beauty

My Painting is an Introvert

Although I have my extroverted moments, I am by all accounts a pretty hardcore introvert. So I recently succumbed to all the publicity I was hearing about Susan Cain's new book "Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking" and from the first page, I couldn't put it down. 
"We live with a value system that I call the "Extrovert Ideal" - the omnipresent belief that the ideal self is gregarious, alpha and comfortable in the spotlight. [...] Introversion -- along with its cousins sensitivity, seriousness, and shyness -- is now a second-class personality trait, somewhere between a disappointment and a pathology." (Cain, p. 4)
Cain doesn't vilify the extrovert, but rather makes the case that introverts offer different strengths that are too often overlooked and undervalued. And I began to think how this introvert-extrovert paradigm may help to explain not just the struggles with how we introverted individuals may relate to the world, but also the struggles of so much introverted art that must contend with our cultural "bias against quiet".

If you put a celebratory Beatriz Milhazes next to a poetic Giorgio Morandi:
Beatriz Milhazes
Giorgio Morandi

or a visceral Gerhard Richter beside a meditative Agnes Martin,
Gerhard Richter
Agnes Martin
or an aggressive Kim Dorland across from a dreamy Kaye Donachie,
Kim Dorland
Kaye Donachie
the quiet introverts have a tough time competing for attention. Jonathan Lasker once wrote in his essay "Beauty in the Age of Road Kill":
“Contemporary culture is oriented toward sensation far more than it is toward beauty.  This is very much in keeping with the image of our world:  the texture of life is seldom beautiful, although it is usually sensational.  It is fast, loud and enervating...[...] We want a more direct and less onerous way to pleasure, which we hope to augment by increasing our sensations.”
But introversion is much more than beauty. Cain ascribes the following qualities to the introvert:
"reflective, cerebral, bookish, unassuming, sensitive, thoughtful, serious, contemplative, subtle, introspective, inner-directed, gentle, calm, modest, solitude-seeking, shy, risk-averse, thin-skinned". The extrovert is "ebullient, expansive, sociable, gregarious, excitable, dominant, assertive, active, risk-taking, thick-skinned, outer-directed, lighthearted, bold and comfortable in the spotlight." (Cain, p. 269)

Lasker may be right that our culture is becoming so numb from such persistent over-stimulation that only more sensational or shocking displays can move us. But I don't believe this is inevitably or always true. The loudest voice is not always the most interesting or the most poignant. I firmly believe there remains an important place for gentler, quieter expressions of our contemporary experience. There are many of us whose sensibilities crave a more contemplative space, not just for repose but for reflection and revelation. I see my paintings becoming more introverted now, and I'm becoming emboldened by the possibilities in quietly subverting the Extrovert Ideal.

Sheer Possibility

Here is a sneak peak of my new painting in the studio. It's a diptych. I'm still working on the second panel (cropped out of the photo). For some reason a couple of the fragments have been painfully slow to dry, so it's taking a little longer to finish than I had hoped. It will be exhibited at the big 60 Painters show that is opening in two weeks.

The painting is a subtle shift from my previous work, but I'm excited by the possibilities. In my last show, one of my favorite works was "Veiled", an image that seemed to be dissolving into white. I liked the ethereal quality of the work, and I've been wanting to paint a new series with a similar quality -- sophisticated greys (Morandi is one of my painting heroes), and an image that is more haunting than bold. The greyed palette that I've used here with subtle bleeds of color, along with the almost vibrating transparencies give this painting a whole new dimension. It was good to try this idea first with a more minimal source image, but I'm intrigued by what I might concoct with more extravagant source material. I have this idea that I want my work to express a form of Baroque Minimalism -- an oxymoron, I know, but it doesn't mean it's not possible. In fact, I'm quite certain that it is.


Fluid Forms

"The human body is above all a mirror of the soul,
and that is the source of its great beauty."
-- Rodin, 1925

Watercolor is so underrated. I'm returning to some watercolor experiments that I began many months ago, and it never ceases to amaze me how it is one of the most sensual, unpredictable, heavenly media. Too closely associated with flower paintings and seascapes, watercolor seems born for the body. These are some of my favorite watercolor paintings by Auguste Rodin from the turn of the century -- bold, sexy sources of inspiration.

 


 

 
 

 

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

Bellowing Desire

An extended passage from Lee Siegel's collection of essays entitled "Falling Upwards" - this passage is from an essay reflecting on the work of novelist Saul Bellow (but I'm not posting this because of an interest in Saul Bellow...):
"The world's siren song, its sweetness and strangeness, is the ordeal of Bellow's heroes. Life fills them with such a sense of promise and beauty that, in the end, they turn inward as a way to escape the inevitable disappointments that plague passionately receptive natures.
Men of most powerful appetite have always been the ones to doubt reality the most" says the African King Dahfu to Henderson in Henderson the Rain King. These life-famished figures are contemporary; they cannot, Dahfu continues "bear that hopes should turn to misery, and loves to hatreds and deaths and silences, and so on." They are contemporary in precisely this sense: the more their desires expand, the further reality recedes.
So Bellow's heroes leap away from disappointing reality into ideas, and then away from insufficient ideas into sex, and away from sex into fantasy, and back to culture, and then back to experience - and on and on, in an infinite regression of distancing from the episodes in life that fall short of life's promise. They must protect their psyches from the insult of inadequate conditions. This psychoacrobatic motion is anarchic, like laughter; and it reproduces the odyssey of Mozart's music, which modulates from earthy to sky to the far end of heaven and back to earth.
Bellow's heroes are in flight from reality to the heart of existence. They flee from life for love of life. Henderson is both strengthened and harried by a small persistent voice deep inside him that repeats, "I want I want I want." There is something terrible about these protagonists who are so consumed with desire. They burn life away with the intensity of their wanting, feeling, thinking, and almost always find themselves alone, barely alive, far away from other people. It is as if their defeat by desire were also the fulfillment of their desire. A wish for deprivation lurks in the depths of their voracity."

Beauty in Disguise

If you could see me, you wouldn't describe me as beautiful. I'm pretty enough, and I can feel pretty good about myself on a good hair day with a flattering outfit. But I'm not beautiful. Enough men have hit on me that I assume some would say I can be sexy, or hot, or however men describe it outside the company of women. But it's not beauty. I think it would be fair to say that I have a fascination with the fantasy of being beautiful. For me, the fantasy is not about gaining the approval or love or admiration of others. It's something I assume I would feel inside myself - not just a confidence, but perhaps a freedom, the kind of freedom that comes with donning a perfect disguise.

I generally don't talk about the role of beauty in my work. I'm comfortable discussing the theoretical debates surrounding the idea of beauty in contemporary culture, but to declare my work to be a meditation on beauty, I don't think I'm ready for that yet. It closes off the possibilities. It sounds trite.

Someone recently said to me that they were tired of the idea that people thought art had to be deciphered, that art was somehow a means to hide something obvious that the viewer just had to find. I agree with that, but I don't think it applies just to viewers. I think artists too, now faced with the pressures of insightful and theoretically rigorous artist statements, can find themselves trying to define and clarify and explore ideas without even making the work. But the more work I make, the more I continue to be surprised by the themes and ideas that reveal themselves to me in the process of making and in the completed pieces.

My private relationship to beauty is slowly revealing itself. People have been telling me so. But that doesn't mean that is what the work is about, or what I intend it to be about, or what I hope it to be about. But it is there nonetheless.