Charles Tarlton's "Richard Diebenkorn, Ocean Park 17"

"...[the] classic situation of trying to reveal in language what the act of seeing provokes.”

                                                                                                              — Robert Creeley

The artist stands ready in the presence of a blank canvas, but nothing so far has happened.  Up ahead in time a finished painting is waiting, but something has to take place now to launch the creative act.  The painter has a long straight edge and a piece of charcoal; he draws three parallel horizontal lines, and then, fidgeting with the straight edge, lays in three more parallel lines diagonally.  The canvas has been “besmirched,” and the artist has his problem.

these are not pictures

out the transom, but pictures roused

by the geometry

of it. The lines creating

shapes in a regular pattern

from the toothings

of these inaugural gestures

the painting grows

according to a logic born

of the moment’s vagaries

Here is a definition of process.  Building on the stimulus of the first lines he drew on the canvas, the painter improvises colored shapes as needed, drawing other lines, following the promptings of whatever just emerged, gesture, then color, then another gesture, until he is exhausted.  But, wait, the next morning, back in the studio, he repents, and begins to scratch out and paint over yesterday’s markings, leaving hints to reveal here and there the way he had come.

he only knew it was

finished once he’d come back

from abandoning it

in despair, to find it all

working perfectly

any truth in the art

derives from his accruing

fragmented judgments

over a frantic period

of exasperated struggle

You cannot ask what any of it means or represents, more than his efforts to get right the thing that had kept going.  The peculiar angular drawings in the top half of the picture just happened in the working out of pressures from the day before.  They are pictures of nothing, lines arranged to the emotional satisfaction of the artist.  Still, they are interesting, are they not?

what do you think

stairways, the generally celestial?

closer up, the details

confute interpretation in the sense

of particular visions

what’s wonderful

is exactly that elaborate

drawing of figures

without subject or reference

then knowing they were right

All the Ocean Parks started the same manner, though this is not something one can say in a strictly historically way.  No one was there watching, but the familiar diagonals appear in nearly every painting (are they hiding in every one?) cutting across the horizontal-vertical matrix.  And in nearly every painting they have been worked back into the deep pentimenti by over-painting and erasure, never completely obliterated because they constituted the glimpse from which the works arose.  Not perfect evidence, perhaps, but enough to help us understand the genesis of the archetypal motif.

but still it’s details

differentiate each painting

from the others

keep each one interesting

in its own familial way

no two days alike

exactly, no two Ocean Parks

precisely the same

number of triangles, the same

dispositions of red

Art Criticism 101B

what if he had

a giant dictionary in his head

could he give meanings

to the shapes in their arrangement

so we’d know what they meant?

we might then indeed

find California light made manifest

O, geography of the west

in the myriad exotic objects

he is said to have portrayed

*Ocean Park #17 can be viewed online at: http://uima.uiowa.edu/richard-diebenkorn/

Here is an excerpt from the descriptive curatorial essay on the University of Iowa Museum of Art’s website, a perfect illustration of what is most wrong with Diebenkorn criticism today.

No. 17 is a brilliant example of Richard Diebenkorn's now legendary exploration of architecture and light in his Ocean Park series.  The Ocean Park works are essentially conversations between "ocean" — broad areas of atmospheric color implying nature's vastness — and "park" — ambiguous lines evoking a desire for order and containment.

“Ocean Park” refers neither to the “ocean” nor to a “park,” but to an area near the beach in Santa Monica, California, north and south of Ocean Park Blvd.  This is where Diebenkorn had a studio. 

Architecture?  The idea must arise from all the straight lines.  Light?  All the bright colors, yellow and white, why, they must be representative of—light.  Ocean?  I don’t know.  You tell me.  And park?  You mean park like grass and trees and, oh, aren’t those the legs of giant picnic tables?

What's It All About, Alfie?: On Abstract Art and the Question of Meaning

Here are two paintings from the year 1824. The first is a "Seascape Study with Rain Clouds" by Constable:

This certainly could be an abstract work by a contemporary artist, hanging somewhere in Chelsea. The second is by Caspar David Friedrich, "The Sea of Ice":

Again, if I had not yet seen this, and someone told me that this painting was in a gallery in London, just completed by a young German artist, I would be impressed.  Both of these works are actually likely to have been studies: of light, of form, of the layering of paint. They contribute to each artist's practice, and yet neither is really characteristic of the major works of these men.  I find them moving. And yet, I have friends who belittle abstract art, who, when they are faced with a work by one of our contemporaries that seems as "abstract" as these, laugh, or think of them as "studies" for something more significant, as works with no meaning, as mere decoration. I have seen a sweet little old man point his umbrella towards the center of a huge De Kooning and say "There, there's the lighthouse. And the rock is just over here."


I remember an interview with Robert Motherwell on PBS, where he said, at one point, very slowly and forcefully, that "If the abstraction, the violence, the humanity was valid in Abstract Expressionism, then it cut out the ground from every other kind of painting."  And we look at a Motherwell, "Elegy to the Spanish Republic XXXIV" from 1953-4, measuring 80 x 100" (think here of scale):

When you have been in a roomful of Motherwells,  it is impossible to deny their "violence" and "humanity." They are not decorative. They are meant to evoke feeling. I knew someone who worked for Motherwell once, who, fresh out of art school and trying to become a famous painter, asked his new teacher a series of questions. And Motherwell, a very articulate and learned person (Stanford, Harvard, Columbia), fed up, said, finally "Don't talk to me about theory.  *#%$  theory. Go home and astound me."  Abstract art may provoke theory, but it isn't made out of it.

It can be easy to walk right past a painting and not even try to take it in: it's too hard, it's too late in the day, it seems a silly exercise, people say. And yet, and yet. Take Mark Rothko.  Here is a work of his from 1954, called "Homage to Matisse" (who had just died that year):

Matisse is right there. Rothko said that "there is no such thing as a good painting about nothing."  He meant, he said, to express "tragedy, ecstasy, doom ..." through his work.  Rothko's work does not reproduce well. It must be seen. He created it through transluscent layering, and, when you stand in front of one, you can see the colors peeking through, the way memories appear, unbidden. The paintings reverberate in real life. There is a DVD called "Rothko's Rooms" which is a pretty powerful introduction to his complexities as a person and to the aims of his art.  Kirk Varnedoe said that "Rothko may make us think anew about the evening sky, but having once thought about the evening sky, we think about Rothko differently."

Josef Albers created a series of works over years, working through the way that colors could show us the way to see.  Art and science were one, for him, and he worked through endless combinations of colors, sometimes with only faintly observable changes from one to the next, all in the same shapes, squares nested inside of squares.  Below is "Study for Homage to the Square" from 1970:

 

Even in digital reproduction, we can see something happening here.  As I thought through my list of abstract painters, I had no luck finding anyone who painted in the void. I can't think of anyone who didn't have recourse to feeling or meaning as the paintings developed. Not anyone. Albers may have said it best: "Learn to see and to feel life; that is, cultivate imagination, because there are still marvels in the world, because life is a mystery and always will be. But be aware of it."

And so I leave you with one last view, of a Northern California winter sky: