Over-Exposure

On my last day vacationing by the Ottawa river yesterday, I finished reading a book about Francis Bacon - interviews, commentaries - a lot of it setting out his biography and how it related to his work. After awhile, knowing all the sordid, twisted details of his life started to actually take away from his work for me, not add to its power. The author repeats over and over how carefully Bacon managed his image, but interestingly Bacon seemed more guarded about how he felt about art and his own work than he did about revealing his private (and not-so-private) demons. Considering I've started this blog, and am revealing almost daily my thoughts and feelings about my work and art in general, it's made me think about whether that sense of "mystery" that Bacon supposedly cultivated in his work really had anything to do with its success. While, as an artist, I'm fascinated with his process and his ideas, as a viewer, I think there can be just too much information. Obviously the viewing experience can be enriched by a deeper understanding of the historical and theoretical context of the work, but at the end of the day, it is a painting to be experienced visually. Isn't it? I hate to bring up Barthes again, but he touches on this idea when he writes of closing one's eyes to best see the photograph (or in my case, painting):

"Absolute subjectivity is achieved only in a state, an effort, of silence (shutting your eyes is to make the image speak in silence). The photograph touches me if I withdraw it from its usual blah-blah: "Technique,", "Reality," "Reportage," "Art,", etc.: to say nothing, to shut my eyes, to allow the detail to rise of its own accord into affective consciousness." (Camera Lucida, p.55)

Francis Bacon's paintings don't touch me because of my knowledge of his relationship with Peter Lacy, or of his reliance on the images of Muybridge and Velasquez, or of his alcoholic rampages. My relationship to his work may begin with sympathy, but a connection is made through empathy - the "I see how you feel", becomes an "I feel that too". I think viewers (and especially art historians) can go too far in trying to understand the ins and outs of the artist's perspective, when the artist's purpose is not to make a diaristic statement, but to evoke/provoke an experience in or connection with the viewer. Ambiguities and contradictions in the image keep the image alive and provide a forum to explore those aspects of our nature that lie buried within ourselves. I'm not sure what this means for this blog - but I certainly don't think you have to read it to experience my paintings. This is more about the journey than understanding any particular painting.

After I blogged the other day about moving to my dark side, I got an email from a friend who seemed a) surprised that I had a dark side, and b) perplexed that I would want to revel in that side to "suffer" for my art. While I think it is safe to say that I'm a half-full kind of girl, we certainly all have a dark side - traumas, insecurities, vulnerabilities. But it's not that I want to "suffer" for my art. Nor do I want my art to be a navel-gazing endeavor. I just think that art that taps into those unresolved or unsatisfied parts of ourselves connects with people in a more honest and meaningful way than art that is supported merely by interesting philosophical ideas. What I was trying to say, was that I want to be more fearless in my art. Art is a very revealing venture, whether you want it to be or not, and I think most often it is the bravest among us who create the best work.

Who Doesn't Like Bacon?

OK, I can't take it anymore, it's time to talk about Bacon. The whole purpose of the New York trip was to see the Met's Francis Bacon retrospective, and it certainly didn't disappoint. It's impossible to blog about it all, but there were certainly some major ideas that emerged for me.

Firstly, those damn gold frames. Bacon required all of his works to be framed in gilt gold frames with glass - the glass being the most unusual aspect. Seeing a painting in the flesh is, quite literally, being able to see the flesh of the paint. By putting his work behind glass, it was hard to see some of the subtleties of the dark glazes, to feel the visceral swipes of thick paint, to savor the soft gloss of the paint's skin. The exhibit explained that he primarily worked from photographed images, and since my own work deals with the relationship between painting and photography, the way I saw it, he had begun by transforming a photograph into a painting, and then by framing it behind glass, had basically transformed it back into a photograph. The final framed object was experientially a photograph of a painting. Also, I think it's interesting that although Bacon's instructions were strict with respect to framing his work for display purposes, the reproductions of his work are of his unframed paintings. Since Bacon worked from reproductions, he was certainly very conscious of this secondary life his paintings would have, and yet he did not require the reproductions to be of his framed work - which just reaffirms to me that when the paintings were viewed in reproduction as actual photographs of the work, the frame and glass just became redundant.

Secondly, there is no denying that Bacon quite willingly, and regularly, went to his dark side. A very dark side. Throughout the summer I have been becoming more and more conscious of how cerebral my work is, and wanting, with some trepidation, to explore a more explicitly sensual/emotional content. Working with Nitasha and Rebecca in the studio this summer has only strengthened this desire - their work is raw, intense, brave. It's making me feel like a wimp, over-thinking everything. Although art always exposes something of who you are, and while I have come a long way this year, I think I am still very much in hiding. And I think it has been easier to hide in landscapes and abstraction. But once you start using the figure, more and more becomes exposed. As Nitasha and I drooled through the Bacon exhibit and then trolled the New York bookstores looking at endless numbers of art books, Nitasha kept commenting that the paintings and images that struck me, that I kept being drawn to, had quite a dark sensibility. In the past year, my work has slowly been revealing a more romantic, feminine desire, and now it seems a darker side is starting to come into the mix. Certainly, if anything is going to bring out your desire to revel in the dark side, it's a Francis Bacon painting.

Thirdly, a more minor point, perhaps, but something I couldn't stop thinking about as I looked at Bacon's paintings. His distortion of the figure is incredibly sculptural, as if he had made a plasticine maquette of the figure and then twisted and pulled it into the form that he wanted to paint. Picasso, Matisse, de Kooning, all painted the figure and yet explored their ideas about the body, form and gesture in sculpture as well. The more I looked at Bacon's paintings, the more I could not fathom how he had not been drawn to expressing himself through a sculptural medium. It began to peak my curiosity as to how I might approach my ideas in sculpture. Looking at works by artists such as Petah Coyne, Sherry Boyle, Michele Oka, I have to believe my ideas have a place in the third dimension.

The final element of Bacon's show that has stayed with me (beyond the sheer power of the paintings themselves, of course) is the small display they had of Bacon's source materials. Bacon once said "Images breed images in me." Actually seeing the images that had resulted in the paintings was a fascinating peek into Bacon's creative process. Although there were no sketches, his works look as though the impeccable compositional structures were well thought out before paint ever touched the canvas. But it was very inspiring to see how these paintings of "genius" were sourced largely from very accessible, unremarkable images. With the cynical approach to the appropriation of images in post-modernism, it can be intimidating to rely on reproductions for source materials. There is a stigma somehow of a kind of failure of the imagination. Artists like Bacon prove otherwise.

There is no question that the Bacon show was a mass of inspiration for my studio practice, but at the end of day, most importantly, experiencing the show was a thrill, a privilege, a sheer heart-wrenching pleasure.

Such A Dirty Mind

On Friday, Nitasha and I ventured out to Chelsea to see if there was anything worthwhile. I always find it's pretty hit-and-miss in the Chelsea galleries, and I wasn't optimistic for the August shows (New York is deserted in August). Generally, I would say there were mostly misses this time, but there were a few great things.

One of the highlights was a Cecily Brown painting from 1999 ("Boy Trouble" - left image) that was hung in a group show called "Naked" - a collection of almost 50 figurative paintings from as early as the 1800's to today. The Cecily Brown painting was one of the best I've seen of her work (I saw the Oct 2008 show at Gagosian and had mixed feelings about it) and it was definitely the best piece in the show. The paint handling was a tour de force - varied and exciting. While the style was loose and gestural, there was a great sense of editing, just enough control that every smear and mark oozed with intention. I thought it was a much more powerful piece than those from 2008. The newer work is much more chaotic, full of anxiety and a hyper-kinetic energy - the initial confrontation with it is impressive, but with a longer look, the paint overwhelms every representational reference, making the experience more of an adventure in painterly abstraction than anything else. But in this 1999 painting, the energy seemed to emanate from within the figure itself - a man with a huge erection dominating the canvas.

But since I've always considered myself an abstract painter, it makes me wonder why I wouldn't prefer Brown's 2008 paintings that have been obliterated into abstraction? When did I cross the line from abstract painter to conceptual painter to (gasp!) FIGURE PAINTER?? While I have been using the figure in my work, I wouldn't say my work has been ABOUT the figure. But maybe it should be. Maybe I want it to be. Maybe it already is. Dear God.

And then there's that huge erection. Really? I'm certainly no prude (and I love this particular painting), but I don't understand why so much of the figure painting in contemporary art (that gets any international attention) seems to be either graphically violent or pornographic. It's just so OBVIOUS. Are there not more subtleties to be explored in the human condition? And even if sex and violence are so fundamental to human nature that any image of the figure cannot avoid them, are there not more interesting and complex ways to address them? In Camera Lucida, Barthes talks about how some photographs are endowed with a "blind field" - that the punctum of the photograph (discussed in my posting yesterday) implies a broader image/context than the photograph explicitly shows, which the viewer makes seen through his own assumptions/imagination/input. That seems much more interesting to me. Why do these artists feel compelled to display the contents of their own dirty mind, when it seems much more confrontational and provocative (and ultimately more effecting) to create an image that forces the viewer to delve into the contents of their own dirty mind. I think Kara Walker is one artist who does this particularly well - the disturbing implications of her work come from the viewer making the final connections in the images she creates, a much more potent and shocking experience for the viewer - although a lot of Walker's work is still pretty graphic, I think her more ambiguous images are much intriguing and arresting.

Speaking of the erotic image, Barthes writes:

"it takes the spectator outside its frame, and it is there that I animate the photograph and that it animates me. The punctum, then, is a kind of subtle beyond - as if the image launched desire beyond what it permits us to see: not only toward "the rest" of the nakedness, not only toward the fantasy of a praxis, but toward the absolute excellence of a being, body and soul together." (p.59)

Admittedly, it's much harder for the artist to involve the viewer in the completion of an image, but as Barthes argues, those are the images that the viewer retains in his/her memory - when the image is completed by SHUTTING the eyes.

My fascination with these issues may mean my work is heading somewhere new - sensuality, eroticism, seduction...more subtlety and suggestion...it may be a whole new world.

At the Airport with Roland Barthes

There is much to discuss. I have been in New York since my last posting, and the ideas and inspiration from my trip are overwhelming. But I will start where my trip began - at the airport, stuck in endless delays, but where luckily I was kept in good company by Roland Barthes - through his short but classic text "Camera Lucida", in which he attempts to identify and define the essence of photography. (I know - it's a little weird that this is my holiday reading, but alas....)

He begins by explaining that his relationship to photography is not as a photographer, but only as part of the "spectrum" of a photograph (being the target of the photographer's shot) or as a spectator (looking at a photograph). His inquiries begin with his subjective responses to these experiences.

As the subject of a photographed portrait, he laments the "sensation of inauthenticity" he inevitably experiences as he is caught by the photographer's searching gaze, conscious of the conflict of four separate selves: "the one I think I am, the one I want others to think I am, the one the photographer thinks I am, and the one he makes use of to exhibit his art." (p.13) In this transformation from subject to object, he finds the specter of Death - "I have become Total-Image, which is to say, Death in person" (p.14). He returns to this idea throughout the book, and it reminds me of Andy Warhol's interest in the connection between the photograph, the image and death. But more interesting to me is viewing photography as a way to resist death, as a means of creating immortality (or at least the promise of such). That aspect of the real that is captured in the photograph may "die" upon the camera shutter's release, but it is instantly reincarnated into a new aspect of the real through the life of its photographed image. Indeed, Barthes later writes, "Photography has something to do with resurrection." It is "at once the past and the real." (p.82) I currently explore this notion in my work by choosing images that play with the idea of the past and present, and that raise questions about how images of/about/from the past persist in our contemporary visual culture. In many ways, my recent paintings may be seen as reincarnations of images that are themselves reincarnations. I have been conceiving of my work as a series of translations, but the notion of reincarnation may be a more accurate and more interesting formulation to consider.

Barthes then goes on to analyze those photographs to which he is attracted. I love his introduction to this section: "I see photographs everywhere, like everyone else, nowadays; they come from the world to me, without my asking; they are only "images", their mode of appearance is heterogeneous. Yet, among those which had been selected, evaluated, approved, collected in albums or magazines and which had thereby passed through the filter of culture, I realized that some provoked tiny jubilations, as if they referred to a stilled center, an erotic or lacerating value buried in myself..." (p 16). I feel like I could have written this myself about my reason for having images as my subject matter and my reasons for choosing specific images that I want to "reincarnate" in paint - ("they refer...to an erotic or lacerating value buried in myself"...I love that.)

Later, he writes that a photograph he loves produces in him "an internal agitation, an excitement, a certain labor too, the pressure of the unspeakable which wants to be spoken." (p.19) This quote reminded me of something the (amazing) artist Ann Hamilton once said (and I paraphrase) - that the artist's job is to make visible what cannot be spoken. I know in the art that I love, there is often that heartbreaking recognition of a kind of unspoken - perhaps even unspeakable - truth. Barthes even compares the impact of a photograph as a "wound". I worry about my own work veering too far into the cerebral and moving further and further away from the emotional, the sensual, the soulful. For I agree with Barthes: "I see, I feel, hence I notice, I observe, and I think."

One thing I did not expect in this text was how Barthes relates photography to elements of performance. In one passage he refers to the photograph as evidence of a photographer's "performance", and later declares that the best word to describe his experience with photographs that he likes is as an "adventure". ("In this glum desert, suddenly a specific photograph reaches me: it animates me, and I animate it. [...] this is what creates every adventure." (p.20) This directly relates to the idea I explored in my August 4, 2009 blog regarding conceptualizing painting as performance. Nothing like getting a little encouragement from one of the heavyweights.

And then came the idea of the punctum. Before reading Camera Lucida, I was somewhat familiar with Barthes' use of this term, but in this text, he describes it as "that accident [caught in the photographed image] which pricks me". That emphasis on the punctum as an accidental aspect to the picture recalled discussions I had had in my Visual Arts & Music class last year regarding the difference between the iterative vs. improvisational aspects of performance. Through these discussions and in analyzing my own work, I began to think of improvisation as the key to the life of a painting (or more broadly speaking, a performance). Barthes' punctum concept seems to capture a similar sentiment with respect to a photograph. It is the uncontrolled/accidental/improvisational aspects of art that keep each performance for the viewer alive. Of course the punctum may be different for each viewer, but with respect to painting, I believe the punctum must be found at least in part in the artist's handling of the paint. It's why the PAINT matters. And I know this is an aspect I need to push further in my own work.

I must have gotten on the plane around this point and finally headed off toward Manhattan. Ideas were swimming in my head, and I hadn't even landed yet. It was only the beginning.

The Heart of the Matter

The last week or so has been all about reassessing the paintings of the summer and understanding my dissatisfaction with them - analyzing, questioning, reasoning - but in the last few days it has been all about the paint again, and I just love it. The simpler compositions I'm working with require me to explore much more subtlety in the surface; I'm taking more risks with the color, and not painting the surface as sheerly as I have been; and now I'm allowing the paint texture and brush strokes to reveal themselves too. My natural touch with the brush is quite gentle, so the paint-handling has a really sensual, feminine look that I'm actually quite happy with.

I've also added a new color to my palette - Manganese Blue - which looks like it has light embedded in the pigment. It's infused the painting with a type of brightness that my other oil paintings don't have. It's made me want to explore some other new pigments that give this sense of light - although I do find the contemporary palette can get too attached to the screen-aesthetic and lose the richness of some of the more traditional colors. Pthalo-based (and other synthetic) colors can easily overwhelm a painting. But in moderation, it could help me to re-invent the historical types of images I use with a slightly sexier edge than my past works.

With all the emphasis on conceptual matters in art now, it's often too easy to lose focus on the magic offered in the materials. I still have a lot to learn about oil paint, and I've only begun to figure out what I can make it do, but I just have to remind myself to not get so wrapped up in the ideas and the image for the work that the importance and relevance of the paint itself gets lost. I see my work almost as a defense of painting - that the translation of these digital/photographed images into paint changes their meaning, changes the viewer's reception of the work - which means I need to make sure that the paint in my work is speaking as loudly as the composition, the ideas and the image. In fact, that probably describes all the paintings I love - when the paint itself is not just a tool of expression, but is an undeniable part of the message.

Saved By Elizabeth Taylor

After hours of playing with images and working with more and more complicated compositions, I realized that I was sucking the emotional content out of the images by making them far too cerebral. While looking for images that were more couture-related, I came across this iconic image of Elizabeth Taylor, and was immediately reminded of the now even-more iconic interpretation by Andy Warhol (this is the painting that Hugh Grant sold for $zillions a couple years ago). Because Warhol's work shares many of the same concerns as my work, I loved the idea of creating my own translation of the original image. I have chosen to do two paintings, each derived from a different fragment of the original image. After making my ink prints of these fragments and photographing each print repeatedly over a few hours, I combined the various versions into one image. But the compositions are simple - much simpler than anything I've painted in quite some time. I think they have a dreamy quality that I've been wanting in my work but haven't achieved so far. (Sorry - I'm not going to post my composed images until they're painted.)

It's made me rethink the idea that an excess of detail can seduce the viewer to look longer. With all the visual excess we face everyday, I wonder if painting would do better to exploit its stillness rather than fight against it. Painting can seduce the viewer with a type of image that offers a quieter source of contemplation rather than yet another visual bombardment. The abstract painter David Reed disagrees, arguing: "Feelings start with motion. Seeing films and TV make this necessary. I don't think we can go back to a notion of stillness or balance in painting and the kind of contemplation this implies." (David Ryan, Talking Painting: Dialogues with Twelve Contemporary Abstract Painters, p. 204). I'm not sure yet whether I disagree with this statement now (even though I relied on it in support of my thesis), or whether the concept of motion is more complex than his statement perhaps implies. Reed works with fragmentation in his work, but the fragmentation is quite limited. Perhaps the juxtaposition of two fragments implies enough motion to excite the contemporary eye.

I guess I'll just have to wait and see what happens when I translate it all into paint.

An Epic Problem

I started this week expressing my frustration with my work - and now, after a good week of progress and new ideas, I'm ending the week somewhat down, on another note of frustration. I have to produce a small work (or two) for a group show at the end of the month, but my new ideas all seem to be so epic - they either involve large fragmented pieces, or multi-paneled works that could fill a gallery on their own.

I am excited about exploring the idea of painting as performance with a serial approach to an image, painting each of the various transformations of an image that result from my ink print process. My photographs then become a documentation a "happening" of sorts - as if the image itself is in the midst of a performance. I'm sure there are video ideas to explore in there somewhere as well - but I still have a couple little paintings to make. And SOON.

Face It (Face What?)

With what felt like a mini-breakthrough yesterday, today I am faced with so many options for what to do next, I'm a little overwhelmed. While I am currently in love with the new images I photographed yesterday, and I still believe it would be interesting to keep these photographs as distinct works and not just source images, I'm not sure what my next move is. How do I decide which one to paint? And once I paint an image, is the photographed version obsolete, redundant, or complimentary? Once I paint it, should I exclude the photographed image as a distinct work? Perhaps I won't know the answers to these questions until I paint one and see.

I find myself conflicted in developing this new work. Since my thesis, my inquiries have been focused on exploring the life of the image, and I have chosen images that have an extravagant and frankly, pretty feminine sensibility. Until this year, I never painted the figure, and considered myself an exclusively abstract painter. But now that I have had the thrill of painting an image that looks back at me, I have become obsessed with the painted face. The subtleties of expression, the implications of distortion, the confrontation of a painted stare - it's endlessly fascinating. There are artists such as photographer Thomas Ruff and painter Chuck Close who use the portrait as a means to explore different aspects of the image, and I'm intrigued by the possibilities of having my work reference the ideas and strategies of such artists. However, there's also the baroque, ornate sensibility that I have striven for in my choice of images so far that reference a sensual excess as well as question the contemporary life of the historical. Could I really set aside the frills, ruffles, ribbons and crinoline for the simple elegance of the human face? Dresses are just so much fun to paint! And then I also wonder whether working with multiple images begins to distract from the larger issue at hand, ie. the complex life of an image, a single image. Perhaps taking one image and pushing as many different translations between media as possible is a more rigorous and interesting approach.

So in the immediate future, I have to decide:

a) Multiple Images - Portraiture;

b) Multiple Images - Sensual Excess/Historical; or

c) Single Image.

Which approach is best to push my ideas forward at this stage? I need to make a decision soon - blank canvases await!!!!

Back To My Roots

So! An exciting day today so far. In processing a new image for my next painting, I was letting the ink run/move/drip on each print (I really liked the drippy/dissolved woman in the recently failed painting - photo in August 3 post), but today the results just weren't what I wanted. The distortions, particularly in the faces, were too dark, too disturbing. To clarify some of the facial distortions, I began to crop details of the image before printing them. The details are SO much more interesting. The fragments become not just mere fragments of an image, but new images unto themselves. And the enlarged fragments allow the ink to separate/bleed/blend in more complex and unpredictable ways - and offer so much more visual information from which to paint. But the best part is that I think these latest images can be really strong images on their own - before I've even painted them. It's made me think that photographs of these ink prints could be a really interesting addition to my work - and create an interesting dialogue with the paintings that translate the combination of these inky fragments into paint. I also think it will begin to clarify/emphasize the important role photography has in my work - offering a painted image that manually "reproduces" a photograph, and a photographed image of a mechanically "improvised" image.

Mirror Mirror on the Wall

So with the latest painting failure, I've been busy reassessing. In my thesis painting, finished in March, my thesis advisor Anda remarked that it reminded her of a hall of mirrors.

"Communing with Las Meninas", oil on canvas, 96" x 144", Amanda Clyne

The idea has stuck with me, and yet in many of my works since, I have taken a more cinematic approach to the composition, building long horizontal structures that force a more linear, narrative reading of the relationship between the fragments. I've been disappointed in this approach. Having already decided to return to the type of fragmentation evident in my thesis painting, I realized today that I should try to make the compositional structure and size of my works mimic the relationship of a viewer to a mirror. The emphasis of the images would then become more about the "slow gaze" at a reflection, rather than a reference to the passive gaze at a moving image.