Entry - 11.29.19

From my first exposure to his art, I’ve retained an undiminished interest in the paintings and prints of Edvard Munch.  After reading a lot about his life and looking at many reproductions of his work, I came to understand that Munch’s oeuvre could be classified as belonging to three major periods: a developmental stage during which he was influenced by Naturalism and Impressionism, an interval of mature fruition which lasted from about 1890 to 1910, and finally a long period of decline characterized by a diminution of ability.  I recall that during my years of undergraduate art studies one professor summed up the course of Munch’s production in a nutshell: he created amazing works which reflected his intensely volatile lifestyle and a perspective colored by mental illness; after he sought treatment and adopted a more moderate way of living, his art lost its edge and was no longer worthy of serious examination.  I am always wary of any easy summing up of an artist’s output, but I must admit that my own observations corresponded to a large degree with this evaluation.  The powerful works that really grabbed me and I returned to again and again all seemed to have been produced during that relatively short interval of mature fruition.  I refer to works like:

Edvard Munch - Summer Night-Inger on the Beach - 1896

Edvard Munch - The Sick Child - 1896

Edvard Munch - Puberty - 1894/95

Edvard Munch - Death in the Sickroom - c1895

Edvard Munch - Madonna - 1894

Edvard Munch - Jealousy - 1895

Edvard Munch - Melancholy - 1891

Edvard Munch - The Scream - 1893

Edvard Munch - The Brooch - 1903

Edvard Munch - The Voice - 1896

Edvard Munch - Ashes - 1895

Edvard Munch - The Storm - 1893

But I can’t help wondering, if these three periods hadn’t been defined for me so categorically, would I have been disposed to see his output, instead, as part of one continuum defined by regular peaks and valleys.  In 2017, just before I retired, The Met Breuer hosted an exhibition, Edvard Munch – Between the Clock and the Bed, which featured many of Munch’s late paintings, the majority of which I’d seen only in reproduction.  The show included works from throughout Munch’s career, and I must admit that, though I was curious to see the late work, I wasn’t expecting much.  I was surprised to find a good many of the late paintings in the show to be emotionally powerful and technically sound – in fact, I was impressed at how intuitive his painting continued to be in his later years, surfaces varying from thick impasto to thin washes to bare canvas, and I recognized that he successfully pulled off some fairly audacious exploits in these canvases, adopting practices that I would hesitate to attempt.  I was impressed.

Edvard Munch - The Night Wanderer - 1923/24

Edvard Munch - Starry Night - 1923

Edvard Munch - Self Portrait between the Clock and the Bed - 1940/43

Of course, my impression could have been a response to some very selective curating on the part of the show’s organizers.  Without a doubt, Munch’s vision did undergo a major adjustment in his later years.  I would say he went from seeking through generalization a universality of experience during his youth to striving to present a specificity of experience by documenting real observations in his later years.  In these later works, the “players” are real people, with real occupations and class affiliations; they wear clothing specific to their function and status.  Munch is no longer the dissipated, intellectual outsider exposing the internal workings of a troubled mind; he is a member of a community whose members struggle against natural and manmade forces to survive or even thrive in the first years of the twentieth century.  While earlier, Munch would use compositional devices to obscure the effect of perspective, he now stressed that effect, depicting lines of crops converging in the distance or emphasizing the difference in size between individuals and objects in the foreground and those further away.  Often the later pictures record specific locations revealed in the distinct light of a specific time of day.  Even in a work whose theme encourages a more universal interpretation like Adam and Eve of 1909, Munch chooses to rely on specifics; we witness a somewhat well-to-do schoolgirl encountering an awkward young worker in an orchard – she confidently and coquettishly grasps a branch and bites into an apple, while the dumfounded boy is passive, his hands planted firmly in his pockets.  This painting is not a depiction of an engagement between the archetypal “man” and “woman”; the actors are members of specific classes as defined within an identifiable epoch.

Edvard Munch - Adam and Eve - 1909

Edvard Munch - Life - 1910

Edvard Munch - Workmen in the Snow - 1912

Edvard Munch - Man in Cabbage Field - 1916

Edvard Munch - Horse Team - 1919

I must admit that the above works don’t engage my interest as powerfully as the earlier work.  Here Munch documents externals rather than piercing externals to reveal the hidden core of things.  Often these paintings have an almost “photographic” quality to them – as if Munch captured a snapshot of a moment in time and translated it into a lushly and energetically painted image.  Perhaps my response to these images may only be a matter of personal preference.  And while there are many obvious failures included within his late oeuvre, Munch’s mature production is also riddled with many awkward, inconsistent and mawkish works.  I think the modernist revolution demanded that artists make forays into uncharted territory both thematically and technically – most particularly during the opening years of the twentieth century; inevitably radical experimentation would often result in less than perfect outcomes.

To understand how Munch’s approach to painting evolved it would be a good idea to explore briefly his own history and the changes that were occurring within the art world during his developmental years.  Born in 1863, Munch saw his mother succumb to tuberculosis when he was five years old, to be followed by his favorite sister within the following decade.  Later on a brother who had survived to adulthood passed away shortly after marrying.  Munch himself was a sickly child, often restricted to bed where he developed an interest in drawing; he believed that he was being pursued by death, that an inescapable fate awaited him.  To compound his jaundiced perception of the human condition, Munch believed his family to be inflicted with mental illness. His father, who Munch described as “temperamentally nervous and obsessively religious”, was a poor provider, unable to furnish a reliable income for his family.  His younger sister was diagnosed with mental illness at an early age and was later committed to an asylum.  Munch had a number of unsuccessful relationships with women but, being naturally wary of family life and fearful of his own mental condition (exacerbated by alcoholism), was unable to make a commitment to any of them.  Considering his personal history, it seems inevitable that Munch would address weighty matters within his art.

During his early studies, Munch was exposed to Naturalism and Impressionism and initially experimented with these styles.  But he recognized fairly quickly that the direct replication of outward semblances would not satisfy him.  Fortunately, in the late nineteenth century, a movement was evolving amongst a loosely connected, geographically diverse group of writers, artists and musicians who sought to expose absolute truths and explore personal perspectives in their work, often employing mythological references or dream imagery.  Members of this movement sought to address large themes, to examine the private motivations and drives that fueled human behavior and to develop a new language to describe the indescribable.  This movement was dubbed Symbolism.

Ferdinand Hodler - The Night - 1889/90

Arnold Bocklin - Island of the Dead - 1880

Gustave Moreau - Jupiter and Semele - 1895

Gustav Klimt - Death and Life - 1915

In many ways, Munch was the consummate Symbolist.  Paintings like Melancholy, Puberty, The Sick Child, Madonna, Jealousy, Death in the Sickroom, The Dance of Life and The Scream absolutely address essential themes central to universal experience.  In these works, Munch finds the quintessential vocabulary that permits the viewer to readily empathize with the monumental themes which he explores.  Somehow he finds a way to unite the universal and the personal in a single image.

But Munch is at times also categorized as an Expressionist.  More so than any of his contemporaries, Munch pushed the limits of what was acceptable technically in his art.  He used paint intuitively, often employing thin washes to rapidly cover large sections of canvas, streams of running color comingling as gravity drew them downward.  At other times, he applied paint in thick blobs, without seeking to achieve fine nuance or effect a satisfactory transition between individual strokes of color.  He employs long, sinuous strokes of paint that snake across his canvases, whether depicting water or hair or sky or jetty, creating a dizzying, unsettling effect. Often, in his haste, he left the bare canvas exposed.  He paints rapidly, presenting only those basic elements essential to the recognition of form and eschewing detail and nuance.  Munch has developed a method of painting that is deeply personal: intuitive as opposed to deliberate, emotional rather than intellectual.  He apparently works very quickly and energetically, giving immediate vent to the emotions which spark his efforts.  Immediacy and authenticity are critical to his process.  This approach conforms with many of the basic tenets of Expressionism.

Earlier this year, I read Karl Ove Knausgaard’s examination of Munch’s oeuvre, So Much Longing in So Little Space, in which the author not only provides a personal evaluation of Munch’s art but engages in discussions with a number of contemporary artists about Munch’s place in history and his influence on their own work.  I found the book to be enlightening and informative, often indulging in the author’s very subjective reactions to lesser known works of the artist.  A very astute observation of Knausgaard, one I had never made myself, was:

“One might say that Symbolism consists of solemn or grandiose motifs painted in a careful or pusillanimous way.  That is true of Gustave Moreau and Böcklin, for example.  And one could say that Expressionism is trivial motifs painted in a wild way.  What is striking about Munch, and what makes him special, is that he paints solemn motifs, like The Scream and Despair and Melancholy, in a wild way.  He stands midway between the two schools.”

He’s right about the motifs addressed by the Expressionists.  Often they were prosaic, but it was how they were addressed that made them significant.

Maurice de Vlaminck - Sailing Boats at Chatou - 1906

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner - Street, Dresden - 1908

Henri Matisse - Open Window, Collioure - 1905

Chaim Soutine - Pastry Cook of Cagnes - 1922

Erich Heckel - Path between Bushes - 1907

I might go further than Knausgaard and suggest that Munch’s exposure to the work of contemporary Expressionist artists may very likely have been responsible for his eventual shift from grand themes to more everyday ones.  Maybe seeing Expressionist work much more firmly grounded in aesthetics made Munch recognize what, I believe, most modern viewers now feel about Symbolist art – that, in addressing grand, dramatic and aberrant themes, it often descended into sentimentality and awkwardness.

Knausgaard also recognizes something that I’ve thought about for years - that an interesting parallel exists between Munch’s late work and that of fellow Norwegian Knut Hamsun.  While Munch began depicting ordinary townspeople, farmers and laborers in his art, at about the same time Hamsun in his later novels stopped presenting odd outsiders, mysterious strangers and struggling intellectuals and chose to address lowborn and unsophisticated people in his writings.  In works like The Growth of the Soil, The Women at the Pump and Wayfarers, Hamsun apparently pays homage to the unworldly folk who scratch together a living from soil and sea, tirelessly labor while battling the unforgiving elements and have no time, patience for or interest in intellectual pursuits.  Something was definitely happening in Northern Europe at that time which made people suspicious of sophistication and engendered in the individual a desire to return to his or her roots.  The Nazis recognized this development and embraced “the Volk” in their propaganda, relating the soul to the soil and celebrating the simple peasant worker.  Sophistication became synonymous with degeneracy, education with indolence.  There are probably a million reasons for the evolution of this perspective.  I believe that primarily this kind of thinking came about as people became aware of the drawbacks of industrialism and rampant capitalism.  Also the pointless slaughter and destruction of World War I must have made ordinary people question the judgment and motives of their elite, ruling classes and promoted an allegiance to local, grassroots initiatives.  Later on, the financial collapse that came with the Depression must have made people question their reliance on big business and financial institutions and encouraged them to look back wistfully to a golden age when their wellbeing would have been linked inextricably with their own personal industry.  I think both Munch and Hamsun couldn’t help but be influenced by the development of this outlook.

I believe this blog entry to be even more meandering and unorganized than usual, so a brief summation might prove helpful.  It is my contention that the commonly held belief that Munch’s artistic production can be placed in either of two specific categories (pre or post psychiatric treatment) is erroneous and misleading.  I also assert that the premise that his technical skills diminished after treatment is inaccurate; there are certainly plenty of late Munchs that show the same technical brilliance and inventiveness as his earlier work (particularly the self portraits).  Munch’s personal history made him a natural participant in the Symbolist movement, providing him the opportunity to address epic themes that related directly to his own life experiences.  His work did change over the years, but the change was more of a slow evolution than an abrupt cataclysm.  And that change was more thematic than stylistic, most likely resulting from exposure to Expressionist art and the influence of an early twentieth century Northern European Weltanshauung that idealized the simple existence of honest, unrefined laborers.

(By the way, Oslo’s Munchmuseet invited Knausgaard, also Norwegian, to curate an exhibition that was held at the museum in the summer of 2017.  The exhibition, Towards the Forest, featured many paintings, prints and sculptures culled from the museum’s own collection that had never been shown before.)

As always, I encourage readers to comment here.  If you would prefer to comment privately, you can email me at gerardwickham@gmail.com.

Entry - 8.3.19

My youngest son and I recently returned from a trip to Ohio where we spent a week with my nephew Rich and his wife Sam on their farm.  Our goal was to assist them in their work, perhaps tackling a few tasks that might require multiple hands and the wee bit of muscle that we could provide.  To be honest, I guess our initiative was partly altruistic and partly selfish, in that, while their gain was in material labor, ours was in experience.  I mean how many opportunities do you have in a lifetime to immerse yourself intimately in a completely alien way of life?  Through sheer serendipity, it turned out my sister was visiting the same week, which proved a great benefit for not only did she participate in many of our chores but also provided babysitting services for Rich and Sam’s young daughter.

Sam

While there I talked a lot with Rich and Sam about their farming methods which are far from mainstream.  They grow a large variety of vegetables and fruits in two not extremely large fields which they maintain mostly by hand.  They don’t use pesticides or weed killers.  I used to refer to their approach as “organic” until Rich explained to me that the regulations that determine if produce can be certified as organic have been so watered down as to make the designation practically meaningless.  Their goal is to produce food that is safe to eat while preserving the environment for our and future generations – an admirable objective which necessarily results from a firm personal commitment, for farming this way is time consuming and labor intensive.

Rich

Unfortunately, the week we spent at the farm will most likely end up being the hottest and most humid of this summer.  So when we were out in the fields the sun was bearing down on us without mercy.  I must admit that lollygagging and socializing meant that we usually missed the prime early morning hours when the sun was low and temps reasonable; consequently we often were active during the worst part of the day.    I would work in the heat until I felt a little lightheaded and nauseous, then take a break in the shade for a drink of water.  My son was infinitely more robust.  He could work for hours in the sun without respite.  I kept my eye on him to make sure he didn’t succumb to heatstroke, but he tolerated the conditions superbly.

Sam in the Fields

While at the farm, we participated in a great variety of tasks.  We weeded by hand.  This meant that we were bent over for long stretches of time with our heads at knee level and a Japanese hand hoe in hand.  Of course, the back started to ache mightily after just a quarter hour of this activity.  Rich told me that when he first started farming his back hurt like hell, but with time his muscles strengthened and bending over no longer bothered him.  I felt the worst part of weeding was the tedium of extracting the weed without taking the desired plant along with it.  Often, the two were inextricably united.  One day we assisted with the harvest.  This was easier than weeding, but once again we were stooped over the plants - often straddling them, our legs splayed out awkwardly. Before going to market, all the produce had to be cleaned.  My son and I individually washed by hand a large variety of cucumbers and squash, carefully rinsing off residual soil and removing prickles.  This was an agreeable activity because it was performed standing upright out of the sun.  I particularly liked submerging my hands in the ice cold basins of water which was extremely refreshing in the July heat.  The ongoing joke was that I was completely lame at identifying the produce that Rich set out in bins for us to wash.  “Zucchini?” I’d ask.  “English cucumber,” Rich would patiently reply.  “Romaine lettuce?” I would venture.  “Nope.  That’s basil.”  My favorite activity during our stay was repairing the long driveway.  This entailed shoveling and tamping down gravel again out in the sun, a job that appealed to me because it was purely physical and not fussy.

Washing the Harvest

I would be misleading you if I left you with the impression that we worked our asses off while in Ohio.  Not by a long shot.  We probably spent as much time watching Disney movies with Rich and Sam’s baby daughter as we spent in the fields.  I took one day off to paint in the yard.  And we certainly whiled away many an hour gabbing around the dining room table, so much so that I often wondered if our net contribution to the farm was actually negative.  Maybe all we accomplished was to disrupt the routine of two extremely productive people.  Rich and Sam assured me that this wasn’t so – that our assistance was tremendously helpful.  I think they were just being nice.

Ohio Clouds

We brought along with us to Ohio a sign I had made for Rich and Sam displaying on each side the image of a fox and the name of their farm: Foxhole Farm.  The process by which this piece evolved is extremely circuitous and resembles the machinations I go through in creating any artwork.  Yes.  Occasionally a work does progress methodically and predictably from start to finish exactly as I have planned, but, much more commonly, my process is about false starts, clumsy blunders, corrections and reinventions.  I think it might be interesting to examine how this sign came into being, hopefully revealing along the way some parallels to my regular process.

Almost immediately upon learning of Rich and Sam’s foray into farming, I thought their fledgling enterprise could use a sign.  Maybe my inspiration was the strange sign that Balthus made for a seafood restaurant back in the 40’s.  It surely was in my thoughts.

Balthus - The Cat of the Mediterranean - 1949

In my mind I imagined a thick, rustic plank showing, carved in relief, their business name and the image of a fox.  I sketched out a few drawings of foxes, radically simplifying their structures to create a graphically accessible image that I could execute with some crude carving tools.  For my birthday, I asked my wife to get me a set of carving knives and a strop for sharpening them.  Then I visited a couple of local hardware and lumber stores to seek out the perfect slab of wood – preferably a thick, solid, soft, knotless one.  Unfortunately, none of the stores carried what I was looking for.  In fact, it was impossible to purchase any solid piece of wood in the size I desired, but I did find a large composite panel constructed of a multitude of knotty sections which I reluctantly bought.  This panel leaned against our living room wall arched over a baseboard radiator for months while I contemplated it, wondering if it could withstand the stress of the carving process without fragmenting.  I recognized already that my relief would have to be shallower than I had intended because my panel was not particularly thick.  Finally one day this spring I thought to myself “nothing ventured…” and retrieved the panel to begin work, only to find that, while exposed to continual heat throughout the prior winter, it had dried considerably and had developed a crack along one of its seams.  I sawed off the cracked segment, rounded off the corners of the panel and applied glue to the edge of the panel to strengthen it.  Clearly, I would have to give up my plan to carve the panel.

So I thought I would draw on the wood with an indelible Sharpie hoping to create the feel of the busy illustrations in 19^th century newspapers.  I had come up with a simple concept that one side of my sign would depict a fox out hunting at night while the other would show him descending into his den with the morning’s sunrise.  After I had worked on my drawing for several hours, my wife came in from work, examined the results of my efforts and could only observe: “My!  That’s a lot of lines.”

I felt my drawings were satisfactory but noticed that the many dark toned knots in the panel distracted from the imagery.  Perhaps if I stained the wood the contrast between lights and darks would lessen.  I used a Weathered Oak stain which did little to temper the harsh glare of the bare wood while introducing subtle grays which simply made the sign look dirty.

So I stained the panels a second time, in this instance using an Early American stain.

This resulted in a definite improvement but I still wasn’t completely happy.  The imagery required greater definition and distinctiveness.  I decided to use oil paints in transparent layers to give the images more clarity and provide greater visual appeal, but I wanted to retain the drawings I had executed with the Sharpie too.  Initially, I was painting as intended in thin washes but soon found myself employing the more robust, impasto technique I typically use in my work.  After several days of painting, I was satisfied with the piece and felt I could call it complete.

Morning

Night

I believe I achieved a balance in these two images.  Though the painted surface is primarily perceived, the underlying drawing is still plainly visible; in fact, in some areas I left the stained wood and ink untouched, permitting it to read as earth.  I also wanted to achieve a balance between graphic and illusionistic representation.  Of course, this work is a sign and as such should serve to capture the attention of passersby and communicate a message.  To accomplish this, a powerful graphic quality is required.  For instance, the stylized rays of the rising sun in one image and the giant full moon and black silhouettes of pines in the other refer to real phenomena while presenting them in a more striking format.  At the same time, I couldn’t avoid getting interested in the real anatomy of a fox, the sinewy structure of its legs, its magnificent feathery coat, the complex variations in coloration of the fur on different parts of its body, the absurd balloon of a tail nearly equal in girth and length to the fox’s torso.  Or in painting the full moon, I made sure its patterns of craters, valleys and swirls were accurately represented.  So there’s a lot of nuance and observation in these images as well.  Finding the right balance between simple graphic design and convincing illusionistic detail was my challenge.  Hopefully I found that balance.

I must admit that as a sign my work is truly a failure.  My original concept was to create a sturdy, rustic, two-sided placard that could be hung from a signpost on Rich and Sam’s property to promote their business – a kind of quaint declaration of their presence, more fun than utilitarian.  Right from the get go, I learned that the composite panel was too fragile to endure being suspended from a bracket.  And oil paints cannot withstand the extreme temperature variations that come with exposure to the elements.  So when I presented Rich and Sam with this albatross, I informed them that it was their job to figure out what to do with it.  I’m sure they’re still scratching their heads.

Random Farm

But that’s what makes painting interesting for me.  You may have a very unambiguous goal in mind at the start of a work but still end up with something completely different.  If it weren’t for the twists and turns, the conundrums, the gambles and the compromises, I don’t think painting would excite me.  Painting is really about process.  And, speaking of process, since our trip to Ohio, I’ve been thinking about how many parallels there are between painting and farming.  First, before you can begin you must have a solid knowledge base.  Whenever talking with Rich and Sam, I was often in awe of how much they knew about farming and how much experience they had gained in a relatively short period of apprenticeship.  Secondly, you have to have the right tools.  Rich seemed to pull out some odd looking tool for every task he assigned to us, and, as we discovered, the right tool made an incredible difference in how effectively and efficiently that task was addressed.  Thirdly, things don’t always go as planned.  Weather is definitely the wild card on a farm.  Earlier this year, during our extremely wet spring, the new plantings were washed away and the fields had to be reseeded.  I’m sure, when it comes to weather, it’s always going to be too hot or too cold, too dry or too wet.  And then there are pests.  Just during our short stay on the farm, Rich showed us slug damage on the English cucumbers and I stumbled upon a Japanese beetle infestation among the basil plants.  As with a painting, you can’t throw in the towel when confronted with your first complication; you have to seek out solutions.  And finally, you have to be willing to put in hours of labor.  We only experienced a “snapshot” of one phase of the farming process, but, even then, I was astounded at how much work goes into putting produce on our tables.  We spent hours in the fields weeding and harvesting.  All the produce had to be washed, often individually by hand, then weighed, bunched, packaged and labeled.  Ultimately, the produce was loaded into a trailer and carted off to restaurants or offered for purchase at a local farmers market.  I’ve often been stunned at the ridiculously low prices for which dealers and collectors have suggested I should sell my work.  I’ve thought to myself that, considering the hours that I put into a single work, I could earn more per hour working at the neighborhood McDonalds.  Rather than sell at such insultingly deflated prices, I prefer to give my art away to receptive and appreciative friends and family members.  After witnessing how much work goes into farming, I believe a turnip should cost $50.

Adena Burial Mound

I am most grateful to the folks at Foxhole Farm for welcoming my son and me into their home and providing a unique hands-on experience of a way of life completely alien to our own.  It was great to get to know this wonderful family a little more intimately and work side-by-side with them for a short while.  On our last evening at the farm, I gathered the work crew out in the yard for one final farewell group shot.

If you live in the Dayton area, you can purchase produce from Foxhole Farm at:

Oakwood Farmers Market 22 Orchard Drive, Oakwood, Ohio

     Every Saturday from 9-1, June 1st through October 20th 

Centerville Farmers Market 892 South Main Street, Centerville, Ohio

     Every Thursday from 3-7 pm, May 16th through October 25th 

To learn more about Foxhole Farm, please visit their website at: https://www.foxholefarmohio.com/

As always, I encourage readers to comment here.  If you would prefer to comment privately, you can email me at gerardwickham@gmail.com.

(Note to Rich and Sam:  Though I tried to be as accurate as possible, I’m sure I got a lot wrong; don’t hesitate to set me straight by commenting here.)

Entry - 6.8.19

“Works of art often last forever, or nearly so.  But exhibitions themselves, especially gallery exhibitions, are like flowers; they bloom and then they die, then exist only as memories, or pressed in magazines and books.”

-          Jerry Saltz

So my wife and I took down my art show on June 2^nd, and I believe that a brief follow-up to my last entry addressing my then impending exhibit is warranted.  I show only very rarely, so the experience is anything but routine for me.  It certainly makes sense at this time to document the work shown and offer a few observations.

As I stated in my last entry, I’ve been attending weekly life drawing sessions at the Unison Arts Center in New Paltz for over a year and really enjoy the atmosphere there.  The sessions are informal, friendly and relaxed, and the vast majority of participating artists are quite talented.  Their gallery space is intimate but sizeable enough to permit the display of a significant selection of work.  Since the life drawing sessions are held in the gallery space, I saw a good number of exhibits come and go and eventually began to entertain the idea of showing there myself in the future.  I conferred with the individual who oversees the drawing sessions, and, though positively inclined, he advised me that I would have to put forward a proposal to the organization’s management team.  As is my norm, I then lost steam and months passed.  Eventually (I really can’t explain why) I decided to move on this inclination.  I gathered together a sampling of digital photos of my work, updated my resume, wrote a succinct proposal laying out my intentions for an exhibit and submitted them for consideration.  To my surprise, I received a quick reply and was slated to show in the near future.

Originally, I intended to exhibit only my oil paintings but, as a concession to Unison, agreed to include a selection of works on paper – which offered the slim possibility of generating sales.  So in the weeks before the show, I was reprinting linocuts, purchasing frames and having mats prepared professionally.  I began surveying my work to determine which paintings and prints would be included in the exhibit.  I dusted off the paintings and thoroughly cleaned up a good number of existing prints that could be displayed as already framed - often many years ago.   I prepared a list of works for Unison which should have been an effortless job except I realized a little late that, while my paintings were thoroughly documented, the prints were not.  Dating the prints and determining their dimensions after they were already out of my possession proved a daunting undertaking.  I found a nearby rental location and reserved a truck in which to transport the work.  And finally I put together the obligatory Artist’s Statement, a document in which the artist, hopelessly, attempts in an extremely abbreviated format to explain what his work is all about.  Any regular reader of this blog should know that I’m anything but concise.  Of course, I wrote an unusable long and wordy statement that I include below:

             For many years now, I have primarily explored within my multi-figure compositions what I call “charged moments”.  These charged moments arise when something critical might occur - when the ordinary course of daily activity might be disrupted, resulting in commotion and upheaval.  The potential for disruption is suggested only; it is equally possible that nothing significant is at play – that if I chose to present the same scene just a few seconds later these activities might be concluded customarily, leaving the depicted players unscathed and impassive.

             Even when painting a portrait, a nude, a landscape or still-life, I try to defy conventions, to present my subject in a way that will not satisfy a viewer’s expectations, imparting a vague feeling of frustration or distress.  Usually this dissonance is somewhat subtle.

 It is my belief that this approach to subject matter offers my audience immediate access to my imagery and encourages, as well, a more engaged exploration of the themes that I address – hopefully promoting within the viewer a personal dialogue extending beyond the scope of anything I could have imagined.  Furthermore, and perhaps more importantly, my imagery reflects my worldview.  While it seems to me that today, more so than I can ever recall, people are compelled to interpret individuals and actions in strokes of black and white, I see only shades of gray.  I maintain an inherent suspicion of absolutes and an impatience with all dogmas.  Duality, ambiguity and contradiction intrigue me greatly as phenomena of contemporary existence.

After reviewing my statement, Unison returned a thoroughly pared-down version of it for my consideration.  The words were still mine, but now the statement favored heavily the “what” I was doing and ignored the “why” I was doing it.  Nothing irritates me more than when an artist describes his or her process as resulting from nothing more substantial than a whim.  (“I wanted to paint a green painting, so I did.” or “I had a lot of bottle caps lying around and thought wouldn’t it be cool to construct a landscape out of them.”)  If the artist cannot provide an explanation of motivation and purpose, it’s usually indicative that he or she is just treading water.  So I took another shot at the statement, trying to retain its original substance while doing so in much fewer words.  My attempt left Unison still dissatisfied, and now they returned to me a new statement written in the third person that was almost comically meaningless.  At that point, I implored them to use their original edited version which they graciously agreed to do.  Another hurdle surmounted!

Hanging the show was unexpectedly challenging.  I won’t go into detail but will just say that all of the strife and commotion endured that day was totally unnecessary and a bit outlandish.  With my wife’s and son’s assistance, I successfully installed the exhibition without suffering any casualties and felt that, once on the wall, my work would be secure until it was time to be removed.

Hanging Day

Beside the request that I include some prints and paintings on paper, Unison gave me free rein to determine what works I would include in the show, and I feel confident that I ended up with an extremely solid and representative sampling of my oeuvre – probably the best I’ve ever put together.  The show consisted of twelve oil paintings, ten prints and two gouache paintings.  I believe the exhibit benefited from the inclusion of the works on paper.  They added some diversity to the show and permitted me for the first time to display a sizeable array of the linocuts and woodcuts that I’ve generated intermittently over the last few decades.  Printing is a process that I have explored seriously, but the prints always seemed to play second fiddle to the oil paintings and never got shown.  It was very rewarding to see them on display together, holding their own, in my opinion, to the more ostentatious work.  The show was called “A Matter of Time”, alluding to how my paintings often capture an isolated instant of activity when the imminent potential for substantive change exists.  It was only after selecting the name that I recognized that it had a second meaning in that this show included work produced over a long period of time.  Many years of working fulltime and commuting into NYC on a daily basis had restricted the number of hours I could devote to my artwork and certainly reduced my output.  To put together enough work to fill Unison’s gallery space meant gleaning paintings and prints from decades of production; the oil paintings were generated between 1996 and 2018, and the earliest print included was completed in 1986.  The vast majority of the images documented the people and places that defined my life at these times.  This exhibition truly represented the results of “a matter of time”.

Personally, I dreaded most the opening celebration.  I was concerned that there might be some ceremony involved and I might be required to make a speech.  I abhor ceremony, not just because I’m less than an exhibitionist but because ceremony reeks of the artificial and the moribund.  In spite of my reservations, just in case, I had a vague oration constructed in my brain that I hoped would never be put to use.  My fears were completely unfounded.  Unison generously provided their space and an assortment of provisions for the opening without imposing expectations or restrictions of any kind.  The event, which beforehand I thought of as something that would have to be endured, proved in reality to be extremely enjoyable and rewarding.  A sizeable crowd assembled in the gallery space over the opening’s two hour duration.  Of course, my wife and children attended, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that all of my siblings, their spouses and many of their children came – a rare gathering that only seems to happen these days for weddings and funerals.  Many representatives of the local home schooling community were there.  My sister-in-law and brother-in-law heavily promoted the show with their book club, and my boys coerced their workmates to attend.  A few old friends were there as well as a selection of Unison members who proved to be both very receptive to my work and knowledgeable about art in general.

That's me among my paintings.

The opening crowd conservatively estimated to be ten thousand.

New Hamburg Reading Society

New Hamburg Reading Society

The Spirits and Cheeses Crew

Great to see a few old friends I hadn't gotten together with in years.

Many of the individuals who modeled for the artwork were able to attend.

The opening flew by, and I savored a brief moment of feeling relevant.  I appreciated greatly the show of support from friends and family.  It’s not easy to haul oneself off to a Sunday evening art show – especially when an episode of the final season of Game of Thrones is scheduled to air that same night.

So with the hanging of the show and the opening out of the way, I could relax, put my feet up and relish the thought that my work was currently on display.  Well, not quite.

One of the benefits of showing at Unison is that the location is used for Dance, Tai Chi and Qigong classes, Writing Workshops and Life Drawing Sessions during the week and concerts and other performances on weekends.  This means that throughout the duration of the show, a regular stream of educated folk with an interest in the arts will see your work.  This is certainly not the norm for most smaller venues.

The downside soon became apparent. As a promotional tool, Unison shares snippets of their weekend performances on social media, and my wife and I were shocked to see on facebook the first weekend the show was up a long line of singers squeezed onto their undersized portable stage, the gyrating posterior of one singer apparently lapping regularly against one of my paintings.  We were aghast, but hopefully it was a onetime occurrence.  Not quite.  In the weeks ahead, usually just before going to bed, my wife would be making a final tour of sites on her tablet and she’d let out a gasp.  I’d turn to her quickly.  “Oh no!  What are they doing now?”  She’d reluctantly turn the screen of her tablet to me to reveal some new outrage that would leave me hours later lying in bed wide-eyed and anxious.  During the exhibit, we witnessed drum kits positioned immediately before paintings, upright bass players strumming away contentedly oblivious to the artwork inches away and flamenco dancers strutting about energetically amidst the exhibit.  Though we were spared the visuals, a high school chamber orchestra was somehow wedged into the space, a movie screen for a student film festival was installed above the paintings and a fundraiser dinner was hosted at the location.  I was just waiting to hear that a Beijing acrobatic troupe would be performing there or maybe a Liverpool dart throwing competition would be held in the space.  As it were, at every Saturday life drawing session I attended, I began by repositioning many of my paintings and prints that had evidently been jostled about since my last visit and would painfully endure watching one participant in the sessions splashing away in oil paints, her easel abutting one of my canvases.  Obviously exhibiting at Unison was not for the faint of heart.

On the other hand, a very positive event occurred along with this show.  Ever since relocating out of NYC about twenty five years ago, I have been impressed with a local magazine, Chronogram, which is dedicated to promoting the cultural life of the Hudson Valley.  In particular, I’ve enjoyed the high quality reproductions of remarkable artwork featured on the cover and within the pages of the magazine.  Very early on, I determined, somewhat irrationally, that one day my own work would be represented there.  Seven years ago when showing at another location, I presented a selection of images to the magazine; but though we had several productive communications, we were unable to successfully arrange to have my work included in the publication concurrent with the exhibit.  With this go-round we achieved better results, and in Chronogram’s May edition, my painting, Aloft, was featured on the magazine “parting shot” page.

Chronogram - May 2019

Parting Shot

I had a few email communications and one long phone interview with Chronogram’s Shrien Alshabasy during which I rambled on incoherently about my life and artwork.  Somehow from that she managed to put together a concise and elegant article.  If you would like to read her piece, I include a link below:

https://www.chronogram.com/hudsonvalley/gerard-wickhams-solo-show-at-unison-arts-center/Content?oid=8268947

Finally, it’s important that I make clear that it is not my intention to disparage Unison.  I still consider the organization to be an essential and successful promoter of art, music, dance, film and performance in the Hudson Valley and hope to maintain a rewarding relationship with them for many years to come.  And I certainly appreciate all of the time and effort the Unison staff contributed to make this show a possibility.  For all my travails, I would have to say that the experience of exhibiting there was an overall positive one.  But I also recognize that as a neurotic, exacting, overprotective artist it would probably be best for me in the future to only exhibit in locations specifically dedicated to solely displaying artwork.

Special thanks to my wife and children for their help in transporting, installing and taking down the show and preparing for the opening.   

As always, I encourage readers to comment here.  If you would prefer to comment privately, you can email me at gerardwickham@gmail.com.