Link to an essay I wrote for Addison Parks's show at Crieger-Dane in 2000

http://www.bowstreetgallery.com/Addison_Parks/Catalogue_Essay.html

Addison has reprised a conversation I had with him from 1999

A Painting from the show at Crieger-Dane on Newbury St Boston

Link:
Art Deal Magazine 

or read it here:

AP When a painting gels, it seems like it is much more than just getting it to "work." In a funny way it seems like it is put to rest on the one hand and set it motion on the other. That point when everything comes together and the fusion sets in and it jumps into a kind of hyperspace, that whoosh, and the whole thing becomes so much more than the sum of its parts that it is almost an understatement. At that point it is as though the work is out of our hands, and in that funny way, ready to go, like a child that grows up. I find that I like it when this maturation comes in the natural process of painting; however I also enjoy the challenge of finding that certain something which propels the work to that other level. The hardest ones are those that are so close and could be really great but the next second crash and disappear forever. Does this happen to you? Those paintings that come along and promise so much and never deliver? What happens there? I get tight, I guess. Pitching a no hitter into the ninth and then losing my focus and blowing it because the promise was too great. I would have to say t hat most of my "best" paintings never made it. What about those last few moments? How do you treat a painting at that point? What sort of factors come into play? What does it depend on,hang on, how do we know? MMWow!Where to begin.How a painting occurs and how it at its best can correspond to some truth,not absolute,just an exhilarating correspondence between it and some unknown part of yourself.I know the "dropping the ball" sensation to keep with your sports metaphors or striking out as you put it in the ninth.Someone said that the beauty of baseball is that 300% in batting is damn good and as such corresponds to life.So the implication is that you have a lot of failures for the few successes you have.I was thinking that today in my studio that the last two days of new color,return to brushes,lots juicy paint might not gel; I thought of the waste,but recalled something from Robert Frost that waste is part of the game.Something about butterflies destroying themselves as they gorge themselves on milkweed nectar.All the little sperm that don't make it. But I know also what you say about just feeling right about it doesn't mean the painting works. Often I get sort of bogus recognitions in my work;for example I'll see some contemporary philosophical principle at work."How post modern of me""This is so intersubjective"I can rest assured that the next day I'll wince at what I've done.The best work either is pushed over the long term step by step piece by piece to a point where the whole goes beyond the parts.(That is I sweat over the interrelationship of the parts,back and forth,and may find by chance that the parts begin to resonate unawares in a way that I may never have intended)(is this the hyperspace you are talking about) or having just discovered some new realm I can knock off a series of images within that mode for a few weeks..Until its novelty wears off(obviously the new mental configuration is initially pleasurable)then some new problem presents itself or the painting wants to be more. I think that what I want most is the painting to be a presence that people will keep coming back to.I said something to that effect in response to Richard Tuttle's NYT interview.He said it was an American phenomena this need to create an intense personal presence.Not to clobber the viewer but to grab them maybe but give them so much complexity they can't let go.Bringing complexity into our visual space.He said it should not be fast like signage or ads.But I think at some level it should be fast and then slow. I think most people are very clever,clever to a fault.They've got their back covered, they never let down their guard.I think I am easily mesmerized by the surface of things,the beauty of light,the candy in the store window.And I get burned,taken advantage of,while you are dazzled by the candy,someone is picking your pocket.Now in day to day life which is made up of deals,negotiations over territory,what's yours and mine I suppose one had best not be too naive.But in art I think it is an advantage to be susceptible,to be open,to lose boundaries.This "promesse du bonheur" thing I was talking about. It gets you into new territory like the promise of fertile and rich frontier lands for the pioneer. APWhat about clarity of purpose, intensity, conviction? For better or worse, is obsession a must for the artist? MMThose are the things you hear about as a student.At least I did at Yale.If you say that you are an artist than you must act like one.You got to do art,obviously to be an artist.I was that way especially in the beginning.It was all or nothing.Every day every event had to confirm this self image.I wasn't much fun and the girlfriend I had at that time bore the brunt of my obsessive nature.Self narrowly defined constantly needing to have the definition mirrored back.It is a trap.I was definitely an insufferable type.I see things differently now.Focus, clarity in art is a mode I can shift into.When I am there in the studio,I am totally there.I let go of it all when I am out of the studio.There is so much else that makes you an artist,like being an engaged human being,involved with others and influenced by one's surroundings.Eric Bogosian has a new great monologue which includes a bit on the narcissistic actor who seeks a reflection of his fame at every moment of the day; for relaxation at night he watches himself on TV.You aren't real unless you are getting that reflection. It is the danger of teaching.A built in cast of fans. Teachers are like football coaches.I heard the pep talks,from my parents too.Self immolation is the only way to get that recognition.All or nothing,your whole life has to be in it.But you know if there is nothing else feeding you,then you dry up.You end up imposing a very narrow definition of self that boxes you in.I like to be surprised to see how I can spontaneously be redefined by my work. The "lived life" contradicts the image you had grown accustomed to. It crops up in my paintings. AP How did you get going as an artist? MM As usual you ask some tough questions.My experience in the art world is that people just don't talk about the life,the struggle etc.I think that a lot of people I have worked with in academia over the years are happy to have a job in the arts and their art is just a kind of passport to that world.If there is a struggle it may be that there is a part of that world that is closed to them.A gallery,NYC,critical acclaim etc.But the struggle with the work,the split between what is and what you want never comes up.I don't hear that very often.Except from you.I remember once helping to organize a symposium at the Art Institute for a group of narrative painters.They showed their work and then talked about it.The essence of what they said was a long whine about rejection,not getting from the art world what they thought they deserved.All of that is real ,no denying,but someone asked what about the work,the joy the pain,the vision,the hope. Well your questions get to the core of it all to that inner debate and struggle that keeps us moving and creating. I'm just an ordinary guy.I enjoy the different kinds of weather,landscape.(Sounds like I'm putting together an ad for men seeking woman)I get lost in my senses very easily.They are like clothing, a a garb that we cloak ourselves in.They define us.Until something catastrophic happens.The cloak is rent.This oscillation gets me going. AP What do you credit for your love of art, and what lead you to dedicate your life to it? MM As for dedicating my life to it:The seeing just happens unless you shut you eyes.And all that seeing,the whole environment,other art,the people in it has to be digested.I really often suffer from a sort of visual indigestion.It can only get processed through art.I remember having a clear sense of this at the end of High School>I had dedicated myself to academics quite successfully,beginning to master the world of words and their meaning when I became quite lethargic as though there were 18 years of images that had to get processed.At that point I was doomed to be an artist or else go crazy with this excess of visual stuff inside of me.And so it continues to this day.And a love of the language,like someone can love words. I like the underlying structure that keeps rising to the surface when I paint. AP What do you think the kind of work you do has to offer the art community at large? MM Thank god for other artists.Who else can truly the enjoy the games I play and the risks I take with the tradition. AP A lot of people think that twentieth century art will end up on the trash heap, if it hasn't already. What contributions do you think will last and why? MM The severed Ear show I think established an interesting connection between pure abstraction a la Polk Smith and a more lyrical approach embodied in Joan Snyder for example. Abstraction was moving away from a scientific,reductive trope to becoming something like abstract letters that when combined into words can begin to open up the world of life and emotions.It moves out of a self reflexive mode into a life world of meaning.It is just beginning.I feel that I am part of it. AP How does being an art educator affect you as an artist? What about your recent experiences?(optional) MM Just as my life as an artist is based on all sorts of assumptions,so was my teaching.Not everybody wants to buy into them.I tend to think that as a person I am quite transparent: What I am should be clear to others.In fact So much is lost in translation. WE should all have spin doctors just to survive in academia.The most important thing in teaching is to remain at heart an artist,Everything should come out of that.That is what the students want to hear in any case.I think a lot of people to teach because they want to be needed.The student teacher feed back loop is insidious. Martin Mugar with Addison Parks, July '99--Part 2

 

 

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My review of Cosima Spender's film"Without Gorky"

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“Without Gorky” a documentary about the family of Arshile Gorky made by his granddaughter Cosima Spender was shown this past Thursday at The Wasserman cinematheque at Brandeis to a large crowd mostly of Boston Armenians. Cosima was present and did a Q&A after the film. Gorky committed suicide in 1948, when his daughters Maro and Natasha were still children. The story is about his looming presence in their lives to this day. This is a story about victims and victimizers and unresolved guilt. It has much in common in its format with Dominic Dunne’s TV “who done it” series of the crimes of the rich and famous “Power Privilege and Justice”. The film’s premise is that something horrible if not quite a crime happened and seventy years after the event, the victims are interviewed and fingers are pointed at the guilty. Like a jury taken to the scenes of the crime, the mother, daughters, Matthew Spender and Cosima from behind the camera visit the locations where Gorky and Agnes had lived from the Union Sq studio in New York to the Sherman Ct farmhouse, where Gorky committed suicide and finally, in at attempt to rise above the horizon of the family drama, they all make a visit to the remnants of Khorkom near Lake Van in eastern Turkey where Gorky was born. The documentary ricochets between the lofty and the petty and at times with the way it piques our love of gossip and voyeurism it might easily be serialized into a reality TV show like that of another metis Armenian family, the Kardashians.

The victims are Maro, Natasha and Agnes, although Agnes gets her share of criticism as a victimizer as well.  She is a still stunning woman who radiates a kind of aristocratic hauteur, even in her late 80’s. Cosima, who hints at a not so easy childhood as the daughter of Maro, appears to be unscathed enough to be the disinterested observer of the crime. I think she made this film as a catharsis to get over Gorky’s svengalian power to define the life of her mother and aunt. The film could have easily been entitled ”Getting Over Gorky”. Both Maro and Natasha seem damaged to varying degrees psychologically in particular Natasha*. Just a toddler when Gorky committed suicide, she has no memories of her father, although upon a return to the Sherman CT farmhouse some long repressed memories do resurface. Matthew Spender who wrote a book on Gorky interjects insights about him in the detached manner of an art historian talking about Gorky as the important art historical figure that he has become. At one point on a tour of Union Sq he comments about the way the urban environment inflected his work and at the end at Lake Van on the manner in which the landscape of his childhood gave him an endless source of memories and images that would nourish his work as an adult.

The film pointedly reminds us that when the family shared the same physical space Gorky was an impoverished struggling artist. Family life was fraught with tension and possibly violence. “Mougouch” the affectionate name Gorky gave Agnes and which she seems to prefer, had pretty much abandoned any artistic ambitions to keep Gorky painting. Agnes after Gorky’s suicide put both daughters in a boarding school for six months to travel around Europe with her lover and Gorky’s friend Matta. It apparently was more devastating to them than the loss of their father. In the end it is hard to place any blame on anyone still alive who lived with Gorky. Gorky’s deteriorating health, his old fashioned attitude toward women and the years of Agnes’ subservience to his goals finally absolves her of any guilt of abandoning Gorky before his suicide and her children for six months after his death, at least to this viewer of the film. The films strength is that it accepts the messiness of life and love and eschews  the elegiac.

And how does Gorky fare? He is not around to defend himself. We depend upon the words of Mougouch to know what happened. She describes him as a “full catastrophe” to use Zorba’s words for marriage. However, what seemed to hover around the edges of the film to its credit and that transcends the often pathetic gorging on the reputation of being a “Gorky “ is that something larger than life happened when Gorky and Agnes met. On the surface he was a handsome bohemian with a reputation for being an exotic, who would save Agnes from her predictable destiny as an upright flower of Yankee culture. But beneath the surface was his history, which she wasn’t prepared for. Gorky was a man with a destiny that he had to live out. The shared life could not help but be explosive. On the one hand was a need to work out all the disparate influences he has absorbed from Picasso, Miro, Kandinsky and the Surrealists and that lead many of his generation to see him as talented but unoriginal. On the other hand those mysterious years of his childhood are a mystic source that he drinks from for the rest of his life. They are so sacred that he hid them from everyone, including his wife. It was a sacred font that he has to honor and cherish in the way he cherished his mother’s memory in that evocative painting he did from the photograph taken in Armenia. 

ADDENDUM#1:

I see in Gorky an example of a shamanic personality that I've witnessed in other Armenian artists, for example  Varujan Boghosian and the late photographer Arthur(Harout)Tcholakian. Stories I’ve heard about Saroyan , Gurdgieff and the filmmaker Parajanov seem to  point to the reality of an  Armenian wizard with a Zorba-like predilection for the unpredictable. They reach beyond the rational to the creative power of the irrational.  A quote from Kazantzakis seem apposite here:

Alexis Zorba: Damn it boss, I like you too much not to say it. You've got everything except one thing: madness! A man needs a little madness, or else...
Basil: Or else?

Alexis Zorba: ...he never dares cut the rope and be free.

ADDENDUM #2
My great uncle taught Gorky in Boston.Here is the blog on that topic: http://martinmugar.blogspot.com/2014/11/the-gorky-connectionmy-great-uncle.html

addendum #3 Here is a blog on the Armenian as perennial outsider 

*

When watching a  documentary  one is lulled into the belief that what one sees is fact when it is just part of a storyline.  I sensed this when I watched “HarvardBeats Yale 29-29” about the classic game in 1969 where Harvard comes from behind to tie what looked like a certain loss.( I did attend that game,which claims twice the number of attendees as seats at Harvard Stadium) The story is based on interviews with the players about their recollections of the game around 40 years later. Yale player Mike Bouscaren turns his experience of the game into a transformative story of how he learned to get beyond a grudge match against Harvard’s Hornblower so as to finally see the opposition’s humanity. It fit nicely into the background references to the ongoing Vietnam war and the machismo that lead American into the war. By the same token Natasha’s forlorn look played into the theme of victim and victimizer and as in Bouscaren’s case in the end may not be factual.

A great example of writing that let's things be without killing the subject with labels.

http://artdealmagazine.blogspot.com/

Addison Parks reassessment of his Forrest Bess essay from 30 years ago

link

I discovered this painting I did in the 90's on line .It had been in auction in Provincetown last year.

http://www.bakkerart.com/2011_Sampler_Auction.html

Scroll down to the M's.It did not sell according to the text file.It was from a series all of which I regrettably gave away as either birthday gifts or to auctions.I think this may have been from an AIDS auction in Boston at the Cyclorama.I was looking at Howard Hodgkin and Al Held.
Addison Parks and Larry Deyab see a Bess influence but I did not know his work at the time.

Here is another one.They are both small paintings on board.

 

There seems to be a momentary revival of interest in Forrest Bess.Roberta Smith wrote about him in the NY Times.Here is Addison Parks from 1981 in a much more insightful essay

http://www.forrestbess.com/

Compare Parks to Roberta Smith's need to put Bess into the context of the Minimalists.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/23/arts/design/forrest-bess-paintings-at-christies-and-whitney-biennial.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=forrest%20bess&st=cse










Addison's latest essay on Bess on his new and improved blog Artdeal

m/

Elaboration of a recent essay from my blog appears on Berkshire Fine Arts

Berkshire Fine Arts

                                             A work by Don Shambroom in the Met

After Becketts's struggles during WW11,fighting with the resistance and trying to not be caught by the Nazi's,a change came over his work.Some called it a sort of passivity.I think openess would be a better term,closer to Meister Eckhardt's Gelassenheit.This quote points to what happened within him.

At the close of this long, impassioned letter of March 9, 1949, Beckett declares himself “no longer capable of writing in any sustained way about Bram or about anything,” a disclaimer that is almost comical when one considers the dense pages of forensic disquisition that have gone before, as Gunn points out. Yet we must fix on the vital word here, for in the next breath Beckett declares: “I am no longer capable of writing about.” This is far more than—perhaps is not at all—a confession of critical impotence. Years earlier, at the end of the 1920s, in an essay on Finnegans Wake the young Beckett had insisted that Joyce’s final masterpiece is not about something, but is something, a thing-in-itself that is only comprehensible in its own terms. Now, in the controlled frenzy of the composition of L’Innommable, Beckett is aiming at a similar autonomy of the work, by seeking to instill in himself as artist that sense he perceived in Cézanne “of his incommensurability not only with life of such a different order as landscape but even with life of his own order, even with the life…operative in himself.”⁸

Starting with Anthony Powell and ending with De Kooning via Hegel

 

Several weeks ago I was invited to lunch by a good friend,Addison Parks, who asked several mutual acquaintances to join us. I recalled that one of the guests in his role

of gallery director had shown the work of a friend of mine, Don Shambroom,whom

I had met at college almost forty years ago. I told the gallery director,John Wronoski,

that this friend had appeared and disappeared in my life and had

recently reappeared after an absence of ten years by being highlighted

as someone I might want to link up with on LinkedIn. The gallery director, 

who is also an antique book dealer, said that my description of this

 relationship reminded him of the Anthony Powell twelve volume book

”A Dance to the Music of Time”, that follows the lives of a group of Oxford

 graduates over a lifetime as their movements conjoin or pull apart.

 Recently I decided to make the leap from virtual reality to

 the real world and actually get together to chat with this artist friend.

 We arranged a visit at his home in Massachusetts.

 One thing we learned in our five hour talk is that there

 were other people, whom we both knew, who were participating in

 this dance, some, in particular, art professors from College whom we

 both knew and others whom we had become friends with separately. The first

 of these latter connections was our visits with Norman Rockwell in the

 Sixties as aspiring young teenage artists. We both got the same

 advice from him to go to art school and not college, which

 we both ignored.Our conversation touched briefly on my blog and in particular the piece on

 the “Humpty Dumpty Effect”. My description of this process had a strongly

 entropic bias to it. As Yeats said in "The Second Coming: ” Things fall apart
 the center cannot hold”. De Kooning’s name came up as someone who took
 things apart and then tried to put them back together again. Cubism allowed him
 to tear  apart but the holism of the human body and the force of his gesture
 allowed him to tie everything back together in a way that the human body had
 never before been subjected to: centripetal and centrifugal

 at each others throats. Last night I came across a book on Heidegger’s late

 writings entitled “Four Seminars” that are transcripts and analyses of

 gatherings of Heidegger and his students in the South of France to discuss

 in particular some portentous Hegelian sentences. All of this is off the cuff.

 His references range from Wittgenstein to Marx to Norbert Weiner. A quote

 from Hegel becomes the source material for a long discussion, which I think is

 relevant to what has been said above in regards to de Kooning.The original

 statement by Hegel goes as follows:” A mended sock is better than a torn one”.

  Heidegger transforms it into his preferred form:” A torn sock is better than

 a mended one.” His discussion revolves around unity. When the sock is whole

 and being worn we are not aware of its unity. When it is torn we become aware

 or self-conscious of what holds it together in its being as sock. Therefore the split

 points to a preceding wholeness. To mend it brings it whole again but with a

 self-awareness of an underlying unity. Is this not what de Kooning does: he

 takes the world apart and then tries to mend it. Hegel says that the scission

 points to a need for philosophy. I think that this bringing

 back together is explosive in two ways: #1 the effort to tie things back, the

 mending. #2 The force that resists this mending and wants to dissolve again.

 His work participates in a dialectic as it moves back and forth between

 the whole and its parts and back again to a new whole.

      

Impossiblity of transcendence in American Art

I remember an artist, who had recently lost his wife to cancer,  telling me of his inquiry into what various religions had to say about the afterlife. All I remember is what he had to say about the Mormons, for whom heaven is just like the world we live in on earth,  just permanent.When you die, you will be greeted by all your dead kin and I assume go on pretty much as you did here, but, forever, as one big happy family. Such a belief doesn't make the real inferior to the ideal, but in a strangely counter-intuitive fashion reinforces the validity of the here and now. It is as though the higher realm of heaven gives its divine seal of approval to life on earth. I wonder if this belief is quintessentially American. I read recently in the diary of Bataille, where he described the arrival of the American soldiers in Paris at the end of WW11, and how with their swagger seemed to epitomize a certain immanence of the ideal in the real. Americans don't struggle to transcend the real but are masters of manipulating it and reinforcing it. It explains the predominance of Pragmatism in American philosophy.There are problems to be solved and social injustices to be abolished. Pragmatism  dominates the airways: on cable TV with their shows on loggers,truckers, fisherman. There is no time for meditating on the meaning of the universe when you got a lien on your equipment and have to produce to make the payments. The strangeness of existence, the why and wherefore of our individual life is not an issue, except as raw survival.  I think the sitcoms we see today and those of the past show American Families shoehorned into a kind of eternal present and through the magic of film are eternally young in the endless reruns,(is that the Mormon heaven on earth?) until you see somewhere that the actors have died of drug overdoses or god forbid die of old age.Whether the family is traditional or not,  the story is the same old notion of trying to get along despite one's differences.

Richard Rorty, an American Pragmatist philosopher, is sympathetic to deep thinkers who problematize everything as long as they don't get in the way of the liberal agenda of according  more and more rights to more and more social subsets. We have to be above all good citizens. Strange thoughts of our origins and destinies are to be kept to yourselves. He sees them as intriguing mental exercises, which when applied to society, result in the violence of German and Japanese politics between and during the two World Wars. The Nazi's fell under the spell of Nietzsche and the Overman and the Japanese fell under the spell of Zen. On the one hand you had the will to power and on the other the will to nothingness. On the one hand you had the Holocaust, on the other Kamakazi pilots. A nuanced study of Nietzsche's thought and Zen Buddhism find that both belief systems can be interpreted to be heuristic attempts to control excesses of self-assertion, that Nietzsche thought the German's prone to, and infatuation with the void, which Zen tries to disabuse its adherents of. Because they put the region of that struggle within the individual's consciousness and not in the self as part of a community, makes them susceptible to thymotic excess. No more drama of the saints trying to be at one with God. No more struggles with right or wrong within the soul; the battles are all societal. Heidegger deconstructs consciousness as too wrapped up in Christian theology and wants through Dasein to place it back in the world. Our sitcoms do the same as they disabuse us of any notion of individual superiority to the group.The dads are all either castrated clodhoppers or bigoted buffoons.

I have been reading a book by Malcolm Bull. Never heard of him until I stumbled across his book on Nietzsche at Barnes and Noble. Browsing in bookstores will soon be a thing of the past,alas!!
He seems to be a student of Deleuze and  contemporary social theory. He quotes on several occasions  Kojeve, the famous interpreter of Hegel, who was responsible for introducing Sartre to the work of Hegel and Heidegger, an enounter which generated Sartre's "Being and Nothingness". Kojeve sees humanity in the modern world as  resembling more and more a herd. Unlike Nietzsche, who was horrified by this process toward a mass culture, Kojeve embraced it as inevitable, beneficial and sees it as a sort of negative transcendence. We would now transcend our humanity by becoming more animal. Malcolm Bull says:"Becoming animal is becoming modern, perhaps as Kojeve suggests the future of modernity".  Kojeve imagines  this new humanity(if "human" would even apply any more to this new species)would "perform musical concerts after the fashion of frogs and cicadas." No more solo parts.No more tension between the hero and the chorus. Maybe we will all look like "Swamp People" who in the latest ad are made to resemble their prey.By the way, Kojeve is one of the fathers of the European Common Market.

Not a very pretty picture:the Mormon happy family as sclerosis of the ideal in the real and on the other hand an animalization of the race which is masked as humanism. All that science does with its logos is to provide a rationale for this herding of the species.It makes it more reasonable.

see my essay on Heide Hatry







  

"The Humpty Dumpty effect": once the veneer of reality is broken in 20thc art by the analysis of the a priori visual structure that shapes that reality, the whole cannot be reconstructed.I accept this as having been inevitable but it still haunts me as the burden of the Modern condition.You can't go back to the garden.

I sent this to someone who wanted to read an excerpt of my drawing book.I edited it some more and as always amazed at how infinite the editing process is.

Pedagogical use ofthis information

In our perceptual experience value is first level, lines second. Historically this is the case from the end of the universal use of chiaroscuro in 19thc Salon paintings to the primacy of lines in the Cubism and Abstraction of the 20thc. However, the transition from the Renaissance to the Baroque went in the opposite direction And in art education this sequence from the Renaissance to the Baroque defines the method that is followed in constructing a drawing: construct the drawing first with linear measurement and insert value into that structure. Value in minute increments provides the veneer or the surface of the world that we call Reality. Courses that used to be advertised on  matchbook covers and your standard drawing class at the college level, all start with measurement. This is not to say that it does not work but by skipping over the level one of perception it ignores two truths:#1 the hierarchical relation of value to linear structure and #2 the notion that an object is part of a whole visual field. It isolates the figure from the ground in which it is embedded and jettisons a priori the role of light in the uncovering of the world.

Moreover, the use of line as measurement in classical drawing is very different from that derived from perception and the art of the 20thc. It imposes a top down order from rigid laws concerning the construction of the human figure and the use of systems of perspective. They both trap the visual world in a sort of intellectual vise.

Moreover, my method works. I have observed again and again students, who never internalized the rigid process of your typical beginning drawing class, get a fresh start studying my method. It becomes a sort of cognitive therapy where the linking of the way we see to drawing results in a drawing style that is natural and provides a base that can be built on.

At higher cognitive levels we interpret the values as recognizable things. In mid to late 19^th c French landscape painting, chiaroscuro was used not only to give enough detail to make a world of recognizable objects but described the social classes by the styles they wore and locations of the objects in the landscape. I recall seeing in a show at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in 1996 that interspersed salon paintings with Impressionist paintings done contemporaneously. In order to add even more specificity to the represented scene, one artist wrote the provenance of the boats on their sterns in a seascape. There is no doubt on the artist’s part that this representation is only a representation and not reality. The Impressionist artists of the the late 19thc became conscious of the a priori structures that made the world real, and cured art of the lazy notion that what is painted is in fact reality. We create reality from the a priori structures of the eye. In fact drawing and painting in the 20thc, undergoes what I would call the Humpty Dumpty affect. Whereas in the classical period all the analysis of the visual world supports a finished product that looks like the world we move in, in the 20thc the underlying systems for shaping the world, once separated out and used by themselves, lead to the reductionist trope toward abstraction that defines our century. ” All the kings horses and all the kings men could not put Humpty together again.” Lines end up constrained in Mondrian’s verticals and horizontals or are liberated as gesture in Kline and Joan Mitchell. Value ends up in Rothko’s numinous masses. Color perception ends up first in Matisse’s color patterns and finally in color field painting, or just the color panels of Ellsworth Kelly. Occasionally one finds a movement that takes an abstract language and moves it toward verisimilitude as in the work of the Macchaioli of Italy in the early 20thc, who used the pointillism of Seurat combined with the volumetrics of Caravaggio to create some heavily realistic work. Much of Picasso’s work never uses the surface of realism but except for the cubism done with Braque assumes a viewer placed in front of the scene depicted. In the hands of other artists his discoveries suffer what philosophers call reification: it is assumed that the language is reality. Like the Machiolli, that approach has a leaden quality to it.

 The following is a series of three drawings that show the genetic connection between value and line. I did these last Fall as a demonstration for the book I wrote on drawing of how the two are connected: Value as a lower order structuring of the visual, and line as a higher order that is built on top of the valuing of visual data. It also shows the separating out of line after the values is removed. At that point the line is free to be used in a totally self-referential way. Mondrian followed this process in his Apple Tree series which goes from value to purely linear in which the apple tree is no longer recognizable.

Jason Travers, as a student at AIB, did the last drawing. It is followed by a drawing by Twombly. Jason’s drawing shows the lines beginning to break away from the original value drawing and interacting with each other self-referentially. In the Twombly drawing the lines are free to "do their own thing.

Value drawing done with charcoal

Lines added at value shifts

Values erased and lines enhanced

Jason Travers drawing moving from value to linear approach

 .

Cy Tombly drawing with liberated lines

Just stumbled across this reply to my Lester Johnson piece on Berkshire Fine Arts by the poet Rosanna Warren. Google every gallery on earth and you will find 99% are exhibiting "one show": a found object(ersatz sculpture ) on the floor, photo-document on the wall and a pseudo-profound statement about some group in need of uplift into the Hegelian dialectic.Global group think!!

Figurative Expressionist:Lester Johnson -->

Dear Martin,

What an extraordinary piece. I wish I could have seen the Johnson

show; I'm living in New York this year, on leave, writing.

You put your finger precisely on the problem: the coercive Hegelianism

of Greenberg's vision, and the intolerance it institutionalized. Great

image too, about the media world of Pop (and post-Pop, conceptual art)

as a vast  pyramid built by an army of slaves (us!). It's refreshing

to have you articulate so strongly and lucidly the fact of mass

dehumanization in which our culture of mass advertising and

consumerism collaborates. And to set Johnson's art as a

counter-phenomenon, of highly intelligent (not romantic) response and

analysis.

I never studied with LJ, but have admired his work over the years, and

am sorry to miss this show. Good for Acme-

Warmly,

Rosanna

As artist we live mostly surrounded by incomprehension of various varieties. Sometimes there is disdain and resentiment or pure philistine disgust for someone who dedicates their life to the pursuit of a private vision. This article reinforced this notion.There is a happy end to the story:at least over time the writer met me half way.I have added a few more slights to make my point.

The Weekly Dig 2006

Martin Mugar at New England School of Art and Design

KATE LEDOGAR

A few summers ago, my sister and I took a week-long class with Martin Mugar at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. It was a sort of paint-what-you-will situation. Mostly, I was just happy to be out at the beach, surrounded by fishermen and drag queens, and eating lots of Portuguese pastries. I gave the painting I was working on a sort of good-natured, half-hearted attention. OK, I dabbled. The only part of the class that truly caught my interest was Mugar’s slide show presentation of his own work.

At that time, he was painting dots: vaguely patterned, and in a few repetitive colors. His slides—which spanned a good 25 years—traced his development from exceptionally lifelike figurative works, to a transitional period where he broke down the subtle colors forming surfaces, to the dots-only approach he currently practices.

In my own painting experiences, there were instances where I found myself nearly mesmerized by surfaces. Expanses of walls and skin started breaking down into moving particles of color the more closely I looked at them. Eventually, I felt unable to reproduce their colors at all. In Mugar’s interim paintings—which fell stylistically between the realism of his early work and his most abstract canvases—he was painting surfaces as I saw them, and doing it well. His paintings gave me a mixed feeling of awe and resentment by showing me that it was possible to do what confounded me.

His current paintings interested me less. I was suspicious that he had worked into abstraction in order to appear more contemporary in style. Plus, I was probably too distracted at the time by the promise of some local delight (perhaps a late afternoon "Doggies in Drag" parade) to give the matter much further attention.

Now in the bleak of winter, up from the slushy, grey streets of downtown Boston, I'm in a much more focused frame of mind to view Mugar's paintings. Along for the trip is my sickly boyfriend, who wanted to get out of the house.

In the small pass-through lounge/gallery at the New England School of Art and Design, Mugar's paintings look like sherbet-colored globs of icing on the wall—something that a little kid would like to eat. They consist of large globs of paint in bright, chalky hues repeated in different combinations on rectangular and square canvases. I watch the sickly boyfriend out of the corner of my eye. From the abrupt way he stops in front of each painting, gives it a couple of seconds, then moves onto the next, I can tell that he's decided he's been duped. He says, "Well, when you seen one, you seen 'em all, right?" and slips out into the hallway to look at the student assignments pinned to the wall.

But Mugar’s paintings are meant to be gazed at for extended periods of time; they offer a sort of mute conversation for the eyes about the act of looking. The paint sticks out a good half-inch from the surface; pastel smears poke out from the sides and drip off the bottom. This texture buildup creates a topographical landscape that would challenge an ant trying to get from one side of the painting to the other. Due to the subtle variations of color, each painting—though similar to the ones on either side of it—offers a unique visual experience.

After studying them closely, I no longer think that Mugar's abstract works are contrived solely to attract attention—in fact, just the opposite. I suspect these paintings represent an obsessive attention to sorting out a visual "problem" that fascinates Mugar, which he has pursued whether galleries and critics notice or not.

If you visit the show, I recommend that you visit Mugar's website (www.martinmugar.com) beforehand—it gives some good context and background to appreciate his work.

MARTIN MUGAR’S WORKS WILL BE ON DISPLAY AT THE NEW ENGLAND SCHOOL OF ART & DESIGN THROUGH 2.5.06. 75 ARLINGTON ST., BOSTON. 617.573.8785.

Here is a recent example of stupidity: I was accepted into a group show into a NY gallery (First St Gallery)  only to be told to remove the painting ASAP after it was dropped off. I had to hire an art mover as I had already returned home to Boston. 

In the first decade of the Millenium I was grateful to Charles Giuliano for including me in several group shows at the New England School of Art and Design. One show there was favorably reviewed in the Boston Globe. That kept my work in the eye of the Boston art goers after commercial galleries Crieger-Dane on Newbury St and the Rising Tide in Provincetown closed at the end of 2000. Charles had reviewed my work and I always had the impression he thought highly of it. During the second decade I was included in a series of show at the Danforth Museum. Katherine French was the director of the Museum and the shows purported to represent the New England art scene. In the nineties I had participated in similar shows at the Fitchburg Museum and the Brocton Museum to favorable reviews. French left the Danforth a few years ago and took over the art center in St Johnsbury VT where she recreated the same sort of group show bringing in New England  based critics to select the work. Covid 19 has brought an end to this annual event. My last encounter with French was before the last show when I dropped off work in Boston to be shipped by her to Vermont. I was still smarting from the unceremonious treatment at the First St gallery and was hoping that she might promote a piece that represented my work at its best.Yes it was heavy. I sensed her unwillingness to take it and when I explained the rejection of my work by the New York gallery that had been selected by Ronnie Landfield after I had dropped it off  she started in a  long litany of complaints of having to hang my work over the years. I dawned on me she had never complimented me on my work. It was just a heavy burden. So much for respecting my 50 years of showing and contributing to the art scene in Boston.