I am not a big Rolling Stones fan, but one song, Shattered, came up when I was listening to iTunes.  That ending part where Jagger sings, “Pile it up/Pile it high on the platter!” stuck in my head.  It was like some sort of vile command at an obscene banquet.

banquet, first version

This painting was on my studio wall for years.  I thought it was finished.  It was weird because it didn’t feel like my work, even though I had painted it.  I had a connection to it since I had made it, but I had a tremendous amount of distance from it.  I couldn’t figure out what it did for me or why I couldn’t claim it as my own.  But it stayed on the wall.  For years.

banquet, second version

Every now and again, I would paint on this picture.  I’d change some things, try some things.  At these times, the painting wasn’t really a painting at all.  It was more of a site.   I mean that in real terms. It was an actual location I could go to where I could try things out and let things happen.  I would repaint the entire picture sometimes and then wipe all of the paint off to return it to the way it was.   At these times I felt like I was rehearsing something.  Like I was trying out new material before I had to present it or something.  Those changes built up over the years.

I was in my studio about a week ago and I looked at the picture.  The head on the far left started to look familiar to me.  I know that sounds stupid since, after all, I had painted it, but it seemed like I had seen the painting somewhere else.  The more I looked at it, the stronger this feeling became. I realized that I had painted another version of that head for a painting called the notice. It wasn’t an intentional action, but I saw that I was able to make one painting because I had made the other.  I had been painting on the notice for years.  I was able to resolve it, finally, once I painted the head in the other painting.  Like I said, it wasn’t an intentional thing.  It was only after looking at the picture for a long time that I could see what it had been giving me.

the notice (2001-12) oil on panel, 12×12 inches

Almost every head in this picture lives in another painting at this point.  It’s been a series of migrations.  They came in one picture and moved into another one.  It makes sense to me that I couldn’t finish banquet because it was never meant to be a painting – it was meant to be a site of possibility that led to other paintings.

I repainted the picture last week.  Everyone who had to leave, who could  leave, has gone.  There is only one that remains in light, balanced aggressively in the in-between space.  It’s trapped in a moment where it is a portrait and an object.

after a banquet (2011-2015), oil on panel, 16 x 20 inches

Nat Meade, Study (Plaid Pantry)

Steve Locke: I have been following your work since we met at Skowhegan 2009 (and I’m lucky enough to have one of your works on paper). I have always felt an affinity for your work not just because of the subject, but because of the qualities of the paintings themselves. You have a way of making images that appear to be simple but upon deeper investigation reveal themselves to be complex and layered in their realization and, by extension, their possible meanings. In an era when so much of painting is directly informed by the digital and the photographic, your paintings don’t just require a slow looking, they demand it. Because of this, your work rewards the viewer not just with an image but with a sensation. I mean this in the way that someone like Bridget Riley is interested in the effect of the painting on your eyes and your body. I get a sense of air, light, energy, heat, and physicality of space from these pictures. That does not happen a lot in contemporary painting the fact that it does in your work is a testament to your practice. In the current moment, you are making paintings that reveal and foreground their process without losing their integrity or importance as pictures. Pictures that illuminate the body as a site of contemplation, disappointment, extremity, or disbelief. Which lead me to my question:

In your painting practice, how do time and light (in both a real way and in a poetic way) influence the choices you make in depicting the body, its movements, and its locations?

Nat Meade: Light is another player or character in my work. I want it to be as tangible and, in a way, as physical as the figures and forms.

Around the time that we met I set out to change my approach to painting. I no longer wanted to make paintings that were referential and dependent on an external source. Instead I wanted to invent a painted moment- performative in its small and inward way. It was important that the images were discovered through their execution. The transition was difficult and for a long time I struggled to make anything satisfying. I needed parameters to make what I was doing challenging and tangible. I came up with a set of self-imposed rules and light became the constant player, a means of focus that also allows for playful discovery. Along these lines forms and figures have been reduced to simplified shapes in a shallow space. I can (hopefully) (more or less) predict how light might rake across the things I paint. I treat everything- light, color and form as a thing-just a stupid thing.

(Photos from Nat Meade’s studio by Jean Paul Gomez)

James Ensor has been described as employing an allegorical use of light. I only know what this means intuitively. It has to do with light asserting itself as a persistent actor. I see it in his work and want it in my own. There is directional lighting in all of my paintings-overly defined beams cutting through the composition, splitting figures, casting shadows, indifferently raking over faces. Color and light are closely linked. I like to assign the light areas a color and dark areas another: make the light areas yellowish and the dark areas green. My friend and artist Michael Brennan has said that “…[t]ime and light are made manifest in [my] work as color. Color as crumpled light.” I think I understand this intuitively as well. I like to build up opaque areas of light and emphasize the literal ridges of light and shadow. It is like repeatedly saying, “Here is the light AND here is the dark.”

Light can add drama and brevity. It can also conceal and ridicule. There is something inane about the cast shadow from a nose or a pair of eyeglasses. I like to zoom in on these moments. My subjects are meant be contradictory: elevated or beatific and buffoonish or absurd. I have been painting these bearded figures at three quarters view, a wedge for a nose, sometimes with gaping mouths like a hollowed out tree. They are these male stand-ins. I have recently realized that this goes back to an Antonio Frasconi print that was in my childhood home, a minimal woodcut of a bearded Walt Whitman with a triangle nose and series of dashes for a beard. It looked just like my dad. In my head the image was both God and Father, which were probably the same thing. On some level my work deals with this kind of elevated personage and its frailty.

I feel like this doesn’t exactly answer your question. Light is the constant character. Time and setting are frozen. And the body is reduced to its dumb, tangible parts so I can play with it like a Mr. Potato Head toy.

Thanks again for asking,
Nat

Find more of Nat Meade’s work at www.natmeade.com.

I started this painting 8 years ago

I finished a painting today.

I had been painting on it for a while. At least 8 years, I think.  I don’t mean I was painting on it every day for 8 years.  I mean from time to time, over that stretch of time, I would take up the picture and try to get it done.  It feels done now, meaning that it succeeds as a picture and it has a life of its own independent of me.  It does something that I did not anticipate and it continues to disarm me as a maker, and to empower me as a viewer.  In a nutshell, that’s how I know it’s done.

I think about what I was doing over the various times I took up the picture.  I was in love when I started it and I thought I finished it then.  In fact, I thought I finished it a number of times.  I’ve had a variety of jobs, lovers, friends, losses, success, and failures over that time.  I think the picture bears the traces of all of it.  Some days I picked up the brush with confidence only to be embarrassed at how badly the picture was coming along.  I would turn it to the wall on these days.  Even looking at the back of the panel, I could see the failed image.

I never really had an idea of what this picture was supposed to be.  It has been a variety of heads over time. It’s been too many colors; the flesh tones have gotten progressively bloodless over the time I painted it.  It’s been sanded a couple of times, by hand and with a power sander.  I had way too much paint on it for a while and the ridges and history of the dried paint sometimes got in the way of the track of the brush.  The dried paint forced me to make the same decisions over and over.  When I sanded some of the paint off, I made an effort to keep the image.  Sometimes I could and sometimes I would just paint over everything and cry.

Perfect nose

Years ago, I cant’t remember how long ago, I saw a man at the Purple Cactus who had a beautiful nose.  When I got back to my car, I drew his face and I had the drawing in my wallet for a while.  I pulled it out the other day and thought about the painting.  I wondered if this was the nose that was supposed to be in the painting.  I tried to put it in and it made me change the entire picture.  It was a worse failure than before.  I wondered if I should just paint the nose and leave the rest of the painting.  Maybe it could just be a painting of a nose?

I was at MacDowell and there was snow.  The greens and the greys mixed in a way that I could only describe as heavy and thick.  I loved the density of the winter color.  For the first time in a long time, I considered painting the landscape.  I would never do that because landscape painting is really fucking hard.  Especially for a control freak like me.

I pulled out this painting yesterday and thought about heavy grey.  I mixed a bunch of color in the memory of the snow.  I looked at my jawline in the mirror and repainted the picture.  It’s not a big painting, about 12 x 16 inches.  It took me a few hours to repaint it.  I used my jaw and I painted over the perfect nose of the man but for some reason, I thought about his hair and I used it.  I invented the cheekbones and followed the line of them to place the eye pits and the line of the skull.

I thought he might be blind.  I painted his eyes and then I thought he might be blinking or winking.  I thought he might not want to see what he was seeing.  I thought his mouth might be a sign of life, bloody, vibrant.  A dead head with a living mouth.  I thought he was somewhere between the lusty and the dead.

His ears were bigger.

I set the painting on my table so it would be the first thing I saw when I came back into the studio and I went home.  When I came in today, that’s when I knew it was finished.  I didn’t want to do anything to it and I was looking at it for a long time.  I was a viewer, I wasn’t a painter then.  That’s how I knew it was done.

I started making a base for it.  It needs to be a free standing painting.

Tom Brady, New York, 2012. Mario Testino

I’m standing in the Mario Testino; IN YOUR FACE show at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and I hear three ladies a little older than me (I’m 49) talking about how upset they are about the way that a doberman is represented in a large photo of Gisele Bündchen’s husband.  They thought someone must have taunted the dog in order to get it to respond the way it does in the photo. Mind you, they are in a room filled with photos of women in various highly erotic and problematic situations.  But the dog.  That really gets them.

I don’t write about work that doesn’t excite me, so you may be wondering about why I am writing about Testino.  The show did excite me. It made me think about a lot of things.  I don’t care for the work.  At all. But it did make me think about some things.  First of all was the thought, why this work?  Why here? Why now?

It’s not that it is photography.  I happen to love contemporary photography.  And it’s not that the show is filled with many many pictures of sexy women.  Even the few images of men in the show are photographed like sexy women.  I like sexy women.  I enjoy pictures of a half-naked Mrs. Tom Brady from behind, too (there are quite a few of them in the show).   You may be shocked to find out that gay men, myself included, have been socialized in an image culture dominated by the eroticized and available female body.  I’m gay, I’m not dead.

What the Testino work reifies is that eroticized and available body as a tool of capital, but the show tries to re-present the work in the context of art – specifically the art of portraiture.  “Sex Sells” could be the name of the show instead of “In Your Face.”  (Truthfully, it should have been called “Money Shot.”)  The work is to be judged as independent from its means and purpose.  These are images that are aligned with the production of objects and aid in the promotion of the commodities depicted.  OK.  I’m fine with that.  But now, I have to look at these  images, writ large (and in some cases, crazy large) and the MFA asks me to consider them outside of their origin as advertising and promotion.  I think that is a hard thing to do.  Without the magazine, what are these pictures?  (And since every picture has been produced in a magazine or for a promotional purpose, why are there no photos allowed?  Everyone who buys a fashion publication has access to Testino’s images, so why are they excluded from personal consumption when they are in the museum?)

The exhibition is on walls a color that could only be described as “Conde Nast Green.”  It is dark and illuminated with spots and frames that contain light. This adds a great theatricality and import to the pictures.  A giant image of a glamorously sweaty J. Lo-as-a-boxer arrests you before you are confronted with an enormous image of a blackfaced tanned Lady Gaga.  There is an aluminum rail with label  information that keeps you from getting too close to the pictures.  The darkness and the spotlighting, the sudden gleam on the aluminum, and the images of beautiful people and the “beautiful people” all conspire to turn the entire space into an exclusive club where it is completely plausible that you would see Kate Moss at the next table, and OH MY GOD THERE SHE IS!  It’s the only time you’ll ever be this close to people like this.

This is going to sound harsh, but I really got tired of the images very quickly.  They say it’s hard to make a bad photo of a beautiful subject.  I don’t think Testino’s pictures are bad, that’s not really the point.  They just are uninteresting in light of the the truly innovative and powerful images of other people working in fashion.  So many of his images look like the work of other photographers that it is hard to see what the appeal of the work is if you know anything about fashion photography over the last 40 years.  It’s not that the pictures are quotations of previous work on which he then expounds; he is simply redeploying the tropes set forth by other fashion photographers.  He tries to talk about fashion’s relationship to fetishism but he just ends up trying to channel the perversion of Helmut Newton; and Testino’s theatricality squelches any erotic charge.  He tries to talk about the private erotic world of women, and he just reveals the enormous debt he owes to the truly amazing Ellen von Unwerth, who is able to make women sexual objects without stripping them of their agency along with their clothes.  He even tries to mimic Wolfgang Tillmans in his photos of “kids being kids” in Amsterdam and his “alternative” installation techniques (some photos are printed on photo paper and tacked to the wall) but you end up looking at the labels on the kids clothes to discern what the ad is for.  You don’t believe for a second that these images, or any of the images in the show, have any life outside of their editorial or promotional function.

That’s not to say that there are not some amazing photos in the show. I do have to say though that every picture that was knock out fantastic had one of two elements: Kate Moss or Tom Ford for Gucci.  I don’t know why.  If I had to guess, I think it is because Tom Ford really knows how to make clothes that make you want to fuck the people wearing them. That and I think it may be impossible to take a bad photo of Kate Moss (even the blogs documenting her without make-up or her “bad teeth” can’t diminish her otherworldly radiance). So one has to wonder what is the secret of the success of these pictures over the other.  Testino is quoted in the wall text talking about each photo being a “colloboration.”  Maybe the particular vision of Tom Ford-era Gucci or the peculiar devotional relationship between camera lenses and Kate Moss was what enabled these images to be so successful independent of their function as ads.

Helmut Newton, Saddle I, Paris (at the Hotel Lancaster), 1976 by Helmut Newton

This is maybe the thing that made me so interested in this show; so many images in the show and so few of them resonate with me outside of their origin or the moment when I first saw them in magazines.  Why is that?  And why is this the contemporary fashion photographer that the Museum wants to put forth for a larger consideration?  The only reason I can think of is that Testino is easier than Newton, or von Unwerth, or David LaChappelle or Jurgen Teller or any other photographer who makes work about or with fashion.  The Testino images at their most radical don’t generate the tremendous heat of a von Unwerth or inspire the pearl-clutching gasp of a Newton.  There is a Testino photo of a woman wearing nothing but a large mirrored collar on her hands and knees.  Next to her is a glass of champagne.  (I’d post a photo but, I wasn’t allowed to take any.)   It sounds like it would be a demeaning image (and it kind of is) but it’s also just a boring photograph about “decadence.”  The quotation is clearly Newton’s Saddle I, Paris (at the Hotel Lancaster), 1976 (part of the Sleepless Nights folio).  The image is problematic to be certain, but there is a real commitment to imaging fetishization, femininity, servitude, decoration, and power.  Newton is all in; he’s not holding anything back for propriety and that’s what made (and makes) him so shocking in the world of fashion and in the world of art.  His image is an unsettling re-presentation of the consequences of desire.  How horrible would it be if you got what you wanted?  This is what your desire looks like. It’s obscene and wrong and so hot that you can’t tell anyone about it.  But here it is.  It’s not just a photo decadence, it is decadent.  And you cannot look away, can you?  (It really is a shame that the Helmut Newton retrospective hasn’t travelled here.)

That’s the core of it really.  (And it is spelled out by the separation from the sexless Royal portraits upstairs and the other photos downstairs.  The black and white seriousness of the Royals reinforces notions of purity. If Testino is channeling Newton downstairs, he’s certainly trying to be Lord Snowdon upstairs.) Testino’s pictures skate on the surface of sex; they don’t dive down into the realms of sexuality they claim to be about.  The exchange of power and agency that comes in the give and take of sexual experience is absent from these pictures.  That absence makes the work palatable and manageable.  Even the title “In Your Face” projects an idea of transgression that the work never reaches.  Instead it’s crime without breaking any laws, domination without leaving any scars, and sex without shedding any tears. Because he is so willing to adapt the truly radical discoveries of other artists and marry them to advertising he is able to create titillating work that encourages staring, but doesn’t make you feel badly for looking.  You aren’t implicated in any of these pictures.  Your position as an uninvolved spectator is affirmed.  It really is like flipping pages in a magazine.

I wanted to say to the ladies who were so upset about Brady and the doberman, “Don’t worry, I’m sure no one was hurt in the making of any of these pictures.”