My recollection of Addison Parks will appear in "Provincetown Arts" at the end of this month

Addison Parks

(1953–2018)

WHEN JOYCE CREIGER paired Addison and me

for our inaugural show in 1998 at the Creiger-

Dane Gallery on Newbury Street, little did we

know that she had initiated our twenty-year-long

friendship. Little did I know that my exhibition

partner had already achieved renown in the ’80s

in New York, not long after graduating from the

Rhode Island School of Design as part of the

neo-Expressionists with shows at the Joan Washburn

and Andrew Crispo galleries. He achieved

parallel success as an art critic at ARTS Magazine

and, when he moved to Boston, at the Christian

Science Monitor.

In 1998, Addison drew on his New York and

Boston connections to mount a show of hybrid

abstraction at Creiger-Dane entitled Severed Ear,

which, in retrospect, could only be considered

postmodern anticipating the Provisionalist

painting that Raphael Rubinstein labeled as

such in 2007. It bespoke his ability to befriend

a diverse group of artists and also a highly intuitive

mind that could sense connections unseen

to most people.

For more than a decade, Addison and his

wife, Stacey Parks, ran the Bow Street Gallery

in Cambridge. On occasion, he would host

luncheons with gallery members and other gallerists

where there were vibrant discussions on

art that one gallery member described as Pinteresque.

These are memories of Addison at his

best, a brilliant conversationalist bringing people

together to discuss the topics of art and life that

defined his existence.

People remember him. One evening, I was

conversing with someone at the Milton Resnick

and Pat Pasloff Foundation, telling him about

the death of Larry Deyab, who had been Resnick’s

studio assistant. Somehow the conversation

turned to Addison’s death, and he said

Addison had reviewed his first show in NYC.

Recently, a Boston artist contacted me out of

the blue to tell me what an impact Severed Ear

had on his life and art. Addison was not a happy

camper in Boston, and justifiably so, since a

certain fussbudget mentality reigns in this town

that was not sympathetic to charismatic types

like him. He was an enthusiast in an art scene

defined by doctors and lawyers.

What is most memorable about Addison is

his unbending resistance to those experts who

wished to define him, whether it was the doctors

who set timelines on his illness, or a stockbroker

who thought he should go all tech stock in 2000.

Sometimes I almost wondered if he possessed

the wisdom of a shaman in the way his insights

seemed to transcend the boundaries of practical

knowledge. For all of these things and more, he

will be greatly missed.

— Martin Mugar

Beckett's "Endgame", Robert Storr's and Addison Parks's recollections of Deyab's unique character and achievements

Addison Parks wrote an exquisite remembrance of Larry Deyab.

http://artdealmagazine.blogspot.com/2016/03/happy-birthday-larry-deyab-rest-in-peace.html?m=1


The essence of the painting by Larry Deyab is captured in this excerpt from Beckett’s “Endgame”.  Few artists can express the grimness of human existence. Goya is alone except for Deyab.

 HAMM: 

I once knew a madman who thought the end of the world had come. He was a painter—and engraver. I had a great fondness for him. I used to go and see him, in the asylum. I'd take him by the hand and drag him to the window. Look! There! All that rising corn! And there! Look! The sails of the herring fleet! All that loveliness!

(Pause.)

He'd snatch away his hand and go back into his corner. Appalled. All he had seen was ashes.

(Pause.)

He alone had been spared.

(Pause.)

Forgotten.

(Pause.)

It appears the case is... was not so... so unusual.

Or Robert Storr's essay on his work is eloquent:

TAKE NO PRISONERS
Larry Deyab’s paintings come from a dark place. If you have not already seen it for yourself they will take you there. If you have you’ll immediately recognize where you are but see it as if for the first time through new eyes. That place has many names and its primary characteristics are also many as are the reasons for the differences among them. Those differences matter and we look to painting to help to distinguish them. For lack of a better word, though, and out of respect for tradition, let’s call this continent of disquiet Melancholia, though Baudelaire its greatest poet, preferred a term referring to the source of the humor – black bile – classically understood to be its cause; Spleen. As in the late works of Francisco Goya y Lucientes – “luciente” means bright, shining but the light in Goya is defined by contrast with its absence - blackness suffuses the atmosphere of Deyab’s imagery like toxic squid ink sprayed or spit out on the canvas. Frequently, though, that blackness fades to a heavy metallic grisaille that appears suffused with unspecified toxicities like the atmosphere of an all but barren planet, a planet that might well be our own a hundred years hence – or as things are now tending, much sooner. Deyab’s landscapes – virtually empty horizons, carbon trees against asphyxiating skies – reimagine the conventions of the Romantic sublime for use at the end of the world, recast the pathetic fallacy that nature bespeaks human emotions for that moment when humans have vanished from the face of the earth.
That noted History has already met Larry Deyab half way. More than half way! It is crowding him at very turn. And he is pushing back. Because he has a stake in how history turns out and how its tragedies are misunderstood in their unfolding. Of course we all do, but Deyab, who is of Syrian extraction, reads the daily headlines from the Middle East from a different perspective than the majority of native-born Americans. When we talk about “difference and diversity” in this country the dialogue tends to channel into well worn grooves cut by the ongoing catastrophe bequeathed to us all by slavery. But many waves of immigration followed that of the “founding fathers” who landed at Plymouth Rock, just as they followed those of slave ships docking in Atlantic and Pacific ports of call to supply labor to the Southern colonies and later the Southern states. Deyab’s family of these later transplantations, and it is with more recent and correspondingly vivid collective memory that he watches in horror at his adopted country blunders through the fog of war in Syria, Iraq, and beyond even as new refugees who might be part of his extended clan – the Family of Man – flee or attempt to flee from wars they did not want and from which they suffer more grievously than those who started them. Place names from that part of the world – Fallujah, for example, where mercenaries from the aptly branded Dark Ops squads of Blackwater were burned and then lynched on a bridge for crimes they did commit – is one of those places. Other pictures commemorate monsters from the region – for instance Sadam Hussein’s sadistic sons Uday and Qusay – or thugs from various other post-colonial zones of armed conflict in Asia (specifically Cambodia) and Africa (specifically Liberia), and spill over terrorism in Europe (in particular Munich and the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics.) Thus Deyab enters the ranks of contemporary history painters like Gerhard Richter, Leon Golub, Luc Tuymans who have updated Goya’s Disasters of War by showing the Disasters of Peace - or what goes by that designation in an era when “lesser” blood-letting is trumped by the prospect of nuclear annihilation – while eschewing all the tropes of valiant heroism and idealistic common cause characteristic of history painting prior to Goya.
Meanwhile some of Deyab’s emblems of horror are purely mythical – the vampire Nosferatu being one – or archetypal – demonic clowns, side show freaks fleshing out the roster. And some are Biblical, notably from the stations of the Cross a subject rare in contemporary art but a staple of painting in the pre-modern period and to that extent a symbol of Deyab’s challenge to the conventional post-modernist wisdom about what can and should be painted. It would seem that that in a world of daily martyrdoms on the evening news the flagellation of Christ, his crown of thorns, his struggle to carry his own Cross to Calvary are again relevant to some artists who are wholly of their time in every other respect, arguing that as metaphor these stories have yet to be exhausted. In Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood her central character Hazel Motes is caught by his landlady mortifying his flesh with barbed wire around his ribs and pebbles in his shoes. When she admonishes him to stop stating that “People don’t do things like that anymore” he calmly answers her saying words to the effect “So long as I do, they do.” Deyab is such a painter.
It is ironic that many of these dark images are realized “en pleine aire,” specifically on the back porch of a triple decker house in Cambridge Massachusetts where Deyab grew up and to which he has returned to make his own after a long period in the rough and tumble of the New York art world where his circle mixed contemporaries and near contemporaries and cherished elders. In the latter category Milton Resnick, Pat Pasloff, and Ronald Bladen; in the former rising talents of his own generations or of those just slightly older than his, Julian Schnabel for one. Accordingly Deyab’s sense of artistic tradition is first rather than second hand or academic, and never a matter of nostalgia for a Golden Era he missed, but of a living connection to artists he admires.
Yet like any “son” of imposing fathers and mothers Deyab learned early that he did them no honor by trying to mimic the look of their work, which inevitably means doing the heroes work over again but less well and for the wrong reasons - or for no reason at all other that excessively deferential admiration and want of an independent identity and raison d’etre. Making one’s own way as an artist necessarily requires making it – the thing, the work - one’s own way. The first step in that direction is choosing one’s own tools and formats. This Deyab did by setting aside the tools of the past - tools he had mastered and effects he loved and thoroughly understood - and picking up others in tune with his times albeit visually dissonant in the context of the full-bodied painterly painting to which he was initially drawn and at which he excelled early in his career. Chief among them are commercial enamels and spray paint, which account for the unwelcoming, unyielding surfaces of his panels. Speaking of Van Eyck Willem de Kooning famously said “ flesh was the reason oil paint was invented.” Foreswearing the hedonistic pleasures of that medium Deyab has opted for a raw, deliberately limited but for all that no less expressive choice of tools and materials, essentially those of taggers who inscribe their names and thoughts and fantasies on unprotected walls in public situations. Addressing the private anguish that public events inspire and showing viewers those things in a state of nakedness from which they would prefer to turn away, Deyab has chosen to be a painter entirely in and of the world – while it lasts. His pictures are hard to look at and harder still to ‘like” in a period when “liking” has become a finger tip reflex response to canned and spoon-fed feel good imagery of every description. I don’t like Deyab’s pictures but I take them seriously as they insist that I do and once seen I can’t forget them.
Robert Storr – 2015

The New Realism:Ananian, Deyab, Lee and Mugar

I am not talking about Realist art per se, although a realist painter will be included in my discussion, but an attitude toward life that is realistic. I first touched on this in my critique of the Boston Art Scene and the Marathon bombings. I had just finished up a show in Boston that winter with Paul Pollaro. I had not shown in Boston since 2007, so it was a re-acquaintance with the Boston art world. The then current Boston art scene seemed to me to be more interested in providing well-crafted objects and weak sentimentality than with trying to understand the depths of the world we live in. Just the ripples on the surface not the powerful forces that shape that surface.  The political elite’s reaction to the Bombings later that Spring seemed to say that they had rather support a veneer of meaning, propped up by platitudes, than deal clearly with the nature of the world that produced such horror. In the case of the Marathon deaths, the political class brought out the big guns to channel Boston’s enthusiasm for sports so as to heal an emotionally rattled city overcome by this tragedy. It all reeked of Babbitry.

I recall in high school working late one night on an essay on "Moby Dick". I could not figure out the mystery of it all and the solution of a mystery seemed to be essential to the book and to writing a successful essay. Who is Ahab, what drives him? How do we function is a world shaped by mad leaders? It seemed ridiculous to hand in a paper that left the big questions unanswered.  I am sure that most of my classmates could have cared less. I remember going to bed at midnight, the night before the paper was due, somewhat disheartened with my unresolved essay, only to wake up a few hours later with an insight into the problem. It lay in the “Try Works” chapter. Recently, because I couldn’t remember what the chapter was about , I googled the title of the chapter.  I was not surprised it was a meditation on the need for perseverance and faith as one passes through the dark night of evil and sorrow, captured by the patterns of fire and smoke spewing from the rendered flesh of a freshly killed whale. “There is wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness.” says Ishmael. How do we navigate that distinction? It made me think of Clint Eastwood in “The Outlaw Josey Wales” who hovers between the two woes; one a wisdom born of sorrow; the other a kind of madness, akin to Ahab’s?

All I have reread at this point is that chapter but I am astonished how much there is to unpack in each sentence. The end of the short chapter describes Ishmael’s realization that he has been steering the Peqoud ass-backwards and is close to capsizing the whole boat for me is a searing image of an upside down topsy-turvy world full of mistakes that are combined to weave the fabric of reality itself.

 

"Victim "2014 Deyab

There are a handful artists, and I will include myself , who are emotionally robust enough to look at the shape of things and depict them accurately. I think the key to their way of thinking and feeling is an ability to see things in context: a kind of intuition of the whole or a knack at seeing what “is” in the context of the unseen. Larry Deyab at first glance can appear to be a so hip and contemporary with his preferred use of spray paint, photographic journalistic source material and a Richard Prince sense of the edit and erasure. But his art embraces a totally un-contemporary sense of horror more akin to Goya than Prince as he responds to the ongoing chaos of the Middle East. His preferred media of spray paint provides an identification with the lives of the victims who have been reduced to poverty and terror and if asked to paint their condition could not go the a fine art store to buy brushes. It conveys a sense of urgency and identifies with the victims with the brush of urban anger,spray paint. His subject matter heretofore dealt the Arab-Israeli conflict, now stands aghast before the unwillingness of the Western powers to engage in the Syrian conflict that is moving rapidly toward genocidal proportions: Images of blind fate, the hammer of doom. Victim and victimizer. The emotions go beyond the photo journalistic source of the images but seem more akin to some generational and macabre dance of evil.

 

"Sargasso Sea," Mugar 1997

Excess is at the heart of these conflicts. Over the top annihilation of the opposition, a fury that knows no boundaries. Confronting and engaging this aspect of life and death is not something easily achieved with Realism, nor with Abstraction for that matter. I attempted to engage these issues in my work from the late Nineties, shown at Crieger-Dane in Boston and has remained an issue that seems to escape the critics. Or maybe they see it but it is that very notion of excess that puts them off. Somewhere in my career I lost any desire to make art as a vehicle of self-expression. The Neo-Expressionism of the 80’s seemed to be the last gasp of that self-centered version that came out of Germany in the 20’s and 30’s.I wanted a language that would embody the state of things of things as they are. Things as they are swimming in a sea of forces bigger than themselves. But also as inevitably forced into conflict with each other. The titles of the work gave them away: “Mackerel Crowded sea “,”Sargasso Sea”, “Footprints”. The first title is taken from Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium”, a poem that establishes a sharp contrast between the modern reality of man as swarm and a more god based hierarchy that lends a ground of eternity to our individual existence. “Sargasso Sea” created in my mind a sort of organic island without substance that houses enumerable species….”Footprints” imagines a larger force squashing lesser forces. The latter title and painting is no permission for this sort of oppression but a rather sang-froid description of academic politics. I have always felt that the sadism that we love to imagine is so far from our day-to-day lives virulently in the perverse little politics of the world we work in.

 

"Self Portrait" Ananian

Mike Ananian’s realism evokes implicitly a kind of male stoicism that reminds me of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman”: the life of someone who has to get up for work each morning to fulfill his sales quota, whether there is pleasant background music or not. I also think of Mamet’s “Glengarry Glen Ross”, where real estate brokers driven by the Darwinian will to prevail, are capable of undercutting their colleagues, selling questionable properties and committing  crime. There is no room for humor or grace, only the hope that their life of struggle has some heroic meaning. The characters in Ananian’s portraits seem to carry their faces like Roman portrait busts without any halo of divinity.

"Helmet" by Billy Lee

They are strangely reminiscent of his UNC-G colleague Billy Lee’s sculptures of heroic hoplite heads. Guardian’s and sentinels that are eye-less. They don’t observe anymore; they have been reduced to pure will. They are holding their ground full of a contained phallic fury.

Maybe my work and the work of Deyab, Lee and Ananian is lacking in irony, the staple of contemporary art. We are  not fetishistic in the creation of our art objects, just forcing our images to remind the viewer of the hardness of survival. No bromides, no fatuous statements about commodification. This work is not fun. No matter how hard we try to create fantasies about the human condition and leaders and gurus to fulfill them we can’t escape the grim reality of conflict.