Oxygen, 48" x 60", 2010, acrylic & ink on wood panel

Hi everyone. Happy New Year! Sorry I’ve been out of touch. Working working working…

Here’s a painting I just finished. Also, I’ve started a fan page on Facebook for David Palmer Studio. If you’re on FB, stop by for a visit!

I just visited the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, where I saw, among other things, a couple of Rothko paintings and a Barnett Newman. Maybe that’s why this installment of the continuing Yellowstone day is more colorful than previous ones (see parts one and two).

I stopped at a favorite spot along the upper Gibbon river, where it’s really just a creek. The snowbanks through which it meandered, diminishing daily with warming temperatures, appear to be only a meter deep. But to reach them from the road would have entailed passing across much deeper snow–a serious obstacle in spring when it is too soft to support me on either snowshoes or skis. Fortunately, there were a few gaps in the trees that afforded adequate views.

The images are similar to the natural abstracts I photographed elsewhere last year. Partly for that reason, I decided to do something different. With Messrs. Rothko and Newman in mind, I converted the black-to-white scale of values to a red-to-dark-blue scale.

Below are the black and white versions of the last two.

I am guilty, perhaps, of over-compensating, of going from too weak to too strong. But what’s a little exaggeration among friends? Don’t you ever over-do it on purpose, either for effect or experiment?

First Communion of Anemic Young Girls in Snowy Weather

A Harvest of Tomatoes on the Edge of the Red Sea Harvested by Apoplectic Cardinals

Total Eclipse of the Sun in Darkest Africa

I should have had this up two days ago, but Karl distracted me with his own April Fool’s post. By the way, long before John Cage, Allais presented a blank set of musical bars entitled Funeral Mass for a Deaf Man.

[Update: though intended to be amusing, this post is not an April Fool's bluff. The pictures mentioned are, as far as I know from several accounts, matters of historical fact.]

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A week ago, late Sunday afternoon, I finally made it out to the semi-wilds, a place I’d never been, though not far from known territory. I was hoping to get to something interesting by snowshoe, which can actually be an easier way of traveling than by foot in summer. You don’t have to step or climb over all the obstacles, just walk above them on the nice, white carpet. The photograph above shows the main stream, Hyalite Creek, near where I started off. Admittedly, the water’s not entirely black, thanks to the foam and spray from turbulent spots. But where it runs smooth, it’s dark, dark, dark.

I soon left the stream at the first minor tributary, and ended up spending all my time along it, taking the series of photographs from which selections are presented below:

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The usual issue for me with such images is how far to abstract from the gray world—there’s very little color here, even before processing—toward a binary opposition, not unlike Jay’s white stake in a black heart. Because I liked the turbulent streamflow, I wanted to emphasize it more than in a “naturalistic” rendition, like the version below of #7 in the series:

On the other hand, I didn’t want to take the contrast all the way up to the fantastic or surreal, as in the version here:

I do admit to liking, in the last one, the way the water is converted into astronomical imagery, not unlike the special case of the spray in Stardrops. But somehow, at the point where I am in this work (and all of it is still unsettled), it just feels overdone. I’ll go a certain distance from reality in my tendency toward abstraction, but I’m not ready to let it out of my sight.

How about you? How far do you go?

Update: I’ve renamed this series Dark Water and put it on my web site with a brief statement.

Robert Zakanitch, Red Watercolor, 34 x 36, 2007

Pattern and Decoration: An Ideal Vision in American Art, 1975 –1985 is the printed catalogue of an exhibit held at the Hudson River Museum in 2007 -2008. The catalogue has excellent essays by Anne Swartz, Arthur Danto, Temma Balducci, and John Perreault, as well as including short biographies of the artists and plates of the exhibited art. Most of the words which follow come from the catalogue.

The P&D catalogue gives a textual underpinning to formats and surfaces that we enjoy but have come to think of as “mere” decoration. Arthur Danto, for example, says that decoration fell somewhere between figuration and abstraction and “encompassed almost the entire visual culture of many non-Western traditions…. The impulse to decorate was the impulse to humanize.”

Miriam Schapiro, The Kimono, 1976, 60 x 50, acrylic and collage on canvas

According to Danto,  the P&D artists were already using decoration before the movement was created, and what naming it did was to “enable its members to recognize what they had in common.”

Joyce Kozloff, Tile Mural for Harvard Square Subway, 1985 -86

Danto is the eternal optimist, claiming that P&D is easily a third mode of art making, and that “formalism ought easily to apply across the boundaries to all three categories of art, had it not been weighted down with prejudices that had little to do with its essential practice….. It is not difficult to suppose that there are three modes of embodiment:” i.e. figuration, abstraction, and decoration.

The P&D movement is obscure, but the impulse, to make pattern, to decorate the environment with beauty,  seems universal, perhaps too common to be seen as on a par with the usual high-art suspects in western art history. Moreover, P&D often lacks irony, a form of expression that dominates almost all art these days. [I'm thinking of D. and the whole LA scene right now....]

Tony Robbin, Coll: the Artist, 2007–4, 56 x 70″

Critics of P&D had to come up with convoluted reasons for rejecting it, although some of the rejections (too pretty, too feminine, too serious) weren’t too hard to come by. But Donald Kuspit in a 1979 article “Betraying the Feminist Intention: the Case Against Feminist Decorative Art” in Arts Magazine felt that “art based on decoration betrayed the critical potential and intention of feminist art.” It apparently was too close to formalism in its theory and therefore, “too authoritarian.” But what is most fascinating is Kuspit’s later “confession:” He felt, he said, that he needed to “rationalize my enjoyment of Rober Kushner’s art  … compelled to apologize intellectually for the deep pleasure I take in it…”

Robert Kushner, Night Garden, Acrylic,Oil,glitter, gold and silver leaf, 60 x 60, 2000

Anne Swartz, the chief contributor to the essays in the catalogue as well as the curator of the exhibit, says “I suspect that until recently, a certain Puritanism surrounded the view of feminist art that prevented it from being seen as acceptable when it was sexually exciting and provocative. So when P&D art utilized some of the mechanisms of feminist art (provocation, pleasure, softness, etc) it challenged the intellectual systems that were supposed to be uppermost in the viewer’s mind, prompting a critic like Kuspit to repudiate the intentions of P&D as not supporting the utopian notion of feminist art as a sterile ideology.”

Swartz also speaks of the “bombastic approach of the new-expressionists…. It [P&D] wasn’t self-referential…and [had] an overall treatment of the surface.” Kim MacConnel said to Swartz, “P&D is nonhierarchical in the sense that it is not refining itself to an end point and time…. It is much more chaotic. It is open to different voices, it accepts different voices, it’s making different voices.”

Kim MacConnel,Tri-Rotating, Acrylic on canvas, 95 x 126, 1980

I’m fascinated by the theoretical underpinnings of this artistic movment,especially the constructs of “non-self-referential” and “non-hierarchical.” aAlthough I’ve moved far away from Pattern and Decoration in my own work, I still love it and so, perhaps, am looking for the verbal language which would allow me to speak more “authoritatively” about it.  But reading and looking at these materials also makes me think I could incorporate P&D into my own vision. One artist, Leslie Gabrielese, serves me as an example:

Leslie Gabrielse, Dancing on Top of the Mountain, 60 x 130, 2001, fabric and acrylic paint

I am a bit bemused at how enthralling I found the textual materials in this catalogue. There’s nothing like having one’s prejudices confirmed, I guess. Aside from the art and perception in this post, when you examine your work history, have you found at one time or another  some verbal explanation that seemed to capture something about a visual that you had but couldn’t explain? Something that enabled you to recognize what you had in common with other workers in the same modes?

The catalogue, by the way, is Pattern and Decoration, and is online as a Google book. The Google pdf version cannot be printed, but you can order a hard copy from the Hudson River Museum, Elizabeth A. Sol, Manager of Administration & Visitor Services, The Hudson River Museum, 511 Warburton Ave. Yonkers, NY 10701 Phone – (914) 963-4550, ext. 239 Fax – (914) 963-8558. The museum doesn’t seem to have a secure online server, so I ordered my copy by phone. A good slide show of the works (many of which couldn’t be included in the Google online version) can be seen in the NY Times .  Here is the accompanying Times review.

I apologize for the slightly formal tone of this blog entry — I’m still assimilating the language appropriate to P&D and so find myself less easy about explaining it. But here’s one last image that I found, all on my own, to continue the dialogue:

Yinka Shonibare, Here

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The Jolly Roger Bar, 12th and Madison. Oil on board, 12 x 16″

As you know, I’ve been painting around Portland, here and there, returning often to sites to note what else is there, what I may have missed, what more is available for turning into paint.

These paintings have a certain “feel” to them — a style that fits with the record of my visits. I work on-site and then tweak and fiddle in the studio. I also find myself making larger, stranger, studio-begot contributions to the sets of pieces.

I have already exposed the Fremont Bridge grouping to A&P; here’s another set of depictions of an entirely different place in Portland.

IOOF Building, SE Alder and 6th St, oil on board, 12 x 16″

At this corner, SE Alder and 6th Street, humans were a large part of the scene. In fact, although the casual observer might not recognize it, it quickly became obvious to me that this is a neighborhood, with people who watch out for the street, some of them renters in nearby apartments, many of them regulars who use the area to hang out, to see what the day will bring, smoke a bit of pot, check in with street friends, have a swig or two from a communal bottle.

The Melody Ballroom, SE Alder and 6th St, oil on board, 12 x 16″

The US Bank Parking Lot, SE Alder and 6th St, oil on board 12 x 16″

As I painted, I got stories of all sorts from the neighbors, ranging from the tale of the fire that caused the apartment house windows to be so ill asorted (US Bank) to the charming Hispanic panhandler who never saw “in the U  S of A a painter on the streets” (Melody Ballroom). The congregation of the Rivers of Life Church peered at the dabblings on the board when I was painting the Eastside Funeral Directors’ Building, while someone who had been rocking at the Melody the night before was asleep out of sight in the corner of the IOOF building. The erstwhile Eastside Funeral Directors’ Building turned Volunteers of America Center once housed a senior day care, but now appears to be a school or halfway house for “troubled” youths, youths whose curiosity about plein air painters was vast and somewhat distracting.

The Eastside Funeral Directors’ Building (now Volunteers of America) SE Alder and 6th, oil on board, 12 x 16

SE 6th Avenue is between two main boulevards in southeast Portland, and large numbers of vehicles, whose inhabitants see nothing in the neighborhood except obstacles to drive around,  use the street as a way to avoid traffic jams on 7th Avenue or Morrison St.

The images above are plein air paintings, oil on board, all 12 x 16″, done at the corner of SE Alder and 6th in Portland Oregon. Below is the studio SE 6th and Alder — the way it evolved in my consciousness:

The Corner of SE 6th and Alder, Portland, Oregon. Oil on canvas, 30 x 30″

The SE 6th and Alder paintings are the result of approximately 14 hours of sitting at the site, watching people and vehicles, interacting with passersby, seeing the sun sliding across the façades of the buildings, and painting these things as they presented themselves on site. Later, in the studio,  SE 6th and Alder  becomes a place where cars are toylike, but the buildings impose themselves almost as human – elegant, funky, and imposing.

In short, these paintings represent experiences that I had in my encounters with this particular environment, on these particular days, in the late summer of 2008. They also represent something of what I am trying to achieve in my painting.

It’s easier to say what I don’t want to do than what I want to do. I don’t want to do beautiful (or at least not “merely” beautiful); I don’t want to faithfully record what I see, in the manner of a camera’s eye. I don’t want to focus on edges or color or shapes or the feel of the oil paint, although I obviously deal with these basics of painting all the time — and I enjoy thinking about them. But they aren’t my focus.

Bloomtime, 12 x 16″, oil on board

What I am striving for is to capture something of my sense of the place, a sense which is limited by my own ability to see and record what I see, to feel and record what I feel, and also limited by what is in front of me, by the environment itself. It’s something of a surreal set of overlapping circles — the objects in front of me, my sense of those objects, the interaction between myself and the changes that happen during my stay on the site — what I want, in short, is to capture a sense of this time, this place, through the limited yet hopefully interesting eyes of this particular human creature, myself. It can’t be done with monocular perspective nor realistic rendering; my eyes don’t see as the camera sees; my senses capture far more and far less and my vision encompasses peculiar bits of the scene, leaving other bits for some other visionary. My encounters add transitory information that has to work itself, however wonkily, into the paintings.

The Fremont Bridge as It Addresses the Land, Oil on canvas, 18 x 36″

One stray ingredient is one I deliberately left out of last week’s post on some modern Chinese abstract artists, for reasons of space and time. But Che Chuang’s painting of a head, shown above, struck a real chord with me. It reminded me strongly of two heads of my own that have appeared in these pages. The level of abstraction, original color, and even shape are not so very different.

Furthermore, that finding or fusing or confusing of the figure with a natural object (sheet metal qualifies if far enough returned to nature as to no longer serve its manufactured purpose) was very much the subject of Stone Soup, musings on Yellowstone rocks informed by Mark Stone’s essay series on figuration and abstraction, for which he’s preparing a new installment.

Continuing to add the miscellaneous ingredients at hand: on that same Yellowstone trip I photographed a pattern of lichens on a chunk of basalt that reminded me of a rider on a horse. That rock formation is known as Sheepeater Cliff, after the tribe that lived in the area. Just today at lunch, I came across an article about the Sheepeaters (by David Lewis in the Montana Pioneer) with the following quotation from the book Mountain Spirit, the Sheepeater Indians of Yellowstone (by L.L. Loendorf and N.M. Stone):

Like many other hunters and gatherers, the Sheep Eaters did not make a distinction between the natural and supernatural worlds. … As it was believed that spirits from the tree domains left their likenesses on rock surfaces in the form of petroglyphs, Sheep Eaters—especially men—often went to rock art sites to connect with their powers.

Which happens to dovetail ever so nicely with my current reading about Australian aboriginal art, fascinating for many reasons. I’m particularly interested in the relation of people (including the “artist”) to place, a question I’ve been pondering in my own fashion over at Along Sourdough Trail. I’m bound to have more on that topic later, but if you’re intrigued, my favorite place for it on the web is Deborah Barlow at Slow Muse (great writing in a slew of categories).

That about clears the counter; I’m leaving the kitchen sink as it is. Perhaps finding that all these disparate ingredients fortuituously fit together is not so surprising. Perhaps there’s greater unity in my flailings than previously suspected. Perhaps even something edible will come along eventually.