Judith Barbour Osborne: "Synchronized with ... head and heart"

“A really good picture looks as if it’s happened at once. It’s an immediate image ... one really beautiful wrist motion that is synchronized with your head and heart, and you have it, and therefore it looks as if it were born in a minute.”

                                                                                                            Helen Frankenthaler

“Really good” pictures tend not to happen “at once,” though, as Frankenthaler knew better than anyone.  Her “Madame Butterfly” woodcut, below, is composed of 102 colors, from 46 woodblocks, and measures 2 meters (6 ½ feet) wide (www.nga.gov.au/exhibition/Frankenthaler). The print is far wider than one wrist motion, and took a bit longer to put together than one minute. And yet, when we look:

 ... this woodcut doesn’t make us feel anything that isn’t in this moment, right now. All we see is that Frankenthaler had a way of making paint and inks float away from their supports, whether she poured or printed.   And somehow you don’t want to solve the mystery of those floating images. You fall in with them, as you would any compelling natural landscape. 

Her work is sometimes critiqued as “just too pretty,” a damning phrase designed to undercut the work and its maker, yet artist Amy Sillman says there’s no “just” about it:

Frankenthaler’s taste and grace are tough, like ballerina grace: those women aren’t sugarplum fairies but muscular athletes, with machinelike, disciplined bodies. Frankenthaler is in an incredible athletic decision-making process while working... It’s an experiment with the alchemic and extreme reliance on color as material and as optics...

                                    “House of Frankenthaler,” printed in The heroine Paint,  p. 267

Sometimes, it takes another artist to see the underpinnings of a work, along with the artist’s consciousness and experience that remain (almost) invisible.  When I see work this strong, I want to know that some artist, somewhere, has seen the work and is willing to try and take on its challenges.                                                                                                                                                                                               

Judith Barbour Osborne is a likely suspect.  She has several shows on at the moment in Connecticut galleries.  I have just come from her Exit Gallery show at the Essex Art Association (an opportunity given as an award, the highest the gallery offers), and then I visited more work in a show at the Guilford Art Center. 

Osborne has worked with poets and musicians...  She works with words as well as paints, choosing to bring meaning into the light, to make “aspects of non-visual reality visible, as if staining the wind” (JBO artist statement).  Judith  Barbour Osborne’s compact show in Essex, “Staining the Wind,” is a master class in making an intimate space feel immense. She works in smaller spaces than Frankenthaler, yet she manages to create huge effects with her close studies. I think she has found the very next level after Frankenthaler, and pushed it to its very limits. Here is her “Revelation # 4”:

 It has a calming presence, for me, although Osborne says that she generally hears people talk about the energy in her work.  It may be that calm and energy come from the same core place, in us, the place that relaxes by the sea or in the mountain air. In the artwork before us we find words, too, embedded in the paint and inks, just barely there, like a whisper or the strain of a song being sung far away. Osborne says this is an integral part of her work: “My artwork is text-based and utilizes elements of chance and intention. I abstractly write text with tools ranging from small hand-made brushes to mops and brooms, from syringes to batiking tools”  (see the site where she has worked together with a poet on an artist’s book: www.vampandtramp.com/finepress/o/judith-b-osborne.html).

Here is
“Revelation # 3,” also at the Essex Art Association:

 and a detail:

All the marks Osborne makes seem interconnected, indivisible from one another. As we stand before them, we see that there is no looking at one mark, or one place in the painting. The eye moves over the whole surface, the whole “landscape.”  She has made a whole world, here.

Osborne is not only connected back to painters like Frankenthaler, though. She is thinking forward, so she is also the director of a group of ten artists, Gallery One (http://www.galleryonect.com) and they are exhibiting work at the Mill Gallery of the Guilford Art Center (through May 15, 2016). They support and encourage one another, a gallery without walls. The works as a whole make a very strong showing. Here is one of the pieces,  Osborne’s “Revelations # 1”:

and a detail:

This is a painting created with transparent inks, brushstrokes, and splattered marks, and it is luminous.  It was a rainy and gray day outside, so we lingered indoors as long as we could, staying with the art. The courage it takes to leave all that “blank” space in an artwork... fierce.  The words and the strokes from the artist’s hand somehow turn us inward, crawl inside some empty space we must have been leaving there, a space exactly as big as art.

For Eduard Manet, for Helen Frankenthaler: on Renewing a Painting Passion

I read an article called "What Paint Does," by Robin Greenwood, in Abstract Critical (16 January 2012).  Greenwood argues for a new awareness of abstract art; we must look at the artists we love with some purpose, or else risk simply "re-inventing" everything that abstraction has already accomplished, both successes and failures. Greenwood writes: "If ... perish the thought ... I were to offer advice to an abstract painter starting out today, I would suggest they copy the artist they most admired until they got somewhere near to competing with them, and then move on to someone better; and so on, till there was no-one left and they themselves were the best of all (I'm an idealist)."

Well, I was looking to start again... the odalisques in abstract landscapes are a complete series on their own, now, and ... what's new?  And I thought about all the artists I most admire. I have consciously worked from the starting point of David Hockney, in a series of landscapes in 2003, and I un-consciously have leaned on Joan Mitchell, Willem de Kooning, and Kandinsky.  But I had never tried to look at Helen Frankenthaler's work from the perspective of how it was really feasible, in part because I thought she would be, like Gertrude Stein or e.e. cummings, an act impossible to follow. But I really thought that Greenwood had made a wonderful suggestion, and so I looked at a catalogue of Frankenthaler's work that I have, called East and Beyond. In his essay, John Yau shows us, at one point, that Frankenthaler took an Édouard Manet painting, "Fish (Still Life)," (which is 28 7/8" x 36 1/4") from 1864 as a starting point:

Here is Frankenthaler's, painting, completed in acrylic on canvas, 71" x 115," in 1981:

We can see the spaces and light that both paintings share. John Yau writes the essay for this catalogue and he says "a point-to-point comparison ... would ultimately miss"  Frankenthaler's pursuit here, which he says is "the desire to grasp that which remains elusive," memory, the fact that "the world is constantly appearing and vanishing" (24).  That may be true; but artists, when pressed, are unwilling to say too much about the point of their work.  I looked at these two paintings and thought that this would be a way in to Greenwood's prescription.  So I started, with two 30" x 30" wood panels. I took photographs after each stage of the painting I was making; I won't give you all of them, but here are a few on the way to my "somewhere near to competing with" the Frankenthaler:

This was the first shot over the bow -- it was really fun for me -- burnt umber with burgundy and yellow ochre, acrylic paint thinned down with water and glazing liquid and spread with bits of an old pillowcase. It became an effort of my full body, walking around the painting, with each additional layer, pursuing the Frankenthaler pursuing the Manet, which was a photograph in an open book in a corner of the studio floor:

Black and purple wash over the top to get at some of Frankenthaler's and Manet's fabulous blacks, then, skipping forward a few sessions:

More yellow ochre, then white, permanent green middle and pthalo green and white, then thalo green and glaze.  More blacks to right. Then, two steps later:

Cerulean blue hue, more green, more whites, yellow ochre with raw sienna and burgundy. Now, for the final picture, which I got to stages later, after throwing white paint, adding yellows and oranges and details of red, green, browns, pouring, and scraping and pouring the whites:

Now, this isn't precisely the same as the Frankenthaler. And yet it was so luminous, and so balanced, and so much fun.  Now, I decided, I had to try and make the painting my own. "Seize the glimpse," Robert Motherwell said, and then "the ethic lies in erasing that glimpse." So here I go, erasing, scraping away with sandpaper, and adding some white and lighter hues:

Then, layers of more paints, more scraping:

One of the things that is emerging is three horizontal spaces, which I did not want to encourage. So I went into the painting with brushes and scrapers and splashes. Another idea that emerged from looking was that there were no straight lines or geometric shapes here, as there aren't, generally, in Frankenthalers, but I wanted them, and so I added a triangle in the lower right:

Now I am liking the light here, but there needs to be more surface and we need some pencil and drawing here, too. We had gone for a walk along the Alameda shoreline, and the boats, balconies, rocks and scattered birds gave me the last few images here:

I think this is to Frankenthaler as she was to Manet; I am calling it "E.M. and H.F. Walk on the Beach in Alameda."

Ukiyo-e: "pictures of the floating, fleeting world ..."

French artists first became familiar with Japanese art at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1867. The characteristic subjects, the differences of scale, the unfamiliar intensities of color, and the innovations in the nature of background in these Japanese works soon found their way onto easels and sketchpads in the West. Here, just to remind ourselves what it must have looked like, at first, is a lovely print, "Irises," by Hokusai:

Look at the sharp edges of the leaves and the insect, the way the bottom does not feel heavy, but rather reaches upwards, and the ivory of the iris blossoms, though close to the color of the white-gray sky, are softly outlined and distinct.

What started me thinking about Japonisme? I recently saw a picture of a Renoir painting. Generally I think we see Renoir as a painter of sensuous women or small children immersed in gardens. Yet, here was this painting, "Still Life with Bouquet," from 1871:

Rembrandt (the framed work on the wall), Impressionism (the bouquet wrapped in white), the books and tablecloth (generic!) but then we see that vase and that fan ... they float.  The influence is there. Then we look to Whistler, who has used Japanese styling in his landscapes and portraits ... but here is a beautiful little study, which appears to be called "The Blue and White Covered Urn" (really?):

Simple lines, elegant against the background, each mark with a slightly different shape, nothing repeated, all observed closely. Now to Van Gogh, who, again, is someone we know loved Japanese prints; here is his "Still Life with Japanese Vase with Roses and Anemones," from 1890:

Definitely not the still, calm world of the Whistler, and with a vase at an angle worthy of a Cézanne, here is energy -- tucked inside the Japanese envelope.  And now to the latest of the artists in this group, Matisse, and his "Still Life with Apples on Pink Tablecloth," from 1924:

Here, Matisse has complicated the background, pulling the wall into the foreground just a bit, and he is taking chances, too, with the colors pink and yellow, which often tend to fight one another. Here, they seem to have just enough interaction to keep the eye moving around the canvas... and the blues here come from the traditional vase patterns that Whistler was studying but here they are given to us with  a larger, freer brushstroke. Matisse would work in this mode pretty extensively ... but he seems to have been the only one of these artists to take the lessons of the Japanese print and apply them across his work.

And then I thought -- who else has looked at Hokusai and Horishige since the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? There have been people here and there -- Brice Marden's "Cold Mountain" series, inspired by Japanese calligraphy, would be one contender -- but no movement, as such. And why not?
While we think about that -- why the excitement stopped with Matisse -- I did think of one painter who is working through her Japanese influences: Helen Frankenthaler. In a show at Knoedler & Co last winter, "East and Beyond," Frankenthaler exhibited work in the ukiyo-e tradition that she began in the 1980's. Here is one of my favorite works by Frankenthaler from this show, "For Hiroshige," a painting from 1981:

And here is another work, a woodcut, "Weeping Crabapple," from 2009:

These demonstrate, I think, the possibilities ... we have come full circle, but without losing anyone's own artistic "voice."

The Anxiety of Influence vs. "It was her voice that made/ The sky acutest at its vanishing..."

"She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker ..."  from "The Idea of Order at Key West,"
                    by Wallace Stevens

So I was just sitting here, sketching ...

And I was thinking about the ways writers and artists balance artistic influence against developing their own artistic "voices" or styles. Stevens's poem, quoted above, gives us a woman whose voice is so surely her own that the sea clings to it.  I attended a reading the other day; the writer's day job was ...   "editor."  And so, in the question-and-answer period, I asked her how she protected "your own voice" while reading so many other contemporary writers.  And she gave us all a long, wandering answer that never circled back to her "own voice." Why didn't she answer?

My memory -- which I will admit, is shaky on this point, so I will be very brief! -- of Harold Bloom's book The Anxiety of Influence  centers on the weight of all those writers (or, in my case, artists) who have come before.  And, that, where one is most influenced, one is most prone to deny that influence.  Picasso, for example, doesn't mention Renoir anywhere that I have seen, and of course we would not expect him to. The lush Impressionist works seem to have nothing to do with Picasso's thin washes of color and focus on the hard-edged line. And yet, and yet: a show called "Picasso: Challenging the Past" came together at the National Gallery in London in 2009, and we see the names we expect: Ingres, Velazquez, El Greco, Delacroix. And then the one we do not expect, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, with "Seated Bather in a Landscape, called Euridice," from 1885-1890, a painting that, the catalogue tells us, Picasso owned.  The curators (Elizabeth Cowling, Neil Cox, Simonetta Fraquelli, Susan Grace Galassi, Christopher Riopelle and Anne Robbins) have placed a Picasso, "Large Bather," 1921, up against it. See what you think.

I have always wondered where Picasso's large bathers came from. This seems pretty definitive to me. But Picasso's voice survives these influences, in part because he has folded them into his "own voice." His style often shifts in reaction to other artists' work. The influence moves him forward.  But it could, just as easily, set any of us back. So how to escape it?

And then I thought of Helen Frankenthaler (not a new thing for me: see November 9th and 14th entries).  She lived with first one, then another of the biggest art-world names of her time, Clement Greenberg and Robert Motherwell. I once heard her work dismissed by someone who didn't know any better as "second-rate Motherwell."  But Frankenthaler, despite the weight of living with these two men, created her own world, just as Stevens's woman does in the poem above. Frankenthaler created color-field painting. She was, in Stevens's words, "the single artificer of the world/ In which she sang." Before anyone else poured thin washes of paint onto untreated canvas, there she was; she had taken the thrown lines of Pollock's paint into a new direction.  And now she has moved on, to a graceful printing style -- influenced by Japanese prints -- and has rediscovered another "voice."  Here are two prints; the first is "Madame Butterfly," and the second is "Book of Clouds":

 

No-one else works this way. So, to my novelist, if you are reading this ... I hope it helps you see what I was asking.

Artist Statement VI: "The picture did not live within the frame ... it did not belong within the frame"

One thing that needs to be included in my artist's statement is the question of movement. I have always felt that one of the chief weaknesses of traditional landscape painting -- and perhaps even of portrait painting -- is the fact that the figure and ground, the objects and the composition, often show no sense that the whole thing could move at any second.  That is, the model could get up, the artist could turn her head or move the easel closer to the stand of trees, the light is changing ... The Cubists and the Futurists considered this point, but I believe it still needs to be resolved pictorially -- now.

If we look back at Constable's "Hadleigh Castle, the Mouth of the Thames: Morning After a Stormy Night" (see my post from November 10), we see the castle, the river, the rocks, the sky spread out before us.  But -- how wonderful would it be if we could see all the things he could see as he was actually painting? The castle comes into greater focus, or the dog runs ahead ...

In her Lectures in America, in "Pictures," Gertrude Stein talks about movement: "Does an oil painting tend to go back into its frame because after all an oil painting belongs in its frame. Or does it not .... And if it does belong in its frame, must an oil painting be static."  And she answers her own question -- no -- a painting need not be "static," and Stein goes to the example of a painting that seems --to her -- to move, Leonardo Da Vinci's 1499 work, "The Virgin, the Child, Saint Anne and John the Baptist."  As it happens, we saw this painting at the National Gallery in London last year; it is a "sketch" for a more formal painting that was never completed, stretched across eight sheets of paper, but it is more beautiful than any "final" painting could be, I think:

Stein says that "in this picture there was an internal movement, not of the people or light or any of these things but inside .... In other words the picture did not live within the frame, in other words it did not belong within the frame .... [and since then] I have passionately hoped that some picture would remain out of its frame."  And there is internal movement here; you can feel it, walking around in the gallery with it. This can be explained in part by the figures' sinewy curves, and by the background that dances just a bit beyond specificity.  But really, as Stein goes on to say, a painting "must not completely only exist in its frame. It must have its own life. And yet it may not move nor imitate movement, not really, nor must it stay still. It must not only be in its frame but it must not, only, be in its frame." This is, in part, a discussion of the Modernist idea that a painting must be a thing in itself, and not representative of something outside of itself, but I also think this is about the life in a painting, the way a painting can feel like a very brief, exciting moment in a life.

So the artist, and the work of art, have this difficult task, to allow the art to move without moving.  Can this be done now, without resorting to one-point perspective or any sort of illusion? Well, look at Helen Frankenthaler at work:

She is moving, the paint is moving, but it will all have to stop and, at some point, the painting will be in a show ... will it survive? I think so. Let's look at "Madame Matisse," from 1983:

Matisse had painted his wife with an enormous hat and a green stripe along her nose, a painting bought by Leo and Gertrude Stein, actually, and this painting takes that stripe and makes it move.

Part of what I am still working on, both in my statement and in this new series, is the idea that paintings should encourage the viewer to see ... to see just as if you were in the same landscape as the painting, and see the colors and the shapes as you would if you were walking by. Sometimes this will lead to the shapes seeming to be a blur, or to seem as if they were shrinking or growing; other times it will lead to one thing seeming specific, because it is what the painter chose to look at and to paint. We turn our heads, we focus in on objects, as we walk ... anywhere.  Here is an early example of my landscape-as-movement idea, a 2 x 4' painting called "Landscape as Drama":