TALKING PAINTING: THE GIFT OF LISTENING

Addison Parks(2011-13), Noneedtopanic.com, oil on canvas, 18 x 24 inches

Nobody talks painting. Nobody. Some people argue, some people poke around the edges, some people contextualize, and some people describe, but nobody talks painting. They just talk ABOUT it, which is what my friend Richard Tuttle liked to say, his wry smile close at hand. 

And there is a reason for all of this. Nobody talks painting because nobody listens to painting. You can't talk painting unless you can listen, and listening is hard. Painting doesn't speak to everybody. People may be interested in painting, want to own it, criticize it, curate it, hang it in their homes, go to galleries and museums to see it, even love it, but if it doesn't speak to them and they can't listen, well, then they can't talk it. Which is fine. They can do all of those other things. They don't have to talk painting. Talking painting isn't even important. You don't have to be able to talk painting to enjoy it. But make no mistake, being able to talk painting is a gift. And after years of talking painting I had a funny thing happen the other day.

Addison Parks(2013), Little Star, oil on canvas, 18 x 18 inches

I was sitting with my daughter in the living room of our home and she just started talking painting--my painting. It was kind of startling to me. I hadn't had someone talk about my paintings in I can't remember when. And she's 13! I felt uncomfortable. It felt wrong. Like she was taking care of me instead of the other way around, which is the way it is supposed to be. But she was doing it and she was right there and she was saying everything that meant everything to me, like she was messing with me or speaking in tongues or channeling Greenberg or something. EVERYTHING! I wanted it to stop. I had gotten used to people never really having anything to say. I felt unnerved, undeserving.

Addison Parks(2010), Liberty's Fire, oil on canvas, 36 x 42 inches

When I first started writing about art I got the same reaction from people. I could talk about their work and they were shocked. I could listen and keep listening, just going down into the work. I could tell that they had this strange mixture of feelings -- elated and at the same time violated. They asked me how I could see what I saw in their work. There was disbelief. Was I putting them on. Exactly what I felt when my daughter talked about my paintings. 

I had always assumed that everyone could talk painting, that they could see what I saw, so that if they didn't say anything, that it was because they chose not to. But then I discovered that they couldn't. They couldn't see anything, but I could. When I stumbled into a writing job as an art critic for a small weekly it took right away. People wanted to know what I saw. People wanted me to see for them. Either because they were the artists who needed it, or just people interested in art who couldn't see it. As a result when I moved to New York after art school, I became a sought after art writer. And it wasn't because I could write. I couldn't. But I could listen, and like I said, keep listening, which is the important part about listening. You don't stop. Then I found some way to put what I heard into words. It took a while for me to understand all the fuss, but I actually made artists cry with my words. They had ached to hear the words I said; they had ached to hear someone say what they had poured into their paintings. 

When I finished up teaching at RISD in 1996 and retired to raise a family and paint, I had one last critique with my students at the RISD Farm. It was a fitting end for my career teaching on and off at the school that I had also graduated from in 1976. My favorite place at the school had been the Farm. It was where I went to paint during and even after I got my BFA. Sitting out on the grass I was determined that I would leave these freshman with this one gift, or at least the knowledge of it. 

I made them listen to each other's work if it was the last thing I was going to do. It was as though I had asked them to eat shit. It was slow going for the entire class. Still I kept at it. I was determined. And then a miracle occurred. One of the students did it. He listened to someone else's work and kept listening, just going deeper, and then said what he had experienced.  He read it like he was reading the innermost thoughts of the girl who had done the work. And she was embarrassed. Naked. "You can see that?" That was her reaction. But she was also pleased. It was awesome, and everyone new it. It was a wonderful ending to the year, and I have never taught since.  Years later I received a letter from one of the kids in the class telling me what it had meant to him. That it was the best class that he had ever had. 

Addison Parks(2011), Constellation Flower,  oil on canvas, 42 x60 inches

When my daughter read my work I felt like an open book. "You can see that?" That was my reaction. That was how I felt and I didn't even know it right away. I was in shock. My daughter thought that it was no big deal but she was pleased with my reaction. She liked finding out that she had this gift. Just to make sure I hadn't imagined it, I asked her to look at my newest paintings. She nailed them. Not a little to the left or a little to the right. Dead center. She saw everything. Plain as day. She saw what I was thinking. What I was up to. She saw the layers. The thing behind it. Like she was reading my mail. 

And all of those artists I had talked to over the years flashed before my eyes. Over forty years of people who I had talked to about their work and watched them look at me as though I was messing with them. "Who told you"... "no one ever"... "how did you know" and more swirling around in their brains. Because that was how I felt right then. And I felt grateful the way that they felt grateful. A little like crying. Like they weren't crazy. Like what they were doing in their work was really happening.

My daughter was funny about my reaction.  She just laughed and said it was because everyone I know just wanted to talk about their own work. She apologized if that sounded mean. Just the night before she had seen an artist in our home pass all of the many other artists on our walls and gush unabashed in front of her own work. She thought it was funny. 

But what she said wasn't untrue. I explained to her that not every artist is an art lover, that there are makers out there. People who make art because they have to, because they can't do anything else, because they are trying to fill a hole in their life, because they are good at it. They aren't necessarily interested in art at all, not in anyone else's, just their own work. Which is fine. Not a supposed to be. Not a judgment. Just the way things are. I told her that for some other people it is a chicken or egg thing, that it was for me, that I couldn't remember whether I loved art or making art first, that it seemed to happen all at once, but together. Still, after a long time of talking about other people's work it was nice to have someone to talk about mine. I just didn't think that it would come from where it came from, that it would come from my teenage daughter. Just goes to show!

Addison Parks, Spring Hill, 2013

Addison Parks(2012), Banana Boat, oil on canvas, 6 x 8 inches

CUT CANVAS: Children of Different Gods

Porfirio DiDonna(1985), oil on canvas

Some artists destroy their work. When it let's them down. When they think it's bad. When they don't want it to ever see the light of day. That is their choice, of course, but I've always wondered about it. For some reason it struck me as some kind of machismo. Part of the whole artist angst thing, the myth of the struggling artist. Some kind of God the creator, God the destroyer, God the Almighty complex. A little self-conscious to my mind. Especially when it is carried out like some  sort of Viking funeral or execution or something. Actually what it really struck me as was a rush to judgment. I've always had to sit with my work for a long time to understand it, to learn from it. I guess I'm just slow.

When I was a kid my mother told me God was everywhere. And I believed her. It made sense to me. Why would it be any different? How could it be any different? God is in all things. God is just another word for life. In all things, in all of us. I guess I'm what people who name things call a pantheist, at best, or an atheist, at worst. But I believe in that idea of God being everywhere. With every breath. A thousand times with every breath.

Because of that I believe in everything. Life is in everything. Everything has a purpose. One way or another. I have a hard time throwing things away as a result. And sometimes that is the down side. But I also like to fix things as a result of that conviction, and that is usually an upside. That is the kind of world/God/life I believe in. You don't give up on stuff. You don't throw things away. You keep believing. You make them better. For example, when I was teaching at Putney, I couldn't believe that they kicked kids out for breaking the rules. All of this talk about a family and learning, and then they kicked kids out. You can't give up! You can't kick kids out! When my contract was up, I left. I didn't want to teach at a school where kids could be given up on. Say all you like about the rules, but I don't buy it. There is a much bigger rule. You don't give up! You keep the faith!

Which get's me back to artists who destroy their work if it has somehow "failed," or failed them, or did not come up to scratch! I've run into this a bunch of times lately, which is why I'm writing about it. 

The first was with my friend John Wronoski who founded the recently closed but very successful Pierre Menard Gallery in Harvard Square. He opined one day over lunch about artists who should have thrown most of their work away, who let bad work get out there. He cited Picasso as a classic example. In that 'if I were king of the world' way that we are all guilty of, he proclaimed that he could or would do something about it, that he would be just the man, up to the task, of ridding the world of all the bad art out there. Like gun control, he would be the Czar of Art Control. I wish him the best. When a few years later he generously offered me a retrospective I accepted. When he promised to rid me of all my bad art, well then, I thought better of it, and gratefully declined. Call me sentimental. Call me over protective.

But it is not sentimentality. It is what I believe. I believe that everything has a purpose. And that applies to my work. I'm looking, and seeing, and learning. I never give up on my work. Even if I paint over something, I know it is still there, underneath, helping out. If it is leaning against a wall somewhere, unfinished, it is just waiting, a promise. If I don't ever get to it, it still retains that value to me. I don't paint to be successful, I paint for the experience. It would be crazy to assume that I could only learn from my "successful" work. We have all learned infinitely more from our "failures." In that way our failures just might be our best friends of all; that like pain, they teach us about our greatest challenges!

Nina Nielsen(2008), oil and sand on canvas

Another recent experience came a month or so ago when I showed my friend, the legendary dealer and artist Nina Nielsen, a picture of a painting my friend Larry Deyab saved from the studio of Porfirio DiDonna after he died. No dealer ever represented an artist more fervently or faithfully than Nina Nielsen did Porfirio DiDonna. She was furious about the very fact that a painting of DiDonna's might be out there that he wouldn't have wanted out there! Furious because DiDonna would have destroyed that painting, and he wasn't alive to defend himself and protect himself from just such a travesty. She was so furious that her husband and partner John Baker had to practically keep her from tearing me apart. And you have to love her loyalty and passion. I do. Wouldn't it be nice that we should all have such a devoted dealer?

She was upset because DiDonna destroyed his work, believed in destroying his work when it wasn't right, and didn't get a chance to destroy this painting. She loved and respected him completely, so that she loved and respected his wishes, with a vengeance. End of story. In truth he was practically obsessive-compulsive in the methodical way he went about destroying his work. Apparently he would take it somewhere else and cut it up and destroy it. To another part of the city! 

And of course I didn't get it. As I explained, I'm just not like that. Nina and I argued because I didn't get it. My thinking was, how great! You love his work, I love his work, and here's another one. What could be nicer than that. Amazing!  I also figured that if he really wanted it destroyed it would have been destroyed. Since it wasn't then he must have wanted to keep it. Divine Providence! 

It was even easy to get Nina to admit that artists can be lousy judges of their own work. That artists are naturally and for very good reason very myopic about what they are doing vs. what they have done. That they are happiest about what is happening at that moment, and that they tend to distance themselves from older work even when, or maybe especially when, other people tend to be more comfortable with the older work for obvious reasons. That sometimes this is one of the things dealers do that helps artists; they give them perspective. But this was different, because this was about what DiDonna truly believed, not what either of us believed. Nina and I probably believe more alike. 

But DiDonna was a believer too, a true believer by the looks of it. And that confused me. He took his paintings somewhere else and cut them up, like a mob hit man, and that was just plain crazy to me. Why did he do it? Again. Maybe it is time for me to understand something, get something. Figure it out. I don't know. Still confused. I remember a story a long time ago about Bill Jensen, or was it his father, who thew all of his work from a bridge somewhere in someplace like Minnesota before he left for New York. Maybe I got it wrong. Maybe it is just legend or myth. Jensen was friends with DiDonna.

Porfirio DiDonna(1981), work on paper

But then it dawned on me. Of course! DiDonna and I believed in different gods! He was religious. Catholic, but so am I. John Baker thinks he might actually have been a religious painter, making religious paintings, and I would have to agree. DiDonna believed in what I consider the cruel and unforgiving god of a religion that kicked people out. That gave up on people. He believed in the church. He was just acting out his religion in his work. If every artist is a creator, the creator, then he is God, and he plays God in his work. Porfirio DiDonna was just acting out his God. His church. Work that failed him was destroyed.

It makes me think of sin eating. A necessary evil to make a perfect world. John Wronoski was willing to be a sin eater. An art world sin eater to rid the world of bad art. 

James Balla(2009) Cadoro; oil on linen

So when very recently I was speaking with my friend James Balla about his work and he told me that he also destroyed it, I expressed disbelief. I pressed him on it. Say it ain't so. I just couldn't believe it. He just didn't strike me as that kind of person. He struck me as very forgiving. As someone who never gave up on anything. Fortunately after a few moments he recanted. We were speaking on the phone at the time and he said he was standing in front of a painting with an old painting poking through. A painting he liked a lot. Apparently the old painting was causing the new paint to crawl a little and that of course was a problem. Unacceptable by most people's standard, especially the whole art handling world. Except that it wasn't, it turned out, a problem. Jim admitted that he actually liked seeing the old painting waving from behind the new painting. "Hi! Still here!"

Heide Hatry

There isn't an artist alive that doesn't think that they can solve all of their problems by making art, maybe even solve the problems of the world. There isn't a painter out there, not now, not ever, that didn't think that if only he or she could just make a great painting, all of their problems would be solved. DiDonna was no different. We may not believe in the same God, but we believe that. I have another friend, Heide Hatry, who makes her work out of meat. She's working something out, and she is solving all of her problems through that work. She can make meat beautiful, and she believes that, and lately she almost has me convinced(what can I say, I'm a vegetarian, but then, so is she). Her conviction is that powerful. Her latest works are flowers made of meat, and they are extraordinary. 

Heide Hatry

Never mind keeping the faith. Never mind never giving up. We're talking about resurrection. Resurrecting a past. Healing a past. Heide's dad was a pig farmer. A pig farmer who died falling into a pig pen when she was still young. Tragic all around. Tough all around. Brutal.  So survive that! A parent has but one real mission in this life: to make their child special. That special is God. That everything is special. That they are a special part of a special life. A parent who dies young, even accidentally, blows that reality out of the water. A parent who dies young is lost, gone, and in doing so sadly breaks a vow and fails a child. Heide Hatry has been mending this hole her whole life. She is fierce about it because she has to be. If she doesn't mend it then who will? If she doesn't save herself then who will? If it takes meat to make life beautiful again, special again, deliberately, methodically, intensely, then what could make more perfect sense than that? If it takes making art by making flowers out of meat to fix her life, then who could fail to cheer her on?

A long time ago my old friend Richard Tuttle tried to impress upon me the violence inherent in the creative. To put it simply, breaking eggs to make an omelette. He sensed my naive devotion to the creative, that I believed in creativity and not destruction. What he didn't understand was background, my refusal to give up on things, that that was what was at the bottom, that I was the determined byproduct of a broken family, that I was a cast off. That when my parents got divorced, my father even moved to another continent. That I fixed things. That I made things better.

Richard Tuttle(1998); New Mexico, New York #14, acrylic on plywood

When I worked for Brooke Alexander in New York I was allowed to take the trash, old frames and stuff, back to my studio so I could resurrect it for myself. I had asked permission. Artists are trained to recycle what others cast off to survive. Once I took home a crate Richard Tuttle had used to ship some prints to the gallery. When I took it apart I discovered that he had made it with some old work, that on the other side of the plywood that was on the outside, were two works of his, two drawings on the painted plywood on the inside. Old works that were intended to be leaned against the wall. He meant, like Porfirio DiDonna, that these works were destroyed. And they weren't. And I never told him. I never told him that I saved them. That they have since leaned against my walls. In my homes. All of these years. That even though he gave up on them I never did. I never told him that this is what I do, that this is who I am, that this is what I believe. But I know he would understand. I know somewhere he believes it too. 

Addison Parks

Spring Hill, 2013

That's the Tuttle drawing below the Basquiat head and to the left of
the DiDonna work on paper. All behind the doors opening outside.

LA DOLCE VITA: REMEMBERING NINO FRANCHINA

That drawing on my wall!

Something occurred to me recently while lost in the haze of a gaze at a drawing doing its thing on my wall, as drawings are want to do, their thing, whether anyone is looking or not, that thing, patient, dancing, posing, strutting, gesticulating, or simply being. So I was admiring this drawing, a drawing I have had for almost 50 years, as it spoke to me in soothing tones, as it gently showed me the way for the umpteenth million time, while I have been stupid and arrogant and off course and flailing about, and once more it whispered to me in its way, kindly, generously, without force or noise or fanfare, like some tree that silently gave me comfort and shade and solace. 

Now it makes me sad. I never told it. I never told the artist who made it and gave it to me so long ago. I never told him how of all the people who have taught me, mentored me, influenced me, some powerful, some famous, that  it was his mark that left its mark on me. I never told him and thanked him and celebrated him and rewarded him and hugged him for it. Maybe he knew how profoundly he had affected me and the course of my life. Maybe, or maybe not. I'll never know. Makes me feel sad, makes me feel like a jerk, and makes me want to be better. Fiercely determined to be better. 

Me & Xeni on our terrace at Via Margutta 48

This started in about 1962. In Rome. Via Margutta. Number 51. He had a studio off the far right side of the courtyard. We lived next door at 48, and because I had a beautiful studio there that had supposedly belonged to Raphael, the other artists called me Piccolo Raffaello.  After school or on the weekends, I would quietly inch my way into the doorway of his studio trying not to disturb him while he was working. I was about 9. If he wasn't welding, he would have been grinding and hammering metal,  or drawing, goggles still on his head, face blackened where they weren't, a cigarette hanging from his mouth. He would let me watch, and would go about his work. He knew I was there. Soaking it all up. Learning. Dreaming. Taking note. Because this was it. The way. 

There isn't enough time to tell this story. But when I look at my life now, when I look at my work, I realize that this is where it all came from. Every bit of it. The spirit. The form. The contemplation. The work. The way. 

                                           

Brain experts say all we do is model. We model on things, after things. We don't really have ideas. We just model. Unconsciously. And to a certain extent for once I would have to agree. This was my model, and I never even realized it. When it finally struck me, thunder struck me, it rushed in like water, the floodgates opened wide. Overwhelming me. Spinning me around. Carrying me upward.  It was all there. Everything.

His work stood up, tall, vertical, abstract, but still a figure of sorts, with wings, like an angel, like a light, like a plant, a tree, a flower, a fountain, a spring of life! The radiant life-giving force. The shine. The shine within all things. Sentinel. Standing guard. Guardian. Standing strong. The protector.  Noble.  At the ready. The champion. The knight. The angel Gabriel. Avatar. His Avatar. A modern day avatar channeling the old world chivalry and valor and virtue of the sacred knights of centuries past charged with the quest, the good and humble devotion to the service of all humanity. Art. Artist. Do some good.

Sculpture was my first love. One of mine.

Wall drawings of mine that sprang from doodles

And there it was in the drawing hanging on my wall, and I stared at it dumbfounded. That star. That beacon. And this has always been the driving force in my work, swirling around inside of me, all my life, in every doodle, in every image sense inside me, waiting to come out, and finally emerging, in sculpture and then painting over the past tens years, once I stopped pursuing the gallery machine, once I just started working for what it was all about, for the pleasure of it.

With Sandy Calder

And this sculptor that I had watched work so often, he labored, he pursued his quest like the knight. He hammered and cut and welded steel. He shaped steel. He made it shine. He made it fly. And he was not a world famous artist that I was aware of. Because he did not act important. He did not act celebrated. He did not strut. But famous and important artists knew him. Alexander Calder, David Smith, Gino Severini, DiChirico, Fontana, Pomodoro. Their works all hung on his walls, and so did mine. I met them on his roof deck, laughing, drinking, talking up a storm, while he operated the grill like the artist he was, like the creator, at the forge, in the fire, squinting, cigarette pursed in his mouth, gesturing with tongs in hand. When I saw his towering piece in Spoleto at the first festival there organized by Giovanni Carandente in 1964, I have to say I was, well, ok, about time! We were Carandente's guest on his beautiful roof deck. Carandente, Italy's foremost and most beloved art critic, appreciated his work! 

Next to his sculpture in Spoleto

When my family was away I would stay with this sculptor and his wife. Together the three of us watched The African Queen in awe on a little black and white tv in their little flat high up over his studio, magnificent with views of the domes of the ancient city, more intimate and family like than I ever knew. I make a fuss about the fact that the wife bounced on Picasso's knee as a child. That her father was the seminal Italian Futurist Master, Gino Severini. That she dragged me by the hand to get mural instruction from her famous aging father when he was in Rome. That he explained how one could find inspiration in the patterns formed by casting sand across fresh plaster. I make a fuss about that. I wear it like a feather in my cap. I never spoke, never once, about the quiet but indelible inspiration of the sculptor who gave me it all. I never spoke about the artist who was somewhat crusty on the outside,  but of such a kind and generous spirit, like that tree. I never once mentioned Nino Franchina.

Addison Parks, Spring Hill, Dec. 2012

Nino and Gina Franchina, Via Margutta 51 studio

1964 Mostra D’Arte Dei Cento Pittori; Rome, Italy
My sister DD watching my paintings at Via Margutta 48

Bruce Helander Last Summer at Peter Marcelle

EDEN(2002), Mixed Media, 145 x 122cm

In life we get certain opportunities; even certain advantages. A roll of the dice, a flip of a coin, white's first move in chess. A baseball manager knows that he gets 27 precious outs to master his opponent, and treats each one like gold. A writer depends on having one thought, one sentence, one word with which to win his reader, never getting the second chance to make that first impression. The image-maker understands all of this. He is the fisherman,  and like every good fisherman he knows that it is all about the bait. Bruce Helander is just such an artist, and he gets it. Give him just the corner of your eye, and he'll catch it.

 

Fun in the Sun(2012), collage, 25 x 15"

Bits of paper, that's all. Bits of paper are that with which he crafts his lure. Collage. A bit of paper that like the first drop of rain becomes a flood, becomes a vision, and all at once each vision becomes a dream, a paradise, a carnival, a Sunday outing with the top down, a portrait, a landscape, a new world. That's what Helander does. He is that explorer. That guy. He finds the lost city of Atlantis, the fountain of youth, El Dorado. With bits of paper. He aims for nothing less.

 

Elvis Reinvented(2012); collage, 21 x 15"

That's what his images are. He doesn't waste any time. He doesn't waste our time. He has something for you. He has something for everyone. No one has ever taken collage where Helander has. And not for nothing. Not Picasso, not Cornell, not Bearden, and not Rauschenberg. Bruce Helander is, yes, first and foremost as much magician as master of collage, but that is just his craft; it is where his collages take him, and finally us, that matters. Those dreams he makes, those rides he takes us on, those new worlds he discovers; they are endless, bottomless, unfathomable. They open doors that lead to places at once strange and familiar, remembered and unseen, lost and found. Helander takes bits of paper that have a past and gives them a future. He takes something broken and remakes it whole. He takes what most people would think is trash and makes art. 

Post Triangle(2009); collage, gouache on board, 17 1/2 x 15 1/2 in.

I once found myself on the wrong side. Among "rich" white people on holiday being shown a thing or two by a troupe of Jamaican entertainers. Embarrassed because they had nothing but were gods and knew it, and we the audience had lots of money but were bankrupt. Anyway, each entertainer had this one something, this one something that he or she could do, and do lights out. Something with basically a piece of detritus, an old hat, or a bottle, or a broken bike. Feats that were impossible and unimaginable. Feats that were amazing. With a piece of junk. But they had that one thing, that one tiny chance, that one meager role of the dice, and they made a fountain of gold. 

That's what Bruce Helander does. He told me once a long, long time ago that you couldn't wait for that something to come to your door, that you had to go out and take your chance. That's what he does. What the artist does. Bruce Helander takes his chance.  He shows us a thing or two. He takes a few scraps of paper and makes the impossible and the unimaginable and the amazing. A few scraps of paper and he is a god. 

Addison Parks, Spring Hill, October 2012

Images courtesty of the Peter Marcelle Gallery, Bridgehampton, New York

This is my second crack at the Bruce Helander show. In August I made a frenetic mess of it. Mea Culpa!

From Russia with Love

Marc Chagall, 1960, ink and crayon on title page of The Birthday Of The World

I love Chagall. There, I said it. That hokey gaudy folksy sentimental sellout of an "artist." I love Chagall. I'll say it again. I always have. I don't care if he isn't respected by serious art people, or that I might lose their respect if I ever had it. I'd rather have Chagall. Any day of the week and yes, twice on Sundays. Especially on Sundays. Sunday morning is the best of the week, Sunday evening the worst. All in the same day. Go figure!

Chagall. Yes, I loved him as a kid. Loved the lavender print hanging on the wall in our Rome living-room next to the large studio window below which Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck filmed Roman Holiday a few years earlier. Loved being shown the newly installed murals in the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center  by our great friend Beverly Sills after tea at the Palm Room at the Plaza, her daughter Muffy exclaiming how "the chandeliers look like Mummy's earrings!" 

When I was at Exeter my art teacher Charles Carrico tried to bully me out of love with Chagall. Out of love with trite pictures of embracing lovers and flying cows playing violins. That was the year my sister was murdered in New York, and Carrico held my college future and beyond in the palm of his hand. Even though he totally set me back because I was frankly a too willing student, he did single-handedly instill in me that even in America one could be an artist, a painter, that I didn't have to be a set designer or illustrator or architect, something which had been drilled into me since returning to this country as a high school student. But I kept Chagall, even though I somewhat lost myself. His posters hung in my room. My sanctuary. Touch stones. Lights in the dark.

My great friend Martin Mugar just wrote a blog post about not letting the fickle and begrudging art world get to artists. He gave me a little shout out for suggesting that it is about keeping one's good health. A healthy attitude about what is important, about what you can and cannot control. I would agree, but I would add that it is not just about health, but about love: remembering the love that brought you to art in the first place, remembering that art is an act of appreciation, love, that it is the result of what we care about, love. When you have art, the love of art, you are never alone.

Chagall is all about love. The story of love, the power of love, the color of love and the love of color. So it is easy to forget that at one time he was a member of the modernist avant-garde that poured out of Russia and the later Soviet Union. That he hired Malevich and Lissitzky to join the faculty at Vitebsk. That he was friends with Leger in Paris, and Mondrian in New York. That he helped shape this revolution in art that was modernism.

I love color. It is said that after Matisse, Picasso considered Chagall the next great colorist. I can't argue with that. Color at all is considered gaudy in puritanical America. Cher's character in Moonstruck said as much when beneath the marvelous murals at the Met. Americans in general are afraid of color, probably because they don't understand it. Color is associated with bad taste and poverty. Color is all the poor can afford. My friend and adopted grandfather, the great American modernist Leon Polk Smith maintained that color could never be bad, that it was innocent, that it was joy and life, and only people made it bad with their ignorance. His greatest compliment to me was that I was "obviously a colorist. "

Richard Tuttle, my most difficult mentor, ascribed meaning to color, and preached a severe philosophy of color awareness, taking an altogether different attitude from Smith's, seeing color as man's expression in bold and literal terms. He believed that color spoke for us, but we just weren't paying attention. He found our obliviousness both painful and impossible to ignore. In some ways you could say that as a result, color meant more to him than anyone, that it's power was so awesome as to be as terrible as it was wonderful; that the damage it could do in the wrong hands made it frightening. 

Chagall's color has been called gypsy. Jeweled. Like stained glass. He was a Russian Jew. His work is both Russian and Jewish. My wife, Stacey, is of Russian Jewish descent. She always hated Chagall. He reminded her of what people hated about Jews, that people hated Jews at all. All of that really scared her. She wanted to fit in and turned her back on one of the richest cultural heritages the world has ever known. Today she is ok with Chagall, and somewhat proud of that heritage. I bought her this drawing by Chagall. It is from 1960, the year she was born, the birthday of the world, my world. It shows an artist holding a palette, painting flowers, nature's palette. Me.

Addison Parks, Spring Hill, September 2012

Bruce Helander at Peter Marcelle: Art Lover Boy Wonder

Fun in the Sun(2012), collage, 25 x 15"

Bruce Helander has had to pay the price for being more than a great American artist. In his illustrious career he has done it all, art school dean, publisher, dealer, curator, collector, writer, critic, entrepreneur and artist, and  he has done it all his way. Call him a Renaissance man, from Kansas. All groups demand dumb loyalty, confining us to one discipline, and the arts are no different; but to his credit  Bruce Helander is too smart for that.

"A Survey of Works" at the Peter Marcelle Gallery in Bridgehampton, New York this summer showed off this brilliant artist in all of his witty and inventive glory;  over two decades of collages, assemblages, and paintings tracked the bright arc and spectrum of his unique art experience. Bruce Helander pioneered the mining of Americana for probably the last 50 years or more, and the ground is firmly his. What his friend Tom Wolfe is to American Arts and Letters, Helander is to her Fine Arts. What Wes Anderson brings to filmmaking today, Helander has been forging for the last half a century.

But the Fine Arts in New York are a tough club.   The late great Richard Merkin,  another friend of Helander's,  boogied through the gates on the coat tails of America's one true and undisputed celebrity and style: Jazz. Helander had no such ride.

Is it any surprise that the source of this work flows from the Heartland. It is not about influence, but roots. Bruce Helander is Heartland America’s native son, land of sun and corn, son of corn. There was not ART there. Art was the fins of a '57 Chevy. It was the silver diner, the ferris wheel, the pin-up girl.  It was the jacket worn by Presley. It was fantastic, and it was the fantastic.  Art was the show. The great and powerful Oz was artist, and Bruce Helander is that showman. Not everybody gets that. He is a descendant of Oz. His style is a little bit carney. That is his charm. He is quintessentially American.

Elvis Reinvented(2012); collage, 21 x 15"

The New York modern art world was born European, Europhile and Eurocentric. It was shaped by the likes of Stieglitz, Mondrian, Duchamp, Rebay, Gorky, Graham, Peggy Guggenheim, Gertrude Stein, and Betty Parsons(and of course by the guy who was always in the room, Picasso). It was the New World, where Europeans came to free and reinvent themselves. It was where ex-pats came home to roost. Bruce Helander has more in common with Thomas Hart Benton than Pollock ever did. Pollock is mistakenly called our one great All-American artist, but Pollock caught the ball from Europe and ran with it thanks to the likes of Jung and Andre Masson. Bruce Helander is the All-American. He doesn't just chafe in Gucci,  Gucci chafes next to him. Like Thomas Hart Benton, Bruce Helander would be happiest with his work hanging over a bar. You can't take the Kansas out of him.

And in this there is flash, and he becomes Flash. And then there is his keen eye and appreciation for all things fake and faked. Bruce Helander is a connoisseur and aesthete of the clever work of imitation. He is the professor of ersatz and simulacrum and duplication. But make no mistake, he is the real thing. He celebrates our true nature. Our boldness. Our brash. He revels in it like Marilyn Monroe in a bubble bath. Pin-ups are his perfect playmate. The French may have refined the art of never having found a situation that could not be improved by a naked woman; but the pin-up is pure, red-blooded American.  That it borders on politically incorrect makes it an excellent source of both tension and the not-so-secret guilty pleasure.  It is just one aspect of his work that is both naughty and comical. Where he is the Joker. The shameless punster. The clown. The guy killing himself with laughter. Having us on. Winking. The gift of a smile for each of us. Seriously.

Post Triangle(2009); collage, gouache on board, 17 1/2 x 15 1/2 in.

Sure, Helander too owes a debt to Picasso. Collage is his medium. The Cubism of collage. It is the ball he has been running with. It is also the lens he sees through, and what we see through in turn.  But the debt ends there and he paid it. After that he took a left on Tristan Tzara and followed that through the light past Magritte and De Chirico all the way down Utopia Parkway to the thruway and parts unknown: a little place just beyond postmodernism called deconstruction, where he set up camp way ahead of the pack.

Bruce Helander has an exploding sense of invention that remakes things, transforms things, takes things apart and puts them back together, makes them whole, makes them beautiful, and brings them to life. It is what he does; he makes collages and assemblages. He makes work that looks back at us. 

Bruce Helander is more than artist as original, artist as creator, artist who makes something from nothing; Bruce Helander is the reinventor, the recreator, the recreationist, the recycler, the great recycler, patching together what others cast off. In this he is both artist and educator, because folks, this is how it is done, this is what makes great art. And this is what makes Bruce Helander so special. He shows us the way.

What finds and  fancies and forces its way into his images, cut and cemented in place, are the stuff of the American Visual Experience, the once Life Magazinesque: advertising, wall-paper, billboards, kitchen labels, comic strips, posters, and sex. A largely print design world. A largely vanishing world.  A quirky and whimsical world where cigarettes are good for you, Elvis is The King, and all breasts point to heaven. Neon lights and chrome. Paint and leopard skin. Sequined sun glasses and Hawaiian shirts. Roller-skates and apple pie. State Fairs and prize pumpkins. A world Helander lovingly documents and preserves and resurrects.  A world he remembers for what was best about it, for what was unique and special about it. A world that is well worth remembering. But again, and most importantly, also a world that is above all both fun and funny. Where everything is fair game. Where he can poke fun at it all, including himself. Where the motto is “sense of humor or die trying.”

That Bruce Helander loved art made him a rare bird in that world. That he is an artist who is also a great art lover makes him rarer still. It is what lifts him above the common artist that can love only his own work. Bruce Helander is an art lover; art lover extraordinaire; art lover boy wonder!

This is what he does at the end of a long day, cutting and arranging pieces of paper under a plate of glass; playing with fragments of images and shapes and colors and words and puns of all kinds. Squinting at them through the smoke of a cigarette that might have once been in his mouth.  His mind racing, eyes searching,  ta-ta-ta-ta-ta, processing at a 100 miles an hour. Flashing. Turning. Turning everything on its ear. Gaming. Referencing. Conjuring. Riddle me this! Riddle me that! And so it goes. Wordplay is as much a part of these collages as image play. That makes them as much a delight for the mind as for the eye, a delight seen sharply through rose colored glasses. A parade for the eyes that ultimately takes us somewhere else, somewhere Jung would have relished, somewhere down a yellow brick road.  And there's the surprise! Toto, we aren't in Kansas anymore!

Addison Parks, Spring Hill, August 2012

EDEN(2002), Mixed Media, 145 x 122cm