Eugène Carrière

I discovered the work of French Symbolist painter Eugène Carrière after leaving the Alexander McQueen show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York last week. I saw this small painting hung in the corridor of the museum. Through my new McQueen-infected eyes, the work struck me as particularly haunting, with a renewed contemporary relevance.

"The Communion", Metropolitan Museum of Art

Here are a couple of Carrière's portraits that I think have an equally eery, fragile presence.


  

Beyond the Dress

Installation of Alexander McQueen at Metropolitan Museum of Art

High expectations can be a dangerous thing. Once you expect something to be amazing, it is far too likely that you'll end up disappointed, or worse, that the truly amazing will no longer be able to actually amaze you. But the much-hyped Alexander McQueen show "Savage Beauty", which I saw at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York this week, easily surpassed every sky-high expectation I had.

There are enough reviews of the show that I don't think it's necessary for me to repeat all the accolades again, but I'd like to share a few thoughts I had about the show:

Art, Not Fashion

When I first arrived at the museum and saw the throngs of people waiting to enter the show, I admit I felt a little jealous that a fashion designer was able to draw a larger, more excited crowd to the museum than any art exhibition I had ever seen. Inside the exhibition, as each viewer stood in awe, patiently soaking in the exquisite nature of each McQueen dress, jacket and pair of shoes, I was a little hurt that I so rarely see such attention being paid to the artworks of the greatest painters and sculptors.

But then I realized that we had all been duped. While I'm sure many, if not most of the visitors had come to the show because of their interest in fashion, Alexander McQueen (and the absolutely brilliant curatorial team at the Met's Costume Institute) made sure that we were not looking at just clothes and accessories, but at a fully realized artistic vision, one that incorporated sculpture, painting, performance, installation and new media, all under the guise of fashion. I remember years ago seeing the Armani exhibit at the Guggenheim. I loved the show but the dresses and suits were - let's be real - just dresses and suits. But the McQueen show was so, so much more. It was art in its most masterful, dark, and poetic form of expression. When I left the show, the world looked different. McQueen had undeniably infiltrated my vision.

A Second Skin

I love the abstract nature of fashion and how it plays with form, movement, color and texture. When I look at fashion, I see abstract paintings. One day, I plan to paint them. Throughout the McQueen show, there was certainly no shortage of extraordinary sensations. My favorite was an organza dress, so intricately layered that it created the impression it was made entirely of smoke, the floor-length skirt appearing to rise from the floor like dry ice. But from the very beginning of the show, it was clear to me that McQueen's works were impervious to abstraction. The garments and accessories are so thoroughly steeped in narrative, that the body itself becomes an inextricable element of his design. Some garments seem to attack the body, while others seem to have instigated an irrevocable process of metamorphosis in which the woman is in the midst of transforming into a hybrid being, morphing with creatures that offer her new forms of protection and defense. And a few garments violently suggest the aftermath from some sort of dehumanizing body-snatching invasion. With each garment, the dress covers the body not as a decorative article of clothing, but as a second skin, as if it were a kind of natural outgrowth from our dark, mutating, genetic make-up.

The Perfect Eulogy

At about the half-way point in the show, my eyes welled up with tears, and I spent the rest of the show fighting them back with only moderate success. It was all so overwhelming, so haunting, so brilliant. By the end, I felt like my heart and head would explode from a potent mix of ecstasy, emotion, and inspiration. The metamorphosis suggested in his garments seemed to be taking place inside me. But there was still another show I wanted to see -- the Richard Serra drawing exhibit. At first, I wasn't sure that I could absorb another visual onslaught, and when I first entered the Serra exhibit, the weighty, spare, geometric drawings seemed better suited for another day. But as I began to wander through the exhibit, I began to see Serra's drawings as the perfect eulogy for Alexander McQueen himself. Confronted with one of Serra's large towering black squares, the entire surface immersed in the heavy scrawls of rich, caked-on paint stick, I saw the roughly textured surface transform into the delicate ruffles and decaying lace of McQueen's creations. Standing back to take in the drawing's impenetrable blackness, grand scale and stark form, I experienced a dark, monumental silence. It seemed the most fitting conclusion to McQueen's truly epic exhibition, and the most eloquent representation of the lingering, tragic void left by his senseless death.

Richard Serra (detail of drawing)
Richard Serra at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Size Matters

I couldn't sleep last night. I started a new painting yesterday, and I love the composition. It's an elongated, twisted portrait that reminds me of Brancusi's Bird in Space (pictured to the left). The problem is that I composed the work for a tall, narrow stretcher that I happened to have leftover from an old painting idea that I ended up not pursuing -- always good to reuse old stretchers for new and improved ideas. Except that I measured it wrong, so the new composition I planned was actually 4 inches longer than the stretcher! I thought I could just crop the image and use the stretcher I had, so I continued on my merry way, thinking it would all work out just fine. But after painting all day yesterday, that nagging voice in my head would just not shut up. "It's too short." "It'll never be as good as the original version." "You should stop painting this." "Don't sacrifice a better composition in the name of speed and convenience." MAN!!

I was really happy with how painting actually went yesterday, so it became even more tortuous to consider abandoning it now that paint was actually on the canvas. I went to bed wondering if I was just being too picky, if it was worth all the extra work it will take to re-do it, if when I re-paint it, it will be as good as what I did yesterday. I just couldn't come to terms with the fact that a few inches was making such an enormous difference in how the work was perceived!

But with fresh eyes this morning, there is really no doubt. The longer version is better. It will bug me every time I look at the painting if I don't change it now. SO frustrating. But lesson learned. As soon as I saw that the stretcher was a different size than my composition, I should have stopped cold. Considering I custom-make my stretchers down to the 16th of an inch, how could I not see that chopping four inches off my composition might not be the best idea? Oh well. This morning I've made the new stretcher. Now I just have to muster up the courage to strip the other painting off its support and toss it into the trash.

Too Much

I have too much to say. Way too much. So much that I have found myself unable to say anything at all. I've written countless unfinished blog entries, all of them totally inadequate ramblings. I have so many ideas lately, inspired by so many disparate things, I can't find the time to sort through them and articulate what it all means for me and my work. As the ideas pile up, I don't want to post my latest finding without catching up on the older ones first, but I can't seem to find the time to catch up, so the ideas pile up and pile up. I no longer know where to begin. The longer I leave it, the more the ideas shift and move, overlapping and looping around each other. They feed off each other, growing bigger and more complicated, becoming so thoroughly intertwined that I can no longer find a way to disentangle them into neat, compartmentalized postings.

I know the ideas are working their way through my paintings. I can see the influence in my latest compositions. But I continue to experience an unshakable anxiety that if I do not find the time to sort through, synthesize and articulate my responses, the ideas will start to lose their potency and will begin to suffocate within the tangled mess of incomplete arguments, fragmented thoughts and forgotten connections.

I've had strep throat this week, so my mind is fuzzy and my body aches. I'm exhausted with illness but wired from boredom, and the combination is pushing me perilously to the edge. More often than not (and especially at times like this when I'm sick), I find myself frustrated by the gap I experience between the possibilities I see in my mind and my ability to execute them in a sufficient time such that the products of my efforts don't feel like old news when they are finally complete. The speed of my body can't seem to keep up with the speed of my mind. I recently read a book about the California artist Robert Irwin (a goldmine of inspiration that I have been working through in my recent series of unpublished and unresolved blogs) in which he laments our culture's emphasis on performance:
"We are past-minded, in the sense that all of our systems of measure are developed and in a sense dependent upon a kind of physical resolution. We tag our renaissances at the highest level of performance, where it's really clear to me that once the question is raised, the performance is somewhat inevitable, almost just a mopping-up operation, merely a matter of time. " (from Lawrence Weschler's "Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees", page 90.)
I so get that! In the last couple of months, I feel myself caught in a deluge of questions that my work just can't keep up with. I know I must accept temporary resolutions, whether in order to complete a painting, post a blog entry, or write an artist statement. But be forewarned: these works are not definitive statements, they are merely a series of still inadequate working hypotheses.

It makes me return to my favorite quote that I posted on August 1, 2010 by Arnold Glimcher about how artworks are but a series of clues to the art that ultimately resides in the mind of the artist. But even that assumes that the art is fully formed in the artist's mind, and I'm not convinced that this is always so. I certainly love the idea that the art is already there, somewhere inside me, and that all I need to do is sort through the mess, excavate through the comfortable and the obvious, and free it from deep within. In fact, in moments of inspiration, like when I was reading Weschler's book on Irwin, the ideas strike me not as foreign entities, entering my consciousness from somewhere unknown and external, but much more like liberated P.O.W.s, at long last released into my thought processes from that dark, secluded place inside my mind that is otherwise inaccessible to my available modes of expression. I love that art can be the source of such liberation.

I could go on and on. There's so much more to say. I feel like I should end with some definitive conclusion to all this. But alas, I have none.

Portraits of a Sensation


photograph, Amanda Clyne ©

I am not a storyteller. My curiosity in the world lies not in reconstructing a nebulous past or imagining a fantastical future, but in experiencing the pregnant intensity of a living moment. When I am drawn to something, whether a person, building, object or image, I place the world on pause to probe the source of my empathic fascination. I delve deeper into the experience, not by inventing accompanying narratives or researching encyclopedic details, but by envisioning ways to embody the moment and prolong the sensation. Art can fulfill this desire in me, either through the creation of my own work or through my experience of the work of others.

Growing up, I found that the art that spoke most profoundly to my sensibility was in the modern works of the 20th century, particularly those of abstraction. While I appreciated the skill and complexity of the great works of the old masters, their dramatic form of storytelling did not move me in the way that a de Kooning, Twombly or Agnes Martin work did. The more narrative I perceived, the less I felt engaged with it. I didn't even like reading. Stories just didn't do much for me.

So imagine my surprise when a few years ago my painting began to move away from abstraction and toward representation, of the human body no less! But my paintings are not at all about storytelling or even description. Is what I paint really representation? Is the use of the figure determinative of whether a work is representational?

I am beginning to find an answer in Daniel Smith’s erudite introduction to Deleuze’s book “Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation”. Without taking on the grand debate between Modernism and Postmodernism, I find myself drawn to Deleuze’s distinction between “figuration” and “the Figure”, as his concept of the Figure seems to offer a third category of imagery that seeks to challenge the conditions of representation while lying somewhere between representation and abstraction. Smith explains that for Deleuze, “figuration” is a form that is intended to represent a particular object to the viewer (ie. representational), whereas “the Figure” is a form intended to elicit a sensation from the viewer through more direct means, such as in the work of Francis Bacon. In my own work, the insidious melancholy and pathos I evoke is far from the violent rage in Bacon’s work, but I find I share with Bacon, as Smith writes, “the problem he shares with Cézanne: How to extract the Figure from its figurative, narrative, and illustrational links? How to “paint the sensation”…?”

For my last solo show, my exhibition “Illusive” was sub-titled “Portraits of an Image”, a kind of statement of purpose to clarify that I did not consider the paintings to be representational portraits of a woman. Perhaps I need to expand that idea, and conceive of my next paintings as not just portraits of an image, but as portraits of a sensation.

Rethinking the Blog


The studio of Francis Bacon

It has been a shamefully long time since my last posting. I must explain my absence.

I began this blog with the intention of sharing the struggles and machinations of my studio practice as a way to capture the energy, empathy and exchange of the shared studio environment that I miss and love. I have worked alone in my studio for almost two years now, and while the solitude keeps me focused and productive, I am always rejuvenated and reassured by conversations I have with my fellow artists, whether we’re discussing the trajectory of our ideas, exchanging new techniques and methods, or simply offering each other support and encouragement in the face of inevitable bouts of self-doubt and frustration.

But as the marketing efforts ramped up for my first post-graduation solo show last September, I became self-conscious that this collection of unfinished thoughts and uncensored queries could undermine the reception of my work. As I looked at my friends’ blogs, I realized that they were primarily used either as a marketing vehicle to show off recent artworks, exhibition announcements and media coverage, or as a stage for a carefully crafted online persona. Mine was, and is, neither. I have wondered if it should be.

But now, after months of silence, I realize that my original vision for this blog must stand. Being an artist is so much more than participating in the productive cycle of artwork, exhibitions and sales. That is the part that makes it a job, but it is not what makes you an artist. For me, being an artist is the whole adventure of wrestling with ideas and seeking mastery over materials, of confronting failures and reveling in breakthroughs, of working, waiting and watching for magical happenings to occur in both mind and matter, and above all, of sharing these obsessions with others who go through the same.
So today I am renewing my mission for this blog -- to divulge my take on the inner-workings of this crazy, difficult, amazing life, come what may.

Where The Art Is

Here is an excerpt from a recent interview I found on YouTube with Arnold Glimcher, the former president of the Pace Gallery in New York, discussing the work of Louise Nevelson:
"What interests me is concepts, is the cognitive process of art. And that process is perception. How is the artist’s perception unique? I don’t think that when you see the most extravagant, extraordinary exhibition of Louise Nevelson’s work, you’re really seeing the art. These are maps or charts or clues to the process that makes the art. The art is Nevelson’s perception of the world. The art is happening in Nevelson’s head. These [the sculptures] are the maps to that art. And I believe it’s true of any artist."