Tag Archives: painting

Day by Day in the Studio 4: July 16

July 16, 1974

After I had lived at my loft on Lispenard Street for about 15 years I finally unpacked the last two boxes I had brought with me when I moved back to New York from Halifax, Nova Scotia where I had been teaching at NSCAD. I needed the room in my closet and I couldn’t remember what was in the boxes. Whatever it was, clearly I hadn’t missed it. Inside one box was a wrapped package and inside that package was an album of page size (about 12 x 9 inches) gouache paintings on paper, combining images of birds and flowers taken from bird books and flower catalogues annotated with poetic language, by which I think I mean, a few words, personal but not specific enough to be political. The ubiquity of this type of imagery as a trope is one that I have written about in my essay “Trite Tropes, Clichés, and the Persistence of Styles,” where I admit my own early contributions to the genre. This was the work to which I devoted my first winter out of graduate school and I had completely forgotten its existence. Lesson #1: we are increasingly so concerned with producing a recognizable, stable, packaged product by the last semester of graduate school that the model of search as part of artistic development seems ridiculous, impractical, dangerous even. But people are still people and what an artist deeply cares about and may devote a year of life to may end up being not that important, may end up not amounting to much, although what can seem a failure at one moment at a different time can appear important.

At the end of my first year out of graduate school my favorite teacher, Stephan Von Huene, had come to New York and visited my studio. He had been extremely supportive of my work in graduate school while encouraging experimentation and the embrace of accident. Now he was clearly upset with the direction I had taken, he felt I had gone off track. Thinking back on it today I think he felt I had lost some of the charm of a personal and feminist narrative and gotten mired down in a gloomy subject statically presented. The strange thing is that I almost immediately forgot what exactly he had said to me, partly because as he spoke I was already converting his comments into a plan to change my work based on my interpretation of what he had said, and, Lesson #2, that pretty much describes the imperfect art of teaching, where as long as some transaction occurs that moves the game forward it doesn’t really matter if you understand each other exactly.

In the weeks after his visit I decided to bring into my work the image of the empty dress. My reasoning as far as I can recall was very simple: I had always been interested in clothing, I had a few beautiful books on the history of costume, which due to the fortuitous importance of painting and drawing as the only means of recording visual appearances for centuries meant that I was looking at dresses and costume in great paintings from art history which was one among many factors and influences that kept me looking at painting when I was in my early teens even when I thought I was doing something else. I learned through imitation of New York Times fashion illustrations how to draw quick fashion sketches in pen and ink which kept me drawing, and I had come out the other end of my teens doing gently satirical, autobiographical small gouaches in which female figures were often elegantly dressed in a 1920s style of clothing in a Rajput and Sassetta influenced, Hairy Who inspired style and scale with a feminist impulse which became more focused at CalArts. So I returned to the image of the dress, now empty of the extra narrative element of the figure, and quickly decided to tear away the ground–I’m pretty sure that had something to do with something Stephan said, maybe that I wasn’t doing much with the ground so I got rid of some of it.

The dress is long since a trope of feminist-inspired art but at the time it was not that prevalent, and there was not so much of a leader/follower situation as that it was a moment when a range of subjects and materials from women’s daily lives and personal experience were newly available to women artists of a range of age and experience. That summer I worked on small paintings of empty dresses as representative of the curious phenomenon of femininity as a role that women put on and take off. Although elements of the earlier work have remained and recur in my work–landscape, figure, the book of pages, the use of language–at the time these empty dresses felt like the first work I did out of graduate school that I could call my own.

*I’m going to cheat a little here: this work led to Dress Books in 1977 where person-sized rice paper dress shapes had pages covered with language, so that a viewer could stand, gonad to gonad as it were, and try to read the figure of the woman:

Mira Schor, Dress Book (back), 1977. Ink, dry pigment, Japan Gold Size on rice paper, c. 63 x 24 in.

And the dresses from the summer of 1974 led also to works from the summer 1978, more abstracted, and also more decorative and flirtatious dresses:

July 16, 1984

Mira Schor, The Odd Pod, 1984. Gouache, dry pigment and medium on rice paper, 72 x 36 in.

In 1984 I worked on gouaches on very large sheets of rice paper: some were part of a series of calendar pieces for the momentous year 1984–here was the one made during July here in Provincetown,

Mira Schor, 1984 Calendar, July, 1984. Dry pigment, gouache, and medium on rice paper, 72 x 36 in.

Many of the figures were taken from forms that I was interested in, found in nature, forms which in themselves had a figurative, anthropomorphic element, primarily skate egg cases and milkweed pods. Odd Pod was a type of seaweed I found on the beach.

I had pushed the media I was working on, rice paper, dry pigment, gouache to the limits of their capabilities in terms of size. At this point I began to work in oil on canvas and linen. It was at this time also that I began to write about art and Susan Bee and I founded M/E/A/N/I/N/G, and in order to write about contemporary art, I also began an immersion in contemporary art and feminist theory and some of the critical disciplines which were of great importance to art discourse. I looked back on the works from the 70s and early ’80s, particularly these landscape-based works but also even the feminist works such as the Dress Books–though I stubbornly continue to feel these are epitomic seventies feminist artworks despite the fact that they have not as yet entered that closed history–as part of a dream world, one that the intellectual and aesthetic politics of the 1980s intentionally undermined, and, though I gained a great deal from the specific kind of coming to consciousness in my encounter with such texts during the contentious and bracing period of the ’80s, I also felt the loss of that dream world.

Reminder: I will return to posting on art, culture, and politics soon enough but I hope my subscribers and readers will allow me a slight summer detour, a project of posting works done on specific summer days from different years, begun July 13. Because the desire to do this arose on the spur of the moment, after I had left New York and most of the records of my work, I’m going by works that I have on my hard drive where the work’s date is specifically included in the file name, making this a fragmentary impression of the work, which for anyone interested in seeing more, is sketched out very schematically but with a more comprehensive and traditional chronology on my website and I may cheat later this winter and add more relevant works which have specific dates.

Day by day in the studio 1: July 13

I will return to posting on art, culture, and politics soon enough but I hope my subscribers and readers allow me a slight summer detour, as I trace my work from different years through specific days in July and August.

Learning how one works and how one works around work blocks is an essential skill for an artist. Every artist has her own habits and devises her own solutions.

Since I began to work as an artist, that is, thinking of it as my work in the most profound sense, as what made life bearable and meaningful, various patterns and approaches have asserted themselves, but their familiarity in no way makes them rote or comfortably reliable.

I understand more and more how incredibly privileged I’ve been to even be able to make art at all, as economic conditions make the kind of time and intellectual independence necessary to make art more and more difficult to come by. I’m doubly fortunate that, since the age of twenty, I’ve had the incredible luck of being able to spend two months a year in a beautiful place away from the city with relatively unobstructed time to confront my work and to work. A strangely agrarian rhythm established the summer as a particularly intense laboratory in studio struggle, beginning as if from zero.

So almost before I had made the “official” decision to be an artist by pursuing graduate studies in visual art, the beginning of the summer marked a moment of renewal and reassessment that has always been paired with a momentary but seemingly eternal sense of impasse. Even a short gap of time between studios and periods of concentrated work will have created enough of a critical break to put the whole enterprise in crisis. It is likely by now that this is a necessary element of my work process that I should recognize as such but it always feels awful. The road back to my work, that is to say to the part of myself I value most and need so that the rest of me won’t crack under the pressure of the daily, at first appears blocked. As my friends can attest through forty years of listening to me wail over the phone about how I’m not working, the work isn’t going well, that I know I always say that but this time it’s really bad, no amount of experience and of tricks I’ve successfully played on myself in the past mitigates the sense of despair that overwhelms me, even as, as it turns out a few weeks later, I was and am in fact “working.” I’m despondent until a moment when I feel a sense of access to the work, where I both feel that I am working and that I can see the work I am doing without its already being historicized within my own process.

Each calendar day carries enormous weight, has a specific identity. Studio set up by June 24, canvases stretched and rabbit skin glued by July 1 or earlier if possible, drawings begun end June, day and late night spent sketching anything that comes to my mind, summer readings begun with sketchbook at hand, sketches immediately scanned for use in developing paintings, first efforts to put paint to linen by July 4, assessment of drawings mid-July, July 11 often “the day” when the sense of working clicks in, slow down beginning August as social life interrupts pure isolation, return for another round of taking the summer’s visual metaphor as far as I can, before I am forced to stop so the paintings can dry to be taken back to New York and teaching and city life and winter rhythms.

Especially in my earliest years as an artist I felt the importance of leaving a daily trace of my existence, and I have dated many of my works over the years to the day. In recent years I document the studio every day to keep a record of the stages of paintings and, always driven by a diaristic narrative of the work itself, to keep track of the order of things as they develop in the studio, and sometime to realize that I painted over something I should have let be. This summer I’ve decided to begin to research what work I did on each particular and precious day of summer, over the years. I will post as I can through the summer, limited only (and it’s a big only) by the fact that I can only go by what I have on my hard drive, with most of the documentation of my work in New York, so this is a project I may return to. This particular way of presenting the work, focusing on the production from July and August, gives a very incomplete idea of the progression of the work, which is sketched out very schematically but with a more comprehensive and traditional chronology on my website. And, in general, I am aware of that my work appears to have undergone many changes in appearance over the years, but I see the work as an ongoing narrative where the apparent differences in what is represented and addressed and how this address is materialized visually are in conversation, with large periods of time where figure, language, and landscape may dominate, but, I hope to establish, a hand and a politics remains constant.

I begin with this day, July 13.

July 13, 1976

Mira Schor, Fan: Dreams (front and back), ink, dry pigment, metallic powder, Japan Gold Size on rice paper, c. 8 1/2 x 11 in.

In the summer of 1976 I was working with a V shape which had emerged from a formal analysis of earlier work whose subject or, using Barnett Newman’s distinction, taken from Meyer Schapiro, between the object matter of the work–be it an apple or a figure–and the subject matter, the formal and material language of art itself, whose object matter was the female figure and then the figure of an empty dress. I also was beginning to use my handwriting as a visual element, used in order to represent the idea that women were filled with language and because my handwriting could “read” all too easily as abstract form. The writing was personal, often I recorded dreams and added commentary, or worked in a linguistic and diagrammatic manner, from an image I had read about that was resonant, as in this rice paper fan from July 13, 1976.

July 13, 1977

The summer of ’77 I made a series of masks, always two sided, using the same materials and visual elements as in ’76.

Here they are again, this time front and back in one image:

July 13, 2009

I had set aside the masks for many years, but began to look at them again as from 2007 onwards I began to work with the shape of an empty thought balloon that gradually turned into a head wearing glasses.

Mira Schor, Three States, July 13, 2009. Ink on paper, Muji Time notebook, c. 5 ¾ x8 ½ in. 2009

I began to think about doing this day by day in the studio exercise yesterday and went through the image archive I have with me to look for works that I had scanned or photographed and that were specifically dated. This morning I hesitated: the impulse to do this might be a concession to this year’s work block, but I decided to take it as a spur for today’s work.

July 13, 2013

It’s a bit of a crazy risk to post works that are not finished, but as part of this exploration of daily practice here are two of the work process images I take every day, here is what is on the floor and on the work table today, as I try to remind myself that what I’m trying to get to is what is true to the process of the work and where I am in my life and in the world, right this minute.

What does a man see when he looks at his own image?

Towards the end of the opening of Susanna Heller’s exhibition at MagnanMetz Gallery of recent paintings, “Phantom Pain,” as the gallery emptied, I happened to witness a profound moment: Heller’s husband, sociologist Bill DiFazio, wheelchair-bound since loosing his left leg three years ago to a terrible illness, rolled his chair up first to gaze deeply and long at a painting by Heller of him sitting in his chair, Lost in Thought. Then he moved purposefully to contemplate the second painting of him in his wheelchair, Phantom Pain. I wondered, what was he thinking when he looked at these portraits, which so exactly mirrored his present self.

Susanna Heller, Lost in Thought, 2013. Oil on canvas, 50″x33″

Heller is best known as a painter of New York cityscapes, the site of her epic walks through the city, through the complex linearity and rough materiality of her Brooklyn neighborhood, of subway tracks and bridges, of the patterns of the city streets and island outline seen from the bird’s eye view of her studio in the World Trade Center Tower One in the ‘90s and the patterns of disintegrated metal in the paintings from after 9/11. In the current exhibition this aspect of her work is represented in the first, main room of the gallery by several paintings, including Rolling Thunder (Night for Day), a tour de force nineteen foot wide painting in which she represents the thin, vulnerable, nervous skyline of post-Hurricane Sandy New York City, dwarfed and threatened by the vast and turbulent sky and sea swirling around it.

Susanna Heller, Rolling Thunder (Night for Day), 2013. Oil on canvas. 69″ x 238″

Artist and writer Bradley Rubenstein has an interesting appreciation of this painting in his review of the show, “Spirits in the Material World,” looking at Heller’s views of the city through the “post-apocalyptic” lens of Cormac McCarthy‘s “ruined landscape in The Road,” and Heller speaks of her approach to landscape in a February 2013 video interview on Gorki’s Granddaughter filmed in her studio shortly before the exhibition opened . Her discourse on painting is refreshingly unstrategic and utterly haptic, as she speaks about trying to convey as directly as possible the most intimate and almost primitive aspects of perception, of points of view in relation to up and down, gravity, and scale.

Heller turned her unflinchingly curious gaze to the calamitous injuries her husband suffered when he lost his left leg to necrotizing fasciitis, a horror movie illness that most victims do not survive. The doctors who saved his life, caring for him through over twenty operations in three months, probably never had encountered a patient’s family member so driven to confronting painful realities and so able to turn them into art. She sat in the hospital making hundreds of drawings, of her husband lost in a forest of medical machinery, and of the vistas of the East River soaring outside the hospital window. She drew to save her sanity as she tried to help save his life. Some of these harrowing drawings are installed in a corner of the same room as the paintings of Bill in his wheelchair. Unable to paint during many months of caretaking, in her mind she imagined, catalogued, memorized the paint marks that might articulate what she was seeing. When she was finally able to return to the studio she began to work from these drawings and these mental maps.

In my snapshot, Bill’s back was to Waiting for Dawn. The painting is as raw as his body in those early months, the figure lost, disintegrating, supported by another kind of tower,of all the equipment of the most modern interventional medicine. The painting is vertical, a bed, a kind of falling tower, a coffin with its withered occupant a disintegrating effigy. The paint is rough, encrusted, melting. The man looking at his image in a wheelchair is the man who survived that painting, who left that state of in between life and death to return to an altered life, though the trauma can never be made whole.

Detail, Waiting for Dawn

A glorious abstract blob at the top of Waiting for Dawn, maybe the TV monitor for all the medical equipment but maybe also a cloud drifting in from the river is characteristic of the fine line Heller walks between representation and abstraction in her paintings. In her cityscapes, she characteristically fights to achieve a true representation in paint of her experience of urban space: despite her familiarity with the subject, the paintings are worked, sometimes even overworked, paint is scrapped, reworked, erased, painting scraps are glued on.

Heller talked about painting the figure as something for which she had no skills, as foreign as nuclear physics, thus it is interesting that these paintings of immensely difficult painful subject matter are painted with a vigorous simplicity that allows the viewer and the subject to simply be, “lost in thought,” in the turbulent space she is always looking to embody, with all the horror and melancholy of a life transformed by sudden, dramatic, near fatal illness. The human figure and the very particular figure of her husband created a challenge to one of the core aspects of her approach in the studio—that of doubt that haunts every brush stroke, and something new to her work happens in these portraits that is different than the encounter with landscape: in the first portrait of Bill, in the hospital, the overworking or overthinking becomes a powerful expression of the drama of the human body pushed to the limit of survival, where “overworking” is an embodiment of flesh itself in flux. And in the more recent paintings of Bill in his wheelchair every mark seems to have arrived there with a minimum of second guessing and Heller’s line becomes more fluid, her use of outline reminiscent of Alice Neel’s later portraits–each artist is pitiless yet empathetic, though Heller doesn’t veer towards caricature. Abrupt application of painterly paint, impasto outbursts seem open and spontaneous, arriving as thoughts, not as statements or struggles.

In meeting her match in this specific human figure, the haptic approach flows unimpeded.

Susanna Heller, Phantom Pain, 2013. Oil on canvas. 50″ x 33″

These are not easy paintings in their somber subject matter, the phantom pain of mourning and loss but anyone interested in painting, and particularly in seeing a kind of approach to painting that is unsynthetic should go see them.

John Berger writes, in his essay, “Painting and Time,” “Paintings are now prophecies received from the past, prophecies about what the spectator is seeing in front of the canvas at that moment.” He continues, “a visual image, so long as it is not being used as a mask or disguise, is always a comment on an absence. Visual images, based on appearances, always speak of disappearance.” And what was the man seeing when he looked at his portraits that recorded the presence of absence, “phantom pain”? He says he saw in them that his wife loved him and understood him deeply. That is what he says. But the photos suggest something else as well, the ineffable gap between the person and the image: even one’s reflection in the mirror is fundamentally a stranger, a very familiar one perhaps, yet at some level Other.

On the other hand brush marks are indexical traces of the painter in the act of painting, making these paintings, at another level, self-portraits of the artist.

Susanna Heller, studio visit, November 18, 2011, photo: Mira Schor

Phantom Pain runs through April 20

Susanna Heller is represented in Canada by Olga Korper Gallery in Toronto

Three days more to see “Toxic Beauty”

This blog post …what can I say? The stated goal of A Year of Positive Thinking was to write about art I love, and I love Frank Moore’s work, both the later paintings, on view in the exhibition Toxic Beauty: The Art of Frank Moore at Grey Art Gallery through December 8 and the marvelous early film Beehive which is on view at Fales Library at New York University’s Bobst Library, on the South side of Washington Square Park, on view only through Friday at 6. For some reason I was never able to pull together a sensible text about this work, so my apologies to my readers and to the work, but at this very late date, this is just to mark my admiration and urge anyone who can to go see both shows while you can. Moore’s paintings, which if they were paintings by Hieronymous Bosch or Frida Kahlo would be considered treasured masterpieces, are mostly in private collections and thus out of public view, and I hope there are ways of seeing Beehive again, it’s just joyful and great!

Frank Moore, detail, Wizard

This often seems like it’s a difficult moment in which to theorize painting. Or, rather, in the face of the temptations of and support for other media and methods of being an artist, young artists may still retain a longing for painting, but it is difficult to find material in support of their longing on two crucial fronts: contemporary theorization of painting, which is essential in an era in which linguistic validation is often more important than viewing artworks, and contemporary painting itself. Of course both exist: there have been significant attempts to move painting theory away from ideas still steeped in modernist discourses so that it can be seen as responsive to and participatory in the specificities of contemporary communications and there is a lot of contemporary painting including both work that is extremely successful in the art market and work which is seen to engage with more radical thought. However on any given week in which you can take students around to galleries or museums, there is no guarantee you will come across paintings that successfully enough make the dual case for painting as a practice able to address contemporary cultural issues while addressing its own medium and history.

That the narrative of the death of painting is still ongoing should be evidence at the very least of painting remaining a naggingly persistent ghost, or not even a ghost but a kind of zombie entity, not quite dead enough to go completely unmentioned. It continues to appear if only as a negative, as something that cannot be done—when a student of mine related to me what another student had told her about why painting was no longer a viable medium because it is too burdened by its history etc.. in the spirit of nihilistic humor, I took notes. At one point last spring it occurred to me to write a series of essays on the theme of When Exactly Did Painting Die? Not exactly a murder mystery, you see, not a Whodunit but rather a What Was the Time of Death mystery, or, maybe, When Was the Victim Last Seen Alive? mystery. This avenue of thought, or rather this umpteenth version of the life or death of painting argument first occurred to me as I entered the more sedate and serene uptown branch of the Armory exhibition last year, the one that is actually in the old Park Avenue Armory, and in the calm uncrowded atmosphere, from the doorway I spotted a really good late Philip Guston painting of a big fat head smoking a cigar. Well, I thought, here is evidence that painting was still alive in 1977.

You can bring the date up closer, depending on your individual taste. And of course I paint and I don’t see myself as a necrophiliac.

This is all by way of a long introduction to look at the work of an artist who instead of accepting the narrative of the death of painting, turned from performance/video to painting when the subject turned from life to death. I would be remiss if I didn’t mark in this blog the very inspiring show of Frank Moore’s work, Toxic Beauty, at the Grey Art Gallery and at the Fales Library at New York University’s Bobst Library, before it closes on December 8. Better to be last to recommend this show than never, but I feel incredibly guilty that I haven’t written about the show since I first saw it in September, and that alas even now I won’t be able to do more than suggest a few ways of thinking about the work in both parts of the show. If A year of Positive Thinking is meant to be the space where I write about artwork I love, then this is the show, I love this work, I also think it is great, so I am mortified that even at this late date just before the show closes, this is still not a polished review or essay, just a few ways of thinking of the work in the two parts of the show and a few comments rather as if I was seeing the show with you and occasionally appearing at your elbow to point to something.

The show’s two locations each present one of these two orientations of Moore’s work. You are most likely to start at the Grey Art Gallery for reasons of accessibility from the street and location venue name, but then you will start at “the end,” with paintings Moore painted from 1985 to his death from AIDS in 2002, wherein he grapples with the face of fatal illness and the Death that ravaged a community of gay men in the ’80s and ’90s, the death of his lover, his own battle with death. Another theme of the paintings from this period is the death of a Nature ravaged by human intervention. If you start at Fales, with the earlier work, including video performance and dance, you will start with life, a joyful consideration of procreation and life. Yet to reverse the order of viewing is probably not such a good idea. Start with death, with painting as the best medium to express death. Then return to the artist’s earlier work and leave the exhibitions with life. You will be inspired by both and both media are well served by the order.

Frank Moore’s paintings are representational, figurative, with an overall approach of magic realism that places him in the general spectrum of Surrealism in a line from Hieronymous Bosch to Frida Kahlo, with a streak of folk art or regionalist art in some of the structural details including the handmade frames made specifically to develop the theme of each particular painting. Many of the paintings have ambitious narrative programs, addressing complex and highly emotionally charged subjects, in particular the countless painful and dramatic aspects of the personal, cultural and medical struggle to deal with AIDS before the development of relatively successful drug protocols. The paintings are executed mostly in a mixed technique of oil and silkscreen on linen or canvas, mounted on wood or some sort of board, very carefully painted, with extremely smooth surfaces, fine lines, and a great attention to detail. The craft of the execution is essential to point out because it is so important to see these works in person, they yield only a fraction of their impact or meaning when they are experienced only as images.

Frank Moore, Wizard, 1994, oil and silkscreen on canvas, mounted on wood, in artist’s frame (pharmaceuticals, resin, and aluminum), 68 x 95 1/2 inches–this is a large painting with exquisite surface and detail, and an awful reproduction here

: Frank Moore, Wizard, detail of painting and frame

If you look extremely carefully at the surface of one of his paintings, for example, “With this ring…” (200o), a large painting with a dominant flat pink background, you may pick up ever so slight traces of canvas weave, but for the most part the surface Moore has created with great thought and care is smooth so that he can use a horizontal pink stroke with a slight differentiation of dark to light where more pigment falls from the brush. The details, an index finger at the tip of which a tiny bride reaches out to a gold wedding ring dangling from the tip of a single octopus tentacle, a fly, a gigantic grasshopper, climbing the vertical strand of a double helix, are painted with tremendous attention and care for line. So, the evocative, slightly creepy subjects amidst the brilliant color, are not the only important elements of the work. As a painter, you need sable brushes, from large filberts to single hair, good quality paint for the beautifuly surface and color, and you need to have chosen to create the painting surface so that these marks can be created and catch the light and the eye just so. You have chosen this because you love this shine, this color, this level of detail, because they reach towards the uncanny, and because they help you create an homage to notable predecessors and inspirations, Frida Kahlo, Hieronymous Bosch, Dali , who also worked with smooth surface, fine line detail, rendering, and who carry the DNA of hallucinatory magic realist representation in the service of narrativity. I may have gotten the actual materials and tools wrong in my notes before the work, but I’m not wrong in drawing attention to the details of Moore’s craft: here are his comments about this painting’s fakture:

I use a relatively limited ranges of pigments–two blues (ultramarine, phthalo), three reds (alizarin crimson, cadmium red light, phthalo rose red), five yellows (cadmium lemon, medium and dark, hansa and diarylide), two greens (permanent green light and phthalo), dioxanine purple, titanium white and ivory black. NO earth colors–I prefer to start from a point of maximum color saturation. I find the final product is more brilliant and luminous. Occasionally I will use something else like manganese blue or cobalt.

I’m a brush addict. I buy them wherever I find them. I use unorthodox brushes such as masonry and roofing brushes, wire brushes, sticks and other plant material, sponges, textiles and quite often my hands, particularly my thumb, which, for example, is evident in the stippling on the tentacle in “With This Ring…”. The marks made by unconventional tools seem to lend the work a more natural feeling, which contrasts all the more strongly with the photo-mechanical reproduction techniques I also use in the work.

Moore, “With This Ring…”, detail

In the same interview, with Douglas Dreishpoon, reproduced in the show’s excellent catalogue, Moore also writes about the importance of drawing:

Drawing is critical. Drawing is melody. Drawing nurtures the thought, connects the mind to the page. All my images start in my mind as some kind of elusive paradox, oftentimes not even necessarily a visual one, but when I try to give it visual form it is usually with clumsy scribbles no one will ever—pure drawing.

Another thing I would point out if I were standing beside you, is that although the paintings are large in size and have such ambitious, political, narrative programs that are developed in many detailed vignettes best read from very up close up, Moore is masterful in his maneuvering of the viewer so that large abstract compositional elements and beautiful large areas of color draw you in until you are close enough that you begin to perceive the detail and be captured and captivated into an entirely different type of reading. This is the case in Oz for example, a painting I still remember seeing when it was first shown in New York City at Sperone Westwater Gallery. Oz (1999-2000) is a kind of encyclopedic landscape of catastrophic environmental mayhem, a genetically engineered beanstalk shoots up from a pot of gold coins while individual families relax, play golf or the piano, and lie on rubbish piles of their destroyed homes. The painting’s theme makes even more sense to me than when I first saw it when it was originally shown at Sperone and thought about how strange it was to have this intricate painting about genetically engineered corn. Today the damage wrought by genetically programmed agribusiness and the image of destroyed suburban life is much more part of our knowledge and image bank than it was even fifteen years ago, when it was made and when it seemed like a bit of an esoteric though unforgettable direction. Moore might have appreciated, in a dark way, the facts and the imagery of a recent story on NPR about how little natural life exists in an average Iowa cornfield as compared to plots of land in other areas of the world.

Many of the paintings deal directly with the trappings of illness, medications, IV lines, blood, cancerous lesions. In Patient (1997-1998) blood seeps from an open IV line onto a bed, which, painted an icy blue, seems to be a melting pool of ice water instead of a zone of comfort. In one detail you have the smooth blue precision of the sheets, painted bubbles of water or foam and silkscreened white snow fakes (thus actual patterns, not invented ones), there is no direct figuration, not necessary, but there’s as much about mortality and evanescence than if the leaking bleeding body in pain was present.

Frank Moore, Patient, 1997-98, oil and silkscreen on canvas mounted on wood, in artist’s frame (red pine) 49 1/2x 65 1/2 x3 1/2 inches, detail

There was one painting of Moore’s that I particularly held in my memory since I first saw it at Sperone years ago, because it was so inventively expressive especially considering the simplicity and economy of its subject in comparison to the impressive larger works like Wizard.

Blood seeps out of two slices into a loaf of bread and into the middle of a puddle of spilled heavy cream which has oozed out from an overturned cartoon. The red paint has been dropped into the pool of white paint to create a very careful Jackson Pollock in the shape of a Crown of Thorns. The Christ reference and the art reference are at the center of a still-life painting with an almost folk art sensibility: the dusting of flour on the loaf of bread is created with a kind of spray effect which is completely different in technical feel than the loaf, or the cream and blood spill. It’s a folk Zurbaran of the AIDS era.

Frank Moore, Easter, 1994. Oil on canvas, 20 1/4 x 27 1/8 inches.

* At the Fales Collection, the works on view include some of Moore’s many sketch books and two filmed collaborative dance and theater and performances, The Miller’s Wife (1987) and Beehive (1985) along with the story board drawings for these. The Fales section of the show is only open on weekdays so there are only three more days to see it, but all I can say is, Beehive, which Moore created with choreographer Jim Self, is one of the most beautiful and joyous works I’ve ever seen. Its subject, procreation of the bumblebee, is entirely oriented towards life, and its style is absolutely the opposite of the paintings: big bold primary colors, yellow, red, blue, orange, black and white. The forms are also bold, the music is great, lilting, funny, silly, joyful, driving, with sound effects, “dialogue” something like the “uh oh” of the Teletubbies or like funny sound effects from the 1920s and early television but put through an electronic filter and always upbeat and beautiful. Here the artistic resonances are not with Hieronymous Bosch but rather with Diaghilev and Matisse, and with the sets an ’80s Pop version of a German expressionist movie. The angles of the spaces may be related to German Expressionism but the color is more Russian vanguard modernism, or folkloric a la Diaghilev with an overlay of ’60s pop feel.

Beehive is quite addictively magical and gorgeous. Death is not here, it does not shadow this work at all, just beauty, joy and pleasure through sound color, movement.

The one element which is the same in both groups of work–this film and the paintings–is that, even though the overall appearance and style are different, each gesture and frame is exquisitely thought out and executed in detail, even if in the film the details are bold, bright, and joyful, rather than finely detailed and horrific as they are in the paintings. Nothing is amateurish, there is no DIY , no camp, and yet the style is not commercial either.

In Beehive nature is good, in paintings like Oz nature is damaged by human intervention, it has beauty but that beauty is toxic.

Frank Moore, Formal Garden, 1985, Oil and felt-tip pen on canvas, in artist’s frame (wood), 26 x 104 1/2 inches

One of the first paintings you see at Grey Art Gallery, Formal Garden, is, in its forms and spirit, more like Beehive than like any of the other paintings in the show. A horizontally oriented painting with a rustic wood frame made by the artist, it represents boldly drawn shapes, a bird, a phallus, an elephant all seem to burst from roots in dark earth up into blue sky above: the chimeras caused by man’s intervention in nature are still exuberant and slightly folk inspired forms. This painting is from 1985. Moore was diagnosed as HIV Positive in 1987. In a late interview with Robert Atkins on the AIDS-Arts Forum Artist in the Archive series, Moore suggests various artistic and also practical reasons reason for his change of focus from dance and performance to painting,

Theater work is great because it forces you to make instantly comprehensible gestures, there’s not a lot of time to ponder ambiguity or you risk losing the audience. As [artist] Thomas Woodruff says, the problem with subtlety is that nobody notices. I also liked the communal nature of theater, the family value. But there’s also a downside. You are often under a lot of pressure, there are constant deadlines and people are depending on you. Theater is also much more expensive to produce than painting, what with salaries, space rental, and the like. Also, unlike a painting, theater is ephemeral. Another factor that really pushed me out of theater was the long illness of my lover Robert Fulps. I had to be at home.

It is tempting to take that further and see not only the turn towards painting but also the change in the style and narrative direction of the work after 1987, as the best medium for Moore to develop a complex, detailed, crafted visual language for the subject matter he now felt the necessity to address.

Frank Moore is a major artist and yet his name and work are less well known than other artists of his generation who also died of AIDS, including Keith Haring and David Wojnarowitz. There are always many factors in what happens to an artist’s reputation when that artist dies too young, before they can do everything they can for themselves in their life time. Since his estate is represented by an important gallery, Sperone Westwater, it is hard not to presume that his relative obscurity (with passionate admirers and fans of course) is due to the fact that his work is composed in part of large narrative paintings of formal complexity representing the dark side of American life and death in a painting language that is by turns familiar, seductive, beautiful, but also does always not give us a quick and easy read. And these are paintings that are best seen in person, because their craft and their sculptural presence is so important. And, further, the major paintings are in private collections so not readily available for public view and study. I can only hope that the owners of Oz, Wizard and other major paintings from this particular series see their way to donating these paintings to New York museums, hopefully several of them to the same institution. I vote for their being able to be compared and contrasted with the works of Florine Stettheimer, so, New York museums, the game is on.

Or, anyway, in terms of my murder investigation, Painting, What was the Time of Death? “Toxic Beauty” assures us that painting was still alive in 1994 when Moore painted Wizard, and in 2000 when Moore painted Oz. That’s not that long ago.

Painting: the undeadness continues.

A State of Intense Excitement and Apollonian reserve

The last art exhibition I saw with my mother was Picasso and American Art, which we went to see what turned out to be just a few weeks before she died. The show was very crowded and after a room or so of looking at the earlier works, which were part of the most meaningful works in her own development as an artist when she was young, she sat down while I looked at the rest of the work. We had to take a taxi back home because even the walk from 75th to 79th to the bus station was too much for her, but as she sat in the taxi she said, “you know a show is good when you want to go home and work.” That’s the way an artist feels, that pressure to run from a wonderful experience with art because you feel the pressure to use the energy towards your own creativity. That’s the way I felt yesterday at the exhibition at the Morgan Library, Josef Albers in America: Painting on Paper.

Josef Albers, Study for a Kinetic, ca.1945. Oil and graphite on blotting paper, 48.5 x 61.1cm.

Since the work is mainly in the collection of The Josef & Anni Albers Foundation, this is a unique opportunity, and visits to the Morgan are always a pleasure: right now there ‘s a small but thrilling exhibition of the original score and storyboard of Robert Wilson and Philip Glass’s Einstein on the Beach, an installation that highlights the impact a small group of works can have within an imaginative frame, and a major drawing exhibition , Dürer to de Kooning: 100 Master Drawings from Munich that just opened today–and going through the main rooms of the original Morgan Library is always a wonderfully inspiring experience, with rare volumes, letters, and amazing ancient carved stone cylinder seals just some of the highlights.

That I would urge anyone to go see this show in its last two days is rather surprising. I’ve always thought of Albers’ work as representative of a didactic approach to color that, in a manner that felt paradoxical or antithetical to what you assumed was their purpose, actually deadened the excitement of color. That is perhaps particularly true if seen in reproduction when the image certainly folds back easily into design and color theory instruction. I’ve always thought of the painting, particularly the Homage do the Square series he worked on for almost three decades and which are the best known works, as being rather dry and fussy, amplifying the didactic approach to color I did not subscribe to. Nevertheless when I read about the exhibition at the Morgan Library I felt that I must see the show. The works in the show looked and sounded vibrant and improvisational. I went yesterday. Sunday is the last day: I urge anyone who is interested in painting, in color, and also in work process, who can get over to the Morgan, to see the show before it closes. These works on paper have a very different feel: there is a presence and a vibrancy to these works, a presence of pigment, applied directly to thick blotting paper, and a vibrancy of hue which I don’t associate with Albers’ more known works, although now I think I should re-investigate those works and perhaps separate them from the didacticism I associate with them. The earliest works in the show, from the early 40s are also more exciting visually because they are more compositional and relational, often directly referential to architecture, as for example his Variant/Adobe series: in these works he uses rich sienas, ochres, oranges, and pinks, against warm and cool greys.

Josef Albers, Variant / Adobe, ca. 1947, Oil on blotting paper, 48.2 x 61.4 cm.

In addition to the Variant / Kinetic Series, and the Variant / Abobe series, the show includes many preliminary studies for Homage to the Square, of which Albers wrote, “I’m not paying ‘Homage to the Square.’ It’s only the dish I serve my craziness about color on.”

1.-Color-Study-for-White-Line-Square.1976.2

Josef Albers, Color Study for White Line Square, undated. Oil on blotting paper (with gouache, pencil, and varnish), 29.53 x 29.66 cm.

All of Albers’ statements quoted on the wall text were rather pithier than I expected, although given his tremendously influential role as a teacher at Black Mountain college and at Yale for many years it shouldn’t be so surprising but historical art figures whose work has an Apollonian cast to begin with can become quite dessicated by time unless great scandal of some personal clings to them and adds lubricity to their image as much as their work.

Many of the works are covered with both tiny notations and bold sgraffito directly into the wet paint, most of these colors notations as to the pigment color and the brand of paint: Albers did not mix most of his colors except some pinks and purples and he tried out similar tube paint colors from many manufacturers, and would note on the sketch and even directly in the paint which color he had used–“chrome ox Shiva” reads one such notation.

I experienced a kind of calm joy from the work while at the same time following another, pedagogical, line of thinking how many art students don’t think twice about getting the newest computer but don’t invest or even investigate good paint, get discouraged at the first bad painting they do and veer towards more technologically seamless media instead of trying out endless “variants” until a personal approach to painting is found. There were 200 of the Variant / Adobe series within a few years, and that doesn’t seem like that much.

Albers’ direct method of application of paint and the heavy weighty surface of the blotting paper give the color luminosity and materiality, which perhaps the masonite his major works on are on may have diminished, though I feel I have to look at them again after seeing this show. I think of blotting paper as an absorbent felt-like material without particular resonance but here the material is like a very heavy card stock with a newsprint off-white / light gray cast and a very satisfying sturdiness to it, and I made a mental note to look for something like that to try some oil on paper. Albers must have also slightly drained or blotted the excess tube oil from his paints because there is barely any haloing or seepage of oil around the paint areas.

4.-Study-for-Homage-to-the-Square-with-Color-Study

Josef Albers, Study for Homage to the Square with Color Study, not dated. Oil on blotting paper, 44.3 x 30.2 cm.

As I write this late at night, after a day spent at the Creative Time Summit, about which perhaps I will write something tomorrow, I know that for some, perhaps for many young artists looking for contemporary modes of expression, content, and context, painting studies like these must seem even less pertinent to the present than a cave painting might: coming from the seemingly familiar relatively near past, they may seem totally archaic, tired old stuff that can’t help them in their own search. I can well understand that, I can see the distance, and I see the relevance and appeal of newer methodologies of artmaking. Yet the exhibition is exhilarating while at the same time the modest exhibition space itself is like rehab for the overstimulated: no photography allowed, few people, just the work and hushed silence, literally: I happened to run into several friends and as our conversation over the work became more animated, the guard shushed us! Such an unspectacular white cube atmosphere is actually rare these days, and a treat. It was refreshing, inspiring, and thought provoking to see this work.