On the Nature of Art

"I've been thinking a lot lately about the nature of painting."

I said this one day recently to my friend and colleague Shawn Fields as we peered out of a fourth floor window in Chelsea. It was a luminous day, and the sun glinted off the Hudson river like a benevolent god winking. The wind paused profoundly in its journey from the west and I couldn't help but think that it had some beautiful and poetic significance.

He replied with a chuckle.
"That doesn't surprise me. What would surprise me would be if you had stopped."

I had the feeling that I took myself altogether too seriously. So, I laughed as well and enjoyed the sun.

"So, what's new?" He asked.
Happy to embark on any conversation about art, especially with Shawn, I began with an idea that I had been molding quietly for the past year or so. I didn't know if anyone had thought it before me, had written it down, or shared it with their colleagues in a moment such as this. But, I did know that Shawn could help me mull it over.

Once I said it out loud, we both knew that it seemed so simple that we couldn't believe we'd never heard it before.

It begins with the format. Painting is static, by its nature. It does not move. It does not change with time. Its meaning is locked into a single eternal statement, and your mind must take the mold of the lock to reveal its secrets. This is both its strength and its weakness. Because of this, a painting is inherently read iconographically through layers of symbolic meaning, like an onion. So, I ventured to say that a powerful painting should reinforce this kind of iconic reading. Almost before I finished saying this Shawn had the very same question as I:
What makes a painting iconic?

So we embarked on an analysis of a multitude of paintings which represented this iconic power. One of first we brought up was Andrew Wyeth, and Shawn explained that what he thought made Wyeth's work so striking was the way he composed large regions of clear values overlapping. There was always a dark, a middle, and a light - most often another intermediary value as well. He said, that if you shrink an Andrew Wyeth down in black and white, you'll see these patterns in every single painting.

We continued on to discuss other factors that made work iconic, and what even narrative paintings like "Susan and the Elders" by Rembrandt, or "The Death of Socrates" by David, had in common with obviously iconic paintings like Goya's "Saturn". What I found was that one idea kept returning: conceptualization. Conceptualizing color, conceptualizing form, conceptualizing light....
It seemed the common element that united the iconic impact of all these artworks was how the artist filtered the content of the work through his/her ideas about form, color, light, 2-d and 3-d design, texture, etc.... And as I pondered, it all became crystal clear. Of course, it seems so obvious now, but for some reason neither of us saw it before.

Because each artist was conceiving of these elements, a little bit of the idea was passed on in each of them. It was not the subject matter, but the way that these paintings were made that revealed the meaning, though the subject depicted could help. It was as if every single square inch of canvas was saturated with the artist's breath. His emotion, his perspective poured out of each shadow or highlight - the way he handled his brush, the decision to make a gray into blue and a hand into a silhouette, to make one detail sharper and another more obscure. There is a hierarchy and a meaning to how these elements are composed and relate to each other, which intuitively reveals meaning to the viewer. There is a mystery in this.

Film, by contrast, is a narrative form. The images change through time, in fact, it is virtually about change. This lead me to realize that verbal language is the very definition of the narrative and this is why it is so difficult, if not impossible to truly describe a painting in words. It is much farther than translating from one language to another, one just cannot communicate a purely visual idea in a verbal way. And one cannot communicate a verbal idea in a visual way. They are two banks over a canyon, but somehow the human mind can bridge the colossal abyss between - albeit across a dangerous and swaying rope bridge. We can see both sides, but we cannot transport anything more than a teaspoon of meaning between; hopefully not spilling its valuable contents in the unsteady journey.

A Momentary Lapse of Reason

Craftsmanship is not a word I had ever entertained in the same sentence with the name Julian Schnabel. And because of my biases towards actually caring about the visual component of Visual Art, I had all but written him off in my mind. No, to be totally honest I had completely written him off.

However, I was taken by surprise when I happened to stumble upon his latest exhibition at Claire Oliver while dropping some work off at my gallery on W 26th st. At first, I was entranced by the distant light of what appeared to be stained glass windows glowing in the gray mist of a rainy Wednesday morning. Had Claire Oliver been turned into some minimalist cathedral? I thought this unlikely so I decided to investigate. Upon closer examination, my first impression was of exultation. I had found the contemporary iconographer: who I dearly wished to be myself if I could only shake the monkey of seductive Baroque light off my back. My second impression was of shock- for I saw the name Julian Schnabel stenciled on the wall, above the aptly named show:

Burning Inside.

Which is how I felt. I quickly cycled through the five stages of grief:

Denial:This couldn't be Julian Schnabel. There's no way.
Anger: Why would he do this? This isn't his territory! He should stick to his cracked china, dissonant colors, and crudely drawn figures!
Bargaining: OK, you can have stained glass, but you can't monopolize contemporary iconography or beauty.
Depression: Who am I kidding? I don't understand the art world. Maybe I should just quit.
Acceptance: You know, if he's starting to think about aesthetics that means there's a growing market for it. This could be a good thing for me.

You see, I felt as if the team for passion and sincerity in art had finally won a big name over from the dark side, or a Franciscan monk who had just converted a Benedictine theologian. Gothic references aside (and also my self-righteousness), I think that the slight aroma of humor and sarcasm did slip in at times to the detriment of this near mannered mastery of the more sincere pieces.

The artist has gathered bits of the Byzantine clerestory, alchemically bound the light into a Gothic exploration of contemporary subjects - the abject ascetic business man seated on an English bench; a forlorn Ophelia poisoned in her room of startling geometric beauty. But my favorite piece (above) hangs in the entrance, encouraging inquiry: the androgynous and slightly decaying princess of somewhere bearing witness to the Guernica death of innocence, caught between the diametric opposition of two cosmic forces. This is My One Desire.

Just as I grew warm with the thought, I glanced again at the name on the wall and my tepid soul reversed the sensation. It seems that I had not looked closely enough. All the hopes of the past half hour had been dashed upon the tiles of Clair Oliver's floor like the heart of a sordid lover. Well, perhaps not that badly, but I was sadly mistaken. The name on the wall was in fact Judith Schaechter and not Julian Schnabel. Well, of course, that explains everything.

But, this message is to Julian Schnabel if by some strange twist of fate he might come across this article: Oddly, I still harbor a dim and newly founded hope that you'll come join us while there's still time. The grass is truly greener over here.

And to Judith Schaechter, thank you for the beautiful work. It stands on its own regardless of what name is attached to it - a testament to time and man's quest for meaning. I am sincerely glad it was you and not him.

Dichotomous Analysis: A Formal Necessity in Painting

Arcimboldo, Glenn Brown, Robert Treece

I think there's an interesting play between abstraction and form/space that makes these dynamic. In my view, there is a correlation between abstraction and iconicism (graphic images imprint more strongly on the mind), whereas space seems to imply time.

Yet, the format of painting is inherently iconic because it lacks the element of time and change. Perhaps this is why some of the most powerful painted images are iconic as they reinforce the nature of the medium. However, I can see how a narrative can be especially dynamic in contrast with the iconic nature of the medium if it holds a strong enough implication of time. But I think that the most intriguing images have a dynamic tension between the icon and the narrative - in painting, film, and photography.

Three visual elements lead me to define an image as iconographic or narrative in painting:

The graphic or tonal composition (contrast)

Time - as implied by singularity (iconic/layered meaning), or repetition and variation of form (temporal/chronologically revealed meaning)

Language of the paint (abstraction <-> form/space)

Perhaps this last correlation is a bit unclear. So, my thought process is as such:
The flatness of the abstract image defines the painting as a static object within the viewer's space.
The illusion of form and space implies that the viewer is within the space of the image, or the image is an extension of space. Since the viewer experiences time, the image implies a stillness (which is a reference to time). The abstract image in itself does not relate to stillness or change/time.

What is interesting to me is when an artist mixes these different elements to imply a seeming contradiction between both iconicism and temporality, which all the artists above do. It is the tension between this and other formal dichotomies that interests my eye:

Light/Shadow, Chromatic color/Neutral color, Warm/Cool, Iconic/Narrative, Texture/Smoothness, Open form/Closed form, Organic form/Geometric form....