Art Sync: Stories Without People

Elizabeth Johnson: On Gross McCleaf’s website you describe a farm in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. You write: “The land vibrates with textures, sounds, smells, and crawls with life. Stand in one place too long (to paint a picture, for example) and the dusty straw ground slowly pulls apart . . . revealing the smooth, wet clay beneath.” Did you grow up on a farm? Why the strong bond with dirt and earth? Are you always looking for the basis of things? Or is this feeling a result of standing and working for days on one spot? 

Caleb Stoltzfus: My upbringing was suburban. But my dad farmed for much of his life, before I was born, and he comes from a long line of Amish farmers. Farmers often believe, from their experience, they must conquer nature, overcome its dangers. I appreciate Old Testament scholar Ellen Davis’s framework for thinking about nature. Essentially, in the first chapter of Genesis, where God defines man’s relationship to the Earth, there’s a Hebrew word, radah, that some have translated as “dominion over.” But Davis argues that a better translation might be “master among.” To master something is to understand it, implying that it’s complex and worthy of respect. I’m compelled by how nature and man’s response to it encapsulates many rich concepts. There’s much to ponder within that dynamic.

CS: I appreciate how observational paintings use lived experience to present topics that don’t fit neatly into one worldview. For example, my recent paintings of interiors of Woodford Mansion, the historic house museum in Fairmount Park, where I am a caretaker. The objects in the collection are beautiful examples of eighteenth-century craftsmanship and design. Living with these objects as a caretaker is a complex experience. While I appreciate the artistry of silver teapots, Chinese export porcelain, and furniture that was owned by the elite of early Philadelphia, I temper that appreciation with recognizing the enslaved labor needed for their fabrication. Living in an eighteenth-century Georgian mansion adjacent to the Strawberry Mansion neighborhood provides daily stark contrasts. There are wide varieties of lived experience here, and as much as possible I’m trying to document that without resorting to oversimplification. 

EJ: You seem darker than the Wyeths, and favor structure over light effects. Do you think of somber scenes as poetic? As inherently narrative? Is there no story in cheerfulness?

CS: Neil Carlin, my first teacher at Studio Rilievo, gave me the most important thing you can get from any education: the foundational confidence/framework to pursue a career as a painter. He gave me the tools to build good paintings, hard skills to be able to paint from observation in a controlled studio, and the discipline to work for months on a painting. At Covenant, I began dialoguing with more modern artists. Jeffrey Morton had an honest relationship with his medium, with its materiality, that contradicted the priorities of my classical education and disrupted my path toward a traditional way of making pictures. Through Daud’s pure skill as a painter––the dazzling nature of his work––I saw the power of the image as décor. My paintings respect this. I want them to be pleasant to look at. It might sound superficial, but the power of design is important. Daud’s paint quality helps describe materiality, which I’m interested in right now. His images felt real, they invited the view into them. Despite their romanticism, they aren’t just windows into another world.

EJ: Are you still working on the Walt’s Farm series? Why do you seldom put animals in the farm paintings? I imagine that at least insects, worms, and birds are around when you are out, if the farm animals are penned. Do you want to keep the focus on animals that have died via the presence of bones?

CS: I’m not currently working on the Walt’s series. As for animals, I’ve tried putting them in the composition, but they were distracting. When I included sheep, they would commandeer the painting, making it about something I wasn’t interested in anymore. I guess you could say animals made the paintings feel scenic, rather than symbolic. Using bones in the composition suggests the presence of animals on the farm, it emphasizes the struggle of animal versus nature, which is a predominant theme in that series.

EJ: On Instagram, you posted a commissioned painting, Cornucopia, that looks like there’s a quilt pattern behind the image. I love how the clouds look in this effect. What was the idea for this approach? Did you work from quick drawings of figures?

CS: This is a rare example of using Photoshop to arrange figures. The quilt pattern is part of my method to accurately transfer a composition onto the canvas. I overlaid several photographs I took of the subjects to create the final composition, and I used the grid to guide me as I fit the figures onto the canvas. As the work progressed, I felt it was dishonest to hide the grid under a layer of paint, I felt that––to be honest to the image––I should reference the fact that this is a product of a collage of photographs. I probably won’t use this approach again.

EJ: Also on Instagram, you have an intriguing problem-solving discussion with @vincent_desiderio about Centennial. You said you wanted the painting “to be about line and paint, bound together by the dark image of a deteriorating structure.” Yet you felt that “somehow it always fell back into more of a ‘window’ onto the scene instead of a constructed object.” What an enticing way to describe the dilemma of painting! Are you still contemplating this issue? Perhaps color could solve the problem?