In this talk, Jen and I discuss the trajectory of her career, but we also get into teaching, learning, the role of advanced degree study and the importance creating the space for conversation.

I hope you enjoy this show.

PS: It must be said that Jen makes the best barbecue sauces I’ve ever had.  Ever.

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

what wasn’t thought possible, 2015, gouache and egg tempera on panel, 8 x 10 inches

Painting is a way to see if something is possible.

In a real way, exploring a motif is an investigation to see if it is possible to be painted.  I wonder sometimes if something cannot be painted.  Wondering is pointless, however, because the only way to know is something is paintable is to try to realize it as a painting.  This is the difference between a theory and an action.  All my understanding about painting comes from figuring these things out in material. I can’t make a theoretical decision about art before I make something.  This kind of analysis can only take place in the presence of something.  Otherwise I would talk myself out of doing anything because there is always a reason NOT to do something.  But in the right hands, a still life painting can be a radical assertion. (I’m thinking of the brilliant Janet Fish in particular.)

The challenge is to make something even though there is nothing left to make. The challenge is to question the notion of the unpaintable, the unsayable, the unseeable.

Sometimes I make a successful picture that contradicts what I think a picture can do, or should do. Sometimes I make something that I do not recognize as my own work.

These are paintings that teach me about the paintings I need to make.  They also point to the work that I am still in the process of learning how to make.

Core to my art making process is to make art out of horror.  The current moment presents us with no shortage of that.

My challenge is to make work that speaks to the time without trivializing.  My challenge is to compete with spectacle.

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.

The edge of Gardner Lake in Connecticut.

I have been making watercolors for almost a year now.

I started by accident really.  It was around my birthday and my friends Susanna and her sister Jane invited me to come to their place in Connecticut for a few days to hang out.  My friend Linda came too.  Jane even made me an incredible strawberry shortcake with whipped cream for my birthday cake.  I finally began to relax after the grueling school year I had just had.  It was a wonderful time.

Linda and Jane were cooking and Susanna and I sat in the back yard under a huge tree.  There were stone steps down into the lake.  We brought watercolors and spread them out on the ground.  Susanna had a huge book of watercolors that she had been working on.  They were marvelous to see.  Very directly painted with some dry brush textures over luminous washes of color.  They captured the motif of the lake but also carried the weight of the air.  You could clearly see that the difference between the water and the air was just a question of a soft shift of color.

Susanna went for a swim and I started to make some paintings of my own.  I have to say that I never liked watercolor and even when I had to do it in school, I was not very good at it.  I had a very patient teacher, Donna Rae, who kept telling me that the medium was trying to teach me patience.  I didn’t know what she meant.

I soaked a bunch of paper in the lake.  I could see Susanna swimming back and forth and was taken with the way she belonged to two places at the same time.  The binaries kept flashing in my head: wet/dry, over/under, inside/outside and so on.  I also thought a lot about the way the water was all around her and separate from the same time.  I sat on the edge of the stone steps and put my legs in the water, watching the way the transparency of the water changed the color of my legs.  I pulled some paper out of the water and started to paint on the wet paper.

Susanna came out of the lake and sat with me.  We painted.  We talked.  Susanna has been a mentor to me since graduate school.  I have learned more from her than I could ever say.  That day, we talked about color and light.  We talked about loss and losing.  We talked about work and how to preserve your self and give to your students at the same time.  We worked.  She painted the motif in front her in luminous greys and humid yellows.  I thought about the movement of a body in the water and how to shift the sense of weight in transparent waves.  I remembered what Donna Rae was trying to teach me.  I didn’t realize I had learned.

I’ve made over 100 watercolors since that last time Susanna and I touched the water.  I was able to show about half of them at the Hudson Opera House earlier this year.   Because of its historic character, I wanted to have the pictures presented in a manner consistent with the venue.  I went on a scavenger/treasure hunt for a variety vintage frames.  I used some without glass so the viewer could experience the texture of the paper.  I also included 4 free standing paintings in the show.  One of them, you don’t deserve me was from my Samsøn show years ago, but the other three were new.  Their execution revealed some of the things that I had learned in the making of the water colors.

Anthony Palocci, Jr. Looking Up, 2015, oil on canvas, 60×96 inches. Studio view.

Steve Locke:  I think you are making some very challenging and gorgeous paintings, they were a high point of the last DeCordova Biennial. The ones that Lexi Lee Sullivan chose for that show married a haptic and almost brutal paint handling to elegant and bravura drawing. The result was spell binding. Like Vija Celmins, you managed to imbue everyday objects with an interior life. And at the same time, there was an assertion of modernist flatness and vivid surface that referenced Jasper Johns. Even the picture that Robert Moeller included in his pop up show, Yeah You Missed It, contained this dichotomy between the depicted and the felt.

My question is how does the idea of restraint inform your selection of imagery, your approach to color, and practice as a painter?

Anthony Palocci, Jr.:  It’s kind of funny for me to think about restraint. I haven’t thought about that in such depth until this question…

The first restraint I may have set up for myself was that whatever I painted must be manufactured. Whatever I paint cannot be organic or naturally occurring, it has to have been manipulated somehow. Whether it was built in a factory, sent through a meat grinder, or put through a mill, it’s got to be assembled by some form of fabrication. I think this focus stems from wanting to talk about people. I decided that I could say a lot more about people by painting images of the objects they created rather than depicting the people as themselves…

I used to paint a lot of people as people but there was a conflict of interest there because I didn’t want to talk about the individual. The individual was a very messy idea for me, something too complicated as one gets wrapped up in their story…Seeing someone in a painting, one identifies with that person as being of the same form and therefore empathizes with them; whoever they are, as they are depicted. At that point you’re too far into the painting for me…I needed to keep more of a distance between the painting and myself/the viewer/my audience…

By this “restraint” as you call it, I have boiled down my big ideas to the essential stuff I want to get at. By making a selection of a larger picture I eliminate everything else I don’t want to paint. I get distracted easily a
nd the world is such a vast place I need to discipline myself to hone in on one thing at a time. It’s really what keeps me grounded, to take one thing out of life and spend time with it. Even these objects have a story though, but it’s less literal than a person’s story because these objects are inanimate. They don’t have brains or blood. They have electricity, oil and motors. For now in my selection of imagery I have solved the first major problem I had as a painter, “What do I paint?”, and now I can get on with it…

Color is a whole other box of rocks. Color is so overwhelming to me now more so than ever because I am teaching color to students. Not only does one have to decide, “What do I paint?” but one must decide, “What Color do I use?” you could also ask, “How do I describe this?” or “Is it invented or observed?” and then there is the “Why then? How come?” to every answer you end up with…

I used to just grab any tube of paint that looked good at the time. Then that became problematic. Color is delicious and it is very easy to overindulge. Color is distracting because it is emotional. I can’t have color break my composure. For me it has always been a balance between the Venetians and the Florentines, Romanticism / Classicism, color / form, and painting / drawing. One can’t look at a form divorced from color. It’s a complicated issue for me.
My solution to this problem right now has been to work within the restraint of chromatic grays. And recently I have been drawn to objects composed of grays with parts made of plastics, metals and wires, so the shoe fits. I mostly work with either a warm or cool mixture of red and green with white added in for the shifts in value. That’s what goes on top. The under-painting is a whole other animal. I started using washy glazes of saturated colors as a ground so that the grays on top didn’t feel so dead (Nat Meade used to pick on my paintings in grad school because the grounds were left white, like the Impressionists). My under-paintings are color coordinated, differentiating the layers of spatial depth. Each painting is different but the most common use of the color is as follows:

Yellow = ground
Green = shadow
Red = light

Sometimes I mess with that, with blue, orange, and sometimes purple, just to see how the gray will behave on top. The same color gray will look different on top of a red than it does to a yellow or green, and in that, the same gray becomes a different gray. There are so many variations within these limits I feel like this is merely the starting point for me in my exploration of color. But for now, this is how I am making sense of things.

As far as my practice is concerned…it comes down to discipline again. I know I have to do certain things before I get down to business and waste a lot of material, so I have to come up with plans before I begin a painting. Every big painting starts off as a series of sketches. They can be formal or informal; on bar napkins or paper, whatever is available when I get an idea for a painting. From that point if I want more from that idea I make a small sized gouache painting and start thinking about how to conceive of the image and what to do with the paint. One thing leads to the next and I decide a size appropriate for the scale of the image and go. A lot of the time the larger paintings lead to smaller works as well. One part might strike me as worthy of more time or a separate canvas, so that spills out onto other surfaces. Keeping this part open for exploration helps me maintain an interest in any given subject. The deeper I can go into one thing, the more I can get out of it, the more I figure out, and all the while I am generating more paintings so I don’t feel like I’m wasting time on a big blow out.

Lately I’ve been returning to the image of the window fan I had hung in DeCordova. I wasn’t satisfied with my depiction of it. For a long time I would try and see how something was made, and then sort of internalize that form and make a painting of it. Now I am trying to keep it more true to what I am looking at, more observation and study of the thing itself. I’ve come to be more invested in the work as a result. Now I feel as though I am manufacturing these things. I observe, disassemble, and reassemble the objects. I’m also becoming interested in the situations one might find these objects in. The painting you cited in Yeah You Missed It is that same fan from the DeCordova but in one point perspective and with a window screen on top of it… The painting fools with perception. When you look at this painting you are looking at a small selection of a scene. Looking up from the ground outside an apartment to the second floor window where the fan is. I’ve cropped out everything but the space with the fan in it. Due to the perspective a lot of the object is obscured by the screen in front of it and the painting starts to take on different roles. It’s an illusion of space and it’s flat, like that Modernist thing you described. The tactility of the paint also helps with that. The painting asks a lot of questions at the same time and contradicts itself.

Installation view of Yeah, You Missed It, curated by Robert Moeller, at the Mills Gallery, Boston Center for the arts.
On wall: Palocci’s Looking Up. (Sculpture by Antoniadis and Stone.)

The restraints of this one object lead me to this strange selection of that scene and it is leading to even more. Restraints aren’t really restricting. I feel that restriction can be liberating, as it forces one into focus. It just takes a while to find that focus.

Talk soon,

Tony

monument #10, egg tempera, oil, and collage on wood with acrylic

I have a lot of things to remember.  That is why I started making these monuments.

I didn’t know that they were monuments when I was started, but, like most artists, I don’t immediately know what the subject of the work is when I am making it.  As I continued to make them, it was clear that they are markers, like a sign on the road.  They are indicators, placeholders, something that I recalled and needed to make manifest in a form that would serve as a container for that recollection.

Spaces have a residue.  I work to give that residue a form.  And an expression.

This rendering of form is not the same as recreating a room or building an environment.  It is more about sensation than anything else.  Sensation is a something that painting is dynamically suited to convey.  (Bridget Riley talks about this here.)  I am using touch, timing, color interval, placement and composition to create the sensation of the place, but not the place itself.  I am creating an interior sense of a body in a space without a theatrical recreation of an environment.  In this way, the work contests the sense of spectacle in art and instead posits recollection as the portal into the work.

My work has a direct relationship to lost spaces and lost people.  Rooms are filled with images of people who used to inhabit them. They are sites of memory. My impulse is to make an image for a specific space I wanted to remember, or a place that reoccured to me visually as well as emotionally.  These spaces need a memorial.

I don’t mean solely domestic space and I don’t mean the interior as in psychological, although I think both of those spaces figure into the work. (I came of age as a painter when Gaston Bachelard‘s ideas where going though school like a virus.)

I cut a section of a memory into a shape and mark it with an avatar, a witness.  I want to bring that space into your space, and mark it with light, because it is NOT your space.  I paint them on the back because I want to frame it in the light of memory, the halo of experience, the way you recall something while you are looking at something else.  It glows with recollection.  The corner, the edge, the meeting point, these can be the indicator of an entire environment.  The shift of surface is sometimes a subtle transition and sometimes blunt flex of thought.  It can be a marker of how a room changes, or how the body moves from one space to another.

To work in egg tempera is to embrace a different idea of time.  In a fundamental way, painting contains time.  The surface of a painting records everything.  And for the painter, you know what was there and you know what had to be destroyed in order to make the painting look the way it does.  For the painter, all of those paintings inform the last painting.

Sassetta,
Virgin of Humility
1440s
Panel, 79 x 46 cm
Collezione Vittorio Cini, Venice

The material also contains a sense of devotion.  Applied in strokes, each one drying immediately, and layering color in the most direct way, egg tempera allows me to caress the faces of the witnesses in the paintings over and over again. As Sassetta painted the Virgin, he touched her face over and over again. The act of rendering is an act of devotion.

Halo, 2002, oil on panel, 16 x 16 inches

Like a lot of artists, particularly painters, I’ve made my share of self-portraits.  I did these paintings to teach myself about myself, to mark time, to solve a painting problem, a variety of reasons.  Not all of them are art, but the ones that are have a special place in my practice.  I look at those pictures and I can think back to the moments when they were painted.  In fact, I think they contain the haptic trace of my emotional life.  Some of them, many of them in fact, I have destroyed.  Sometimes I’ve done this because they were failures as paintings and sometimes I had to get rid of them because it was enough that I knew that I painted them.  I have some photos of these paintings, but the objects themselves are gone.  Even though I am a painter, it is very hard for me to make a painting.  It’s expensive in a variety of ways.

So when I got contacted to be in a self-portrait show, I was kind of skeptical about doing it.  Like I said, I am a painter but I am not someone for whom the self-portrait is a key part of my practice.  The other artists in the show included Anne Harris and Susanna Coffey, both of whom I know and the latter is a dear, close friend.  There was also Maud Morgan and the divine Gregory Gillespie.  For that reason alone I wanted to do the show.  Coffey has had a profound impression on my work.  Gillespie, with his relentless reworking and extensive understanding of surface and material has as well.  I was thrilled that some of my work would be in consideration with these giants.

I have a self-portrait project Circumference that I offered as my contribution but the curator was interested in paintings only.  (Looking backward I also think that the underlying content in the work was, shall we say, difficult for the curator.) I have three self-portaits from a very difficult time that are very precious to me.  I struggled with them in the making and there were a lot of difficulties that I resolved in the work, and they bear that out in the making.  I talked to Julia Lavigne, the Associate Director at Samsøñ about them and she felt like it would be a good thing to have them in the dialogue created in the context of the show, which was called Self-Examination through Portraiture.  I trust her judgment.  The largest painting of the three, Self-Portrait at Skowhegan was on uncradled panel exactly the way it was painted.  In order to have it exhibition ready, I had it framed with a gorgeous float frame to accentuate the irregular edges of the picture.  (The folks at PSG Framing in Somerville did an amazing job.)

They were painted on panel and they are hard-won.  I discovered things about scraping and sanding and allowing the surface to show in the picture that are basic tools in my practice today.  My show at ICA Boston there is no one left to blame includes paintings that were begun at the same time as the self-portraits and they contain all of the lessons I learned from making these pictures.

Once I agreed to the show, I was informed that there would be a catalog for the show as well.  I was also told that all the artists were writing statements.  I wasn’t really interested in making statements about the work and said as much and the gallery provided them with a general statement about my practice.  Also, since this was for a text that was going to be published, I really balked at being asked to write something for publication without being paid for it.  I was asked multiple times and advised that it could be short.  So I eventually relented.

Here’s my statement for the show:

Self-portraiture is a form of self-location. It is a means to understand where I am physically and emotionally, in addition to being a way to explore formal issues and materials.
I made these paintings at a time when a lot of things were coming apart. There was the tremendous loss of the AIDS epidemic, my mother’s decline, and my own constant fight to have an identity as an artist. I made these paintings to prove that I could do them. I wanted to make a record of myself, my time, and my likeness knowing that it would change but knowing that the paintings would hold the memory of the moment and would be a truer record than any other thing I could access.
I wanted to prove that I existed in the context of art. The most concrete way I could do that was to paint myself into history and into being.

Steve Locke, Boston Massachusetts

I sent the statement and Julia and Camilø Álvårez handled the transport of the work to the venue.  They managed the entire process, consignment agreements, photos of the work and all that things that they do all the time for the artists they support.

I got an invitation to the opening and I was thinking it would be fun to go if Anne and Susanna were there.  I had seen Susanna earlier in the year and started doing watercolors with her at her family house in Connecticut (which led to an exciting new body of work).  Unfortunately, neither of them could get to the opening and I figured I would still go alone.  It was then that the curator contacted me about giving a talk about my work at the opening.

I got this email:

On Oct 8, 2014, at 10:09 AM, Audrey Pepper <audreypepper@mac.com> wrote:

Hi Steve,

Everything is in place. The catalog is at the printer, plans for picking up the work are in place.

I am checking in regarding the talk that will take place during the reception on Thursday, October 16th. The reception is 5 – 7 p.m. and the talk/discussion will probably be 5:30 – 6:30. I hope that this still works for you. Rick Fox will also be participating. I will be introducing the exhibit and then introducing you and Rick. There will be time for you to show images of your work and considering the theme of the show, it would be interesting to hear about your larger body of work and how the self-portraits play into it. I am asking the same of Rick Fox. There will also be a chance for there to be a Q & A.

I am thrilled to have your work in the exhibit and look forward to meeting you.

Best,
Audrey

I replied that I had the opening on my calendar, but I had no idea that there was a talk.  The curator then said that she had discussed the talk with Julia (who told the curator that she would have to ask me directly) and she thought I was on board.  And I certainly did not know that there was a talk that would include me showing images of my work and a discussion of my “larger body of work” and doing a Q and A.  All of this during the opening of the exhibition.  So it’s not an opening for me, it’s an artist’s talk and a Q and A.  And there was no compensation for my time or travel offered. So I made the work, framed it, supplied a text, my gallery arranged consignment and photos, and in addition, I am supposed to provide my time and discuss my work.

For free.

I said as much in my reply:

On Oct 8, 2014, at 11:12 AM, Steve Locke wrote:

Hi Audrey,
I apologize. I didn’t realize that I was being asked to speak about my work and my studio practice. I thought that contributing the work and the text for the catalog was all. I guess I misunderstood.
I am sorry, but I am not able to contribute my time to the talk.

S

I got an apology for the “lack of clarity in communication” and a hope that I would come to the opening.  I didn’t go.

Later, Julia did a follow up with the curator.  She asked about the catalog and also about the response to the show.  She got this message in return:

Hi Julie (sic),

I am waiting for the photos of the installation from Debbie. You will see that we only hung the 2 paintings that were in good shape. I don’t know if Debbie has been in touch with you regarding the damaged painting. I do know that you responded to her concerned email, the day of the installation, stating that one of the paintings had a large chip of paint off of the front surface of the painting. I saw the photo that you sent back in response, confirming that you knew of the clearly damaged surface. I must say that I was shocked and disturbed that a painting would be sent out in that condition, and that you thought that we would include it in the exhibit.
I was down in your neck of the woods for a couple of hours, a week or so ago, and although your lights were on, the door was locked. I had the catalogs with me at that time. I will mail a couple to you.
As far as interest in Steve’s work, I was there for the reception and haven’t been back since. I know that they get a certain flow through the gallery, but the exhibits are mostly for the benefit of the students. Debbie is the best to answer your question regarding interest in his work and responses by students and faculty. I know that they used the exhibit as material for classwork/papers/research.
These exhibits go by so quickly. This one ends this Saturday. I am making arrangements with Matt Clark to return the paintings to the gallery the beginning of next week. Does this work for you?

Best,
Audrey

Night, 2002, oil on panel, 16 x 16 inches

In fact, Julia had been contacted about “damage” to the paintings. She thought it strange and assured the curator that there was no “damage” to the works; that they were how I intended them to be.  Apparently, the curator knows what my work is supposed to look like, (which works are in “good shape”) more that I or the people who have represented me for years.  In fact, Halo, has a small mark where I scratched to the ground of the picture to bring a dot of light to the surface. She also saw fit to reprimand the standards and qualities of the staff and owner of Samsøñ.  To that end, Camilo Alvarez sent a reply:

From: Camilo Alvarez [mailto:kmilo@samsonprojects.com]
Sent: Tuesday, November 11, 2014 3:20 PM
To: Audrey Pepper
Cc: Julia Lavigne; Disston, Deborah
Subject: Re: image

Audrey,

My Assistant Director’s name is Julia.

These paintings belong to the artist’s private collection. They are in the condition the artist and I are completely comfortable in exhibiting.
They would never have been released if we didn’t believe they deserved to be seen. Our attention to detail with all the unique works that come through us is thorough.
These works are not ‘damaged’. I would say more ‘damage’ has been made to those who have now been unable to see them.
We look forward to receiving the catalogs, installation images and works. Please note we are open Tuesday to Saturday from 11 to 6PM.

Best,

Camilø Álvårez
Owner/Director/Curator/Preparator

This is really the point where I found out about any of this.  Camilo and Julia worked hard to insulate me from this insulting behavior but it just got to a point where I had to be included in the discussion.  Especially after the Director of the gallery sent Camilo this email:

On Nov 11, 2014, at 3:46 PM, “Disston, Deborah” <D.Disston@snhu.edu> wrote:

Camilo, I think the tone of your email is unnecessary. It was our decision to not show the large painting by Steve because it gave the appearance of being damaged and we did not want to be perceived as poor stewards of our art exhibitions and/or collections. Steve’s reputation and work has in no way shape or form been damaged. As you recall we have exhibited his work in a group exhibition Traversing Gender for which he happily came to give an artist talk. We have happily included his work in our catalog and as Audrey pointed out she was hand delivering them to your gallery and the gallery was locked during your office hours. We all take pride in our work and we should all be respected equally for those efforts. We will be de-installing our exhibit on Sunday and arrangements are being made with the art shipper. I will mail you catalogs and email you installation images. Until then, let’s continue doing the good work we all do and give each other support. – Debbie

Self Portrait at Skowhegan, 2002, 20 x 24, oil on panel with floating frame

Apparently, all of us needing to be respected for our efforts doesn’t apply to me or my vision for my own work.  And again, someone really feels the need to reprimand an adult who has worked in contemporary art venues for his entire career about how an artist’s work should appear – an artist whom he has represented for over 7 years.  And as far as my reputation is concerned, well, I’ll let Camilo address that:

Deborah,

I thought Audrey’s tone was unnecessary as well. I hope you agree. I wonder why I was admonished for expressing and defending my viewpoint?

I am never worried about perceptions. I think if you had shown the painting and someone remarked about its perceived ‘damage’, it could have been a teachable moment about the artist’s process. Steve and I spoke about that very work and its moments and the fact that there is no such thing as perfection. Considering it is a self portrait, the correlation of ‘damage’ upon the painting by the artist makes it art. Think: Dorian Gray. The reflection of time in a painting, with the artist…

I also didn’t mention anything about Steve’s reputation. The inference was that I (or the artist) was being irresponsible by unleashing a ‘damaged’ painting into the world was an affront to my responsibility.
Thus it was more about my reputation being sullied. It seems to me more worry was felt about the perception of your respective reputations in fact by not exhibiting this work.

It is impossible to respect all equally. Some do more than others. I do a lot. I’ve been told I do good, sometimes great work. I have also been told I support great work and whenever anyone questions the inverse, you can expect to hear from me about it.

Best to you and yours,

Camilø Álvårez
Owner/Director/Curator/Preparator

You can see why I love him so much.

I found out about all this as I was driving to get groceries.  I saw the email string and had to pull over to a parking lot to get a hold of myself.  I am used to being insulted about my work.  I am used to being misunderstood.  I am not used to not being taken seriously as an artist and I do not appreciate being told that the decisions I make about presenting the work I make are not art, or worse that they are “damage” or mistakes, or evidence of me not caring about my work, the venue, or the viewers.  This has the weight of a gutter insult to me.  Especially in light of the way this whole thing has been handled.

Camilo calmed me down and I was able to drive the rest of the way home.  He told me to forget the whole thing.  I just cannot.  I sent the following to the Director and the Curator:

Debbie and Audrey,

I am really at a loss to understand the events that have taken place around this show and my work in it. I have learned late that one of the works I sent at your request (Self-portrait at Skowhegan) was not exhibited because it was perceived by the two of you to be damaged. I cannot believe that you think that I would send a damaged work for exhibition. In fact, I had the painting framed at considerable expense to HIGHLIGHT the irregularity of the edge of the support and the difficulty in layering the painting’s surface. This show was supposed to be ABOUT self-examination and that guides every aspect of my practice. Had you seen there is no one left to blame at ICA Boston, you would know that the surfaces and edges of my paintings often show the stresses and decisions that happen in creating a picture. In a show that contains Gillespie (who famously reworked and abraded the surfaces of his pictures) I find it hard to believe that you could not or would not see my work as part of that conversation. I cannot believe that I am so disregarded as a maker that my choices in the way I make my work are questioned and dismissed because of the way they may look to viewers.

My work is supported by the statement I wrote for the catalog.

Camilo Alvarez has known me and my work since 2002 and he and his staff, particularly Julia Lavigne, are deeply knowledgeable about my practice and my ideas. A simple call about the situation would have allowed them or me to educate you about the pictures I make. My “reputation” and my career are in a great amount due to his belief and support of my vision and my work. I found Audrey’s and your messages to Julia and to him very sad. They really do not deserve to be addressed as though they do not understand the work of exhibiting and contextualizing works of art.

Lastly, I was asked to contribute a text to a catalog, for free. I framed and prepared the work for exhibition at no cost to you. And I was put forward to give a public talk about my work under the guise of coming to an opening with no compensation for my time in speaking about my work or my travel. I loved coming out to SNHU and talking with students; it’s part of my life as an educator. But speaking at an opening or giving a talk about my work and my practice with images is not something that any artist would be asked to do for free. I am left with the feeling that my refusal to participate in the talk was the reason for the removal of my work.

After the wonderful experience of participating in TRAVERSING GENDER I am completely shocked and frankly, hurt, at the way my work and the people who work so hard on my behalf have been considered.

I advised my friends Anne and Susanna about this.  I feel a little bit better after getting this all out.  It boggles my mind that in 2014, this is the way that people make determinations about their audience, the people with whom they work, and what they think deserves to be seen.  It is difficult to bear that a  work I made to prove something to my self and to the world was hidden from view because people could not understand the difference between intention and their own ideas of art.

Luc Tuymans, Gaskamer (Gas Chamber) 1986

 One of the greatest works of art of the 20th Century is Luc Tuymans’s Gaskamer (Gas Chamber). In addition to being an image yanked from one of the unspeakable horrors of the murder of European Jewry it is a painting that refuses to obey the conventions of paintings of history.  It’s a modest size instead of being epic.  It is painted in tonal neutrals instead of a rich palette of color.  It is on a warped and angled stretcher that prevents it from being a regular rectangle and instead presents an uncomfortable image in a new form.  This is because of Tuymans’s choices, both formally and conceptually.  I can imagine the curator and director of this exhibition keeping this painting from view because to show it would make people think badly of them.  I think badly of them because they do not understand that art is not about comfort or ease.  It provokes a public conversation.  It’s sad that they do not trust themselves or their viewers enough to ask the question, “Why did the artist do that?  What are they saying to me?”

In light of all this, I got another email from the director of the space.  You would think that I made all of this clear, but apparently, I still don’t know what I am talking about when it comes to my own work:

Dear Steve and Camilo,First I want to preface that I know you both are committed to your profession and do great work. I have always admired the verve with which you engage in the arts and this is one of many reasons we invited you to be a part of our exhibit on self-portraiture.

I believe there are some significant misunderstandings here which I would like to attempt to clear up. First, “Self-Portrait at Skowhegan: is included in the exhibit, It was “Halo” which we chose not to exhibit because there was a significant white spot (chipped paint)on the surface. I contacted Julia the minute I noticed this to let her know of the condition. She in turn sent me an image showing that there was a chip of paint missing. We were not provided with the explanation that such a thing was intentional. Audrey and I discussed what we wanted to do and chose to not include “Halo” .

Here are a few thoughts about your comments about compensation.

It has been our practice at the McIninch Art Gallery to ask our exhibiting artists to speak at our opening reception, to provide bios, artist statements. I do not pay a stipend for that. If you were a guest speaker and not an exhibiting artist, I would. Why is this? Out of our incredibly small budget, we pay for advertising, marketing materials, the cost of printing catalogs, art shipping, insurance, installation costs, staffing, curatorial fees, hospitality costs, taking the artist to dinner after the event. And then there is the in-kind cost of time spent working with professors and providing them with didactic materials so that they can utilize the exhibit in their curricular activities, which is all the time. In exchange for all of these expenditures, I feel that it is fair to ask the artist to speak at an opening reception. It is entirely your prerogative to disagree and chose not to participate.

We are very proud of the exhibit. There is still time to see it. The show runs through Saturday.

The art will be returned next week. I will be forwarding installation shots and more catalogs.

Debbie

Her initial message states that the “large painting” was not shown.  At 20-by-24 inches, Self-Portrait at Skowhegan is the largest work.  But now she says that painting was shown and Halo was not.  So truly, I really have no faith in anything about this at this point.  Listen, if you don’t want to show the work, fine.  I don’t really care.  Just don’t tell me that my work is damaged and don’t be “shocked and disturbed” that a contemporary art work might try to trouble conventional standards of art.  If this is so upsetting, maybe the curatorial career choice is a bad one.

So even though Julia sent them a photo saying that she knew about the spot on the painting and that it was intentional, they still decided it was not.   It was also good to see where the gallery’s priorities are; they have so many expenses that their operation sort of requires the artist to work for a meal.   And clearly, if they were so concerned why didn’t they just send the piece back to me?  Why hold on to it, not show it, not inform me that they were not showing it, and then tell me reprimand me and Samsøñ for sending it?  I am deeply confused and feel silly explaining this over and over again to them.  I contacted my two friends who were in the show and let them know how ridiculously unprofessional this whole thing has turned out to be.  I found out that one of them hadn’t even been invited to the opening and that neither of them had received the catalog. If I was to go out to see this show at this point, it would be to take my work off the walls.

Deborah,

What you referred to as chipped paint on the surface is called a mark. I put the mark on the painting. It’s not an accident, it’s not damaged, it’s not “chipped.” Julia made this clear to you. It would have been better if you let me know you were choosing not to include the work. That would’ve given me the opportunity to take all of my work out of the show. My question to you is this: why do you assume that I do not know what I’m doing as an artist and that I don’t know how I want my paintings to be seen?

Samsøñ provided you with my bio, my CV, and a general statement about my work. They also provided at no cost to you Hi-Rez images of the work for publication.I was asked to craft a special statement for this exhibition. Since as you probably know language is part of my practice as an artist, this is also artwork. Since this was to be published as a document in a catalog for the exhibition, it would be normal for an artist to be compensated for a contribution to a publication.

Lastly, there is a difference between speaking to someone at an opening and being required to provide a slide talk with images and an overview of one’s work. As I said, I enjoyed talking with students during Traversing Gender. That is a very different situation.

Joe Biden famously said, “if you want me to know what you value, show me your budget.” Thanks for making your priorities clearer for me.

I’ve advised my colleagues Anne Harris and Susanna Coffey about this unfortunate situation.

If artists are only valued for their ability to entertain, then they are not valued at all.  In this case, the appearances were more important that the message of the works.  Instead of seeing the artist who poses a question (“Why is that white spot there?  Oh wow, it really makes it seem like it’s a piece of dust illuminated by the light, doesn’t it?) the artist is an irresponsible person who sends out damaged work and needs his “reputation” maintained.  Again, this entire thing has left me very sad.  I cannot wait to get my paintings back from this show.

Still from FACES (1968), a film by John Casavettes (Fred Draper and Gena Rowlands)

A lot of what I understand visually is structured by the screen; specifically the movie screen.  I watched a lot of television as a child, but the experience of seeing movies was deeply affecting.  I didn’t really learn about film as an art form until I got to college.  I took a film class at Boston University that introduced me to cinema and more importantly, cinema history.  I became a much more sophisticated viewer of movies and I would go alone to the Harvard Film Archive or the Coolidge Corner Cinema to see old movies on the big screen.  But the film that really affected me and impacted my work as a painter was John Casavettes Faces (1968).

I saw the film as part of an undergraduate class called Narrative in Art at MassArt.  The class was taught by David Nolta.  We had looked at a number of films in that class and for the life of me I really cannot remember any of them.  Faces on the other hand made a tremendous impact on me.  In this story of a marriage coming undone I saw something about the emotional structuring of space that I carried into my own work.

Gena Rowlands as Jeannie and John Marley as Richard

I remember Nolta telling us that the first part of the film was really hard.  It is essentially three drunk people in a room and if you have ever had to listen to drunk people when you are sober you know how annoying that is.  This section of the film is loud and the characters are boorish and clumsy with each other.  Gena Rowlands plays the luminously beautiful Jeannie, John Marley is Richard, and Fred Draper plays Freddie.  As the characters move in and out of the frame and weave back and forth in the room, a variety of spaces and shapes open and shift framing and isolating the characters.  The bodies communicate the attractions and revulsions the characters experience to the point where the space gets filled and emptied over and over.  The first 15 minutes of the movie are physically exhausting and raw.

Through out the film, the space between the figures is an indicator of the relationships.  The shapes that are created between the people, even when there is a tremendous amount of physical distance, can pull people together or drive them apart.  It is a masterwork of composition that has haunted and informed me all this time.  I have a way of describing it when I talk about my work in terms of love.  If you are very in love with someone (or even just deeply sexually connected to someone) and you are at a huge party, you don’t even have to look to know when they are in the room.  The emotional space between you is so shallow, that you are next to each other all the time.  By the same logic, you can be sitting right next to someone whom you despise that the space can open between you like a chasm.  I saw that in Faces for the first time.  Two people sitting together on the stairs, emotionally close – sometimes touching even – and a huge amount of air between the two of them.  It was the first time I saw the shape and the form of something coming together and then falling irreparably apart.

Dorothy Gulliver as Florence and John Marley as Richard

A detail of Marshall’s UNTITLED. Please go to the link so you can see the entire image. It is MUCH larger than this.

I have a tremendous love for the work of Kerry James Marshall.

So I was completely thrilled when I heard that the Harvard Museums had acquired Untitled, his 12-panel woodcut and installed it at the Sackler Museum.  The first time I saw this piece was in New York at Jack Shainman.  It seemed to big for the space then. It was almost impossible to understand it as an image because the space didn’t allow for the gestalt of seeing the entire thing. It could also be my youth and my inability to understand what the work was positing, and how, in so many ways, Untitled reveals Marshall as an artist who locates his practice in the core of the Western tradition of art.

Rodin’s ETERNAL IDOL and Marshall’s UNTITLED

The Sackler has two ways to approach the work.  Those using the elevator have to walk through many of the masterpieces of the collection. (The Harvard Museums are being renovated and the Sackler is filled with some of the great works of the collections of the Fogg and the Busch-Reisinger as well as objects from the Sackler.)  You essentially approach the piece after walking through the history of art.  If you come up the stairway, you leave the Sol LeWitt and walk up many stairs through the earth toned concrete atrium to the fourth floor of the museum. These two journeys, one through history and the other from the ground to the sky, affect how you approach Untitled. 

Opening the darkened door after climbing all of those stairs you see the first panel of the work, which spans the entire rear wall of the gallery. The size of it is overwhelming.  And the process of woodcut applied to this particular scale of image making shows a mastery of the technique.  The 9-color print is made up of 4 x 8 sections, the size of plywood.  Marshall uses a building material to make an image of an architectural space.  The remnants of the wood grain haunt the image with the history of it’s making.

We start in the first panel with a view from high up.  We can see the city below us and the edge of a yellow brick building.  Then the severe black lines of the frames of the work come into view; they reinforce the perspectival grid system of Alberti that Marshall uses to create the sense of deep space in the work.  As we look from left to right, we see the reframing of space.  We have entered not just a skyscraper, but someone’s home were a group of men are assembled, having coffee, eating, talking, engaged with each other.  A hallway leads to a bedroom.  The wall turns and black rectangles decorate and the surfaces.

It’s a really strange image.

First, we are outside, high in the air.  Then, as suddenly we are close enough to a window where we can see the flowers in the window box.  Do skyscrapers have window boxes?  That could prove sort of dangerous.  There is a window but we cannot see into the space, but then suddenly, we are in the space.  And the ground of the room is green and textured, more grass than carpet.  So we are outside looking in, and then the inside has element of the outside.  We were high up and now we are in the same space as this grouping of men.  Six men in two groups.  Having coffee, eating, talking.

Marshall reveals his deep interest in the history of art without making a post-modern “pastiche” of style.  He makes a stage set of perspectival relationships in the room.  The bench is the central perspectival device (it is also very similar to the George Nelson benches in the gallery.) We are with these men in their appointed, modernist space. The black squares on the wall reference Malevich.  Using the co-terminus space of baroque painting and marrying it to the severity of the perspectival grid, Marshall collapses the distance between us and these men.  He also uses the pyramidal composition of Raphael to create these monumental groupings of men, who declare and frame the space with the gestures and placements of their bodies.  They point with their limbs and their gazes.  The twist of the figure on the left shows the influence of Mannerism and its emphasis on the extreme action of the body.  The hands and plates establish the planes in the same way that Manet uses his figures in Le déjeuner sur l’herbe.  In fact, the grass in the living room is a direct link to that moment, when a painting becomes a declaration of a constructed truth.

Continuing through the room (in the sixth panel) we see that one of the plates does not seem to “agree” with the planes suggested in the rest of the image, thus declaring a different kind of space.  The difference here makes other differences clearer.  Marshall uses brown in two of the figures, the coffee server, and the man with crossed arms.  There are linked on a strong diagonal in the composition which is split by the square vase on the table.  This split to me talks about a certain idea of doubling and time.

The Master of the Argonaut Panels, The Judgment of Paris, c. 1480
Tempera on panel, transferred to canvas

There is a small painting in Harvard’s collection called The Judgment of Paris.  It is a depiction of the event that causes the Trojan war.  The interesting thing for our discussion is that there are two depictions of the same group of people on opposite sides of a panel split by a flowering tree.  Common elements are repeated and illustrate the narrative; the golden apple that Paris holds on the right is held by Venus on the left.  Nature acts as a divider, and an indicator of the passage of time.  In light of this, it is possible that instead of a depiction of six people, Untitled could be one grouping of three people at two different times.

Because of its size and scale, Untitled is experienced in time, not just visually.  Like Eakins’s Swimming Hole, each figure leads you to the next in the composition and the pyramidal composition in both paintings lends a sense of monumentality.   But unlike Eakins, where your eye tracks the movement of what could be a single body in a smaller scaled painting, Marshall makes you move your body to experience the image.  Once you enter the room, what you can see from one part of the house you cannot see from another. Therefore, we experience this as two groups of men in a vast domestic space.  For all the focus on the figure grouping, there is a tremendous amount of space in this picture that is absent of activity on first examination.

The image offers a sense of domestic life, of privacy, of community, of home, of rest and restoration.  There is a safe place to gather and a safe place to rest.  In light of Marshall’s other work, most notably the heartbreakingly beautiful Souvenirs (there is a glorious one at the Addison Gallery at Phillips Academy), I look at this image as a respite.  In the Souvenirs, a luminous black angel prepares a place for us; a bit of heaven, as it were.  She prepares a place to mourn. This place is absent of participants, but the angel looks out at us.  Untitled may posit the use of that space of mourning prepared in the Souvenirs. Where else but heaven could a group of black men relax and have privacy and safety to speak their minds to and for each other? It also makes me think about the two brown figures and the groups split by the vase.  Is one side the past and the other the present?  The two brown figures actually seem to face each other.  Are they “real” and the other figures memories?  Or ghosts?  These questions shift the functions and readings of the black rectangles in the image.  They are clear references to Malevich and Mondrian (vis-a-vis the verticals of the black frames and in the later panels that hint as well to Ellsworth Kelly), but they also carry the weight of absence and death.  You stand at one end of the work and look down the vast length of it to the black square at the other end.  That square pulsates and vibrates as you approach it.  The small overprinted head on the last panel is like a reflection in a dark mirror.  We are in the “upper room” physically (we just walked up that illuminated staircase to the top of the Sackler) and visually.

If I told you there is an image of six black men at the Sackler, what would you think?  What could you image?  I am guessing that one would not imagine a group of men in a pink room having coffee.  The history of blackness in art, and of black maleness in particular, has been strongly tied to narratives of violence, separation, anger, exoticism, and hypersexuality. Or they are represented as an historical occurrence, reinforcing the notion that black people are somehow outside of contemporary life.  This is not to say that there are not “positive” or “favorable” images of black people in art, but to say that when black people appear in art, they are nothing but their blackness – they are not human, they are indexes.  (You can see this in the gorgeous Ingres Odalisque with a Slave that is directly opposite Untitled in the next room.  This work uses images of blackness and exoticism to eroticize the possessions of the empire.  They are things to be looked at.  In the Marshall, we are participants in the action in the room.  It is a key difference that talks about the nature of subjectivity and the possibility of agency.)

Marshall takes on the reductive notions of blackness.  By using that color, and he is a master of the color black in the same way that Alex Katz is a master of the color pink, he expands its pictorial and poetic possibilities.  In Untitled, black is flesh, fabric, and furniture. It varies in density and texture. It is warm and cool.  It is figure and it is ground.  It is structure.  It is public and private, heavenly and earthly.  In unpacking the color formally he shows that it can be many different things visually and socially.  We can actually think about it as a color and not a label.  It is a site of possibility.  And placing black people in contemporary art affirms their presence in life as it is lived today.

There is a vast amount of space in Untitled that is devoid of the body (although images promoting the piece feature the body).  These are hallways we pass through, spaces we negotiate to get to another space – blank areas whose blankness is reinforced by formal placement of rectangles of pulsating blackness.  Places where nothing happens.  Talking Heads have a lyric that posits heaven to be “a place/where nothing/nothing ever happens.”  Another part of the lyric really captures what I feel when I look at this work: “It’s hard to imagine/that nothing at all/can be so exciting/can be so much fun.”