archeTEXTURES Talk

Last night I had the special opportunity to hear Dore Ashton speak at The University of Washington. Ms. Ashton is a well renowned author on art and culture, a critic in painting and printmaking at the Yale School of Art and teacher of art history at the Cooper Union in New York. Her talk focused on her specialty, which is the New York School of painters, known as the Abstract Expressionists. These artists, who were her friends, started painting between 1900-1920 and they all had something in common, the great depression. Between 1930-1945, they also witnessed one of humanities worst crimes on humanity, the Holocaust. Something that not everybody knows is that the fascists manipulated art and used it in the systematic elimination of Jews and many other groups of people whom they felt did not fit into their idealization of Nordic culture and Nazi ideology. This unfathomable task left sensitive people, artists, to ask important ethical questions, such as what is art for? How had it functioned in other cultures? Asking these questions, was the abstract expressionist artists way to reassert human values. Ashton stated that, "it was a need for knowledge, which the arts represent" So how did the Abstract Expressionists communicate these concerns? Through the language of paint. These artists had a common love for paint and they used it to express their inner emotions, thoughts and subjectivity.

In thinking about how this relates to contemporary times, we have once again found ourselves at war, which has now been going on for the last five years. Although there seems to be relief and an end to the war coming ahead, Americans are all faced with threat of another depression. I feel the times are ripe for leaving behind our obsession with materiality and our cynicism and embracing something more optimistic. And for me that means painting. And although we see very little of it today out in the galleries and museums, there are still artists out there who are making meaningful paintings. After hearing Ashton's passionate talk about her love for the Abstract Expressionist artists and for painting, I am overjoyed to share with you the painters I love, and the work I do.

Starting in the 19th C with the Northern Romantic Painters, I have an affinity to German painter, David Casper Freidrich. Friedrich represented a break from classical artists who sought to mimic the world they saw in a naturalist or realistic manner, whereas Fredreich sought a reunion with the spiritual self through the contemplation of Nature. Friedrich said, "The artists should not only paint what he sees before him, but what he sees within him"

The other Romantic painter I love is British artist, William Turner who is commonly known as "the painter of light". In this work, "The Fighting Temeraire" he evokes ephemeral atmospheric effects, striving for expression of spirituality in the world, rather than responding primarily to optical phenomena. Inspired by Turner, is another of my favorite artists, the French Impressionist painter Monet. Monet painted plein air, or in the open air, and captured the light and its changing qualities on form. Growing up in Chicago I had the opportunity to see the Impressionists paintings over and over and observe his distinctive brush marks, which create movement and also add to capturing the feeling of a fleeting moment in time. This painting was painted in 1903 and it is called the "House of Parliament, London, Effect of Sunlight" Another French artist, whose paintings I also returned to again and again at the Art Institute was Cezanne. This painting is called "Mont-Saint Victoire" done in 1905. A bit more geometric, Cezanne brought structure and order to his paintings by reducing forms to their basic shape, while retaining a rich and complex relationship of color.

From the American painters, the ones I love the most are the Abstract Expressionist painters I mentioned earlier. The Ab-X artists painted large scale canvases that expressed the emotion they felt on the inside. One painter distinct from the rest, used color in a way no other artist has done. His sublime but emotionally present canvases are simplified geometric color fields, whose relationship of pure color glow and resonate with emotion, and touch me at my core. The other artist I enjoy in a very different way, is the work of Joan Mitchell. Mitchell was the anomaly of the group because she was a woman for one, and she also painted in Chicago. Through the flurry of meaningful marks she unleashes on the canvas, she triggers turbulent emotions and appreciation of the material of paint.

From the many contemporary painters, the ones closest to my heart are Brice Marden, and local Irish painter, Helen O'Toole. I discovered Brice Marden in graduate school, when the work I was doing reminded many people of his. I had never heard of him, so I looked him up and when I did, I couldn't believe not only the visual similarities, but also the ethos which we shared. Marden's work is also inspired by nature, but he seeks to grasp the feeling of it rather than a likeness. He also looks to eastern calligraphy and notions of Buddhism, which I have a deep interest in and have explored, on many practical levels.

My other source of endless inspiration is local artist Helen O'Toole. I met her in graduate school, at the University of Washington, where she was a mentor to me. Helen's work deals with the memory of landscape, and how she is aware of how the space shifts from form to atmosphere, focusing on the relevance of the rectangle in relation to color, light, space and its geometry. Her larger than life size paintings are as powerful as she is.

As a means to move from my influences into my own work I want to begin to show you some select work I did at the time I was in graduate school, because it was then that I began the work that I continue to investigate today. What I realized at that time is that my subjectivity draws me to the observation of the natural world. Nature connects me with stillness and by drawing from observation I become the observer, I am watching, I am an aware presence that perceives. The process of seeing, engages the right side of the brain, which shifts one away from a mode of mental thinking. By doing so, I remain in the present moment, tapping into my right action, my creative action, my intuition and my deeper sense of knowing. As I continue to show the work, the imagery may seem to change on the surface, but the questions and investigation are all intertwined. That reminds me of something Dore Ashton mentioned that DeKoonig said, "there is no comfortable chair for an artist to sit on" and I feel that this is true if an artist is searching for authenticity rather than relying on formula for resolution.