Photo credit: Jason Houston
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 A’Dora Phillips interviews Lennart Anderson

in Collaboration with Brian Schumacher

Lennart Anderson on painting from life with central vision blindness; what vision loss has taught him about painting; art school; creativity; genius; influence; not fitting in; and hunkering down.

The perceptual painter Lennart Anderson, who turned eighty-five this summer, currently has a show on view of figure drawings and portrait paintings at Leigh Morse Fine Arts. Several of the works in the show have been done in recent years, as Anderson faces the greatest challenge of his artistic career and struggles to paint with central vision blindness due to macular degeneration.

The disease struck his right eye in the late nineteen nineties, but for a few years, he was able to continue working with little trouble using the monocular vision that was left to him – partially because he’d always relied more on his left eye to paint. When his left eye succumbed to the disease in 2003, it was a different story. Within hours, he went from being able to see to having such a disorganized glimpse of reality that he doubted the solidity of the world around him. On direct glance, a gray spot stood between him and whatever he focused on. In addition, straight lines looked wavy, doorways appeared out of whack, and objects seemed smaller and farther away than they were. He could no longer read, recognize faces, perceive color, or put his finger down precisely on the spot he wanted.

While Anderson has not read the New York Times since that day in 2003, he continues to paint, sometimes from direct observation, though more frequently from drawings he did when fully sighted. His painting techniques have necessarily evolved as his vision has deteriorated, but his daily ritual has changed little from what it has always been. By mid morning, he is in the third floor studio of his Park Slope Brownstone, classical music playing as he mixes paint. His work-in-progress waits, his palette, the monographs on Velazquez, Ingres, Degas, Poussin, and the many other artists who have influenced him. He has worked in the same third floor studio since 1966, and a collection of objects reveals the passing decades: catalogs from shows long past, drawings and notes composed by his children when they were young, sketches and photographs of Anderson’s late wife, Barbara. His studio’s most recent additions include accouterments related to vision loss: a magnifying glass on top of his Ingres monograph, a magnification machine, a big button phone, rulers and bits of paper with mathematical calculations on them, which he uses in preparation for transferring a gridded drawing to his canvas.

Some of what Anderson has painted this past decade is undoubtedly among his strongest work, though decidedly different from what he did before suffering from macular degeneration.

Brian Schumacher and I spoke with Lennart Anderson at his Park Slope studio on several occasions between January 2012 and July 2013 and were joined by the photographer Jason Houston on June 22, 2012. We found on our first visit to Anderson’s studio one of the walls dominated by “Idyll III”, a painting Anderson had been working on for more than thirty years. We were amazed by Anderson’s determination to finish as a legally blind artist a painting he had started two decades before, especially as he described how erratic his vision was and the problems this created for him as a painter. He persevered, however, and “Idyll III” served as the centerpiece of Anderson’s March 2012 exhibition at Leigh Morse Fine Arts (which Jed Perl of the New Republic cited as one of the year’s top three gallery shows). Over the past year and a half, Anderson has moved on to a composition of three figures on a bluff, based on drawings he has gridded and transferred. He has also been painting portraits from life. We have talked with him about his drive to work from life, the painting challenges that come with diminished vision, how to use the inspiration you get from other painters, and what it was like coming to New York City as a young artist in the nineteen fifties.

Photo credit Jason Houston

VISION LOSS & LOOKING

A’DORA PHILLIPS:  You have been legally blind due to macular degeneration for the past decade, but are still painting.  This must mean you are still able to see to some degree?

LENNART ANDERSON: What I see is erratic and very hard to describe. I can’t say I’m blind, but, when it comes down to it, I don’t see well. That’s why reading is so damn hard. I have that blind spot. If I’m looking for something, I can’t find it. I have to look over and underneath and to the side.  I think I make a lot of it with people. What are you asking for?  Sympathy? I just want people to understand that, even though I can see, there is a problem – though I gather it’s pretty easy to spot that there is a problem.  It’s interesting, for instance, how quickly people will give me a seat when I get on the subway – right away, usually. But, I’m old, really old.  And maybe it’s that.  Maybe people don’t even notice that I’m blind.  That I’m having trouble seeing.

To keep my eyes from worsening, I get an injection every seven or eight weeks. When I go in to the doctor’s office, they always do the same thing. They have me sit down, and they project letters on to the screen. They always start with the letter E, and I can’t see it. Every time I go there, the same thing. So, they try the next one. But my eyes haven’t really changed – or I don’t think they have – since the summer of 2003, when within a few hours I went from seeing well to not being able to make sense of things.

Because of my vision, I’m using my life now when I paint. I mean by that, all the painting that I’ve ever done.

Photo credit Jason Houston

PHILLIPS: I notice you have a stack of books here, with a magnifying glass.  Are you able to take in a whole painting or drawing now from a book or do you have to look at it in pieces?

ANDERSON:  I live on books.  They’re the greatest things.  Before my eyes went bad, and I would take out my book on Velázquez every evening and pore over his paintings.  I was learning, but I wasn’t studying.  It was coming in from another place.  Now, I can’t see the images in books much at all, but I still pore over them.  I know the paintings so well that I imagine I’m seeing them, but I don’t really see them.

PHILLIPS: Despite your vision loss, you paint in your studio nearly every day. What is your working day like?

ANDERSON: I get up early and come up here and procrastinate. Often, I just listen to music and don’t do anything until about two and the light is going to go. Then, I might work for an hour or two. That’s to save myself. But that has always been my habit. When I was painting in the nineteen fifties, I would sometimes find myself going through some job lot five blocks from my house, when I was supposed to be working. After supper I would start to paint, because I did not want to lose the whole day. It’s always been that way. Unless I have someone posing for me.

PHILLIPS: Habits aside, you have gotten a lot of painting done since 2003 and have had two shows, one in 2008 and one in 2012.

ANDERSON: Yes. And all the paintings in my 2008 show were done after macular degeneration. Most people are surprised that I’m working. Are you still painting? What else would I be doing?

PHILLIPS:  Up to when you lost central vision, you painted detailed still lifes from direct observation, along with figures and portraits. In the first few years after your eyes went, you did a few more still lifes of a lion’s mask, and they are entirely different from what preceded them. Did you have to modify your painting process significantly to complete your lion’s mask paintings? Did you work from direct observation, as you typically had?

Lion’s Mask, 2006, Anderson’s last still life painting

ANDERSON:  I did three paintings of the lion’s mask. I painted it once with a tiger plant and once with an artichoke up in Maine the summer after my eyes went. In fact, I took the mask with me to Maine precisely to paint it, since it’s nice to know what you’re going to do, instead of hanging around and worrying about it. The third painting, the one with the simple head on it, I did later, in my Park Slope studio.

When I painted the lion’s mask in Maine, I used photos, a very difficult decision for me. I had always hated the thought of depending on photographs, since you’re not painting the subject, you’re painting a photo. But, honestly, a damn photo is better than your eyes, even if you can see. I always knew that, but I didn’t want to cave in. People say, ‘photos lie,’ but that’s bullshit. I never painted a better head than Bart Giamatti’s: for weeks, I drove to Yale and spent Sundays in his office, trying to paint him while he was watching football.  I could never get it going. Then, at some point, a photographer went in to take some pictures of him. I asked to have some of the photos and used them to finish the portrait in my studio. With “Lion’s Mask,” I didn’t rely on photos entirely, though. I also had the mask very close to me. So I referred both to photographs and the mask as I painted.

Later, back in Brooklyn, I set the mask up again, right next to me – it had to be close for me to see it. There’s no stepping back now to see something better; if I step back, I lose sight of something altogether.  When I painted the mask in Brooklyn, I tried to do so without using a photograph as an aid. I wanted to just try painting it from direct observation, but without my realizing, the image would slip away from where I put it on the canvas by a quarter of an inch or so. The more I worked on it, the more it would go off. Rita Natarova, a painter and former student of mine, was living with us [Anderson and his daughter] at the time, and she would help me correct the drawing when I couldn’t control it and it shifted. It was quite an effort. I have the same problem now. When I try to paint the blue around the figure in the painting I’m working on right now, I think I’m painting right next to the figure, but in the end, there’s a faint halo around it.

You see, it is hard for me to paint with my eyes in the condition they are in right now for a number of reasons. I can’t even see some points that are close together.  I can’t put my hand down where I want to. I can’t make a line where I want to. When I can’t put something down where I think I’m putting it, it’s off. Then, you have to correct. I can’t work with a full brush. I don’t have confidence in it. You can’t see it so you don’t know if it’s right. It’s bad enough when you can see!

PHILLIPS: The lion’s mask paintings are your last still lifes after a lifetime of still life painting. Did you abandon still life because it was too hard to see the subject?

ANDERSON: That’s right. I can’t see a still life.  Like, the apples over there on the mantelpiece, I can’t really see them. I know them well enough that I could paint them from memory, but that’s not what I do.

Photo credit: Jason Houston

PHILLIPS:  Do you work from direct observation anymore?

ANDERSON:  I still have people sit for me sometimes. I put them through hell. I tried to do a head of a beautiful girl, Dali-lah, we call her.  Delilah is her name.  Dali-lah.  It would have worked out had I had the confidence.

PHILLIPS: You started to lose confidence in what you were doing?

ANDERSON:  I don’t know how I can beat that. If you can see, that’s good, but if you can’t see, you have to hope that the painting is going well.  I kept changing my painting.  It was much further along at one point.

Maybe the most significant problem I now have with painting – and this definitely makes it harder to do a portrait – is that I have a difficult time painting back to front. In the old days, I would have put in the big form that the eyebrows sit on before painting the eyebrows themselves – which involves working more comprehensively. But I can’t paint through the eyebrows anymore because if I did they would be lost.

I try to set things up so that I can work in a broad way if I can.  I try to work with a bigger brush. Not get into this tiny stuff.  I can actually paint better with a bigger brush than if I was into the small brush. I can just get a feel for the gesture of the form.  And that helps.

PHILLIPS:  Is that because there’s a memory in the hand about the gesture of the form?

ANDERSON: It may be. That’s probably true to how I feel.

Portrait of Rita Natarova, 2013, as shot in February 2013

PHILLIPS: After working on Delilah’s portrait, you undertook one of Rita. Do you essentially follow the same process as before macular degeneration when you set out to paint a portrait, as regards having the model sit for you and painting from observation?

ANDERSON: I could never paint a head the way I used to, often in a single sitting, with the subject at a distance. I can’t see anybody. It’s just my bullheadedness that makes me try. That’s what it is. Straight out bullheadedness.  Wanting to paint a beautiful woman. Wanting to do a great head, not one you have to make allowances for, but a head that will really knock people out.

Sometimes, I had to be within inches of Rita when I was painting her. The drawing was constantly changing. She would tire and couldn’t hold the pose and, like with “Lion’s Mask,” I couldn’t keep my drawing steady on the canvas. With these two things moving around, the shape of her head kept changing. Every day, a different shape, but it still looked like her. This went on for weeks. She must have sat for me twenty or twenty five times. I never got into the features while she was posing; by the time our painting sessions ended when she left for London, I still hadn’t put in the eyes and mouth. I remembered the shape of her mouth one day – it was something I could keep in my head – and put it in from memory, as well as the eyes. She thought she would have to come back to pose for me again at some point so that I could work on the features and was surprised when she saw her finished portrait on the Internet.

Now I’m working on a portrait of Kyle Staver, who has a unique head. The problem with that is that you have to be able to see well. I can’t fake it or paint from expectation. I have to rub noses with her, literally. It’s really terrible. With my magnifying glass. And even with a magnifying glass, I can’t compare two points. It’s very frustrating, because that’s what you paint with – similarities and differences.

PHILLIPS: Aside from the occasional portrait, you work mainly work from drawings now.

ANDERSON:  That’s right. When I returned to New York from Maine the summer I lost my sight, I decided to see if I could make painting from the drawings I had done of models. I have a lot of figure drawings from when I drew with my students on Saturday mornings at Brooklyn College. I treat the drawing as if it were the model, which relates back to one of the things I used to emphasize when I taught – that you don’t have to make drawings, unless you won’t have the model to work from later. Sometimes in class, I would see a student making a drawing, and the drawing would be terrible, but they would be planning to paint what was in it, because they felt they needed to stay true to what they’d put down. Don’t use the drawing. There’s the model. That’s your drawing. You don’t make something in between you and it.

Some of the figure drawings Anderson has in his files and now works from.
Photo credit: Jason Houston

Because I’ve been working from my drawings, I’ll tell you, I’m constantly amazed by them.  They don’t look like a whole lot, but then you start to analyze them in order to paint from them. The subtlety in them is mind-boggling.  None of them took more than twenty minutes and some of the best ones took ten, but there’s a great deal of information included in all of them.

The big painting of Jupiter was the first painting I worked on using my drawings – an awful thing to have done so soon.

Jupiter and Antiope, 2004/5, the first painting Anderson undertook after losing central vision in 2003, using drawings he had done from the model pre-macular degeneration for reference.

A photocopy of the drawing that Anderson used as a model for Antiope in his painting “Jupiter and Antiope”

Anderson’s Study for “Jupiter and Antiope,”

PHILLIPS:  What sort of painting process do you follow when you use your drawings as models?

ANDERSON:  When I compose my paintings, I pull the figures from individual drawings that had nothing to do with one another.

I start by Xeroxing the drawings I’m working with – which I learned I had to do after screwing one up. Then I decide where it should go on the canvas, and divide the drawing in half, which gives me three points – having three points has always been crucial to me. After dividing the drawing in half, I take quarters, and so on, creating a grid that will allow me to transfer the essential lines of the drawing to the canvas. I go to a great deal of effort with the grid, trying to map out the drawings accurately. Not infrequently, there are three or four lines on top of each other, and I have to choose between them. I sometimes make mistakes, since marks that may not look like anything, or that might even seem like mistakes, turn out to be meaningful and descriptive. I try to keep the mathematics as simple as possible, but it gets kind of horrible sometimes.

The drawing Anderson used as a model for Antiope, gridded

PHILLIPS:  So you use the grid to control a sense of scale and as a way to transfer the movement of the lines, right?

ANDERSON:  The grid is the master. I don’t fool around with it. It can be murder trying to paint what is in a line. It’s harder to paint from a drawing than it is from life, by far. Though, of course, painting from a drawing now in my situation is not what it would have been.

One of the reasons it is so hard for me to work this way is because you have to keep telling it what it is, you know? One of my main tenets has always been: Don’t tell it what it is; ask it. That’s what I always told my students. But I can’t ask it anymore, and I often have to go on what I remember.

The irony is that because of working with the drawings – like in that painting – my painting is tighter than it has ever been before, more precise, when you’d think it would get sloppier. It’s all on that edge of how many sixteenths or thirty-secondths of an inch it is. In fact, I mentioned to someone recently that these days, my line is actually closer to an Ingres line than ever before.

“Still life with salami and olive,” one of Anderson’s last still lifes before his second eye succumbed to macular degeneration.

PHILLIPS:  You seem to work from a much more limited palette than you used to.  Does that relate to your vision, as well?

ANDERSON: I don’t see color very well and have limited my palette accordingly. I understand what the few colors I use can do, and I don’t vary how I use them. Even so, mixing colors is very difficult. Yesterday, I mixed up something for the flesh tone – white and ochre, a little black to darken it. I left the pile of yellow ochre on my palette, next to what I’d mixed. I got my brush into the ochre, and it ended up on the painting, but I didn’t see it for a long time.

It occurred to me recently that I really ought to use a small painting palette now because I’m working with so few colors. The middle figure on my painting of “Three Nymphs on a Bluff” was essentially done with yellow ochre, white and black.  Maybe some brown and raw sienna.

Above and below are two separate paintings Lennart has been working on since about January 2012 based on a composition of drawings, sometimes called by Anderson “The Three Graces” and sometimes called “Three Nymphs on a Bluff”. He was still in the process of working on them when these shots were taken, in February 2013.

I’ve learned a lot about painting from macular degeneration. Just yesterday, I had an observation about a painting of El Greco’s depicting an artist with a small palette in his hand.  What the heck is he doing with such a small palette? That guy’s small palette really tells you something. The painter is not going to work on the whole painting, but just in one small area. There were probably one or two colors on his palette all together. Or, look at the dress in Ingres’s portrait of Princess Albert de Broglie. It was painted with Prussian blue, period. You know how dark Prussian blue is?  It goes through the entire range.  Ingres is not messing around with black or anything else. You see what a powerful thing it is to limit your palette. Historically, painters didn’t use color the way Cézanne or the other impressionists did. They screwed up color terribly, I think.  Made it much more complicated.

PHILLIPS:  You have been influenced by Degas ever since you encountered the auction catalogs from the sale of Degas’s studio contents at a friend’s house back in the nineteen fifties. It’s now widely accepted that macular degeneration was also at the root of Degas’s eye troubles, though in Degas’s case, it was an early-onset form of the disease. A lot of your recent strategies for working are similar to Degas’s. For instance, as his eyesight worsened, he seems to have relied on photographic reference and began tracing over his drawings as a starting place for paintings, exploring multiple iterations of the same subject, much as you’ve done with the “Three Nymphs on a Bluff.” Were you thinking about Degas as you strategized about how to keep working?

ANDERSON:  No, not really. Degas is complicated. I don’t know how he did it, and I don’t know what the state of his eyes was. He was complaining about them forever and didn’t paint for the last fifteen years of his life. That was probably the eyes, but he might have just said, ‘the hell with it!’

For myself, I just had to figure out some way I could keep going, that’s all. Like today, I wanted to quit. I said, ‘this is ridiculous, just ridiculous. I’m not doing anything but measuring and getting it all wrong and throwing myself on the floor.’

ANDERSON’S REFLECTIONS ON THE CRANBROOK ACADEMY, 10^TH STREET IN THE NINETEEN FIFTIES, AND HIS OWN PLACE IN THE ART WORLD

PHILLIPS:  Changing direction somewhat, your drive to work from perception – that has been with you since you were in art school, if not before. As I understand it, you had to be somewhat bull-headed as a young artist in the nineteen fifties in order to pursue your interest in working from life. That includes when you were at The Cranbrook Academy, which touts itself as the cradle of American modernism and certainly aligned itself with the abstract expressionist movement when you were there.

ANDERSON:  Even before I went to Cranbrook, when I was an undergraduate at the Art Institute of Chicago, they didn’t think much of things like likeness.  Do a great head, you know, whatever that was and they all did some kind of thing, but it wasn’t a likeness.  A good head in those days was a zero with a couple of lines in it. I left Chicago thinking I was an expressionist painter. After a time at Cranbrook, I found myself tiring of painting expressionist pictures. I started getting fellow students to pose for me and did portraits of them for $15 a piece. I was told not to paint the figure. But one day I saw the first model I’d ever drawn (in Detroit in 1943) at Cranbrook. Her name was Leona.  She’d come out on the bus and was just sitting there.  So I said, ‘why don’t I paint you?’ and I did.

Anderson holds his painting of Leona, done around 1951, when he was at the Cranbrook Academy.
Photo credit Jason Houston

PHILLIPS:  Were you unique in that?  Because that was definitely not a figurative period of time.

ANDERSON: I had friends who regarded me more highly than the faculty generally did. Even though I had a good final year at Cranbrook, I just slipped out. Nobody raved about my work except the sculpture teacher, who said I should stick with it.

It’s curious, though.  The school wanted to show its breadth, so they used my painting of Leona in their catalog when I was there.

PHILLIPS: Why did you tire of expressionism?

ANDERSON: There’s a good answer to that. I’m not dependent on what I’m carrying around in my head. If you have something to look at, and if you’re diligent, and if you love it, you can make good art by working from perception. Otherwise, you think you have to have an idea. And then you paint your idea.

PHILLIPS: And why is it important, when you’re working from perception, to strive to represent what you see with a high degree of similitude? Why are you striving to do that even now, when it requires so much effort?

ANDERSON:  I’ll give you a smart answer. Why do you play tennis with a net? You understand my answer, don’t you? It means you’ve done something right. That doesn’t mean copying, because you can’t do that, not well. You have to see and to organize.

PHILLIPS:  So, you didn’t really have any training in figure and portraiture.  You figured out how to work from life on your own?

ANDERSON:  No.  I’ve been looking at paintings forever. And I got a few pieces of advice early on that were crucial.  For instance, I had a teacher in Chicago my first semester, Elmer Forsberg, and his mantra was that you had to draw the whole figure on the page. He had a way of doing so with circles, and I didn’t know of any good painter or good drawings with circles, so, I never adopted his technique, but I did get the whole figure on the page then and have ever since – when I wanted to.

I want to say something about the fact that I knew Pat Passlof at Cranbook. She was important to me. On the back of my expressionist canvases, she found the figure paintings I had done at the Art Institute of Chicago and liked them. That generated the representational direction for me.

PHILLIPS:  But when you arrived in New York a few years later, you were still torn between working expressionistically versus representationally, weren’t you?

ANDERSON: When I came to New York, I had the idea that I wasn’t going to be an abstract expressionist, but it was the dominant style in those days and everybody – I shouldn’t say everybody, but almost everybody – was doing their version of it. And I was genuinely interested in de Kooning’s work, especially his early work, and what was behind the abstract expressionist movement. The abstract expressionists were there because they were fed up with representational painting – dark paintings, sentimentality. I thought I could do paintings that the expressionists could recognize. I met de Kooning and Franz Kline, though I wasn’t friendly with them. In fact, De Kooning visited my studio at the Academy in Rome when I was there, but he didn’t have much to say about my work, which disappointed me – unlike Philip Guston, who was excited by what I was doing. I knew Milton Resnick, as well, since his wife was Pat Passlof. Milton was a frightening man. He would scare you to death. Thought he knew everything. Once, when I visited Pat, I had a few small still lifes with me. Milton came in, looked at them, and said something like, ‘why are you doing these for?’ I said, ‘I’m trying to make a go of it, you know.’ And he said, ‘no, you’ve got to get with it and get on the bandwagon and take charge.’

But Pat made efforts on my behalf. She got me into the Artist’s Club, which was not easy to do, and I’d go there on Friday nights to listen to people talk about painting. And Elaine de Kooning once came to see my work when I was living on 10^th Street and was encouraging. Before she left, she asked me what my rent was. I said, ‘$29.75′, and she bought a little wash from me for that amount. Later, when I needed a letter for the Rome Fellowship, she wrote one for me, though I don’t remember being the one to approach her about it.

Still, I’ll tell you, I was reclusive. I was in New York in the nineteen fifties, and knew a few people, but they weren’t the big names or anything like that. I lived on the same block as some of them for a year and a half – with Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning, and Esteban Vicente, and Milton Resnick. They are history, but I’m not history. It’s just the way I am. I’m not unfriendly, but I feel like I’ve always been hunkered down, you know? I’ve got something I want to do, or try to do, and am working to get by.

THE ARTISTIC PROCESS, GENIUS, AND INFLUENCE

PHILLIPS: I feel like, historically, artists have been much more able to move from imagination to observation, perception, and memory, that it all goes into the pot and is used. You’re one of the few contemporary artists I know who also seems to have embraced that path and move fluidly between different modes of art making.

ANDERSON: I don’t fit into anything very well. I didn’t deliberately do that. I just followed whatever I was interested in, painters and paintings that inspired me. I don’t claim to be one of those geniuses. You’re not supposed to be influenced. You’re supposed to be yourself, but I’ve always been influenced. Painters steal. Artists steal. I remember when I went to Cranbrook, I was so intimidated by the jargon about creativity. Creativity – I never knew what that was. I still don’t know. There it is.

Are you getting anything out of this – are you recording me?

PHILLIPS:  Yeah.  I am recording it. The recorder is right here.

ANDERSON: So, you’re getting material?  Great.  That is what I was hoping, that you were going to nail me down, ask the right questions, and make me talk. ‘Don’t tell it, ask it,’ as I used to tell my students.

Photo credit Jason Houston

A’Dora Phillips holds an MFA in Fiction Writing from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and studied painting for several years, including with Jacob Collins at The Water Street Atelier and Daniel Graves at The Florence Academy of Art.

Brian Schumacher is an artist and designer whose paintings and drawings are held in many private collections. He is also an Assistant Professor of Drawing and Design at the University of Cincinnati College of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning Brian has studied, taught and practiced traditional drawing and painting for over a decade.

This article has been written with the generous assistance of the American Macular Degeneration Foundation (AMDF), which is committed to the prevention and cure of macular degeneration and offers hope and support to the afflicted and their families:  http://www.macular.org/

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Painting Perceptions would like to thank A’Dora Philips and Brian Schumacher for their generosity in making this fabulous and important interview available to our readers. Additionally we wish to thank the American Macular Degeneration Foundation who has provided invaluable financial support for the professional photography and the many other expenses related to this project. They are also providing support for a planned film related to this issue, more information will be made available as we know more. They’ve given the art world a huge gift with this interview and artists should return their support as much as possible with their donations.

A previous Painting Perceptions article that includes a slide talk Lennart Anderson gave in Italy can be seen from this link.
A website dedicated to the work of Lennart Anderson as well as essay’s and interviews can be seen from this link – lennartanderson.com

Interview by Elana Hagler

(Ed. note: untitled cityscapes are approx. 6 x 6 inches and are oil on panel)
click here for larger view

Arcenio Martin Campos attended New Mexico State University for studio arts, and then the University of New Mexico for studies in art history. He began drawing on his own as a child, and between schools acquired much of his fine art education from independent study and private instruction in the human figure. From 1999 through 2002 he taught small classes in cast drawing and facilitated open figure drawing groups in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Martin graduated from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia in 2007, receiving a Certificate in Painting. He is currently searching for stories for the figures he’s drawn over the course of his life.

I don’t remember when it was that I first met Martin Campos at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, but I do remember that I was immediately struck by his enthusiasm and seemingly boundless creative energy. I found Martin to be the sort of person that invigorates everybody around him. He is able to savor life on a level that most people can barely imagine, and all this shows in his vivid and enigmatic paintings. Martin’s eyes light up when he talks about painting, and that same light is made manifest and intensified in his work.

Elana Hagler: Thank you so much for taking the time to do this interview. What is it that first got you interested in painting and drawing?

Martin Campos: As far as I can recall, it was in the 3rd grade. I was living in the southwest, between Carlsbad, New Mexico and El Paso, Texas; it was the late 70s. My family lived in the middle of the desert with only a two lane highway running between the two cities. Pretty desolate. Big rigs would rumble from time to time along that road. So my first dream was to drive one of them. That above anything else. I loved the sound and the power. I do remember, at that young age, the sense of power these trucks evoked. I cried my eyes out when I was told I was too small and too young to drive one. My third grade teacher handed me a sheet of paper and told me that I could draw a truck and pretend I was driving one. This is my first significant memory of drawing coming into my life. Painting came much later.

EH: You first studied art history. What lead you down that path and how did you redirect yourself into a life of art-making?

MC: I did not receive my degree in Art history but I got really close. I spent many years embarrassed about that fact. As you get older, I think you tend to see how life develops patterns. Things get clearer. At least as I get older, I am increasingly becoming aware of how fate has a hand in things; mysterious things happen for a reason and turning my path to the creative part of me had a life of its own. You figure out how to follow your intuition.

With my academic studies, I was just biding time or at least my subconscious, it seems, was just finding the time to break through in regards to me being an artist. At the University of New Mexico, I was considering being a teacher, but really, under the surface, it was just a matter of time. Our Art History program at that time went through a drastic shift and I dropped out after a year of looking for possible graduate school options. This path led me to Philadelphia and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. That is when I left the idea of being an Art History professor and reclaiming what had always been real for me. So the redirection was no real redirection, but just following the path that was always there. Seeing paintings for the first time while visiting the East Coast and visiting the Academy definitely sealed the deal.

EH: Your studies at PAFA with Bruce Samuelson, Murray Desner, and Alex Kanevsky obviously had a huge impact on you. Could you pass along some nuggets of painterly wisdom that you absorbed from these wonderful painters?

MC: Their impact was one that I was not expecting. Upon my arrival at the Academy, I had a mindset that was far different from the one I have now. Now, I don’t know if that has anything to do with what I had in me the whole time or what the Academy had in store for me, but my decisions prior to my experience at PAFA were based on premeditated moves. My art beforehand was cut and dry. It had a beginning, middle and an end. With all that said, the most profound and fundamental shift these instructors had on me was to make me aware of how a work can be an ever changing and shifting organism. Art as an organism: a painting, a sculpture, or a drawing as a thing that can constantly move and be adapted.

So for me it was not as much a change in specific formal elements as a leap in thinking, and the ability of these instructors to pull out the artist that I was the whole time. That was the hidden treasure of the Academy.

EH: It seems that in your recent body of work, you are dealing with invented and remembered bodies and environments. What role, if any, does observation play in your work?

MC: Observation comes mostly from my periphery. Not so much what is in front of my field of vision. In the past, I always was reactive to a specific visual cue and focused more on that as a subject. Much credit goes to my fiancée for being such an inspiration in that regard. She was the first artist I met who worked from a more intuitive sense; creating pieces based on an internal struggle or a hidden visual cue. Now, of course, we all do that in some form or another but for me growing up in a small town and seeing someone do it right there in front of me, that was the whole enchilada. I just didn’t know how to get there.

My studio is strewn with visual cues and photo references. I dedicate sketchbooks to certain models I work with and key in on their lives and stories. I also work in their space, which I find is more comfortable for them, and they tend to be more gregarious and forthcoming with the stories of their lives. I take the scads of drawings and sketches to my studio and work from the residue of those moments. It is the experiences married with the drawings from those models, and the tons of reference material, that spark a painting. My last body of work was based on structures and forms and how both relate to one another. I dedicated that year to filling my studio with wood and photos of old, dilapidated buildings amongst figure drawings. These days, I tend to like an overwhelming amount of material in front of my field of vision to extrapolate from. This clears my mind to do the sorting out. Somehow, I clear it up in my work.

EH: What is the role of surface and touch in your paintings?

MC: It is becoming more and more important, especially after the last group of paintings done in 2011 to 2013. There was one piece in particular where I found myself reaching for plaster dust and throwing it onto the painting. My last studio had crumbling walls of plaster. I just did it as a gut move one afternoon. Just like you would reach for a napkin to wipe your face or to catch a sneeze. I distinctly remember when I did it and later on sitting down and realizing what I had done. I was creating imagined structures by using products of a structure! Now this is coming from someone who started out drawing academically and abhorred any kind of mixed media move of that sort. Somehow, something was always there inside of me that wanted to get that feltness out. I remember wanting to feel that wall in that painting so strongly that I did that gesture. It was the situation which called upon immediate and subconscious truthful action. These days I key in on that—or try to not be too conscious of it and let my reactions mingle freely. I just keep my studio well stocked with weird objects that will act as triggers to such moves.

Killing it to Live, 2013, oil on canvas, 58″x56″

EH: Could you talk a little about the role of lost and found edges in your work, and of the creative and destructive impulse?

MC: For me lost and found edges are determined by the juxtapositions of the subject matter and music I listen to. Currently, it is flesh against wood or steel (that is, buildings). Soft against hard and cold. I tend to favor musical structures with odd time signatures. Right now, it is progressive rock to the chagrin of most of my friends. I devour the lower end and the percussion of this genre of music. I eat up all kinds of sounds but right now in the studio the drumming of John Bonham and Bill Bruford coupled with Chris Squires bass structures are key to the way I lose and find my edges…..As for the impulse for destruction, I am becoming more and more comfortable with killing a piece for the want of the felt impulse that started it. We all do it in some form or another; it is what makes art after all. Some are just more blatant than others in the manufacturing of it. I love the tension of maintaining the semblance of a recognizable image with the expressive move, where I am at that precipice of destroying it. I named a painting Killing it to Live after that very notion.

Snow Scene 2010, oil on panel, 24″x24″ (detail)

Undertow 2010, oil on panel, 24″x24″

EH: Would you tell us a little about your use of color?

MC: Color is not too important until the subject begins to speak to it—then it becomes exciting. I really key in on my subject, how fleshy and how primal it is. I do not have a set palette and I just grab tubes out of a pile and use them. I know where all my reds, yellows and blues are in my studio. I just reach for what I need intuitively. If it doesn’t sing on the canvas or board then it gets shoved around or scraped off. Thinking painting is what I call it. Liquid thought. I do have to say that my experiences with painting en plein air have been crucial. This practice has made me favor working with very saturated color as arbitrarily as possible. This gives me the option to adjust and to look for areas of weakness in the outset. Find the culprit at the start and annihilate it. So color is very important after all, but not for the reasons most would think in regards to what I do.

Worm Woman, 2012, oil on panel, 24″x18″

EH: Why paint the female form?

MC: The million dollar question. I have been making connections to this recently. “Recently” meaning the past four years or so. I somehow see the answer connected to my sisters and the nurturing maternal figures of my upbringing. The juxtapositions of these forms against structures—structures as symbols of strength and fragility—which are attributes of the women in my youth.

Tulpehocken, 2012, oil on panel, 24″x18″

Untitled Drawing,  2012 – charcoal and pastel on paper, 19″x12″

EH: Hearing your thoughts really gives some great context to your paintings. Thank you so much for taking the time to do this, Martin. If you could go back and give your eighteen-year-old self any bit of advice, what would it be?

MC: To be a little more cognizant of the moment. I tended to have a delayed realization of this. As far as the formal elements are concerned, I would say stay the course with no changes.

Untitled Drawing, 2012 – charcoal on paper, 19″x12″

Untitled Drawing, 2012 – charcoal and pastel on paper, 19″x12

Duane Keiser, “Self Portrait in an iPhone, 9/10/2011″ oil/paper, 6″x5″

Duane Keiser is perhaps best known as the leading pioneer in the trend of painters selling work online. He is not only a fabulous painter who has sold work in major NYC galleries but continues to be a leading figure “in democratizing the art world, using the Internet to change the making and selling of art” as a 2006 article in USA Today discussed.

In another article in the New York Times written by Michelle Slatalla in August 31, 2006

“By most accounts, the roots of the painting-a-day movement reach back only as far as December 2004, when a painter named Duane Keiser, who also is an adjunct professor at the University of Richmond in Virginia, decided to test his discipline by challenging himself to post a new creation every day on his site at duanekeiser.blogspot.com.

“I wanted to make a ritual for myself, to complete a painting in one day, every day, without any excuses,” Mr. Keiser said in a phone interview last week. “I liked the diary aspect of it, that it was like putting a time stamp on a painting. When it goes up on the blog, I know it happened on this day.”

Mr. Keiser’s experiment soon attracted the attention of boingboing.net, a popular blog that identifies online trends.

“After somebody wrote a little blurb about me for Boingboing, the whole thing just spread like, well, it was unbelievable,” Mr. Keiser said. “I would wake up in the morning and paint, say, an egg, and post it, and then some guy in India would e-mail me and it was breathtaking to realize that within a few minutes of my finishing a painting, people everywhere in the world were looking at it.”

Previously, Mr. Keiser sold most of his work through traditional brick-and-mortar galleries. “But this has allowed me the flexibility to not worry about whether a gallery will accept me,” he said.

When asked about his pricing stats, Keiser stated: “The blog was launched in 2004. I’ve posted about 1,300 daily paintings since then. All but a handful have sold. The highest selling price was around $1,500; the lowest was $79.”

Many articles written and interview conducted with Duane Keiser, a selection are available on Keiser’s website. My favorite interview was with interviewer John Seed of the Huffington Post who discusses his Painting a Day approach and work in depth in his 2013 interview.

I’ve been following Duane’s blog since it’s beginning. His seductive and rich painterly style and ability to resolve a painting in one sitting combined with brilliant internet marketing savvy has helped insure the success in his painting a day blog when many other painters who tried to copy his approach failed, either due to not having an internet presence or lack of vision and skill. Suffice to say, Keiser positioned himself to be in a perfect convergence of not only being a terrific painter with early internet attention but also that he wired into the central nerves of regular people. Not just art collectors but many people who were buying art for the first time, wanting to bring meaningful, beautiful and affordable paintings into their lives. Perhaps, helping to spawn a new generation of art lovers who may be willing to help other painters with buying work.

In this interview I wanted to focus more about his process and thoughts on painting rather than the ins and outs of selling work online, other interviews have already covered this in depth. I would like to thank Duane Keiser for taking the time to respond to my email interview with such engaging and thoughtful answers.

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Above is a slide show of 40+ selected painting that I particularly enjoy, chosen primarily from his painting a day blog archive.

Duane Keiser was born in 1966 in Beaufort, South Carolina. He studied with Raymond Berry at the Randolph-Macon College in Virginia and also studied with Lennart Anderson and received MFA at the Brooklyn College in 1990.
Has taught as a Adjunct Professor of Art at the Randolph-Macon College, Ashland, Virginia and the University of Richmond, Richmond, Virginia

Shown in many venues including group shows with the Allan Stone gallery and solo shows at the Fischbach Gallery in New York and participated in the 2011 Group Exhibition, “Persistence of Vision: The Peterson Collection of Contemporary Realist Art,” New York Academy of Art, New York. He has received many awards including the Richard Estes Acadia Foundation Grant, 2008

“Rosebud on a Book, 8/26/2010″ oil/linen 5″x6″

Larry Groff: Please tell us what lead you to become a painter you are today? Who were your most important early influences?

Duane Keiser Most of my current work addresses themes that can be traced back to the years I studied under Ray Berry as an undergraduate at Randolph-Macon College. But I can’t talk about early influences without mentioning the place where Ray taught me to paint–Pace Hall. Pace was built in 1876 and has been restored, but when I was a student in the mid-1980s, the second and third floors were condemned, and the first floor, which housed the art department, wasn’t much better. But the rooms were large and high-ceilinged with original bottle glass windows that lit the space like a cathedral. Up until the 1960s, Pace had served as the science building. Amazingly, there were still chemistry formulas written on the chalkboards in the abandoned labs upstairs, and old test tubes (and the occasional mummified dead bird) lying around. It was beautiful and haunting. Ray gave me the key to the building and I spent many days and nights making paintings of the interior. Pace was where I discovered Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Hopper. It inspired my fascination with light and night. It was where I began to understand what Bachelard called the “poetics of space.”  It is where I first began making small premier coup paintings of sunbeams as they moved across the cracked and peeling walls. That exercise would eventually grow into my Painting a Day project.

Pace Hall Lights, oil/paper, 11″x9″ 1986

Night Studio (no.4) oil on linen, 12″x12″ 2004

LG: You’ve made several landscapes and teach a plein air workshop at Luck’s Farm in Virginia. I understand you sometimes paint there with your former painting and Karate teacher, the painter Raymond Berry. What is special about your teacher and this place that you return so often?

DK: You’d never know that Luck’s farm is only five minutes from Randolph-Macon College. It’s off the beaten path and hidden from the main road. The owner has very generously granted the College permission to conduct painting classes there. The landscape includes small bodies of water nestled among several acres of gently rolling farmland that’s divided by rows of trees. Constable would have loved it. It’s quiet and subtle, and it delivers new surprises every season. Ray and I–Ray, especially–have come to know it very well over the years. Whenever I see one of his Luck’s Farm paintings, I always know exactly where he stood, and often recognize individual trees and bushes. He recently devised a method to paint encaustic out in the field. His new work is truly sublime.

Raymond Berry, Luck’s Farm, Frozen Pond Looking East, January 23, 2014, Encaustic on Board, 8″ x 10″

Ray is one of those extremely rare teachers who has a vast and deep pool of experience to draw from and an uncanny ability to pass it along to his students in a way that’s both poetic and clear. He’s an intuitive teacher–he knows what a student needs to know, and when he or she needs to know it. A testimony to his gift is the fact that his students all paint very differently from one another, and from him. There is no “house style” in his department. As a teacher myself, I know how tempting it is to devise little systems for my students to follow, rather than teach them the hard-to-grasp principles of seeing, perception, and practice that will enable them to develop in their own way. He has changed my life in many ways, and I feel lucky to have met him.

Dot’s Diner, oil on linen, mounted on board, 12″x 12″ 2003

Main Street Station, oil on panel, 80″x36,” 2009

LG: You studied with Lennart Anderson at Brooklyn College graduating in 1990. I can see some affinities with some of his still-life subjects such as his Jiffy-Pop painting and your work. How influential was Lennart’s teaching to your work?

DK: I’ve always loved those jiffy pop paintings. Lennart has been very influential in that I’m still processing what he taught me at Brooklyn College 25 years ago. His teaching is very direct and honest (like his painting) and to this day, I have not seen a painter with an eye as refined as his. A few of us got to watch him begin a painting in one of his Saturday morning figure classes. As we looked over his shoulder, I remember thinking he painted like a five-year old–pressing his finger onto the canvas, scraping, smearing. No tension. There was this sense of someone seeing very purely with no assumptions or ego. He took obvious joy in the problems of painting and of seeing. It was wonderful to watch. If painting is a silent dialogue between the painter and the subject, then Lennart is a supreme listener. After fifteen minutes, I could barely discern the figure in his painting, but then he put a couple of perfectly placed notes of color down and a thigh appeared–a solid, beautiful thigh. The amazing thing is that it seemed to surprise him, too. It was as if he was so enthralled with the colors and paint that he forgot that about the figure. It was astounding. I recall that moment as a perfect example of an expert with a beginner’s mind.

“Mango,5/8/2012″ oil/linen, 5″x6″

“Edamame, 3/17/2013″ oil/board, 7″x5″

LG: You recently posted on your website what you call Transitory Paintings, one of Luck’s Farm as well as a painting from your window. These videos show a slideshow of the paintings many incarnations, like a slideshow of photos starting with a child and ending with an adult all from the same location and position. You painted over some stunning paintings and I wanted to cry seeing them being buried alive like that! You make dramatic changes, not just minor revisions to these paintings. I was dumbfounded after reading that you plan to have the buyer agree that you will take back the painting periodically to repaint it. Having an “open relationship” with old lovers might sound like good idea in theory but won’t it create complications with your current sweetheart? Please tell us something more about what lead you to this fascinating new venture.

Lucks Farm #12 1-12-2013

DK: I “finished” a small interior of my studio window a few years ago but then kept noticing something interesting happening with specific elements, like the light on the wall, or the trees outside the window, so I’d take the painting down and work back into it. I kept doing this until I realized I had a completely different painting–what started out an overcast winter painting ended up a sunny spring painting. So I decided to see if could make a continuous painting that changed as my subject changed. At first, working this way seemed half-crazy but after some time it began to feel normal and it became a meditation. I began to enjoy how the surface built up and that the pentimenti came to serve as a visual metaphor for transience and change. My goal is to hang the painting on the wall with a large touchscreen playing a slideshow that allows the viewer to select previous iterations of the painting. The fact that past iterations are gone and the current one will be gone soon, too, makes the sense of transience and loss more palpable than if the viewer were looking at a series of separate paintings.

The couple with whom I have this “open relationship” are dear friends who have bravely agreed to serve as my guinea pigs. They bought the Luck’s Farm painting with the understanding that I could drop by any time, take the painting off the wall, and paint a new iteration of their Luck’s landscape. They’ve been great about it. I know they prefer some iterations to others, but they keep their opinions to themselves and allow me the freedom to work without pressure.. At some point, we’ll come to an agreement on when to stop.

How does your small premier-coup painting inform your larger paintings done over multiple sessions? Do you really make a new painting every day or do you go through periods when you put that aside?

DK: Premier coup painting has given me more freedom and flexibility in my larger work–to the point where the lines between the two modes of painting have blurred. Many of the great paintings I love have aspects of both. One reason Las Meninas has such an intense verisimilitude is that Velazqueuz could shift seamlessly between quick and sketchy and slow and deliberate, to parallel the glances and gazes of visual perception.

When I started back in 2004, I made one painting every day for about a year-and-a-half. Since then, there have been brief periods when I’ll stop to work on other projects or to re-group and clear my mind.

“Still Life with Mandarins and Bottle, 3/21/2011,” oil/linen, 7″x5.5″

“Crane Fly, 5/18/2012,” oil/paper, 7″x6″

Farmer’s Market, 11/9/2013,” oil/paper, 7″x6″

I understand you’ve been practicing Shotokan Karate for almost 30 years. You stated in a 2006 interview (I will link) that your painting informs your Karate and vice-versa. Much of the martial arts I imagine would involve repetition of certain moves in a meditative-type fashion but in painting I would think repetition of moves might risk becoming formulaic. I’m curious if you can give some examples of specifically how this has played out for you in your work.

DK: There is a great deal of repetition in this particular style of karate, but ideally, it’s a mindful repetition. By this, I mean that when you repeat a technique a thousand times in a row, you are trying to make each technique your best, each time. You won’t, but that’s the goal. You have to learn to actively resist the temptation to go through the motions, to phone it in. It’s the same with painting or any other creative endeavor. But with A Painting a Day, the problem is particularly acute because of the frequency of the process and the self-imposed deadline. It’s easy for painterly efficiencies to become habits, and for habits to become mindless algorithms. It requires a constant vigilance to avoid sleepwalking. I should add that I’ve stopped my SKA practice, but what I learned from it plays an active role in everything I do.

Bethann’s Bouquet oil on panel, 11 x 14 inches 2013

“Dragonfly on a Sill, 8/10/2013,” oil/paper, 7″x6″

“Tea Bowl with Lemon Slice, 4/3/2008,” oil/linen, 6″x5″

LG:Do you need silence and isolation to concentrate completely on the work or are you the type of person who has music blaring, tv on with kids and pets playing and phones ringing off the hook? What helps you to make better paintings?

DK: My studio is attached to my house and I have a distractingly adorable five-year-old daughter so prolonged silence and isolation isn’t an option for me. Painting outdoors has taught me to deal with all kinds of distractions, including trains, drunks, wild animals and biblical weather, so I’m not too particular.

LG:I’ve been thinking a lot about a comment someone left on an interview with you, she quoted Edgar Degas: “Painting is easy when you don’t know how, but very difficult when you do” You replied with another Degas quote: “Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things.”  Do you ever find that your high level of skill in painting can work against you?

DK: The fact that I have a lot of tricks and techniques to choose from only means that I have more ways to avoid dealing with the essence of a problem. So yes, my skill can work against me. I chose that particular quote because my best painting often seems to happen when I’m lost and haven’t the foggiest notion how to proceed, or when I’m on the verge of wiping off a painting in disgust. I think this is because at that point I am finally prepared to let go of those precious passages I was hanging onto at the expense of the whole. William Faulkner said, “In writing, you must kill all your darlings.” I think the same is true for painting.

“Sunbeams and Pushpins, 1/29/2005,” oil/board, 6″x5″

“Cigar, 2/23/2008,” oil/board, 3″x8″

LG: There seems to be more painters than ever these days, competing for spots in the few galleries left standing since the last round of economic downturns, trying to reach a rapidly shrinking collector base with artwork of every imaginable style, subject and medium, all with an incredible range of talent from work that rivals the old masters to epic imbecility. It seems hopeless and incredibly exciting at the same time. How do you feel about the painter’s chance of survival in today’s artworld? Is it worth it to stay in the traditional gallery game or better to reach collectors and new art buyers directly on your own?

DK: This is a golden age for painters. We have more options to get our work in front of fans and collectors than ever before. I don’t see the collector base contracting, I see it expanding. With an increased number of painters, I see an even larger increase in the number of collectors. It’s simple–new technology (computers, smart phones, tablets) offers direct access to artists’ studios and galleries. As a result, more people are buying art. Not just the top .001% that we constantly hear about in the news, but across a wide range of household income.

Is it worth it to stay in the traditional gallery game, or better to reach out to new art buyers on your own? The answer depends on your individual circumstances. The important thing is that this question is being asked. Twenty years ago, you wouldn’t have dreamed of asking an artist if it’s worth it to work outside the gallery system.

Generally speaking, I think it’s worth it to at least explore your selling options outside the gallery system. Some artists aren’t suited to selling their own work, which is understandable because it can take a lot of time and energy away from your painting. On the other hand, playing the gallery game can be time-consuming too and great galleries are few and far between. I’ve done it both ways. I had a good experience with Fischbach Gallery back in the 1990s, and I’ve had success as a self-represented artist.

“Dad’s Crossword,8/11/2013″ oil/linen, 6″x7″

“Degas Puzzle, 3/13/2013″ oil/linen, 7″x6″

LG: Most of your paintings aren’t just an accumulation of details or fine-tuning an image’s rendering into a photographic likeness. You seem willing to not hold anything too precious and are free to change the painting at any point right up until the very end; as you cleverly demonstrate in your egg cracking and ice cream cone paintings. What would you tell students about your reasons for not being precious with your painting and your willingness to leave the painting open right up until the end?

DK: In my first painting class with Ray Berry, each of us had a couple of hours to paint a small oil study on paper. He then asked us to line them up on the wall for a critique. After the critique, he told us to wipe the paintings off. Jaws dropped. You would have thought the Pope asked Michelangelo to take a belt sander to the Sistine chapel. And the funny thing is, none of us even liked our paintings! They were terrible, and we knew it, but it was still hard to wipe them away. Ray’s request had the intended effect of revealing our knee-jerk attachment to our work, and freeing us up to experiment and make mistakes in future paintings. In other words, it helped us realize that painting was an investigation rather than a tidy step-by-step process.

LG: You’ve had well over a half-million people watch you painting on youtube, how does this make you feel?

DK: It’s interesting to think that the number of people who watched those videos could fill up several football stadiums. On the other hand, the typical cat video on YouTube gets millions of viewers so I’m not sure the numbers alone are a big deal. Whether it’s one person or a million, I’m encouraged to know there are people who appreciate my work and want to see it.

“Penny,” oil/linen, 2.5″x3″ 2006

Quote selected by Duane Keiser from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard:

There are lots of things to see, unwrapped gifts and free surprises. The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside from a generous hand. But — and this is the point — who gets excited by a mere penny? If you follow one arrow, if you crouch motionless on a bank to watch a tremulous ripple thrill on the water and are rewarded by the sight of a muskrat kit paddling from its den, will you count that sight a chip of copper only, and go your rueful way? It is dire poverty indeed when a man is so malnourished and fatigued that he won’t stoop to pick up a penny. But if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days. It is that simple. What you see is what you get.

Daily painting is woven into my life and has become a kind meditation for me; a way to practice being in the moment and appreciative of what I have. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard has had a big influence on me. This passage in particular shaped the way I approach “A Painting a Day:” (from the interview with John Seed)

“Abandoned Nest, 5/3/2010,” oil/linen, 6″x7″

“Night Window, 8/27/2012,” oil/linen, 7″x6″

by Elana Hagler

The Porcupines From Cadillac, oil on linen, 28″ x 42″

Alexandra Tyng is a painter who lives and works in Philadelphia. She has a B.A. in Art History from Harvard and an M.S. in Education from the University of Pennsylvania. In terms of her painting education, she is mostly self-taught, having examined the work of the old masters, reading and researching about methods and materials on her own. She is best known for her landscapes, portraits, and narrative figure compositions. Alex Tyng is represented by the Fischbach Gallery in NYC, Dowling Walsh Gallery in Maine, gWatson Gallery in Maine, and Gross McCleaf Gallery in Philadelphia. Her work is included in numerous public, corporate, and private collections across the United States and abroad. She is also the founder of the philanthropic initiative “Portraits for the Arts,” a program that supports Philadelphia’s art community.

Elana Hagler:  Alex, thanks so much for joining us here. I’m particularly excited to talk to you because I feel like we have so many interests and concerns in common. Also, one of the things I love about your oeuvre is that you really work across genres. You are well-known for your landscapes, but you also do portraits as well as complex figurative, more narrative compositions. So many people stick to a very specific niche, but you seem to broadly embrace a number of passions. You mentioned how someone once told you that as long as you stick to landscapes, you can be part of the avant-garde art scene, but if you paint portraits, you will be marginalized as a commercial artist. Has your experience been very different or do you find that there is still this stigma attached to working in portraiture?

Alexandra Tyng:  Thinking back, I can see what that person meant, because that really was how the art world was in the 70s. At the time I rebelled against the idea of choosing one or the other, and I just kept on painting both. I was just at the beginning of my career and nobody knew my work well enough to pay that much attention to it anyway. In fact, the portrait world was and is so entirely separate from the world of selling art in galleries that I had two completely different careers that almost never crossed. At a certain point the managing of these two parallel careers became too exhausting and time-consuming, and I realized I needed and wanted to find a way to bring them together. By that time, the art world had changed dramatically and portraiture was being accepted as “fine art.”

Vision to Hand, oil on linen, 36″ x 26″

Dr. Gerald Grunwald, oil on linen, 44″ x 36″
Collection Thomas Jefferson University

EH: In your interview with the Newington-Cropsey Foundation, you talk about not having wanted to go to art school because of this perception of being forced there to come up with a gimmick to have some sort of a concept when that wasn’t something that was occurring naturally in your work at that time. And I do know what you mean, because I certainly felt that sort of expectation being applied to me from various critics when I was in school. Do you feel that your studies in art history and psychology have influenced the direction that your painting has taken? Also, do you feel like you had enough external input from other painters whom you knew from your community that there wasn’t really a lack of that kind of more formal painting educational feedback for you?

AT: Actually I was always interested in concepts, and I tried intermittently to put some of my ideas into the first figure paintings I did in high school. But I didn’t know any other contemporary artists (like Bo Bartlett and Vincent Desiderio) who were doing this, and the galleries I knew weren’t showing figures. I’m not sure how ready I was then to work consistently on developing my ideas. I was kind of embarrassed by them, really, I think because not only was I painting realistically, but also I was expressing my feelings directly and sincerely, not trying to be cool or ironic, I didn’t have the confidence to do that in the prevailing climate. As a teenager, I read books about things like the warping of space-time, layers of time, and paranormal events. I was practically brought up on Jungian psychology, and I was fascinated by the analysis of fairy tales and the talk of archetypes and symbolism and synchronicity. I was already interested in different historical periods, and people—their motivations and the relationships between them. So when I got to college it was natural for me to major in art history with a minor in psychology, which added a lot of depth and specificity to my knowledge. Because I didn’t go to art school, I didn’t get to know other painters in Philadelphia till I joined a cooperative gallery. I made some friends who continue to be friends to this day. But I really didn’t have a large network of artist friends until the internet created a way for artists to interact.

The Letter A, oil on linen, 42″ x 46″

Knight, oil on linen, 26″ x 80″

Green, oil on linen, 38″ x 30″

EH: I’m fascinated about how you combine different layers of time in your current figurative work. Can you tell us more about that? Also, like you, I’ve been captivated for a long time with Jungian archetypes (also the work of Joseph Campbell) and fairytales/mythology. How do elements of these concepts play into your work?

AT: My figurative work is the most personal of all my work. It’s where I allow myself to explore ideas that interest me and really get deeply into them. The scenes come out of my imagination and, because they did not actually happen, the events and people are not bound by time. Sometimes in a single painting I’ll put two figures that are really one person at two different ages, or several figures that lived a hundred years apart. I like it to look as if it were actually happening, or could have happened, so it’s important to me to get the perspective and lighting and viewpoint consistent. It’s all in the service of the concept. The Jungian idea of the archetype makes sense to me, probably because I was exposed to it from an early age. (My mother was one of the founding members of the Jung Center in Philadelphia.) The idea that symbols are remarkably consistent across cultures, even in the past when cultures were more separate, intrigues me because it makes me wonder if all human beings have in us some genetic memory of the Big Bang. My father used to say that “matter is spent light,” If you think about it, all living things came out of the same matter that was created at the beginning of the Universe, so it’s possible that we all share a way of finding connections and patterns, and assigning meaning to forms. I incorporate a lot of symbols into my paintings, but I don’t like to tell the viewer how a painting must be interpreted. It’s no fun to spell everything out for the viewer. I try to create a whole environment in which symbols are part of the setting and interaction between people, so that there are many layers of meaning, many possibilities of meaning, and I’m leaving the painting open to interpretation. I believe there’s always an aspect of visual art that is unseen. You can’t predict that, or control it, but you can try to put your non-visual thoughts and emotions into the painting when you’re working on it, and hope that some of that is communicated to the viewer.

New World, oil on linen, 36″ x 60″

Louis I. Kahn, oil on linen, 52″ x 36″ Honorable Mention, Members Showcase, Portrait Society of America, 2011; Collection National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C.

EH: One thing that we have in common is that it took both of us a while to accept that painting could actually be a “real” profession that was a valid pursuit for a lifetime’s work. Could you tell us a little about how you can to terms with this very defining choice?

AT: For me it was a matter of figuring out how to bring the practicalities of earning a living together with the conviction inside me that told me I was put on Earth to be an artist and I couldn’t really do anything else quite as significant with my life. My parents [the architects Anne Tyng and Louis Kahn] were not much good at making money, so they really couldn’t advise me on the practical aspects of being an artist, but they also couldn’t support me financially. I always knew I would be an artist, but after college, reality hit. I had no clue how to make money to live on. Every time I was broke, my friends would say, “why don’t you get a real job?” I’m sure all artists have heard that at some point from well-meaning people. I had different ideas of how I could earn money on the side doing this or that, until finally I realized my art was of much more value than anything else I could do. Now I see that there are thousands of ways artists can make a living, you just have to figure out what suits you the best.

Morning Sun Over Monhegan Village, oil on linen, 26″ x 46″

Across the Havens, oil on linen, 36″ x 70″

EH: I’ve seen many portraits fall into this trap of these sort of worn and recycled presentations and clichéd approaches. How do you keep your compositions and just the entire sense of the portrait fresh?

AT: It helps that I don’t just do portraits. I usually have a variety of things going on. In the summer I spend a lot of time in Maine, painting landscapes outdoors, and I’ve been a field instructor at the Plein Air Convention in Monterey for a couple of years. My outdoor paintings become studies for larger studio paintings. I am usually planning or working on a figurative piece in the studio. So portraits are just one of many things I paint, and I always approach a portrait as a new adventure, a new problem to solve. As part of the process, I enjoy painting people from life and getting to know them. Also, I think it has something to do with the way I approach a commission. My parents were architects who did all their work on commission. I grew up paying attention to how they approached the process. They didn’t just take an order from the client; they listened to what the client wanted and then used that “program” as the starting point for inspiration. So, for them, a commission was a collaboration with the client from which something greater emerged. And that way of working with portrait clients seems natural to me.

Harriet Pattison in Her Landscape, oil on linen, 38″ x 30″

EH: Many people seem to fear that working on commission can be very limiting in that it may involve a good deal of artistic compromise. You mention that you find that working on commission can be an enriching and invigorating thing rather than a limiting thing. What advice do you have for young painters who may be new to the process of collaboration with a client?

AT: Remember that the artist-client relationship is a process of collaboration. If it turns into an adversarial relationship, it just won’t work. When you are working on commission, get into the mindset that what you can accomplish together will be greater than what either of you can accomplish alone. Really listen to your clients as they tell you about their vision of the portrait, and use that information to learn about them and to inspire you. The clients’ ideas are parameters rather than constraints; they will help you shape your own vision. And keep the communication lines open. The more you let your clients in on the process, the more they will like the final product.

Steven K. Herrine, M.D., oil on linen, 38″ x 32″

EH: You mentioned that you only started painting images of your family members fairly recently, because you were to some extent afraid of having people think that you were exploiting famous family connections. I have also been somewhat timid of touching more obviously on issues such as the Holocaust, the general Eastern European Jewish experience, and my particular family stories, which are all so tied up in that past and the whole transitory, immigrant experience. My reticence is because I know that some people talk about the Holocaust in particular as being something that gets exploited (I think those people often have a political axe to grind) and the last thing I want is to feel like I am, in any way, exploiting the pain my family experienced. Still, my family’s experiences have been such a large part of my own emotional inheritance. For me, it all still bubbles around inside, and I don’t really know what form it may or may not take in the future. But for you, your family and the stories they’ve told have now started to make their way into your work, and I would love to hear more about what that means for you and how you found the self-assurance to flick off those nagging doubts.

AT: You bring up a really good point, which is that we all have our own stories to tell. The stories come from the interweaving of our experience with our history and heritage, and also from our personal ways of looking at our experience and processing it. Years ago I read a book about how to see your life as a story and how to tell that story. There are many books on this topic for writers, but the premise can be applied equally well to painting. The author basically said that everyone has stories to tell; it’s just a matter of seeing your own life in a certain way. Something happens to you, and you think it’s thwarting your direction, but actually it’s pointing you in another direction, which you can only see when you are far enough from it that you can look back at the whole thing. It makes a story when you can understand its true shape and meaning. Your description of ideas “bubbling around” inside is exactly what I experienced for years. Like you, the ideas existed in a nebulous state, and I had to wait until they took shape. It really is a torturous experience to live in this state of uncertainty and inner turmoil while ideas are gestating. You wish they were ready to be born but they aren’t yet. I can see how it could make some artists crazy. The last thing I wanted to do was exploit my connection to well-known family members by painting them, so I refrained from that for years. I also wasn’t ready to tell my story because on some level I didn’t realize it actually belonged to me. Once I took on that “ownership,” my imagination was free of constraints, and I was able to “speak up” on things that are important to me—themes in my life, things I’ve observed and felt strongly about. This coincided with a point at which I had enough skill and experience to paint my ideas. But at the end of the process there’s a new uncertainty: Will the painting work? Will it strike a chord with lots of people, not just you? You have to really ask yourself “What am I saying?” and still, when the painting is done, there are no guarantees. Not all paintings are masterpieces. You just have to keep trying, keep painting, and keep exploring ways to communicate more successfully in your own visual language.

Art and Legacy, oil on linen, 40″ x 52″

Royalty, oil on linen, 42″ x 54″

EH: Could you say something about your actual technique of painting? Do you tend to paint more directly, or is it a more indirect, layered approach? Do you do preparatory sketches? Do you make an elaborate underdrawing, or do you just jump in with large painterly shapes?

AT: My painting process is primarily direct, though in the studio I apply more layers, I incorporate some glazing and scumbling, and I can make the choice of whether to paint wet-into-wet or wet over dry. The basis for all my paintings is working from nature. Whether I’m painting a portrait head in a studio setup or working outdoors, I’m trying to put down exactly what I observe. In preparation for large studio work, I take reference photos, so I work from both the oil studies and photos. I use the photos to design the composition and decide on the exact proportions and size of the canvas. If it’s a complex figurative composition I do a lot of graphite and charcoal sketches first. Then I print out photos for the background and figures, and I plan exactly where everything is going to go by moving figures around. I prefer to cut and paste rather than work it all out in Photoshop because then it looks too finished and I feel as though I’m just copying a photo. The painting is more in my head than in any of the reference material. When I’m working in the studio, I paint from the computer monitor, the oil sketches, and as many as 20 or 30 photo references strewn around the easel.

EH: What directions are you excited about exploring with your work for the future?

AT: One thing I’m starting to do is to get back into drawing more. I’ve always enjoyed expressive line drawing, but I’m now trying all kinds of new graphite and charcoal and papers, practicing creating fully developed drawings in which I turn the form and control the values and edges and variety of marks. I want to continue working in different genres—landscape, portrait, figure—I like having the option of moving around so I never get bored. I’d like to continue developing my figurative work, continue reading about and figuring out new ways of using archetypes, symbolism, psychology, physics, and ideas about layers of time and perception. I’m planning to continue with my family theme, and I will probably expand my subject matter to include other casts of characters. My overarching goal is to not repeat myself and to continue challenging myself.

Moving the Mountain, oil on linen, 14″ x 18″

Blue and White Chairs, oil on linen, 9″ x 11″

View Alexandra Tyng’s recent podcast interview with the Newington-Cropsey Foundation here.

Tuxedo, 28 x 28 inches, oil on linen mounted on board, 2014

Prince Street Gallery in New York City is having a show of my paintings July 29-August 16. The show features landscapes of my suburban neighborhood in the San Diego as well as a few paintings of the city’s industrial waterfront. Additionally there are fifteen landscape paintings from Civita Castellana, Italy where I painted for the past two summers

I’m grateful to the members of the Prince Street Gallery who invited me to show my work at this great artist cooperative with a rich 40 year history and many terrific artist members.  I’d like to invite any readers to my show, the opening is on Thursday, July 31 from 5-8pm and I will be available to meet anyone while I’m in NYC from Aug 1 – Aug 12 during gallery hours, just email me…. larry@paintingperceptions.com. This is my first solo show in NYC and I wanted to use this as an opportunity to post an auto-biographical sketch and commentary about my work. Please see my website for more a greater selection of images and information.

The exhibition titled In and Out of Sight underscores my combining on site observation, the “In Sight”, with studio work or the “Out of Sight”.  Also, the in and outs of painting then repainting, putting on and then scraping off, keeping a painting open to an organic, painterly process that moves beyond literal rendering of the scene’s specifics. However, at the same time I’m drawn to specific characteristics of a place, especially things that evoke a quirky sense of rightness, mood or humanity.

Of course, many landscape painters take this approach, combining the excitement and specificity of painting from observation on one hand with the inventions and strategizing in the calm, protective comforts of the studio. Despite working mainly from life for many years and running this site about perceptual painting, I am not a purist with strict rules about only painting in front of nature.

Tuxedo is a painting I finished a few weeks ago. The title is from the name of the park where much of it was painted but also plays with its formal-wear meaning; formal painting issues being the reason to paint, not just for an otherwise ordinary view of my fortunately scenic neighborhood. By formal I mean such things as the musicality felt from the intervals and groupings of related and contrasting forms and how their positions in space, geometric configurations encourages the eye to move through gestural pathways in the painting. It is about the experience and discovery of the interactions and vibrations of light on color planes and shape relationships. This painting was primarily done on site but there were also many important decisions and changes made in the studio.

To me great landscape painting is abstract painting that also has a structure and is intrinsically bound to certain visual restrictions. These restrictions paradoxically can make the process more freeing. I increasingly find that by narrowing the range of choices you free up your mind to push ideas further and to look at design possibilities more fully.

Tug and Tanked at Tenth St Terminal 20×24 inches 2014

Each painting has its own rules about how closely to follow observed facts. Sometimes the most interesting thing to me is the chance arrangement of forms found in the chaos of nature that is far more interesting visually than the order I might impose on it. The visual surprises from nature can be a catalyst for bigger abstract ideas that would have been difficult or impossible from invention alone. Other times nature is just a jumbled mess and you first need to wipe out everything in order to see where a painting might come out of all of it. On occasion, a more laborious (and often less successful) manner involves putting in everything that might be tried, then as the painting progresses, gradually removing the non-essential – which is somewhat like how I’ve lived my life for many years.

ai piedi del Monte Soratte, 11 x 15 inches oil on paper mounted on board, 2013

I didn’t start drawing until my mid 20’s. At first, the main art I knew about was more along the lines of hippie decorating and protest-sign art. As a teen in the late 60′s, I lead a feral lifestyle, dropping out of high school to have as many adventures as possible. I left the hippie counter-culture to be more with the straight-laced radical anti-war protest and Marxist-Leninist type groups, and became a full-time activist for a few years. Eventually, I became disenchanted with the craziness and doctrinaire party lines and began to understand that being a revolutionary leader wasn’t a particularly wise career move. Since then I’ve have a hard time buying into notions of the one true path, and have tried to avoid art-world variations of “correct-thinking”.

I went back to school and got my GED and then went on to become a nurse (LPN) which is how I supported myself for 25 years, working in various hospitals in Boston. One of my more memorable early experiences with art was when the head nurse on the unit where I worked brought in some large art books on Bonnard and Degas. I had never seen these before and I was enchanted, wanting to marvel over these books every chance I got. I started experimenting with watercolor and I soon decided I wanted to learn drawing and asked a good artist friend, Matthew Mattingly, to teach me. We would meet once a week to travel around Boston drawing homeless people sleeping in the library, people waiting for trains in the station, study perspective problems of airline terminals and buildings in the North End as well as hiring models. The search for more exciting views sometimes brought us to the wilder parts of the city; industrial waste sites, trespassing in waterfront oil tank farms—places where gangsters from Charlestown might dump bodies. This visual thrill-seeking went on to become a long standing interest. Sadly, after 9-11, security police take their job far more seriously and I am far more careful about ‘no trespassing’ signs.

My first drawing efforts were exciting but rather pedestrian as art, still I started to learn the basics.  Drawing never came easy for me but it seemed important, and eventually became my obsession. I applied to Mass College of Art in the mid-80’s where I was lucky to study with George Nick. Immediately after seeing his slides, I  knew he had what I wanted.

Cowles Mountain over San Carlos, 26 x 36 inches, oil on linen mounted on board, 2013

I made my first oil paintings with George Nick. He gave beginning students assignments to paint still lifes from life in black and white with a palette knife. His structured, highly engaged and inspirational teaching was critical in shaping the direction of my painting for years to come. He got me involved with my long held interest in painting from observation. He wasn’t an easy teacher and minced no words if the work fell short in some way. One of the biggest lessons I learned from him was that painting is something vital and not to be taken casually. That painting is more than just craft, it also about integrity, vision and poetics. His way of teaching the basics of painting still holds great value and relevance for me today and I often hear his voice in my head when faced with a painting problem. His focus on getting the right tone, color and good drawing was the mantra that I used to keep myself in check over the years. From his teaching I learned that working from observation could be a way of making art that ran parallel to life, not just trying to mimic it.  That close attention not only helped you better see the motif but also that nature could offer far more interesting design and colors than what you were likely to come up with on your own. Working against something, to compare how tall to how wide, how dark to how light, where something is in relation to another, is a tone too cool next to another? These types of questions better allowed me to more objectively see my work, get out my own head and if all went well, tap into a more authentic voice, one less apt to fall into formulaic or stylized mannerisms.

I threw myself completely into the process of learning, trying to listen and act on his advice. I was making large paintings of the boiler-room in the huge, ancient basement of the school (a few of these are posted in the archive section of my website) trying to study the light in dark spaces and make solid, monumental forms. I wanted to combine study with an expression; accuracy alone seemed boring. However, painting realistically from life was sometimes a hard sell in a school where most were painting in a neo-expressionist or abstract manner. Hiding out in the basement for a couple of years seemed to give me the freedom to paint the way I wanted and keep me away from many distractions. I remember once I became friendly with an attractive painting student who I wanted to impress and invited her to come down into the basement to see this huge painting I was making of the boiler room. After looking at the painting for about 10 seconds she shook her head saying you can’t paint like this, you can’t be serious – this is regressive, academic 19^th century painting. I was speechless and crushed that my plans to ask her out fizzled so miserably. Over time I developed an attitude you might call ‘realist victimhood’ and feeling oppressed by what I felt was the ‘New Post-Modern Academy’. However, this ultimately worked to my disadvantage, blinding me to many new pictorial possibilities that went beyond just learning the specifics of how to better draw and paint in a traditional realist manner and many good conversations went past me as I didn’t see the relevance to my work.

Looking Beyond This Field, 11 x 14 inches, oil on linen 2013

Three Tanks, 20 x 24, oil on linen 2013

In my late thirties, I went to graduate school at Boston University (’93) where I studied with John Moore. The feedback and encouragement from John Moore and getting to listen to so many fantastic visiting artists such as Graham Nickson and John Walker was invaluable. However, the widely divergent views of so many different personalities that came through giving critiques, many times giving the exact opposite advice of a previous critique, could be maddening. If anything, for me, graduate school was sometimes more about learning how to politely listen and then promptly go back to doing whatever you were going to do anyway.

During graduate school I supported myself by working full-time as a nurse at a residential program for 36 formerly homeless mentally ill residents. This home became like a second family for me and a rather bizarre counterpart to my life in school. In addition to my many nurse responsibilities, I also ran an art group where I tried to get the residents drawing with oil crayons. Eventually the group got shut down after our artwork display of Max Beckmann-like nudes in provocative poses was a bit more than the flowers and vases the staff had been expecting to see.

Through my contacts with the Dept of Mental Health, I got permission to paint in an abandoned building at Boston State Hospital. (Boston State Hospital was a large mental hospital largely shut down and abandoned in the 70′s) The security guard would unlock the door in the morning and then let me out again at the end of the day. These paintings were somewhat a continuation of my basement interiors but also sparked exploration of my own family history. At 15, my mother was committed to a mental institution for ten months after a suicide attempt. I tried to see if I might make some narrative painting involving the highly personal, and emotionally charged subject matter. I started making large figurative works—using Max Beckmann, Stanley Spencer, Paula Rego, and some early renaissance painting as inspiration. Around the same time I was also making large, dark interiors as well as a 19 foot, 6 panel painting from out the window of a view of the Citgo sign, the Mass Pike and Fenway park—using binoculars and each panel represented a different time of day from morning until dusk. This allowed me to paint all day long. (these are available for viewing on my website)

After the frenetic pace of graduate school was behind me I started to obsess if I was really cut out to be a painter.  I was depressed about my work and the possibilities of ever getting anywhere in an art world that seemed unreceptive to the kinds of painting that interested me most.

Laughing at a Cenotaph, 8 x 11 inches oil on paper mounted on board, 2013

At 40 years old, it hit me that in order to move forward I needed to put my energies into figuring out who I was as a person first. I decided to put painting on hold. The most important lesson back then was how to live without alcohol. I had been a somewhat happy but introverted type of drinker who worked very hard all day and then hammered myself to oblivion, pretty much every night. Unknown to me at the time, alcohol abuse played a significant role in how I viewed myself  as well as my paintings, however in ways too involved to explain here.  I am extremely fortunate that I’ve been sober over 20 years and that I was able to confront this issue before it took a more serious toil. Also around this time, in the late 90’s, I decided I could no longer work as a nurse and I started looking for a new career. 3D computer animation captured my interest. I taught myself how to use a program called Maya, as well as a number of other programs. I also taught myself html and got temp jobs making websites. I eventually got a full-time gig making medical training and product marketing 3d animations and other CGI for a video production outfit. I enjoyed this work a great deal, and still do this part-time, but of course this wasn’t creatively and intellectually sustainable for me and I needed to find a way back to painting.

I started painting small still lifes—concentrating on naturalist light and color— getting the observed color to feel exactly right. I didn’t want to start with anything too complicated so that I could more easily fit it into my full-time work schedule. Procrastination and doubts quickly are pushed aside when the painting gets going—the process becomes addictive and lures you right back in, almost as if you never left.

I got married around this time and without the support and encouragement of my wife, Liz, I would be telling a very different story, among other reasons, she gave me the idea of starting this blog. In 2007 we moved from Jamaica Plain (Boston) to San Diego to take care of my aging father during his last several months, to take over for my brother who was deployed to Afghanistan as a physician for the Navy. I eventually got to a place where I was able to paint full-time.

Southern California’s sunny and dry Mediterranean climate and extremely varied and awe-inspiring scenery is paradise for an outdoor painter however I found the artistic climate here to be markedly different than the East Coast and I felt isolated at first and started the blog Painting Perceptions as a means to reach out to other painters.

Birchcreek 10 x 20 inches, oil on linen, 2014

Cloud Hewn, 18 x 28 inches, oil on linen 2014

Gulfcrest, 11 x 14 inches oil on panel 2014

I wanted to see what leading observational, modernistic as well as traditional, painters were were doing and thinking, to try to establish more connections between those who are lucky to be surrounded by great schools, museums and galleries and those of us who live in areas where that isn’t the case. The art world seems far less NYC-centric than before but living off the art-grid makes you seek communication with kindred spirits. Facebook and the many painter blogs has helped to bring this about and I am proud of whatever help Painting Perceptions has brought to the table.

View at Castel Sant’elia 18 x 13 inches, oil on paper mounted on panel, 2014

Falisci Ruins at Civita, 14 x 21 inches, oil on paper mounted on board, 2014

Cliffs at Civita Castellana, 14 x 20 inches, oil on paper mounted on panel, 2014

Piazza Matteotti 36 x 28 inches, oil on linen mounted on board, 2014

I have been incredibly fortunate to go to Italy during the past three summers. I attended Israel Hershberg’s JSS summer school in Sienna and Civita. My studies with Hershberg’s Master Class and with Stuart Shils, Ken Kewley, Yael Scalia and getting to meet and listen to Lennart Anderson as well as the input from the many other terrific artists there was pivotal for me in getting new insights into my work and directions for moving forward. It was a jump start for my mind’s ability to look at my work with fresh eyes, to better structure and simplify, to look at color in new ways and to add some new voices in my head’s ongoing chatter while painting.

Having the time out from the responsibilities of regular life, completely focusing on my work, and being surrounded by such magnificent surroundings of landscape, art and culture brought my work more quickly to a higher level. Many of the works made in Italy are in this show, a few I reworked in the studio to the point that they are entirely new works based on the memory of my experience. Being in the heart of where Corot had painted many of his greatest outdoor Italian paintings in Civita Castellana—made a profound effect on me. Israel’s knowledge and enthusiasm for Corot made the experience all the more meaningful. My involvement with Stuart Shils helped me to shift my focus away from specifics of the observation, letting myself have a looser grip on the drawing so that I might better get at the bigger visual structure; to orchestrate instead of just recording inventory. My Italian experience is something I’m still digesting and I am looking forward to returning to be with my many new friends in Civita.

However much I’ve learned from my many great teachers, I always return to my contrarian roots. I don’t follow leaders but I clearly also have had trouble watching the parking meters – and have paid many fines for not minding my own business closely enough. I want to learn as much as possible about other people’s methods, rules and aesthetics but ultimately I need to make my own paintings, not someone else’s. Corot was reported to say something like  “do not imitate, do not follow others, if you do you will always be behind”

I’m not sure it’s possible or important to bring something completely new to painting anymore. Avant-Garde painting seems as shopworn as any other form of painting that still involves using paint to make visual images in some manner.  Of course, like many other neurotic painters, I go through many dark moments of wondering if I’m deluding myself to be a painter in this day and age. But most times I’m content to just add my name to the ridiculously  long list of painters trying to have a great life doing what they love. To celebrate my luck of still being on the planet,  painting what grabs me visually and have the process as much fun and engaging as possible. Having a great life, good friends and being able  to give something back is what makes it all worth it.

If anyone is in the New York area and can stop by the gallery for the opening or if you would like to meet me at the gallery while I’m in New York, I would be happy to set up a time. I can do this between Aug 1 – 12 while the gallery is open, just email me (larry@paintingperceptions.com)

Trains 4/14/14, oil on panel

Lois Dodd has been painting her everyday surroundings for sixty years. Her current exhibition, from February 26 through April 4, 2015 at the Alexandre Gallery in NYC shows twenty-four recent small-scaled paintings that depict familiar motifs such as gardens, houses, interiors and views from windows. Dodd, now eighty-seven, is an iconic figure of the early New York Tenth Street art scene, along with her contemporaries, such as Alex Katz and Philip Pearlstein. The Alexandre Gallery has the current exhibition online as well as many earlier works for view that you can view from this link.

The late painter Will Barnet talked about Lois Dodd in an interview with Barbara O’Brien. (From the Kemper Museum catalog, Lois Dodd Catching the Light)

…”What she has is something that belongs to the language of painting that actually only a very few artists really understand and know about. She has that feeling that the flatness of the canvas, and the verticality or the horizontality has to be met in a certain dynamic way. And she can arrange her forms so that the verticals become alive in relationship to the horizontal. So there is a certain wedding of the two. And so her work has a structure that you miss in most painters. In other words, you have a feeling of solidity and that the forms really belong to each other, where they’re in the distance or in the front. They combine in such a way that they come together and form a whole picture, and that’s what is exciting about—one of the exciting things—Lois.” –Will Barnet

With a career that spans six decades, Dodd is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Academy of Design, and a past member of the board of governors for the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Among many honors, she recently was awarded the Benjamin West Clinedinist Memorial Medal in 2007 from the Artists’ Fellowship, Inc. and Cooper Union’s Augustus Saint-Gaudens Award for professional achievement in art in 2005. Her works can be found in museums, including the Portland Museum of Art, Maine and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri, among others.

The excellent catalog, Lois Dodd Catching the Light can be purchased from the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art from this link. This catalog is from her Kemper Museum retrospective where more than fifty paintings were shown from 1955 to 2010.

I wish to thank both Lois Dodd for agreeing to the phone conversation and for her time and thoughtfulness with answering my questions and to share her experience and ideas with our readers.
I would also like to thank Elizabeth O’Reilly for the many ways she helped make this possible.

Larry Groff:  Do you spend a lot of time looking and thinking about the subject before you start to paint?

Lois Dodd:  It’s more about what I see when I’m walking around looking for something. Then after that it a matter of what size I want to work with and the proportion it will fit into. Then I try to isolate something that would make a good painting, a good subject. I look through my pile of gessoed panels that are different sizes and different proportions. They are all rectangles or squares and I always take a few of those when I go out so I have a variety of panels to choose from because that is the first decision. If you’re looking at something you want to paint and it looks exciting, the lighting is good and then you have to decide what size what shape of a panel will it fit onto; you ask yourself, is it a horizontal thing or vertical or square. Those are the first choices.

LG:  How do you start a painting? Do you make studies or thumbnails first? Do you use a viewfinder of some sort?

LOIS DODD: I don’t really use a viewfinder but I can put my hands up to frame the view or something like that. I don’t make thumbnail sketches, I’m more interested in starting right on the panel. I start with thinned out yellow paint and draw with the brush. So it’s pretty minimal, general and not tight. You asked me if I scrape off, I don’t use a scraper but I don’t use heavy paint either I really paint rather thinly so we never get to the point where I can scrape. But if I don’t like what I’ve done I can rub it off with a rag with turpentine and rub it all around and then I have a nice colored ground to work into that I can use.

LG: When you find the motif that interests you; do you form the composition in your mind before you start? Or is it something that evolves from your prolonged looking at the thing?

LOIS DODD: I do see a geometric breakdown of space of the rectangle so it has an underlying geometric structure so that is pretty basic to what I’m looking at.

LG:  but the rest of it: the color scheme, the mood, the positions of things; they sort of evolve?

LOIS DODD: No, the position of things, that configuration, is what attracts me and what I find exciting to begin with, so I don’t move things around. They’re either already where I want them or I might get up and move my chair and easel, it might be a little better a couple feet this way or that way. What I’m looking at more or less dictates the composition. I don’t really take any liberties with the subject, if it’s no good to begin with, that’s it.

LG: Do you measure things to get everything right in terms of the relationships between things?

LOIS DODD: No, Did you see that film about that painter in Madrid, Antonio Lopez Garcia? Speaking of measuring?

LG: Victor Erice’s Dream of Light http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dream_of_Light

LOIS DODD: Yes, do you remember where he’s standing in front of the tree and marking where his feet are going to be and where the leaves are and all of that? I’m certainly not doing that but I’ll move few inches this way or that before I start if I don’t like what I’m getting at.  Standing or sitting down makes a big difference too.  Once my position is set it’s usually fine.

LG:  So it isn’t as important for you to pursue getting the underlying grid of horizontal and vertical geometric relationships? Is it more that you want to get the overall feeling or pictorial expression of the thing you first saw, your first impression of why you were attracted to the motif?

LOIS DODD: Yes. It’s the way the light is hitting the subject and is creating the composition. The big thing is my paintings are done in one sitting; partly because of the light and partly because of the weather. I can only be there a couple of hours because after that the light changes the whole composition. The sun will have moved and everything is different in two or three hours so my paintings needs to be done in that time.

LG: Do you use larger brushes and smooth surfaces so you can work quickly and broadly?

LOIS DODD: My panels are up to 15 by 20 inches or smaller panels that are 12 by 18 or 12 by 12. I have a whole pile of gessoed panels, they’re not huge, 20 inches is largest I would go, as larger Masonite panels tend to warp or be weird. They aren’t reliable when they get too big. Once the painting is bigger I paint on linen.

LG: You also work on aluminum panels?

LOIS DODD: The little tiny ones are aluminum step flashing that you can get in the hardware store.

LG: Step flashing? I’m not familiar with that.

LOIS DODD: Step flashing is for putting flashing down the bottom of a chimney where it goes under the roofing material to keep water out. That’s what they’re made for and they come in these really small sizes. You can buy big bundles of the stuff for very little money.

LG:  What a great idea! Do you gesso these?

LOIS DODD: It’s a very good idea. I sand them like mad because I think they’re too smooth and then I gesso them.

LG: What kind of gesso do you use?

LOIS DODD: I use Liquitex usually. Step Flashings are very convenient when you see something and you’ve got 20 minutes. I do a lot of them at night when the moon is full.

LG: You must simplify things a great deal to get everything in one sitting.

LOIS DODD: Of course, I’m not looking for details or surface description that’s for sure. But I am looking for the light, how it hits volumes. I am looking for the light and the color.

LG: Is what you’re looking at the main concern or do you also think about how other art might relate to your scene? For instance, if you were painting a scene and thought ‘this reminds me of an Arthur Dove painting’ or someone like that would you ever push it in that direction a little? Or does all that great art history in your head come through more intuitively?

LOIS DODD: I think so, sometimes you see things that are like somebody else’s painting so you stay away from it. Have you ever had that experience where you think, ‘oh my god this looks like something so-and-so would paint’? So I’m not painting it. It’s somebody else’s subject matter.

LG: Interesting. So you wouldn’t want to do your take on that subject?

LOIS DODD: Well, if you don’t notice that it’s someone else’s subject, definitely, you’re always doing your own take. Sometimes I see things that looks like other people’s paintings but that’s not interesting to me to begin with. It’s not for me.
INTERVIEW CONTINUES

LG: What tends to grab you most as worthy subject for a painting? For instance you’ve painted windows for a long time.

LOIS DODD: That’s true; I’m still painting windows. This winter I’ve been doing a lot of painting out the window because of the weather and the window structure is so nice, you’ve got this perfect Mondrian construction there in front of you. Windows are a great device and are endlessly fascinating. I do go back to them from time to time.

LG: When you’re working on a painting is there a point that you arrive when you know this is exactly what you want and the painting is done or is it more like the time is up and this is what I’ve accomplished. Do you adjust it once back in your studio or do you not touch it? How do you determine when the painting is finished?

LOIS DODD: Usually when I put the last stroke down it’s done. There is nothing more to say; there is nothing more to put down. It’s pretty clear. It’s not a problem of when to stop; if I start dickering around with details I know that ok “you’ve gone over the top, now you got to stop”.

I was doing portraits for a couple of years of friends, they weren’t really portraits, I thought of them as heads. I wouldn’t want to promise anybody I could paint his or her portrait. In the process of doing that, I would work for a couple of hours and I would have my painting and I would think I could really perfect this now if I worked on it longer. But if I did that it would no longer be my painting, it would be fixing my painting. It would be repairing, trying to improve and that doesn’t really work. The minute I start doing that it starts taking apart or destroying what I already had to say. So it doesn’t work, for me. The work ethic is not a good ethic is what I’m trying to say.

LG: You qualify that by saying “for me”, another painter who might obsessively revise and repaint you might not have a problem with? You might still like their work?

LOIS DODD: Oh yes. Sure. I think it’s a mystery. Every artist works so differently out of something so different. It’s very hard to understand what even your best friends, what they’re doing and how they got their palette, and how they selected the color. The whole thing is always a big mystery. But you can certainly enjoy and appreciate what other people do. What I envy are people that ladle the paint on thickly and juicily. I see that and think that’s so gorgeous, just look at the paint quality. But here I am with my thin paint and the idea of putting on a second coat on my painting would ruin it. It would shut out the light. I get a certain amount of light that is coming back from the white gesso panel , it comes through the painting. If I go back and put more than one coat then you’re suddenly in the position of having to paint light into surfaces. It is a completely different process and that just doesn’t work for me.

LG: I’ve read you don’t like setting up still lifes and prefer to find things as they naturally occur. With this in mind I’m curious about your thoughts on Morandi. His carefully arranged still lifes have a pictorial genius that would seem to have many affinities with your work especially with regards to intimacy, simplicity and directness of organization. His landscapes could almost be considered found still lifes from nature.

Has his paintings ever been influential to you? What can you say about his work?

LOIS DODD: Morandi hasn’t been an influence on me but I love his painting; they’re wonderful, so amazing, they are surprises every time. I’ve looked at his landscapes and I think their influence is in keeping it flat, keeping it simple. That seems to be the message in his landscapes. All of his paintings are wonderful but he’s probably not the person who has been that influential to me.

LG: Who would be influential?

LOIS DODD: That’s a good question. I look at all the American landscape painters but I probably look even more at the abstract landscape people. Like Arthur Dove and John Marin. I look at a lot of stuff. I don’t feel like I’m besotted with anybody that I would try to imitate what they do. I don’t think that is a good idea to be totally in love with so-and-so’s painting. No matter what you do, you have to make your own stuff. Influences are great but they’re not too useful really.

LG: But perhaps you would be influenced by the issues other painters were exploring? For instance, Cezanne, you might not be interested in painting like him but you might be interested in what he was thinking about?

LOIS DODD: I don’t know what he was thinking about. I have no idea what he was thinking about! (laughs) He definitely was an influence, especially when I was first out of art school. I think we all looked at Cezanne, he was perhaps the biggest influence for landscape. Between him and Picasso. When I graduated from art school Picasso was the big person who influenced everything that was going on. Back then there was Cezanne and Matisse. There are so many good painters. It was French painting that people looked at most. I remember the galleries uptown when I was in art school; the few galleries there were basically showing French impressionist paintings. The big move to open galleries came sometime in the fifties.

LG:    You were one of the founders of the influential Tanager Gallery, one of the first artist coop galleries around Tenth St. Alex Katz, Philip Pearlstein, Fred Mitchell, Lester Johnson were among the many artists who showed there. These galleries were influential as they gave opportunities for a wider variety of art to be seen than just what was seen in the more conservative 57^th street area galleries.

It must have been exciting with Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline and Milton Resnick having studios nearby and where many younger artists sought them out at the nearby Cedar Tavern. Alice Neel, Paul Georges, Lester Johnson, Al Held and many others were showing in the various other coop galleries that started there soon after yours. The art critic Harold Rosenberg, wrote in 1959, said that the purpose of the “the art colony on Tenth Street’ was to “transmute the ranks established by social class into a hierarchy based on talent or daring.”

I’m curious to hear what that time was like for you. Can you share a memory of one of your more influential meetings or events with some of the luminaries of that era?

LOIS DODD: As you say it was a very exciting time, we were running our own show, so to speak and made a gallery out of it. We first started on Fourth Street and were there about a year. It was a tiny place. Then a friend told us about a space on Tenth St that was bigger so we moved. Around the same time other galleries began opening. The Hansa Gallery opened and gradually the block filled up with galleries, even around the corner. There was a lot of going back and forth to the galleries and the activity of people going in and out and talking about the art. It was a very social scene for about ten years there, from 1952 to 62.

The Tanager was there from ’52 to ’62, other galleries came a little later and lasted longer. There is nothing there now; it is very close to where I live so I walk through that block every so often. It’s unbelievable how it has completely become another place.

LG: How would you compare the co-op galleries that exist today in Chelsea with the original co-ops from back then?

LOIS DODD: We closed up after ten years because it looked like the galleries uptown were beginning to look at our generation of people. A number of the people that were a part of our group got themselves uptown galleries. We started asking why are we doing all this work, painting the floor, painting the walls, keeping the door open and tending to this place when it looked like the world was opening up and we could all get galleries for ourselves and not have to do all this work. So we closed up. But actually, newer co-ops opened within seven or eight years. I think the uptown gallery scene wasn’t all that great as it turned out and people did the co op galleries all over again.

The thing is there are never enough galleries and if you want to have a show and you know other people in the same situation you can try to do it yourself. That was an exciting time. People came there and talked about stuff. The artist’s club was nearby. We used to have openings on Friday nights and then people would tend to go to the club and hear the panels. So the whole thing was a real community effort.

The art world was smaller back then. In the end you knew every artist in New York City except maybe for the uptown-type people. That was a different world.

LG: The Cedar Tavern was nearby I’ve read, did you meet a lot of the personalities that went there, like de Kooning?

LOIS DODD: They had studios in the same block we had the gallery in. I never went to the Cedar Street Bar myself but we saw them in the galleries. All those people would visit.

LG: Were they open to talking to young painters?

LOIS DODD: Oh sure. Sure. Guston was around before he moved upstate. Franz Kline was there some. de Kooning moved out to the country at a certain point. At least before they became really famous. I think the trouble started when their paintings became worth real money and had uptown galleries and then the evils of jealousy and backbiting entered the picture. And you would see some people not being very happy about other people’s success and the like. But up to a point it was great.

It was always interesting but by ’62 we felt like we’ve done this long enough and we don’t need it anymore so we stopped then. But the next generation had the same problem, they again started a number of co-ops and their co-ops, interestingly enough, are still in existence over in Chelsea. The ones in Chelsea now started up probably in SoHo, The First Street Gallery was originally down at First Street on the Bowery. The Bowery gallery likewise, they were both down near Houston Street on the Bowery. They’ve been in existence a very long time. They started when the members were just out of art school and set up these places. Of course it’s been so long there are other people who are in these galleries now. There is still a real need for co-op galleries.

LG: I was recently in Chelsea and saw many of the galleries. I came away thinking that a large percentage of the work I saw then seemed to have a commercial appeal, seemingly chosen for its marketability or because of fashion. But the co-op galleries this seemed less so. Maybe the paintings there had a more uneven quality but it didn’t have the same commercial appeal.

LOIS DODD: Yes, you’re absolutely right.

LG: I’m curious if you might have anything to say about that? Seems to me that great painting comes more from a freedom to experiment and being about the art rather than just how well will it sell.

LOIS DODD: Many of the galleries in Chelsea are there to be a business. What sells is what they are going to show. That’s something else and has another motivation.

LG: It’s sad though because so many of these sellable paintings have a kind of slickness that is off-putting.

LOIS DODD: Probably a lot of students go to art school with the thought that they can make a living doing art and if they get into that, maybe they can make a living for awhile, but then the fashion in art can change and things aren’t so certain. If you’re in it for the long haul, and get something out of it for yourself. Which is why we do it, then you’ll keep doing it. There are all kinds of art in this world. There is art and then there is painting. I sometimes think it’s split now. There is the “Artworld” that has all this really hot stuff and it isn’t all painting, in fact most of it isn’t painting. There is a lot of other kinds of stuff now. Then there is the world of painters who as always are a kind of medieval group doing their medieval thing and getting something out of it.

LG: I’ve often thought it would be a good idea to start a secessionist movement for painters to get out of the artworld! But people tell me I’m crazy

LOIS DODD: (laughs) There is the art world and there’s painting world and it is two different worlds I agree with you. It’s totally another thing.

LG: Well, it’s what we have so I guess we have to work with it.

LOIS DODD: It’s what we have. Exactly.

LG: Many early Abstract Expressionists, such as de Kooning, Pollack, Kline and Rothko had strong traditional skills. How important is being able draw and paint representationally to the making of great art?

LOIS DODD: I don’t think it’s that important that you can draw and paint representationally to make great art. Think of all the great geometric art that exists in the world, the total abstract stuff that there is and it has nothing to do with representing the figure. I’m not so sure that that’s it. It still is a great thing to be studying. The fact of being able to do that is quite wonderful.

I think that sometimes people come out of art schools thinking that they are going to make a living maybe. Maybe that’s what the art schools are after now. They don’t even seem to teach the Bauhaus basic design stuff anymore. Which is what I was getting at Cooper Union when I attended there, they had a basic design course and it was based on the Bauhaus. You came out of school with a vocabulary about line, shape, form and color. All those thing have been separated out now so it is more difficult to study the vocabulary of art and put it together into a painting. The Bauhaus people invented this wonderfully useful thing to study, what, this visual vocabulary. Very good stuff, which I’m not sure is being taught as much anymore.

LG: From what I understand the emphasis is more on art theory.

LOIS DODD: Oh, we’re going to talk art now. Not do it, just talk about it. I’ve always wondered about that. I’m too much of a cave-woman type person to go for that. If you’re working with your hands, we’re hand-workers and you use your head too, of course, but you can’t just use your head; where’s the joy in that for a painter? I guess there is if you’re a theoretician and you’re going to write it down but then you’re a writer that’s not a painter. Maybe that’s an artist, maybe that’s what art is now, right? A discipline for theoreticians.

LG: Sometimes the explanatory text label is more important than the work itself.

LOIS DODD: Remember that period awhile ago, a short movement, where that kind of art was popular, what was that called? Where you just read the art that was on the wall.

LG: With like Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger and all those people?

LOIS DODD: Right.

LG: I forget what it was called. I was never very interested in that. One thing you said a minute ago that caught my attention was the word joy.

LOIS DODD: I said that?

LG: (laughs) You said it the context of saying what is the joy in that… I think that is an important thing, there doesn’t seem to be as much interest in joy so much. Or beauty. It’s more about irony or heavy, grim, psycho-sexual, socio-political kinds of issues and there isn’t much room for beauty and joy. I suppose that would be consider passé or sentimental. The whole visual joy one gets from looking at good painting is lost. Is there any fix to that?

LOIS DODD: I don’t know either. Maybe it’s just how much of it you need as a person. Maybe it’s all very individual. Some people seem to get painting and some people don’t see it anyway, they could be surrounded by paintings and don’t really get it. Other people do. It’s an odd trait and it’s not universal. The trait of the visual thing of being able to relate the visual stuff in a way that seems to speak to you.

LG: Do you think that people get it naturally or do they have to study it first?

LOIS DODD: I think it is a natural thing, I remember once I had a painting and a woman who was passing by and saw the painting and really seemed to get it, a sudden reaction. Other people wouldn’t react at all. I think it’s almost physical.

LG: Sometimes I think people just don’t get enough exposure to learning about art in schools anymore, less exposure to art history in a meaningful way.

LOIS DODD: That’s probably true.

LG: But on the other hand people do naturally respond to great things. They see a great painting, like one of your paintings next to something like text art or video and it’s a totally different feeling. It might be intellectually engaging but it doesn’t give you that astonishment, that visual joy or magic.

Do you feel optimistic about painting? 

LOIS DODD: Yes, I do. Look at cave art. Human beings can’t stop doing it. There is always somebody making something. It could go through a low period maybe. No, I don’t think it dies. I don’t think it can. There are always a certain number of people who are just going to have to paint. They have to. I don’t see how it could die.

It’s funny, one time I was over at the Studio School and ran into a woman in the hallway who had just enrolled there and she said that she already had a degree but whatever school she went to they were up to the minute and it was all computers and she hadn’t had a chance to paint and she was dying to try to paint. So she came to the New York Studio School. There are people who just have to try it, have to get into it. I think it must be pretty basic stuff.

LG: It’s a good remedy for many of the world’s ills. It gives you a reason to live.

LOIS DODD: That’s true!

LG: Everything else takes on a secondary importance if you have a great painting you’re working on. Who cares if you have or don’t have all this stuff if you have a good painting?

LOIS DODD: It puts it all in proportion doesn’t it? It makes you able to face whatever it is better after you’ve had a painting session.

LG: Right! Absolutely. You can get all bent out of shape over the headlines in the newspaper but then think “there isn’t much I can do about that” but I do have my painting, I can do something about that. That makes for a great quality of life that can maybe make up for the fact nobody buys your paintings and you live like a homeless person…

LOIS DODD: Yes! Oh god… (laughs) hold on to that thought.

LG: You taught painting at Brooklyn College from 1971 to 1992. How much has what you taught to students affected your own painting and conversely to what extent do you try to teach your own approach to painting to the students?

LOIS DODD: I taught at Brooklyn College for 25 years. I didn’t try to teach my own approach to painting. It wasn’t convenient when your teaching in a college, for the most part we were in a room and I paint outside. There weren’t many opportunities to ask the students to go and buy setups like folding French easels and take them outside. I didn’t do that so it was a completely different experience in the classroom. However it was good, I enjoyed teaching. It was more to try and figure out what they needed not that they should learn to paint like me, which they weren’t going to anyway. They all had their own selves to work on. I wasn’t trying to push my approach. A few people really wanted to do that, a couple of the graduate students that are friends, who I paint with now.

LG: Like Elizabeth O’Reilly?

LOIS DODD: Yes, like Elizabeth. That’s where I met Elizabeth in the MFA program. There are people like that, who keeps in touch. But otherwise I didn’t want them all to be painting like me, that doesn’t seem like a good plan at all. In a way maybe you have more to teach when you teach somebody to paint exactly what you’re doing. Then they can reject it. I don’t know, it’s always been a question in my mind but it’s not my inclination to do that.

LG: What advice would you give a younger painter today?

LOIS DODD: Today there are artists and there are painters. They are two different things and you ought to understand that before you get into it. Artists are not limited to paint, the way painters are. They can do anything they want just about and call it art. It’s a big wide field. But painters are involved in this ancient craft that keeps going on. But I don’t know what advice I’d give anybody. It’s a hard thing to do. If you have to do it, you have to do it. That’s your problem you know? If you have to be a painter you’re going to get the satisfaction out of it that we all get out of it. And you’re going to get the frustration that we all get. And you’re going to have to figure out some other way to make a living. I guess my advice is to figure out some way to make a living.

LG: There are so many people who assume they’ll get a job teaching or something but it’s hard to do

LOIS DODD: There aren’t that many jobs. That’s hard to find.

LG:  They don’t always want to hire painters in the art programs either; they often prefer to hire ‘artists’.

LOIS DODD: Yes, Nowadays that is true. Right.

LG: I understand that for many schools the Studio time the students get is much less. They want to have more lectures and fit in more with the academic environment.

LOIS DODD: Right, they want to build up their brains.

LG: I imagine it’s more expensive, it’s likely cheaper to have an adjunct teacher lecturing than it is to fund a whole studio. I don’t know but what that’s going to mean. Before it was almost mandatory you had to go to art school on some level but now it seems such a dicey proposition to shell out 80 or 100 grand for art school and when you come out with such debt, and perhaps not even learning how to really paint on top of that!

LOIS DODD: I don’t know, it really is a strange time.

LG: Have you given workshops?

LOIS DODD: I was doing some up in Maine at Rock Garden Inns. There were people that would come there that wanted to paint outside. So I got invited. Every week they would have another artist come and paint with the people there. So I was doing that for a week in September. That was very enjoyable.

LG: Do you think people can really learn painting through that?

LOIS DODD: Usually they are older ladies who are doing it on their vacation or whatever. They are serious but they also have another life. They can’t dump that life to become a painter. There is no way for the people to give it all up to become painters. It’s a good question but I don’t know what’s going to happen. Whether people will just go study with other painters or maybe the schools will turn around and start going back.

People are still painting at places like the Studio School that is full of painters and drawers. Painting and Drawing that’s basically what they do. And there are some good ones there too. There are a few places but you’d have to know where they are and find yourself getting there.

Lois Dodd talking about her paintings in a 2007 video by Bill Maynes

courtesy Alexandre Gallery, New York

courtesy Alexandre Gallery, New York

I was fortunate to become good friends with Christopher Chippendale while we studied with George Nick during our undergraduate years at Mass Art back in the mid-80’s. Christopher and I also both went through the same graduate degree program at Boston University, however not at the same time. We continue to keep in touch and it has been a great pleasure to compare notes and observe the paths both our works have taken over the years.

Christopher Chippendale is represented by Soprafina Gallery, Boston and has been a member of the Painting faculty at Mass Art for twenty-two years. In addition to his work as an artist, Chippendale has been the recipient of numerous grants and awards, published critical essays on art, curated and juried many exhibitions.

The Soprafina gallery will have a solo exhibition of Christopher’s new work in November of this year and he will teach a summer landscape painting workshop this July at the ART New England summer program.

I am grateful to Christopher for putting the considerable time and effort into such thoughtful and articulate writings in response to my questions.

Larry Groff: What led you to decide to become a painter?

Christopher Chippendale: In the summer of ‘74, my brother, who had himself studied painting before becoming a photographer, wanted to stage and then photograph a tableau vivant based on Manet’s Le dejeuner sur l’herbe. At the time, we were living at a place called Wood’s Ranch—a sprawling, ranch-style rambler on an old estate, surrounded by magnolias and lemon groves at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains in southern California. For the tableau, it was decided that I would take the part of the young gallant who, in Manet’s painting, reclines on one arm while gesturing casually with the other. My brother took the role of the second dandy, seated in the “picnic” center, whilst my then girlfriend sat for the female nude to the left, looking out at the viewer. Atop her discarded habillements, we arranged the same objects as seen in the foreground left of Manet’s Le dejeuner: a picnic basket, some fruit (they appear to be lemons), a hat (we apparently had no bonnet). An over-grown thicket of scrub and lemon trees served as our Bois de Boulogne. My brother set the camera on delayed timer, jumped into his pose and, with the click of the shutter, our playful re-enactment of Manet’s once-scandalous painting joined us to it—in California fashion—forever.

In the following months, a couple dozen prints of our mise-en-scene were produced in the darkroom and, that December, reflecting the wittiness of my brother’s conceit, we sent these out to friends as our Christmas greetings. Ten years later, when I enrolled in art school in Massachusetts to study painting, I came finally to realize the vocation that had been eluding me. Becoming a painter was the first vocational decision I had made in my life with absolute certainty and resolve. Like any momentous decision, it reframed the significance of events that preceded it, making them clearer and necessary, in this case fitting them into the larger narrative of my becoming a painter. Even minor events like our staging of Manet’s painting—which now took on an affectionately prophetic significance—looked fateful in light of my painting decision.

A few years earlier, when I was seventeen, I set out hitchhiking from my home town in California with a vague notion that I was “going abroad.” Nine months later I was in Afghanistan. I had wandered, alone and without an itinerary, through much of Europe, into Turkey and across the Black Sea to Iran, to Herat and as far east as Kabul. I have always been a wanderer, much more drawn to voyaging than to destinations. The openness of setting out with only marginally described objectives engages me still, as a painter, and it informs my work. I do not know the destinations of my paintings. I seek my subjects in the work itself. Like Cezanne, I seek in painting (“Je cherche en peignant”).

I returned to California from Europe and Central Asia and lived for five years in a remote cabin, high in a mountain canyon in the Angeles National Forest. This was my return to, and embrace of, the idea of living a “natural life.” It was also a retreat from the world such as I’d experienced it during my travels abroad, and a place for me to reflect upon them. I read literature and philosophy, wrote poetry, took long hikes, played music, drew and painted, swam daily in the stream outside my cabin door, communed with friends, and worked building trails and fighting fires for the National Forest Service. During one interlude from this period of my life I posed, with my brother and girlfriend, for the aforementioned Le dejeuner.

Looked at in one way, this was a paradisiacal episode of my life. I came eventually to see in it, however, an untenable future. I realized that I needed to be in the world, which I knew little about. I had grown less ambivalent about the value of a formal education, and was drawn to the history I had experienced in my travels, and in the literature and philosophy I read. I decided to move across the country to New England to go to college.

College was in many ways an extension in formal terms of what I had begun on my own already. I majored in French and French literature, writing my thesis on the idea of consciousness in Proust. As part of my program, I went to study in Paris. There, I took a cheap garret room in a five-story walk-up in the 6^th arrondissement, and enrolled in French language classes. My interests, however, were in the life and culture around me. I would often cut classes and, as if this prefigured what lay in my future, spend my days wandering around the city, drawing and going to museums. In my daydreams I imagined myself returning to Paris to study painting at the Ecole des Beaux Arts.

Some weeks before my scheduled return to the U.S., I ran out of money. With no prospects of formal employment, I spent my last twenty-five francs on a book of early English ballads transcribed for alto recorder, and I descended into the metro. I busked there, two hours each day, for pocket money and to pay my hotel bill, changing venues daily to avoid harassment from the local gendarmes. To hold up my sheet music while I played, I used a collapsible stand which I fabricated, ironically enough, from the legs of a broken French easel I had found on the street one night.

You ask what led me to decide to become a painter. I think I was always predisposed to become a painter, but it took some important side-roads and divagations along the way for me to discover the rightness of that decision.

Larry Groff:      You studied with George Nick, who has been a leading figure and advocate of painting from observation. What can you remember about his teaching that has been most influential for you?

Christopher Chippendale:   On a practical level, Nick instilled in me the core conceptual and foundational tools that would continue to serve as a cornerstone of my painting to the present day. On a personal level, his way of thinking about painting helped orient me to a more outwardly focused, concrete way of looking at and being in the world. His was an existential influence and, therefore, for me, an influence of the most crucial kind—one that began with, and was ever refocusing my wandering attention to, the facts of the observable world directly in front of me.

Nick urged me to adopt a clear, that is to say, presuppositionless view of whatever I painted. I was not to presuppose anything in addition to what was actually given. Emphasis in his studio was upon immediate perception, upon what was there, before us, and upon seeing it as such, without past and without future. Nick wanted his students to make an effort, in a deliberate way, to cancel or put aside the normal habits and assumptions with which they approached the world in their everyday understanding. Our charge was to take visual sensations simply as they presented themselves, and only within the limits in which they did so.

To accomplish this required, besides an undistracted Zen-like focus upon the immediate world before us, an examination of the processes by which we, as individual painters, saw the world and transcribed it. Our outwardly focused concentration upon the given had also an inward, requisite component—call it self-examination—through which we should aim to discover how our conceptions of things colored, like tinted glasses, what we saw within the motif. Thought itself, in other words, had the power to transform the visible. One of my duties as an observational painter, I learned, was to understand the manner and mechanisms by which my own individual conceptions of things, whatever their origins, acted upon and informed my perceptions. As Nick’s own teacher, Edwin Dickinson, put in a phrase reflecting the richness of his own circumspection: “The seen distortion is what a thought did to the sight.”

Nick guided us like a courtroom lawyer to question the veracity of what we saw, as evidenced on our canvases, and to question how our conceptions of things distorted how we saw them. Observational painting, I learned, was geared towards something much more essential and original than representing the motif. In my best work I didn’t presume to know what the motif was. Painting, as Nick taught it, was oriented away from the known world, towards the phenomenal one, away from our conceptions of things and towards things themselves. Painting did not serve a mediating role—it served an investigative one. Its function was not to express the predetermined, but to determine, in fact, what was, and to express that directly in ways that only painting could, and as accurately as possible.

Nick’s approach to observational painting reflected a defining 20^th century philosophy, existential in nature, and committed to the truth of the unmediated. “Not ideas about the thing but the thing itself,” as Wallace Stevens put it, in a late, great poem of his by that title. It was a philosophy with which I resonated. I found in painting, moreover, a means to express it. I found there a palpability, a physical process that clarified for me a need to locate and express my experience of the world in concrete terms, which is to say, in things themselves.

Observational painting, I learned, was not a mimetic art form. We were not in the business of copying or duplicating what was before us, but of transposing it through paint, and through the forms we each adopted as individual painters. Our goal was not to match or try to outdo what nature did best, but to interpret it through metaphors that were “parallel” and in every way “true” to the facts we perceived, except in being literal about them. Ideas of “truth” in observational painting were, accordingly, not limited to ideas of “likeness” or verisimilitude. One could be absolutely true to the richness of one’s perceptions without being literal about them, in the same way that poetry can bear witness with great precision to truths and realities that lie far outside of, and are in fact inexpressible within, the jurisdiction of the literal.

I found observational painting richly full of paradoxes and contradictions, often vexingly so. Nick taught me to think more with my brush. I learned from him that making was itself a form of expressed thought, and that solutions were to be found in painting itself. Standing before the easel, considering the variables that arose in my paintings with every passing moment, I learned that it was ultimately important to act—to paint—in clear material terms, and sooner rather than later. If recklessness was the consequence, and errors and mistakes the result, then these were simply the facts and uncertainties of painting. Risk, in Nick’s view, would forever trump cautiousness, and I inferred from his approach, which I came largely to adopt myself, that being overly guarded and calculating in painting was ultimately a dishonest act.

The existential overtones of this approach to painting were clear and compelling. Nick’s insistence on the need to paint in the face of paradox and ambiguity, moreover, underscored the importance he placed on intuition, and he suggested a place for us to apply it. He encouraged us to paint at the threshold of the unknown, where there were no ready answers. “Paint more like a Martian,” he might say when we were painting too literally, implying that painting beyond what we already knew, and forgetting any preconceived ideas we had regarding the motif before us, would push us to see and reconstruct the world around us in fresh and original ways.

To illustrate the kind of painting I am speaking of here, which Nick modeled in his own work and encouraged us to essay in ours, I can share with you an important exchange I had with him on the occasion of his forty-year retrospective at Mass Art in ‘93, four years after I had left his studio. I was standing alongside him in the gallery before a long and narrow painting of his called Muddy River, in which a heavy-handed build-up of light-valued pigment in the middle of the canvas served to represent a wind-blown highlight reflected on the River. Seen up close, from the position where Nick had painted it, that ungainly chunk of paint struck me as overly two-dimensional in its effect and weirdly out of place: it sat brazenly upon the canvas surface and did not conform at all to the three-dimensional plane of receding water upon which it so obtrusively lay. Yet, as one backed away about ten feet from the painting, that seemingly coarse application of pigment sat right down into the illusionistic, three-dimensional space of the river where it seamlessly took its place. So I asked him: “How did you know, when painting that passage, while standing, that is, directly before the canvas, that that crude chunk of paint when seen from ten feet would sit right down into the three-dimensional world you were also describing? Speaking quickly, as though he were still flush from the victory of having just painted it, Nick turned to me and said, in clear, declarative terms: “I willed it! You have to will these things!”

Flummoxed by his response, and embarrassed that I couldn’t grasp straight away the sense of what he had just told me, I said nothing, while my thoughts swirled. Was this some kind of Buddhist riddle? What did Nick mean, “I willed it”? What mysterious powers did he possess that, by simply wanting something badly enough, and forcing his will to achieve it, it came to pass? Surely this was no fantasy; the canvas before us did not lie. The passage in question was clear and marvelous. Its construction, as paint, was tangible. This might be an example of wish fulfillment, but it was the opposite of wishful thinking. How, then, did this notion of willpower fueled by artistic desire correspond to the notion of craft? How did one learn how to do such things?

In time, with more experience of my own as a painter, I came to appreciate the sense of Nick’s response to my question. I came to grasp the nature of his accomplishment, and to understand its relationship to craft. I came to see this particular passage in Muddy River, moreover, as an emblem of his painting philosophy, and a distillation of much of what I had learned from him. Nick’s philosophy of painting, and the source of his success in Muddy River, lay in a dynamic recipe of several components: hard work and the state of preparedness hard work engenders; an absolute commitment to the terms of the instant; a willing embrace of the adventure and risks of the unknown; and a concomitant reliance on intuition to guide critical action when painting outside the provinces of acquired knowledge.

In stressing the importance of hard work, Nick insisted on the discipline of finishing every painting one began, however bad, or good. He once told me I ought to be “chained” to my easel, after I had abandoned a painting that was causing me too much pain and difficulty, and had gone to him for counsel and sympathy. When it came to matters of importance in painting—like finishing a painting, like pushing harder than one could possibly imagine to find and give shape to one’s subject—Nick was single-minded, hard-nosed, and a realist. He knew full well the inherent resistance of oil paint, that vexing, “oleous paste in its sticky inconvenience,” as Lawrence Gowing called it.   He knew, also, the undercurrents of despair that accompany many artists’ realizations of the gap between their ambitions, on the one hand, and their actual achievements on their canvases, on the other. When, in no uncertain terms, he gave me to understand that the endeavor I had embarked upon as young painter would be unremittingly tough and full of setbacks, he was speaking from experience. He was also introducing me to the code and honor of being a painter.

Being a painter, he was saying, meant owning up to the privilege of contending with the struggles which shape and define one’s voice and one’s calling. Being a painter meant shouldering, proudly, and without expectation of outward recognition, an unconditional belief in the value of what one strives for in one’s work, and in the efforts needed to obtain it. Being a painter meant persevering in one’s darkest hours—the St. Crispin’s Eve many painters know—and believing, no matter how bad things look, that with faith in oneself, and with a new day approaching, one will find an answer. Such moral agency, as I found studying under Nick, had a profound impact upon me. It was one thing to study and learn the craft of painting in many of its objective manifestations. It was another to feel compelled by the greater purpose underlying it.

Like Cezanne, or FDR, Nick himself was a person of action, of doing, not of theories and speculation. He believed that finding one’s way to solutions and discoveries in painting was best facilitated through the only agency over which an artist has significant control: the production of a high volume of work. As his daughter, Katya—herself an artist and a keen and intimate witness to her father’s daily practice—once observed: “Creating a high volume of work…[was] for my father a moral obligation.” Of all the modern painters, I think, in this, Nick most resembled Cezanne. The image of his decades-long routine of setting out each day an hour before dawn in his oversized studio truck, so as to be on location and set up—his paint laid out, his brushes in hand—and poised to paint as the sun’s first rays broke upon his motif, mirrored Cezanne’s commitment and ultimate sacrifice.

Famously prodigious, Nick’s productivity in and for itself was not, of course, the goal or end-game of his practice. The goal of always producing was the state of readiness such practice produced. The goal was the greater potential for success that such conditioning made possible. Being prepared made more viable the chances of his succeeding when out on the frontiers of his own painting, where it mattered most, where there were no well-trodden roads, nor familiar stars to guide him. Nick painted for these moments. He trained for them, prepared for them and, when they arose, he was ready for them.

Through Nick I was thus exposed to a kind of painting that was geared to the uncharted, the unexplored. His was a kind of “frontier painting,” one which demanded of its practitioners a frontiersman-like preparedness and a come-what-may openness to whatever might lie ahead. I knew first-hand about improvisational modes of creating, about working extemporaneously with contingencies as they arose in real time. I had practiced and performed improvisationally for many years as a jazz string bassist. Nick’s approach mirrored for me also the openness of my setting out to travel years before without a set itinerary. It was an approach that did not prematurely foreclose upon the possibilities to be discovered by an overly determined agenda. It validated a way of thinking about painting where, as the Welsh novelist Gwyn Thomas put it: “The beauty is in the walking. We are betrayed by destinations.”

Nick did not teach painting as a performative art form in which something already known and mastered was simply repeated, however marvelous or accomplished such repetitions can sometimes be. Painting, as he taught it, was never about a particular “look” or brand or style. He taught painting as a performative art in that it was geared to the moment, to painting, literally, alla prima: at the first, at the beginning, before time. For me, Nick’s approach offered a compelling rebuttal to the notion that, as a human being, I wasn’t able to grasp my experience as it unfolded. In Nick I saw someone for whom action was more than a translation, a mere echo of the original. Even if one held to the absurdity of an instantaneous painting, Nick’s approach presented the possibility, at least, of narrowing the disconnect between language (whatever its form) and life. Such ideas would simmer and percolate and, years later, take on a critical role in my work as a painter.

The kind of time Nick painted in, and taught his students to pay attention to, was present time. One learned to respond to conditions before one, not as one would hope or wish or conceive of them to be, but, as immediate revelations. Even when I would sometimes return to a passage a fourth, a fifth time, in my efforts to get at something which eluded me, Nick urged me to approach that passage each time as at the beginning, as a vehicle for the exploration of the now. I learned that I wasn’t in front of my easel to “fix” things already made or given, but to discover them anew. In such a philosophy, each day is a new one. I wasn’t to be bothered or hampered by what went before. This was a progressive attitude, one which looked forward and was forward-looking. This was painting about the now, about one’s thoughts and feelings now, about the light in its particular aspect now, like his wind-blown highlight upon the Muddy River.

Painters paint as a condition of not knowing. This, at least, was one credo I took from Nick’s classes. I learned that I wasn’t in front of the easel to arrange or to construct meaning, but to discover it. Preempting craft (what I knew and could perform already) in the moment of a painting’s execution, was a requisite of painting in the moment, a requisite necessitated by the exigencies of the moment, when there simply wasn’t time to figure things out. When, however, having put out from safe harbor—from all that is known and familiar—and finding myself, as upon a wide open sea, “boldly launched upon the deep,” as the narrator in Moby Dick says of the Pequod, and “soon…lost in its unshored, harborless immensities,” I had better be ready. Nick, I would argue, in his best paintings—and as a condition of them—has thrived most on these moments of being “unshored” and “harborless,” and it is precisely at such moments that “willing,” funded by the preparedness, hard work and intuition underlying it, played its critical role.

In painting, as in all the arts, there are epiphanic moments: particular pieces or passages that stand out or rise above in an artist’s work. The promise such moments hold out is an important—perhaps the most important—ingredient that keeps the painter going to the next painting, and to the next: the idea, the feeling or hope, of breaking through. Nick’s attitude towards inspiration was emphatically unromantic. He knew there were no conjurer’s tricks, no incantations with which to summons the Muses. But he knew how to be ready for them if they arrived, and he knew how to trust his intuition as his guide. As Robert Frost once said, “You’ve got to act on insufficient knowledge. You’ve got to have that kind of courage.”

Interview Continues

Larry Groff: In your essay, “Fluidity in Focus,” you discussed why it has been important for you to “forget what you know,” and engage directly with visual sensations, translating those sensations into color patches, and that you need to be in tune with the immediacy of the moment.

You stated that this “is an approach to painting based in finding rather than making, in perception rather than in preconception.”

Doesn’t “finding rather than making” also mean that plein air painting is just more fun than studio based, more purely conceptual work? Or, to put it another way, aren’t you saying that a big attraction to painting outdoors is the visual excitement of changing light and other surprises of nature that challenge you in a way that is more meaningful?

Christopher Chippendale: I see my work in a tradition of painting where the notion of forgetting plays an important role. In that tradition, forgetting is a technique employed by painters in the service of discovering things in an original way. It has an established history in the discourse of observational painting. Constable spoke of his desire to “forget that [he] had ever seen another picture.” Corot wrote of the need to “[detach] yourself completely from what you know,” and Monet told his student Lilla Cabot Perry to “forget what objects you have before you.” When Hawthorne taught students to translate objects into “spots” of tone-color, he added, “Don’t think of things as objects. Think of them as spots coming one against another.” He thereby encouraged students to forget what things were, while prompting them to consider what they saw solely in terms of the tone-color sensations that things presented. My own teacher, George Nick—himself a recipient of Hawthorne’s counsel as transmitted through his teacher, Edwin Dickinson—routinely doled out phrases like “forget what you know” and, borrowing from Mallarmé, “abstract your eye from memory.”

Each of the above utterances was shaped by the specific historical circumstances that gave rise to it. Taken together, however, they echo a consistent theme. For each of these painters, the idea of forgetting was an intentional strategy employed to help them disrupt the easy, homogenizing channels through which visual sensations were resolved by conventions and habits of mind into symbolic forms. The idea of forgetting, then, as I intend it, has been employed by generations of observational painters as a means to circumvent the familiar, culturally determined ways of looking at things, which dominate and make possible the normal conduct of our daily lives. It is the tyranny of such conventions and habits of seeing that these painters have sought to sidestep through the practice of forgetting.

As a tool of seeing, forgetting has an atomic interest; it is concerned with origins, with trying to locate and express the basis, or bottom, of what is perceived. Importantly, its use by painters presupposes a foundational trust in direct visual impressions as a basis for their work. Both “finding” and “making,” as I use these terms, relate directly to this notion of forgetting. Making concerns the execution of an idea, something determined beforehand. Finding, as I mean it here, presumes no such predetermination. One “finds” things precisely because one doesn’t expect to. The work of the finder is neither goal—nor destination—driven.

You ask me whether finding, rather than making, also means “that plein-air painting is just more fun than studio based more conceptual work.” In response, I want to acknowledge, first of all, that the terms of your question do not disguise your intent to be at least a little provocative. Painting out-of-doors, or anywhere else, as I’m sure you know, is not like going to the amusement park. I do, certainly, sometimes feel a special kind of excitement when painting out-of-doors in a direct, improvisational manner. My excitement is partially propelled, I think, by my feeling on some such occasions an evaporation of a barrier that I often feel separates me from the world. I put in abeyance my critical mind, my skepticism, my penchant to analyze, and give myself over as completely as possible to the process of painting. Perhaps the excitement of such moments is that, being completely absorbed in the moment, I lose all sense of time and, with it, all sense of my being a sentient creature in time’s passage. I forget, that is, my own mortality. Painting, in such moments, “outside of time,” I do sometimes feel as though I existed, not in mortal clock-time, but in the originating moment of the experience that I am simultaneously depicting.

To be clear, though, I don’t find painting out-of-doors to be in the least lacking in intellectual rigor, or in any way conceptually deficient, as your questions suggest. Those were the criticisms leveled against the Impressionists: that they were mere passive recorders, that they were sensual, anti-intellectuals, that their work lacked thought and planning, that, by accepted standards, it was formless, lax and without structure. Wherever I am painting, but in particular out of doors, I am engaged with a fundamental problem: that of trying to make sense of (that is to say, to make order of, to structure) a number of shifting, unstable variables of both an objective and subjective nature.

Standing before the easel, I am looking both for a synthesis of vision and a concurrent means of transposing to the canvas a representation that feels true to the changeable qualities and complexities of what I see. I am working with and against my own history as a painter in my efforts to see clearly and respond honestly to what is before me. I am working with and against the schemata of painting approaches of the past. I am letting myself go, one moment, reacting to the immediacy of my enterprise, and then checking myself, the next, stepping back from my easel, attempting to make sense of the interpretations I have set down upon my canvas. I am trying very hard to get at my subject, to determine what it is exactly that I am painting, all the while fabricating a form to express it. These are complex procedures, procedures of the mind as well as of the hand.

All that said, I think the “big attraction” for me in outdoor painting is its amplification of a fact that I find always present: that, try as I might to see or interpret the visual world as something fixed and finite, there is ultimately nothing ever stable or fixed about appearances, anywhere. Some situations (painting indoors or under controlled lighting) may offer the convenience of seeming to be unchanging, but all studio-based artists working perceptually know that the more you look at something the more you see, and there is simply no end to it. In conditions such as these, what becomes obvious is that it is not the motif that is changing, but the painter—his perceptions, his feelings and his projections upon the motif before him. Such changeability in the painter confirms the truth of what Zola meant when he wrote (in 1866): “A work of art is never anything but the combination of a man, the variable element, and nature, the fixed element” (my italics). This subjective and self-reflecting “variable element” in painting, and its relationship to the perceived world, is where many of my interests stem from in my work as an observational painter.

Larry Groff: Why is the painter’s experience before the sensations of nature so important? Why should we care about what some painter feels while painting outside?

Christopher Chippendale: I think the short answer to your first question is that we wouldn’t have art of any kind if we didn’t have artists’ experience, whether those experience were before “the sensations of nature,” as you put it, or before anything else. Speaking for myself, I cannot separate my experience from the work I produce. Yet I should say here, in answer to your second question, that I neither paint nor reflect upon my painting process in order to elicit interest in my painting experience. I paint and I reflect upon my process in order to get at my subject, to define it more clearly and—as far as may be—efficiently.

In this regard, I am not concerned if others care (or don’t care) about what I myself feel or experience when painting outside, or anywhere else. I am glad if people are interested in my paintings, but my efforts are not geared towards communicating my experience to others. My efforts are geared towards ascertaining what that experience is, what its perimeters are, what forms and aspects it takes, the colors it assumes. My focus is on what I see and on trying to get the stubborn paint to do what I want.

As I’ve suggested, perceptual painting for me is not a mimetic art form. I am not involved in copy work, but in trying to find and shape the right expression for my experience before the motif. I am not involved with copy work because there is never one thing for me to copy, any more than there is one fixed point in time, or one given form, or one given color. There are only forms and colors and experience that change and modulate the more I look at things, or the longer I do.

I am an observational painter. I am engaged with the art of trying to find and lay down upon my canvases accurate translations of what I see. I want to show how things really are, or how I experience them to be, yet how things are is attenuated by my awareness of their mutable character, and by the fact that my experience of them, as defined by the attributes of a particular moment, changes from one instant to the next. These changes may be generated from the outside (as by measurable shifts of light as occur when working out-of-doors) or from the inside (as by my changing moods or sensibilities) or by the simple fact that the more and longer I look at something the more I see. My experience, like my motif, is unfixed, variable and ongoing; it exists over time and, as such, it changes over time.

What is of consequence to me is not my experience but the work that arises from it, the achievements and qualities which that work shows. I am the ultimate arbiter of its success. I will look at my work and find that it either does or does not succeed in showing (according to my terms and understanding) how things really are, or how I need or want or them to be, in order to express what I am after. Usually—nine times out of ten—my work falls short, which keeps me going to the next painting, and to the next.

Larry Groff: Why is it important for the artist to paint what is “true”? Isn’t getting such things as the “right color” measured differently by each painter? That if Corot, Cezanne, Van Gogh all painted exactly the same scene, each would make a completely different painting, but all would be equally true?

Christopher Chippendale: The fact that the criteria of “what is true” is determined differently by each artist does not alter the importance of painting what is true, or of trying to do so. What is true is, after all, not a given. In the case of observational painting, determining what is true depends upon site-specific information and highly individualized processes and ways of seeing which are unique to each artist. Accordingly, we can appreciate work from a wide range of styles (you mention Corot, Cezanne, Van Gogh) without calling into question whether the work of one or another of these artists is more “true” than that of the others.

In the tradition in which I work, observational painters scrutinize the world that is immediately before them. They check and cross check like doubting Thomases what they see. They adopt a skeptical, circumspect eye both towards their own assumptions and towards appearances. They train themselves to let go of their acquired knowledge in the interest of seeing things “truly” as they are, without prejudice. And they do all this to establish, as unequivocally as possible, the terms of the particular truth of the particular painting before them. The British painter, Rodrigo Moynihan, put it this way, while considering (in a 1934 essay) the late work of Cezanne. In Cezanne’s scrutiny and approach, Moynihan recognized what he termed “that skepticism of the true ‘eye’ painter, whose creative spirit must proceed by assuming nothing in its search for a synthesis of vision, which, while not pretending to be absolute, is true under the particular laws which govern it.” Not absolute, but true under the particular laws which govern it. That, to me, seems like a pretty good recipe for one’s goals for a painting. Such an approach necessitates, Moynihan goes on to say, “The visual attitude in painting, as opposed to the conceptual or idealistic [one] and… the artist… directed not to the perfection of a pre-conceived form but by the appearance of his painting.”

Most of the problems with the concept of “truth” for observational painters (as for everyone else) stem from its appropriation as an absolute concept. Even your phrase, “paint what is true” carries an overtone of a compunction to paint something already determined, something fixed and established, as though “what is true” were some fixed notion existing independent of the painter’s efforts to determine it. For some—for those who hold “the conceptual or idealistic” attitude towards painting—“what is true” is in fact a fixed, preexisting notion, to whose standards they feel their work should conform. From my point of view, what is true does not exist independent of my efforts to determine it.

Ideas of truth in observational painting, at both the institutional and individual levels, are not sacrosanct, irreproachable, singular, beyond question. Most histories of painting tell a history of orthodoxies of truth and of challenges to those orthodoxies. The most famously quoted modern example was the institutionalized painting of the French academy and the Impressionists’ reaction to that orthodoxy. The same kind of struggle, between the purveyors of institutionalized ideas of truth and those marginalized by those hegemonies, continues today. In the field of representational painting, for example, a monopoly of today’s curators, galleries, art theorists and graduate painting programs have preferred on the whole to follow the trend of championing a kind of painting based on the meanings of represented subject matter, rather than on how things are made. Understandably, this does not sit well with those observational painters for whom the emphasis of their art remains upon the how of painting as a primary means of expression. As Andrew Forge said of Monet’s later work: “To unravel its meaning is in a sense to enter into its making.”

We are surrounded at every moment by institutions, sciences, policies, schools, religions that have either set themselves up in the name of “truth,” or claim to speak in its name. Such a proliferation of “the truth” or of “true discourse” (oral, visual, what have you) has had a pronounced effect upon us. “We must speak the truth,” Foucault said, adding, “We are constrained or condemned to confess or to discover the truth.” Foucault’s larger concern was the analysis of power. Who sets the standards of truth? Who are the purveyors of truth? What relations of power are involved in the production of discourses of truth? Observational painters, including the schools and spokespersons for the particular styles or brands of observational painting, do not operate independently from this will to truth, nor from the powers it serves. We all have a stake in it, and our individual practices are implicated by it. We understand the social construction of the individual today much more than we did a generation or two ago. One of our obligations as individual painters, I believe, is to identify and question the standards and ideas of truth that our own work serves.

Langdon Quin, a highly respected painter living in both Italy and upstate New York is having an exhibition of recent landscapes at The Painting Center from March 31–April 25, 2015.

Quin has exhibited widely, both nationally and internationally. Since receiving his MFA in Painting from Yale University in 1976. He is the recipient of many awards including a Fulbright Fellowship, a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, and two Ingram Merrill Foundation grants. He is also a member of the National Academy of Design in New York City.

His work is in prominent public and private collections both here and abroad. In addition, he has had a distinguished academic career teaching and is currently a Professor Emeritus of Painting and Drawing at the University of New Hampshire.

Quin has had numerous one person shows in galleries on both the east and west coasts. These have included The Thomas Deans Fine Art in Atlanta , the Kraushaar Galleries, Robert Schoelkopf Gallery, New York, Alpha Gallery, Boston and Hackett Freedman Gallery, San Francisco.

I am very grateful to Langdon Quin for spending the time and energy in talking with me about his background, process and thoughts on painting during our Skype call from his home in Italy.

Larry Groff:    The Painting Center has an essay about your upcoming show on their website says that you recalled vividly that Fairfield Porter “likened painting to poetry in urging the consideration of “particularization of experience” Porter also said along this line of thinking: “You can only buck generalities by attention to fact,” Porter continued. “So aesthetics is what connects one to matters of fact. It is anti-ideal, it is materialistic. It implies no approval, but respect for things as they are.”  I’m curious to hear what you might have to say about how this thought has affected you.

Langdon Quin:  Yes, Porter gave a talk at Yale that was, I think, taken from an essay he published “Technology and Artistic Perception” in the American Scholar journal; this was shortly before he died, so it later seemed to me a summing up of his idea about why painting was important in an age where everything was changing by the minute.

At that point it was 1975, and it seemed, in retrospect, just incredibly prescient that he could identify and insist on a place for painting likening that activity to poetry—both forms filling a need has to do with specifying the particular experience that people have in relation to something seen, felt, remembered, imagined, whatever it was, because technology and its generalizing tendencies was eradicating those important subtleties.

The thing I remember distinctly was this rather simple analogy that worked for me, and stays in my head: He said, “Most of you here [but I wasn’t one of them, because I was/am old enough] are too young to remember a soda fountain, a place where you would sit on a stool and somebody would mix a Coca-Cola for you with a certain amount of seltzer and a certain amount of syrup, and that became your drink. So, it was particular to that place and one would perhaps prefer one soda fountain to another because of the way they mixed the Coke, or made a cherry Coke or some other variation.

Then, Coke became bottled, and in doing so it became uniform, and it all tasted the same. So, it just stays in my mind as a kind of metaphor about Porter and his identification of the primacy, and importance, he placed on distinct material realities, that were worth celebrating in at time when new technology was seeking to blur such distinctions.

it gave me a way of understanding Porter’s work, because he just wanted to be terribly specific about not just what he was seeing, but also what he was feeling about the things he was seeing. Like all of us, he made stronger paintings as well as making some pretty ordinary paintings, but this intent of his to particularize experience seems most clear in the late work. In these, it seemed there was something inspired in a kind of materialistic identification with the paint in reference to whatever he painted, not just to make it illusionistic; but to make it feel like the place, something that was imbued with another layer of physicality and intervention, made manifest in the paint handling itself.

I’ll say that. I’ve always been drawn to people like Corot and French painting of the 19^th century and other periods. The 19^th century French model for me of late however is less Corot, than Courbet. Courbet’s landscapes look like observed places, they breathe light and air, but they also have a transformative power that’s palpable. So that’s the kind of landscape painting, that I’m admiring these days; I see it in Courbet, I see it in Balthus’s Chassy paintings, I see it in Hodler, I see it in Soutine, Bonnard, Morandi, and others. Our conversation is prompted by my landscape show coming up, but I do paint figures and still lives as well.

Larry Groff:   What lead you to become a painter and what were your early years like as a student and young artist?

Langdon Quin:   I had the benefit of a wonderful high school teacher who passed away some years ago. His legacy is felt today at the school, in the form of the gallery that is dedicated in his name and memory,  the Mark Potter Gallery at The Taft School. It hosts terrific shows in the school’s beautiful space.

More than anything, I think he was a model for me as a way to live a life and to embrace all kinds of experience. I was swept up with my enthusiasm for him and his passion about life’s possibilities. It was as simple as that. I was a suburban kid from Atlanta, and I had won a scholarship from some Atlanta people to go to that boarding school in Connecticut. No one in my family that I can think of had any artistic inclinations. So, this teacher was the person that got me moving early on in the direction I took towards becoming a painter.

Like most of us, as a child I showed some propensity or talent for drawing and doing things in classes that, from third grade up, sooner or later got recognized. But this certainly didn’t make me feel like I could, or would want to become an artist.

I’m wasting too much time telling you a perfectly, as I say, ordinary story, but Mark was important to me. Fast forwarding quite a bit to 1973, Caren Canier (my wife) and I, without knowing each other previously, met in a summer program at The Tanglewood Institute in Lenox, Massachusetts, where we studied with Gabriel Laderman.

We had an intense, long summer with Gabriel in our faces for a couple of months. There was really a big door that opened for me there, thanks to his auspices. I am forever indebted to Gabriel. We became friends later, and I’m still in touch with his children. Gabriel died a couple of years ago, but he was a wonderful teacher and very important to me. I certainly would count him as a major influence.

Without totally discouraging me, he made me realize that I really didn’t know anything, and that I had a lot of catching up to do. I remember distinctly,(I was 25 at the time) when. he said, “You should go back to school and enroll at KCAI. ” In those years, he was very enthusiastic about the teaching of Stanley Lewis, Wilbur Niewald, Lester Goldman, and other people at the Kansas City Art Institute. He said, “You should go back to Kansas City and start over.” I said, “I’m 25. I’m not going to start over as an undergraduate.” I guess he was okay with that, but he may have been right with that recommendation.

Larry Groff:       I’ve heard that the painter William Bailey has been an important mentor and friend. Can you say something about what that has meant to you and your work? Who have been some other important figures for you?

Langdon Quin:  Eventually, I was accepted at the Yale Graduate program and I studied there with a number of people, including William Bailey.

Bill and I are very close friends. He was enormously important to me. I would say that he gave me an understanding of color theory, based on Albers, that I hadn’t really understood in spite of some study.

My understanding of color was, up until that point, completely intuitive. I could mix warm and cool, but I didn’t know about the qualities of color juxtapositions and how they can be weighted against each other abstractly and also drawn from observable phenomena. Bill really gave me more than a clue—he gave me a vision of the way that can happen and be used expressively. His belief in the importance of drawing was also very meaningful to me.

My other teachers there, to whom I am also indebted, were Gretna Campbell , Bernard Chaet, and Lester Johnson. This group, together with Gabriel, I would say, were the significant influences as I was developing as a student. I later came to know James Weeks very well, when he taught at Boston University. He and I shared an office, in fact. I was an adjunct instructor at the time, and he was a full-time professor at Boston University. I taught at BU for five years, and throughout my time teaching there we were good friends and quite close.

Larry Groff:   Where you at BU when Philip Guston taught there or he had already passed away?

Langdon Quin:  My wife, Caren, was a grad student there finishing in 1976 . She had been an undergrad at Cornell and then went to BU. She was very close to Guston and counts him as one of a couple of very important teachers.

I met him on a number of occasions, when he would come back to Boston from Woodstock… At that point, he was pretty much cutting the cord with BU and would appear a couple of times a year to do a critique or a conversation with people. He was not present on a regular basis in the late 70’s. I spoke to him a couple times in those last years before he died in 1980. But, I won’t say that any influence came from a direct personal connection.

My years in Boston were good years, but I think of them especially positively because of my association with Jim Weeks. He was a wonderful man, and the things that he did in his work I came to understand and appreciate in subsequent years. I looked at Jim’s work and thought about the things he said, and later decided, “He was right!” It’s a shame that he’s a neglected painter, at least in terms of the public awareness of him.

Larry Groff:    What was some of the things that you remember the most that he might’ve said that was important to you, in terms of moving your work forward? Is there anything in particular he would say?

Langdon Quin:  Well, if I could make a connection in terms of “Boston” people, and what they meant to me, I’ll say that Jim’ s idea of spatial compression with shifting play between two and three dimensions is one of the things I also admired in Guston. Everybody these days seems to love Philip Guston. Unfortunately, he’s been the progenitor of a particular kind of cartoony imagery one sees a lot of today, but I think the thing that’s missing in most of the people’s understanding of his contribution is that his paintings had a surface tension that was so considered and so taut. One really feels the heft and pressure of the forms he made and their juxtaposition. The subject matter has an offhand look to it, but it’s really quite charged in formal terms. That was true of Weeks, as well. Weeks’ paintings, to me, had this wonderful surface tension. I mean, the way he would compress two and three-dimensional things together, and then separate them and relax them, open them up, close them down. It’s not a language I really understood at the time, but I’ve come to understand it better. That is the way it works with good teachers, I think—it takes a while to get what they are talking about and trying to do in their work.

When you’re first hearing something from someone you admire, you’re trying to get it from the back of your head to the front of your head. so you can use it .But you don’t quite get it because that takes some time, and when finally you do start get it, you can’t thank them, because they’re gone! Nonetheless, I feel that way about Jim Weeks and Gabriel, certainly, who’ve both passed on. I think they were both terrific artists and educators.

Larry Groff:    Does William Bailey’s involvement with classical arrangements and composition from a modernistic perspective have much influence on you? I think I can see similar concerns with a more classical sensibility in your compositions.

Langdon Quin:  The question is of great interest to me, Larry. But, in a way, I can’t comment intelligently. I suppose Bill and I do share a classicizing instinct, but I don’t really know what that looks like. I mean, Bill’s not a landscape painter, and I am, and surely the ideas about color and drawing he passed along to me have found their way into my landscapes. We’re all drawn to people that have a form sense that we identify with and admire. In Bill’s case, his sense of interval, pace and arrangement, exist in worlds he makes up. On the other hand, just about everything I do is grounded in observation. Nonetheless, his form sense is something I really respond to, and maybe I reflect something of that influence in my apprehension of landscape motifs. My work, I don’t think, looks so much like his. But, I take it as a compliment however; that you think there’s an observable connection. I’m thankful for my training with him and greatly admire his accomplishment.

Larry Groff:   Not the outward appearance, I meant more that what you might select to paint or how you might place emphasis on the horizontality and intervals has a classical feel to the composition at times. Of course the subject matter’s completely different. Like you said how color affects his. I think of his color as very subtle and subdued. His color is deeply felt and wonderful, but completely different than yours. I wouldn’t easily see a connection of his color to yours at all until you brought it up.

Langdon Quin:  No, I think Bill probably likes aspects of my work and appreciates our shared history and respect for particular painters. But I’d guess he thinks my color is in a very saturated range that doesn’t always work. It may be that I’m trying to reconcile things that he’s tried to reconcile as well, but with a totally different palette and approach. I’m interested in the possibilities for more saturated color in the landscape, more in the spirit of Bonnard than say, Corot, both of whom I consider great colorists. But, I mean, compared to everything else that is out there in the art world that passes as experiment and color, my efforts fall in a pretty narrow traditional range, and that is fine with me.

Larry Groff:  :    Can you talk about your process in painting the landscape? Does it differ significantly from how you go about making your figurative work and still lifes?

Langdon Quin:  I think people think of me as a landscape painter but I do make other paintings. The ideas for those paintings have a different, slower-forming genesis. But in my day-to-day experience, the landscape seems to intrude most and calls out more for its recognition and observation.

Whenever I make a painting of any kind, whether it’s landscape, figure or still life, I have to have seen that situation in the world. I have to have experienced it. Even if it’s just momentarily, even if it’s just a drive- by event; if I have seen it, then I can believe it and I can develop it, or try to, at least. That pertains to the landscape, figure, still life, whatever. It all starts from there.

But returning to your question about my landscape process, I start from small oil studies done on the spot. I have a few French easels and I just set them up. I do quick paintings and drawings. Then my practice these days, certainly for a landscape, is to bring those things back and develop larger paintings in the studio from them.

What could be more traditional than that? It’s so historical. That’s what just about everybody I admire did. It’s not set in stone; it just seems to work most easily like that. I had up until the last 10 years or so, occasionally set up big canvases outside and tied them down with guy wires and things. I just don’t care to do that anymore. Too much bother!

I enjoy painting more if I can develop pictures in the studio based on plein air sketches and then make the compositional choices and color changes that the painting suggests to me. So, at that point, it’s not what is dictated by allegiance the actual motif, and studies from it, but what happens after those initial encounters.

I want keep the life and quality of the motif alive, but I don’t want to be tethered to it. I want to be able to change it and move things around. I’m more of a studio painter in that sense, than I used to be in my 30s and 40s.

Larry Groff:     So you don’t feel restricted by the particulars of the scene that you’re painting in the studio? If a house were in one location, you’d be willing to move it to an entirely different place if you wanted?

Langdon Quin:  It usually doesn’t amount to a change as big as that. I don’t make dramatic changes in the alignment of forms so much as the color and the importance of different forms, the elaboration of the form. They pretty much stay in the same place. The drawing and the positioning of forms is more or less what I start off with. It usually stays that way, although I do make changes like that sometimes.

The main changes have to do with the palette and the kind of articulation of passages, whether they’re pronounced or diminished or played up and down in terms of their importance. But it’s all grounded in a set of things that I’ve seen and then manipulate.

Certainly this is accurate with regard to landscape; the figure paintings are a different thing. The show coming up is all landscape. It’s more appropriate I guess that I talk to you about that.

Larry Groff:    Feel free to talk about whatever is important to you. I was asking you kind of more all about landscape because of the show, but I love your other work just as much. In particular I was admiring your still lifes. I was looking at your catalog again and I’d forgotten what incredible still lifes… Like the still life with 2 tables from 2004, a fabulous painting.

Langdon Quin:  Thank you. The still life… I would say of the 3 forms, if we can simplify it and say the 3 forms, that the still lives are the most dependent on direct observation. When I paint a still life I’m sitting there in front of it, and stay put in front of it pretty much from start to finish.

When I’m painting a landscape, I start them outside. I draw, paint from the motif, I bring them in and they become studio paintings. If I’m doing a figure painting, it’s a similar thing. I’ll paint from a figure. I’ll make a figure painting, a little figure painting, then I’ll think, “oh, well that one would look like something possible if I could put it with this other figure painting that I’ve also done from observation, and then some grouping and/or narrative might emerge in pairing the two”.

The two of them then start to take off as a combination that becomes complete invention. I don’t have the same models back or anything like that. It becomes another studio enterprise altogether. They’re slower to develop and I don’t think I’m very good at it, in the sense that I can’t resolve them (figure compositions) as comfortably or happily as other things.

I’m a little more tentative about those things and their successes or failures. After this show, I want to paint more still lives and get back to some figure painting ideas.

Larry Groff:   I loved your Danaë painting, a fairly recent figure composition, I think. Another incredible painting.

Langdon Quin:  That’s a weird painting. I don’t think of it as being terribly successful, but something I got very involved with. It was almost completely invented. I had a model at a certain point but the model wasn’t doing what you see in that picture. It was all-associative. When I thought about all the images, whether Titian, Correggio or the many other great Danaë paintings that artists have made, I wondered, what if Danaë was angry at being disturbed when Zeus appeared in whatever form he chose, and she was irritated and refusing him rather than acquiescing? It was just a kind of whimsical departure from the traditional idea. It was based on some figure paintings I had done from models but then changed dramatically. I don’t know about that picture. I don’t want that to be my last figure statement.

But another one that you might see on the website is called La Capriata, which is a group of 6 men perched on some precarious scaffolding, working on a construction project. That was something I actually saw, and I looked at it and said, “That’s a painting!,” After I watched them, I immediately sat down and made some drawings from memory… The workers disappeared later, of course, They’d gone home for the day, but the memory of their grouping against the sky was very intense.

I developed that out of a very crisp, clear memory. It wasn’t the fantasy that the Danaë painting was. It was based on a very compelling, searing visual thing that I saw and I thought, again, going back to what I said earlier—If I’ve seen it then I can believe it. I know it happened. Then I can think about developing it.

The times like the Danaë painting where I haven’t really seen that situation. I don’t really totally believe in the fiction nor my process in picturing it. Those are the ones I’m more tentative about because, I don’t know, they weren’t grounded in something seen, something observed.

Whether it’s still life or figures or landscape, I feel most comfortable if I initiate something from direct experience. Those are the things I can get behind because I know they exist or existed.

Larry Groff:    You had an earlier painting, the La Bottega, the family portrait that was on the cover of your catalog. That seemed like it probably involved this painting from memory yet it still seems very specific.

Langdon Quin:  That’s a good example, as those are all people I know. That’s a place that I know very well. I know what everything looks like there. I have seen those people go up and down those steps and I’ve seen those people working in the background.

The development of that image perpetuated a kind of painting experience because it was informed by an awareness of those people and their interaction with their environment. Also, I could re-visit the place, just drive over there with my car, sit there and say, “Oh yeah. That looks like this. That looks like that.” Go back, make a few drawings, and keep working on it. It was all part of an observable place and time, even though the picture was a studio painting.

Larry Groff:      I curious to hear how you might reference other art in your work, especially the color. Some of the color in your landscapes brings to mind early renaissance Italian fresco painting to me. Is that something you think about or is it more just your personal color sensibility? Or has it more to do with your location that is particular to Umbria? I’m hoping you could talk about the relationship of your color and other art.

Langdon Quin:  Well, I remember many years ago somebody saying to me, “Your palette is so unique.” I thought, really? I didn’t feel that. I’m not at all objective, or aware of that. I can’t answer your question except to say that whatever affinities may appear in my palette or my view of color or how color may be operating, they’re not conscious or calculated on my part. I’m not trying to mimic someone else. The things I do with my own palette and the things I admire in painting are wedded in some way that I’m just not really aware of.

Larry Groff:    It’s not a conscious process then?

Langdon Quin:  Not at all.

Larry Groff:      I suspect that for most people, it’s just their sensibility or personality that comes through without their control. But perhaps what makes up your personality comes out of your love for particular kinds of situations and particular types of art.

Langdon Quin:  I’m impressed by the luminosity and the intensity of light in lots of different kinds of painting. French painting, but also Italian painting. The idea of a painting giving off light enchants me. I‘ve read of Alex Katz asking the same kind of question—how much can the painting act as a container of light, how much light can it emit? In terms of the painting’s luminosity, in terms of its color’s expressive suggestion? How much can it push out from the wall? Those are things I really like about certain painters.

Again, Balthus comes to mind. Especially the paintings from his chateau in Chassy, and his other 1950s works. Bonnard is another major figure to me. He makes a painting glow. I want my painting to glow and I want them to contain a light. They need to be tonal but they also need to be luminous in terms of the modulations between their tonalities and their local color identifications.

I suppose this is a late modernist idea about color. It’s not a 19th century or earlier idea about a directed light moving through time, space and different narrative moments within the frame of a single image. I want the whole thing to be materialized and a container of light that acts at once. This is a modernist idea even if not many people in our postmodern art world value that, or see it as such.

I would say that in the last 20 years or so, the tonalities of my paintings have gotten much lighter. That effort has been purposeful—to make the paintings as positive, meaning pushing away from the wall, as they can be.

Larry Groff:      Many of your landscapes have an open, scrubby quality to the brush strokes that lets the white ground of the canvas show through, at least from what I can see on the computer screen. I’m hoping you might say something about this.

Langdon Quin:  I don’t paint on toned canvases. I start a painting on a primed white canvas, lead primed white canvas. I really believe that referencing the whiteness of the canvas is important to keeping the glow of the paint present because the more you paint on them, the darker pictures get naturally. They run into all their problems with muddiness, chalkiness, etc.

If you start on a white canvas, you’re constantly referencing the white canvas. I purposely leave a piece of white canvas available somewhere in the painting so I can keep cueing things to that piece of white canvas. Keeping the value structure up because if it starts to get too dark then I know I’m in trouble.

I never paint on a toned canvas. I think it’s a mistake. I was a teacher for many years; I wouldn’t let students tone their canvases. I said, “Start with a white canvas. Always. Divide it and refer to the white as a moment on the scale of light to dark. Use that as a key of how to develop the rest of it.”

Larry Groff:     Do you work fairly thin, thin paint, to utilize the transparency of the paint over the white ground to get luminosity?

Langdon Quin:  The rougher the canvas, the better to me, whether it’s a quick painting or a long painting. I think that the roughness of the canvas enables me to create accidents that then suggest things and I can follow the suggestion and run with it for a while.

In answer to your question, I do start things pretty thinly, but just to lay them in. Then I drop the paintbrush and I pick up the palette knife and I start just trying to build a surface that feels right. That doesn’t mean that it stays that way. I scrape it down, build it up, scrape it down again, build it up. That activity of going back and forth between thick and thin is part of the process.

There’s a painting, a very large landscape I did a number of years back that I worked on for a long time. There are places in it where the paint is quite thick and there are other places where bare canvas is showing. It stayed bare in those places only because it keeps feeling right in terms of its value and strength in a color way.

Not that I’m trying to, I don’t know, trying to make a quilt of thick and thin paint at all. It doesn’t matter to me if it’s thick or thin. If it works, it works. I do enjoy the process of building up the paint and tearing it down, building it up again, tearing it down. Seeing what all those scumbles can come up with. That’s the pleasure, especially in studio painting

Larry Groff:      You work on canvas, not linen generally. Is that the case?

Langdon Quin:  It’s all linen.

Larry Groff:      On the catalog it said canvas. I was…

Langdon Quin:  I say canvas but I use the term loosely. It’s all linen. I don’t paint on cotton duck anymore. I haven’t for years. Although, I have no objection to it. Good cotton duck is certainly better than bad linen. For the most part I use linen, and I used buy Utrecht linen. They made/imported a kind of linen I loved. But they don’t anymore. I buy my linen here in Italy for the most part, and use it here and back in NY. My practice really these days has to do with starting paintings here in Italy and then taking them back to the U.S., I roll things up, I take them back, I work on them there, I bring them back, I go back and forth with tubes under my arms all the time.

My paintings rarely get more than 4×5 feet because that’s all I can carry on a plane. Oftentimes they’re a lot smaller, but that’s about as big as they get. Sometimes I’ve done paintings joining two side-by-side 4×5 panels that are more comfortably broken down and rolled up.. I’m moving back and forth between 2 different places. That’s my life these days and that’s what I do. Tubes and more tubes!

The linen I prefer is rough and has a lot of imperfection in it. That’s what I like. I like it almost like sack cloth. Just something that creates plenty of accidents as I put the paint on it and play with it.

Larry Groff:      Do you, this is an aside really, for my own problem. I have been using linen most of my life, too. Lately I’m getting a little disenchanted with it because I have so many problems with it sagging out here. You would think it’s relatively dry, it would be less of a problem. It’ll be tight as a drum, it’ll be perfect, and then a few days later I’ll come and it will be all sagging and waving like a flag. It drives me crazy.

Langdon Quin:  Yeah, I know. I know. It’s a problem certainly. That’s one of the reasons I stopped buying stuff from Utrecht, I would get linen that the warp and the weft, I don’t know what it was, they weren’t the same fibers or something. I would get all these little bows around the edges of the canvas. I said, “Screw this. I’m not going to buy their stuff anymore.”

I eventually just stopped. Yeah, linen is always subject to humidity and other things. I have a guy in Queens, New York who makes stretchers for me. He’s great, prompt and careful. His name is Victor Anchissi. I key them out when they get saggy. It hasn’t been a problem. I do know what you mean however.

Larry Groff:     So, maybe it’s the quality. Regretfully, I’m using cheaper linen. Perhaps if I used better quality, it would be less of a problem?

Langdon Quin:  Yeah, maybe. I don’t know. It’s mainly a matter of, seems to me, of using stretchers that you can key out. The problem is once you finish a painting and you’ve got it all keyed out and it looks fine, you put it in a frame then you attach the framing, then you’re stuck with it. If it starts to sag then what do you do?

Larry Groff:     You and your wife, Caren Canier—who is also a painter, divide your time between living in Troy, NY and Gubbio in Umbria, Italy. How long have you lived there and what is your place in Italy like? Have you become close to your neighbors? What is it like to live there?

Langdon Quin:  It has been a major component of my life and hers. I can’t think of a better way to put it, really. We’ve been here for 33 years,. I taught in the US for 30 plus years, finishing up at the University of New Hampshire in 2010. I always came here in the summertime in those years, but since I retired I’ve been able to come for shorter periods in the winter as well. I do that whenever I can, and I’m here right now for several weeks, which I usually do every February and March. Then I leave, go back to the States, and come back from May through mid-September.

Our place is an old farmhouse that has seen better days, but we keep picking at it and keeping it lovely and pretty much in the vernacular, historic form for this kind of house. It’s sort of a “farmette”. We have gardens, some grapes, some olive trees, and it’s lovely. It’s very nice. Our children have grown up here as well, so they have attachments to it, but probably nothing like ours. We’ve been doing this for a long time. I have a studio here, and I have a studio in New York state, where I live in the US. We’re pretty close to New York City, so we’re there for a couple of days just about every week.

We’re triangulating between these places, and we’re lucky to be able to do that. I spend a lot of time traveling, a lot of money traveling, but at the same time it feels good to move around. I generate a lot of painting ideas here in Italy, and as I said before, I roll up the canvases, and build ideas with those starts I can make, and take them back to the States, work on them there, and often bring them back here. I have sets of stretchers in both places that fit these paintings, so I try to make the transitions as easy physically as I can.

The house in Italy is in a very quiet, rural place. We’ve been here a long time so we have plenty of Italian friends and neighbors that we see a lot of. As with any home, we have our problems with household things, but it’s still nice. We don’t have central heating, which makes it uncomfortable sometimes in the winter and we live with woodstoves and fireplaces going all day. It’s a bit rough, but lovely. I will never complain about it.

Larry Groff:     That sounds like such a wonderful life, I’m very jealous! This leads to my next question, which is, does having a deep personal connection to a place, such as in Umbria or Troy, NY is essential to the life or success of your painting? Or is that connections more just a point of departure? That the painting then takes a life of its own, and it becomes more about the formal issues and about the painting itself, rather than the actual thing that you’re painting, or are they inseparable to you. I’m curious for your thoughts about that.

Langdon Quin:  In a way, I would like it if my paintings were seamless, that is, a viewer might see that it’s a painting of Italy but that would feel incidental; it wouldn’t look terribly different from a painting of New York State insofar as its feeling. I do paint the landscape in New York State. It’s more dictated by seasonal restraints however. The New York State landscape is quite beautiful, and I value it. The light there is different than it is here in Italy, and different kind of forces on view, and certainly not uninteresting. It’s not like I’m saying,” oh, I can only paint the landscape in Italy”.

It’s about the painting. The initiation of the painting has to do with the place, but the continuity of its development is particular to the painting and not the place. I can do that wherever I am, as long as I have the materials to do it. I do have another kind of feeling about surroundings in the US… at least where I live in New York State,. The culture and history of the relationship of the people to the landscape is very different from the Italians I know about.

I’ll just try to simplify this by saying that one is a sympathetic relationship, and one is an antipathetic relationship, the latter, representing the American side of it. We beat up our world there, and treat it badly and abuse it. And certainly that happens here in Italy as well, but you don’t sense it as much in the countryside because rural people are still so careful about their cultivation and land management, and they seem to prize it more. It’s more part of their patrimony, and lives, and I admire that and respond to that. In America, at least in New York State where we live, it’s a more problematic relationship to the land, which is not uninteresting as an idea in terms of developing something narratively/pictorially, but at the same time it’s kind of a bummer in any social sense.

Larry Groff:    I would think Troy would be closer to Italy than any other places. I’ve heard that Troy is one of the few smaller towns like that that have retained its identity. It hasn’t changed quite as much over the years.

Langdon Quin:  Our mailing address is Troy, but we live in the country, east of Troy, towards the Massachusetts-Vermont line. We’re out in the landscape and it’s really quite lovely where we live, and we’ve been blessed not to have a lot of rampant development. The last major battle we had locally, was over a Wal-Mart moving in nearby, a decade or so ago. And, as in every other place in America, you can’t stop Wal-Mart. So we tried, but it’s there. But so far, our immediate surroundings haven’t changed too dramatically. However, it is a landscape that’s definitely threatened.

Farming has stalled statewide, and local Hudson Valley farms are shutting down and closing. It’s just a very transitional world there, and you feel it. I don’t sense that as much where we live here in Italy, so that’s among the positive things about being here. I paint the landscape in New York State, but I hold off in the winter, especially in this terribly brutal winter we’ve had this year. I really enjoy being in my studio upstate, but I just don’t get out to paint the landscape much, because it’s just so tough to do that. It’s not very inviting or hospitable.

I’m usually focused more on other forms… I draw a lot from the figure, and paint from the figure, and try to develop more figural ideas when I’m in the States. The ideas are slower to develop, so it’s not a period that I tend to I produce a lot in. Here in the summer months, I can get things rolling more quickly. The days are longer. It’s 8 o’clock in the morning and I can be in the studio if I choose to, and not return ’till 8 at night…

Larry Groff:    Who are some of your favorite contemporary living painters?

Langdon Quin:  Although I try to look at everybody, I can’t say that I have any particular contemporary heroes right now. There are certainly lots of painters out there whose work I admire. I’m reading a little biography by Phoebe Hoban about Lucian Freud Lucian Freud: Eyes Wide Open (Icons).

But whereas I like Freud’s work. I don’t think he has had any influence on my work, it’s just … He’s a celebrated artist that I respect, and I certainly admire others such as Antonio Lopez Garcia. Their work is impressive to me, and I admire much about their ambitions, and I respect them, but I’m not exactly worshipful. There are lots of people I can mention. Leonard Anderson, Stanley Lewis, Leland Bell, Louisa Matthiasdottir… Another painter who comes to mind, whose lovely show I saw a show about 6 months ago, is E.M. Saniga, whom I don’t know personally.

Larry Groff:     He’s a great painter and person. I got to meet him in Civita Castellana, when I was at the JSS in Civita program.

Langdon Quin:  Yeah. I saw a show of his, and I thought, this guy is something special. Gillian Pederson Krag is another person that I do know quite well. She’s under many people’s radar, but she’s a terrific painter.

Larry Groff:     She’s great, Elana Hagler had an interview with her on Painting Perceptions…

Langdon Quin:  She’s wonderful. In fact, she’s my wife Caren’s former teacher, and they’re very good friends, and I am as well. There are plenty of people that I see on Facebook but I don’t know personally, but impress me such as this guy, Emil Robinson’s work, I admire his work (http://emilrobinson.com/home.html)

Larry Groff:      Another excellent painter. I also got to meet him a couple of times and had an interview with him.

Langdon Quin:  I don’t know him personally. I have to say that I’m pretty negative about aspects of Facebook, but the good thing about it is that it makes you realize that there are lots and lots of people out there who are painting with great intelligence and great sensitivity, that you’re probably not necessarily going to see in Chelsea or anywhere else in New York City. But, it’s gratifying to know that such good painting still flourishes. That feels hopeful; to know that there are people out there that can respond. That’s the way it is when you teach, as well. There are always students that still want to make pictures of people or whatever, and they either do it, or don’t do it once they move on. But they want it at the outset, and need it then, and come to you for that information. You know, life goes on.

Larry Groff:      Do you feel optimistic about the future of representational painting, as you’ve grown to love it, the kind of work that you do?

Langdon Quin:  No, I wouldn’t say I’m optimistic at all. Actually, I would say I’m a bit cynical about it. For the following reason: I think the saddest thing is that for a lot of people that I know that for a lot wonderfully talented artists who are capable of doing great things, the marketplace and the art world do a lot of damage. They combine to dull the sense of urgency to paint for some very fine painters. If you’re not going to sell the work, you’re not going to show it, then why do it? That’s depressing, and yet most of those people, including myself, just try to keep doing it because that’s what we do. No. I’m not very positive, I’m afraid.

I talk to people about it, and some people say, “Well, all it would take is one or two perceptive art world critics, or dealers, or this or that, and suddenly the whole thing could change positively.” I don’t believe that. I think that the culture is losing its capacity to really embrace painting as a poetic, and essential form. If at all it’s embraced embrace it as something else: celebrity, style, or whatever…

Larry Groff:      Fashion.

Langdon Quin:  Fashion. Yeah. I don’t like to think about that part of it, so to answer your question, no, I’m not optimistic at all.

Larry Groff:      A thought I’ve had for quite some time is the art world’s elevation in importance of conceptual-based art and the fall of painting about visual concerns feels like we’re heading toward some kind of neo-medievalism, in that the painting has become increasingly more about ideas that one contemplates not unlike what people did with the icons during the medieval era. Irony is becoming a new catechism of hipness and beauty no longer has much relevance. Of course visual imagery is still there, but often more to illustrate a concept than to celebrate beauty.

Langdon Quin:  Exactly. Even though it’s said that “irony” was over years ago as the expressive vehicle of the art world, it still appears to me that it’s driving the bus !Is distance from any sort of poetic interpretation of things, or an earnest interpretation of things is so huge. And that’s really disturbing. I don’t know when it’s going to change, or if it’s going to change, but it’s certainly seems bleak these days.

It makes me think that, in spite of its power in the marketplace, New York is a terribly provincial place because that’s such a singular attitude that prevails. And that’s just small-minded, and doesn’t make any sense to me. That’s why I say I am not encouraged. I do know that there are places in the Midwest, on the West Coast, everywhere, where people are doing good things and feeling productive and positive about it, so maybe I should cheer up.

Larry Groff:      I understand. It’s particularly difficult for people who live away from the bigger art centers. Where I live in San Diego, I think there are a lot of people in the art world here who want to emulate the New York scene. They’re getting at it from maybe 10 years ago or something, but they are even more dismissive of people doing work from observation or other kinds of a sophisticated relationship to the history of painting. They all want to be about the cutting age, but they don’t really think about art history, I think, in a way, and it makes it really difficult for people who are, because you can’t get shown. If you can’t get shown, because they think you’re old fuddy-duddies or something, then you can’t sell your work or get hired as a teacher and it becomes very difficult to make it as a painter.

Langdon Quin:  That’s why, at this point in time, some 35 years or whatever it is after speaking with Fairfield Porter that I just cherish that encounter with him—because he seemed to be taking such a stand in opposition to what you describe… Even then he realized what the lay of the land was, and how important it was to embrace an idea about painting that would really transcend trends, time, and shifts in popular culture. I think he was very important in that way. That does make me feel like there is a conversation still going on, however attenuated, and that’s good. This is part of it, you and I talking like this.

Larry Groff:   Other people get to read this, and it gives them ideas, so we’re helping to perpetuate this continuum of ideas about making good painting.

There is a poetic quality to so much of your work. I think all really great painting has that, for me it’s the visual poetics that really makes the painting succeed more than anything. Much more than the level of skill in depicting things or the level of realism, or whatever, it’s has to first engage me from the feelings, the mood, the poetics.

What would you suggest for someone, a young person just starting out, wants to do this kind of painting, representational painting, whatever you want to call it, to really appreciate the sense of poetics, the visual poetics. Is there something you would recommend?

Langdon Quin:  I don’t think you can really recommend so much. I think It’s nascent or it’s not nascent, meaning that if they want to image something then they have to figure out how to do it, and have to seek out somebody that can teach them how to proceed, or look at something on the walls or in books. The will to image something is pretty hard- wired in many people. That’s what students bring to a beginning painting or drawing class. There’s some fundamental wish to do it, and they don’t know about the art world, or culture, or anything else. They’re just following an intuition that feels important, and that’s what a good teacher will have to build on.

I guess the answer to your question is: if you don’t feel it and you don’t really look around the world and think how beautiful this or that is. Or, “gee, wouldn’t it be nice to image that”—if that’s not there in the first place, there’s no way you’re going to just decide that that’s what you’re going to do. It has to be there in the first place, and I think it is for many people. I think it’s part of our makeup, that we want to image things, and how quickly you get swept up in fashion, or trends, or this or that, is going to dissuade you from doing that, but the people that want to do it are going to find a way to do it, I hope.

It gets harder and harder, but I think that will go on, and remains the refreshing thing about teaching. When I taught in New Hampshire, all these corn and milk-fed young people who were my students came from pretty conventional backgrounds, and weren’t particularly sophisticated, but they wanted to make images., They wanted to make pictures and they wanted to construct figures. Whether or not it continued in their lives in any way later is a different thing, but I think the will to do that is often there. That’s what’s hopeful, I suppose.

Larry Groff:    Right. One thought that I had, kind of a grim thought, but I see many things in this society falling apart, and are not really being sustainable. It’s too much to get into now, but it feels like … The one thing that can be real is painting, and it gives you a reason to live. The whole world could be falling apart, but you’ve got a great painting in front of you that you’re working on, it’s sort of, like, so what? I’ve got this painting, and it gives you a reason to keep going. It gives hope and it gives a reason to live.

Langdon Quin:  Painting is a political act, and if you paint that harbor, Larry, and you say, ‘I saw this and it looked like this, and it felt like this,’ and, again, paraphrasing Porter, ‘You particularize an experience and you make it an individual stance in a form that can be shared,’ it’s essentially a political act. You are saying to other people, “I want you to see this the way I see it,” and when you do that, it may or may not resonate with a viewer, but it means something to try. Again, to reference Porter, because I think that’s what he was saying, it’s that ‘this is what you have to do. You have to communicate the particularities of things that life in its visual realm presents’

I am looking forward to meeting Kurt Moyer in July and August of this summer at the JSS in Civita in Civita Castellana, Italy where he is teaching an affiliate workshop. I am grateful to him for taking the time to have this email interview with me about his painting. Moyer lives and works in Rochester, NY and is represented by the The Gross McCleaf Gallery in Philadelphia and the Warm Springs Gallery in Charlottesville, VA. He has shown in the Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft, Allentown Art Museum, Pennsylvania State Museum, Penn State University, and the Phillips Museum at Franklin and Marshall College among others. Moyer will be having a solo-show at the Gross McCleaf Gallery in January 2016 and will also be featured in a “Landscape” show there July 2015.

Larry Groff:  What were your early years like as a student and as a painter? How did you become a painter?

Kurt Moyer:   I had a great childhood, but not one particularly steeped in art. My parent’s property backs up against the French Creek State Park in Pennsylvania, so as a boy I had miles of woods to explore. I am certain that those childhood experiences with nature helped form my direction as an artist. Like many other young artists, I can remember being singled out as somebody who could draw well. My parents were very supportive and enrolled me in extra art classes at an early age. These classes at local art studios, and later, figure drawing courses for high school kids at the Moore College of art and Design provided me with a good foundation. I was also fortunate to attend a public school that had a well-funded art department including separate classes in Drawing, Painting, Ceramics, and Photography.  Both the art teachers were very good, but it was Mr. Kuhn, the Ceramics teacher, who provided me with the clearest model for what a career in the arts could look like. Tragically, he was killed in a car accident in my junior year of high school.  It’s hard to know how much of an influence this had on me, but I followed his earlier advice and enrolled in Kutztown University (his alma mater) as an art education major.

LG:  Who have been some important influences for you and why?

KM:  It was at Kutztown that I really discovered the enormity of painting.

My focus quickly shifted and I discarded the idea of being an art teacher and a ceramicist. I discovered a different path in painting and printmaking, and fully recognized the lifetime of study and work that lay ahead of me. At that time, there was no way I could pursue a teaching degree, or stand in front of a class and teach something that I had only just discovered myself.

Although there are many artists and teachers who influenced me, George Sorrels is the person I credit most with forming me as an artist. He had already been teaching at Kutztown for almost 30 years when I enrolled in his class and he was nearing the end of his career as a teacher. He taught me that painting was capable of embodying our most profound emotions—that both making and viewing painting can transport us in a spiritual sense.   George opened my eyes to artists of the past and gave me a faith in the language of painting that I have never lost.

At the core of my education were regular painting excursions that he and I would take out into the countryside. It’s hard to underestimate what you can learn by watching a great artist build a painting from start to finish. He was a true mentor and supported me in many ways, including passing down materials and even hiring me to deliver his (sometimes still wet) paintings to his gallery in New York. We kept up with these painting sessions for many years after I graduated, often meeting up with other area artists and KU grads, John David Wissler, Michael Allen, and William Kocher.

LG:   What are some of your most important considerations when starting a painting?

KM:   When it comes to landscapes I am looking for a connection to a place, and every now and then I find a location that’s perfect for me.   I have a couple of sites that I feel like I can go back to over and over without ever losing interest. Partially it is because the light or color is so beautiful and the structures form a good composition, but these places also have something else special, something harder to identify.

In the summer I work from outdoors as much as possible. Recently we moved to a house where I have a few good subjects right in my backyard. This “Edge of the woods” painting was made only a few steps from my studio.

I am also fortunate that about six years ago, just before my daughter was born, a great friend and talented artist, Jason Tennant, invited me to build a small cabin on his land.  I jumped at the opportunity to build what I thought could be a great source for my paintings, a sort of studio-in-the-woods. I knew that after my daughter was born I might not have the opportunity to build it. So every day I would load up my truck with as much lumber as I could and drive the hour or so to the site. I spent the next couple of months hammering the cabin together. It’s a tiny structure, only one 12’x12’ room with a nice deck to paint from. I positioned the cabin to overlook the pond and almost immediately started a series of large canvases that represent the light at different times of day.

LG:   In your paintings of Bathers there are many wonderful groupings of figures in the landscape. Can you tell us something about how you came to this subject matter? Are there certain painters you reference or are inspired from when posing the figures? Can you tell us something about some of the issues you are thinking with regard to your composition and the placement of the figures? Do you make studies from life or use photographic references of models with the bathers in the woodland landscapes? What kinds of reference material do you use with the beach figure paintings and can you say something about your process of making a larger figure composition?

KM:  When I was growing up in South Eastern PA I would often visit the Barnes Foundation and the Philadelphia Museum of art. These collections house many of Cezanne’s bathers, including two of his important “Large Bathers” that he worked on in the last years of his life. These museums and their extensive collections of French impressionism had a huge influence on me and certainly helped shape the kind of art that I am making today. In fact, The Barnes and Philly collections are so full of bather-themed paintings by Cezanne, Renoir, and Matisse that I just accepted “Bathers” as a subject for painting that was as common-place to me as “Landscape” or “Still life”.

I admire Cezanne’s approach to the subject above all others. Particularly, I like how the figures in his paintings exist as a representation of humanity. I don’t see them as individuals nor do I see narratives to be figured out—especially in the later works. They are not all about abstraction either, his figures seem to exist to echo our sensuality and to serve the overall effect of his painting.

For me this subject feels right and I plan on following it wherever it wants to go.

My bather paintings often start with some small kernel of an idea—not a clear vision of what the piece will look like in the end. Usually I begin with an arrangement of male and female figures that feel at least plausible. I have discovered that more than three figures seem to work best—any less makes the painting feel more intimate than I want.

Then I start directly on the canvas in full color and without a lot of preplanning—letting all the elements move around until they finally settle into their place. I often reference my earlier landscape paintings for color, and sometimes I will dig through piles of old figure drawings to help me fix poses. In the summer I occasionally hire models to pose outdoors. These sessions are wonderful and produce invaluable color studies, and sometimes, under the best of circumstances, they even contribute directly to a larger work.

I use photographs rarely, mostly for landscape reference.   I try not to rely on them for my drawing and never for color.

LG:   How much does observation inform your work?

KM:   My year is split roughly in half—generally the summer months are spent working directly from observation and painting from life. While the winter months are focused on studio-generated work. Almost as soon as the leaves start to change color I go into my studio and I don’t paint from the landscape again until spring. Of course I see the beauty in winter but, at least for now, it’s not a part of my work and I have almost no desire to paint it. In the summer my feeling towards the landscape is very primal, and I work frantically to drink it all in. Then it switches off like a light and I return to my studio.

The feeling that I want to achieve with my bather paintings is clearly a “summer feel” so I am able to use my plein air work as resource material to get me through the winter months. We have pretty drastic seasonal changes here in Rochester, NY and I have learned to adapt.

LG:   Anything special about your painting technique? What paints do you put out on your palette? Anything note-worthy about how you paint?

KM:   I don’t think so. I have included a photo of my palette if it’s of any interest to you or your readers. I have been buying almost all my paint from RGH, a small paint manufacturer from upstate NY.   I use a pretty common set of about 20 colors. This is the order they appear on my palette:

• Lead and Titanium white (mixed)
• Burnt Umber
• Burnt Sienna
• Ultramarine Blue
• Cobalt Blue
• Phthalo Blue
• Cerulean Blue
• Phthalo Green
• Sap Green
• Viridian Green
• Cadmium Yellow Light
• Cadmium Yellow Lemon
• Cadmium Yellow Medium
• Sometimes Bright Yellow, Jaune Brilliant, or something similar
• Yellow Ochre
• Indian Red
• Mars Orange
• Alizarin Crimson
• Cadmium Red
• Dioxazine Violet

I use a very small amount of medium: 1/3 cold-pressed linseed oil, 1/3 Linquin, 1/3 Gamsol

LG:   Many of your paintings, especially your landscapes, have an impressive level of naturalistic light and color, why is this important to you?

KM:  That’s very simple. The world is a beautiful place!

People connect very quickly to paintings with naturalistic color. It reminds us of our shared experience.

LG:   You are teaching a painting workshop at the JSS in Civita this summer in Civita Castellana, Italy.July 20th—August 3rd. Can you tell us something about how you go about teaching your workshop there? What has been your attraction to the JSS in Civita?

KM:   I am very proud to be associated with the JSS. And I am honored that Israel Hershberg has asked me to come back to teach this year. I think that Israel and Yael Scalia have set up an amazing program in Civita. It’s hard to imagine a better opportunity for someone interested in landscape painting than to go work from the same sites that Corot used to make such pivotal paintings. Of course there is no shortage of amazing landscape to paint in Italy, but the opportunity to study alongside so many other artists is what makes this program special. This year’s guest of honor is Ann Gale, who I think is a fabulous painter. I purposely scheduled my class so that my students and I will be there at the same time as Ann. I am also looking forward to meeting some very impressive master class students and artist-in-residence painters as well. I really think this confluence of people is the real reason to go. As I mentioned earlier, I feel like painting with other artists is the best way to learn. Even if you only get a glimpse at the way they approach their craft.

We are all such visual and experiential learners—so in my class I will do a lot of demonstrating. I often paint along with my students so that they can see how I think my way through a painting. The core of my teaching is helping students to see and translate what is important to them into a successful painting. Often this means simplifying a complex landscape into more manageable pieces and identifying which colors are most crucial for creating space. My class is open to anyone interested in working directly from the landscape to improve their painting. It’s going to be a great experience—and I still have a few spots left!

LG:   What is most important to you about painting?

KM:   At least once a month I walk into my studio and I feel like my paintings are all wrong. I never feel like I have been wasting my time -but I often feel like I am standing at the bottom of a big mountain and I have a long way to go.

So I feel like the struggle has important role to play in painting. But so does the feeling of connection to a larger world and the moments of pure joy that come when everything seems to be falling into place.

I had the pleasure to interview, Andrew Wykes a British painter who currently professor of painting in Minnesota at the Hamline University in St. Paul. He has been painting at the The Ballinglen Art Foundation in Mayo, Ireland for three summers and is teaching a workshop there this summer (see this link for more info) Wykes studied at Richmond upon Thames College, Epsom School of Art and Design and an MFA in painting from American University. He has taught art for thirty two years in schools and colleges in the UK, Belgium and the US. Andrew has shown his work nationally and internationally including London and in New York. He is a recipient of three Minnesota State Arts Board Initiative Awards in 2009, 2013 and 2015. He was awarded a fellowship at the Ballinglen Arts Foundation in Mayo, Ireland, and is featured in the document film “Painting the Place Between”. He is represented by the Groveland Gallery in Minneapolis, MN and The Water Street Gallery.

Larry Groff: What were your early years like as a student and as a painter? How did you become a landscape painter? 

Andrew Wykes: I have always painted, since I was a boy. I thought everyone did that, only to find out at Art College I had done an enormous amount of work from my past and the other students had made very little.

Back in the 1970’s in the London and the South East of England where I grew up, it was a different world in term of attitudes and outlooks. The landscape was less spoilt and over developed, much has changed since then and not all for the good.

I took a foundation course at Richmond upon Thames College in London in 1978, it was in the days before austerity took a grip. It was a year of exposure to many different art practices, fine art, painting, drawing, figure-drawing, illustration, graphic design, learning how to draw letters and proper spacing. Also learned about book-binding, photography, and an array of printmaking techniques. This was before computers. It was mainly aimed at commercial arts but if one were to be a graphic designer you would have had a really strong foundation to work off. It was rich experience for me.

I still wanted to paint and make fine art, so I then took a three-year Diploma course at Epsom school of Art and design – Just out of London. By then Maggie Thatcher was in power and steep cuts had robbed the art colleges of resources and many were closed. We felt it, as worked in cold studios with little direction. I was lucky to have the other keen students to work with and our teachers were hanging in the London Galleries – so to speak.

LG: Who have been some important influences for you and why?

AW: At the age of fifteen, I was struck by the Constable paintings in the National Gallery collection in London; shadowy, dramatic with an inherent poetic quality. I felt more was going on than mere depiction. The drive behind was on one level a personal experience of place and yet the work holds a pantheistic view of the world. I treasured the dusky tonal colors of horizons and trees; subdued chrome greens and gray pallid Prussian blues. These had a direct and recognizable characteristic that I too saw and enjoyed in the landscape. In reproductions of Constable this does not come over. Also, what impressed me, and still does, is Constable’s determination to get it right. While employing a controlled, well ordered direct means of working, the goal to make a parallel of what he sees in real time and space, actual on a flat surface and to give immutability.

There also so many other painters I look at but in fact it is formal aspects of music that is more influential now. In my studio at Epsom I remember frequently listening to such contemporary music as Brian Eno’s “Ambient Four, O Land” along with other obscure orchestral works. But before that I was always drawn to the landscape around me. It was and still is my solace.

LG: What are your most important considerations in looking for a view to paint? 

AW: I don’t really look for a view to paint. I used to. But I feel there is too much to look at. If I was pinned down, I would say it is to do with nerves and personal preferences that come out of a whole internal catalog of memoires, geographical and autobiographical and desires to acquire the experience of the seen. I find looking and returning to the same subject over numerous  sessions rewarding. I tend to go deep into a subject—not wide.

LG: How much does observation inform your work?

AW: Observation is vital. I have always got great enjoyment from seeing. I feel privileged that I have this gift to see. I also think it is to do with retaining the child’s eye of the world before label’s for object’s disguise the subject.

To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees. (Paul Valery)

Painting is all about seeing. It is learning to understand what one sees in formal terms of course. I am not concerned with depiction or likeness. I am battling with my preconceptions and how to make a spatial world work on a flat surface.

Painting is abstract. It about universal feelings. But on a less formal level, active looking has all the rich trappings of meditation or prayer or oneness, the joy and surprise during a rare moment of lucidity.

LG: What can you tell us about your process? Anything special about your painting technique? What paints do you put out on your palette? Anything note-worthy about how you approach to painting outside? 

AW: The way I work outside changes. It is all to do with practicality. Ideally I would like to have a place where every is set, up and can stay there undisturbed for an unspecified amount of time while I come and go.

But there is an attraction to stripping everything down to the bare essentials. I grew up very near to Windsor Great Park in the UK. I would walk several miles to my location. Everything had to be carried. Small back, easel, food, tea and the appropriate clothes for the weather.

My palette is a mess, no organization. Often more paint on me than the palette! I am clumsily and naturally get paint everywhere—food too!

A lot of my painting now, is made in the studio from memory and photographs. Here I am able to work with very strict systems or processes. I give myself rules throughout a piece. For example a lot of the bigger pieces are made with many rolls of masking tape, my hands and paper towels. I work the paint into the canvas with my hands. No brushes (I never clean them and they go hard so they are useless to me) lids fall off the tubs of paint and get lost in the piled debris on the floor. I don’t have time to clean up and be tidy. That detracts form the urgency of painting. It is a bit of a performance I suppose. I can’t teach that stuff, we all find our managerial solutions, what works best for one does not for another. Although I would not recommend my approach!

LG: Many of your paintings seem to have a very active and assertive surface, with energetic marks that emphasizes the horizontal and vertical relationships and underlying grid. Can you tell us something about what you are thinking about with regard to the surface and marks?

AW: I have a strong sense of composition structure balance and space if what I see around me. I am irritated when see a building that is off-plumb. There is so much structure in Constable and of course Cezanne and also Frank Auerbach. But the structure and build up of lines also asserts the pressure or tensions between planes and spaces. The surface left on the canvas is the residue of a process of addition and subtraction of paint.

LG: I understand you teach at Hamline University in St Paul, MN. Do you teach landscape painting or is primarily studio based training? Is landscape painting something that is taught in the universities or it something people need to figure out more on their own?

AW: I have taught for over 30 years and I’m constantly figuring out ways to deconstruct the students assumptions and fears about painting. I teach Drawing and Painting from a variety of visual stimuli, both in and outside the studio. I also make work that is more conceptually based without visual stimuli to draw from.

On the whole students are overwhelmed by the idea of landscape it is too esoteric for most of them. Some are interested, they tend to be well grounded in others area of school as well, they seem to understand analogy and the different between loneliness and being alone—which painting is. Perhaps it takes an older soul to love landscape.

LG: What is the painting scene like in Minnesota? Do you miss being near the major art hubs like NYC or London? 

AW: Minnesota has good support for artists in general. And what I have found is artist tend to connect with each other more so than back in the UK. Minneapolis is not what I would call a painting city. Some of the attitudes of what is hip verge towards rather dull installation art. I feel galleries and schools are showing and teaching from a fashion that’s gone. It’s either a derivative of 1990’s installation work or crass sentimentalist landscape. Good painting is dismissed for not having content. I have never been one for fashion. In London painting is painting without apology. Yes, I miss London, I had a privileged upbringing being exposed to so many free public collections; cutting edge shows and good art schools.

LG: You are leading a landscape painting workshop at the Ballinglen Art Foundation. August 4th – 12th 2015 in Ballycastle, Ireland this summer. Can you tell us something about how you go about teaching your workshop there? What is the attraction to Ballycastle for landscape painters?

AW: I was awarded a fellowship at The Ballinglen Art Foundation 7 years ago and this is my third time going back. The landscape in that part of Mayo is quite extraordinary. It is like going back into the past there are moments when I feel I am back in the 1960s, some of the cars and road signs… I suppose it’s the unpretentious, undeveloped land. Stone walls and fields that have been that way for centuries. For a painter you are accepted and uninterrupted. The weather is so changeable from one hour to the next, for me it heightens the sense of drama and urgency to get something down.

It is challenges the way one works and that is a good thing.

LG: What matters to you most in painting?

AW: How can paint address the sensation of being in a space so as to rival the experience of the place itself? This is a question of timelessness that continues to haunt me.

The experience of painting a landscape “on site” can bring me feelings of refuge or unease as well as melancholy or hope—feelings that hold me in the present moment. I am aware that the landscape itself in unresponsive—the love I feel for it will not change it from its position of indifference.

This past spring the painter Jane Culp invited Celia Reisman and I to visit her home and studio complex in the Anza Borrego desert area about an hour and a half from our home San Diego. Ms. Culp bought a large expanse of property here in 2000 and eventually built her studio and strawbale adobe home which looks over a wide vista of pristine desert-mountain wilderness. She has been living here full-time since 2009. I would like to thank Jane Culp for her enormous generosity with her time, talking at length about her background, painting process, and thoughts on painting. Ms. Culp has had many solo shows including the John Davis Gallery in Hudson, New York, The Painting Center, New York, NY and the Bowery Gallery in New York City. She has been reviewed by John Goodrich in 2014 Jane Culp: Suspect Terrain who stated:

These paintings have something of the quality of devotional works, as if the artist sought to subsume herself in the conjuring of the transcendent, using purely traditional means. (Imagine, in the twenty-first century: composing in paint!) This may be why they convey such a strong sense of the moment — a moment belonging to both the artist and nature, as if their exertions were simultaneous. One suspects that Culp relies on the drama of the desert to trigger and shape her ongoing engagement with nature. It’s fortunate she’s found her motif; her landscapes at John Davis are as vital and original as any being produced today.

Lance Esplund in the Wall Street Journal, 2010, stated:

…Ms. Culp arrives in these expressive oils, charcoals and watercolors at a place of structural clarity and composure—while making palpable the rush she feels interacting with nature. Her pictures’ restless skies and stepped, sharply carved mountain peaks retain the vastness, monumentality and naturalism of their subjects. Yet ultimately she is painting not the landscape but the thrill of engagement.

Larry:   What made you decide to be a painter?   What were your early years like as a painter? Who were some of your biggest influences?

Jane:  I began to draw at 4 years to make sense of the world, there was no decision or choice.   My painting teachers, Fred Conway and Arthur Osver at Washington University art school taught me love and reverence for the painting masters, Rembrandt, Tintoretto, Rubens and Cezanne while working from life figure sessions. My MFA at Yale was tough going, perceptual painting was cast out by Pop Art, and my scholarship withdrawn.   Living in NYC in the 1960’s was raw but a fun challenge for a midwesterner with no money nor influential friends. I have a lot of adventure stories from NYC about staying alive, and understanding the larger reality of politics, and painting. They said”if you can keep painting for 10 years after school then you will continue to paint for all your life” I did because i wanted so badly to have both the freedom and individuated path of painting to give my life meaning. Using body based BioEnergetic therapy, I painted my way into Abstract Expressionism from the Renaissance with Gustin and de Kooning, and later for my landscape years, found painting articulation with Soutine and Titian.

Larry: When did you first come here to Anza, California and how did you go about building your home and studio out here in such a remote desert area?

Jane:  In 2004 Dorland Art Colony burnt to the ground in a wildfire. Dorland had been my landscape painting refuge from NYC for nearly 20 years. Cabins were considered only a “skin”to separate you from nature while living within her cycles. The Anza land looked like a national park in its sheer beauty, so I spent my sheckles and bought 60 acres where my friends: a painter, a kayak river guide, and a surfer, built a studio for me like one I had at Dorland. The Mojave desert winter proved to be unbearable while living in my studio so I built a small but high tech, solar powered off grid straw bale cabin. It’s very quiet with 2-foot thick straw walls, environmentally friendly but endless work to keep up. That’s my bargain with this magnificent land–to live with it gently and leave a small footprint.

Larry:  You recently helped the book The Unpicturelikeness of Pollock, Soutine & Others:Selected Writings & Talks by Louis Finkelstein. come into being. Louis Finkelstein was your late husband and you own many of his paintings. Can you tell us something about why this book is such a great read for painters?

Jane:  Louis was a real perceptual painter, and he wrote from his painting experience sifted thru his tremendous classical knowledge of both the history of art and of human culture. He was a renaissance man. He wrote about large ideas, about what he saw, read, experienced and understood. He analyzes art fashions with knifelike, surgical precision. His writing is dense with ideas and insights and may sometimes comes across as difficult because of his passion for particulars and articulation. It is challenging to digest his writings but they yield a painters feast of content that is immediately relevant in the studio. His writings push painters to be the best painters they can be. He believed in the possibilities of the written English language; that thru it we could define our human condition and the language of painting.

[For more information on Louis Finkelstein please see links to a LOUIS FINKELSTEIN: THE LATE PASTELS IN THE CONTEXT OF HIS ARTISTIC THINKING a brilliant essay by Martica Sawinon Lori Bookstein Fine Art and the article on Painting Perceptions, Louis Finkelstein, On Painterly From the 06/27/2000 NYT Obituary “…As a critic, Mr. Finkelstein wrote for Artnews and the College Art Journal. He was highly regarded as a teacher both at Queens College, where he worked from 1964 to 1989, and at the Yale University School of Art. He was a regular and popular lecturer at the New York Studio School in Manhattan from 1966 to 1998.”

Larry:  What was it like to be married to Louis Finkelstein? Can you talk about how he influenced your work?

Jane:   Living with Louis was vital, fun, and made me stretch intellectually.  We were passionately in love, that never changed. We worked hard at painting everyday all day, and dinners were late and sweet. He was an intrepid chef in his apple green apron, all the while gesturing with forks and knifes while booming out art ideas with his distinctive accented NY voice. At breakfast he gave extensive art history lectures to me at 8am while I was still torpid, or put forth important art ideas on the crowded freeway while I weekly drove us to NYC (he was a rotten driver) from Stillwater NJ, our landscape painting spot. All his waking hours were consumed by painting, reading or writing about art; he never stopped.He taught, painted and wrote with great dedication about seeing the world and its values in terms of painting and its ideas. He lived with the highest of intellectual aspirations and his facial expression was of curiosity when he died.

Larry:   You’ve likely been asked this a million times, but what keeps you drawn you to paint these forms for so long?

Jane:   I love rocks, I don’t know why.
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Larry:   Living things, like trees, seem to be less visible in your work however your rocks are alive in a different sense.

Jane:   They have an active history.  They were formed by wind,rain, and by tectonics that push up and crack apart as the rain filters through. And so the West is full of young rocks and young land being formed. The East is full of old used up rocks with trees growing over everything and in your face. So I like the West where I can see what has happened to the earth and what is still happening. I’m  totally captivated by this. Why? Because it speaks to me. Because I can look at a rock and  feel its history in my body.  I’m close to the earth, the sky is over me and huge. When painting, my body is very close to the rocks, the landscape is all quite alive.

Larry: You paint these mysterious, monolithic forms in a rather harsh, barren environment. You live and paint where there are few people around. You’re not painting in a studio or school where lots of other artists around. Why this attraction to solitude?

Jane:   I use to love to watch the ants build things in my grandmother’s rock garden. I turned over every rock to see what was going on under it. I still feel the same spellbound curiosity about nature.  I cannot get any peace where there’s a bunch of artists fighting with each other. I tried studio painting for years, and I hated it. I hated people around me and making noise. I don’t want to know what they’re doing. I want talk with nature, and if I’m going to spend my time painting, which is hard enough, I’d rather be painting someplace that I love where I can hear my feelings  speak. When I moved here, i felt i had moved into my drawings. As Ellen Maloy says in her book, The Anthropology of Turquoise: Reflections on Desert, Sea, Stone, and Sky

“Of all the things I wondered about on this land, I wondered the hardest about the seduction of certain geographies that feel like home—not by story or blood but merely by their forms and colors. How our perceptions are our only internal map of the world, how there are places that claim you and places that warn you away. How you can fall in love with the light.”

Larry: So do you think having the solitude effects the level of your concentration when your working? Do you find that your head is in a different space if you don’t have other people around?

Jane:   Yeah, I’m extremely distracted by people. I wish I weren’t. It’s been a bane to my existence.  out here I feel in harmony with my surroundings, like birds following me around, watching.  I feel quite peaceful here and I don’t know what else to do with life except find a little peace. I certainly can’t change the present world situation much.

Jane:              I can help my friends the birds and little creatures by making a wildlife refuge here. Keeping this land wild for them. I think wilderness has its own order and this resonates in my being. I cannot stand an artificial enforced order. When a rock cracks it has a reason for cracking. When a rock is smooth, it has a reason. visual forms that have consequences are vital. Every thrust of movement I see in nature and feel when I’m drawing has a direction, has a consequence because I see it in  the  landscape in front of me having consequences. I  feel it and try to paint that. I can’t feel that in the East with the trees, houses and weeds in my way, they garble my brain.

Larry:    The other thing that you mentioned too was the color out here. That the color out here is so important to you versus what’s back East.

Jane:      Green, I hate the Eastern green.  Back East it’s all fat opulent green which just sits there vegetating and takes up all the space in summer.  In spring it’s a chorus of shrieking green.  The colors here are elemental, my pigments contain them and they explain how the earth moves. I love the warm reds and oranges of the earth, mysterious in their color layering that follows  folds created by tectonics in the earth. The light colored sandy grit of decomposed granite underfoot is the scrubbed remains of rock and then there is that bit of turquoise light that hides within violet shadows…

I think the color here has a lot more individuated character, it fits the forms. The attempted greens of the scratchy little brush are sparse, deep dark with orange umber black in them.  I like the shape variety of clouds in the always changing big sky. The West has different clouds than back East, the winds tear and pull at them incessantly fighting for their moisture. Those elliptical clouds formed over the Mojave desert are just killers. They are amazing beings. You can see what’s going on in the weather patterns out here so much easier than back East. Nothing is buried. It’s all obvious. I can’t spend time trying to find where the bottom of a tree comes because there’s a bush in front of me. I don’t want to, and I’m not sure I even want them to overlap. I just want to see the nature of the beast in front of me, the nature of the creature, the nature of the mountain, the tree, the rock, whatever it is. I’m not interested in static patterning and design, instead I’m curious about uncodified irregularity. So it has to be a natural order for me to spin the story. I can’t paint intuitively without movement and natural order.

Larry: Maybe what you’re looking at out there in the desert, these forms, the rocks and everything; it’s almost like they’re containing you. You have this expressive energy with making the art, but these forms help keep everything in check. It’s keeping that expressive power in check, channeling it into responding to what your response is to the desert forms. Perhaps it’s that you are really an abstract expressionist painter that stays within the visual boundaries of what you’re looking at. You’re completely free as long as you stay within these boundaries. If you have unlimited freedom …

Jane:              You can’t do it.

Larry: Then there’s no structure. There’s no composition. The thing just sort of falls apart into mush.

Jane:              It’s flabby.

Larry: Flabby, good way of putting it.

Jane:              It’s true.

Larry:              I don’t see your paintings as wanting to be naturalistic, They seem more like a strong expressionistic response to nature. You’re going at it in different ways. Obviously not the same way that Corot, Monet or California plein air painters would do it. Aren’t you painting it more along the expressionistic lines of Soutine or Oskar Kokoschka…?

Jane:           To me they are naturalism in a very real sense: I think we are just starting to see Nature for what it is, not as a cooked concept. Ironically, we are seeing Nature just as we are losing Nature. Maybe my paintings look strong and expressive because I try to be one with a sparse and chiseled landscape, but I really am trying to paint what I see, feel and know. I guess the expression comes from the feeling of identifying with natural forces.

Yes, those painters and Titian too, hopefully.  Have you ever seen any of Titian’s drawings? How many times he changed them as he worked. First the figure was leaning over the woman and then he moves in toward her, then closer still and then reaches toward…all in the lines of one drawing. His painting are like that too. So I would include Titian with Soutine, I really think they are buddies. And they move. That’s how they do it. Things are moving always in the process of becoming and then they do become alive to us otherwise the painting becomes a static design or a surface pattern.

Larry:            I recently heard someone say that bad abstract painting designs and bad representational painting illustrates. You seem to avoid both these pitfalls because of the structure with its rhythm and gestural forces; your color and marks lend a visually poetic sensibility to these paintings.

Jane:            I paint intuitively following a rhythm that my eyes feel as they travel thru the space of the landscape.  The structure or ordering of forms has to support this rapid movement. So I put the forms on an axis, like I learned to put figures on an axis then I can see them in space and flat too. I do that, or try to because I don’t know any further way to reduce them and their nature, except on an axis.

Everything leans like Cezanne’s ptg. of Madame Cezanne in the Met. To make sculpture more alive, the early Greeks broke the symmetry, this up, that down. Rembrandt’s light and dark masses–part of the form rises, the other part falls.  The whole form of a landscape can be treated this way.

If you concentrate to put the thing on an axis, then you do hold onto it and I’m sometimes impetuous, or I can’t or maybe I’ll use the horizon line as an axis…as a set-up.  But this is all technical stuff. The painting depends on me striving first to realize the presence of the mysterious character and forces of the landscape and then  try to push the conversation. In my best paintings, a particular landscape presented itself as an immediate visual take of emotion, it grabbed me.

Larry:             Your work has a great deal of surface texture, are you doing something with the sizing to manipulate the texture of the gesso of the ground to respond to the subject somehow?

Jane:   I use a thick oil ground on the isolated masonite board.  But yes, I’ve made underpainting  bas–relief diagram of the landscape area I was painting with a spatula. This helped me understand the structure of the place.  However upon painting directly upon the built up ground I found myself coloring it in. it was repetitive,imprisoning and not inspiring. Years ago I did paint  directly the tones seen on my little clay bas relief landscape sculptures to learn.

Jane:              Painting and sculpture, they’re two different things. Painting is paint, it’s color, and it’s tone, and you use it as a relief, perhaps, in the way of a relief, but it isn’t relief. It’s painting. They don’t mix: they seem to negate each other.  Even the Greek painted sculpture doesn’t quite work. It becomes something else, decorative.

Larry:              You like having texture be independent of the actual mark.

Jane:              I like the texture of brushstrokes to evidence the process.  I find that my marks are primal and articulate. When I’m making a drawing or watercolor trying to comprehend the whole thing, they tend to be large arm movements.  I do the same thing when I make the under-structure on the board, so I will find that somehow they work right in. There’s bound to be some analogous rhythm in it, a rhythm that works and guides my gestalt. Under, over, it works. It was just by chance that I found it.

I’m just extremely grateful to have it, because until then I couldn’t feel any substance in my paintings.

Larry:              How much time do you spend looking at the subject before you make the mark. What would the ratio of looking to mark making be?

Jane:             It depends on where I am. There’s always a moment of silence before I start, where I ground myself and think, decide what’s important. When I’m on residency or in the Mojave desert I would see something very beautiful and it comes on you like a storm. It presents itself. That’s what you’re trying to paint, that initial presence. It’s better to sit and contemplate it a little so you can fully feel it. Nothing else, if you lose sight of that one vision–and it does change, probably immediately. If you don’t get it then you won’t have anything. You can’t get the character of a person unless you get it right away. Time passing just doesn’t allow it.

Larry:           So are most of your sittings in a couple, two or three sittings, or one sitting, or does it vary?

Jane:              For one quick sitting it will go three or four hours.  in the intense Anza Borrego  desert heat it has to be that, and I wish it didn’t. Paintings near the studio let me go back and forth 3 or 4 times.  In Yosemite National park  I have  painted several particular motifs over and over thru many years. Joshua Tree is now a drive through park, it’s harder and harder to paint in it.

Larry:             Death Valley seems to be just absolutely incredible.

Jane:              It’s very incredible, and you think this is hot. Well, Death Valley is really hot, the light is blinding, and its beautiful. It’s hard to remain there very long. I think I was there 10 days and that’s all I could take. I was camping out.

Death Valley is flat in the middle and any standing water is brackish and filled with the salt of distilled heavy minerals, it’s deadly. It’s an amazing place. Even in back country off-road camping there wasn’t any shade, just harsh unforgiving pounding light but there were big rocks and dazzling earth colors.

Jane:   Paintings teach you about how to see. Cezanne now there’s one, I still keep looking at him. When I first looked at a reproduction of his watercolor landscape Bend in the Road as a student, I couldn’t figure it out. About six months later, still looking at it–upside down, sideways, with rapid glances backwards. Suddenly one day I looked and it started to fold out like a staircase. Things came out, they just stepped out off the page.

Larry:           You seem to  paint the similar places over and over again, reminds me a little of Cezanne and his Mont Sainte-Victoire series of paintings…

Jane:   Yeah. It’s a landscape legacy.  To me, Cezanne made landscape painting into real golem painting. Before that landscapes were usually the background of things. I studied the 17th century Dutch landscape painters for a while along with Cezanne. Dutch paintings are wonderfully dramatic in the light and shadows, the use of the horizon, you feeling apart of the landscape and even the paint.

You can see a mountain so many kinds of ways. The Chinese know it too, the mountain continues to elude you.    The author of “Arctic Dreams”  writer Barry Lopez  says, “Nature eludes you, it changes its mood so quickly you will never be able to define it.” He says you can go out and pick up a leaf or  remember the scent of a bush, or see some scat, he says you try to put all these pieces together of the land that you love and hope to define it.  He said, “The land will always elude you.” And it does.

Painting is a slow way of seeing. Understanding what you’re seeing.

Larry:             But you lived in New York for years, right? So how did you deal with living so far away from your subject?

Jane:   Not easily. Louis and I would go out to paint in the Delaware Water Gap in summers. In the winter I would take a month or two off and come to Dorland Mountain Art Colony here in Southern Ca.and do my favorite, western painting.

I would leave him to come out here. Actually when we first got married I had a six month stay at Dorland and I left right after we got married. He had to come out and get me. It was one of the two times he came West..

Larry:              He didn’t like it out here?

Jane:   No. There’s no trees. His paintings show how he loved trees. He thought the West was awful. We drove days to get to Bryce Canyon, he said with great anger ” I can’t paint here–there is nothing to paint, it’s chaos” and we packed up and left.  And he looked at the Grand Canyon and he said, “This is like Hell! I can’t imagine walking down there, it’s frightful.” He hated it. He did some nice work in Zion National Park and Yosemite. We had a good time, but we never came back. He would say in Yosemite how much he liked it and his paintings showed this and he did make some lovely pastels. Then he’d get back and he’d bad mouth the west. It was funny.

Larry;         A  true New Yorker.

Jane:               He grew up there, he called himself a “child of the Met”.

Larry:              What did you think of the Bay area figurative painters?

Jane:   I thought they were very painterly. I love Diebenkorn, Park, Bischoff. I particularly love early Diebenkorn’s landscapes and Oakland museum has a dynamite collection of many early Bay Area landscape painters.

Larry:              They do. I saw that a little while ago. They have a great collection, David Park, Joan Brown.

Jane:   Have you ever heard of Hassel Smith ?

Larry:              No, I’m not familiar.

Jane:   He was a landscape painter. He make these graphic, abstract landscapes around Diebenkorn’s time or a little before. There was a Bay Area group of landscape painters then. They were experimental; they tried to do the abstracted landscapes with an eye toward still life composition.

Larry:              Didn’t most of them paint urban scenes or figurative? I don’t remember seeing that many pure landscape like what you’re doing.

Jane:   Whats “pure”?.   Concern with keeping the landscape topography and character of primary concern? …early Diebenkorn painted experimental landscape..

Larry:              Early Diebenkorn was?

Jane:   Still  landscape. Beautiful, magnificent paintings. they were the Berkeley hills and landscape concerns later continued thru his big light filled last paintings…the Ocean Park Series.

Larry:              Oh right, the Berkeley Hills.

Larry:            He was painting from observation then or was he studio??

Jane:   He painted from observation then, thru the windows and remembering. He was working from his abstract thoughts too.

Jane:             He looked a lot at Early Rothko I think. And then Hans Hoffman, I think he was influenced, they had a big Hoffman collection in Berkeley.

Larry:             Would you say that Hans Hoffman is someone that was an influence on you?

Jane:   I did look at his paintings. As a teacher, he was too strong. Louis never studied with him because he felt he would be too influenced by Hoffman, but some people did like Mercedes Matter did, I think.

[please see the highly relevent Frank Hobbs blog post that reproduces Mercedes Matter essay from a 1973 NY Times article on How Do You Learn to Be an Artist? where she talks about drawing, Plasticity in art, Hans Hoffman and more]

Larry:              Did you? Did you study with Hoffman?

Jane:   No, I’m not that old.

Larry:              You’re not that old. I get the timeline mixed up. I knew you were in graduate school at Yale in the early 60’s, so he wasn’t teaching then?

Jane:   Louis was teaching, I was his student.

Larry:              Hoffman wasn’t teaching then?

Jane:   No, Hoffman was not teaching at Yale then. I think he was in Provincetown. He might have been out there teaching.  Mercedes grew up knowing Hoffman thru her father, Arthur Carles

Larry:              Now I read  that one of Louis’ teachers was Edwin Dickinson, is that right?

Jane:   Louis put a book together for him at Yale. He proofed the plates. He made sure the color was right for him on it.

Larry:             They have such different approaches.

Jane:   Yeah. Well Louis liked different; he liked particularly artists who were good and were successful. Success influenced him,  And yes, he really liked Edwin Dickinson. He liked Wolf Kahn too. Because he was successful. He admired success, that get up and go. Who else did he like? Oh a lot of painters. Always the masters, he could tell you anybody’s painting and he’d know where each painting was in what museum. In just about what room.

Larry:              He was also really pushing painting from observation when that was a really radical thing to be doing back then. I mean very few people were thinking about that in a modernist way. Back then.

Jane:   Yeah, well it was the abstract expressionist time and he continued to paint representational. He did dabble a little, I saw some good early abstract paintings and sculptures of his.. but he always returned to paint from life.  He believed in it.

Larry:              Back then, it was probably unheard of to have a teacher talking about painting from life, like what Louis Finkelstein was doing. It just seemed so out of step with what other people were doing back then.

Jane:   Yeah, a certain period that was true. A period in this country.

Larry:              Why is painting is having such a hard time holding on in the art world these days?

Jane:          First of all, What art world? You must be referring to the Art Market of commerce and fashion. Painting is a slow way of looking, it’s thoughtful. When was that of value?  Everyone is in a hurry, they don’t want to think.  Career artists don’t want to develop a vision, they want a style. Especially the young painters in graduate school. They don’t even know what a vision is. They  think they are born with this talent that makes them great or makes them hot. This is not a vision, more often it’s fashion. You have to know and love the tradition of the language of painting and want to keep that tradition alive with your own vision. Like the medieval monks keeping the art of writing and reading alive during the dark ages. Most likely, you have to work years for a painting vision ; you’ll get more cranky and more vision as you get older. It distills.

Larry:              I’ve heard a few people say that it used to be that the painters getting out of art school would basically go into seclusion and not show for many years, just paint. Maybe show a few friends but they wouldn’t really show or promote their work until they the work felt solid and right. Often now students want to show as soon as they get out of school, or even while they’re in school. Wanting instant gratification.

Jane:             I thought, you know after 50 years of painting, it will get easier. It doesn’t. For me, painting doesn’t seem to get more facile. Maybe for some people it does. Louie’s got better towards the end. I think you get better if you just keep working at it. You just have to work work work, and then you have to let loose, just like life. When you’re talking about getting into the zone, you’re letting loose of the control.

Larry:              It is paradoxical that sometimes in order to really lose control and get into that zone of being unselfconscious; you have to increase the control of your looking, to heighten your attentiveness.

Jane:             Absolutely! It’s tricky business. Hopefully when you’re painting, you’re not thinking these things, you’re just going after what you see, which is  good reason to paint perceptually-to stop the chatter.

Larry:   We were talking earlier on the way here about the idea of plasticity in painting.

Jane:             Oh yeah, bad word, but it’s such a good idea.

Larry:   What is the definition for you?

Jane:            Louis’ definition of it was that “Plasticity is the expression of volume–not simply a description of three-dimensionality, but volume as the primary standard of thematic coherence and meaning. When he spoke of Wagner’s music as “sounding forms in space” critic Eduard Hanslick was talking about something similar… Volume or “voluminosity”–the character of having volume–is to me the most global and rigorous standard by which the integration of a picture might be measured.  It is also the most expressive property of a picture. It carries with it a sense of our own bodies, along with other bodies, in the physical world. It is the basis of all imagination.”

My definition is when every part and element works with and is conscious of each other in the whole painting and there is some sort of consequence and movement to this, so a painting is vital and alive.

Illusion is not experiential and when you are painting illusion, you are usually painting a conventional idea. You’re painting only  an idea of what you’re seeing. It’s prosaic. You’re being literal about something. You’re not being poetic with many levels of interpretation of meaning.

Larry:  I’m not sure I follow.

Jane:             Well it is if you are locked into the idea of foreground, middleground, and background.

Larry:              Oh I see.

Jane:             With an idea that that is indeed possible. It’s not what your eyes are seeing. It might be  your experience when you walk, but that’s an idea that the Renaissance gave you.

Larry:              Right, right.

Jane:             It’s a nice way of ordering the teeming landscape.

Larry:   It’s a construction to make a painting.  It’s one way to do it

Larry:              That doesn’t necessarily mean, using some sort of system of perspective, like one point perspective or whatever. It could just mean, you could do it in a very general way, like Corot, a landscape that he would do, would have very clear definitions of space and boundary.

Jane:             Yeah but wasn’t he trying to paint what he saw?

Larry:              Yeah. He wasn’t following a system particularly, but he did have foreground, middleground, and background.

Jane:             it’s a good clarifying and ordering principle, I could certainly use more of it.

Larry:              What I meant more was, like your paintings, I think there is a plasticity, but it’s seeing the painting as a whole unit. It’s more of its abstract qualities that it has this sort of …

Jane:             You have to see the whole thing.

Larry:             It’s different than illusionistic space. It’s a different …

Jane:             You’re participating on, like you say, a flat level at the same you’re participating in depth, and when Hoffman said … When they talked about the picture plane flattening depth into the picture plane, bringing all the depth into that action.. When you squash your depth that has been experienced into the picture plane, you’re bringing a large energy  into that squash, because there’s all that room that you’re squashing. It has a force that a flat painted plane won’t ever have, and probably a plasticity that it won’t have either. When I think from looking at Mondrian’s trees and then into what he went into eventually, he kept that. Remember his trees?

Larry:             Sure

Jane:             How much space in between each branch? How much volume and tension there was? I think if you don’t bring it to the surface somehow in your own history in time, it’s not going to be there. You don’t just start painting flat. I think that’s why Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns are who they are. I think they’re just glorified commercial artists, and I’ve always believed that. I think they’re very good, I think they’re very tasty. There’s a lot of physicality and stuff that humans like. It’s delicious, but I don’t think that they have that compression, I don’t think they have that tension in their work. I never have thought that. I think no matter how fast you move your arm, you’re still not going to necessarily get it. I think that’s where the splits started. We highly value perceptual painting, I think they didn’t work from perception. They took objects from the world around them and plastered that onto the painting, but that’s not perceptual painting, nor do they have volume.That’s not running it through your mind as something, your experience, above all, and your feelings, judgments and your calls, those are hard. Those painters don’t risk. No risk. The  outcome of the painting was already cooked; it was a done deal.

Jane:              Plasticity!! That word again.If it had been any other word, it might have taken off . People have said that over and over. He just chose the wrong word. One night we all sat together and tried to think of a word and we couldn’t think of one. I think we were all having dinner at Irving Kriesberg’s and were talking about it.

Larry:              Do you think they’re talking about plasticity in the art schools today?  I wonder if it is even on the radar of most people?

Jane:            Not at all.  People have no idea that kind of coherence in paint even exists.  It’s too bad. It’s such a loss. It really is exciting. I find it all very exciting but god knows they don’t have a clue. If you can’t read the visual language of painting you can’t feel it. I think of perceptual painting as a way to keep the language of painting alive, like the monks scribing during the middle ages keeping books alive.

How a painters eyes see..They used to teach like that a long time ago. I think Irving Kreisburg wrote a book like that ( http://www.amazon.com/Irving-Kriesberg/e/B001HP6BQE) and other people have too.

Jane:   Do you know Irving Kreisburg? http://irvingkriesberg.com/index.html

Larry:   No.

Jane:              He’s such an expressive , humorous, generous painter. You don’t know him? He died about 10 years ago. Good painter, he did nice big rich colorful physical paintings of animals and white owls .. but they were symbols of animals, they were patterned but plastic. They were very expressionist, abstract expressionist. I adored his painting. I’ve got a pastel of his somewhere. He was just the best guy. He was an old Jewish hippie who married a Palestinian and he brought that mentality. He was this encompassing man. It wasn’t that he adored animals, he came from the freedom and cartoon orientated painting of the Chicago school. He’s a really good painter, but you don’t hear about it. Just like George McNeil.(http://www.amy-nyc.com/artists/george-mcneil

Larry:             I was at an art event recently where someone was lecturing on the importance of painting as a vehicle for social change. However, to me it sounds more like wishful thinking, I just don’t see many political views being changed by paintings. I suspect most people who attend art shows are already predisposed to thinking more about social change. Political-themed paintings are more likely to just be preaching to the art choirs. However, on an aesthetic level maybe you get people to appreciate a new way of looking at our world. Maybe some people will be moved by a painting enough to slow down more to appreciate an new, previously unknown aspect of beauty. Maybe it gives new incentives for making the world worth saving…

Jane:              It’s more often the other way around that the artist is the mirror, the vibration of the society around him. The  political artists and  their viewers are not changing, they’re simply presenting and acknowledging, “Here it is, this what’s going on,” whether you like it or not. Changing, no, maybe one person. I have made a lot of political art for demonstrations and it is just cathartic in the end.  I know of a couple of people who changed because of my landscape work, but they also were able to change and learn more about painting. That had nothing to do with my work. They were open to it, with this direction instead of that direction, little bits. Little bits and little tweaks, that’s about it. It certainly does promote enjoyment of their senses and opens their senses and their questioning and things like that. It keeps their minds open, open enough to look in the first place. IF they possess the mind to do that, if they want to learn.

Larry: I worry that the knowledge about what makes great paintings great is gradually being lost. Schools aren’t really teaching it and few really promote it in a big way. Good painting is not selling as well as it used to be. More and more people seem to be unable to differentiate between good and bad painting. I know this is vague but I worry for the future of painting. Of course there are many terrific painters out there but it increasingly seems difficult for them to make a living doing this. Difficult to show work many times and even more difficult to sell. Even teaching to support yourself is very hard.

Jane:      The planet is dying and the people are crazy. So how can anyone distinquish good painting?        I know Louis used to say that there weren’t very many people that knew painting in the first place when he was alive. He also said, “If I went into painting to make a living, I would never have gone into painting.” It was not expected to make a living off painting. It was not part of it. It was a vocation. It was something you aspired to like meditation to make yourself better, to understand more of the world like a scientist. It wasn’t commercial art it was fine art. Galleries now expect you to bring a following of buyers to them as part of the deal.. so their connections and  sales must be iffy. The large art fairs and online art sites are hurting them financially.

Larry: The booby prize for destitute painters is that you get to enjoy your life. Having a good life doing what you love.

Jane:    Its an existential prize. ..Then we shouldn’t worry about it, should we? We should just go ahead and paint because that’s what we love to do. Furthermore, we don’t have a choice because that’s what we had to do. I don’t think I ever had a choice.  After I was about four or five I stopped having a choice, I just had to draw. Probably you were too maybe without knowing it. That’s just the way it is. I just wish we could convince more people that it’s a good way to go, really a good way to live your life. I have taught art to isolated elderly and disabled adults and troubled children, and doing painting has turned many of their unhappy lives into joy.

Luckily, I’ve known a couple of collectors . Sadly their houses are overloaded with my stuff now. There are many collectors that can see well enough to buy your work but they’re very hard to find as your time and venues are limited. In my case,  they tend to love the wild landscape and be contemplative people. But they are there.  Sometimes they see your work somewhere and contact you. It isn’t over until it’s over.

Robert Dukes was interviewed by Neil Plotkin for Painting Perceptions in 2011 before his his show at the Browse & Darby in London. Mr. Dukes informed me recently of his upcoming show at his Browse & Darby gallery in London. (11 November – 04 December) Browse & Darby shows the work of leading representational artists, currently having an Euan Uglow exhibition, one of Robert Dukes former teachers.

Robert Dukes is London based painter who studied at Grimsby School of Art followed by the Slade School of Art with Patrick George, Euan Uglow, and Lawrence Gowing. Robert Dukes lectures at the National Gallery and teaches for the The Royal Drawing School.

Dukes shared with me some images of new work included in this show and also graciously agreed to share excerpts from the fascinating September 2015 interview with him and the art critic Andrew Lambirth. This comprehensive and engaging interview can be read in its entirety on the Browse & Darby from this link. An e-catalog is also available.

Painting from Observation

Andrew Lambirth: When you’re doing a painting from observation, it’s not just about the visual facts, is it?

Robert Dukes: No. But the emotional thing is either there or it isn’t. You can’t turn on emotion, you can’t generate it, and you can’t fake it.

On the Unfashionability of Still Life Painting

AL: Why do you think that still life painting is currently unfashionable? You don’t see a lot of it about, by contemporary artists, do you?

RD: No, you don’t.

AL: Has it always been unfashionable?

RD: It used to be that in the hierarchy of art it was low down monetarily-wise, so you’d think that the lesser painters would do it. But a good example is Melendez, who wanted to be a fashionable royalty portrait painter, but both he and his dad fell out with the court, so he ended up an impoverished still life painter. You wouldn’t know that looking at his pictures – they’re amazing. Why is it unfashionable now? I think it’s a broader question of why serious painting from observation is unfashionable. It’s not seen as cool or ironical or knowing enough, it’s just what it is. But that’s the reason I do it. I’m painting about painting really, not making an ironical distanced statement. I want to be in the painting, I want the marks to be the thing that I’m painting, which is the opposite of the current trend in painting.

The Importance of Drawing

AL: How important is drawing? Is it still central to what you do?

RD: It’s enormously important. I do think there are a lot of people who are serious figurative painters, who paint from observation, who don’t draw very much – and you can tell in the work. If I don’t draw a lot, the paintings don’t have what Robert Motherwell called ‘a precision of feeling’. When you’re painting, you have to feel where all these marks are going to land, and if you haven’t got your hand and eye co-ordination in from drawing, it’s going to look flabby.

AL: So what is a typical day?

RD: I get up about a quarter to eight and I draw from 9 o’clock to just after 10 o’clock, and if I don’t draw for at least an hour before I paint, I can’t do it. It’s like getting my eye in or doing scales. The first half-an-hour is absolute torture. It’s like anybody could draw better than that. It all goes in the bin. And maybe one morning out of 20, at the end of the session something comes out that is worth keeping.

The drawings are rarely related to what I’m painting that day, they’re usually copies from reproductions in books. Then I start painting just after 10 and try to keep going till 6 o’clock. I do very similar hours when I paint to the hours I worked in the National Gallery – in other words, office hours. I think it’s best to try and find a consistency, just as it’s important to have consistent sleep patterns. So it becomes natural – this is what you do.

Painting from the Middle Out

AL: Tell me about this idea of painting forms from the middle out.

RD: There was a thing I picked up on even at Grimsby, which came from Camberwell, which was not to try and draw a contour or an outline and then fill it in, but try to paint across a form. Gowing talked about that when I first went to the Slade. I want my paintings to have more and more plastic force, to be more realized, to be more there. I paint from the middle out because I don’t want to rely on an outline to define the form. Somehow the colour mixtures define where the edge is rather than monocular measurement.

It’s not as if I’m copying reality: the colours relate to the colours I’m seeing. There may be seven mixtures of colour across a quince in a painting. Obviously the gradation of tone across an actual quince in natural light is infinite, so you’re making equivalents. And you’re also trying to make something that will work as a flat shape. Ideally every single mark will have its own autonomy, have decorative quality, design quality as well as standing for volume or form. Sometimes you make a colour mixture and it feels completely like guesswork, yet it lands on the surface of the picture and it almost goes by itself, and that can somehow define the scale of the form…

Painting from the middle out, and not being in such a hurry to try and find the edges may seem to run counter to the idea of measurement. If you were measuring such a subject as two quinces, one of the first things you would measure would be where the furthest right-hand side is and how high is this quince to that quince, in other words the edges. In practice you utilize both methods, and you measure back into it. When you’re painting from the middle you often feel as though you’re modelling the forms and when you measure you feel like you’re carving back into the forms.

Transcription – Is It Cheating?

AL: I know that some people think that if an artist makes a copy of another artist’s painting, in some way it’s not an original work of art – it’s almost cheating. How would you respond to that?

RD: In some ways they may be right. It’s very hard to compose a painting from scratch, but even when I’m painting a still-life from observation I’m not copying it, I’m making equivalents in paint for what I’m seeing. As Coldstream said, even the most realistic painting looks nothing like reality. In the same way, when you copy a painting, you are – to a lesser or greater degree – transcribing what you’re seeing, you’re not trying to copy it so that someone will be gulled into thinking it actually is a Braque. That would be a pathetic thing to do. Just as pathetic as those poor souls who try to paint photographic realist pictures that get into the National Portrait competition every year. It must be a living death to paint those pictures. You can’t tell anything about the person who painted them; all you can say is that they’ll probably last longer than a photographic print. They don’t have any analogy of form or structure or design or decoration or human content.

On Balthus

AL: Let’s talk about the Balthus. Why did you pick that painting?

RD: Because it’s beautiful. I’ve done lots of Balthus transcriptions in the last ten years but I wanted to do something a bit bigger and more ambitious. (I’ve done lots of heads from the early Balthus portraits of Thérèse, the young girl that was the daughter of his concierge when he lived in Paris in the 1930s.) Anyway, this painting is from his chateau and I’ve edited out the tree and the farmer who appeared in Balthus’ version. So it’s not a direct transcription, and in doing that you realise how important those elements are in the original. I just wanted to paint it like a stage set. And this is why in a nutshell I wanted to paint it and paint more landscapes. I paint still-lives normally and they’re lumps. They’re usually one or two lumps, like one or two apples, in a bare space. Landscape is the opposite of that. This was like trying to paint a stage set or a big space that goes right to the edge of the canvas, rather than paint a single object in the middle of a space.

In any painting, even if it’s a single object painting, the whole surface has to be animated and that’s one of the reasons it’s hard to do single object paintings because they can just dominate the whole space and not work as a flat shape. But in a landscape the whole rectangle is animated right from the start.

AL: But certain shapes in your Balthus transcription are nevertheless leaping out at me: those two wedges and the pale quadrilateral field at the top. Is that true to the original?

RD: The two triangles at the bottom are sunlight coming through and they are very prominent in the picture. The field in Balthus’ painting is obfuscated by the tree, and so it’s not so prominent. One reason for copying anybody, and especially someone as good as Balthus, is that you become more and more in awe of how good they are. Everything in the original links up – it’s terrifying. What’s so amazing is that it seems like a game of analogy and rapport of forms and yet it seems very true to what it actually looks like.

Can Painting be Taught?

AL: Do you agree with Auerbach that painting can’t really be taught? He said ‘all you can do is get people to where they jump in and swim’.

RD: Yes, but you can teach them certain things. I’ve been recently teaching painting for the Royal Drawing School, and there are aspects of it you can teach. What tone is, for instance. The worst question students ask – and they ask it all the time – is ‘how do I make a flesh tone?’ As though they only need one mixture to cover the face! They don’t understand it’s to do with all the other colours around it and the light conditions. That’s so fundamental. Tone is the hardest thing to teach, more than drawing or colour sense. You can also teach how to mix colours and keep a palette clean.

Tacked on the Studio Wall

All sorts of people like Freud and Auerbach have things written on the walls of their studios to remind them or egg them on. George Rowlett has “WORTHY IS NOT GOOD ENOUGH” written on his studio wall. All I’ve got in big horrible letters is: ‘MIX THE COLOUR”. It’s what I teach my students at the Royal Drawing School. If you don’t get the right colour mixture, even if you draw as well as Leonardo da Vinci, it will not sit. But I’m a bit like that myself: I try and force it, or make it work with drawing. But if I get a colour and really believe in it, it sort of falls off the brush and lands in the right place. And if it’s the wrong colour it’s like magnets opposing each other: it tries not to sit on the canvas.

by Elana Hagler

In his essay on Degas in The Shape of a Pocket, John Berger transforms Degas’ name into a verb:

Do we not all dream of being known, known by our backs, legs, buttocks, shoulders, elbows, hair? Not psychologically recognized, not socially acclaimed, not praised, just nakedly known. Known as a child is by its mother.
One might put it like this. Degas left behind something very strange. His name. His name, which, thanks to the example of his drawings, can now be used as a verb. ‘Degas me. Know me like that! Recognise me, dear God! Degas me.’[1]

This quote comes immediately to mind when I look at Ellen Eagle’s exquisite pastel paintings. Each artwork feels like a fresh encounter with a very specific person at a very specific moment in his or her life. I intuit that this individual has been truly, intimately, profoundly seen by the painter and this deep knowing is transferred to me as the viewer through the magic of strokes of granular pigment interwoven on pumice board. And yet, at the same time, I am confronted by the unknowability of this person presented before me, an entire universe within this other whose internal world is shrouded in mystery. My experience of Ellen Eagle’s paintings is that of holding these contradicting sensations simultaneously in the moment of apprehension: I both marvel at the inscrutability and delight at the sense of intimate familiarity.
In preparation for this interview, I poured over Eagle’s 2013 book, Pastel Painting Atelier: Essential Lessons in Techniques, Practices, and Materials. As the title promises, there is indeed a large amount of practical advice contained within, and it is invaluable to anyone working in pastel. I, as an oil painter, was more interested in all of those pictorial values that translate across mediums and enjoyed reading her thoughts on gesture, composition, problem-solving, holding onto the first impression, and so on. This “shop talk” is graced throughout the book with insightful little gems, such as “My bliss animates my strokes” and “I seek the emergence and full crystallization of harmony.”[2]

It is a pleasure to interview Ellen Eagle here, and dig a little deeper into her work and her thoughts. Thank you so much for joining us, Ellen.

Ellen Eagle: Thank you so much for inviting me, Elana.

Elana Hagler: Let’s begin by finding out a little about your early path. Did you come from an artistic family? How did you come to painting? Were there any particular obstacles in your way?

EE: Yes, it is a gift to have come from a very artistic family. My mother was a professional pattern maker and clothing designer. She also created stunning and intricate embroidery, knit, and made curtains and furniture slipcovers. She did all things textile. She made dresses and pocketbooks for me and for my dolls. She painted with watercolor and oil, and, later in life, created very complex decoupages. She made my wedding dress, first making the pattern right on me. She was a perfectionist in all she did. If she went to bed unhappy with a stitch she had made in her embroidery or sewing, she got out of bed to restitch. Whatever she did, she did with the utmost integrity and respect. She frequently told me that she so wanted to be an artist that she gave birth to one.

My father’s artistry was with music and language. He had a beautiful singing voice, and the heart to sing. He seemed to know everything about opera and classical music, which he brought into our home, along with experimental music via radio programs that he sought out, and folk music in the tradition of Woody Guthrie and The Weavers. He also had a most poetic way with words; he had his very own unique way of expressing ideas, and he had an artist’s love of nature. At home, there was always music playing on the record player and radio. My parents were very curious about dance, theater, and music of other cultures, as well. Intrinsic to my parents’ artistic natures was a strong sense of humanism, of tenderness and compassion. My father cared about every child and animal and plant.   My parents joined a record club for my brother when he was an infant. Recordings of all sorts of music were delivered to him, I think monthly. At a young age he became a working musician whose early recordings continue to garner respect and a growing following. He continues to write and perform widely today; his instruments are the guitar and voice. My cousins, too, are artists: one is an Emmy Award winning director/producer; his brother masterfully plays almost every musical instrument imaginable, and was the Manager of Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center, and their third brother is a brilliant sculptor. Another cousin, now deceased, was a playwright/poet/actress/painter. When I was about ten, I brought a set of art supplies to my father’s father who was then in his 80s, I believe. Thus began his pursuit of artmaking, and he was very good.   He was a man of peace, and he began to make paintings of newspaper images of war victims, in the tradition of Käthe Kollwitz.

How did I come to painting? From a very young age, I was absolutely captivated by the reproductions of paintings and sculptures in my parents’ art books. I was fascinated that the images provoked powerful emotion in me. At the time, I was too young to understand why certain images caused pleasure and others left me cold or uncomfortable, but I could not get enough of looking at the works, and wondering about them. Stirring within me in a nebulous way was the first awareness of the balance of excitement and discipline in the creation of a painting or sculpture. The first drawing I remember doing was of a small ceramic bird that perched on a desk in the living room. I was four. My mother saw the drawing on the desk and assumed that my brother, who was eleven, had done it. David told her “No, it must have been Ellen.” From that moment on, my mother made sure I had art supplies and was enrolled in art classes. My first art class was taken at the Staten Island Museum.

I quickly favored drawing portraits and figures over ceramic birds. I drew my friends and family. My father had a small clothing store in a working class immigrant neighborhood. Many of the neighbors did not speak English. I was at the store on Saturdays, when my mother also worked there. I stared at the faces and postures of the neighbors of various ethnicities and colors, and pondered their thoughts, because I did not understand their words. Little did I know it at the time, but I think this exposure set the stage for my lifelong fascination with wordless visual expression.

I can honestly say that I had very few, if any, obstacles, other than at grade school age, where I had writing teachers, drama teachers and music teachers who were more punishing than encouraging of creativity and independent initiative. One writing teacher failed me on a composition assignment, accusing me of having my brother write it for me. I also had a similar problem with a piano teacher. Such accusations and punishments filled me with shame. Fortunately, there were also many wonderful and supportive “noticers” of my abilities, who gave me tremendous encouragement. In junior high school, I had difficulty with math. My math teacher, Mr. Berman, was warm and kind towards me, despite my struggle. As if to counterbalance the writing teacher disaster, upon seeing some of my portrait drawings displayed in the school hallway one day, Mr. Berman entered the classroom of a different subject in which I was enrolled, and announced to me and the class that he sees a great talent in me. That he went to the trouble of finding out which classroom I was in at the moment, and to make a public statement of kindness and support alleviated the sting of my writing teacher, and has remained in my memory all these years. Eventually, my mother started taking me into New York’s Art Students League children’s class, and to a wonderful piano teacher on the Upper West Side. These were great escapes for me. And when I was eleven, my brother was attending City College of New York, within whose Harlem campus resided the High School of Music and Art. My brother saw kids walking around with musical instruments and art portfolios. He phoned home to tell me “I know where in this world you belong.” When I came of age, I was enrolled at M&A.

EH: It’s funny how these incidents stick out in our minds. I still remember my sixth grade art teacher accusing me of lying about authoring a poem that I also illustrated. And yet the rest of that year is mostly a blur.

Tell us about the instructors you had who made a profound impact on you and your work. Can you distill for us any of the major lessons you took away from each of them?

EE: Three instructors made a profound impact on me and my work. From Daniel Greene I learned about color, and the application of pastel. His devotion to craft and his drive to educate himself is inspirational. For example, I recall him telling the students that in his early years of study, he went to the museums to analyze the color in the works he held in esteem. He developed an understanding of the flesh color used by, say, English painters as opposed to Spanish painters. He was also very generous with his support and immediately went out of his way to encourage and help me. At The Art Students League of New York, I took a class in anatomy with Michael Burban. His encyclopedic understanding and his graceful blackboard drawings transformed the seemingly dizzying structure of both human and animal anatomy into clear and solid organization. His sense of humor rendered the information slightly less intimidating and energized me into taking notes with great enthusiasm and diligence. Finally, Harvey Dinnerstein’s impact on me is particularly powerful, and cannot be overstated. I venerate the intensely personal and penetrating intuitive heart of his work, which examines in depth human relationships in his world, both intimate and public. The specific yet economical, essential, powerful, and elegant shapes are intensified by his stunning color. As a teacher, his consistently pinpoint comments persist in helping me today as I work alone in my studio. He could not have been more supportive, respectful, and generous with me, and that continues until this day. He is seminal in my development as an artist, and his influence is everlasting.

EH: In your advice in response to a student inquiry in your book, you talk about the importance of solitude in developing one’s individual voice. Was there any particular period in your life and oeuvre where you felt you were transitioning from student work to the more mature and individualized work of a practicing artist? If so, can you talk about that shift and how it came about?

EE: Yes. In fact, I wrote an essay about the experience for Linea, The Journal of the Art Students League of New York, shortly after I concluded my formal study there, and just prior to joining the faculty. Because I wrote that essay when the experience was so fresh, and a passage from it directly addresses your question, may I excerpt it here for you? I titled the essay Composing a Life:

“….My years at the League were rewarding beyond what I could have anticipated. I selected my teachers purposefully. As artists, the breadth of their knowledge, the quality of their questions, their achievements, and dedication to their personal visions are exquisite examples of integrity. As teachers, they imparted their wisdom with unequivocal support.

“The students’ communal pursuit of formal principles in the studio and lecture hall was invigorating. In time, I gained an understanding of the light in the studio and the pace of the morning class hours. The work I was doing felt wholly genuine to my perceptions. I was riveted by the single figure in light, in air, so perfect, and the work poured out in jubilant response. I felt complete.

“I had every reason to stay. Which is why I began to consider leaving.

“Was my work adapting to conditions that were becoming too familiar? Was the great support of the classroom, apparently strengthening, actually undermining my responsibility to question and see for myself? And was I possibly overlooking relationships and incidents in my own life that, because of their nuanced and complex places in my heart, require more acuity than I was bringing to the professional model? I knew that there was more technical development to aspire towards, but I had faith that growth would come naturally in the search for ways to touch upon my most personal themes….”

“And what were my themes? What mattered to me? The luminous spaces of the classroom stimulated an urge to explore composition outside the studio. But what did this mean in terms of the portrait and figure? Is narrative a concern for me? Where does portraiture leave off, where does narrative begin? How do ideas and observation work together? It was exciting to think about exploring a more complex depth of space than I had done, but my overriding love has always been straightforward portraiture. What was my interest in composition about and where would it lead me?

“No matter when I would leave class the problems of arranging and financing a life of figure and portrait painting would be huge.   Would my friends and family have time to sit for me?

“There would be times I would want a professional model. I live a distance from the models I have loved to paint at the League and I have not seen much figure painting activity in my community. Would I find access to models to whom I respond and then could I afford to hire them? Will I find obstacles stimulating? Will I persevere? Am I strong? How and if I could work it out I did not know. I would miss my teacher terribly.   I loved working in his classroom. I loved his observations. I did not want to lose my time with him. Most intricately, this feeling was intensified by the concurrent and worsening illnesses of my parents: our bodies are here and then we are gone. The urgent undercurrent of painting the human being. However painful, it was time for me to face letting go if I was to be truly present.

“In the same way that I never wish to cosmeticize what I see in my model, I needed to look into my own character. And the exploration seemed to call for quiet, meditative work in solitude….”[3]

EH: There is a wonderful balance, a melding of the personal and the pictorial, which I admire in your work. You seem to care deeply about the character and inner life of the individual you are depicting without ever lapsing into the sentimental or facile emotionalism. At the same time, your work seems so much to be about form, color, and composition, all the while without the sense of impersonal detachment found in the work of many formalists. This is apparent when reading what you have to say about your portraits…you give anecdotes and observations about the character and his or her life while emphasizing the need to be fully present, to preserve the freshness of the encounter.

Is preserving the freshness of this experience ever a struggle for you? Also, how do you choose your models?

EE: There were two – no, three- instances that I can recall where the freshness was absent from the start. The first two instances occurred when I was a student. In the first, we had two models set up together. One of the models appeared wholly uninterested in being there, and the other set herself in a perpetual smile. Trying to paint someone who doesn’t want to be there, for me, sets up an internal battlefield. I recall feeling that I was going in circles, in knots, rather than diving in and submerging myself in my subject. She really was not offering herself, so I could not enter. The barrier was too great for me to overcome. The smiling model conveyed performance. Perhaps the two were opposing sides of a coin: one didn’t care about pleasing and the other wanted to please so much that she assumed a forced facial posture. Feeling struggle-weary and shut out, I abandoned the portrait and did a studio interior instead. The moment of wresting myself from a dead situation and focusing on my new delightful subject was a liberating and thrilling experience. The second instance also involved a model who did not wish to be there. The third occurred very shortly after I had left school and was hiring models. A particular model had been recommended by a local artist who very thoughtfully gave me the names of several models whom he respected. When she came to my studio for an initial meeting, I knew right away that this was not going to work out. I was so new to interacting with models, and I could not bring myself to tell her that the spark was not there for me. So I hired her and spent a small fortune and considerable time working on her portrait. Not that I needed confirmation that the personal response is at the core of any work of conviction, but the experience did confirm just that. So, in all three instances, the freshness was not there from the start. I find that when my personal response is genuine and positive, the freshness is as strong at the conclusion as it is from the start, if not more so, as insights deepen over time. And I believe this has much to do with working from life: the life within the model, the shifting light highlighting different aspects of the form and color. Your follow-up question—how do I choose my models—is perfectly placed, as the answer follows logically from the bored/performance/no spark situations. There are several considerations when asking someone to sit for me. Implicit in my request is that I have a deeply felt respect for the person. I love to paint people who convey integrity, curiosity, intelligence, and, usually, a quiet sensitivity. I feel excited by other people’s devotion to a particular pursuit of work. In other words, that inner life that you referred to in your observation. I have not generally been attracted to flamboyance in dress or manner, but there are exceptions. I tend to pay attention to a modest presentation. I love an expressive body language, be it a beautiful posture or a kind of combination of strength and fragility. And my eye likes pronounced facial features.

EH: In the section of your book which deals with self-portraiture, you mention that “Paintings have to feel totally genuine. They are not about a reasoned logic. The conscious mind has to step aside and allow the deepest connections to be truly felt.”[4] Right before this quote, you spend some time describing the psychological meaning of Self-Portrait in Blue. Is this meaning something you think about prior to and in the act of composing a painting, or is it more of an analysis after the fact? At what point in the process of conception to fulfillment do you push aside your conscious mind?

EE: The self-portraits and all the portraits begin intuitively. The analysis comes as I live with the painting and observe its development. Something feels genuine, something does not, and I make my next steps accordingly. I observe consciously the painting’s construction and my conscience and gut testify whether the construction represents my truest feelings. Throughout the development of the imagery, I find the conscious and the intuitive have equally important roles. One may step forward as the other recedes, and then they change places again. In the end, if the painting intuitively feels non-genuine, it is. But it is definitely not always a straight arrow from beginning to completion. At times, I have started with what I think is a complete idea, only to discover that the first thoughts are only part of a concept that has yet to fully reveal itself. It works the other way around, too. One could begin with a complex idea, and find that there is a more concise way of saying what one wishes to say, or that the core and most meaningful part of the idea is distilled more powerfully in a simple statement. I do revere simplicity.

EH: Oftentimes, I am more interested in what a painter leaves out than what she includes in the image. Can you tell us a little about the role that the editing of visual information plays in your work?

EE: The role of editing visual information. Well, that is partly answered by my thoughts on your previous question. Also, I work in natural light, and I feel as though I am always seeking to paint the exquisite light. On a formal level, for me, editing has to do with being very sensitive to the way in which light reveals and cloaks form. And every detail has to work in concert to create a harmonious oneness, and that means activity here, quiet there, comparative qualities of the edges. I love becoming aware of the overall abstract underpinnings of my subject, and articulating details so as to not encumber or violate the large, graceful rhythms and arcs. On a different front, I have not at this point in time painted complex multi-figure or outwardly dramatic paintings. Though I paint mostly single figure compositions with a kind of restraint, I am always picking up on, there’s that term “inner life” again, and hope to successfully communicate that life within the constraint of quiet. I think that has something to do with editing. Perhaps it is like writing a piece of music, made of words and melody. The words—the “things” represented in the painting—are the story; the music—the way in which the artist creates the harmony—is the heart, the love, the way the artist feels about the subject.

EH: What do you focus on in your paintings now that you didn’t emphasize as much five or ten years ago? What are the most recent directions you’ve been exploring?

EE: I have begun doing some still life paintings and cityscapes in very recent years, and have done some landscape drawings in Italy and China.   I want to turn my attention to more cityscape and landscape. My interest lies in the arrangement of large abstract shapes., and aerial perspective. It may require a whole different way of applying pastel, and may also summon an entirely new medium. There has been a major shift this past year: I lost my mother last year, and she was to have been my next portrait. I was faced with blankness, as who would I paint now “instead of” my mother? There is no “instead of my mother”. There is only my mother. I teach at the Art Students League of New York on Saturdays, when there is also a class for children. The children are not permitted to walk through the hallways alone, so they go as a class to the cafeteria at break time. I made the mistake of trying to enter the cafeteria when “hordes” of children were leaving through the same door. They almost ran me over, but one magnificent, elegant, self-possessed little girl held the door open for me. She immediately entranced me, and I immediately wanted to paint her portrait. Long story short, I have now done two portraits of her. I felt my mother’s maternal tenderness “channeling” through me as I spent time with Marela, ten years old, and painted her portrait. Marela’s mother takes her to class at the League every Saturday; my mother took me to the League’s children’s class when I was ten. My mother’s and father’s love is very much a part of the portraits. They would love Marela. Except for having painted four children within one family portrait, which I did on commission, Marela is the first child whose portrait I have painted. I have become quite interested in doing children now that I have lost both parents. This is an unanticipated outcome of the profound loss, and yet another gift from my extraordinary parents. I also have the beginnings of a new painting, which is in the earliest stages of a graphite sketch. The concept of the painting is very personal, and requires corporeal imagery I have not explored before. So, I’ll see.

Ellen Eagle received a BFA with Distinction in Drawing from the then California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland. Her pastel portraits have been exhibited widely in venues such as the National Academy Museum, Butler Institute of American Art, Frye Art Museum, Long Beach Museum of Art, Baker Museum, Arkansas Art Center, and Forum Gallery which represents her work. In 2011-12, she exhibited twenty portraits in a traveling two-person exhibit in China. Her co-exhibitor was the curator, whose intent was to largely introduce the Chinese art community to pastel. The exhibit opened at the Dongguan Museum of Fine Art. Eagle teaches the only class devoted exclusively to pastel at The Art Students League of New York. Her writings and paintings have been published in many magazines and books, and her own book, Pastel Painting Atelier, was published by Watson-Guptill, NY, in 2013.

Upcoming workshops:

Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, Philadelphia, Pa; June 6-10, 2016   email: mkowbuz@pafa.edu

Aria Workshops, Istria, Croatia; June 18 – July 2, 2016   http://workshops.pastelnews.com/registration-form/

Dates TBA – Chicago area; and Art Students League of New York.

[1] John Berger, The Shape of a Pocket (New York: Vintage Books, 2003), 68

[2] Ellen Eagle, Pastel Painting Atelier: Essential Practices in Techniques, Practices and Materials (New York: Watson-Guptill Publications, 2013), 12

[3] Ellen Eagle, “Composing a Life,” Linea: The Journal of the Art Students League of New York, v.9, no. 12 (Fall/Winter 2005), 12.

[4] Eagle, Pastel Painting Atelier, 66.

I’m pleased to present my email interview with the landscape painter Raymond Berry for Painting Perception’s new 4 questions segment. Raymond Berry is a Professor of Art at Randolph-Macon College and lives in Virginia. He has been painting the landscape from observation for more than 40 years.

Larry Groff:   You often paint with encaustics outdoors; this is surprising, as you usually think of encaustics as more of a studio medium, with hot plates and all. It is less often seen with observational work. How difficult is it to paint with directly? Is that difficulty part of the appeal? How would this differ from just using a wax medium or oil paint for that matter? Can you tell us more about your setup with this and how you go about painting outdoors? What is satisfying about landscape made with encaustics?

Raymond Berry:   In the 70’s, I worked with wax medium in some large paintings but eventually it drifted out of my working method. After viewing some recent gallery exhibitions, which featured some encaustic pieces, I was reminded of how beautiful the medium could be, especially with using the authentic technique that melts the pigment/wax blend. All of the work that I saw originated in the studio and was abstract, conceptual or crafty in intent. Nothing observational at all; but it was beautiful stuff. I asked myself, why couldn’t I use paint like that in the landscape? Well, because I had not seen an electrical outlet in a tree stump and extension cords tend to be measured in feet not in miles! Can’t do encaustic without a hot plate and heat guns!

I thought of plugging into the car battery or using a camp stove to heat my palette. I realized that I would be painting a palette of “color as soup”, very difficult to control. I needed to keep it simple and that’s when I realized I could treat my cookie pan much as a watercolor palette and just “wake up” my color with heat, not from below but from above with a butane torch! How hard could this be?

[See image gallery at paintingperceptions.com]
Slideshow of Raymond Berry’s Plein Air Encaustics Process

My first adventure in encaustic plein air, me “paint with fire”, was rather interesting as everything went pretty much as I planned except that I set my brushes on fire several times! I also tended to get distracted, looking at how cool my brush strokes were and then my “fire” hand would cheerfully point at something different on the panel and it would drip down the easel and out of the picture plane. I melted away some of my best efforts. Also, the brush hair didn’t catch fire; the handles went up first–all that flammable lacquer–then the hair caught on. This was painting at it’s most exciting! I was standing in the landscape making sublime observations, deeply attuned with nature and with fire in one hand and a brush dripping with hot wax–some of it was actually reaching the panel!

This process is comparable to playing a stringed instrument; each hand is functioning differently but is working together, the left hand applies the flame and the right wields the brush and paint. It takes some driver’s education to make this happen, lots of practice and burned fingers and keeps your ego back in the studio.

A great deal of my enjoyment of this technique has to do with some memory of abstract expressionism. There is a way the material wants to be handled that lends to abstraction and gesture simultaneously. It’s hard not to touch them, the surface is very compelling and really does lend to the painting as an object. The process just seems to fit me and also demands something that I have to work at and wrestle with in a very positive way. It certainly is informed by all those years of oil painting, but it’s a very different animal. It’s been a nice addition to my landscape toolbox and it will be interesting to see how it evolves over the next few years.

LG:   What are the your most important considerations when you decide to paint a particular view? How much of this decision involves the actual scene and how much is it what you think might make a good painting? Can you explain what that means for you?

RB:   That’s a great question and I honestly don’t know that there is a good answer for this. I do have some very strong ideas about what I am trying to find in the land and most of them have to do with places of “power” and lessons in the places that I find. In almost all my investigations there is something of reclamation and constant change: water is almost always present and some growth that is in flux and has some strange and mysterious complexity. I don’t seem to be attracted to obvious drama in the landscape. I do the same thing over and over looking for small dynamics and changes in relationships. I want to become a part of it. I try to understand what the landscape wants. So sometimes it gives me something right away and sometimes I have to wait for it. It takes a long time to be natural with what you do as a painter and there are days when I go out and just disappear into the whole thing and come out with a personal lesson on the canvas. I always learn something each time I go out and I try to avoid cliché and formulation. Even on a bad day, you get something worthwhile from it.

LG:   What aspects of painting give you the most satisfaction? What would you say to someone who expressed interest in being a painter today?

RB:   I certainly like the “completeness” of painting; there is great satisfaction in the concentration and focus you have to have physically and mentally to make things work and move toward some kind of event. You are making something each time, no matter how small. It all adds up to an understanding of something essential to living as a vital and serious person. What a marvelous investigatory and expressive method of finding your place in the world! You also leave a trail of efforts and evidence of your investigation, the good and the bad, the weak and strong things that you can look back and see how they really were. Visual artists have a great gift in that they can critique themselves by taking another look at where they have been and how they can improve and move forward.

It’s an interesting question, what do you say to someone interested in painting today? What is painting today? I don’t know. When I read reviews and commentary in many respected publications, I don’t understand the language they are using. Sometimes there are some intelligent discussions but actually I think hearing artists talk about how they work and what their aspirations are is much more meaningful than criticism and the strange way we tend to write about it. I recently spoke with an old friend that had a very solid position in the museum world a few decades ago and left it because “she didn’t understand the language they were using…it was a kind of code”. How sad is that?

I do teach painting though and that’s a special responsibility. I hope I give my students a realistic and direct way into “painting as search”. I want them to find their way to express themselves and be honest about it. I don’t necessarily teach a technique or a method. I teach them how to begin. I think that’s the best I can do. Do as little harm as possible and try to get them to respect hard work and patience. It’s pretty rare that someone comes to my classes with the hopes of being an artist (one every ten years or so). I just try to be fair and straight with them. I teach quite differently in a liberal arts college than I would in a more traditional art school. It’s a different approach to education than someone on a more artistic track. I’m all for everyone being well educated in a broad sense before moving towards a specific field; thankfully, artists have been traditionally very curious and good life-long learners.

LG:   What makes some painting great and others not so great?

RB:   It’s a fair question and after some thought; I may never use the word “great” again. Donald Trump has beaten it into submission. I do often tell students that something they did was “great” but in context, it’s a nice conversational word to support an exceptional effort. When I was an undergraduate, “Great Art” was most often something big. I have lived fairly close to Washington, D.C. most of my life; I grew up looking at Vermeer’s, Girl with the Red Hat at the National Gallery of Art. It’s a great painting: just 9” by 7”. Las Meninas is a huge painting and it’s so great that most people are struck dumb in front of it. Doesn’t each of us have a separate responsibility for this measurement? There are things that I can see in a painting that my students miss completely because I’m more experienced, educated and so on. It’s a real pleasure to listen to someone really knowledgeable about art talk in front of a fine work. Peter Agostini was wonderful to be with in a museum, he knew so much, but he had such poetic ways of talking about everything. I envy all those students that Lennart Anderson taught and spoke to about painting. I’m quite confident that Tim Stotz, a former student, could teach me a few things that I had not considered if I were in his classes on drawing and painting in the Louvre.

It would have to come down to some alchemy about the humanity of the artist and their willingness (or unconsciousness) to share in that vulnerable notion; like that balance and sensitivity that exists in pretty much everything Morandi did.

To look at a painting and see the brushstrokes of their decisions and revisions, their struggle to find the rightness of a moment and share that with an audience, that is something really respectful. I’m thinking of the little Vuillard in the Virginia Museum of his mother in her apartment; it’s such a fragile instant in paint.

Something incomplete or fugitive in painting can hold a clue as to the mystery and vision of another human being at their most perceptive moments. I was trapped in a huge Cezanne exhibition at MOMA in 1976, there were too many people to fit in the galleries and everyone wanted to move on. I was immobile in front of one of his works from the Bibemus Quarry. I swear that it moved in front of my eyes, it would vibrate or change somehow. I pointed it out to someone next to me, but she thought I was being dramatic and making something up to be arty . Honestly, though, it wouldn’t stay still. What do you call that?

It’s interesting sometimes when you are in a room of “great” works and the distinction becomes its own reward. I was in the Louvre in the early 70’s and I walked into the gallery where the Mona Lisa was being cheered on by about forty Japanese tourists, you couldn’t get close to the painting for the crowd. There, on the other side of the room, almost directly opposite from the camera-wielding herd, was Titian’s, Man with a Glove. No one was standing in front of it. Everyone was looking at a great work of art or a cultural icon for sure, but they were missing one of the magnificent examples of paint handling just a few feet away. I wanted to call them over just to look at the pose, the composition, the face, and those hands! Somehow, we think we know something substantial about this long dead gentleman. This is a kind of perfection. How could someone do that? I still don’t believe it!

Maybe that’s how we begin to recognize how greatness might come into our minds, as something we can’t really grasp ourselves doing. The fact that it exists helps us to see what is possible, but the wonder is that we feel gratitude that it is there for us to see and enjoy.

From from the Bio on his website: A California-born, native of Virginia, earned his B.A. in Art from the University of Virginia in 1971 and his M.F.A. in Drawing and Painting from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in 1975. There he studied extensively with Peter Agostini, Ben Berns and Andrew Martin. He joined the faculty of Randolph-Macon College in 1982, first as Artist-in-Residence after teaching positions at Wake Forest University, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and the Governor’s School of North Carolina. Despite his bad temper and facial hair he progressed through the academic ranks to become a Professor in 1998. Primarily an observational painter of the landscape, he developed a series of “rescued books” combining observed phenomena and vintage photography and has recently been experimenting with cigar boxes and other mysterious things. He has exhibited primarily in the Southeast and in occasionally in New York since the 1970’s.

I was fortunate to meet Connie Hayes last summer in Civita Castellana, Italy and was curious to find out more about her terrific new body of work and want to thank her for her time and for sharing thoughts and images of her recent Italian paintings.

Connie Hayes lives in Rockland, Maine and shows with the Dowling Walsh Gallery in Rockland, Maine. She received her M.F.A. from Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia, and Rome; her B.F.A. from the Maine College of Art in Portland. She received a fellowship to attend the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 1989. Born in Gardiner, Maine she taught at the Maine College of Art for 10 years, also participating in arts administration there for 15 years, including serving as the interim Dean of Faculty. In 2003 she was awarded an honorary doctorate in fine arts from the Maine College of Art. From 1992-1998 she lived in New York City. Since 1990 she has been painting on location through her Borrowed Views project and working in her Rockland Studio.

Larry Groff:     You’ve painted in Civita Castellana, Italy the past two summers? What brought you to this place and to this new body of work?

Connie Hayes:     I love Italy, right from the start in 1980 when I first lived with eight other painters in Rome for a year of graduate school. Art history classes were held in churches and museums, studying works by artists like Giotto, Piero Della Francesca, Titian, Raphael, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Caravaggio and Fra Angelico. To put my eyes inches away from where these painters’ hands worked thrilled me. It still does. In 2014 and 2015 I was invited to return to Italy to teach at the JSS in Civita School, a serious painting program in the Italian countryside. I was again ready to “borrow views”—this time, sharing my process of translating views. For this excitement, Italy fits my passions well.

LG:     What was your experience like in Civita Castellana?

CH:     Given a rooftop apartment, I looked out over Piazza Mattiotti in Civita Castellana, an old, hilltop city with a population of 7,000, an hour north of Rome. Civita is where many artists have worked over the centuries during their European “Grand Tours”. Each day I walked to class through a maze of narrow stone streets, often in deep shadow, but catching edges of light on shutters, arches, doors, utility wires, pipes, and ever-changing strings of laundry. Repeatedly attracted to the muted colors, shallow spaces, irregular surfaces, and crisp and dissolving edges, I felt inspired to paint, and to use them for teaching opportunities.

LG:     Many fabulous painters from around the world joined with the JSS in Civita program to teach, study or just paint the incredible landscape. Artist talks and the discussions over meals and downtimes about differing painting approaches and philosophies have exposed many there to new ideas on what makes painting good and bad. What influenced or stood out for you while you were there?

CH:     I feel deep affinity with the many painters I met in Civita. With great joy, I immersed myself with my students in the intensity of the program, in a very dramatic landscape, overwhelming the senses. Red tufa cliffs draped with lush green vines contrast with softly-colored buildings that themselves line hill tops rimmed by distant hills dominated by a storied mountain, wrapped grandly in mist. Very stimulating conversations among artists often dealt with conveying this monumental beauty in paint. Even using skills applied to familiar subjects, we were forced to rise to new challenges in this vast, historic place.

LG     You often work thematically or with related subjects. What attracted you to paint these Italian façades?

CH:     In teaching, I celebrated my reunion with Italy, but decades after my initial visit, and with a lot of experience, I brought fresh eyes to the subjects of these paintings. As for any borrowed view, I responded to what was unique. But special to Civita, the tangible, smoky atmosphere echoed my love for many Renaissance paintings. Paying keen attention to this special light of place brought new life to my paintings.

LG     A strong, abstract geometry underlies your use of light and color. While many elements are clearly defined, such as laundry on a line, other elements are more abstract, mysterious. What decides the level of realism for your paintings?

CH:     The tension between abstract and concrete echoes the quality of place. Life goes on all around you, in the moment. Yet, experience from the past also appears everywhere, vividly, even though less distinctly. The eye, mind, and emotions resonate to these differences evident in one’s surroundings, reflected in paint.

LG     Can you describe how you develop unity in a painting?

CH:     Lots of scraping and wiping. In addition to my own trial and error, I learned a lot from my JSS colleagues about the quality that comes from putting aside a painting for evaluation. It may need wiping, scraping, or sanding to leave vestiges of color among fibers and weave. Repeating this process develops an accumulation of effort both in the experience and in the pigment that together make up layers of richness. Though one may not see this structure directly, the eye recognizes its richness.

LG     How do you start a painting? How much do use preliminary drawings, photography or studies with your work?

CH:     I vary the way I start paintings. Back in my studio, my drawings, photographs, color studies, painting sketches, and journals often stimulate a painting. I keep ready a variety of prepared canvases, of different sizes. I usually have four or five canvases in process, sometimes even painting over old work. Occasionally, I examine a detail in a photograph, analyzing it carefully with a drawing or an oil sketch. Other times, I might simply begin a new canvas by painting loosely with large brushes, to then sit and journal, sketching possible solutions to paintings that need resolution. I trust and rely on my intuition, pulling from an inventory of sensual memories. Observation and specificity is important to me, but so is letting distance filter irrelevant details. The subjects and places in my paintings are very recognizable. You could go to Civita and find that particular yellow door.

LG     Is how you found the scene important to you? Do your paintings deviate much from what the scene presented? How important is direct observation?

CH:     Wherever I work I continually ask myself the question: “What is this painting about?” Sometimes, my initial answer triggers me to begin a painting, perhaps as simple as seeing a pulsing yellow glow, or being pulled on a diagonal by a shadow, or looking for details submerged in the darks. Intuitively, I love to play with the geometry of shapes and the exaggeration of color. Within the general structure of a scene, I improvise from possibilities, much as a musician improvises.

LG:     You have a solo show at the Dowling Walsh Gallery in June where you will give a talk on “What is Ambition, Related to a Painting Life?” Can you say something more about this?

CH:     I want to reveal how my ambitions have changed over time, using examples of my work as well as by other artists to show what ambition means to me as a painter, and how it can enhance or impair the creative process.

LG:     I heard you say that when you paint, you need to see the world as if it were made out of paint. This is an intriguing notion; can you speak more about this thought?

CH:     Responding additionally to one of your previous questions about how much I might deviate from what the scene presented, I do not declare, even to myself, either subject matter or intention before I begin a series. I find, recognize, and see a subject as if it is already made of paint. These discoveries arise across many subjects and topics. After I have completed whatever number of paintings, though, I look back on the group and recognize related patterns and concerns. I do not plan a narrative.

More generally, I see my daily life as the continuing opportunity to imagine my next painting. Any one subject has a lifespan based on the intensity of my curiosity. My process to follow a subject or image is the same: exploring possibility. I look for subjects that fascinate me with the challenge to find my voice in what sits in front of me, in the world and on my canvas, and to reveal its pictorial power.

As examples, my tree drawings emerged from a Borrowed View in a large apple orchard. My studies on-site became a small series of eleven drawings. My paintings of Maine include coastal motifs, interiors, and still-lives. They all spring from specific places. My series on children-at-play developed from spending time with six youngsters over their first 14 years of life. My Italy façades respond to two very intense summers at Civita.

For all of these examples, my initial attractions to paint are visceral. They arise from glowing light, gesture, strong colors, and the geometry of design. When I reflect on a series, though, I sometimes see what might have subconsciously drawn me to their subject. I discover intention and meaning after the work mirrors to me preferences that I followed, many at levels I do not understand fully. One series shows empty chairs, another closed and locked doors, another absorption in play, another describes food and eating, and yet another floating and water. This open and continually expanding variety of subject matter frees me, in the moment, and in my growth over time. The constant for me is to translate uniqueness of place through my lens of experience in painting and living.

LG:     What’s next for you? Will you be going back to Italy this summer?

CH:     As to my work, I generally avoid making predictions, not wanting to constrain the impulsive freedom that motivates me. But right now, I am working on drawings of ancient architectural forms, mostly column capitals and carvings. I never know how far a series will take me. As for this summer, I feel deep reverence and affection for Italy, and I plan to return—just not this summer. Maine is too beautiful to leave for three years in a row, and I want to be here this summer to appreciate my home state with new eyes, after my recent travels.