In 1987 while living and working in New York I began to notice how subway platform advertisements had a connection to my assembled print images.  By the late ‘80s I had come to the realization that assemblage, in its essence, could be defined as binary structure; one added to another.  I found the autonomy in the process very comforting, as the individual unit, being acknowledged as unique, contributes value, via that uniqueness. My understanding was that by juxtaposing two individuals, potentially representing the x (0) and y(1) of things, the binary format was capable of that dynamism necessary to conception.  In other words, the binary structure follows the format of thesis and anti-thesis and could culminate in the viewer’s process as synthesis. The “diptych” structure in painting represents the idea of using two equal supports, such as canvases or panels. The simple notion of measuring one side with the other,  comparing their images and compositions (among other aspects)  produced a kind of syntax that could stand on its own.  Having acclimatized myself to seeing and thinking this way, I noticed one day that the subway platform ad posters were almost invariably displayed in cases that held two images of the same size together, so I started taking Polaroids of them in late 1987.

I used a Polaroid Spectra camera with a built-in flash. The flash is really important in this work, first for lighting sometimes darkly lit ads but more importantly, for the image the flash makes in the photos. The flash image unites the two ad images in situ. thus dispelling the idea that I simply juxtaposed two images together in the studio.  In most of the photos the images bleed off the edges. This cropping limit was imposed by the short distance I usually had to stand back to get the two ad images in the frame of the camera.  Another step back was death trains and / or tracks.

Because of their scale and proximity to the viewers, the ads were affecting people subliminally.  People pass by in a rush or stroll, stand or sit waiting. Maybe some of those people occasionally focus on the details of the ads. A train pulls up, people get out and move while other schools of people wait to swim into the cars. Because of this I would venture to say the majority “feel” the ads more than they see them.  This scale of image to the body/eye is related to various art ideas. One is the notion that the Abstract Expressionists developed around the “environmental” scale they worked in, with the object of encompassing the viewer’s body completely by the painting.  Then there’s Jim Rosenquist, who described using some images that were so big, that initially, the viewer doesn’t see what they are, in other words… images that were felt before they were seen.

There was a point in time in 1988 when I think I knew almost every advertisement that appeared in subways in New York. It was fascinating, the combination and repetition of images. One could see a certain ad coupled with different partner ads throughout the city.  All the juxtapositions, I thought it was safe to assume, were put up randomly by the workers charged with that task.  The whole operation then, while corresponding to processes that artists would follow in making a work was carried out anonymously and autonomously, so this was perhaps a real demonstration of the collective unconscious.  In the beginning is the consumer, the origin of desire, then there are the business entities involved in the production of the wares designed to fulfill that desire, then the ad agencies charged with the tasks of coming up with campaigns for those products, the “creatives” involved with the actual details of the art and then the format of the ad stands on the platform which funnels it all back to the consumer.

In those years of walks through the subway stations, I thought of the ad images as a collective oracle, a kind of sociological tarot deck that had been drawn from society’s desires. The posters fit all descriptions: ads for things like cigarettes, beer, hard liquor and over the counter drugs, cultural events including musicals, concerts, sports events, ads for movies, travel deals, museums and radio stations, public service ads dealing with health or work related issues, ads for beauty treatments, and on and on. Like a Tarot deck, the ad images could be said to be symbols of all the various impulses we have: survival, food, sex, death, love, power, beauty, money, etc.  They had then been drawn, shuffled and laid out in a precise format with neutrality to any meaning that might be involved their combination. Here was where the artist came in…seeing it and reflecting it back.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  ( scroll over images for titles dates, sizes etc. click to enlarge)

Using picture postcards for my assemblages, eventually I hit a point where I needed to connect to more personal imagery, as the postcard images were intended as souvenirs for tourists.  I had the idea then that I should make my own “postcards”, image souvenirs of my own life.  I turned to a print technique because I could make multiples of images, the large amount of units needed for working in assemblage. The images I conjured were from personal life like photos of friends, or just what ever I was drawn to.

In the early ‘60s my father invented a printing technique, which he called the “clay cut”.  “Clay-cut” referring to the use of clay for a printing surface instead of wood as in “wood-cut”. He flattened modeling clay (plasticene) out in a panel to make the printing plate, then incised marks into the surface to make imagery.  Because the clay surface stays relatively soft it was necessary to ink it and bray lightweight paper, all by hand, to make prints. The general effect was that every print was ever so slightly unique. Syd used this roughly calibrated technique to achieve some nice effects in the few prints he made this way.

In late ’84 I was experimenting with the clay print technique and presentation. By the summer of ’85 I had made a number of works. They were comprised of tiling multiple prints. They were larger than previous work as the unit size of the prints was much larger than postcards.  I used oil based printing inks and rice paper for the media of the prints and then mounted the assembled group to a canvas or a panel.  Eventually I also used water-based colors to stain parts of the rice paper where there was no oil color, a resist between oil and water-based media.

Technically, I could do a few different things to make the editions variable. I could print states, where the plate was inked only once but a number of sheets were pulled off the plate. Each successive print would be lighter until there was no image left. By assembling these prints together in succession I could show in a serial way, the effects of change or time.  Or I could continue to ink one area of the plate but let other areas fade, like in the work “ Gleam And Then Pale.” It starts with a starry night and as the sun comes up in successive versions, the stars fade.  In this case the sky fades from black to light and the printed white stars become invisible against the lightening sky. Or I could color various areas on the plates differently producing different effects within the same image.  An early clay print work was “Life in a Day of the Palm”.  It showed the same palm tree at four different times in the day.

A linear way of thinking entered into my assemblage concepts because of the printing technique.  This progressed the notions I had had about patterning. With an abstract structure merging with the representational images I worked with, I could show, this process is happening to that individual. I had a narrative, the noun and the verb working together.  The assemblages were like short films for me and I could just draw them up, unencumbered by having to deal with photography or projection.

The depiction style that I used to render images was almost cartoon-like, very flat and simple, often with outlined contours.  This related to the representational style I had developed in California, which was influenced by artists like Milton Avery, Charles Garabedian, Hank Pitcher, Paul Georges, Steve & Shawn White, Roy Flowler, Gregory Botts, as well as the works of the European neo-expressionists.  For me the simple style combined with the roughness of the technique evoked an expressionist feel, as the prints were always textured by the various surfaces produced by the crudeness of the clay plates. This offset and countered the lighter, decorative aspect that patterning the prints evoked.

In other works from this period, it is the shape of the unit that presented the image that was altered. In, “Black Cherry Soda” the same image was cast in a triangle, a square and a hexagon.  This challenged the tradition of the frame. Tiling these shapes together, expressed how the same image changed depending on the shape it was presented in, through repetition.

Well into it this period I realized I was creating a large library of images that were the source for the enlarged printed ones. They were the initial drawings on 4 x 6 index cards.  Some were line drawings, others were tone drawings done with gray markers.  I am up to about a thousand, images. Hats, tools, shoes, jets, guitars, vases, objects of all kinds, hands, bodies, faces, trees, leaves, and on and on, wheel barrows, pine combs, horse chestnuts, chairs, bugs, feathers, combs, mounds, rocks, etc.

While at Hunter, I took a class with Vincent Longo. Vinnie is a master print maker and painter and great to have as a teacher and even more as a kind of spiritual guide.  In his class I made transfer prints using my card file of small drawings. In transfers, you make Xerox of things and use acetone to transfer the Xerox to other paper as it’s run through the press.  It was a way for me to think out ideas for my larger print assemblages, which had grown to use diverse images and ways to assemble them.  My thesis at Hunter talked about how I assembled the diverse images I had created. I started to see the act of assemblage as a personal Tarot deck, a personal oracular image library. Of course I was not going to follow a ritualized order in laying them out nor was I was working from a deck of fixed images and meanings, but the choice of images, the why and wherefore with which I spread them out across the wall, revealed thoughts and aspirations as sure as any oracle could.

{ It was also during the Hunter years (’87-’89) point that I started noticing the posters in the subways. I started to see all imagery as pure desire.  The way they were presented in the cases, usually as diptychs, attracted me. I considered them to be close to what I was doing except that these images reflected the collective oracle, the desires of society as a whole, or at least the society of America, of New York. I began an overlapping series of work at this time, which were Polaroids, taken of these diptychs in the subway… they’re next month’s topic.}

The clay prints represented a new period for me, a maturation of various ideas and aspirations. It particularly represented the notion that abstraction and representation could work together. By merging the structures of geometric abstraction, with representational images, I felt I was able to have an expression that was both accessible but also worked on some of those essential levels that abstraction addresses.  This mode enabled a metaphorical narrative.

The aspiration to unite had its genesis in my interest in spiritual philosophy, and in particular, it came from the influence of Baha’i philosophy, which I had been interested in since the age of 15.   The idea of oneness, so central to the Baha’is and so well elaborated in the Faith’s Literature, very much appealed to me.  The declaration of the commonality of essentials while embodied diversely, engenders an inclusive attitude while not diminishing the uniqueness of the individual.

Seeking this kind of balance within the elements of art became a guiding principal. As the work progressed I came to realize that, assemblage boils down to putting two different things together, like the digital reduction that every value is either 1 or 0.   The diptych is the pictorial parallel.  During this period, I met the Canadian painter, Otto Rodgers.  The imagery of Otto’s work had developed from his experience growing up on the plains of Saskatoon where the horizon was ever present.  The horizontal divide influenced his compositions.  Otto talked about making the two sides of the painting as different as possible. He talked about how we gravitate towards finding the connections between different things, and how the capacity of man was in measuring differences, always seeking connections and oneness but also uniqueness, the unknown.

The diptych presented me with a rich yet succinct form to work out the dynamics involved in diversity and oneness and there are a number of diptychs in this group, although the series contains formats of various kinds.  The last works in the series made in late 1989 were the Food / War diptychs.  These combined images taken from gourmet magazines of food plates shot in vivid color, with black and white images of war photos. Images of planes being shot, soldiers in the battlefield, rockets firing, etc. These works were obviously influenced by the subway Polaroids I had been taking and by my thoughts about differences and connections.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A continuation of the postcard works. These influenced by Neil William’s works he brought back from Brazil. A few spray paint on aluminum flashing works honoring High-Life music and a few other things marked the end of an era for me.  In mid ’84 I left working for Chamberlain, left Florida… time for a change.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

One of things that I experienced in working for John Chamberlain was the use of found object assemblage material.  To be accurate, Chamberlain almost always altered his found objects before incorporating them in his assemblage sculptures, but never-the-less his material starts from being found, as it comes from the formation of auto bodies. Working for John was an inundation in assembly line processing. In this aspect, he followed Henry Ford’s process. If John’s work has to be associated with the automotive, it should be for his assembly line of chance operations and not, because his crushed metal elements really have anything to do with car content.

My jobs included cutting things, especially chrome bumpers, bending body metal in a paper bailer and painting.  I also found and processed all the Tonka pieces. When I started working for him he said proudly, “I’m the only one that can make a mistake!” In other words the chance processes I would perform to create his assemblage pieces, where up to him to use or discard.  I was instructed to take cans of color and pour them on piles of  metal I had bent up in the bailer. When the paint had dried and the parts were separated, the color that had dried on the respective pieces was very arbitrary. Once John threw a can of color backwards over his head to land on a pile of metal I had bent up.  That insured that I understood just how chance driven he wanted the process to be.

In the summer of 1983, we were living in my parent’s house on Siesta Key. One of my issues was how the natural places I grew up in, got developed by those who seemed to me, to have little understanding of the natural world that existed there before they came and changed it.  Now looking back, my feelings had to have been as much about the loss of childhood, the loss of innocence, as they were about the loss of nature.  In addition to the anger I felt at the change of the environment, my parents’ property became threatened by a unique kind of coastal erosion while we lived there. A natural pass that carried water from the bay to the Gulf became un-stabilized and began to migrate from where it had been for about 60 years towards our section of the beach. In just a month it threatened to take out our neighbor’s house and then ours. We went through a horrific battle with the authorities and the community before the issue was somewhat settled. It was a rite of passage for me, as I dealt with the authorities alone while my parents stayed in their summer pattern, living in Long Island. I bring the erosion event up to shed light on the work I did then, as some of the images were a direct reaction to it.

My expression of the anger I felt was to employ sarcasm. The vehicle for this came about from my reaction one day to a carousel stand of picture postcards that are ubiquitous in most of the tourist stores down there. The imagery on these postcards are clichés made as souvenirs for tourists to take or send home. There were photos of sunsets, alligators, and girls in skimpy bikinis, sea gulls, or “landmarks” like big new developments. There were images of old oak trees with Spanish moss, water skiing, alligators, pelicans, flamingos, aerial photos of the barrier islands known as “keys”, Manatees, orange groves, sand dollars, lovers walking on the beach and even the Skyway Bridge which during the previous year, had been hit by a tanker. That spectacle / tragedy was used by the tourist industry as a souvenir image. Images on postcards of the bridge missing the lane where 32 people lost their lives by driving off 150 feet into Tampa Bay were common during those years.  There for the tourists who in my angry view were trampling on my sacred ground, the picture postcards seemed the perfect foil for me to use to protest all that I was angry about. And John’s example, of using a found objects and then altering them, became the model for me in the years I worked on postcards.

One of the things I learned from John about assemblage is that you have to have lots of material so that your grouping choices are as various as possible. Postcards were cheap and I could buy them in mass quantities. At first I assembled them together in various tiling patterns.  Their diminutive size made it so that when seen from across a room one did not at first recognize the images. They looked like abstract patterns and in this and because of their scale, they related to my oil paintings from 1979 and the paper assemblages before that. Whether it condemns me or not, I’ll admit I had no awareness of the same kind of work being done by Gilbert and George. What the patterning did to the imagery was of great interest to me, as it automatically sent the images into a deconstructed space. By multiplying them, each element became detached from its context and joined the context of its “likes”.  To me this was strange form of surrealist space where the image’s context was misplaced. I felt this was a way to negate their use for tourists’ pleasure.

At some point because I was still doing some drawings with China Markers, I just started drawing on the post cards. I liked the contrast of the two surfaces, the slick glossy surface of the photos with the flat surface of the wax markers.  Having gotten used to altering John’s found material, my altering the postcards was an easy step and the repertoire I had developed using the markers, which included scrapping layers of wax down to the surfaces beneath was applied to overworking the photographic images on the cards.  As far as I know this was a few years before Gerhard Richter did a similar thing with his “over-painted photographs”. To draw or paint on a photograph is a form of critique made visually and directly, instead of through words which function at a remove from the object itself.  To alter the photographic image by making marks on it, one can emphasize being  “with” or “against”, the image. Drawn or painted over photography, is a form of commentary and artists have been doing it for probably as long as photography has been around.

Anyways, you’ll see in these works, images that deal with shifting shorelines and flooded developments, references to our erosion problem. The idea of putting bright colors over the shoreline images was partly influenced by Christo as he had just completed surrounding some islands in Biscane Bay with pink fabric which was very thought provoking both from an aesthetic as well as environmental point of view. In my way, I altered things too, through drawing. I flooded beach-front developments, swamped new bridges and causeways, erased the crowds sunning themselves on the beaches, drew giant spikes that dwarfed other new buildings, blackened blue waters, put fire and brimstone in blue skies – just generally raised hell among the many images of tourist memorabilia I had found.  This was my way of dealing with my feelings. Some works are “graffitied on” images, which deny the gratification of souvenir visions by being overwritten with the angst of expressionist gesture.   The use of my father’s language – abstract gesture – was also a step towards dealing with my background. Working for John had allowed me to go back to it and use it for my own purposes. I felt the work was in line with some of the neo-expressionist work being done in Europe and in New York by my peers. But there I was, like Robinson Carouso, working on a beach on the west coast of Florida.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As you look through these images they progress chronologically from neat ones to ones with more gesture. This transition can be attributed to being around John Chamberlain. I started working as his assistant in Florida in May of 1980.  Though a generation removed from Abstract Expressionism, his work embodied it enough, that during the time I worked with him, I slowly came to  re-appreciate the aesthetics that my father’s world had first represented.  The emergence of neo-expressionism during the same period was influential in this regard as well.

The drawings were done on  grid paper and the squares are composed of 4 units to the inch.  The media is “china marker” a professional grade wax marker. I liked the quality of the markers because they applied evenly and had great coverage, unlike crayons. The series was started in New York in the fall of 1978,  made while I  did the larger paper assemblages, and continued in my last year in California in ’79 and then again, in Florida while I worked for John.

The motif in the most of these drawings is morphing patterns.  As “pattern painting”  had been influential in the late ’70s  my response might be described as ” post pattern”  because of my deconstruction of that element. After establishing a pattern of the composition, I would then break it, either by redrawing certain parts or by actually cutting the drawing and physically shifting the paper. My process, was to work through a sequences of actions; determine initial pattern, determine color, apply, redraw pattern or cut/shift, recolor new pattern, cut and shift again,  recolor again, etc..all this was following the Jasper Johns’ description .. do something, do something to that, do something to that… etc.

A counter theme, which appeared occasionally in the series was simply to leave the initial  pattern, unchanged.   I always have the need to create some works in a series which occupy a dialectical position from the rest.  Finally, toward the end of the series, the drawings become more about gesture altogether. These emphasized the feeling of the viscosity of the wax line which included how it felt to scrape the wax off. The edges of the drawings become irregular. I liked to call those drawings “fuzzies”.

Drawing is the “arena”, (Harold Rosenberg’s term)  where things can get worked out, where you try anything and everything and see what gives. I made about 100 drawings with china markers and they established my love of working with wax, which I returned to in the ’90s.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In my first two and a half years at Creative Studies I had been exposed to most of the trends in contemporary of art. I have to credit my first girlfriend there, Lani Asher, for hipping me to many things. When I started there I knew next to nothing about cutting edge contemporary art. My background was the Ab Ex generation with a little Pop mixed in.  That was about it except for knowing a bit about 19th Century and early 20th Century art, stuff common to most middle class “artsy” kids.  So Lani’s world was an opening.  Among the many artists she was into, Eve Hesse’s work has stayed with me, close to the heart.

The College of Creative Studies at UCSB was an incredible program. CCS was the first place and maybe the only place, I’ve experienced a truly open theoretical curricula.  A traditionalist on the art faculty was Hank Pitcher. Hank had assimilated Manet and the Impressionists as well as modern figurative artists, like Wayne Thiebaud and Paul Georges. Working with narrative themes and painting in a highly mannered way, Pitcher’s direction was a precursor to some of what happened in the 80s.  At the same time, we had a post-minimalist, the master of “fetish finish” on the faculty, John McCracken.   I had some good conversations with John and some astute advice from him too. Everything from McCracken, was very quietly said and that added a certain power.  We also had two incredible regular visiting artists who lived in LA, and taught on a semester-by-semester basis. Charles Garabedian taught most of the time I was there and Kiesho Okayama taught quite a bit as well.  Kiesho’s family had been the Sakuhaci players for the Emperor of Japan. I think he was supposed to be the next in line.  Kiesho played that flute once for us, by way of introduction, one semester.  It was like the pied piper… everyone fell in love with him.  Kiesho taught drawing and they were some of the most difficult and satisfying classes I have ever taken. In one class we were instructed to draw lines back and forth across the page for an hour or till the paper wore through.

Garabedian was so eclectic. The first time I experienced him was at a slide lecture he gave on Italian artists including Botticelli, Giotto, Piero, and Pontormo.  He talked about how the arrows went though St. Sebastian’ body, the angle of attack and how various artists drew them, and how the ankles of Jesus were painted while he was on the Cross or standing in the water during Baptism.  Chaz blew our minds in adapting these kinds of structural concerns to his California funk cartoon collages. He had the most amazing attitude towards art I’ve ever encountered.  I go to see his shows whenever I can.

We had a class that visited artist studios in LA. guided by David Trowbridge.  I saw Baldesari’s place, the old arcade in Santa Monica, that he had converted for studios. He’d kept all the different rooms and booths where the games had been and had different projects going in each one.   Tom Wudl also taught at CCS and Bill Viola  came through once.  These various influences provided without any administrative editorial, was how things were done at CCS. Throw everything at the student and let them sort it out for themselves.

In 1978, I got to attend Yale’s summer art program in Norfolk, CT. By then I had decided that abstraction / formalism, was the direction I needed to move in.  It was largely because I came to believe that color was the primary force in visual art and I wanted to focus on it, so I began to pursue a reductive approach that would eliminate other elements I defined as non-essential.    This happened in fits and starts throughout the summer at Yale, where I admittedly was struggling, and had a kind of odd relationship with the faculty. Louis Finklestein and Andrew Forge, were running the place. I could not quite cotton to the NY Studio School technique/dogma they dished, although I loved Cezanne on whose work their agenda was based. I did relate though to the photographer Larry Fink and even more to his then wife, (not on the faculty but a “visiting artist” who we could talk with) Joan Snyder.  Trying to make the transition from representational work to abstract, Joan’s example really helped me jump the divide. I have admired her work ever since I came to know it that summer. At some point I started drawing tile patterns and they grew into a series of etchings. These became the basis for moving forward. Even the faculty I did not get along with responded to the etchings, so that to me, was a sign of sorts.

In August, when the program was over I arranged to spend the fall living in New York on an independent study through CCS.  I had lined up advisers, the painters David Budd (SVA) and Ray Parker (Hunter), who would visit my studio, critique the work and report to CCS that I was indeed working. With Fritz Van Orden, a friend from CCS who had graduated and was living in New York and Elizabeth Greason, an artist who Fritz had met in the search for a loft, we rented 276 Bowery. 2nd floor. It was just below Houston St. I was the lucky one, because all I had to do was paint and see shows for three months. Fritz had the most grueling life during those years, driving taxis during the graveyard shift. (He later founded the Ordenaires with drummer Jim Thomas, another CCS grad. They were one of the best instrumental bands, ever.)  Elizabeth, who was gorgeous, worked in upscale restaurants and made enough to support herself a few nights a week to spend the majority of her time in the studio.  She was a very diligent artist.  Ray Parker had a studio nearby, in the same building as Chuck Close. Ray took me over there once and I got to meet Chuck and see how he worked – on a customized easel that moved the canvas vertically so he could cover the entire surface working horizontally from the same position, like using a typewriter.  That was fascinating and taught me something about set-up.

That fall I traipsed around Soho. Dorothea Rockburn, Alan Sheilds, Sol Lewitt, Alan Saret, Keith Sonnier, Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Ned Smyth, Alyce Aycock, Carl Andre, Lynda Benglis, Gordon Matta Clark, Mel Bochner, Chuck Close, Brice Marden and Agnes Martin were the most important to me, and the influence of Joseph Beuys was in the air.  Paula Cooper and Michael Werner had the best new stuff.  Basquiat was still doing SAMO. I also visited the Hamptons once or twice that fall and hung out with Neil Williams.

While soaking in what I saw, I found that I needed to adapt the formalism I was interested in, to personal way of making paintings. Relying again on my training in watercolor, I used washes of color to stain sheets of paper. I would then cut the sheets up into small rectangles and then assemble the rectangles onto canvases or other larger supports, using roplex, the all purpose medium /adhesive of the time. I also used “color chips” to make works with, would glue them down and then add washes of color over the original colors.  I felt that a handmade feel was important to retain, to keep a kind of human feeling to the otherwise hard edged geometric abstraction. The patterns that emerged from this way of working intrigued me and sometimes I would make cuts in the assemblage and shift the patterns of the initial composition. This began to be a language for me.. a way of creating a dynamic in the process.  I was following Jasper Johns’ statement, ” … you just take something and do something to it and do something else to it…” A few pieces became irregular in shape, particularly Green Way. The brick pattern I had been using encouraged me to let the work become a pathway across the wall. The idea of “gait” of movement across the surface was very appealing to me. You could say they were simply shaped works but they became that way through the process and not as a preconceived design.  Certainly Dorothea Rockburn’s work, which was everywhere then, really got under my skin. Nothing wrong with that.

On my return to CCS at the beginning of 1979 I made some larger grid etchings with the intent of using them as a structure to paint on.  Having completed just a few I decided to switch to doing oil paintings. I guess the idea of being able to paint things in and out, which oil on canvas lets itself to so well, was a logical thing for me to explore and moving into oil on canvas was a way of evoking “classical” connotations. I did about twenty small paintings that way. I had my graduate show in late 79. It was half representational – comprised of the work I made from 75 – 78 and half abstract, work made from 78-79. That kind of set up a pattern I would follow… the back and forth between mimetic and non-mimetic practices.

I moved to New York the first day of 1980 and lived in Roy Fowler’s loft on Walker St. for a short while.  Lani had already moved to New York and so we found a place on 27th St., but I was not that happy there, was restless, moody. One day I got a call from John Chamberlain. John had seen some of the paper assemblages I had done at my parents house where I had hung them. We’d met a few years before when he’d bought a car I wanted to get rid of.   John called to ask me if I’d help set up a Florida studio for him. He liked my assemblages and thought I would be a good assistant.  He’d had trouble in Essex, CT, where he’d just moved with his new wife. The town wouldn’t see John’s assemblage material, the crushed car metal he had spread out on his back 40, as anything other than junk. They stopped him from working there.  It was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up, so off I went in May to Florida alone, to work for John.

In 1971 when I was 15, I made a conscious choice to work in art.  Growing up with the influence of my father Syd who was an abstract painter (see: Syd Solomon.com) may make my choice to be an artist seem obvious, but for me, at the time, it was based on the simple notion that I had some skill at drawing. The first work in the group presented, is a pencil drawing that I liked at the time. Somehow it gave me confidence.  I can say now, it had something to do with ordering elements using a certain focus and simplicity.    I had, like many artists’ children, been raised from infancy with painting and drawing. Going to art class in high school was the place where I distinguished parental encouragement from “objective” assessment.  Without my knowing it, my art teacher submitted a print I did to a national student art contest and it won. (Thank you, Mrs. Davis) That kind of cinched it for me, at least for the idea of really pursuing art. I was also involved in music. When I graduated in 74, I went up to Maine and did some small watercolors of trees in bright sunlight at a Baha’i retreat.   Somehow that moment, of painting light shimmering in the leaves, was a major marker, a kind of prediction of how light and transparency were important to me.  I painted my first shoreline watercolor, at Kittery, that summer as well.  After the summer was over I ran in to a surfing buddy, Stevie White, at Georgica Beach in East Hampton. He had just returned from traveling to India. He wanted to go to California and since he didn’t drive, or own a car, I volunteered.  I got to hear about his travels, hitch-hiking from Morocco to India, as we drove across the US. It was an unforgettable combination of words and images.

The California coast around Santa Barbara was an amazing experience for me. The first night we got in we stayed at Hank Pitcher’s house in Isla Vista. Hank was (is) a good painter with high craft, stylized and witty.  The next morning we went out to Devereaux Point to check the surf.  I absolutely fell in love with California then.  It was the scale of everything and the light. I had grown up on a west facing shoreline, on the Gulf of Mexico. I knew how afternoon light looked shining through waves, but California had such altitude and depth compared to the flatness, intimacy and shallowness of the Gulf. And it seemed even more golden.  I started painting, mostly still lives in our apartment on Picasso Street in Isla Vista. (Yes, two artists living on Picasso…. We called each other Braque and Picasso when we surfed. ”Nice tube, Braque.”)  We had a one bedroom, which contained 2 drum sets, many surfboards, and paintings all over the place. It was so 70s surf bohemian !

Eventually I started wandering out with notebooks and then with canvases, painting the places we surfed.  I loved the wilder places like Jalama, Point Conception and  Hollister Ranch.  Stevie attended the College of Creative Studies at UCSB and I worked in an avocado nursery in Santa Barbara.  Eventually I went to Creative Studies, one of the best things that ever happened to me.  It was founded by a literary man named Marvin Mudrick and had one of the advanced arts curricula in the country. With artists like John McCracken and Charles Garabedian teaching at the same time, the influences were serious and yet open.  The only “agenda” I ever heard from CCS officialdom was  that students were expected  “to learn how to think”.  With no programmatic dogma and the independence of its artist/teachers, one had  to figure things out for oneself. That experience served its graduates exceptionally well.

I don’t exactly know how I formulated the way I painted then. I tried to be strait forward, matching what I saw with what I could do technically. I was interested in learning, building a foundation. I drew constantly, in class and out. Growing up with Abstract Expressionism I felt I needed to go back and start again at the beginning, training in traditional mimetic skills. During this period I showed some of my notebooks to the artist James Brooks, who was a close family friend.  Jim was profoundly encouraging then. He said something like, ”it’s all right in there”. The notebook works were done with watercolor and I had the tendency to lay many layers on, often making the tones very rich. The images were seascapes, landscapes and still lives.  The coastal vistas had an effect on my well-being. I got a kind of energy from some places, I can’t quite explain.  Of all the kinds of techniques I have done in my life, I still work with watercolor. They are a kind of talisman. When I assess most of the physical qualities I have sought from painting and sculpture over the years, transparency has to be at the top.  Working with watercolor became a technical and aesthetic foundation.

 

 

(more…)

Over the last decade or so, I have been slowly assembling a chronology of my life’s work in a database – images of paintings, drawings, sculptures, watercolors, prints and photographs. Of the number of good reasons to do this, the primary one for me, is to be able to exhume the hidden narrative my circuitous interests have made.  Having not followed the more standard way, that of perfecting a limited set of media and images over the course of a long practice, I have instead, worked in various visual languages and media, exploring certain interests until I was satisfied, and then moving on to the next.  In an age of specialists, I have been more like a shape-shifter or to use an outdoorsy metaphor, a scout. In my process, ideas morph from one phase into another, or one technique to another and the thread is not always so obvious.

Within the confines of commercial concerns, artists have been required to follow quite narrow parameters. Artists brand themselves for market by sticking to a form and “look”. This has something to do with the lack of depth in the general viewing sector, and it has carried over, pressuring art dealers to require artists to produce more of the same “recognizable” works.  Without a deeper level of understanding of art, recognizing the superficial “look”, is all there is.  This has become coupled with another stereotype, the “obsessed artist”. We have come to judge the artist by the level of obsession/compulsion they have.   Only through obsession is the artist considered to be an expert within his or her chosen set of aesthetics. When an artist moves away from obsession and specialization we tend to be suspect.. he or she must not be serious enough.  It is a limited standard to judge artists with and again, is one that is used by an uneducated audience as they have no other means of respecting the import of an artist or their work.

Now I have no problems with perfecting an idea, deep involvement or specialization, but for me it comes down to the question of how we choose the  limits of our aspirations and how we deal with our natural curiosities.  While working for John Chamberlain, grouping piles of metal in the studio to be used for his assemblages,  John talked to me about the “sets” of his materials. There were the ones that fit into his standard repertoire,  like chrome bumpers, bent fenders, etc., but then there were pieces of metal that John deemed to belong to an “irregular set”, those pieces that, for whatever reason, did not fit into his notion of standard sets.  His solution, which shows one aspect of his brilliance and open mind, was to make works comprised of all the pieces complied from the irregular set.

The point is, that it is often arbitrary to set limits as to what one’s parameters are, especially in the beginning. Eventually, even by taking the freedoms someone like me has taken, one finds one’s limits.  It can take a long time to find the edges of one’s interests.  This was  actually encouraged through the advice given to me by the artists of my father’s generation. I was lucky enough to be doted upon by some of them, probably because in the early 70s, when I was coming of age, there were few young people who took an interest in the art or ideas of the Ab Ex generation. The advice that I got from  them was, “work for 20 years before showing”. In other words, “know thyself first.”

As I look back on 40 years of art making, I can see the links to various paths taken in the service of knowing myself.   One thing that was constant was my use of  the scientific method, which required that I conduct my work by looking into variables and opposites, to guide my explorations.  The years of searching have revealed my sensibility to me. It is that which did not change, while I explored the diversity of examples required by the method.  Without exploring diversely, I could not have recognized the immutable qualities inherent in my being. My process became a mechanism that measured what was a constant internal sensibility ( my uniqueness)  with the various external qualities found in materials, subjects or ideas.

Organizing my work – taking the curatorial approach – also comes about from a professional life of being a curator of the works of other artists. Growing up in my father’s studio and the studios of his friends and later working for Chamberlain, I experienced how artists organize themselves (and how they don’t).  I gravitated to helping artists and their estates organize works. Over the last 25 years I have cataloged thousands and thousands of works; by James Brooks, Charlotte Park, Alfonso Ossorio, Charles Addams and  my father,  and I’ve advised many others charged with this task.  With Ossorio, the curatorial role I played while running Ossorio Foundation, gave me a special opportunity to first digest and then guide the exhibition program of an entire body of work.  During my time there I laid out a plan for 10 exhibitions and we were able to follow through with that, a legacy I am exceedingly proud of. The organization I brought to his diverse and misunderstood body of work, helped people comprehend it and then become enamored with it. Like Ossorio, I have worked more or less independent of market and also have a diverse yet philosophically united body of work.  So I hope I can do for myself what I did for him, by the organization of my work and its explanation and exhibition, through this blog.

So… over the next year I will be posting, in chronological succession, my body of work, starting from 1971 and proceeding to the present. There are about a dozen major groups, with some offshoots. Of course it will not literally be all of the works I have made, but a selection of 20 to 50 works from each period. In the text part of the blog I will write about each group of work that has been put up, discussing their context and how they are connected to previous works and /or future works. I will send notices out each time a new post goes online. The interval between each post will be a few weeks or so, during which time I hope you will feel free to share your thoughts and observations.   As the posts become old, they will remain accessible so that eventually everything will be posted online.  After everything is up, the blog will remain open for any additional dialog that comes about concerning either past or present works. I look forward to sharing my work and ideas with you.

Best, Mike

Mike Solomon  © 2011