Innocence and Experience

Conversations at the Bow St gallery in Cambridge, once the most interesting alternative art space in the Boston area, were a fertile source for interesting blog posts. Owner/Artist, Addison Parks would bring groups of artists and art dealers together and the discussions that transpired were often lively. I would typically stand back and observe the banter. I could not keep up with the rapid repartee between Addison and book dealer/gallery owner John Wronoski. The late artist Larry Deyab once observed that all that back and forth was reminiscent of a Pinter play.

I recently participated in a curated show at an art center in VT managed by Katherine French, the former director of the Danforth Museum. I had no great hopes for the work being purchased or written about as it was too far from the art circles of Boston. However, toward the end of the show the art director informed me that a local collector had taken an interest in my painting. He wanted to hang it in his home for a trial run to see if it stood the test of time, so to speak. The painting belongs to a body of work that is recent and more complex in its use of color that has slowly evolved from bubble gum to richer and more saturated colors with marks transmogrifying into the cyrillic alphabet.  I was flattered that here was a collector in the Vermont woods who could possibly “get it”, even as it turned out, only for a week or two.

I had on occasion wanted to broadcast the potential sale to family and friends but I have become a laconic Yankee and knew not, to use the cliché barnyard saying that a Vermonter might appreciate, to count your chickens before they hatch. I was curious nonetheless to know what had happened and instead of stoically accepting the verdict asked the director what had led to the collector’s change of heart. She divulged that it was in fact the collector’s nine years old daughter who was smitten with the work and wanted her reluctant father to purchase it. I envisioned a young aesthete stamping her foot down stammering “I wanting my painting and I want it now”. What she loved about it were in fact characteristics that I thought were no longer part of my work: the candy color and bubbly strokes applied with a cake decorator. “No daughter you can’t have a painting with the rainbow colors of the Little Pony.”  I assume to have a painting with such cloying infantile traits was more than he could stomach even if it might please his daughter. Anyway, realist that he presumably is, he knew that one day she would out grow it and like all her childhood toys it would be relegated to attic clutter.

#76 2017 oil and wax on board  applied with pastry applicator 42"x 38" (later style with cyrillic letters)

Is there a moral to this story? Although certain critics have deciphered a hidden sinister aspect to my work that is being covered over by the colorful strokes applied with a pastry applicator (Rosanna Warren) or a sense of time in the paced application of my strokes (David Raymond) , my paintings have made several people angry to such a degree that they felt compelled to comment on my blog how repulsively saccharine they appear in color and mood. Or in the case of one artist/ critic, whom I was hoping would review my work in “Art New England", he had no idea what they were about. He just drew a blank. The use of my candy colors elicited excited responses in Provincetown years ago, where they were shown at DNA. Cate Mc Quaid in ”The Globe” responded twice to the  sensuality of the work. First in a show curated by Charles Giuliano. In her second review she found the sensuality was over the top. From my perspective the paintings challenge the typical viewer who is habituated to color used in optical color swatches in so much of the “Shake and Bake” abstraction that I see on line. My use of color eliciting synesthesia to merge appetitive and visual experience appealed to the hedonistic P’towners. But what if this child aesthete saw in the work something that partakes of the dichotomy between innocence and experience. Barbara O'Brien, currently director of the Kemper Museum, quoting Milton, titled the show of my work that she curated: "A Wilderness of Sweets". Addison Parks has pointed to my predilection for the feminine on several occasions in his reviews of the work on Artdeal and from the inception of this style at Crieger Dane in 2000 saw a paradisiacal return to the Garden.

#48 2013 44"x 46" oil and wax on board applied with pastry applicator (earlier bubblegum style)

Assuming that my premise is correct that that the nine year old girl saw in the work is analogous to the simple and innocent joys of a childhood toy like the “Little Pony”, I am reminded of analogous pleasures in Blake’s “The Lamb” : The mood of Spring, eternal recurrence of the prancing newborn lamb’s sheer delight in being alive. What is interesting is that this poem is spoken in the persona of a child:  ”I a child & thou a lamb”. It universalizes the spirit of the child’s and lamb’s innocence. What is this innocence? Why must innocence exist, when the lamb’s frolics in the green of Spring, end only in its  slaughter as a Spring lamb a few months later? Let us all be realists and scowl at the girl’s love of her little pony. The sooner she gets over it the better. As Beckett imagined, the newborn drops right from the womb into the grave.

                                                   The Lamb

                                        Little Lamb who made thee 

                                        Dost thou know who made thee 

                                        Gave thee life & bid thee feed. 

                                         By the stream & o'er the mead; 

                                        Gave thee clothing of delight, 

                                        Softest clothing wooly bright; 

                                        Gave thee such a tender voice, 

                                        Making all the vales rejoice! 

                                        Little Lamb who made thee 

                                        Dost thou know who made thee 

                                        Little Lamb I'll tell thee, 

                                        Little Lamb I'll tell thee!

                                        He is called by thy name, 

                                        For he calls himself a Lamb: 

                                        He is meek & he is mild, 

                                        He became a little child: 

                                        I a child & thou a lamb, 

                                        We are called by his name. 

                                        Little Lamb God bless thee. 

                                        Little Lamb God bless thee.

#66 26"x 24" 2016 oil and wax on board applied with pastry applicator (Picture the girl wanted)

For Blake, Christ was both a child and a lamb putting the innocence of the child and the lamb of the poem a priori in the realm of the godly. One cannot be a lamblike or a childlike without that innocence of God, which raises the question: what then is experience without innocence? Experience can only be a loss of innocence. Why do I in my painting linger in this realm of peachy keen colors if not to insist on the importance of this innocence that precedes experience. Or once out of the preternatural childhood realm of innocence can you ever get back to the garden? Can we move backward from experience to innocence so that innocence can be experienced at deeper and deeper levels as Nishitani says is possible with Nothingness?  Maybe the way back to the garden is to try to abandon the ego that one must have in relation to one’s interaction with the world. Is experience only the illusion of the shadows in Plato's cave. created by the light of pure innocence that we, so fixated on the here and now, cannot fathom?

Woven Tale picked this up and published it on their site with some editing

Lorraine Shemesh and the impossibility of the Romantic

Where we are currently in the cultural history of ideas is hard to pin down. Ex post facto is always easier. The past has already been packaged and defined by countless historians but the present as it evolves into the future is hard to fix and if we try to paste the past on the present we get into a lot of trouble. It seems to work momentarily like assuming Trump is Hitler or the removal of a statue of Columbus from a college campus is akin to the destruction of a Buddhist statue by the Taliban. But is the past really so well categorized and no longer open for discussion. This struck me when I wrote about a visit I made to Edwin Dickinson on Cape Cod in 1970. After I had seen his work at the Biennale in Venice in 1968, I found myself encouraged by his love of the observed world to persevere in my pursuit of realism in the context of the overwhelming dominance of High Modernism in mid-century America. However, in my more recent analysis of his work I noticed that his phenotype was more 19^th century than 20thc and from the perspective of where we stand now seemed to float further and further into the past like some flotsam and jetsam thrown into the wake of a steamship until it is irretrievable and disappears out of sight. And I would add that if such a person were to live in our day and age he or she would be so out of  sync with the prevailing zeitgeist they would most likely go insane.

Dickinson

The most salient characteristic of Dickinson is artist as observer. Not an observer who looks coldly at the world but one who seeks to be at one with what he sees. He takes an anti-solipsistic stance where like Stevens in his great poem “Idea of order at Key West” Dickinson interweaves the self and nature. And most importantly Dickinson’s persona yearns for a meaning to one’s life on earth, a romantic ache for for a meaningful story on the world's stage.  It has a strong narrative bent where he is an actor in his own play. Not Beckett but Shakespeare with a beginning, middle and denouement. I have talked elsewhere of the deconstruction of the strong self at the hands of the deconstructionists or the supremacy of things a la Duchamp or the cosmic melding of self and society from Hegel where we are always mediated by being part of society. This is where we are currently in our world of art, a place where in in an essay on Jed Perl’s criticism I expressed the idea that we have been turning around in circles for quite some time. At the end of history there are no more mysterious unknowns ahead of us to conquer. We are surrounded by all the detritus of society that is circling around an immense black hole. As it circles around we are totally unaware that is slowly sinking into the abyss.

Recently, I sent out images of my new work to several names on my email list.  A few thoughtful replies came back acknowledging that the color of the new work was richer and more evocative. An unexpected reply came from Lorraine Shemesh whom I met , when we both studied at the BU Summer program in Tanglewood, Massachusetts in 1969. Phillip Pearlstein was the artist in residence and several well-known New Realists came to visit most notably Al Leslie. There was a lot written about the New Realists in the art press at the time, which peaked with a cover story in Newsweek in 1970 featuring a painting by Bill Bailey on the cover. Two years later he would be my senior project advisor at Yale. Another fellow student at Tanglewood, Paul Dinger arranged a visit to Leslie’s studio in NYC after the program ended for an article in the art magazine “Boston Review of the Arts”,  that he had recently founded. Probably for the only time in my life I felt as an artist part of a movement.

Shemesh

Shemesh shows at the Allan Stone gallery in New York. Judging from the images in the two catalogs she sent me, she is clearly well trained in the tradition of classical painting as it was taught at BU where she got her BFA in 1971. The first catalog is a retrospective of her work, which culminates around 2009 with her iconic pool paintings that have evolved from swimmers at the surface or just below to a view of their now faceless bodies and body parts totally submerged. Whereas the earlier painting retained the notion of an observation of swimmers in a recognizable setting, the latest work puts the observer in with the observed. She does not rely on a romantic search for connections between herself and the environment that allows Dickinson to overcome his solipsistic isolation but conveys rather the inability to jettison the self in such a liquid realm. Of course to swim casually in a non-competitive manner implies the desire of the swimmer to enjoy being buoyed up by a warm and caressing world similar to the amniotic fluid that supports a fetus.  Shemesh retains a strange, almost awkward, disconnect between the possibility of a merger between the water and the physical hardness of the body that resists it. There is built into her work the impossibility of the kind of cosmic explosion of the self of a Pollack or the a priori connection one finds in Dickinson or for that matter the poems of Walt Whitman.  I think that this is inherited from her realist background but also from the edgy postmodernist zeitgeist of the New York scene. I find myself using the word impossible again as I did in the essay on the play at BAM on Thomas Merton that stated unambiguously  the impossibility of transcendence in a world awash in physical drives and passions. Or the word incommensurable to express the distance of paint and meaning when I wrote about a show I had with Paul Pollaro at the Bromfield Gallery in Boston. 

Shemesh 

Visiting a John Walker show at Nielsen: Newbury St. Nostalgia from 2005 and 2008

                     A day in the Boston Art Scene 2005

John Walker "Seacake"

After circling the Back Bay for at least ten minutes a solitary parking spot at last presented itself not far from the Nielsen Gallery where we planned to see the new John Walker show. It was on a street that had to be cleared by 4p.m. for the commuter rush traffic. We assumed we would be out of Nielsen by then. It is a bargain with the devil, so to speak, when there is nothing else to be had on Newbury St, to be tempted by those empty spots. The price you pay if you overshoot 4pm is to have your car towed by some ex-con who'll extort a hefty sum from you as well as put a dent in your car. Probably best to pay for the garage at the Pru, but the convenience of being near the Nielsen gallery  trumps the risk.

At the gallery we found both Nina Nielsen and John Baker around the front desk and it appeared in a jovial mood. They admitted to having just finished a good meal at Louis's accompanied by an excellent wine. John Wronoski, at whose bookstore we had spent the morning perusing and purchasing signed first editions was introduced. Addison and I tried to convey what we had just experienced at his home/business, that left me close to hyperventilation before the signatures of the some of the greatest figures in the history of philosophy and literature. Somewhat similar to the" guess who I saw" syndrome when you encounter on the street someone who only existed for you in the movies-- we were beside ourselves with excitement.Books by Musil, Celine, Hamsun ,Nietzsche, Hegel all signed by the authors and often given to equally important individuals, e.g. a copy of" The Waste Land" signed by T.S. Eliot to Paul Valery. Time for a moment was "not" as all history collapsed into a kind of cosmic cocktail party where characters from different eras were taken off the shelves to rub shoulders. The most impressive find among many was a manuscript of Kazantzakis's poem "The Odyssey" hand written by the author that looked in its perfection as though God had dictated it to him first draft requiring no corrections.

Nina was more open today; which is not to say that she is usually not open but typically reserved before the needy artists who frequent her gallery (but thankfully not smug like most gallery owners). To their credit both of them are unique in their ability to get excited about the work they exhibit, talk with visitors about the work meaningfully and see it as something accessible not emblematic of some cultural superiority, an attitude prevalent in NYC, where the dealers and the artist exist in some" lofty" space beyond the viewer and both have pulled the ladder up behind them.  This was their temple and they the priests and in such a context one rarely expresses doubt. They were more than just interested in discussing the work; behind the questions about what we thought about Walker's work there was some trepidation which lead to questions about the meaning of life and made me believe that these paintings, which created a kind of twilight world, once entered into, did not allow for an easy return back to our diurnal world. What should have been a cathartic experience, which allowed the viewer to find strength in the encounter with the void, had put the usually confident gallery owners in a state of fear and trembling. 

Walker is literally trying to embrace the very sorrow that afflicts him; expressed through his use of real mud taken from the Maine mud flats near where he paints. Pictorially, all the paintings are similar: recognizable objects have fallen away, a wisp of light lingers on the horizon which is always at the top of the picture plane. Engulfing the viewer in the lower two thirds of the painting are the mud-flats which are indistinguishable from the dark of night..I can't decide which of the following messages he wishes to convey: is it a mud bath and therefore healing or night and quick sand that allows "no exit." Or a biblical lamentation about our mortality with a kind of from mud to mud refrain. As the trajectory that leads from natality wains mortality has the upper hand. This is clearly work about the downward slope of the cycle. 

I remember once seeing a show by one of his protégées which is very similar in style and content though ultimately Johnny Walker Red to Johnny Walker Black. I thought of titling the show "Low Tide Languor;" that meditative space on the beach at slack tide where you dwell on your place in the natural cycle of birth and death. The mood is often one of sweet acquiescence which lends itself to lyricism and is the favorite of poets who intone in that elegiac manner that can turn any words no matter how banal into "poetry." In the case of Walker you have the low tide, the retreat of life but you sensed that this is not passive acquiescence. He's in crisis; the tide is coming and it will not bring him back to the shore. Is the best strategy at this stage to embrace the twilight, to exult in the forces that limit man as part of our human condition. I guess I left with more questions than answers. But whatever the ultimate meaning of the work there was no doubt in my mind that Nina and John were now engulfed in the painting's crepuscular light.

The conversation took an interesting turn when Nina, who had already mentioned Camus as relevant to Walker, tried to see her artists as deconstructionists, implying that there ultimately was no difference between existentialism and the more recent deconstructionist movement out of France. At the time I couldn't respond in a meaningful way but it appeared misguided. If we see both existentialists (e.g.Sartre) and deconstructionists (e.g.Derrida) as undercutting the primacy of thought and reason (the cogito ergo sum of Descartes)as a basis for man's identity, then they are similar. And Nina is right. However, the deconstructionists doubt the whole nexus of being and nothingness which in a general sense is the subject of Walker's painting, and see it as just another attempt to resurrect and dramatize the over-inflated Western ego, which they are trying to rout out wherever they find it. Abandon the whole project all together, they seem to say. Walker wont abandon that project; he stays close to it-quaking before his inevitable extinction. A strong poet to borrow Harold Bloom's term, he faces and drinks deeply of that" dark night" with courage.

The artist at Nielsen that intrigues me most is Profirio DiDonna...He was neither an existentialist, a deconstruction, nor a rationalist but god forbid he believed there is a kind of logos, just the way which things line up and connect.It has a tentative quality to it , that the dots create a kind of order but not a hardwired one like Mondrian. It were as though he was listening to the order, letting it waft over him or better yet trying to touch it dot by dot. Or just expressing a kind of belief that it is there, which is Addison's take on him. Of course I feel closest to him as an artist. In his earlier work of vases there is an energy hovering around the object, something shaping it caressing it. It is a mystical insight . I remember once my daughter at the age of five when we encountered a dead bird in a park in Italy said not to worry because God was holding it in the palm of his hand. It also akin to certain theosophical ideas about forces both etheric and astral that support our physical being.

Joan Snyder interests me as well. In her work she has created a self that is prickly and difficult; sort of like the selves of Beckett's "Endgame" who devoid of hope still have a snarly desire to survive(though I just noticed in the recent "Art in America" that her new work is dealing with tears and sorrow). It was as though she was telling the deconstructionists that there is a solid core to the self and it is indestructible, especially when pushed into a corner-- it strikes back and bites. I remember first meeting her at Yale where she came as a visiting artist. She came to my studio as she was making the rounds of all the MFA candidates studios. On the floor I had tossed a drawing of a dead blue jay I had found on my doorstep. She proclaimed that it was the first authentic work she had seen at Yale. Something that dealt with feelings and not some over-weening ambition to make Al Held clones. She was supposed to stay a semester and quit the next week. A woman of her convictions.

The conversation which had broken off into groups and was already past those first emotion-filled moments suddenly came to an end  when I realized it was four o'clock and our car full of signed first editions was about to be towed. I did an about face and hurdled down Newbury St, putting my out of shape body to the test to witness the car in front of me being towed off. My car had  yet to be ticketed. Sometimes one has to pay tribute to the trolls for intellectual musings beyond the ordinary. Today would not be one of those times. We stayed above the fray. 

MARTIN MUGAR Durham,NH(2005)

PAINTING SURVEY
1970 - 2008 

Nielsen Gallery, BostonMarch 1 - April 5, 2008

Charred, ashes, a swath of detritus spread across miles and miles of a scorched earth, flotsam and jetsam littering a muddy shore, left behind by the tide or a storm, it doesn’t matter. The elephant in the room, the desperate inner child, the man on fire; these all come to mind standing in the glow or wake or shadow of John Walker’s always epic and often towering paintings. On the other hand we get the kind of chalky radiance of frescoed starlight, the closest thing to Giotto these eyes have seen in this world, in this place, in this muddy messed up twenty-first century where less and less is what it seems, where real, the real, is anathema and truth is a joke, scoffed at, ridiculed, kicked in the gutter. And for what?

That’s probably what John Walker would like to know. Can anyone tell him? Instead he’s getting hammered, a hammer the size of a wrecking ball, driving him into the ground, driving a shaft the size of a tree trunk down his throat, telling him that lies are truth and shit is fresh cream.

These many years, these many paintings, tell this story. The call of starlight; the promise of starlight. The shit/mud/magma/primordial ooze that we stand in as we look to the stars. The shit/mud/magma/primordial ooze of a species that cares only about outward things, about power and pretense and position and posturing and primacy and prestige. That pees on everything. He is holding up a mirror. He is holding up a lamp. A lighthouse on the distant shore. Yes, it is shit. Embrace the shit if it brings you closer to the earth. Lie down in it. Lie down in darkness. But look to the heavens. Look to our better selves. Look for salvation and light.

John Walker carries his paintings in his paintings along with everything else in his life. They are of course part of his story, part of his personal mythology, so why wouldn’t they be there. Bits of shapes, words, figures of sorts that reference the things that matter to him, scars from loss and from experience, like falling from a tree or being scorned by a loved one or being bitten by a snake; and wrinkles on our face, smiles or frowns, that we get from what life washes onto our shores or rains down on us. These are all there in the paintings; relics, touchstones, stains, souvenirs, heirlooms, mementos. All the things that shape his life.

There are also his beliefs, his dreams, his hopes, his heartbreaks. It is a kind of world according to John Walker. Not much different from what we get from every artist, really, but today we’re talking about him. Because he has been there, been around, from Birmingham to Melbourne and back again. Because he has been painting and hanging it out there and leaving his mark and defying the odds and getting up and getting knocked down and getting back up again and painting and painting and painting. And it is all in the paint; trapped in its amber, laid out on its mud flats, singing its song, for all who will listen whether we're listening or not!

The first time I saw one of his paintings was almost thirty years ago. Circa 1979. A painter friend of mine and I were looking through a gallery window. A closed gallery somewhere in downtown New York. This is what I remember. We were awed by his painting. We knew his work and he was already legend. The painting was one of the monument shape series. The sort of erect phallic obelisk in the landscape that looks like something broken, at once organic and geometric. It was a figure/ground of sorts. Figure in a landscape. He wasn’t the only person doing this at that time. Other painters come to mind. But it was almost like a sculptor’s painting. Strong, powerful, solid. And yet it was also abstract. Fiercely abstract. Fiercely ephemeral. Real bravado paint; juicy, sensuous, wet, flying. Constable/Turner meets Brancusi/Stonehenge. Again, landscape and figure--horizontal and vertical. Don Quixote's windmills (the later paintings invert the shape, now female, of rebirth and resurrection, pushing down instead of up, below the high horizon--Ahab's white whale, or the pass at Thermopylae).

Over the years he has found new reasons to paint, new memories, new shapes, new dreams, new landscapes, and his legend has grown as the mythology inside the work has grown. His oeuvre has always been intense. And intensely abstract in the way that we come to them. They just act abstract. Maybe skulls, lambs, words, horizons, but abstract. They are landscape but they are flat. They have light and depth but they seem to be much more about surface and texture. They are thick and heavy and dark but they shine. These are not qualities unique to the world of painting. These are not paradoxes unique to the world of painting. Spanish painting comes to mind. Goya, El Greco, Velasquez, even Picasso. They were not afraid of darkness and they used it to make light. So does Walker. If as Richard Tuttle once reminded me, black speaks about white, and despair speaks about hope, etc, and viceversa, then this is the ground we stand on with Walker. His sprawling scatological crusts of dark paint frame the light, his little crumbs of rainbow lead us down a crevasse.

Is there rage in these paintings? It causes tectonic shifts beneath their surface, and strikes out of nowhere like a mid-western tornado. Is there longing, and poetry, and a gentle hand? Surely. Like God or Shakespeare, Walker feels all things, and gives all things. Love is like the dew, it settles on the horse turd and the rose alike--Larry McMurtry once wrote something to that effect. In John Walker’s paintings the love also falls on both. We stand before his “frescoes,” his Giottos, we look up at them, like we watch Rembrandt’s side of beef, or Lear or Macbeth splayed before us on the stage:Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

We are happy to witness this in the paintings. It is his plight, and in the end it is our plight. Life is a dubious experiment, as Jung said. Can we find peace with this? Should we find peace with this? Or should we be trying to talk to the manager, or whoever’s in charge? After all, what the hell is going on? Right? I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore! Help us, Dante, help us Tom Cruise. What is this Divine Comedy? What is this existential joke/nightmare? John Walker serves up a slab of paint. It is as cathartic as Aeschylus and as searing as the deep blue sea. It rocks us. We walk away changed, and no matter whether he or anyone else knows it, we remember. Thank you, John Walker, and rock on!

ADDISON PARKS 2008