You may have noticed that I tend to use the word “approach”
in instances when “style” would be expected.
When discussing the making of art, “style” has negative connotations in
that it suggests that the artist chooses a way of painting as one would opt for
a new hairstyle or select a period in which to decorate a room. The process of creation to be substantive
must be very different. I think in
imagery so bear with me here. I imagine
the artist confronted with an enormous, impenetrable ball of rock, metal and
debris, all comingled in concrete. The
artist knows that at the core of this ball there is something significant, but
he isn’t exactly certain of what that something is. So, he needs to work his way to the center of
the ball. Luckily, at his disposal, he
has a number of tools: a hammer and chisel, a crowbar, a maul, a vat of acid,
etc. I have always referred to these
tools as my arsenal or my bag of tricks; they are the skills and techniques of
paint handling that I’ve adopted, mastered or invented over years of
working. The tools to which one
gravitates are not selected arbitrarily but are determined through very
personal inclinations and unconscious drives.
And so, the artist begins hammering away at the giant ball, only to find
that his efforts result in little progress, the shattering of a stone, a shower
of dust, a chip of concrete sent flying.
But he keeps at it, moving about the ball, changing his tools,
positioning his body differently. And
occasionally, a new “approach” proves effective, progress is made and the
artist toils away for a period of time, believing that he’s conquered the
impenetrable ball and with continued effort the core will surely be his. Unfortunately, almost inevitably, the artist
tunnels into an enormous, solid chunk of metal or rock that refuses to be
penetrated or bypassed and must start the process all over on the shell of the
ball in hopes of adopting another “approach” that will ultimately permit access
to the core.
In my
Henri Matisse spent the summer of 1904 in St. Tropez,
working alongside Paul Signac and Henri-Edmond Cross, two adherents of the
theory of pointillism, an approach that adopted many of the tenets of impressionism
but, in adopting them, transformed them.
For instance, the impressionists utilized broken, impasto brushwork of
relatively pure, unmodulated color to accelerate the painting process, thereby
permitting the artist to capture the unique lighting effects of an instant, and
by using pure tones, often placing complimentary colors side-by-side, were able
to heighten the visual impact of their work, replicating the effect of intense,
natural lighting.
Seurat - Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte - 1886
The pointillists recognized that placing pure
tones next to each other heightened their impact but felt that the
impressionists use of the technique was too personal, too arbitrary. The pointillists painted in uniform dots
applied following scientific color theory, and it was their hope that the
expression of the personality of the artist would be minimized in their work,
that a Seurat would be indistinguishable from a Signac. While the impressionists sought to capture
the reality of a unique moment, the pointillists attempted to construct a nonexistent
universal moment when every aspect of an image, the scenery, the placement and
posing of the figures, their dress, their activities, all reflect the
quintessential.
Matisse - Luxe, Calme et Volupte - 1904
Matisse was not new to pointillism; he had experimented with
the technique since reading Signac’s essay, “D’Eugène Delacroix au
Néo-impressionisme”, in 1898. But in the
summer of 1904, he painted Luxe, Calme et
Volupté, a strange work that stepped away from pointillism and predicted
change that would shortly lead to the fauvist revolution. Of course, the pointillist elements are still
very apparent in this work, but, even though the image is constructed of
individual markings of color, the hues are heightened and often bear no resemblance
to natural coloration. The landscape, a
scene of the Riviera
Three years after Matisse painted Luxe, Calme et Volupté, Pablo Picasso stunned the art world with Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, a work which
depicts five prostitutes gathered in an interior space, a still life displayed
in the foreground. In his earlier work,
particularly that of the Blue and Rose Periods, Picasso had absorbed and
personalized a number of influences. The
symbolist movement, probably predominant during his youth, exerted a strong
influence on his immature work. Van Gogh
and the fledgling expressionists certainly made an impact too, but I would say
that the two artists that served to guide the young Picasso most consistently
were Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Paul Cézanne. The sway of Toulouse-Lautrec is easily
detected in Picasso’s moody scenes of circus performers, street people and the
Parisian nightlife, both in subject matter and execution. Cézanne’s influence came later and provided a
conceptual pathway for the most part.
Cézanne had explored the question of whether a painting could maintain a
visual integrity convincing to the viewer while violating the rules of
perspective. Cézanne accomplished this by
minimizing the perspective variations contained in an individual work and by
masking or disguising the junctures of planes in contradictory perspectives.
Picasso - Les Demoiselles d'Avignon - 1907
Picasso had assimilated Cézanne’s approach rapidly in the months
prior to the summer of 1907, and as he began work on Le Demoiselles d’Avignon was ripe for major change. I think that Picasso was compelled to explore
what would result if, instead of maintaining a visual integrity within an image
as Cézanne had done, he allowed the painting to conform to its own laws that
had little basis in visual perception. Les Demoiselles is more about
dismantling than construction. The
figures are drawn in conflicting styles, some figures being complete and
anatomically rational while others disintegrate and become defined as a series
of interlocking planes. Two figures wear
grotesque distorted masks that cannot be reconciled with other aspects of the
painting. Tonalities are subdued, flat
and unmodulated. There is no
identifiable light source in the work, and the space the figures inhabit is
shallow, fragmented and layered. Picasso
never resolves the conflicts contained in Les
Demoiselles. There was no need
to. He had gotten from the experiment
what he needed, an approach to addressing form and space that would evolve into
a style that has become known as cubism.
Jackson Pollock was a great admirer of Picasso’s work. He’d been known to bemoan the fact that
Picasso had done everything, that he hadn’t left anything new to realize. Picasso certainly was an extraordinary
innovator, having initiated developments in painting and sculpture which would
continue to be explored by future generations of artists for decades. But, no matter how far Picasso pushed his
abstractions, his imagery was always rooted in visual reality. Picasso felt that to divorce his work from
concrete visual references would leave him rudderless, that the creative
process would become pointless. In the
early 1940’s, Pollock was testing the boundaries of abstraction. In Male
and Female, a masterpiece which now hangs in The Philadelphia Museum of
Art, Pollock disguises his subject matter so successfully that, at first, it is
hard to distinguish the male and female figures within an active field of
patterns, brushwork and drips. But upon
closer inspection, the viewer recognizes the totem-like figures, set in two
vertical bands running parallel from the bottom to the top of the painting, by
a few key emblematic features: breasts, lush eyelashes and triangular
feet. The male figure resembles a chalkboard
covered in nonsensical calculations.
Though paint itself is becoming the primary subject matter for Pollock,
like Picasso, he cannot surrender the link to the visual world. He retains references to the physical
attributes of his subject matter; he uses patterns to define planes and establish
compositional cohesiveness; he inserts clearly recognizable numbers and
mathematical symbols in the painting.
Pollock - Male and Female - 1942
In 1943, a year after painting Male and Female, Pollock was commissioned by Peggy Guggenheim to
execute a huge painting, about eight feet by twenty, for her NYC
apartment. This represented an enormous
opportunity for Pollock, and, according to legend, he was slow to get started,
hesitating to consider his approach. In Mural, Pollock has jettisoned
recognizable imagery. Movement in the
piece is established by repetitions of gestures, in particular a series of
strong, mostly vertical strokes that run the length of the painting. Activity is contained in three major zones:
the top section that is more open and less crowded, the middle section that is
defined by large sweeping vertical strokes and the bottom which is packed with
busy, intricate detail work that creates a horizontal frieze along the base of
the painting. These zones enhance visual
interest and move the eye about the painting.
Pollock - Mural - 1943
Pollock’s step toward pure abstraction was influenced to a
great part by ideas being addressed by Jung.
Many surrealists, fleeing Europe during
WWII, had settled in NYC and brought with them Jungian theories of how the
subconscious mind asserted itself in the seemingly accidental gestures of the
artist which contained the germ of not only the individual’s repressed
emotions, thoughts and memories but those of all humanity. Through Guggenheim who represented many of
the surrealists, Pollock had been introduced to these theories, and, at that
time, he was coerced into undergoing Jungian analysis to treat his
alcoholism. Although Mural reflects Pollock’s recognition of
the importance of the subconscious in the creation of art, it retained some
traditional elements. Pollock is still
purposefully applying paint with a brush, and, though indecipherable,
polymorphic imagery and three-dimensional form are suggested. It would take four years before Pollock was
prepared to move to pure abstract expressionism, creating imagery through
dripping, splattering and pouring paint.
While in grad school, I developed an approach to
painting based on a process of abstracting the figure through distortion and
disguise. My goal was to suggest
multiple, often contradictory, activities that the viewer would be unable to
resolve. I found the process
rewarding. I enjoyed painting loosely
and intuitively, working in thick impasto built up in heavy layers or thinning
my paints to facilitate broad gestural strokes that dripped and splattered
across the surface of the canvas. I
became intensely aware of materials and experimented with new mediums, adding
sand and grit to my gesso, using tape to create occasional hard edges,
embracing the accidental effects that resulted from unrestrained painting. I became a fairly competent abstract painter,
and the work I produced during this period pleased me, leading me to believe
that I would continue to explore abstraction throughout my life.
Wickham - Modern Love - 1984
But by the late 1980’s, I was beginning to lose interest in
abstraction. The process of masking
imagery was becoming mechanical, artificial and arbitrary. The themes I addressed in my work were
limited, and repetition inevitably resulted.
I knew that I needed to reestablish reasonable boundaries that working
with more concrete imagery would impose but was resistant to returning to
figurative work. For a couple of years,
I struggled with imagery, working on isolated parts of the figure, including
words and symbols in my work, deliberately creating paintings that were awkward
and unpleasing. These works were,
without exception, failures, and most of them were, thankfully, destroyed.
At the end of that period, I was finally ready to consider
the possibility of painting figuratively once more. It didn’t feel good to be moving in this
direction. I sort of felt like I was
throwing in the towel, but I sought the confines that working with the figure
established. I had no idea how far this
process would take me, but I certainly had no interest in becoming a “realist”
painter. I needed to relearn how to
approach the figure, and I painted a small series of figurative works that were
very painterly and still anchored in abstraction. I wasn’t satisfied with the results and
turned to Picasso’s Cézannesque work to serve as my guide, in that it addressed
form cohesively without slavishly recording external reality. In Two
Women, painted in1986, I constructed my subject matter from a number of
sources: anatomy books, fashion magazines, advertisements and sketches from the
live model. In “building” these two
women, I was not concerned with perspective or desirous of creating a
convincing illusion of visual reality; I was interested in erecting two
structurally sound edifices. I placed my
figures in a shallow, ambiguous landscape of my imagination.
Wickham - Two Women - 1986
I was happy with the results and began painting a series of
similar works. These works were formal
explorations into which I eventually inserted the hint of a narrative element.
Many times with me, development comes as a result of
accidental occurrences. In 1989, I was
approached by a friend who wanted to commission me to paint her portrait. I recognized that she would make a perfect
model, being in great physical shape and very attractive, but knew that, as a
struggling college student, she could not afford to purchase a serious work of
art. I proposed that I’d paint her
portrait for free if she would pose for three additional works, an offer she
readily accepted. We tackled the
portrait first, and I understood that my model wanted a traditional image that
captured her features accurately and established form in a rational space, lit
by a definable light source and constructed following the rules of
perspective. I worked hard on this
painting, but it was challenging for me to make the leap into realist
representation. For so long I had
resisted the draw of realist painting that I struggled to create a consistent,
cohesive image, and, unfortunately for my friend, the finished work was flawed
and problematic.
For me, it was an important step just to entertain
painting in a realist mode again. This
may seem strange since this move is in a less radical direction, but, at that
time, moving toward realism meant reconsidering how I had come to understand art
functions. I still had three works to “collect”
from my model. I had always thought that
my friend embodied a duality, two conflicting personalities that would
eventually have to come to blows to determine a victor, and I decided to use
this idea as the germ for my next painting, a double portrait. In First
Light, I retained many realist elements that I had explored in my last
painting but couldn’t completely walk away from approaches that I had developed
in recent years. So, the image contains
an impossible space that permits me to display each element from the optimal
perspective for viewing, almost like ancient Egyptian art. The figure lying on the sofa and the carpet
exist in a plane that is flipped upward toward the viewer, while the standing
figure inhabits a space parallel to the picture plane. The striped curtain is situated both behind
and in front of the standing figure. All
the same, the picture preserves a convincing visual cohesiveness. I maintained a painterly approach in the
work, brushwork being evident and a bright golden underpainting surfacing in
multiple areas. Just as significant, the
work addresses themes that continue to interest me to this day. It presents a moment in an ongoing narrative
that suggests the possibility of extreme activities while simultaneously
asserting that nothing remarkable is happening here. First
Light is a seminal work for me, a painting that straddles multiple
approaches to addressing form and points the way to future work that will more
successfully explore themes introduced within this image.
Wickham - First Light - 1990
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