Entry - 3.17.23

Little do they realize how ardently I look forward to those storms, when the wild waves will beat at my very door!                                                                                                                                                                                                             - Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

While working toward an MFA at Brooklyn College, I and my fellow classmates were required at three semester conclusions to present a sizable and cohesive body of work to the Art Department staff and the student body. During each of these reviews, the art student displayed that semester's output on the walls and stood before all, ready to explain his or her endeavors, entertain questions, consider observations and, commonly, suffer some serious abuse. Preparing enough work to fill the space was a real challenge. Besides attending grad school, most of us were working to support ourselves, often full-time. Generating that quantity of work meant that our energies couldn't be squandered and our efforts had to lead to productive results that contributed toward the expression of a central concept – both thematically and technically. At that time, I liked to paint fairly large. And, though I didn't follow any strict schedule, I'd say I would have to knock out a painting roughly every two weeks. Additionally, I would beef up my presentation with a number of smaller works that I could execute in two or three sessions. It was an extremely grueling process but one that taught me to discipline myself and led to significant progress both intellectually and technically.

My Final Review

Under this pressure to produce, it was only logical that I couldn't tackle a major “opus” that would take months to complete. That was out of the question. Though I found the Art Department staff to be pretty flexible and open-minded, I doubt that the presentation of one or two monumental jewels would have been considered sufficient to get the nod from the faculty to advance to the next semester. I suppose the student's goal was to find a balance between quality and quantity. So you could rest assured that you wouldn't come across The Night Watch, Burial at Ornans or Raft of the Medusa during one of these reviews. The only way to maintain high quality was to hold one's ambitions somewhat in check.

After graduating in 1984, I was free to pursue my artistic inclinations without restriction. I didn't set out with any big plan in mind; my sole intention was to further explore the themes and techniques that had concerned me during my schooling. At that time, I was interested in themes of ambiguity and contradiction, primarily as reflected in images that proposed an erotic/creative interpretation while concurrently suggesting a violent/destructive one. I would so obscure my imagery that, if successfully accomplished, the viewer could never reach a firm conclusion as to what was going on in any of my paintings. These paintings resulted from my observation that all things (history, politics, morality, success, beauty, etc.) could, quite legitimately, be evaluated from contradictory perspectives, that the premise that an objective reality existed was a deception.

I found creating these paintings to be pretty enjoyable. The work was immediate, intuitive, reactive and spontaneous. My goal was to eliminate nuance, illusion, volume, perspective, anatomy and naturalism from my work (basically all the skills I had worked for years to obtain). My paintings were garish, confrontational... perhaps even ostensibly obscene. They made an impression.

But, upon graduation, I was facing a difficulty. By then, my series had sort of run its course... well, at least, thematically. I felt I could have painted dozens and dozens more similar images varying elements of the suggested activities, applying new distortions, changing tones, lines and textures, and, I believe, that could have been a legitimate avenue of exploration. But that wasn't the way I worked. I also might have done research to uncover additional themes that were potentially suitable for me to address, but that seemed artificial and somewhat extreme. These paintings were conceived within the inner workings of my mind. No one posed for them. There was no source material for them. They were purely products of my own intellect. So I found myself somewhat at an impasse.

Excuse me if I digress a bit here.

I grew up in Suffolk County on Long Island. I didn't know much about my birthplace until our Junior High required that all seventh graders take a Social Studies course that covered local history. We learned about the native tribes that had once inhabited our town, how our area was subsequently colonized and the impact of the American Revolution on Long Island. Our teacher also familiarized us with a number of structures still standing in our town, some predating the revolution, other being built shortly afterwards. Something our teacher said during one of these sessions made a strong impression on me. She said that Long Island was shaped like a giant fish with the boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens forming the head and the twin forks of Montauk and Orient Points suggesting a tail. This fish was surrounded by the Long Island Sound to the north and the Atlantic Ocean to the south. Even though the Town of West Islip in which I grew up was situated on the south shore on this fish, it was easy to forget that our family lived on an island. Long Island is large, about 118 miles long and 23 miles wide at its maximum north to south width. If you lived north of Montauk Highway in West Islip (as we did), where most of the ordinary middle class population owned homes, you could easily forget that your town was a seaside community; though there were clues: occasionally, you would see a boat stashed beside a neighbor's home, our school playground was always crammed with a huge mob of noisy gulls, and if you dug down just a few feet in the yard, you hit sand.

Long Island

So most days our “island” attribute had zero impact. An exception occurred during the summer months when my father enjoyed a brief respite from work. My parents were definitely not “beach people”, but it was practically obligatory for anyone living in West Islip to make at least one visit with the family to Fire Island while on summer vacation. Fire Island was a barrier beach on the Atlantic coastline located directly across the Great South Bay from our town. In fact the pair of bridges that provided automobile access to the state park there emerged from West Islip and crossed to Captree Island before continuing on to the Atlantic shoreline. Bathing at Fire Island was more challenging than taking a dip in a pool or lake. The waves there could be ferocious. I can recall being just a tot, long before I'd learned to swim, wading inattentively in the shallows there, when a mammoth wave, that suddenly formed and towered high over me, came crashing down on my tiny, ashen, skeletal frame, sending me tumbling uncontrollably like a ragdoll in a tumult of shells and salt and sand. All sense of up and down was lost. The ocean's power just carried me relentlessly forward, never offering a moment to surface, until I struck something solid, the bare legs of an adult who looked down in consternation at this spluttering waif embracing his or her ankles. This happened on nearly every visit there, often multiple times. I guess I'd say that during my early youth the beach seemed chaotic and somewhat dangerous. Even as a child you knew that people occasionally drowned there.

Winslow Homer - Northeaster - 1895

As the years passed, I got more comfortable in the water. First I learned to float, then I mastered the dog paddle. Eventually I got the hang of real swimming. I was never a great swimmer (still ain't), but by my teens I had absolutely no fear of drowning, water being an element as natural to me as dry land.

Gustave Courber - The Wave - 1869

West Islip was a fairly affluent town, and our high school had both a planetarium and a swimming pool. All the students had to learn to swim and dive during gym classes. The swim coach was very skilled and capable. If I recall correctly, his daughter was a talented diver who actually qualified for the U.S. Olympic Team in the 70's. Perhaps because we lived in a seaside community, every student had to pass a swim test in order to graduate. (This made perfect sense to me at the time, but I can't help wondering how today's crop of capricious parents would react to this requirement. I can envision contentious school board meetings, folk with nonsensical placards packing the auditorium, the swim coach assailed at his car in the school parking lot afterward, mothers and fathers, furious that their parental rights were being trampled upon, shrieking, “Nobody's gonna interfere with our god-given freedom as parents to decide if our kids will swim or drown!”) Anyway, regardless of today's insanity, back then each student had to master four strokes: freestyle, the breaststroke, the butterfly and the backstroke. There were also a number of survival skills we had to learn. I recall our having to stay afloat with our hands out of the water using only our legs to buoy us and also being required to remain on the pool bottom in the deep end until the coach signaled that we could surface. Somehow everyone in our class managed to pass, some needing more patient instruction than others.

Katsushika Hokusai - The Great Wave off Kanagawa - 1831

During my high school and college years, I no longer needed my parents' participation to get me to the beach, so I spent a lot more time at Fire Island than I had before. Commonly, my friends and I would organize an outing, sometimes our ride provided by a kid who'd already gotten his license, other times we hitched. Often my older sister kindly hauled me along when she was heading to the shore with her own friends. I would usually spend the entire day at the beach, baking in the sun, walking the shoreline and taking a plunge into the ocean whenever the heat became too much. Eventually, I got my own driver's license, which meant I could visit the beach whenever I wanted. At times, I'd go there alone. I brought my girlfriends there. After getting off from my summer jobs, I'd go to the beach in the early evenings when the temps were cooler and the parking was free.

Fairfield Porter - Morning after a Storm - 1973

It was during this period that I became very relaxed in the water. My normal routine when swimming was to paddle out beyond the breakers, alternate between swimming and floating while out there, stay put until the ocean had sapped the last trace of my body's warmth, then reluctantly return to the shore. It was so perfect out in the deep water. I'd feel utterly alone. The squeals and screams of the waders faded away. White sunlight danced upon the ocean's swells around me. I would often float on my back, enjoying the feel of the sun on my face and chest, getting gently buoyed by a regular ripple of tame crests. There were times when I'd lift my head from the water to see a gull beside me, calmly sunning himself on the water's surface, unconcerned by my presence. The experience was very basic, like I was reconnecting with the essential elements of existence: air, water and sun... like I was momentarily suspended in a kind of primordial ooze, wielding unimaginable power and teeming with life.

Reginald Marsh - Coney Island Beach - 1935

On several occasions I'd find myself being pulled away from shore by the movement of the ocean. Despite attempting to rectify the situation by employing a vigorous freestyle stroke for a couple of minutes, I would discover, upon stopping to assess my progress, that I was in the exact same spot or even further out to sea. After several more tries, I would recognize the futility of my efforts and, more out of instinct than intellect, would begin to swim parallel to the shore. With just a few moments' labor, I could then easily proceed to shore. Later I learned about riptides and strategies to neutralize their impact, but honestly I believe that feeling secure in the water and not giving way to panic are just as critically important in addressing water emergencies as training and strategies.

Edward Hopper - Rocky Projection at Sea (Pulpit Rock) - 1916-19

Because I liked to stay out far beyond the breakers, I often provoked loud whistles and intense arm waving from the lifeguards hired to protect swimmers from the dangers of the ocean. I truly had sympathy for these individuals who were made responsible for keeping tabs on a very diverse population (in age, fitness and experience) jam-packed over a couple hundred yards of shoreline, but I also felt extremely frustrated by their interference. Frequently, I wasn't even sure if I were the target of their wrath, but hey! they were looking in my general direction; so I'd just throw in the towel and swim in. Eventually, I chose to swim only in the “unprotected” areas between the official fields. In good conscience, I cannot recommend this solution to others because of the risk involved; but it worked for me.

George Bellows - Gray Sea - 1913

At all times of year, a walk along the beach offered both great exercise and beautiful scenery. Whether alone or with company, I would usually head for the west end of the island and perhaps climb on the rock jetty there before retracing my steps back to the field where my car was parked. I probably made that circuit a hundred times or more over the years. The dunes were off-limits; access to them was hindered by long wavering lines of picket and wire fencing installed to preserve the beach grass essential to stopping erosion. (When I was in the Youth Conservation Corp, one of our crew's many diverse jobs was to erect fencing and plant beach grass on Fire Island.) So, in spite of my regular visits to the shore, I had never been back in the dunes, but once during my college years, a friend and I didn't turn around at the west end of the island and instead looped around onto the northern coastline situated on the placid Great South Bay. We discovered that on that side of the island there was no fencing and that wide, sandy pathways actually cut through the dunes. Careful not to step on the delicate shoots of grass, we entered the dunes where I was surprised to find such an abundance of discarded paraphernalia that I realized that a hell of a lot of sexual activity was taking place back there in those dunes. I guess I shouldn't have been surprised, but I was a bit of a rube. I just associated the beach with sun and sand and salt water, with recreation and exercise, with picnics and family gatherings... a place to connect with nature. I wasn't disturbed or disgusted to learn that some folk had found other uses for the location; on the contrary, I was amused by this snippet of enlightenment.

Jane Freilicher - Late Afternoon, Southampton - 1999

So that brings us back to where I began this entry, with me recently out of grad school and searching for a consequential theme to address in a sizable painting. Considering the history I just related, it seems almost preordained that I would turn to the beach for inspiration. The beach certainly held the potential to present the creation/destruction, life/death and sex/violence polarities that had fueled my self-negating constructs for the last few years, but the theme also introduced problems for me. I had been careful to leave my paintings and drawings very ambiguous – that was essential to my evading firm interpretation. In this painting, at least as I conceived it, I would have to portray a specific location and recognizable clothing, objects and activities. Prior to this, I might include a phallic-like bedpost or suggest a window, an adjoining room or receding space in a painting, but never conclusively so. Depicting this beach scene would mean violating my own sound strictures. But during grad school I had learned the hard way to constantly reinvent myself, to challenge my own precepts, to never get comfortable with any technical or thematic approach to creation. I decided to move ahead with the painting.

Eugene Boudin - On the Beach, Trouville - 1887

This image was to be comprised of three canvases, each 48 inches tall and 40 inches wide, which meant that the finished painting would be four feet by ten feet, by far the largest work I've ever executed. Each canvas is intended to abut its neighbor without any gap between them. Since I worked within a very contained space, each canvas was painted to completion independently on my one easel before I moved on to the next, proceeding from left to right. I made a few notations of where my imagery spilled over into adjacent canvases, but I generally relied on my memory to effect those transitions and match hues. This approach seems untenable to me today, but, back then, I was used to operating quickly and intuitively, without getting hung up on subtleties and minor irregularities. Unfortunately, I didn't maintain a journal or even jot down a few spare notes while I executed this work, so I can't provide any precise information about how long I spent on it. All I can say is that I devoted quite a number of months in 1984 to its creation.

Gerard Wickham - The Beach - 1984

Each panel presents a facet of the beach “experience”. On the left, is The Sea, an image which emphasizes the ocean's destructive power and potential to annihilate life. On the right, is The Dunes which depicts a couple in mid-coitus thereby evoking fecundity and the inception of life. The central panel, The Shore, presents a number of figures engaged in innocuous activities. The central, most predominant figure stands vertically erect, serving as an observer, a neutral witness to the conflicting poles of activity transpiring around her; she represents us, the audience, the uncommitted viewers indifferently registering stimuli and acquiring experience while dynamic forces rage about us. Each canvas describes an arc: the crest of a wave, the dome of a beach umbrella, the crown of a dune. The repetition of this visual motif hopefully implies the cyclical nature of each tableau displayed, ultimately proposing that these cycles have neither beginning nor end but recur eternally.

Gerard Wickham - The Beach (Left Panel - The Sea) - 1984

And, as I've stated several times in previous entries, providing annotation for a work of art is always a mistake. The image becomes transformed into an illustration of the commentary. For instance, adjectives like “neutral” and “uncommitted” and the adverb “indifferently” may propose too strongly an interpretation of the central figure's role that I only wished to allude to mildly in the actual painting. Or the viewer's understanding of a compositional device like the repetition of curved arcs, after having been addressed in the prior paragraph, will forevermore be restricted to a symbolic reference to the cyclical nature of human existence. Certainly, if my words could with equal intensity evoke the same emotions, concepts and paradoxical interpretations as my painting, it would probably make sense for me to stick to the written word. My advice to the viewer would be to ignore my words and just experience the image.

Gerard Wickham - The Beach (Right Panel - The Dunes) - 1984

(With that said, I'm sure that my readers can't help wondering why I would even introduce here any interpretive analysis of my paintings at all. My explanation would be: personal weakness. I simply enjoy constructing sentences and conveying ideas so much that I can't resist the temptation to assert my own thoughts concerning my own work. I'm sure that you've heard the contention that, once a work of art is complete - whether painting, photograph, sculpture, novel, symphony or song, then that work enters the public domain and becomes the property of society, which can offer its own interpretation of the work equally valid to or many times more valid than that of its creator. I wholeheartedly agree with this. However, being a control freak, I can't resist the urge to provide a nudge in what I believe to be the right direction.)

Gerard Wickham - The Beach (Middle Panel - The Shore) - 1984

Afterword

The Beach has never been exhibited... anywhere. I thought the work to be significant and was somewhat frustrated at the time of its completion that I couldn't conceive of a potential location at which to show it. The painting's subject matter was kind of risqué which might offend some conservative viewers, but I felt its execution to be far more problematic. I just couldn't imagine small, local venues on Long Island (where I was living at the time) being receptive to a coarsely painted, semi-abstract artwork that would most likely monopolize an entire wall of exhibition space. I might have been able to find a haven for a reasonably-sized, faithfully-representational landscape, portrait or still life, but The Beach was an eccentric albatross. Neither its size nor its style nor its subject matter would have been an issue at a NYC gallery, but the doors of such institutions weren't flying open for me. So I recognized that The Beach was destined for cold storage. At that time, I was lamenting my plight one afternoon at my girlfriend's home, when my future mother-in-law generously offered to permit the installation of the painting on her living room wall. I looked at the proposed space. Clearly, it was not of sufficient size to display the work, so I just thanked her gratefully, explaining that my requirements exceeded her accommodations. Since then, I have retained The Beach in my possession, carrying it with me during my moves and carefully securing it from damage. It is too stylistically disparate from my ongoing work to include in a current exhibition, but I do entertain dim hopes of someday stumbling upon a location (maybe a not-yet-leased commercial space, an abandoned factory, a soon-to-be-demolished school, etc.) large enough to permit my presenting an unofficial, unsanctioned and uncelebrated retrospective of my artwork which would include my early expressionistic portraiture, the figurative abstractions and my current representational paintings. Naturally, The Beach would be granted adequate wall space in such an exhibition in a conspicuous spot. Though the appetite for such an exhibition would be negligible, I would love to be able to evaluate and sum up in one place the results of my many years of labor. I'm thinking a good time to do this would be in 2035, when, if still alive and kicking, I'll be 75 years old and will have hopefully added a dozen or so significant works to my oeuvre. (One additional observation: the advancement of technology, including digital photography and image editing software, has presented me the first real opportunity to see The Beach in toto and properly lit.)

Throughout my youth I witnessed changes at Fire Island. By the time I was in High School, I noticed that the snowy white foam that formed when waves repeatedly crashed into the shore had turned to a yellowish brown, probably due to the dumping of thousands and thousands of gallons of “treated” sewage into the nearby Atlantic each year. Sometimes while swimming I'd see trash floating beside me, and I'd beat a quick retreat to another stretch of water. I recall the beaches at Fire Island being shutdown as a result of hepatitis scares, and, though I've never witnessed this myself, I've read newspaper articles and seen TV news segments addressing the impact of medical waste washing up on Long Island's beaches. Hurricanes that have struck America's east coast with more destructive intensity and greater frequency in recent years are most likely the result of global warming. As a consequence of 2012's Hurricane Sandy, Fire Island was cut in two, suffered extensive beach erosion, lost more than half its volume and was pushed nearly two hundred feet closer to the shore. Many homes and businesses were simply washed away. In the intervening years since that disaster only 18% of Fire Island's volume has returned.

Andrew Wyeth (Title & Year Unavailable)

So I end this entry with a somber conclusion. As The Beach will attest, I have an interest in presenting imagery that rejects absolutes and recognizes the antipodal contradictions inherent in all things. However.... We humans really like absolutes. We beknight some folk as “heroes” and condemn others as “villains”. We despise ambiguity and gray areas and seek the comfort of solid truths. We believe that there are “good” wars and accept the theory that evil empires and rogue states exist on our planet. Though we recognize that life is finite, we deny the inevitability of death, pushing all intimations of our own deaths to the periphery... out of our scope of vision. We don't accept that within creation lies the seed of destruction. We prefer to see our world as permanent, concrete and unchangeable. We don't want to believe that our piddly activities could reshape our environment. This might help explain why we blindly race onward to adopt new policies and practices that will clearly accelerate environmental degradation. And, although it is soothing to trust in the immutability of Nature, my observations of Fire Island amassed over the brief span of one lifetime show that the possibility of catastrophic change does exist.

Marsden Hartley - Evening Storm, Schoodic, Maine No. 2 - 1942

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