De Kooning Debrief

I have no interest in writing a "review" of an exhibition I've seen. I'm not an art critic or art historian. My interest in seeing the works of other artists is as an artist myself. And as a painter, there are few artists that are more instructive or inspiring than Willem De Kooning.

Inspiration on Steroids

At the entrance to the exhibit was this portrait from 1943-44. I visited the show with my friend and fellow artist Nitasha McKnight, and as the two of us stood in front of this painting in awe unable to move, Nitasha said, "I get the feeling we are going to leave this show crying in pink." I think I already was. 

We were finally able to pry ourselves away from this portrait, but we found ourselves continually immobilized by almost every single painting. His complex, labored surfaces offer so much subtlety and depth, while the fluid drawn lines insert an intentionality and confidence that so elegantly evokes sexy, sensual forms. These forms are repeated throughout his oeuvre and begin to form a language that becomes evident as you patiently work your way through the exhibition. Of course De Kooning is known for his bold merging of figuration and abstraction, of figure and ground, but until I had the luxury of walking through the annals of his entire career in one day, I don't think I fully appreciated the continuities and linkages among his seemingly disparate bodies of work. But there they were, available for all to see if you could just spend enough time looking. And as we stalked our way through the different stages of his career, every leap seemed more understandable, more inspiring.

Half way through the show, Nitasha and I had to take a break. We had spent hours studying the first few rooms, and we hadn't even come to the Woman series yet. Our heads were ready to explode as we tried to memorize every stroke and sensation that lay before us in charcoal and paint, analyzing and grappling with each and every major and minor development we could glean. Our eyes were exhausted from having to accommodate the demands of his scrambled, anarchic but palpable spaces. And the endless array of marks and gestures, scrubbed surfaces and impastoed passages, frail glazes and fearless over-painting, we were consuming it all in a gluttonous visual feast. We needed some time to digest.

We went downstairs for a coffee and sat there for awhile in silence. Finally, we both confessed that the show was inspiring to the point of shaming. Our own practices suddenly looked timid and cautious. We had viewed barely one-half of the exhibition and yet we had seen enough breakthroughs for at least three careers. De Kooning was ambitious, brave, constantly pushing his ideas into new territory in ways that were risky and fearless, never harping on one idea for too long, incurably restless and rigorous in his pursuit. It is an incredibly inspiring - and humbling - model for an artist's career. Nitasha and I agreed, we will have to do better.

Hidden Gems

De Kooning's "Black Untitled", oil on canvas, 1948

For those of you who know me, you know that I am really interested in the genealogy of images, in the influence of past images on the making of new images. This painting ("Black Untitled") by De Kooning is not one of his more famous images, but I was completely smitten with it at the exhibition. When you first approach it, it looks like a strange process-based piece, a relatively inconsequential work that must have been a mere stepping stone toward the more iconic masterpieces like the black and white "Painting" from 1948. But this modest untitled work just wouldn't let me go, and the more I looked, the more I saw.

The photograph of the painting looks much more graphic that the real thing, of course. The painting has a ghostly quality that is eerily dramatic. The longer I looked, the more figural references I came to see, and the tension and angst it evoked brought other great black and white works to mind. Most obviously, it seemed to have a lot of similarities to Picasso's Guernica:

Picasso's "Guernica", 1937

And once I put De Kooning's work in the lineage of Guernica, it was impossible to not see the spectre of Goya's "Disasters of War" etchings (1810-1815).

Etchings by Goya from his "Disasters of War" series

Most of the visitors were only giving this modest De Kooning a cursory glance as they walked through the exhibit. And it certainly would never have been a painting that I would have paid that much attention to if I had only seen it in reproduction. But standing before the painted object, I was completely seduced. Offering it my time and contemplation, it more than rewarded my efforts. These were not painting of instant gratification. Thankfully, Nitasha and I had the time to revel in each work, and the rewards would grow exponentially as we continued our epic trek through De Kooning's career.

Die Hard

By the time Nitasha and I had worked our way through the Women series and later figurative works, our knees were beginning to buckle again. Feeling like exhausted prizefighters entering the ninth round of a boxing match against the world champion, we took a moment to breathe deeply, trying to reinvigorate ourselves. We had to shake off the latest visual onslaught so we could brace ourselves for the body blows that we were certain would come. And come they did.

In the next room, the paintings were hung so close together you could practically see the curators throwing up their hands in surrender, unable to edit even one of the brilliant works out of the tight line-up. But there were two paintings that captured our attention for the longest.

De Kooning, "Untitled", oil on canvas, 1977

 The first was "Untitled" from 1977, the watery blue painting with the red high-heeled shoe. In reproduction, it's hard to see what makes this painting so hypnotic. But in real life, it towers over you, the swaths of pale blue paint forming spaces that are positively pillowy, inviting you to dive in. The dark pthalo brushstrokes recede into delicate crevices, and the suggestions of surf, sand and sex is irresistable. As we walked around the room, I kept looking back at this painting, continually surprised by its visual depth and frothy surface. It wouldn't leave me alone.

The definitive punch that finally knocked us out was "Untitled III", also from 1977. Nitasha and I must have stood in front of this painting for almost half an hour, so long that we started to strategize ways we could pocket the 6 foot painting and run away with it forever.

De Kooning, "Untitled III", oil on canvas, 1977

Among the million and one things that we loved about it was the crazy color choices he had made and how perfectly they played together. We had been noting his color choices throughout the exhibit. I have always associated a particular pink with De Kooning (a juicy pink made from cadmium red light), but despite all of his well-known fleshy hues, throughout the exhibition I couldn't stop remarking on his use of yellow in particular. Any painter will tell you that yellow is a tough color to use well and with subtlety. It can easily be neutered into Easter egg pastels, or poisoned with too much complimentary purple. With the tiniest bit of red, it can succumb to the pressures of orange. Or in an attempt to dim its blinding brightness, it can quickly become fatally drained of its fragile vitality. But De Kooning uses yellow masterfully, unpredictably, never making it come off as staid or cliche, often making it the life-giving artery of the picture.

And don't get me started on his enlightened use of greens.

When we came upon "Untitled III", we just stood there in amazement. At first glance, it's just bloody gorgeous, but as you try to imagine the process of making the work, the subtle and bold choices of color become curiouser and curiouser. Admittedly, De Kooning has his muddy moments, but they always seem to be alleviated by an unusual and inspired remedy. One could look at this painting forever. I certainly tried.

We stared at this painting for as long as we could, hoping that if we just looked long enough, we could absorb his spirit and later replicate his genius in our own work. But overhwelmed and slightly dazed, we finally had to leave. Ever since, as if the ghost of De Kooning himself were whispering in my ear, I keep hearing a voice in my head repeating over and over: be more brave. Get back to the studio and be more brave.

For Show

With my solo exhibition at p|m Gallery this fall fast approaching, and with numerous new works now completed in the studio, I know I should be feeling pretty confident that I'm ready. And I do - but an idea that I had about a year ago and that has been nagging me in the back of my mind, suddenly seems ripe for execution. Do I have time to make it happen in the next few months? I think so. I hope so.

This desire for a new approach to my show has come after painting for months and months, each painting representing an incremental step forward (and the occasional step backward) in developing my ideas. But now to envision my exhibition merely as a careful selection of individual paintings from a large body of work is beginning to feel, on the one hand, inadequate to convey months of exploration, and on the other hand, a lost opportunity to use the gallery space as a specific, contained viewing experience.

Grappling with this issue with respect to my own work has led me to begin to conceptualize the gallery exhibition as a show - a show similar in nature to the stage. Installation artists approach exhibition spaces like this naturally, as a critical element of their practice. But painters who work within the parameters of the rectangular canvas don't often directly address the relationship between their works, unless they choose to add elements of installation to the exhibition (*see the interview with artist Wangechi Mutu that I have posted below). Painting shows can sometimes feel like a selection of products displayed in a high-end retail store. This is the brand we are carrying this month, pick the color and size that suits you best. But the gallery space conceived as a theatre opens up possibilities for creating a more direct relationship between individual paintings, as well as possibilities for a more expansive connection between the works and the viewers. It's an interesting opportunity that I don't want to ignore. Can I pull it off in the next three months? We'll see...


*The following video is an interview by the AGO's David Moos and artist Wangechi Mutu. The whole video is worth watching (she's an amazing artist), but her comments on the gallery space are particularly interesting to me for this discussion. It begins at minute 6:28, in the last two minutes of the interview.

Who Doesn't Like Bacon?

OK, I can't take it anymore, it's time to talk about Bacon. The whole purpose of the New York trip was to see the Met's Francis Bacon retrospective, and it certainly didn't disappoint. It's impossible to blog about it all, but there were certainly some major ideas that emerged for me.

Firstly, those damn gold frames. Bacon required all of his works to be framed in gilt gold frames with glass - the glass being the most unusual aspect. Seeing a painting in the flesh is, quite literally, being able to see the flesh of the paint. By putting his work behind glass, it was hard to see some of the subtleties of the dark glazes, to feel the visceral swipes of thick paint, to savor the soft gloss of the paint's skin. The exhibit explained that he primarily worked from photographed images, and since my own work deals with the relationship between painting and photography, the way I saw it, he had begun by transforming a photograph into a painting, and then by framing it behind glass, had basically transformed it back into a photograph. The final framed object was experientially a photograph of a painting. Also, I think it's interesting that although Bacon's instructions were strict with respect to framing his work for display purposes, the reproductions of his work are of his unframed paintings. Since Bacon worked from reproductions, he was certainly very conscious of this secondary life his paintings would have, and yet he did not require the reproductions to be of his framed work - which just reaffirms to me that when the paintings were viewed in reproduction as actual photographs of the work, the frame and glass just became redundant.

Secondly, there is no denying that Bacon quite willingly, and regularly, went to his dark side. A very dark side. Throughout the summer I have been becoming more and more conscious of how cerebral my work is, and wanting, with some trepidation, to explore a more explicitly sensual/emotional content. Working with Nitasha and Rebecca in the studio this summer has only strengthened this desire - their work is raw, intense, brave. It's making me feel like a wimp, over-thinking everything. Although art always exposes something of who you are, and while I have come a long way this year, I think I am still very much in hiding. And I think it has been easier to hide in landscapes and abstraction. But once you start using the figure, more and more becomes exposed. As Nitasha and I drooled through the Bacon exhibit and then trolled the New York bookstores looking at endless numbers of art books, Nitasha kept commenting that the paintings and images that struck me, that I kept being drawn to, had quite a dark sensibility. In the past year, my work has slowly been revealing a more romantic, feminine desire, and now it seems a darker side is starting to come into the mix. Certainly, if anything is going to bring out your desire to revel in the dark side, it's a Francis Bacon painting.

Thirdly, a more minor point, perhaps, but something I couldn't stop thinking about as I looked at Bacon's paintings. His distortion of the figure is incredibly sculptural, as if he had made a plasticine maquette of the figure and then twisted and pulled it into the form that he wanted to paint. Picasso, Matisse, de Kooning, all painted the figure and yet explored their ideas about the body, form and gesture in sculpture as well. The more I looked at Bacon's paintings, the more I could not fathom how he had not been drawn to expressing himself through a sculptural medium. It began to peak my curiosity as to how I might approach my ideas in sculpture. Looking at works by artists such as Petah Coyne, Sherry Boyle, Michele Oka, I have to believe my ideas have a place in the third dimension.

The final element of Bacon's show that has stayed with me (beyond the sheer power of the paintings themselves, of course) is the small display they had of Bacon's source materials. Bacon once said "Images breed images in me." Actually seeing the images that had resulted in the paintings was a fascinating peek into Bacon's creative process. Although there were no sketches, his works look as though the impeccable compositional structures were well thought out before paint ever touched the canvas. But it was very inspiring to see how these paintings of "genius" were sourced largely from very accessible, unremarkable images. With the cynical approach to the appropriation of images in post-modernism, it can be intimidating to rely on reproductions for source materials. There is a stigma somehow of a kind of failure of the imagination. Artists like Bacon prove otherwise.

There is no question that the Bacon show was a mass of inspiration for my studio practice, but at the end of day, most importantly, experiencing the show was a thrill, a privilege, a sheer heart-wrenching pleasure.