In art school my senior thesis was a series of paintings that I thought of as contemporary portraits of objects such as a chair, a potted plant, or a bunch of freshly picked spring flowers. My idea for this project grew out of my job at an advertising agency where I was frequently sent out to photographers’ studios to pick up proofs and final prints for the ads we were working on.
The agency I worked at developed advertisements for print media. Mostly these ads were for commercial telephone systems and early home computers. Our work appeared in major metropolitan newspapers around the northeastern United States. The photos we used in these ads always looked to me to be twentieth century versions of the premodern still-life and portrait paintings we had so often studied in art history class. In the photography studio “subjects” were always posed on a seamless backdrop or in a light tent. This resulted, in the finished photo, of the subject appearing to exist in a white void. Much as in the paintings, there was always a ground plain indicated by cast shadows, sometimes along with another broad, faint, horizontal shadow indicative of a horizon line. This led me to see the silky white void in the photos as a corollary to the fields of scumbled browns and grays in the paintings.
In the paintings I made for my thesis show, the white void became a field of color. I took most of the colors I used from paintings by Fairfield Porter. I was also mimicking Fairfield’s manner throughout these works, so the paint was stroked on and runny; there was no scumbling.
This series of paintings ended with the completion of my thesis. Afterwards, I was unable to reenter or build out from this work because there was a gap in it that I could feel but not articulate. The fault was not in my idea or in the manner I was trying to manifest it. It was that I did not have an understanding of, or sensitivity to, the kinds of space I was working with. I was mashing together the look of a contemporary advertisement with the look of a painted portrait from another era, while remaining ignorant of the spatial tension inherent in the collision of these two modes of representation.
As with most everyone in my generation, I grew up inundated with advertisements. Often they had a subtle aggressiveness and they exerted a pressure on the development of my visual intelligence and sensitivity. For me, the structure and mechanics of advertisements somehow became part of my natural environment. I didn’t think about or question them any more than I would question why trees were green or why when you look out over a landscape the blue of the sky comes all the way down to the horizon. The physical world is, for us, much like our bodies, always and forever existing. Whenever we open our eyes or tune in to one of our other senses, we are simultaneously aware of our physical being and the space around us. Advertisements and the mechanics of mediation are not like this; their reality is imprinted on us and reinforced through constant repetition.
Having grown up this way I could not see the difference between the space in a painting and the space in a photo made for an advertisement. In reality the space in the photos, the white void, was so lacking in context that your scope of possible involvement was reduced to a minimum. You could get a sense of the physical presence of the subject, you could admire it, fantasize about it, and eventually lust for and desire it. These kinds of interactions can be intense, but they are almost always short in duration. The space that has been constructed around the subject has the shallow physicality of illustration, but it is not a humane space. You can’t linger in such a space because there is no room in it for you to inhabit. There is no center to this space; it’s existence pulls on your psyche, willing you to project something onto it. This situation is exacerbated by the mechanics of photography and print media which together can abstract all sense of human involvement to near invisibility.
The space in a portrait or still-life painted before the modern era exists in a way that is the polar opposite of this. I’m thinking, for the most direct comparison, of paintings with umber and grey paint scumbled across all the parts of a canvas not taken up by the subject. There is usually a cast shadow, and sometimes a hint of an architectural detail like a base board, a doorway or the edge of a table top. Even with these intimations of a physical, domestic environment, the space in these paintings almost always remains amorphous.
Sometimes this technique is nothing more than an acceptable way for an artist to fill up all the canvas left over once they had finished depicting their chosen subject. However, with an artist like Manet, this seemingly simple technique comes to life. The grey and umber paint grow in depth and come to embody a space that is more sensed or felt by a viewer than it is delineated by the artist. Manet created, with this technique, a space that wasn’t simply dimensional, seductive or declarative; it was expansive and effervescent, it anticipated you the viewer; it left room for you to enter it imaginatively and it encouraged empathy. I think this is one of the reasons why today, we can still identify personally with so many of the subjects in Manet’s paintings. The young woman posed with a parrot, a loaf of bread, a bunch of asparagus all live in a space that is painted, that exists in the paint of the painting, not in any particular period of time. This kind of space is experiential and emotional. It can not be explained technically or deduced. In this way it’s similar to the sense of scale a work projects. There is no formula for achieving it; there isn’t any technique that guarantees access to this kind of space, it simply has to come from the artist’s center.
It took a long time and a lot of looking for me to get past my own visual upbringing and become sensitive to the kind of space I’ve been trying to describe. I’m a painter, painting is the medium that I see and think in so, naturally, it took even longer for me to learn to see into other mediums. I know there are artists who are perpetually at odds with contemporary art. They are repulsed by its engagement with our mediated environment. Through them, the question arises of whether or not contemporary art is capable of fostering the kind of space I have been championing here.
Social media and the mediation of so many aspects of our public and private environment have already changed the nature of both our public and private discourses; it is bound to also change our relationship with art. I think of myself as a contemporary artist and believe that so far contemporary art can still have this kind of space in it. I also feel It’s possible that at some time in the future this kind of space will morph into something that can not be reached or encountered, in the plastic arts, through the human touch.
Seeing this space as it exists now, within the jumble of media we live in, is something I will have to turn to in another essay or essays.