Art Sync: Everything Matters

The vocation of art begins in a longing that only the art can address. At first the longing attaches to something in the world. But, over time, the artist notices something about how picturing itself causes almost anything seen to open as an occasion for wonder and surprise. Is the pleasure we take from Cezanne’s apples in the idea of the fruit or, rather, their evocation? The quotidian or the everyday describes things I paint but doesn’t capture the almost erotic charge released in the scruples of painterly seeing.

Berger invokes Simone Weil’s formulation that heaven is at hand (“thy kingdom come”) when we feel God immanent in everything that happens, and we can meet the world, as it is, with desire. This is a tall order, but Berger imagines painting is an activity where this spirit sometimes prevails. The world rises up as the realm of the visible and collaborates in being seen through the resources of poetry and painting.

Although art can be traded and possessed, if the poetry is strong enough, the devotion sufficiently demanding, the world emerges in its enduring mystery and enlarges our common appreciation of the gift of existence. I think Berger is right about the peril of disembodied appetite and desire. The difficulty and attentiveness of art’s communion with the world, for both maker and viewer, is one kind of resistance to our distracted and destructive habits.

When you paint from observation or memory the world resists our assumptions and recipes for recreating the fabric of light and space. Painting forces you toward first principles, which, in their way, are as corrosive as the insights of quantum mechanics. A painter must answer, successively, for themselves, how color relates to light, how shape can embody both an object and a space, and whether the things we desire, like a body or a building, when embedded in a context of viewpoint and atmosphere, retain independence. The doubt implied in this last question is essential to the drama of modern figuration from Cezanne and Monet to Giacometti and Auerbach: Is it the object we desire or the complex occasion of its visibility?

Another thing—clearer now than at the beginning—is that the reality a great picture expresses is not an inventory of things, but a feeling about the necessary relationships that preside among the namable stuff. The sine qua non of all art is, perhaps, the sense of space. Our intuitions about weight, gesture, and time generate fictional equivalents in painting. This awareness connects very different practitioners like Ingres and de Kooning or Velazquez and Giacometti in the quality of their obsessions, and I’m inspired by this trans-historical filiation.

EJ:  Your painting Nausikaa and Odysseus combines the mimicry of life through painting with the mimicry of a mirror and your self-portrait. Was this painting especially compelling personally to complete? Your open-mouthed expression and blurred movement make a sharp contrast with the stillness and mirrored appearance of other subjects in the painting. I haven’t seen all your work, but are you less interested in self-portraits?

SN:  Nausikaa and Odysseus was made in the spring of 2006. It fits with many pictures I’ve made that frame bits of studio experience with echoes of mythic stories. Everything begins with connections I’ve made with people willing to collaborate in making pictures. These are mostly young people, artists, and models, who have the time and motivation to take on modelling. The young are godlike in their physicality and a great visual inspiration. Fionnula, the woman in the painting with red hair, appeared one day in her celadon-green jacket with the bearing of a princess. As the painting developed, my mirrored reflection’s grizzled contrast with her youthful glow made me think of the “Nausikaa” episode in The Odyssey. The story evokes a courtly dance between the middle-aged Odysseus and the fragile, yet luminous, grace of the princess. This is a pretty good summary of my studio experience. I’ve included mirrored self-portraits in many studio interiors over the years. The mirror is a metaphor for the creative enterprise, but also an emblem of a slightly different time and space from the rest of the picture. My melting framed likeness always makes me think of Wilde’s Dorian Grey. There’s something about the separation of artist and sitter in the picture that is, for me, the condition of the artist’s visibility.

These happen intermittently in everyday experience like the surfacing of a Jungian archetype. When I began, I didn’t know the narrative of work would be part of the picture; with most of my pictures the story is not known in advance. The narratives evolve from memories of my reading in literature and history and associations the pictures develop with forebears in the labyrinth of earlier art. For instance, while working on the Roofers I remembered a small painting in the de Young Museum, Thomas Anshutz’s The Ironworkers’ Noontime, which also has a strange array of anecdotal and neoclassical poses.

EJ:  The Graces Survey the City feels like a real success in expanding upon studying the figure and relating it to art history, here, I’m reminded of Goya’s The Colossus. Did you mean to allude to urban construction as being a subtle menace? Bad, but not as bad as war? Do the delicate Graces soften what I imagine was a long-lasting disruption of your view?

EJ:  I am thinking of your painting, Telemachus and the Sirens. Did you let the story of Telemachus guide you as you painted it? Or did you tell the story in paint as you worked? Also, my favorite painting so far is Annunciation. The work suggests a heavy situation with the female subject. My first response was, “Whoa. I don’t even want to know what she is thinking.” It gave me a powerful punch like the embarrassment of breaking in on gossip. The chaos of the objects perfectly balances her expression in a nonverbal way that suggests plot. How did this painting come about?

SN:  All the pictures you’ve noted dramatize the desire to discover a story in what is otherwise a contingent visual event. The pictures are a fiction: the artist seems to be simply painting the visual facts and finding meaning in the meeting of elements that might be random, accidental, even “chaotic,” as you describe the still life in Annunciation. But the picture’s naturalism is also a construction deeply beholden to precedents in Titian, Velazquez, Eakins, and Degas. The implicit narrative, or meaning, issues from both the frieze-like structuring of form and interval, and also iconographical clues like the phallic cranes in the construction pictures, the seductive sirens in Telemachus, and the vessel presented to the woman in Annunciation. For me, there is an irony in the way the narrative is ambiguous, stutters and breaks down into a kind of parody of its historical precedents. In the foreground of Annunciation there is a book on Chardin on the seat of the chair whose cover reproduces the girl with the shuttlecock. I hope the pictures reroute the drive for narrative certainty into another channel. An observational painter’s attention to the contingent facts, both in the motif and the materiality of the medium (what you call “telling the story in paint”) weaves its own spell. The colors and shapes I paint and the physicality I pursue are stimulated by the act of painting. In this activity, the world opens as a set of possible poetic relations. The interdependence of painting and the beauty of the world is an article of faith. For me, painting is not manipulative in the way narratives can be and not possessive like the unassuageable hunger of consumer capitalism, à la Berger’s critique. Rather, painting cultivates a continuously vibrating “double vision” where personal desires seek an alignment with the constant flow of visual events, and arbitrary visual facts are transfigured into necessary poetic relationships.

––Elizabeth Johnson
(elizabethjohnsonart.com)

edited by Matthew Crain

(instagram.com/sarcastapics)