Aesthetics

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Kenjilo Nanao: Hand of a Master

May 14, 2013 in Aesthetics | 12 comments

“Boxes in Terra Rose I,” oil and silver leaf on canvas, 2009 (courtesy of the artist)

Kenjilo Nanao, printmaker and painter, passed away on Monday. He was 83.

Born in Aomori, Japan, he came to San Francisco in 1960. He studied printmaking with Nathan Oliveira, married fellow artist Gail Chadell, and together they spent most of their lives in the Bay Area.

I became acquainted with Kenji’s work through my friend Kevin Simmers who studied printmaking with Nanao in the 70s. I have been a fan of his work ever since.

While I was in California two weeks ago we stopped by Kenji’s studio to see him. Frail and faltering, he spent time with us on the afternoon of April 29. Gail took him to the hospital that night. Two weeks later he was gone.

From the essay by art critic Charles Shere in the catalog for Kenji’s recent show at the Triton Museum in Santa Clara, “Pacific Paintings, 1986-2011″:

After nearly a lifetime of work these painting have attained a rare mastery. Thankfully, Kenjilo Nanao continues to paint, patiently following his muse, his eye, his hand, the evolving vision.

Their first element: transcendance. They are pacific paintings, serene yet energetic. Too often painters approaching these visions find the merely tranquil. There’s nothing soft or merely decorative about this work, though the surfaces are indeed beautiful, often even sumptuous. There’s much going on in and under those surfaces—gesture, memory, attentiveness, intelligence—revealing life, vitality, even power behind the beauty. Not behind it: informing it.

And from Preston Metcalf, curator at the Triton:

Seen in this sense we get a hint of Nanao’s exploration of the nature of humanity. We are not interruptions in the vast transcendent field beyond the physical, but we are all a part of it and so we are all connected and one.

Kenjilo Nano says he makes art to improve himself by the journey, rather than making art for art’s sake. Fortunately for us, by sharing the boon of his explorations, he improves us along the way.

Whether working on his prints or his paintings, Nanao had a master’s hand. The magisterial quietude of his work is undeniable. As Shere observed, “There is nothing more beautiful, in all its generous modesty than this mastery.”

This is the Irreplaceable: that which cannot be replicated or reproduced. Adieu Kenji. And thank you.

Photos from our last studio visit with Kenji:

Kevin Simmers and Kenji

Kevin and Kenji

Kenji sitting beneath one of his luscious red paintings

Ed Carrigan, Kevin and Gail Chadell Nanao

Ed and Kevin

Ed, Kevin and Kenji

Works in progress in Kenji’s studio

Tags: Charles Shere, Gail Chadell Nanao, Kenjilo Nanao, Preston Metcalf, Triton Museum

Being Seen

May 8, 2013 in Aesthetics, Personal | 6 comments

Close up of the surface of a painting from the Orbilinia series

I am honored—and really humbled—by a terrific post written about me and my work by Sloan Nota. We have been friends for about 20 years. While our orientation to many aspects of art and art making are very different, we share a mutual and deep respect.

Sloan is wicked clever, devilishly smart and so companionable. But what stood out for me in this post was how close she comes to the bone of how I work and think about art making. I feel seen. That is a very satisfying feeling.

Deborah Barlow: Blogger, Painter, Force of Nature

A few excerpts:

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Barlow reads widely across disciplines and dives deeply. You can go to her blog assured that she has winnowed out the bloviators and winkled out the juicy bits from writers who are real. She also engages with the other arts — visual, musical, dramatic — at an intense pace that would fell me.

***
My sense with Barlow’s paintings is that I’m not looking at them, I’m looking into them. Falling into the same kind of space you dial through with a potent microscope. It’s not my space, me standing in the laboratory twiddling knobs, but a space caught in a drop of liquid on a slide or between a glassy painting surface and a canvas.

For us big plodding human meats these are invisible realms available only through a lens. The lens we look through here is our idea of paintings: they hang on a wall and we interact with an image — a face, a place, a maze. Except these imagesless paintings are here to tempt you deep into the paint. There are bubbles, flecks, drifts and no signpost for scale. As at the microscope, you have left your scale at the portal.

***
In a studio visit I was introduced to the painter’s technique. Colors get laid on the white canvas, texture builds up, bumps, crevices. Then texture is taken down — sanded maybe? So its Himalayas become eroded plains. I was granted permission to finger this surface, the pigments’ tooth. More layers then, lots of gel medium to retain visibility into the new world abuilding. Additions, erosions, and at the very end clear layers smoothed to a glassy optic. Your window and invitation into the no-image that paint can become. This is not mark-making.

Spend some time and check out Sloan’s work on Green as Sky: A gambol in the goodies. It is luminious, unexpected, inventive and engaging.

Your Own Way of Looking at Things

May 5, 2013 in Aesthetics, Art Making, Poetry | 12 comments

Solitary boat man on the river in Hampi, India

When I Met My Muse

I glanced at her and took my glasses
off – they were still singing. They buzzed
like a locust on the coffee table and then
ceased. Her voice belled forth, and the
sunlight bent. I felt the ceiling arch, and
knew that nails up there took a new grip
on whatever they touched. “I am your own
way of looking at things,” she said. “When
you allow me to live with you, every
glance at the world around you will be
a sort of salvation.” And I took her hand.

–William Stafford

When a friend posted this short piece by William Stafford online, it came into my consciousness as a fully formed image of great power. Glasses that were still singing. A voice belling forth. Bent sunlight. A ceiling that arches and makes more space. Every glance a salvation. It’s all there, a tableau so clear and so powerful that I read it through ten more times.

I adore Stafford as a poet as well as an exemplar of living (I’ve listed my previous blog posts about him and his work at the bottom of this page.) Unpretentious with a quiet demeanor, he didn’t publish his poetry until he was in his late 40′s. His creative gait through life is epitomized by these words from an interview: “I keep following this sort of hidden river of my life, you know, whatever the topic or impulse which comes, I follow it along trustingly. And I don’t have any sense of its coming to a kind of crescendo, or of its petering out either. It is just going steadily along.” That description juxtaposed with his Muse encounter speaks to both the surrender and the salvation of his life’s poetic practice.

Two other writers offer an expansion to this Staffordian backdrop. One is David Esterly, author of a thoughtful book called The Lost Carving: A Journey to the Heart of Making. A former academic who quotes Yeats and Plotinus with ease, Esterly became a world class wood carver who was asked to repair the carvings destroyed by fire in Henry VIII’s palace at Hampton Court. (Because he is an American, this was a bit of a surprise request.) His prowess with language is evident in this book:

A carver begins as a god and ends as a slave. I concocted this aphorism long ago and couldn’t stop using it. It was born of experience. This trajectory repeated itself with each successive project. In all of them the balance of power progressively shifted from the maker to the made. The wood began as a submissive, put-upon thing, then gradually came to life, like Pygmalion’s statue. The carver’s ideas steadily lost their power, while the object grew imperious…You start as a godlike creator, imposing ideas on a passive medium, and you end up grounded in the life of this world, taking instructions from the thing in front of you.

The transmogrification that takes place in the act of making is a key theme in Esterly’s account. It correlates with a passage in the ever insightful Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry by Jane Hirschfield:

Violinists practicing scales and dancers repeating the same movements over decades are not simply warming up or mechanically training their muscles. They are learning how to attend unswervingly, moment by moment, to themselves and their art; learning to come into steady presence…Yet however it is brought into being, true concentration appears—paradoxically—at the moment willed effort drops away…At such moments, there may be some strong emotion present—a feeling of joy, or even grief—but as often, in deep concentration, the self disappears. We seem to fall utterly into the object of our attention, or else vanish into attentiveness itself. This may explain why the creative is so often descried as impersonal and beyond self, as if inspiration were literally what its etymology implies, something “breathed in”.

I’m not sure how to describe these experiences in terms that are linear, measured and easily understood. I sometimes get tired trying and give up, dropping into those easy catch alls of the mystical and/or the magical. But you just can’t throw concepts like those around willy nilly without getting yourself into some trouble, especially at cocktail parties and academic conferences.

Is there a middle ground, a way to express my own way of looking at things? I found some help by reworking a quote* from Frederick Buechner:

The act of making points to that area of human experience where in one way or another we come upon mystery as a summons to take a journey; where we sense meanings no less overwhelming because they can be only hinted at in myth and ritual; where we glimpse a destination that we can never know fully until we reach it. We are all of us more mystics than we believe or choose to believe.

That captures some of it.

___________

*The original quote from Frederick Buechner: “Religion as a word points to that area of human experience where in one way or another man comes upon mystery as a summons to pilgrimage; where he senses meanings no less overwhelming because they can be only hinted at in myth and ritual; where he glimpses a destination that he can never know fully until he reaches it. We are all of us more mystics than we believe or choose to believe.”

Previous Slow Muse posts on William Stafford:

Being Awake
The Strange Notes of our Wildness
Sages of Silence and Fear
That Form in the Grass
Lean Out a Window
Wing, Fin, Flake
Turn to the Open Sea and Let Go
Stillness, in Color
This, Now

Note: Thanks to Desiree Fitzgibbon for introducing me to The Lost Carving—as well as many other great books—and to Jill Fineberg for the Buechner quote. Jill randomly includes quotes at the bottom of her emails, and the timing on this one was perfect.

Tags: David Esterly, Jane Hirschfield, Lost Carving, William Stafford

Embracing the Ephemeral

May 1, 2013 in Aesthetics | 25 comments

Still in tact: The view of the Pacific from UCSC’s Porter College (AKA to some of us as College Five)

“Material Ephemera” at UC Santa Cruz

Another view

Long time friend Alicia Falsetto at the artist reception on Saturday

Things, people, ideas—they operate with a certain kind of circularity. That coming round again has becomes even more apparent as I get older.

Last week I was at University of California at Santa Cruz for a show of my paintings at the college where I was an art student in the 70′s. The school has now grown to 17,000 students—there were just 4,000 when I was there—but the view from my favorite spot overlooking the Pacific is still unchanged, amazingly. And the decentralized campus of “clustered cloisters” still gives off a sense that this is a place that makes room for the introverts and the nomads in the population, those of us who can’t do groups and demand a peculiarly untethered approach to life and learning.

But most of all I was reminded of how things/people/ideas show up, disappear, come back again. In the words of Walter Hood, the brilliant UC Berkeley landscape architect and designer (and keynote speaker at a day long seminar about interdisciplinary exhibitions, architecture and community), it is not about erasing the past but about pushing at “palimpsesting.” He used another relevant phrase: “embrace the ephemeral.”

Talking with Walter Hood (right) at the “Making the Institute” reception at UCSC (Photo: Gene Felice)

My show, “Material Ephemera,” plays with both ideas. Painting has a materiality that compels many of us to lean into that physical reality even more passionately as trends have moved the art experience away from that focus. From an earlier post, Resolute Materiality, this defense of painting from Eric Crosby still rings true:

There’s also something about the resolute materiality of painting that continues to attract artists. These are objects that follow deeply subjective and individual ways of thinking, as expressed through specific materials…Painting offers a frame for contact with this very physical presence. It’s a vivid contrast with our daily routine, where we experience so many images by using a cursor, linking to them, altering them, navigating away from them. Painting resists this kind of experience. A lot of artists today embrace that notion to an extreme. They go where the materials take them, not where the history of painting tells them to go.

Two other experiences spoke to that material ephemerality. One was visiting Kenjilo Nanao, the extraordinary printmaker and painter who is now in his 80s. While frail of body, he was at work in his studio, a brush in hand between frequent lay downs on the mattress in the corner. Material and ephemeral. We are both.

Kenjilo Nanao in his studio

The second was being introduced to the Snail Painters. While a full moon illuminated the Pacific Ocean at 3AM, it also revealed the night time markings of a small gaggle of snails on the window glass where we were staying. Part Joan Mitchell, part Brice Marden and part Terry Winters, these moondanced masterpieces evaporate when the sun comes up. Luckily I awoke in time to catch the invertebrates in their own celebration of circularity before any trace of their magic was gone.

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Portrait of the Artist
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And again

Tags: Brice MArden, Joan Mitchell, Terry Winters, Walter Hood

Paying Attention

April 14, 2013 in Aesthetics, Art Making | 12 comments

Ice patterns in winter: enchantment for free

Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It’s all about paying attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.

–Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag’s words are inspriring for anyone, not just artists. In Buddha’s Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love and Wisdom, Rick Hanson makes the claim that attention actually shapes the brain. What we pay attention to is what gets built into our brain tissue, and our neurons are wired in respond to what we focus on.

But what is this paying attention that Sontag talks of? I don’t usually equate paying attention with vitality, with connecting me with others, with making me feel eager. I work alone in a studio and much of my time is spent just looking at work in progress. At the end of the day, exhausted, I often think of that great line captured in an interview with a nearly 90 year old Agnes Martin as she was exiting her studio: “Painting is hard work.” Don’t I know.

But according to Alison Bonds Shapiro in her article, “Paying Attention,” there is something more than just focusing the mind:

We may think we understand the art of paying attention but many times, unfortunately, we mistake attention for judgment. We think about attention as a “critical” function. Attention is not critical. Judgment is. Attention is neutral. We begin to pay attention to something and then we start to judge it, evaluate it, categorize it and, yes, generally “criticize” it. But judging, while certainly useful, is not attention. Judging involves an underlying assumption that our purpose is ultimately to categorize and take action. We judge something to be done with it. The rush to being done with something does not increase our capacity to pay attention to it.

When we judge something we generally assess whether or not we need to “fix” it, reject it or enhance it, and move on. In other words, we are motivated to change it in some way. Whatever it is right now is generally not OK or not enough and has to be altered. If our intention is to fix or change or reject something our capacity to pay attention to it is actually minimized. We will see only as much as we think we need to see to take action. What if there is more to learn?

Attention is noticing and being with something without trying to change it. Attention takes the time to fully explore, to discover whatever there is to know about something, to watch as things change by themselves without our trying to ‘fix” anything. Attention is patient and attention is kind. No rush. No burden. No criticism.

This approach to being with whatever shows up (Shapiro references her teacher Frank Ostaseski‘s admonition to “welcome everything; push away nothing”) asks for a kind of detachment that is often counter to the intimacy that develops between artist and artifact. We are, in that role as maker, both judge and jury, creator and destroyer. But there are moments when accessing that detached acceptance of everything would feel like a useful tool to have in my quiver.

Tags: Art Making, paying attention

Pieced Cloth

April 9, 2013 in Aesthetics, Antiquities, Art | 6 comments

Fragment of cloth in the Islamic galleries at the Metropolitan Museum

Breaks are always, and fatally, reinscribed in an old cloth that must continually, interminably, be undone.

–Jacques Derrida, Positions

Sometimes it isn’t just about the whole cloth.

This past weekend I thought a lot about fragments, about the shards of incompleteness that are “continually, interminably” part of life. When you really look at this world, whole fabric is a rare thing. More often than not we fashion an existence out of pieced cloth, from fragments.

As a group of us gathered in New York City to remember our friend Morris now gone five years, each story shared was just one small facet of his complex and multilayered soul. Our weekend host Andrew, now a historian, spends his days culling through snippets and journal entries hoping to capture the authentic essence of his 19th century ancestor. Meanwhile the City of New York, the landscape I chose for my life 40 years ago and loved with the zeal of a new convert, is “continually, interminably” reinventing itself, blending fragments of that long ago past with what’s new and now belongs to another generation of supplicants.

On Sunday I spent an afternoon in the Islamic wing at the Metropolitan Museum, my favorite place these days. Coupled with the pristine and perfect wholeness of luxuriously oversized rugs is a carefully chosen array of exotic fragments salvaged from a time long ago and now the proxies for lost empires and kingdoms. These fragments are incomplete and my (our?) understanding of their full meaning is as well. But these artifacts have taken on a life of their own and hold me in their mystery. Their solitude suggests how much is missing and the question of where they spent their previous incarnations before the museum became their home. While minds like my historian friend Andrew might see them as a starting place to understand the past, I am in awe of their very presence, of the power and awe that comes from their incompleteness.

Whether this is just an artist’s love for the implicit or an art maker’s tacit belief that objects do have power, it spills over into other domains. Life is, for most of us, a pieced cloth. Coming to love the irregularities, the gaps and incongruities is what getting older and wiser can be.

Some of my favorite fragments:

Tags: fragments, Islamic Art wing at the Met

We Are Pale Ramon

March 29, 2013 in Aesthetics, Art History/Theory, Poetry | 6 comments

Ghostly demarcations of the land under cloud cover, taken over the US midsection during a recent cross country flight.

My very clever and well read niece Rebecca Ricks sent me a link to an essay published in Frieze Magazine last year. Titled Of Ourselves and of Our Origins: Subjects of Art, it is an edited version of a lecture given by Peter Schjeldahl at the School of Visual Arts.

Peter Schjeldahl of course is the long time art critic at the New Yorker magazine. I read just about every article he writes and connect with him more than I don’t. This essay is particularly full of resonant wisdom and what’s more, it includes the full text of my favorite Wallace Stevens poem, “The idea of Order at Key West” (whose final line is referred to in the title: “Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,/The maker’s rage to order words of the sea,/Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,/And of ourselves and of our origins,/In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.”) Schjeldahl says this about the poem after quoting it: “I think it’s safe to say that nothing in recent writing or art reaches this level of beauty and intelligence, so confidently, let alone with such total mastery of form.”

It just may be that there is a stealth tribe, not easily determined but primal nonetheless: the kinship of those who carry an unearthly passion for that poem. Recite it by heart, and you’re in.

A few snippets from Schjeldahl’s essay (and there are oh so many):

***
Good art evicts intelligence from its left-brain command centre into other parts of the brain, and of the body. It does this by some or another touch or twist of beauty, which can’t be conceptualized but only undergone, like a beneficent seizure.

***
To be really good at anything, assuming that you’re talented, is to work harder and longer, with more ruthless honesty and discipline, than other people could do without bursting into tears. Your secret is that, hard as it may be, it doesn’t feel like work to you. It feels normal, like eating and sleeping…

So as an artist you’re lonely. You know the fragility and vulnerability of your Great Good Place but you lean your whole weight into it anyhow. Along with wanting fame and money and sex, like everybody, you want to slip that place into the map of the world, to make the world a little less wretched to you. You will even go without the fame and money and sex parts, if necessary. You will be misunderstood, often enough by people – darling dumbbells – who praise you. (Be kind to them if you can.) That’s the deal. No one said you were an artist. You said you were an artist. You asked for it. No whining.

Tags: Art, Peter Schjeldahl, Poetry, Wallace Stevens

A Resolute Materiality

January 29, 2013 in Aesthetics, Art Making | 4 comments

Jay Heikes, Ear of Dionysius, Collection Walker Art Center

The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis will be mounting a show of paintings in February, their first group painting show in 10 years. Titled Painter Painter, the exhibit has been co-curated by Bartholomew Ryan and Eric Crosby. I was intrigued—and heartened—by their selection process, their view of the state of painting, and the easy informality of their approach. Here are a few passages from each of them, chosen because they rang true for me:

Ryan:

Painting has always been a somewhat fraught medium, and particularly so over the last 30 to 40 years. Both Eric and I avoided bringing the more trenchant dogmas associated with it into our conversations with the artists. We wanted to be more attentive to the work on its own terms and try to figure things out from there. So our earliest questions were really simple, for instance: why choose the materials of painting today, at a time when artists can work in so many other ways?

We were also interested in a question related to some of the work being made now, which one often hears from older generations of curators, historians, and even artists, which is “Where is the criticality?” There is a certain expectation today that if a painter is to continue as a painter, there has to be some basic level of self-reflexivity, some wry acknowledgment of the problematic status of continuing to paint in a postmodern era, when painting itself has been toppled from its lofty perch. I think that’s been a good thing up to a point, but it has become deadening and knee-jerk. Many of the artists in our show have consciously sidestepped that way of framing their work, and they find more interesting things to think about.

Crosby:

There’s also something about the resolute materiality of painting that continues to attract artists. These are objects that follow deeply subjective and individual ways of thinking, as expressed through specific materials. In this show you will see works that are stained, collaged, sprayed, cut up, stitched, assembled, glued, smeared, rubbed, and so on— some works are years in the making. Painting offers a frame for contact with this very physical presence. It’s a vivid contrast with our daily routine, where we experience so many images by using a cursor, linking to them, altering them, navigating away from them. Painting resists this kind of experience. A lot of artists today embrace that notion to an extreme. They go where the materials take them, not where the history of painting tells them to go.

The Walker exhibition features Matt Connors, Sarah Crowner, Fergus Feehily, Jay Heikes, Rosy Keyser, Charles Mayton, Dianna Molzan, Joseph Montgomery, Katy Moran, Alex Olson, Scott Olson, Zak Prekop, Dominik Sittig, Lesley Vance, and Molly Zuckerman-Hartung.

Tags: Art, Bartholomew Ryan, Eric Crosby, painting, Walker Art

Zadie Smith

January 26, 2013 in Aesthetics, Books | 9 comments

We all have our heros, and Zadie Smith is one of mine. After reading her first novel, White Teeth (written at the age of 22 no less) in 2000, I was hooked.

So of course I was in one of the front rows of very full auditorium at the MFA on Thursday night to hear her speak. Very pregnant but still her gracefully statuesque self, Smith’s lecture was titled Why Write? She said her thoughts on that topic were written as a lecture for her students at NYU. But her wisdom is ageless and timely for all of us—including creatives in other fields—and at no point is she telling anyone what to do or how to do it. “I hate the patronizing of the young,” she said at some point. That attitude, combined with her spectacularly clear intelligence, talent and presence, would suggest that she is a gifted teacher as well.

The spirit of her thinking is captured in her list of 10 rules for writers published in The Guardian last year. It is so Zadie Smith—straightforward, thoughtful, poetic, and never condescending.

1. When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else.

2. When an adult, try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.

3. Don’t romanticise your ‘vocation’. You can either write good sentences or you can’t. There is no ‘writer’s lifestyle’. All that matters is what you leave on the page.

4. Avoid your weaknesses. But do this without telling yourself that the things you can’t do aren’t worth doing. Don’t mask self-doubt with contempt.

5. Leave a decent space of time between writing something and editing it.

6. Avoid cliques, gangs, groups. The presence of a crowd won’t make your writing any better than it is.

7. Work on a computer that is disconnected from the internet.

8. Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.

9. Don’t confuse honours with achievement.

10. Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand—but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never being satisfied.

A few other comments she shared on Thursday night stood out for me. She sees us entering a new era that redefines the relationship between the writer and the reader. She like writing essays because the goal is to be as clear as possible. “Novels, on the other hand, are a messier prospect.” While she was raised with the “western canon” during her education in the U.K., she doesn’t believe it is a viable concept anymore.

These phrases also stood out for me:

“Writing is my way of achieving radical ambiguity.”
“Disperse yourself in language.”
“White Teeth—That’s juvenilia to me now.”

When asked which authors influence her, she said her husband (Nick Laird) is the first to read what she writes because “he is in the house after all” (this was not delivered with a dismissive tone, just practical.) The only other writer she mentioned by name whose work she loves was George Saunders*. When she said his name I had to smile: There I sat, in the Remis Auditorium, listening to Zadie Smith, with Saunders’ latest book, The Tenth of December, on my lap. But then again, of course. I have a connection with her that runs deeper than a book or two.

_________
*My recent blog post about Saunders can be read here.

Tags: Books, George Saunders, rules for writing, Zadie Smith

Feeling the Undercurrent

January 23, 2013 in Aesthetics | 4 comments

Charles Burchfield, “Moon and Thunderhead”

There are many craftsmen who paint pleasantly the surface appearances and are very clever at it.

There are always a few who get at and feel the undercurrent, and these simply use the surface appearances selecting them and using them as tools to express the undercurrent, the real life.

If I cannot feel an undercurrent then I can only see a series of things. They may be attractive and novel at first but soon grow tiresome.

There is an undercurrent, the real life, beneath all appearances everywhere. I do not say that any master has fully comprehended it at any time, but the value of his (or her) work is in that he had sensed it and his work reports the measure of his experience.

It is this sense of the persistent life force back of things which makes the eye see and the hand move in ways that result in true masterpieces. Techniques are thus created as a need.

–Robert Henri

This is such a simple idea but one that feels so close to my sense of how things are in the studio. It is a metaphor that applies to both the making as well as the viewing of art.

It was my sense of just that—a powerful undercurrent—that knocked me out when I saw Robert Gober‘s brilliant show of Charles Burchfield‘s work that was on view a few years ago at the Hammer Museum in LA as well as the Whitney in New York. Gober’s selection of work made it so easy to enter into Burchfield’s paintings in a new and revelatory way, something I had never done before. Burchfield was a nature mystic, and he felt the life force in nature. Amazingly he also found a way to capture that undercurrent in his work. Since piercing through and into that sense of things, I cannot approach a Burchfield painting without feeling that energy. Some are better than others of course, but that undercurrent is so present and so there in his work.

(For those of you in the Boston area, I just discovered three new Burchfields. They are hanging unassumedly in rooms adjacent to the Addison Museum at Philips Academy in Andover. Just ask to see them.)

A note on Robert Henri: His book from which the above passage is taken, The Art Spirit, was foundational reading for me when I first became an artist. Henri is probably better known today from that collection of his teachings—assembled by a former student, Margery Ryerson—than from his paintings although many of his works are very memorable. He also left an extraordinary legacy as a teacher. (He taught at the Art Students League, still an ongoing institution in New York, from 1915 til 1927.) Some of his more famous students include George Bellows, Stuart Davis, Edward Hopper, Rockwell Kent and Yasuo Kuniyoshi.

Other posts on Charles Burchfield on Slow Muse:

Burchfield on my Mind

The Artist Curator Advantage

The Intuition Deliminator

Tags: Art, Charles Burchfield, painting, Robert Henri, undercurrent

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