The painting of Don Shambroom

 Don Shambroom and his work looms large in my blogging that started in 2012. Mostly his opinions that have been shared with me either at visits to his studio on the Millers River in Massachusetts, via email or comments left on my blog posts. Just a presence that added up over time. What he had to say on culture and art were most often very prescient. He has a knack for thinking deeply about any subject that he decides to focus on. Most recently an interest in the life and work of Marcel Duchamp resulted in the publication of a monograph on Duchamp’s last day published by the David Zwirner gallery. In order to write the book he had to enter and hold his own in the world of Duchamp scholars and chroniclers which was no mean task.   When we first met at Yale and then again when our paths crossed in Boston exchanges were face to face. Since the advent of the internet these exchanges have been hijacked by the web and have become part of the very subject matter of his painting.  

Cow Bird

The imagery of the art world in the 20th c to my eye is torn between a Hegelian systematization and the Kantian sublime. Newman, Rothko, de Kooning define the sublime. Of course, Rothko and Newman deal with the numinous presence of the self and de Kooning with the terror (an aspect of the sublime) of being torn apart but somehow surviving to be reconstituted in the real. For these painters the artist still wields power to move the viewer. These artists represent the part that resists being overwhelmed by the whole. The Hegelian trope can be seen in the part being subsumed in the whole. Here the part can either resist strongly or acquiesce subserviently. I noticed this subservient stand in the work of Dana Schutz. She applies a cubistic language that in the end is not a structure into which parts are grounded in the real but a system that obliterates a meaningful use of the parts. It embodies the postmodern dream of the death of man. We are uploaded to the mediaverse  starting in the 50’s with the tv understood by Marshall McLuhan as messaging through it mediatic structure and coopting our whole physical reality finally on FB or at last dreamed of in the metaverse qua Oculus.  

The artists who no longer resist this effacing of the human presence can be seen in the artistic phenomena of zombie formalism that I was one of the first to talk about. It seems to have grown out of the branch of modernism that does not ground itself in the human body a case in point being Frank Stella whose early graphic design-based work is already one degree removed from embodied perception. 

String Theory 

Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe a painter and critic who stumbled across my writing emailed me in direct response to something I had written about the characters in Zombie Formalism. I found it applied to the work of Dana Schutz. His words addressed the struggle of the part and the whole in any Hegelian inspired work of art where the part provides “no bodily surprise” (to quote Gilbert-Rolfe). Nothing that can break out of the whole.  He sent me a link to his writing on the Sublime. The art of Shambroom like any smart artist who wants to find his or herself engaged in understanding the human condition of late modernity has to sort out this Hegelian/ Kantian struggle of the system v.s. the Sublime. Unlike the submission to the systemic like Schutz whose visual world seems to grow out of Saturday morning cartoons or the Zombie formalists who bleed any life out of abstraction, he creates a hybrid of both the intensity of seeing by the artist one on one with things of the world and a systematic world derived from Rauschenbergian space. On the one hand the face, the individual is lifted up into a societal miasma on the other hand things of the world are granted a kind of beauty in their isolation, a stance that exalts their magic of having appeared in time and space. Like a Janus face he looks backward into the 19thc on to the Renaissance and Baroque where the artists were capable of holding up the moment and the thing in its beauteous moment of revelation and on the other absorbing the language of modernism where the human presence is swept up into a higher structure. By straddling the two worlds he is casting doubt on any attempt to see the imagery of mass culture as a superior sort of transcendence as in Warhol, a Hegelian “aufbehung” which ambiguously means both a cancelling and a lifting up. 

Symbolic Drift

This strategy of maintaining both realities side by side without sublimating one into the other, resembles the task that Ernst Junger set for himself. In his writing. He is famous for his WW1 account of trench warfare  ”Storm of Steel” that I recently learned that Don read while attempting in his own scholarly manner  to understand warfare as manifested in WW1 .For Junger WW1  represented a dramatic change in the role of the individual to technology. It is technology that drove the battle not individual acts of heroism. The book had a big influence on Heidegger’s understanding of the growing nihilistic role of technology in 20thc life that he called “enframement” and more particularly ”machination” (that continues to this day in more and more insidious fashion on the internet.)  In my own blogging I have called this transformation the “Humpty Dumpty” effect where the integration of the image of the individual into the whole as we knew it and as it is represented in the art of the west say in the work of Piero or Michelangelo is irretrievably lost as we move into the 20thc. All the king’s horses and all the kings men could not put Humpty Dumpty together again. 

John Singer Sargent's "Gassed"

 In the interim between the wars Junger pondered in his writing how the life of the individual might function outside of the political and technological system. achieving in “The Adventurous Heart” an  almost mesmerizing descriptions of the objects of the day to day reality that he encounters sometimes enhanced by drugs. His goal was to describe the surface of the real with such intensity so as to reveal something of a hidden reality. It also represents a shift of weight from the individual subsumed in the political to its own private inner magic. In many ways it parallels the power of many individual artist such as Picasso who functions as free agents outside the system. Or the proliferation of shamanic types in the 20thc century such as Alistair ‘Crowley, Krishnamurti  or Rudolph Steiner who attempt to integrate divinity in a post Christian  era. Another short book written by Junger between the wars “Forest Passage”  posits the strengthening of the individual in connection with the natural world as it steps outside the leviathan. I was taken aback by the first image described in “Adventurous Heart” in overwhelming detail of a tiger lily, which in turn brought to mind a painting by Don Shambroom of a daylily represented in almost stereoscopic detail. There is no postmodern cynicism in this painting. This is not the world of Yuskavage or Currin that keeps pushing the envelope to further dimensions of perversity.  The realm of Blakean innocence finds its place in Don’s openness to the opening of a flower. 

"Circle of the Lustful" William Blake

Shambroom’s art embraces a hybrid notion of the societal whole and the individual as its own kind of whole. He leans on the structure of a visual language derived from Rauschenberg  to insert images of faces known from mass media side by side with those of people in his immediate family. Sometimes there is text given the same weight as the faces and bodies. Interpenetration of the 19thc world of portraiture and that of billboards or flashing internet imagery. Everything is on the verge of overwhelming the individual. A child on a swing is impinged on by graffiti/slogans. What one must remember in observing these paintings is that everything is hand painted. There is the 20thc lingua franca of collage but the 19th c love of paint to represent the here and now. Again we are helped by a seeing Shambroom as hermeneutically orchestrating a sort of clash/crash between two periods of time and two notions of the universe, that seem to have bifurcated irretrievably to which his work  says adamantly No. The dreamscape of people carried along in a sort of cosmic stream seems to remove a purely societal critique and opens up the possibility of a Blakean insertion into a higher spiritual realm. Shambroom’s work can only make sense if seen as issuing from a shamanic magic incantation. An attempt to merge the media images of mass culture with the domestic play of children

Day Lily

Miles Hall who previously interviewed me on my painting has written a sympathetic appraisal of my book on drawing and painting

  Drawing and Painting: Perceptual theory as a basis for learning how to draw, by Martin G. Mugar  

 While Mugar never mentions the construction of cathedrals in Drawing and Painting, his approach got me thinking about what that might mean in one’s own art and teaching.    

  Humans are tremendously fickle creatures, and sometimes when things go out of style, we have a hard time seeing them for what they are.

   In April of 2019, while the world held its breath and Notre Dame burned, I couldn’t help but think of certain ironies concerning the near universal esteem – or even veneration - being expressed for that cathedral at the prospect of its loss. This in contrast with the ubiquitous scorn the structure was viewed with only two-and-a-half centuries before. In fact, the rise, fall, and rise again in the fortunes of its reputation – from the late Medieval period to the Enlightenment and through to the Romantic era - could be seen as a classic case study of the vagaries of stylistic perception over time.

    The Gothic style’s plunge into disrepute got me thinking about current trends in our perception of Modernism, whose once powerful cache has seen a significant drop in our lifetime. We tend to forget that Modernism wasn’t a monolithic movement or aesthetic, and neither was the Gothic. Rather, the modern period was a century of varying forms where a whole spate of conflicting definitions of art’s essential nature were proposed. Because of its general ideological fervor, our Postmodern eyes tend to see Modernism in hindsight as a highly controlled set of styles, ideas, and institutions. The paradoxical thing is that this race to delineate and limit the parameters of art came out of a desire for freedom from traditional, academic forms and constraints. The early Modernist’s initial impulse was the ambition to build something new from the ground up, not as groups or a collective society (that happened later,) but as individuals. 

     Martin Mugar’s book, Drawing and Painting, grows out of much of the same soil early Modernism did, i.e. the desire to build painting anew, one artist at a time, with individual human eyes. This book places the act of visual perception squarely at the center of both drawing and painting. It encourages the student to cultivate their own cognitive awareness in the act of seeing. Its underlying premise is that vision isn’t just an open window for plundering stylistic preferences or narrative material. It’s not merely a tool in the shaping of our aesthetic or conceptual inclinations, but a deeply significant, ongoing, experiential act, never ancillary. The “eye is always in the process of stabilizing the world” according to Mugar, and the very essence of drawing is grounded in “this ordering of perception.” 

     As I read this book, I was struck by the notion of someone still believing, in very strong and certain terms, that artists can truly innovate through persistent looking, analyzing and feeling. One senses there is still something of the same naive sophistication bouncing around in the author’s head that was present when painters like Monet, Matisse, Braque and Marquet first stepped out into the French countryside to re-discover painting via the observation of nature, or “nature seen through a temperament,” as Zola put it, though I’m guessing Martin might be prone to replace Zola’s use of the subjective term “temperament” with language more firmly grounded in visual function. This is because 150 years later, Mugar’s book is backed up with more cognitive and art historical data, which he mines to make a logical argument for his premise. 

     Martin’s theory emerges out of decades of experience, from both his studio work and his teaching practice. It is informed by his extensive knowledge of Art History and an intense personal interest in philosophy. Alongside this there are specific investigations into cognitive science as it relates directly to certain visual issues. Most all the details of this  knowledge stay in the background however, as Mugar offers up a series of practical exercises. These are laid out as something like arenas for the exploration of vision itself. We are given points of focus, each designed to tap into certain aspects of visual processing. Discoveries are left for the student to unearth through a visual, Socratic question and answer process. Formal issues are dealt with experientially and through looking rather than by describing a particular design concept: Drawing, cutting, collaging, finding negative shapes, using the imagination and redrawing. On the painting side, certain lighting and color parameters are established. There is a strong emphasis on starting out each exercise within its given boundaries, but there is also a feeling that the thoughtful game of chess, once established by those original limitations, could land the student just about anywhere. The destination is not restricted. There are unlimited possibilities in starting from inside those borders. 

      I would be hesitant to strictly call these exercises or assignments, and I doubt they are something to which one could firmly attach a grading rubric of the check-list variety (thankfully.) This doesn’t mean they lack objectivity, as Mugar is a stickler for really making you look at what’s going on in front of you. Caravaggio, Seurat, Cezanne and Braque figure prominently in this book, not for any emphasis on their stylistic flourishings, but because Martin relates certain perceptual functions to what each of these artists did on the picture plane, and how each one saw in new and innovative ways. He orders these exercises according to a different logic of sequence than most teachers I have encountered, starting with those visual processes that happen deeper down in the brain: A nod not only to cognitive science, but to simple intuitive experience as well.

     While Martin doesn’t explicitly stray into the depths of philosophy proper in Drawing and Painting, we get hints of how his knowledge in that field enriches this book. One can see his interest in the thought of Heidegger - or perhaps other flavors of phenomenology and existentialism – permeating the mental atmosphere of its pages. Martin’s approach is also philosophical in this way: he does not offer up recipes or a set of instructions. Even with specific projects given, one must attempt to penetrate the meaning of each working situation he sets up through action and reflection. Though simple and straight forward in some ways, all is left open enough to be somewhat opaque and elliptical in terms of end points. Single sentences can be mined and reflected on for manifold implications. This book will utterly elude and exasperate the student who is looking to memorize technically rehearsed answers for surety and peace of mind. It is not a how-to manual. 

     Drawing and Painting calls us to ask questions, frame inferences, and create something of our own conclusions while being given a partial tour of the territory. The whole map is not handed to us, a priori. Instead, we are initiated into a knowledge of how to navigate the wilderness. What we discover in that wilderness is left up to us. 

 With its compact, elliptical prose this book is somewhat short, and I found myself wanting more. While he dips into certain aspects of perceptual science – the striate cortex was one that was new for me – there are many others that he leaves alone. I went away feeling like other, unmentioned aspects of vision, like depth of field, the fovea, and center surround, could each have had their own set of exercises tailored for them – along with many others. Or did the author decide that in the case of this book, less really was more? This would leave open the possibility that Mugar treats teachers like he does his students, and those things are left for us to figure out in our own curricula. 

     In any event, this is an important and timely book. Much of its significance is its tendency to go against the grain of our present-day reasoning. The algorithm, the template, the prefab architectural plan, these are the spirit of our current artistic age. We are offered an array of various templates which give the illusion of freedom. If followed, no thinking or feeling of your own is required. Sharpen your pencil, measure this, measure that, rinse, wash repeat. 

 Part of the beauty of Gothic cathedrals, and much of the reason we admire them today, is that they were constructed with no architectural plans. Their engineering specs were worked out during the construction process. The builders of  Notre Dame defied gravity by experiment, by an intuitive understanding of their materials and the laws of physics. Drawing and Painting is a call to something similar. It is a call to build painting from the ground up, but in this case through an intimate, experiential knowledge of the laws of visual perception. To some that may seem old fashion. To others, it may be the only new way through.

- Miles Hall, December 3, 2021

Martin Mugar currently resides in New Hampshire. His writing appeared on Painter’s Table. 

Book is available at: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1475021364