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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Snyder, Joan: The writing on the wall

Joan Snyder; Yellow Was Blue (2013); 48" x 48"

Joan Snyder paints bulletins. Raw, brave, savage, savagely elegant paintings as bulletins. They pulse with color and paint and messages and signs and clues and musings  and poetry and humanity and promises. They flash in all directions and at the same time nail down a place, a moment, a crossroads, a confluence that is the thing that painting can still do, where touch and voice and memory and vision and thoughts and feelings and dreams can come together. Stick together. Stuck together. With paint. 

You can see it in her new painting: Yellow Was Blue (2013. 48" x 48"): a canvas at times scorched, singed, burned by fire. Consumed by fire. On fire. Where from the flames and ashes, where buried deep, where sinew and blood cry out, where life like pigment is ground and mixed to become the stuff of paint that gets scraped and pawed and smeared and brushed and washed and scrawled, and then rises, and catches the air, and the wind, and the light, and fills with life and voice, and then smiles and shines on us all.

Joan Snyder; Roses & Weeds (2013) 48" x 114"

And this is understood. Joan Snyder's paintings are what matters to her. What is going on with her. What is going on. These are the things that get pinned to her canvasses. With paint. With color and shape and paint. With color and shape and texture and mark and paint. Joan Snyder takes art personally. Like no one else. Like truth is beauty. It defines her, and her work, and if it is what you're looking for, she is where you go, where everyone goes. 

When Joan Snyder has a show, people come together. They drop whatever they are doing and join groups converging and answering some call. Like a pilgrimage. Converging. Like Flash mobs. Converging. They go to see what's new, of course, but more than that they go to get their fix. Paint like heroin. Fitting. For St Joan. St Joan the heroine. Her legions bleed for her work in the same way that her work bleeds. For them.

If you didn't know better you might think that Joan Snyder had been a disciple of Hans Hofmann. If you didn't know better. Something about boxes of color coalescing and floating over a sea of unreasoned paint. But that would be wrong. Hofmann was nothing if not instructional. Snyder is not, at least not in that way. Not formally. She would never presume. She knows there is poison and prison there, and the world has enough of both. No, quite the opposite, if Hofmann was the teacher, Snyder is the healer. The liberator. She would never say so of course, but everyone knows the unspoken truth. Joan Snyder's paintings bleed for us all. 

What can you say about her color, because you can't separate it from her paintings, but there it is. Color. Like you've never seen before. That goes inside you like fresh squeezed orange juice, that every cell in your body absorbs like a dying breath. Feeds on like a dying breath. Everyone comes poor to Joan Snyder's color and goes away rich! Color that rifles its way into our memory, memory of epiphanies past. Places and times resurrected, infused with new life, alive again! And so generously as well, as though she was made of paint!

Proserpina, 2013. oil, acrylic, paper mach, poppies,

 rice paper, dirt, charcoal. 48" x 120"

Another recent painting, Proserpina (2013), tells the story. We bask in its color like a field of wildflowers, like an expanse of Monet. Expansive Monet. We are nurtured by it. By its nature. We could live for days in it without food or water because it would feed us, be enough for us. Its energy would become our energy. Its passion would become our passion. Its beliefs become everything we believe. We lie down in these paintings. We lose ourselves in them. 

I won't pretend or presume to say what Joan Snyder's paintings are about. They are all different because they are about life and living; they are all the same because they are all her and hers. She is all things: creator, director, narrator, actor, and finally audience, as this is writing on the wall as journal, letter home, letter to oneself.

I will venture, however, that the work is supremely intelligent. Considered with great intelligence. Painted with great intelligence and wisdom. All I know is that jets are also the product of great intelligence, but I just fly in them, and look out the window. Joan Snyder's paintings are something we see that we feel immediately. The language of love. That is what we hear. The language of feeling. So close to the bone. It is unmistakable to us. Perhaps we all hear something different, but then I don't get it. I have heard art historians talk about Renoir nudes and never once mention flesh. They are all flesh. Joan Snyder's paintings are all emotion in the same way. The way Turner was all light. Of course some of the most emotional people I have ever known kept it under wraps. Pinned down. Like to a bulletin board.

Addison Parks

Spring Hill, 2014

Reposted on Berkshire Fine Arts

Gregory Gillespie: Revisited

Madness and Mysticism:

The Ghost of Gregory Gillespie

by Addison Parks

There are people others like to talk about, and then there are those that demand a whisper. The first time I heard Gillespie’s name in 1971, I overheard it. Two of my high school art teachers stood off in a corner and privately exchanged war stories about someone on the outside really doing it. It wasn’t very often that these two spoke about another artist with anything more than disdain, so I took note. Hushed awe has always preceded Gregory Gillespie's name, and among artists, he is legend.

A few springs ago he killed himself. It shocked the art world. It was right after a back-breaking late snow, and not long after a major traveling retrospective of his work. Beneath a gaudy feature on dating at the Museum of Fine Arts, the Boston Globe ran a small acknowledgment of the artist’s life and death with a reproduction the size of your thumb. It hurt. This had been arguably New England’s greatest living artist, one it could genuinely claim. Art did not come over on the Mayflower, I like to say, but in true Yankee fashion, this man was a maverick. He walked his own walk, his own path, and from stem to stern he was his own artist.

I never met the man. I tried to avoid meeting most artists, especially the celebrated ones. I never wanted to be disappointed. I never wanted anything to interfere with the work. You could really like what someone did but somehow know that you didn’t want them in your kitchen. The last thing I heard about Gillespie before he died was from John Baker, the director of his Boston gallery. He and his wife, Nina Nielsen, had been to visit him and their impression was that he had seemed to have lost his grip, that he seemed to be unable to distinguish between art and life, that he was painting on everything, even the walls and fixtures in the bathroom. Baker said that as they drove away they were both shaking their heads. It is also worth noting that he always felt that the guy was totally "benign."

It is hard, pointless, and mean to try to categorize Gillespie. You could say that his work was figurative, but it didn’t fit in with the figurative art of the early seventies, when beleaguered figuration enjoyed a brief moment in the art world sun. Gillespie was a recipient of the Prix de Rome, and there is no question that his work would be forever influenced by that experience, but to put a finger on just what that was would be impossible. Strangely enough, however, you could go so far as to say that he was the one and only great Italian painter of the last fifty years. Since he wasn’t Italian, that might suggest how deeply he had taken that experience to heart.

So what was he? You could also argue that he was the one true artist of his generation. That he was the only artist difficult enough to own himself. He was a member of no club. There have long been murmers that Da Vinci was an alien, and if so, Gillespie was his brother from another planet. There are other hackneyed expressions which apply...the mold being broken...shattered, or that he gave new meaning to the idea of intensity, times a zillion, again, and then add lots of zeros. But no description of the way he worked would tell the story. His attention to detail, his pleasure with illusion, his blatant and simultaneous regard and disregard for “reality,” his constant self-reference, his dreamscape, his madness, his allusions to the spiritual...or better...his mysticism, his super-man painting technique, none of them do him justice. They are all just pieces of the mask. The only way to know Gillespie is to follow his paintings down the rabbit hole. Then you’re looking him square in the eye, which is as it should be.

After he killed himself I had to help one painter I knew in particular, Ulick Mahoney, get past it. He was sad, outraged, blown away. I felt the same way, but Ulick couldn’t seem to move on. Suicide is a complicated thing. If there are suggestions of mental illness, even more so. For the rest of us who put up with being an artist in these parts, it was devasting. It not only meant a lot that he chose to live here too, it meant even more that in the end he chose not to. This man had done it all, and done it his way, and it apparently wasn’t enough. What did that say for the rest of us? If it wasn’t good enough for him, how could the rest of us hope to survive and flourish? The ghost of Gregory Gillespie haunts us still. It is worth asking, however, if a life of art is its own reward. Go ahead.

Everything else is a lie.

While he was still alive I was approached to write something big about his work. I declined. I didn’t want to go there. Afterall, this was the guy who when invited to hang the work of artists he admired in a museum show, hung his own. The guy had balls. Looking at a lifetime of his work, it looks pretty clear that he may never have known the difference between fantasy and reality, or, just maybe, he's the only one who did! Now that he is dead, I wouldn’t mind telling some of his story; I just don’t know where to start.

Addison Parks

Courtesy of Artdeal Magazine; Lincoln,MA, not far from Belchertown, after another late winter snow, 2005

From the Artdeal Magazine Archives

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Leon Polk Smith: Revisited

"You can't explain a painting. It explains itself, if you give it a chance."

Leon Polk Smith, 1983 (From Photo by Nancy R. Schiff/Getty Images)

LEON POLK SMITH

Leon Polk Smith admits to being one of the twice born; art too claims its converts. Seated in his New York apartment, which also hosts his studio, he speaks softly and serenely of the life art has shared with him. The air is surprisingly fresh and relaxed, it doesn't feel like New York. His living room is cool and bright from a crossfire of east and west exposures, high up they overlook Union Square on one side and face a cathedral of water towers on the other. Only Smith's paintings dress the walls, and they light the room with an elegance which is betrayed only by their jaunty and jubilant spirit. He explains that while he is an ardent art enthusiast, all of his ideas come from his own works, and they serve him well by being where he can look at them. He speaks with a gently rhythmic but a touch crusty southwestern accent, and there is still a shadow of the rugged frontier about him, which can be traced back to his work.

"I discovered art my last year in college ... 1934. Having grown up in Oklahoma and having been older than the state, there wasn't much art there. So it was still younger than I at college age, and I had never seen an original painting. I don't think I knew anyone very well who even had art in their vocabulary. And it's quite by accident that I discovered art. That last year, I was in a building I had never been in before, walking down the hall, looking into the rooms as I passed. . . and this room had students and they were painting and drawing. And somehow that fascinated me immediately. I thought: I wish I could do that. And l went in and asked the instructor if I could come in and work for the rest of the term. He said yes.

I think I realized very quickly that I had always been an artist, and that that was what I wanted. That I would always keep it for myself, that I would never prostitute it, or do anything with it just for money.

I had prepared to be a teacher. When I started school, I said, I want to be a teacher, and it never entered my mind.... Even after I discovered art, and said I was going to be an artist, I knew that to make a living I would do what had been my first choice, which was teaching. I taught for about twenty-five years.

After I finished college, and taught one year, I came to New York in 1936 to study at Columbia ... get my Masters ... education and psychology. I knew I wasn't going to start selling paintings (he laughs). Paintings didn't start selling to somehow support me until about 1957. That's when I stopped teaching. "

From the awesome horizontality of the Oklahoma plains to New York's concrete peaks and valleys, Smith's one preoccupation has been space. From the late thirties through the early fifties it was the Constructivist space of Mondrian which dominated his scope: pure rectilinear abstraction with a parity of positive and negative form. Like many others working under the mast of Constructivism, Smith was looking for the next step up, a stage further in the evolution. Some painters pursued lyrical abstraction, but these solutions sat too self-centered to excite him. So he pushed on.

Leon Polk Smith; Center Column Blue and White, 1946

"When I discovered this thing in 1954, of dividing a canvas into two areas, painting in two colors, I did about twelve to fifteen tondos before I was able to carry the idea over into the rectangle. Because I discovered the idea on a circular format, you know I must have told you about seeing this athletic catalog ... the illustrations that were done that were pencil drawings rather than photographs, of a baseball, tennis ball, football ... that came into my studio, that was in the mail. I don't know why it was sent to me ... found myself going through the catalog ... looking through the drawings. certainly was not interested in any of them as a baseball or a basketball, but I was looking. And I thought, what the hell am I doing this for, why am I looking at this ? And a little voice says, because that's what you're looking for ... that excited me and l knew immediately what it meant. I rushed into my studio, got some paper and a compass and started drawing circles and dividing them up. Then I had to start inventing my own break up. I was inspired. Because that presented what was I looking for?

"When Mondrian died, I think 1945, people said he had hit a dead end, or a stone wall and I said I don't think so. There is no such thing as a stone wall except in one's mind. I said to myself, I think it would be wonderful to use his great discovery of the interchange of elements of form and space, or background-- foreground, although he only used it at a direct angle or a straight line--if one could find a way of using that in curvilinear form-and that's what I was looking for, all through the forties ...

Leon Polk Smith; New Moon For August; 1983

"I certainly wouldn't have gone to an athletic catalog to find it, but that's where I found it. Of course the shapes and lines were very limited, and immediately had to start finding my own, which I did. But then that created a space there that I had never seen in painting before. It was flat and at the same time it was curved. It was like a sphere. The planes seemed to move in every direction, as space does. And so I thought, maybe that is because that's on the tondo. I've got to find out if that is true or not. I've got to do some on a rectangle to see if the form and the space still moved in every direction. And it did. So it was exciting to do a painting on a rectangle that seemed to have a curved surface. It was the first time, you see that I had made an important step myself, or contribution in art. "

Color and shape are the converging planes which form the fulcrum over which Smith see-saws his space. They form the language of which he is a master. Color and shape are his domain; the crossbars of his scope; his words. With them he writes poetry; poems which magnificently sweep their time and space into a single gesture.

In space there is no up or down; up here is down there on the other side of the globe. Smith enlarged the concept of space in painting to meet with the twentieth century, everything moves at a diagonal. He first started experimenting with this in the rectilinear Constructivism of the forties; he implied lines which moved diagonally between points. Later he exposed the diagonals and still maintained a vocabulary of implied lines. Both are central to his dialogue, especially today.

Leon Polk Smith; Sunset Caribe; 1983

In the multiple panels Smith takes the concept of positive/negative parity one step further. He invites the surrounding space into the experience, and activates it into an equal exchange. The painting becomes a point of departure - a runway into space.

We sense the awe in this work, and wonder. These latest paintings are of a dimension so large, so fast and so deep, they tower like futurist space machines, seeming to pulsate on the threshold of infinity. Smith constantly talks of excitement as though it were an essential. He has a faith in what art can do, and be, and this is supremely evident in his work; so much so that with it he restores even our doubt in the doubt intrinsic to both.

“. . . Isn't it simply wonderful to be able to paint? That's what l wanted to do. Now I can - It's something I would pay to do, if I were able to, if I had to.”

ADDISON PARKS
August, 1982
Reprinted Catalog Essay Courtesy of the Joan Washburn Gallery
From the Artdeal Magazine Archives

BILL JENSEN: Revisited

Bill Jensen; The Meadow, 1980-81, oil on linen, 22×22”

THE PROMISE OF BILL JENSEN

THIS IS NOT the otherworldliness of spirituality. This is this world: spirituality as the center of being, 14th Street to Tibet. Bill Jensen presumes no grand exclusive vision that I know of. He paints, and in his paintings things happen or don't. He goes places or doesn't. We go or don't. No big deal. Entirely our choice.

No longer is his painted image gratifying by being strong. He can't and won't do that for us anymore. He hasn't for some time now. Years. Maybe he spoiled us, and for that he will accept responsibility. And that is the big deal. So don't vote for him, to paraphrase someone.

The story is fascinating. What happened? What happened to make Bill Jensen drop his sure thing, the golden sword and shield, the cherished crest? You could see it coming a dozen years ago. Blow the lid off and what have you got? What's left, at the bottom, on the other side? Nothing, we fear. Nothing to live for, and paint for. To care for and get out of bed for. Lose the will and what power is there?

Bill Jensen did it. He made the leap and now he has to face it everyday. There is no going back. His paintings are just what he finds. That's all there is. For Jensen. The paintings, his paintings. His vision, but more accurately, what he sees. What he can see. All he can see. And what does he see? What happens between the paint tube and the brush mark, the blank canvas and the place inside him? Can he reach it? Can he clear away the stuff in between, the stuff blocking the way, and then, can it reach him? Or is it even less complicated than that? Will something happen, will something meet him?

Bill Jensen paints the painting, and with his courage not only makes things happen, but lets them happen. But what does he believe? That is the question. What is at the bottom of his paintings? A dozen years ago he gave us something we could sink our teeth into, something solid we could believe. Something that approximated God. Something more than a piece of the rock. The rock itself. But then that changed. He changed. He had a son, a family. He went to Rome. These things touched him. They touch us all. 

Bill Jensen; oil on linen

And then what? No more rock. Something larger. The allness. Bill Jensen makes the trip to Allsville, and that's all there is. A peek at the big picture.

Bill Jensen; Deadhead; 1986, oil on linen, 36 1/2×33 1/4”

BILL JENSEN HAS CHANGED the way he goes about making a painting, so much so that it could no longer be called making a painting. It would have to be called something else. Something like maybe catching a painting, because what he is doing is a lot more like fishing that anything we would call making. Certainly the fisherman would never presume to say that he made the fish, he would merely be content to say he caught it. Bill Jensen is clearly in the business of trying to catch a painting, to land a big one, to bring one home. That would make him happy.

Fifteen years ago Jensen would make small sketches that would be shaped while riding the bus or train, while traveling to and from his studio across the East River in Williamsburg. These would be turned into drawings, shaped some more, and finally, perhaps, hammered into a painting where the promise of the sketch would flower into thin, flat scraps of oil paint on linen, edges sharply cut, contour meeting contour like pieces of a puzzle or plots of land. The process was very much one of making in the extreme, more like forging, as in the forging of steel. The image was controlled, methodical, and determined by expectations. It was tatooed, almost as though there was a code, even a set of rules about the process.


Today Jensen's paintings reflect a different kind of honor, a different kind of conviction and determination. Yes, the battle is still within, but it is no longer the battle: the struggle has been sublimated into the most natural expression of life: a relationship. The process, attitude, and expectations have all radically changed. The value has changed. It is not quality as a value, but as an experience, and that is the value. The earlier paintings were clear and defined-sure truths. They were answers. These new paintings are murky-uncertainties. They are questions. 

Bill Jensen

These latter works are beholden to no one; they are unpredictable and even contrary. They are crusty landscapes and ornery still-lifes next to the earlier iconographic heads. They have a more far-reaching space. The way they are painted eludes calculation or analysis. Sometimes they seem almost painfully triumphant in defiance. They fish for the unseen, the unknown, the shy creature at the bottom, in the shadows. The shapes, the handling of paint, the choice of color have less to do with the language of painting and everything to do with staying close to the bone, to the earth, ear to the ground, the wind, the waves. Instead of fire there is longing, instead of passion there is compassion, and instead of roaring, they very quietly listen. Where the earlier work was standing up in your face, this work reclines. So pull up a chair! There is even that kind of whimsy. So who can say what is going on in these paintings?

Bill Jensen; Untitled; 1993; ink on paper; 19 x 15 1/4"

In the end, Bill Jensen paints mysteries. Aways has. And yes, in the world of painting, as in the everyday, there are boatloads, but very few good ones. As the force of painting fades from our lives, Bill Jensen's mystery paintings remain nothing short of legend. His are great mysteries. 

Late this winter Nina Nielsen and John Baker dedicated the first floor of their Newbury Street gallery in Boston to a survey of Jensen's work from 1986 to 1993. It was a perfect invitation to do the otherwise unthinkable: make comparisons. Here we had works which clearly documented the revolution this artist experienced, and we got to look at them from an almost anthropological point of view. 

Bill Jensen; Paradise Lost, 1987-88, oil on linen, 42 1/4×32 1/2”

In many ways the exhibition was a mystery explained, a marked trail across a vast, untamed continent. Panting by painting a journey from civilization into the hills unfolded. It didn't happen all at once, but instead evolved in a gradual process of letting go, reaching out, of perseverance, discovery, and fruition. Contrary to the way it might seem, Bill Jensen kept his promise.

Addison Parks, Cambridge, 1994

Courtesy of Provincetown Arts; Volume 10; 1994
From the Artdeal Magazine Archives

COLIN MCCAHON: Revisited

Colin McCahon; A Question of Faith; 1970; oil on canvas

Colin McCahon’s

Daring Word Images

WHY would an artist like the New Zealander Colin McCahon (1919-1987) have deliberately tested the public eye and risked an opportunity for success and recognition by instead making paintings that flew in the face of convention? Was it possible that he somehow saw his vision as a solemn responsibility, something not to be compromised, something so much bigger than personal success that there was never any question in his mind what he had to do?

It might be that a true artist gives us what we need, not necessarily what we want. McCahon was willing to put aside the public's expectations, not out of spite, but so that he could ask larger questions. He chose radical themes and a radical means by which to express them. His questions were fundamentally ontological, spiritual in nature, and the clearest way he knew how to ask them was with painted words.

 

"Practical Religion"(1969)oil on canvas;courtesy National Art Gallery, New Zealand

But because religious subject matter violates the precious modern dictum of "art for art's sake," it has been considered inappropriate for use in contemporary art. After almost 2,000 years in the service of churches, illustrating their most-favored themes, art was freed of such duties during the 19th century. Nevertheless, McCahon pursued these religious questions in his work throughout his life, first using the figure, then the landscape, and finally, just words.

Using words got McCahon into just as much trouble. There is a general understanding that a painting must be expressed with images. The viewer not only feels cheated by the use of words but also sees their presence as a failure on the part of the artist. McCahon used words, however, because he was drawn to the way they looked.

"The Kumara God"(1978-79)acrylic on canvas;

239cm x 188cm;courtesy Gow/Langsford, Auckland,NZ

As a boy, he was once impressed by a professional sign painter working on a storefront window. It enchanted him. It spoke to him and inspired him as much as the New Zealand landscape. He saw beauty there, and he wanted to make something of it.

This is the thing that is surprising about his use of words. They come to life. They shine with emotional intensity, robust vitality, and still a delicate grace and silvery light. With words, McCahon discovered the true expression for himself, giving him the freedom that unleashed a power that was inside him and all around him.

Colin McCahon; oil on canvas

Colin McCahon; oil on canvas

My first experience with McCahon was watching a documentary of his life and work (most of his paintings are in collections in Australia or New Zealand, although I was fortunate to see two here in Boston at the Nielsen Gallery). What struck me was not so much his grand and brooding landscapes as the early religious work and the word paintings.

I felt immediately what he must have been up against in terms of public opinion, and I was astonished by his conviction. It is difficult enough to be an artist, but what he did was like swimming up a waterfall. To most people at the time, it was just plain contrariness. Today, as is so often the case, he is a national treasure and a hero to younger painters.

Colin McCahon; Takaka: Night and Day; 1948; oil on canvas

Colin McCahon; The Promised Land; oil on canvas

Interestingly, as early as the 1940s he began painting titles on his paintings. They had to be seen and read as part of the image. He even used speech balloons, cartoon style, to make the figures in his religious paintings talk. People naturally thought he must have been joking, but he wasn't. He was looking for a way to make something happen. He recognized the possibilities he saw in the comic strip. Nobody was doing anything like it in painting. He was working totally alone, and most people would say over the edge, not on it.

 

"King of the Jews"(1947)oil on cardboard; NAG,New Zealand

In the 1950s, McCahon turned to the landscape as a metaphor for his religious inquiry. He had a brief but influential flirtation with Cubism and then Abstract Expressionism. The result was an expansive and gestural landscape that was broken up by separate panels and planes. McCahon assimilated these influences quickly and naturally, keeping his vision on track. By 1960, words crept back into the landscapes, which had become more and more abstract and geometric. By 1970, words had taken over the landscape - a presence that was to become more or less implied from then on. Words and numbers filled his paintings, some of which joined panel to panel to reenact the experience of landscape through movement.

Colin McCahon; oil on canvas

It was the landscapes that brought McCahon success at home, but it is the word images for which he has achieved recognition abroad. The power and originality of these late paintings is magnificent and undeniable. We don't even have to read them to ingest their meaning. There is something that happens as we confront them. They talk to us beyond language. Each turn of a letter, each line of Scripture, poetry, or prose, is a sliver of light or a shadow cast on the water. They are at once enduring, longing, believing, and gratifying. They complete a necessary link in the chain of human experience. A piece we were missing.

Addison Parks 

Courtesy of the Christian Science Monitor, April 27, 1992
From the Artdeal Magazine Archives

ROSEMARIE TROCKEL: Revisited

Balaklava(1986) wool

ROSEMARIE TROCKEL

To start with, Rosemarie Trockel started with us; she chose to introduce us to her work by first introducing us to ourselves. By hanging a hand mirror at the mouth of her Boston ICA retrospective(1991) the way she might have hung a mirror in her front hall, she made us aware that we were guests in her home, allowing us to ready ourselves, letting us see our own glass house. To me, however, the mirror is as much about vanity as self-examination; concealed vanity, fear of self-examination. I didn't look, not then or ever.

At the back of this body of work which includes knitted canvases, bronze castings of dead animals, sculptural arrangements in glass cases, drawings, floor pieces, and quirky apparel, is the oldest piece in the retrospective, Scaredy-Cat (1983). It sat on the floor in the corner of the upper gallery and watched. It is quite obviously a kind of self-portrait. Her Familiar. It says a lot. Two slits peer from iust beneath the top of a plastered cylinder, out of which pokes a piece of wood, like a tail. Seeing that bit of emotion and candor made me look at the rest of the work differently. It made me re-examine not only the vulnerability of the work, but also the fear, the anger, the touch, and, in the end, the humor.

Out on the floor, under the feline's guard-like gaze, are some of Trockel's most intriguing works: haunting arrangements on her customized pedestals and in her glass cases. These pieces recall Beuys in their biological/anthropological quality of inquiry. They struggle with significance, not form. They ask questions. Their inventive visual presence evolves through her personal, almost magical use of materials, natural and synthetic. Human hair, animal membrane, and wire can figure in a piece under glass that we hover over as though it were enchanted. Casts of conch shells hang on the ends of long handles like ladles in a kitchen or carcasses on meat hooks, pretty shells all in a row. A man's white dress shirt stands alone in a tall case - except for a small spider.

Trockel does many things. She is completely human, woman, artist, with all the power, diversity, and complexity that implies. Her work resists limitation. She has scope, mystery, and reach. If three push brooms painted black and hung high on a wall like crucifixes are an angry indictment against men for so much burden and brutality and so little promise and possibility, then is a silver cast of chewed gum likewise a "biting" metaphor for the waste of generations of women who have been used and then discarded! Or is the chewed gum just a whimsical insight recognizing a very funny, and even beautiful, little phenomenon she calls "mouth sculpture?" Is it both! Can the push brooms even be kind of sardonic in the way that a sorceress's getalong can become a crucifix?

Casts of dead animals pointed up just how mercurial her ideas were. Her humor was what was the least expected and most jarring. The dead animals elicit our compassion, and yet we are confused, or at least I was, by the party hat one of them is wearing on its head. Or is it a dunce cap! Is this woman-as-victim, like the image of eyes shining quizzically from one of her knitted ski masks, or is there something else going on! The comic dimension of this work lifted it to a height I have rarely encountered in either art or feminism. It is the power of laughter that makes her work so victorious. With humor, that Trojan horse, she tickles our ramparts and drives her expressions through the gates.

As this exhibition showed, the source of Trockel's power is bound up in her art like religion. Her work resurrects the dominion of the matriarch, earth mother, goddess, and sorceress, and with their spirit instills in it a wisdom, strength, and grace of such intensity that she indeed brings something vast to life. In a tall room near the front of the ICA, Trockel installed a large machine that could manufacture art. Stretched out over a papered conveyor dangled dozens of brushes made from the hair of her artist friends. On the wall adjacent to the machine were samples of its quixotic glory. Call it magic, creation, what you will.

Addison Parks,  courtesy ARTS Magazine,  1991

(Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, April 3-May 12, 1991, after Boston: The University Art Museum, Berkeley; MCA, Chicago; The Power Plant, Toronto; and the Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid)

From the Artdeal Magazine Archives

The Patience of Painting, Pt.2

Charles Seliger; c.1940

My friend, the painter Charles Seliger,  believed that good things came in small packages and to those that wait. I have tried to learn from him. I have. But... I have never felt that way.

Charles Seliger, Lagoon, 2004, acrylic on Masonite 12" x 12"

As much as I might imagine the truth of what he believed, my experience has actually been quite different. Now I realize that I have to trust that difference. The things that made an impression on me as a boy were the opposite of small and patient, they were large and impulsive.

Clouds, ships, oceans, cliffs, grottoes and mountains, the Winged Victory in the Louvre, and the lions on Delos.

It made an impression on me that my mother would spontaneously take us out of school to go see Giotto, or maybe just to go to the beach. It made an impression on me that she looked out the window and said grab your things and took us off the plane at a stopover in Rome flying from Athens to the US,  and that we found an apartment and lived there for 4 years,  instead of going back to Cleveland. My mother never waited for things to happen, she made them happen. Our apartment had a large terrace with a view of the entire city, domes and towers as far as the eye could see.  It had 25 foot ceilings, and windows to match. And we ate beans to afford it, as she would say. And it was worth it!

The author, age 10, Via Margutta 48, Rome, c. 1963

The whole reason I got hooked on art in the first place as a boy was from seeing her working fast and furiously on a giant terracotta head of her lover. There was nothing small or patient about that experience of watching her work. It was inspiring.

One of my many attempts at a small painting, c.1997,  16" x 10"

I have tried to paint small, I have, and I will keep at it, but I feel better when I move my arms, my shoulders, my whole body. I have tried to be patient, but I need to breathe. I need to get excited. I need to feel alive, to stretch out! Now! Anything good that has ever happened in my painting has come in a burst, from an impulse. No exception.

The author in his Carr House studio at RISD, c.1975

Recently when my family suffered a bad experience through no fault of their own, I took them out of school and we drove up to New Hampshire and climbed Mount Monadnock. It was unbelievable. Awesome. It made all the difference.



So maybe good things come in all sizes, and maybe sometimes now is all that matters!

I may never know why my friend Charles Seliger thought what he thought. He was very close to his mother as a boy. Maybe it came from her.



Addison Parks
Spring Hill

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