False Mountain Museum Memories

Jules DeBalincourt. Internal Renovations. 2006.

Clare Grill. Mountain Museum. 2008.

Ricky Allman. False Memories. 2008


Thomas Hirschorn. Non-Lieux. (photo)

The Green Line

Hernan Bas. Untitled (Green Line). 2005



Matisse. La Raie Verte (The Green Line) or Mme Matisse

Kaye Donachie. I fear this hidden motion. 2007

Graham Durward. Yellow. 2007.

Hernan Bas. The Blue Line. 2005-6

Jaclyn Shoub. Near Airport #2. 1997
Oil and Toner on Mylar Mounted on Masonite.

Jaclyn Shoub. Monochromatic #2. 2006

Jaclyn Shoub. Untitled. 2001.

Among my favourite contemporary Canadian painters, Jaclyn Shoub's pale, altered photocopies are printed onto transparent mylar and fixed atop swipey, drippy monochromatic oil paintings. The similarity to Turner is unmistakable. However they remain non derivative. She lacks Turner's ambition, and the paintings serve as subtle atmospheric notations of that rarefied passivity one feels waiting in airports or in transit. A kind of suspension of the ordinary laws of humdrum interaction with reality. But is the technique -- photographic decals as counterpoint to abstraction -- too easy?

There are artists from the old world, whose work we encounter so often in print that it's easy to take their greatness for granted. Leafing through an old pile of New Yorker's I read what is, to my mid one of the most accurate and thought-provoking critiques of the paintings of JMW Turner.

...Unlike John Constable, his quieter, more profound peer, Turner conveys only irritable ambition. We must never forget to admire him. This tires. Turner’s style is synthetic, leaning on picturesque convention (never more so than when most nearly abstract) while brazening arbitrary audacities. He overlays splooshes of paint with passages of tidy drawing like bathtub decals.

Schjeldahl, Peter. "Heavy Weather". New Yorker. 7/28/08.

J.M.W. Turner. Peace - Burial At Sea. 1842

And of course...

J.M.W. Turner. Rain, Steam and Speed. 1844.

Waiting Crowd

Wayne Gonzales. Waiting Crowd. 2009.
Acrylic on Canvas.

Is the gathered group receiving a warning? Watching a performance? The answer’s unclear, which is just as Gonzales intends it. His paintings probe the evidentiary nature of representation, casting doubt on the adage “seeing is believing.”

Edouard Manet. Music in the Tuileires. 1862

The spectacle has evolved beyond the point of engagement...




Wayne Gonzales at Paula Cooper Gallery through December 18th...

Dot Matrix

M. Chevreul. From De la loi du contraste simultane des couleurs
(Photograph by Dominic Tschudin from the RCA Website)

In The Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colours Michel-Eugène Chevreul (d. 1889) made major scientific contributions to the fields of chemistry and colour. Among other works, he invented a three-dimensional colour classification system, which he used to manufacture a colour atlas showing colour circles and monochrome lightness scales.

Damien Hirst. Untitled (Spot Painting). 2007.

Chevreul on Colours. Plate IX.

Chevreul on Colours has been digitized by Google.

A Considerable Distance

Vija Celmins. Rhinoceros. 1965.

[Vija] Celmins is a painter of nature who operates at a considerable distance from her subjects. She works from clippings of reproduced, usually black-and-white photographs, some of them decrepit or blurry, and builds her labor-intensive paintings with many glazed and sanded layers of alkyd or oil on wood-backed linen. ... She has convincingly demonstrated that photography, far from being the "death of painting," can give the medium a foundation on which to reëstablish its exclusive powers.

Schjeldahl, Peter. "Dark Star" New Yorker. 6/04/2001.

Albrect Durer. Rhinoceros. 1515

Durer's Rhinoceros attempts to illustrate an animal -- which he had never seen -- from a description of it's armour and a sketch by an unknown artist. From a considerable distance to his subject, Durer works, in this case, from an imperfect representation of a very real thing - a clipping. His image was accepted as a true representation of a Rhincoerous well into the 18th century.

Durer's Rhinoceros at Wikipedia...

Capital "R" Romantic

Echoes of Friedrich's Rueckenfiguren (back figures); Untitled (Suit) is conte on cotton and all undemonstrative, contemplative, ephemeral mystique.

Troy Brauntuch. Untitled (Suit)

Troy Brauntuch. Untitled (Emily's Coat on Black Table)


'...figurative wonders so dark that their subjects almsot vanish in the gloaming...'

The Anxiety of Influence

Luc Tuymans. Nape.

Caspar David-Friedrich. Wanderer Above the Sea of Mist.

"[In the Anxiety of Influence Harold] Bloom's central thesis is that poets are hindered in their creative process by the ambiguous relationship they necessarily maintained with precursor poets. While admitting the influence of extraliterary experience on every poet, he argues that "the poet in a poet" is inspired to write by reading another poet's poetry and will tend to produce work that is derivative of existing poetry..."*

*The Anxiety of Influence (2009, June 25). In Wikipedia.

Something About Mammals

Simen Johan. Untitled #140.

Gerhard Richter. Hirsch.

"[Working] the fertile ground between reality and illusion."*

*"Simen Johan." New Yorker, 09/21/09, p. 20

Initiation By Way of Doig

My painterly pedigree is distinctly anti-modern. I trained, by apprenticeship to Ernst Fuchs, in a glazed tempera technique. When I saw Doig’s paintings for the first time, it was like Alice finding that little door in the wall. Except, instead of stumbling into a fairy world I squeaked through the crack under a door so big I could barely comprehend it’s existence, into the opulent and dizzying palace of High art.

Funny that because Doig probably wouldn’t think of himself in terms of art with a capital A. But he seems to have stumbled into it. Matthew Collings wrote:

“Peter Doig’s achievement is to give the audience what it thinks it wants, while remaining connected to some kind of genuine painting culture.”

There was a quality I had been searching for in my own work, gesturing towards something like rapture. Based on reality but removed from it just enough to elicit something like intellectual ecstasy. The Akron/Family band sings:

“I have to sing something if I want to sing, but it’s not about the words it’s about my voice rising to a place my fingers can’t reach and my legs are so tired from all this standing still”

The idea of reaching for something, trying for it it different ways, ascending by some earthly means. This was a quality I was seeking in my work, I found it in old icons. But other people didn’t, not necessarily. And in Caspar David Friedrich; that sense of the sacred but not so wrapped up in stiff allegories. I wanted a new symbolism that expressed some part of that marginal space that looks out from mass culture to a place very far away, but leaves breadcrumbs for other people to find the way, remaining connected in some way, not pure fantasy.

Peter Doig. Blotter.

Then I saw Doig’s “Blotter” And I experienced that rapture, I found it in something new. A painting that doesn’t deny it’s a painting, but figurative and about some kind of internal discovery. Romanticism has not died, it changes forms, and it always will. It’s just no longer wrapped up in company policy about humanity being dwarfed by nature, or the forest as temple. Burtynsky, for example, is a kind of reverse romantic. “Look at what we’ve done” and it’s meant to elicit the same kind of feeling as Cole painting the Grand Canyon, saying “look at what we can’t do!” But I’m probably the first person to ever call Burtynsky a romantic.

Peter Doig. Country Rock.

And then I saw Doig’s Country Rock. A marginal landscape; an underpass viewed from the window of a passing car. But it’s all pink and green and beautiful. Just abstract washes and that insistent rhythm of the guard rail, and the outline of those trees laid on top with a projector. Perfect. You wouldn’t expect beauty from a highway scene, but you can find it if you look, like Burtysnky found it in industry. Maybe we shouldn’t find it, but we can. That’s what I find so interesting.

Edward Burtynsky. Manufactured Landscapes: C.N. Railcuts No. 1

What does Doig say about being a romantic:

“Yes I probably am a romantic, and I guess therefore that it follows that the paintings are probably romantic too. I think in a way to be making paintings and, to invest as much time as I have in the activity of painting, then you have to be a romantic really, particularly with the kind of paintings that I make, with the subjects that they depict.”

The third painting I saw by Doig was the painting “Ski Jacket.”

Peter Doig. Ski jacket.

Ski Jacket was based on a photograph.

So “genuine painting culture” it is. Doig joins the company of other contemporary artists like Gerhard Richter, who bring the practice of painting up against newer kinds of visual technologies (photography, cinema, computer screens etc.) Johanne Sloan mentions this connection in her essay Hallucinating Landscape and she also says: “…There is a shared acknowledgement [among contemporary painters - here the YBAs] that painting has value at the present time as a way of negotiating a dense visual culture.” A way, I take it, to find beauty or significance in a sea of images by investing time in one.

Caspar David-Friedrich. Monk By The Sea.

Using One Work of Art to Describe Another

"Ascension Variations" was a dance performance by Meredith Monk at the Guggenheim in March of 2009. I never saw the dance.

The idea though of ascension characterizes my feeling when I am faced with a successful work of art. It’s about rising to a place we cannot ordinarily reach. The artwork, combined with a sympathetic mental state, makes this possible. “The Ascension of Christ” is a classical theme in art, and it is infinitesimal variations on themes that have characterized the development of the arts through history.

This using of one work of art to describe another was a technique developed by the late philosopher Walter Benjamin in his Arcades Project: a collection of observations, mostly quotations, on the urban phenomenon of the glass roofed Arcade shopping malls in turn of the century Paris. While not strictly speaking art work, quotations are others work employed to illuminate a phenomena, the Arcades, he, Walter Benjamin, had nothing to do with himself. In a sense he went “Window shopping” for observations that align with one’s own feelings. Montaigne's maxim reads: “I quote others only in order to better express myself.”

This blog is intended as an entirely subjective encyclopaedia of my observations and developing relationship with modern painting. An Arcades Project of my own; grasping for a definition of a phenomena so huge and nebulous one must defer to others for insight.