Art Sync: Something About The Place

Elizabeth Johnson: Studying your work, I feel a strong pull toward surrealism, movies, and dreams. What inspires you to put a composition together? Is there a story or mood that gets things going?

Ted Walsh: All kinds of things inspire my compositions. Things I happen to see. Things I’m inspired by, literature, music, other art. A technical painting idea, an abstract compositional idea, a theme from an older painting I want to revisit. A story, a mood. ––It could be any mix of these. Anything really.

EJ: A statement on the Gross McCleaf website mentions that you "often depict scenes of home/place, time, perseverance, history, architecture, disillusionment, environment . . . the list goes on." Your paintings feel universal rather than about a specific place. Understandably, you gravitate to Edward Hopper and Andrew Wyeth who also harbor this feeling. What do you love about American realism? What is it about moody, empty but dynamic dramas that attracts you?

TW: I like the idea of generic places, maybe the emptiness and loneliness. I like places that feel realistic, yet they aren’t real. Hopper and Wyeth make places feel universal, but when you visit the places they painted, you see the paintings in a whole new light...

TW: The old masters are present, but they’re taken with some salt. The earlier colonial painting in America was kind of stiff, but that changed. It’s like they added some rock ’n’ roll. You can see it in Walter Stuempfig, Thomas Hart Benton, Raymond Saunders. I love Sidney Goodman’s paintings. He’s one of my favorites.

EJ: I grew up near Gettysburg. While you were an Artist in Residence at Gettysburg National Military Park, what did you paint? Did you think the battlefield felt haunted?

TW: Not haunted. Maybe mystical, spiritual, metaphysical––otherworldly. I taught there. We took family trips there when I was a kid. I could go on and on about Gettysburg. It’s pitch-black dark at night because there aren’t streetlights on the battlefield. I would go out late and ride my bike on dark roads. One night I saw this blue light just glowing out in one of the fields. I started walking toward it. When I got there, it was a little blue flashlight, making an eerie glow out in the middle of the field. It all came together: my memories of being there with my family, hope and rebirth and light. It was magical. 

Another day, my wife and I were atop the Pennsylvania Monument watching the sunset. There was another family there. The dad was a tough looking guy, perhaps a veteran. I don’t remember how I knew, he must’ve had a military hat or T-shirt. He sent his family ahead to go run and play, and then, looking out over the battlefield, he broke down crying. And I got choked up and I had to put my head down before I started crying too. There’s something about the place.

TW: Yes. I usually try to let viewers make up their own backstory before I tell them what I was thinking. But I’m not strict about it. I’m happy to tell anyone whatever they're interested to know. Sometimes my ideas and theirs line up. I like listening to what people come up with. 

The boarded windows were a surprise. I have them in a few paintings. For the mailbox, I was thinking about old-fashioned vandalism, cherry bomb in the mailbox kind of stuff. But also, about breakdowns in communication, and wasted ideas left unsaid. My wife and kids like to play around with fake blood makeup, and it's worked its way into some pictures. This one of the nose is the first one I’ve shown. It has toughness mixed with beauty. I came across a picture of a soccer player with a bloody nose. My wife, Kay, is the model, and she was wearing the glasses, and I wanted to see if I could paint them. Then it started looking sporty, and then I remembered the bloody nose, and it went from there: everyday life picture, to athlete picture, to picture of beauty, to toughness picture, to technical challenge, back to athlete, back to beauty.

TW: At some point, I felt I needed to learn to paint traditionally. Maybe just to prove it to myself. I spent a lot of time in museums studying and reading about painting technique to learn how traditional paintings were made. I really got into it. My paintings leaned a lot in that direction. In this show, and in my more recent work, I draw on all kinds of influence and get the best of each world.

I like Tuymans. He does things I wish I could do in my own work. But they’re mostly abstract compositional and color things. It’s that modernist influence. It’s been hammered in. 

TW: Hopper was a huge influence, especially in my early years of painting. Perhaps I’m misremembering, but I think he was into psychology. I don’t dwell on the psychology of a piece while I’m painting it. Probably the biggest difference in our surfaces is how his are more direct than mine. We’re both studio painters, which lends itself to influence from both the old masters and the modernists. Over the years, I got sucked into trying the indirect methods of the old masters. Generally, my flat surfaces have more layers built up over time than Hopper’s. But he does have some built-up areas.

Depending on what I’m trying to achieve, I will mix paint on the surface of the painting and/or the palette. I put a lot of care into the surface. It must set the tone or add subtext to a painting on a visceral level. It’s a main part of seeing the painting. It’s an immediate visual/texture thing more than pictorial. I guess I do prioritize the physical painted surface over the surface of the depicted objects, but I’m careful not to make one aspect of the painting––surface texture, depiction, color, scale, etc.––overpowering.

EJ: You often depict changeable skies over brightly lit buildings with strong shadows: contrasting strong light against strong dark areas seems natural for you. Is this because you live near the sea in New Jersey with strong natural light? What pulls you toward tonal contrast?