When I started my Patina project on weathered auto paint and rock surfaces, I originally had in mind flat surfaces with intriguing designs and colors. But rocks aren’t smooth, so I soon began photographing rocks with some three-dimensionality, playing with the ambiguity between tone and color as surface properties or caused by orientation to the light.
Last week, just back from photographing a favorite rock face, a number of ideas relating to that work seemed to be coming together. Unfortunately, working with the images (just a little) since then, the ideas have muddled themselves rather than resolving. Despite some enticing ingredients, the fine soup is still mostly in my imagination. Here’s what’s stirring in the pot:
1) An intriguing series of essays/posts on figuration and abstraction by Mark Stone on his Henri Art Magazine blog. I’m still digesting these and won’t try to write about them now, other than to say they’re concerned with feeling out a new relationship of abstraction and figuration. I take figuration to mean representation not only of the human figure, but of a discernable subject more generally. Of course, being human, that figure is especially important to us, no doubt at a deep neural level. Certainly that’s why I picked out the formation above and the variation of it I showed last week.
Mark Stone: Fashionable Monarch and Fashion Victim
2) Mark’s paintings (more here and elsewhere). I was struck by a resemblance to…
Robert Pepperell: Paradox 1
3) the tantalizing paintings of Robert Pepperell, mentioned in a previous post on Pepperell’s notion of visual indeterminacy. Most of Pepperell’s paintings appear, at first glance, more detailed and realistic, but can never be resolved to actual figures as Mark’s do.
Willem de Kooning: Excavation
Willem de Kooning: Attic
4) 1949-50 paintings of Willem de Kooning that I’m reviewing while plodding through Jed Perl’s New Art City. With or without color, they bear a resemblance to my rock face. There’s a Pepperell-like hint at figures, but they’re not figurative like the Women on the horizon.
Untitled (PH-382)
5) Clyfford Still, who, despite my past comparisons (here and here) of his paintings with my landscape photographs, has said that his work is “always about the figure” (I may have that slightly wrong–can’t find my notes at the moment–but that’s close). I confess I don’t understand this yet, but I keep trying. I may have to wait till 2010, when the Clyfford Still Museum opens in Denver.
This might be sounding like a recipe for paralysis or worse. But I hope it’s clear that I do not at all want my images to look like any of the examples given. It’s just that the idea of figure has come to the fore recently, along with my continuing interest in abstraction. I’m very curious about how other artists have grappled with similar questions. And I suspect each will end up adding some detectable flavor to my stone soup.
What impact, if any, has art history had on your own work? Alternatively, have you any spices to recommend to me?
Steve:
Seems like a comparison of facture to fracture.
Your favorite cliff face, which I take to be igneous in nature and likely basalt, presents an additional dimension – time. This may be arguable, but I would propose that the paintings in your post, stand outside a sequential narrative. Even the much-discussed Pepperell, with its nod toward specificity, falls short of describing a progress through time. In fact, the theme of being, rather than becoming, was very much in the Ab-Ex air after WWII. The cliff face tells of a time and a future, and in much detail to a geologist.
When I worked at the art museum, the physical manifestations of art history everywhere bore down on me like a weight. If anything, it stopped me in my tracks. I have taken from that experience the realization that everybody represented in art history faced and has faced a similar challenge thrown up by standards and the accomplishments of others. Over time I have learned to slow down my impulses and to gather a bouquet of flowerings whose net aroma I try to match in my work.
Speaking of aromas and your mention of spices, I drove home yesterday from the store with two rosemary sets, ready to be planted. The car was filled with an olfactory narcotic; sweet, resinous and resonating in my senses.
Jay,
The rock is Huckleberry Ridge Tuff, i.e. consolidated ash. This is apparently a type location, and is featured in the first photo in the Wikipedia article on tuff.
Your comment about time is so astute, I’m ready to forgive your fixture humor.
Time has arisen as a theme previously, but, as usual, it has slipped below my consciousness for quite a while. Now that you mention it, I realize that capturing a sense of time is also important to me in a number of projects I’ve talked about, such as old cottonwoods, waterfalls, and ghost towns. Here, time is represented in the depth of coloration of the rock, newly exposed surfaces being very light beige. The orange or purple or reddish varnishing happens, I think, relatively quickly here.
With time and erosion in mind, it’s amusing that the two figures serve as caryatids holding up the rock itself.
Steve,
“Soup” is a good description. It will take me several days to figure out what I think.
Cloves are a folk remedy for toothache.
As a beginner, I’m relying a lot on the formality (and surprising whimsy) of Medieval books of hours. I like the small scale, the variety of ornamentation, and the way the space is so often divided with frames. All of which will mean little or nothing since I expect to remain too shy to share any fruits of that reliance in this company for quite some time (if ever)… but you did ask.
Melanie,
I too, tried to ask but my email was bouncing back to me.
melanie,
That’s a delightful place to take inspiration. Perhaps sometime you might tell us about some of your favorite illuminations.
Steve,
oh dear, I realized afterward that that would sound like angling for an invitation — which I hadn’t intended, and which I do realize sounds disingenuous, but really, I hadn’t intended it.
Birgit,
What do you mean that your email kept bouncing back. Ask what/whom?
Steve,
I’m a great one for circling — worrying to bone, kicking the tires, whatever metaphor you like. But the problem with using the famous and fine artists of the past is that rather than circling, they can simply divert — off you go, down that path, never to return to your own vision, lost in the work of another.
So I just thought I’d add a word of warning — not to look too deeply nor too long. Just skim whatever cream rises and go on with your own explorations. Jay is, I think, right. The weight of all the past artists can be crushing. I personally like my soup veggies chopped large and only lightly cooked.
Oh, and I would add that only you will know what you are circling — or at least, I should say, I can’t tell what you are stumbling toward. Which is as it should be, I think. You yourself may even be a bit befuddled about what you are looking for — but you know it when you see it.
I keep wanting to make smiley faces on this comment, but I fear WordPress frowns on such inanities. See, there. I need another!