Entry - 3.4.17

There are more fools in the world than there are people.

                                                       - Heinrich Heine

I am sick to death of cleverness.  Everybody is clever nowadays.  You can't go anywhere without meeting clever people.  The thing has become an absolute public nuisance.  I wish to goodness we had a few fools left.

                                                       - Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

Nobody wants to play the fool.  I’d prefer to be a James Bond kind of character: always comfortable in my own skin, never losing my nerve, ever ready with the perfect witty retort, impeccably dressed no matter what the situation, miraculously in the know as to how to pronounce and play all of those obscure French games of chance.  Wouldn’t that be great?  I think so.  But…

Even though my aspirations are high, my performance in real life is less than sterling.  I play the fool far too often.  This occurs for a host of reasons: the occasional shortfall in self-confidence, an entrenched aversion to dishonesty and deception, the excessive exuberance I can experience when caught up in an exhilarating moment, an insane playfulness that crops up in the most inappropriate situations, the inevitable clouding of judgement that comes with inebriation, a propensity to serve up awkward witticisms that escape from my lips without even the most meager second’s consideration.  Honestly, I could go on forever.

And though I take no pleasure in playing the fool, often experiencing a solid bit of shame and discomfit after coming up short for the zillionth time, I’m really not ready to attend charm school, take any snake oil cure or undergo a frontal lobotomy that will render me perfectly debonair, clever and appropriate.  Without a doubt, I believe that it is a willingness to transgress beyond social mores and conventions, to tolerate personal exposure and risk, that actually transforms human interaction into something meaningful.

My perspective as an artist mirrors this opinion; significant artwork cannot be created without revelation and peril.  Sometimes that means pushing innovation to such an extent that aesthetic evaluation becomes nearly impossible.  In other instances, the artist taps into his or her inner workings, dredging up profound memories, exposing fears, desires, proclivities and weaknesses, and in the process finds a visual language to convincingly excite an empathetic response in the viewer.  It only follows that artists striving to achieve significant expression will often create unsuccessful or discomfiting artwork.  (Unfortunately, my own oeuvre is generously stocked with plenty of unquestionable failures.)  The fact is great artists often make bad art.

While considering writing a blog entry providing a small selection of bad paintings, I immediately thought of the work of Henri Matisse (1869-1954).  Matisse is undoubtedly one of the giants of modernism.  He helped redefine how form and space are represented in art, making color the predominant element in their depiction.  He recognized that a painting is a two dimensional object that need not convince an audience that it is anything more.  Therefore, he ignored the rules of perspective, freed color from literalness, minimalized the effects of light and shadow on form and readily embraced distortion when doing so heightened expression.  Often his strange combinations of clashing colors inexplicably sing, his layering of complex patterning achieve a precarious harmony.

In his early days of experimentation and revolt, Matisse’s work is consistently of high quality, but at midcareer he has regular moments of lost resolve.  He begins to seek the comfort of defining form and volume, of using natural color, of recording features and details convincingly.  For me, this is understandable; Matisse was nostalgic for a facility that he surrendered when he adopted a modernist approach to representation.  Picasso experienced this also, but he would change modes completely, fully adopting a style that suited his mood and subject matter, usually producing a successful work.  Matisse took a different approach.  He attempted to straddle opposing sensibilities, borrowing elements anchored in both fauvist and realist doctrine.  The resulting hybrids are often particularly unsatisfying.

Henri Matisse - Odalisque with Red Culottes - 1921

Henri Matisse - Portrait of Marguerite Sleeping - 1920

Henri Matisse - Reclining Odalisque -1911

Similarly Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) retreated from an impressionist approach to painting and sought to revive in his work traditional features embraced by the great masters of the past.  It was impossible given his sensibilities and years of experience to simply change gears and fully adopt techniques and conventions never before mastered, so his work, as with that of Matisse, suffered during this period of doubt.  This was unfortunate for at those times Renoir unreservedly worked in an impressionist manner, particularly in the landscapes, he achieved a beauty unsurpassed.  Renoir was further handicapped by two other weaknesses: an inclination to portray the cute and pretty and an admitted fixation on flesh, so his oeuvre is peppered with paintings of doe-eyed little girls in frilly dresses, fashionable mademoiselles cuddling adorable lap dogs and fleshy nudes cavorting in unconvincing landscapes.

Pierre Auguste Renoir - Bathers - 1918-19

Pierre Auguste Renoir - After the Bath - 1910=12

Pierre Auguste Renoir - La Toilette - 1888

Pierre Auguste Renoir - The Judgement of Paris - 1908

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938) also labored to maintain a commitment to a modern idiom, in his case an expressionist mode of representation.  Critical to an expressionist approach is intuition and spontaneity, the artwork becoming a direct, unfiltered, emotional response to visual subject matter, and, at his best, Kirchner outshines his contemporaries in readily accessing an internal cache of associations and reactions to subject matter and finding a unique, personal language to convey his perspective to his audience.  Unfortunately, Kirchner became somewhat unhinged after his military service during WWI and a period of drug addiction.  He was, simply put, physically and mentally depleted, and his paintings suffered.  Now hard-edged outlines, permitting no ambiguity or interpenetration, contained discrete forms.  Color was applied in large flat unnuanced zones.  The paintings no longer result from spontaneity and improvisation; they become leaden.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner - Albert Mueller and his Wife - 1925-26

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner - Ballspielerinnen - 1931-32

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner - Kopf des Malers (Selbstbildnis) - 1925

Artists at times become so focused on technique that all other concerns diminish in comparison.  Balthus (1908-2001) had established himself as an artist by creating images charged with a powerful sexual urgency that, on occasion, startled and disturbed his audience.  His early work displays remarkable invention and a catlike sense of balance.  At midcareer, surface texture became important to him, and the resulting paintings are absolute jewels, testifying to the laborious application of countless layers of paint while still retaining the freshness and spontaneity of a study.  Much to the detriment of his paintings, he eventually became obsessed with surface texture, an obsession that overshadowed all other aesthetic concerns in his work.  The resulting work is flat, static and awkward.

Balthus - Girl at a Window - 1957

Balthus - Large Landscape with a Tree - 1957

Balthus - The Moth - 1960

I should note before moving on that fortunately Balthus experienced a personal renaissance at the end of his career, generating work that retained a focus on surface while embracing a new form of imagery inspired by Eastern Art.

I’m not so sure why I started this entry by addressing artists who early on successfully transitioned into an innovative approach to representation but later on in their careers questioned their convictions or lost the fortitude to maintain that approach.  Probably the opposite was most commonly the case.  Artists, experimenting in technique or developing a new aesthetic, often produce unsatisfying work early on in their careers.

For instance, while Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) struggled to shed the discipline imposed in the creation of representational imagery, Lucian Freud (1922-2011) hesitated to permit himself the luxury of depicting form and space illusionistically, retaining modernist elements like distortion and flattening of volume in his early work.  While moving in opposite directions aesthetically, both artists managed to create representational images that were noncommittal, awkward and frankly embarrassing.

Jackson Pollock - Going West - 1934-35

Jackson Pollock - Woman - 1930

Lucian Freud - Gerald Wilde - 1943

Lucian Freud - Girl in a Dark Sweater - 1947

Lucian Freud - Stephen Spender - 1940

Though he wasn’t striving to radically change the manner in which imagery is presented, Francisco Goya (1746-1828) struggled to master basic techniques of representation in his first years working as an artist.  His early paintings resemble folk art produced by untrained amateurs.  His figures are stiff.  They don’t seem to breathe and have blood flowing through their veins.  The clothing they wear is elaborately painted in great detail, but volume is unconvincingly presented.  There doesn’t appear to be a light source, and no body of flesh and blood defines the fabric’s folds and creases.  When the figure is presented in an outdoor setting, the landscape is poorly painted and reads more like the flat backdrops used in early Hollywood movies.

Francisco Goya - Don Manuel Osorio - 1987-88

Francisco Goya - The White Duchess - 1795

Francisco Goya - Jose Costa y Bonells - c1810

Sometimes the tastes of the era in which an artist lives can compel him or her to produce work that today makes us cringe in discomfit.  For instance, after the Napoleonic Wars, Europe became obsessed with the exotic.  France, in particular, having been introduced to Islamic culture during its military forays into Egypt and Syria, embraced a distorted Orientalism based on a surface level appreciation of the customs and mores of a hitherto inaccessible people.  Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863) and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867) provided for a public hungry for romantic escapism images of enticing odalisques ensconced in a sultan’s harem and turbaned warriors armed with bejeweled scimitars and mounted on fiery steeds.  Today, as accomplished as these works clearly are, they disturb us because they are founded on a sentiment of national chauvinism and offer a vision of a rich and diverse culture based on prurient and vapid stereotypes.

Eugene Delacroix - The Women of Algiers - 1834

Eugene Delacroix - Tiger Hunt - 1854

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres - Le Grande Odalisque - 1814

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres - The Little Bather in the Harem - 1828

The Victorian Era seems to be a period of conflicting motivations.  While the most powerful European nations vied shamelessly to accumulate territorial possessions and subdue and oppress indigenous populations… while rapacious industrial entities blindly exploited generations of poor and ignorant workers, in educated and privileged circles the highest moral ideals were purported.  In England, perhaps the most successful and egregious beneficiary of colonial and capitalist opportunity at that time, these ideals were pushed to an extreme, creating a milieu defined by a saccharine sentimentality and a rigid code of morality.  At the height of the Victorian Era, a loose group of English artists known as the Pre-Raphaelites shared an interest in medieval art, rejecting comfortable visual conventions long established since the Renaissance.  They promoted personal invention, attention to detail throughout a composition and the use of bright colors as favored particularly in Quattrocento Italian art.  To some degree, the Pre-Raphaelites revitalized representational art.  But though their images were unquestionably admirable and accomplished, they were often hampered by the expectations and restrictions of the prevailing zeitgeist of their day.  Often their images are painfully sweet and sentimental or exhibit a patriotic or racial bias which today is difficult to stomach.  Though a good many of their images are erotically charged, to avoid offending the prevailing code of morality, nudity and sexuality had to be addressed within a historic, religious or mythological context – creating a weirdly disturbing paradigm.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti - The Beloved - 1865-66

Ford Madox Brown - The Last of England - 1855

William Holman Hunt - Isabella and the Pot of Basil - 1868

William Holman Hunt - The Awakening Conscience - 1853

John Collier - Lady Godiva - c1897

Edward Poynter - Diadumene - 1883

So unsuccessful artwork can result from a variety of causes: the inevitable experimentation that occurs when pushing into unchartered territory, the inability to sustain a radical stance within one’s output, the imbalance that occurs when technical innovation dominates all other concerns for the artist or the embracing of (or succumbing to) the tastes, predilections and moral codes of contemporary society – no matter how untenable or extreme those influences are.  Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), arguably the greatest innovator within the history of art, having reinvented painting, sculpture, printmaking and ceramics in his lifetime, was riddled with self-doubt and at times thought himself a clown pandering to the caprices of his age.

In art, the mass of people no longer seek consolation and exaltation, but those who are refined, rich, unoccupied, who are distillers of quintessences, seek what is new, strange, original, extravagant, scandalous.  I myself - since Cubism and before - have satisfied these masters and critics with all the changing oddities that have passed through my head, and the less they understood me, the more they admired me.  By amusing myself with these games, with all these absurdities, puzzles, rebuses, arabesques, I became famous and that very quickly.  And fame for a painter means sales, gains, fortune, riches.  And today - as you know - I am celebrated, I am rich.  But when I am alone with myself, I do not have the courage to think of myself as an artist in the great and ancient sense of the term.  Giotto, Titian, Rembrandt, they were great painters.  I am only a public entertainer who has understood his times and exploited - as best he could - the imbecility, the vanity, the cupidity of his contemporaries.  Mine is a bitter confession, more painful than it may appear, but it has the merit of being sincere,

                                      - Pablo Picasso, Interview with Giovanni Papini, 1952

It's distressing to read these words of Picasso and recognize that in spite of his unfathomable accomplishments he was still beset with insecurities.  It makes his struggles all the more heroic that he was never sure if his efforts were in any way worthwhile.  Picasso put himself out there.  And I guess that's what this entry is really about.

Perhaps surprisingly, a good many of the artists featured in this entry (an entry which exposes images I find aesthetically unsatisfying or contextually embarrassing) are among those I most admire - artists that I've researched in print and online - those for whom, when featured in a show or exhibition, I'll get motivated to visit a gallery or museum.  But then again, this observation probably isn't that surprising.  Let's circle back to the assertion with which I opened this entry: that meaningful communication is impossible without exposure.  I believe this applies to whether one's painting a masterpiece or having a chat with the barista at Starbucks.  So I have a piece of friendly advice to my readers today: Be the fool!

As always I encourage my readers to comment here, but if you would prefer to comment privately, you may email me at gerardwickham@gmail.com.

Entry - 9.11.13

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 7/31/13 blog entry which addressed the topic of The Artist at Work, I mentioned that First Light was for me a breakthrough painting.  The more common adjective to be applied to such work is “seminal”, in that it initiates a fruitful series of successful work.  If I were to continue with the overly long parable above, I would say that an “approach” that leads to substantive progress toward the illusive and vague core is “seminal”.  Seminal works usually occur within a period of experimentation when the artist is struggling to find the visual language appropriate to a concept that is just formulating in his work.  Sometimes the experimentation is sparked by new, often radical, influences.  At other times, it is initiated through frustration with or aversion to safe, established practices that have grown stale and leaden.  Many times, the artist is compelled to move in a direction that seems too extreme and will hesitate, dancing around that direction before finally taking the plunge (resulting in a seminal work).  Seminal works are fascinating in that within them you can see the artist’s mind at work; often they embody diverse or conflicting approaches without finding a unifying visual language.  Even though these works are commonly unsuccessful, appearing incomplete or unresolved, they are sought after by collectors and usually command high prices.

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’s shoreline, is peopled with a number of nude and seminude female figures who are depicted unconvincingly in a cartoonishy distorted fashion.  The pointillist markings are not uniform and equispaced but have become thicker, directional and more expressionist in character.  The image does not depict contemporary life; these women hearken back to representations of goddesses and nymphs executed by Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain three centuries earlier.  The artist’s intention is to capture a mood of luxury, peace and pleasure as the painting’s title, a quote from Charles Baudelaire, openly asserts, but, in straddling two stylistic intents, the image is vaguely disturbing.  The landscape is presented somewhat naturalistically, conforming for the most part to the rules of perspective, while the figures feel pasted on and don’t exist convincingly in the space.  The boat’s placement appears to be most contingent on acting as a reflection of the cloud formations in the sky and does not seem believable within the landscape.  The mast and spar of the boat along with the flailing boughs of the tree serve as compositional devices, directing the eye about the painting, but appear awkward and out-of-place.  In a year of two, Matisse will divorce color from naturalistic effect, subjugate all compositional elements to the logic demanded by the image, dismiss the constraints imposed by the rules of perspective and permit the brushwork to confidently follow the dictates of his subject matter.  Luxe, Calme et Volupté is a courageous yet faltering step in that direction.

 

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

 

If you would prefer to comment privately, you can email me at gerardwickham@gmail.com.