Installation Shot; Source Paintings by Addison Parks

Art in America and Provincetown Arts Ad

Addison Parks with Source Paintings at Prince Street Gallery 2014

Addison Parks with paintings by boyhood teacher
Gino Severini at the Guggenheim Futurism exhibition

With Special thanks to Martin Mugar, Stacey Parks, Mary Salstrom, and Gina Werfel, without whom this show would never have happened,  and also to John Baker and Nina Nielsen for their much appreciated curatorial assistance and support.





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Addison Parks / Prince Street Gallery / July Show

Here's a little of what's going on in my world.

Viking Funeral (2014) oil on linen, 16" x 20"

From July 8th to July 26th, 2014, Prince Street Gallery will be showing Source Paintings by Addison Parks. These works turn on the simple premise of a center point from which springs a life force not unlike a flower, plant or a fountain. They locate that moment of transcendence and transformation in a single gesture.  As Parks happily concedes, just an excuse to paint. "My belief is that painting is a more-than-the-sum-of-the-parts proposition," he explains. "I'm counting on that. That all things get caught and trapped in and between layers of paint. Since I was a boy I have always been wowed by the power of painting to speak beautifully for life; that I would give myself completely to that is my oldest memory."

Addison Parks lives with his wife and children a stone's throw from Walden Pond. He earned his painting chops as a boy in the Via Margutta artist community in Rome in the early 60's, studying with Gino Severini, and then later in New York at the invitation of Richard Tuttle after picking up a BFA from RISD (’76). He did murals at PS1 in 1980, was one of Seven Americans at Washburn in '82, and had a solo show that same year in the Fuller Building at the Andrew Crispo Gallery. His first son was born while he was teaching at the Putney School in Vermont, and afterwards he travelled and showed in Europe. After teaching at RISD in the late 80's he ended up in Boston where he wrote an art column for the Christian Science Monitor, and showed with the Creiger/Dane Gallery, Nielsen, and later Bow Street in Harvard Square. He also has a summer studio in Truro, just outside of Provincetown, where he has been on the board of directors of Provincetown Arts, and on more than one occasion shown at DNA. His work has been written up in the New York Times, ARTS Magazine, and the Boston Globe." 

The Prince Street Gallery reception for Source Paintings will be on Thursday, July 10, from 5 to 8pm. The artist will be present. A catalog will be available.

Verse (2010) oil on canvas, 36" x 60"

Pass It On (2009) oil on canvas, 36" x 48"

Old Skies (2007), oil on board, 24" x 36"

When Madame Has A Headache (2009) oil on canvas, 60" x 72"

Whale Song (2014) oil on linen, 18" x 24"

Addison Parks; Wroots (2014) Oil on linen; 20 x 16

Addison Parks; Green Thumber (2014) oil on linen, 16 x 20 inches

Addison Parks; Stations of the Crosstown Bus(2014)

Prince Street Gallery 

530 West 25th St, 4th Floor,
New York, NY 10001
Tel. 646.230.0246

princestreetgallery.org
Subway: C,E to 23rd Street
Hours: Tues.- Sat. 11am-6pm

For the Best

Addison Parks; VIKING FUNERAL (2014), oil on linen, 18 x 24 inches

I like dreams, but not because they are better than the waking world, but because they make the waking world better. Most times even when they are bad. Dreams make me think, make me muse, make me grow. They tell me about what I am thinking about, and what I am not thinking about. They speak to me.

Which is why I like art. I like art in the same way that I like dreams. Art and dreams add something to what I already like about life. I like seeing and thinking and feeling and learning. And I like doing, which is what makes making art so much the better. 

We usually say that everything turned out for the best when we think things started out badly. We accept that the universe knew better in the end. We embrace the words of Mick Jagger. Because you can't always get what you want. But! 

Wouldn't it be nice if we were wise enough to know this from the start? That things turning out for the best was something we could see coming so that we didn't crash and burn when we felt denied? A sixth sense.

As a friend of mine started going through a painful separation and divorce recently it ended up bringing my own terrible experiences with divorce back to me. It started when my friend's wife assured him that things would turn out for the best. I was alarmed that she would tell him that, but it made me think about it. 

If my own parents had never divorced I never would have been able to do the thing that made me happiest, painting. My father tried to talk me into doing something else right up to his dying day at age 93. If I had lived with him instead of my mother he would have punished me for painting more than he already tried to do from afar. I am pretty sure I could not have survived that.

Furthermore he ended up living in London for most of the rest of his life, with a sports car that could not fit any of his six children comfortably, and that made him very happy. My mother got to live in Rome for twenty plus years and that made her very happy, and my brothers and sisters for the most part got to live where they liked and do what they liked, and that made them happy. It worked out for the best. I was shocked to finally think so. 

The same had to be said for my own divorce. My ex-wife and I both lead happy and fulfilling lives now that we couldn't have lived together. So much for all the pain and guilt and sense of failure and loss. What a waste of time!

It might be difficult to justify art in a world miserable with suffering, but misery does not make things better. There was never a suicide for no good reason. Self pity or a grudge for no good reason. An addiction or alcoholism for no good reason. A vendetta for no good reason. Good reasons abound. They are just never good enough. Never. And that is what we have to remember deep inside, so that when those reasons come knocking, as they always do, some little voice will save us, our sixth sense will guide us through.

So I believe that art in fact makes things better, and that is not just good enough for me, it is actually great!

Addison Parks,
Artdeal, 2014

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The Spirit of Paper; Revisited

Richard Tuttle, Untitled, c.1967, watercolor on paper, 7 x 10 inches

The Spirit of Paper

Spirit is the shared one, and paper is its special house. It is the stillness, and still--it is always moving. When an individual brings an inspiration to this house, he mingles his soul with the spirit of paper: they cast their shadow into the daylight. This is what is so special and telling about paper; it locates everything, if only for a moment.


Paper is plant, and in America that has meant tree: tree as in the great woods--the primeval forest-the home of wildlife, the Indian, and pioneer. It has been the one raw material for the American home, industry, and culture. Rooted in the landscape, the tree is in the service of both nature and people; it is spent for every purpose, not the least of which is paper. The past of every tree is present in every piece--this is its great beauty, heritage, and spirit. For while these are essentially things not seen in paper, they are its essence. We cannot see these things, and yet they are there, and it is the creative who bring them within our grasp.

The thing seen and the thing not seen, this is the province of paper. Each one is an ally in a quest for the whole: the soul embracing the spirit, the dark stepping into the light. The whole story is the sum of what is put in and what is left out. Not everything can be included, or excluded. They are equal partners. Paper can register the passions of the heart, the journeys of the mind, or the "flight of any fancy," but whether these burn or float on the page, everything put down is still a load for the paper to carry. It is still a shadow over its pure light.
What occurs when the individual joins forces with paper to bridge the unbridgeable is once again visible and invisible. However, while each may be sensed separately, only together will they be under- stood. The way in which paper is used tells us about the user and his attitude. It tells us as much about him as it does about the things which are and are not the object (and/or subject) of his creativity. The attitude is the individual, and no matter how removed or abstract it may be, it means all work is the result of the worker's relationship to things. This is certain.

Consider the attitude of a drawing or a watercolor. The ever-present spirit of paper makes this possible. It is through the individual's relationship to that spirit that we are told so much--about their subject-- about them--about their attitude. What kind of relationship is it! Looking at a work it is hard to know what happens, why we like it, are moved by it, or not even interested. Like reflexes, we sense, intuit, feel, and even act in the presence of a work without understanding or even trying to understand why.

Of course understanding is only equal to experience, yet for a number of reasons, viewers find works on paper easier to engage and experience than the generally considered major works of art in three dimensions or on canvas. There is no doubt that at first a drawing or watercolor is less intimidating. Glass protects the viewer from the work and vice versa, and the open whites of the page offer the kind of levity and rest that a major work rarely concedes. These things do make the work more approachable and easier to live with. That could also mean easier to live without.

It is true, the major work of art can be threatening. It seeks to dominate us with its self and its intensity. It is not for the faint hearted. It is a prickly thing that can be as terrible as it is wonderful. Even if its mask reads flower petals, there are thorns hidden somewhere. It is that drawings and watercolors seem thornless, and this is the marvelous lure they possess.

When we experience paper, we are rarely conscious of it. When we are, we become aware of how conscious the author was. Again, what kind of relationship was it! Was it really an alliance, a camaraderie, a taming, a friendship; or was it an opposition, a domination, a servitude, a battle? Was it all of these things, or none of them! Is paper not even an issue at all--is it just a material--a means to an end!

Looking at a work on paper we can see all these things. We can see if it is just pedantry at work, or ego, lust, therapy or confession. We can also see if it is something more, deeper, about larger truths, touching a live nerve. We can see if it is emotional, psychological, spiritual, sensual or thoughtful in its primary sense. We can see if the individual was in awe of paper or not even aware of it. Art, with the exception of music (and possibly some poetry and prose) is about light, seen and not seen.

Light is how we see, and in its absence we don't. All works are therefore, to some degree or other, about light. Works on paper seem especially blessed in this respect since they are washed in the pure paper light, and they never forget it. There are even individuals who devote themselves entirely to this light, and only seek to magnify it. We face their works as we face the sun and stars.

Color is one of the joys of light, and of living. It is often how we know things and enjoy them. Paper gives life to color almost like light itself and here again there are those whose devotion has been primarily to light through color. It is as stained glass.

Then it is shape which flowers into flesh in the light.`We can touch the shapes which the individual created through his touch. In a drawing or watercolor we see things reduced to shape, and experience that this is how we sense, feel, and know things. In works on paper we can see these things so directly, so simply and clearly, with reason. Works on paper tend to be the single vision, the moment, the full but single face of an inspiration. We can see all this, we can sense and feel it. We can know color and shape as how we view the world, and they speak to us of what we love and hate, think and feel, even if entirely through our unconscious.
All this is possible because the work on paper is usually short and sweet. It is done to make some- thing clear in the individual. It is private. There is nothing to hide or contrive because it is for something else-mostly the self. It is not often intended as a major work of art-or intended to be art at all. This is why it has been called the "backbone" of the arts. It serves a primary function to the creative. Otherwise, it has played a secondary role historically. Drawings and watercolors have been thought incomplete; they promise what the final work delivers.

Not all works, however, drawings or watercolors, are preludes to works in oils or Stone, but even if they aren't, it has been logical to put them last even though they may come first. But that they came first is very important. It makes them rather primary, not secondary. It makes them special--where it happened first, and maybe never again. All the intensity of an inspiration gathered in a moment. Perhaps the moment of truth, This might explain why some painters or sculptors go directly to the oils or stone to preserve the inspiration--a feeling expressed can be a feeling spent. It might also explain why some individuals who work on paper first, rarely succeed in, or even complete, the final work.

As paper is a spiritual house, a cardiograph, a mind reader, and an advertureland, so too with all these it is a door. Through it we pass onto the plane of paper, a place of union or isolation. Out on the plane of paper each lone mark must seek integration, and it doesn't matter if the work is abstract or figurative, progressive or conventional, decorative or plain; what counts is if it is true to and touches the paper. Then it can touch us as we touch it. For paper cannot, and will not, lie.

Addison Parks, 1981, New York City

Catalog Essay, American Works on Paper/100 years of American Art History

This Exhibition traveled to over twenty museums and art centers throughout the United States (1982-85)


Philip Guston, Untitled, 1953, ink on paper, 18 x 23 inches

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William Wegman: Revisited

ARTDEAL MAGAZINE William Wegman



WEGMAN



WILLIAM WEGMAN graciously acknowledges that he follows his dog's lead; that the model, in this case a dog, through some mood or gesture, shows him what he will do. This really is a question of grace, for the results are pure inspiration! In his dogs, Man Ray and Fay, he has recognized the uncanny expression of an immense humanity that wasn't human at all and has realized it with both vision and humor.


William Wegman is famous for his photographs of his Weimaraners. You could say that his dogs have made him the successful artist that he is, or, that he has made them famous, since most people would recognize them and lose him in the frenzy of adoring fans. Nonetheless, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston is hosting an exhibit which also includes his paintings, drawings, and videotapes in an effort to expose us to the complete artist and prove that there is more to Wegman than his dogs.


With almost 150 works from the past 20 years, this retrospective is the first stop on a United States tour that went all over Europe. It is a salute to Wegman's contributions as an artist and a clown. Despite the common bond of humor, the works in the four separate media are all quite different from each other. Only two show any signs of dogs. The truth is that each medium does reveal a different side of William Wegman. One might invite a certain refinement, another detachment, and still another something more in our face. By nature the drawings are witty and adolescent. They have a comic-strip image that tells a story, a joke. They delight in simplicity, a kind of straightforward and divine dumbness that approximates an idiot's wisdom, usually right on target in some offbeat way.


The paintings, on the other hand, are lively and painterly in that they enjoy what paint can do and how images can emerge from that paint. They are also watery, fresh, and colorful, with a great deal of activity in terms of gesture, energy, and detail. Their subjects are large, in the landscape, from the balcony, life in the garden, on holiday, the hustle and bustle of town. They are good-natured and fun, almost bucolic - at least on the surface.




The videotapes are almost childish. One gag after another in which Wegman uses himself and/or Man Ray as an instrument or subject. Most are mercifully brief and enjoyable, brimming with an inventive- ness, irreverence, and crude, impromptu charm. They can surprise. We might not recognize just what we're seeing at first; like something pour- ing down right in front of the lens with the color and consistency of heavy cream. Very heavy. It pulls away and we see that the camera is on the floor and Wegman is on his hands and knees, simultaneously spitting out this stuff and crawling backward so as to form a straight line. He turns a corner and disappears. Around that same corner seconds later appears Man Ray licking up the white liquid line until finally his tongue obscures the camera.


THEN there are the dog photographs. They have a certain classical and velvety elegance and intimacy to go with their cockeyed reality that makes them so appealingly dreamy. It seems unfair to compare them to everything else. However interesting it is to see the full scope of Wegman the artist, all this show ends up proving is that there is a reason for the popularity of his dogs; they are simply wonderful.


Although Wegman studied painting at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston, and even went on to get a master's at the University of Illinois, he made his mark as an artist when he began photographing Man Ray in 1970. It was the beginning of a love affair between an artist and his model that lasted a dozen years and produced some of the most powerful and memorable images of its time.




The affection in his work is plain, even as it is undercut by humor, making it unique in a cool and cheerless art world. That Man Ray consented to pose, sharing his compassion and intelligence, however ridiculous the situation, lends the work its emotional touch. This is not a dog performing tricks. It is a free spirit indulging, even guiding, the lens and the artist. It is showing him and us something we have never seen or recognized and have yet to learn. To see the photographs is to believe this. The more preposterous or awkward the arrangement, the more gentle and haunting his wizened gaze, and the more profound the psychological impact.


As Man Ray approached the end of his life, Wegman turned from black-and-white to color Polaroids to preserve all he could of his canine companion's camera magic. The athletic young lead had by then become something of a character actor, but he had something to give, right to the end. It wasn't until almost five years after Man Ray's death in 1982 that the artist began working with dogs again, this time with his young female Weimaraner, Fay (b.1985). Life renewed itself with a new love, and the magic was back. Wegman and his dogs are jesters in the court of art. They clown around, recreating scenarios that benignly slide up beside us and strike a pose, showing us just how foolish our own charades are. Looking into the dog's eyes we are looking into a mirror, seeing how we feel about our own predicaments, asking how we got there, if and how we'll ever get out. It's all very funny, and then it's not. Dogs look pretty silly doing these things, but then so do we.


HUMOR is a seamless and essential part of life, one section in a strand of spaghetti. Wegman sticks that part up front in his work, and we call it humor. He gives us one long strand, however; one long enough for a meal. There is an innocence natural to most of the early work, to the drawings, the videos, and the photographs. It is hard to keep that alive. Life tests our sense of humor. Loss touches us all. When Wegman struggled, his dogs kept their innocence. They stood in for him, acting as his better half, a kind of alter-ego self-portrait.


This is the happiest of alliances. Most artists will admit just what a difference it makes to have a great subject. Then they can get about the the business of drawing, filming, painting, or photographing. William Wegman has had the great fortune of having two extraordinary subjects, Man Ray and Fay, and he has done them extraordinary justice by listening to them.

Addison Parks, Sept. 9th, 1991;

Pgs 16 - 17; Courtesy of the Christian Science Monitor


The William Wegman show will be at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, through Oct. 6, 1991 before traveling to the Ringling Museum, Sarasota, Fla.(Nov. 8 - Jan. 5), and the Whitney Museum of Art, N.Y. (Jan. 22 - April 19, 1992).



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Todd McKie: Revisited

Todd McKie

He showed me his first painting, something which gave him so much pleasure at the age of 10, and gives him pleasure still. It was of a dog sitting in the grass with a tree to its left and a driveway to the right. He said that even though the dog mostly resembled a brown smudge, to him it seemed to be looking down the driveway. Twenty years ago, Todd McKie came to Boston straight from art school and began a career here which by now ranks him as one of Boston's finest and most influential artists. What he does today depends on that same sense of touch, that same sense of beingness alive in a gesture; a smudge.

The word "wonderful" was invented to describe Todd McKie's art. It sparkles like a child's garden on a sunny blue day. It is an innocent vision of life, objects at one, floating among the elements, half dream, half glimpses of a plan. McKie says that they are all characters on a stage, and points out one or two that look lost. Yes, lost in the garden, lost with wonder. Todd McKie makes wonderful images of primary existence, plants, animals, humans, vessels, furniture, fun.

There is something casual about this artist's work, as though it was all about something happening. It is not surprising to hear that he started out doing performance art. The work is almost just a record of some place he is, or goes. The color is so rare it is startling. It has sound. When I see it I hear it, and as if for the very first time. It is that original. I couldn't get over it. Blues, greens, oranges - "smudges" of genius.

On the wall adjacent to the one where his first painting clung to two nails was a bulletin board with a few photographs and drawings pinned to it. The photos were of Jesse, his son and only child who was killed last year. He took down a drawing and showed it to me. It was something Jesse had done of him that was like-spirited in both imagination and humor. The McKies like their humor. Todd's wife, Judy, is a furnituremaker whose work is as wild and playful as her husband's. He says that they share the same inspiration. Then he went over to his stacks and pulled out a watercolor that he and his son had done together when Jesse was 15. Jesse had painted the fish. It was shiny and bright.

Addison Parks
Courtesy of the Christian Science Monitor,  February 14, 1991

The Time of Day, Revisited

Louise Fishman, MacDowell Series #10, 1980. Oil on canvas, 8 x 10

THE TIME OF DAY

This is a story of fear and ignorance. My story; A New York story, circa 1979. I was doing some writing for ARTS Magazine. Richard Martin had given me an Uptown beat, which wasn't particularly exciting, mostly mainstream and old guard haunts. Robert Miller's space stood out as the exception. Nonetheless, I got around. On one morning I might get yelled at by Betty Parsons for not seeing something her way; and my way, some punk of a painter's, was in print(later I atoned). On another day in another venue a dealer might casually offer to pay me to write something, anything at all, about their show. Just your regular stuff. This story is about one of the times I went astray.

One afternoon when searching for something to write about, and feeling pretty bored, I found myself pacing around a group show at Oscarsson Hood. I was alone in a gallery full of preneoexpressionist paintings, and free to conspire with myself. Did I say I was bored? It was then that an awful idea occurred to me: I was going to look for the worst painting in the show. Instead of searching for work I liked, I was going to discover the one I hated. Wow! What a concept! And I had a winner! Yes! There it was, a little smudge of a canvas by Louise Fishman.

Of course, you can guess the rest. After really looking at the painting, I fell in love with it. I was more excited than I had been in a long time. I went on to visit her studio, and write two articles about her work, one under an assumed name.

I might have been too ashamed to tell this story if it didn't have such a happy ending. Ashamed for being such a little shit of a human being. Ninety-nine percent of what I'd written had looked for the best in what people did, and I considered myself an enthusiast above all, an artist supporting his brothers and sisters. So what went wrong?

At the time it was Richard Tuttle who would remind me that what I was really looking for was my own reflection, my own "dimension." That dimension was my own values, my own tastes, my own experience. As broad as they might have been, I was still limited by them, and I was justifying them on the grounds that they were founded on some kind of knowledge. I thought I knew. In twenty years of writing about artists and their work, I have learned that I do not know, and cannot know. That no one can.

So now what? You don't agree? You can't agree? Everything you've been taught has told you otherwise? I had the same education. With maybe a couple of exceptions. My mother was an artist with an eighth grade education who taught me to think for myself. A mind of your own was about the best thing you could have beyond a good heart. She was as intelligent, well traveled, and well read a person as you could hope to meet. She was also an art lover.

What I got from her was that you had to give in to a work of art. You didn't master it, you let it master you. Only by surrendering would the work surrender to you. Richard Tuttle talked about it in terms of walls; that our walls had to give way before the walls of the work would. If we don't surrender, the only things that we will connect with will be ourselves in some other form. By looking in the opposite direction that day I discovered something else. I have since tried to preserve that peripheral vision despite my own limited dimension.

I speak for every artist I know when I say that it hurts when someone we've shared our work with fails to take an interest in what we've done. No curiosity, no excitement, no enthusiasm, no touch, no connection, no response. It is like making food that someone has just left on their plate. If they are content to be married to such behavior on the grounds of taste, as though they were correct in some assessment, and somehow justified in passing judgment, then they are only lying to themselves. Ironically, they would want more for themselves. Who wouldn't? I was lucky enough for some twisted reason to give Louise Fishman's painting the time of day, when I wouldn't have otherwise. As a result, I grew about six inches in a heartbeat, and the magic that is art became mine. In the end, middle and beginning, that's all it takes. The time of day.

Addison Parks, June 1996;
Reprinted Courtesy ARTSmedia Magazine;Boston



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Harold Shapinsky Revisited

Untitled (1984) oil on paper, 17x22

HAROLD SHAPINSKY made a surprisingly big impression on me. Surprising because I figure that the world is jammed full of Shapinskys. That out there are millions of people who have just done what they loved doing just because they loved doing it even though no one else noticed. I didn't talk to him for much more than an hour, but talking to him impressed me more than his paintings.

And it wasn't what he said, and it wasn't that his paintings didn't make an impression, because he said good things, and makes wonderful paintings. No, what impressed me about Harold Shapinsky, and really made me appreciate his paintings and understand them so much more, was what he didn't say.

Harold Shapinsky is a 65-year old man who had been living and painting in Brooklyn, New York, in obscurity until six years ago when he was "discovered" and given his first one-person show, in London. He had been working all of his life in a style he evolved as a young man which at the same time was changing the face of the art world: Abstract Expressionism (characterized briefly as a form of painting which emphasized gesture in an effort to define the flatness and realness of color and shape as a more integrated realization of the painted space). While the work of its recognized pioneers, giants like Pollock, De Kooning, Gorky, and Rothko, continue to cast a huge shadow over the art world, Abstract Expressionism has long ago been absorbed into the scriptures of art history.

When something or someone comes along that asks us to examine with fresh eyes what we have accepted as law, we are naturally skeptical. We look at this kind of work normally under the watchful gaze of museum guards; how can we be expected to take it seriously as the life work of someone whom we have never heard of, who has been storing it under his bed? In describing Harold Shapinsky's work, people talk about how it has the passion and appearance of a De Kooning. Perhaps the appearance, but not the passion. I am a great admirer of De Kooning's work, however this work is really quite different beyond any stylistic similarities. Whatever it is that makes this work tick, it is worlds apart. And that is what makes it so interesting.

Apparently this work caused something of a stir because of how closely the dates correspond to the emergence of Abstract Expressionism. I don't know why this should come as such a surprise. One, that the paintings were done at the same time, and two, that they are "good." And that no one has ever heard of or seen the work.

You don't have to spend much in the so-called art world to discover that exposure and fame are as much of a mystery as art itself. Talking with Mr. Shapinsky,however, explains a lot. He is a shy and quiet man. But that doesn't explain it all. We have to ask, why the attention now and why, if he never wanted it, would he accept it now? It's still a mystery.

Untitled (1945) oil on paper, 21x28

So after all this time he had his first solo exhibition in New York(1990), at the Helander Gallery(which has closed since this was written). It was a small retrospective of the last 30 years of his work. Also included were paintings done in the last year. Happily these recent paintings are as lovely as any of the others; the man has not lost it. Any surprise? Not really. Not when you consider that he never seems to have strayed. There are differences, of course, but somehow there is something wonderfully the same, something constant, something remarkably true. Harold Shapinsky has held strong his faith in his vision, when all around him the world has changed.

What he pioneered in the spirit of the future 40 years ago is already in mothballs. And yet his paintings possess the authenticity of the real thing because they are the real thing. Harold Shapinsky is still painting Abstract Expressionist works that have all of the life in them that they had back then because he still believes in the form. Everybody acted like he was some kind of missing link. Well he is, and talking to him, I found out why.

It would be a mistake to sum these paintings up as some kind of "expressionism." Expressionism comes and goes. These paintings possess something more profound and lasting than passion. Their very existence is proof of that, and so is their vitality. I prefer to think of them as having a great deal of light instead of fire, in that light suggests a slow and enduring flame. The light is the thing I sense very strongly in the paintings. It is an impossible thing to put a finger on. It's just there. It is the kind of light that shines naturally in the art of children. Which says a lot. Children make art as plain as sunshine. You can't say much about it. It is all one. A pure and whole expression of life.

Which may explain why this work has failed to produce much "adult" response. There isn't enough self-conscious artifice for critics to sink their teeth into. That's the thing. I could hear it in myself as I talked to Harold Shapinsky. The negativity. The bitterness in the guise of criticism. I found no harbor in him for the expression of any such thoughts. None. It hit me like a hammer while I was talking to him. And then all of a sudden I saw it in the paintings. The acceptance. The positiveness. I was ashamed. But awed, and humbled. Something to admire and remember. Harold Shapinsky had nothing negative to say, and that said it all.

Addison Parks, 1990


This article originally appeared in the Christian Science Monitor and the Los Angeles Times on Dec. 3, 1990.

From the Artdeal Magazine Archives

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