WANDERING
Why Landscape?
To experience transcendence, you must know your origins. Where do you come from? What place stacked your bones into the shape of you? I live in the most cosmopolitan city on earth, yet I look more like an overweight Greek waiter than a “dazzling urbanite,” to borrow a line from Blazing Saddles. My wife, Katie, and I wear black to fancy receptions, but I’m never more than one burp away from the beach bum that I really am, preferring flip-flops, shorts, and a T-shirt, even on chilly days. I don’t take myself very seriously, but I do know on which side my bread is buttered; I know where I come from. The most soulful paintings are tethered to one idea, one place, a single heat source, and no place burns hotter than the American South.
Because it remained somewhat separate from the Western expansion of the United States in the nineteenth century, the South was perceived as complex, isolated, and exotic, an ideal breeding ground for eccentrics, storytellers, songwriters, and artists. You know as well as I that there isn’t one Southern landscape any more than there is a single Southern identity, yet all of us lucky enough to have been born there wear the same tattoo of geography across our sunburnt shoulders. I live in New York City, but I’m tied to the shape of the Carolina coast, whose tangled woods and oppressive heat don’t represent progress over nature but defeat at its hands. I grew up in landscapes so hauntingly beautiful that it was unbearable. As a kid, I believed that I could see the languid air that stuck to my eyelids and hung like curtains at dusk. The South spawns many writers and artists because it’s so damn hot, and heat makes people crazy. Some artists seek inspiration in her languorous scenery, while others surrender to humidity’s curfew and allow their eyes to be torched by untamed light. That’s the difference between a landscape painter and a Southern landscape painter; a Southern landscape painter extracts poetry from capitulation. An artist is born the moment he or she gives up. If you’re making art, you’re trying too hard. Stop it. The best paintings look like work, not art. I gave up trying long ago and what was left over, that sleep- deprived, desperate version of myself, was my spark.
I’ve built a successful career fanning that spark.
Southern children are taught to drink in the wondrous details of the local landscape: a flower isn’t just a flower but a blue water hyssop or Southern marsh canna, birds are black-bellied whistling ducks or red-footed boobies, and barbecue sauce is light tomato, heavy tomato, mustard, or vinegar. Poetry lives in details, and the artist’s job is to amplify them. My connection to the landscape of South Carolina has nothing to do with nostalgia; it’s much broader than memory. It’s my clear seeing place. A career has many moving parts, but there must be a cable that runs from your soft tissue directly to your clear-seeing place.
Every artist needs such a place, for this is where your muse resides. Mine is an old man named Homiah. He has gray sideburns and wears a shabby brown trench coat and a Gatsby cap. Homiah has been my muse for as long as I can remember. The reason that I work all day, every day, is so that Homiah will know when and where to find me; I lock my door, start messing around, and pretty soon he appears, all soft-mouthed and weightless. His only prerequisite is solitude.
As a kid, I found solitude in cardboard boxes. I’d find a rectangular box slightly bigger than my body, drag it into the woods, cram it into the bushes, and crawl inside. I wasn’t escaping anything so much as seeking containment amid wildness. Remoteness entices me. As a teenager I’d take our eight-foot johnboat down the Waccamaw River into hidden coves, where I’d smear a marmalade of cold river mud on my face and bare chest. Then, I’d lie on the floor of the boat and drift with the current. The fecund smell of river water clears my mind, and I need it on a regular basis.
If I can’t travel to a remote location, then I summon it in my imagination. Urban life has taught me by necessity how to withdraw into myself on command as an electric eel generates voltage. Manhattan can be whatever you need: busy or lonely, rapid or glacially slow. I have the best family ever and plenty of friends, but I love to be alone and feel fortunate to have a career that demands solitude.
Every year, I take at least one trip alone in which I can drive and listen to the radio. These trips are not always to remote locations. They sometimes dovetail with other interests: magic conventions, Star Trek conventions, Graceland, casinos, and once even a celebration of the 1980s television show Dallas (I’m a big fan), which included a barbecue dinner on Southfork Ranch hosted by the original cast. Avid enthusiasm for interests other than painting is an integral part of my practice because through them I get to know myself better.
While driving alone through the stark Nevada desert, I heard a beautiful poem by Lisel Mueller called “Romantics” on NPR’s Writer’s Almanac. The poem contemplates the close friendship between Johannes Brahms and Clara Schumann. It closes with words that have stayed with me ever since: “Each time I hear the Intermezzi, sad and lavish in their tenderness, I imagine the two of them sitting in a garden among late-blooming roses and dark cascades of leaves, letting the landscape speak for them, leaving us nothing to overhear.”
The words “leaving us nothing to overhear” articulate something I have felt for a very long time. Art isn’t the reliving of an experience, but the total possessing of it. Artists have long invented multisensory ways of possessing the landscape around them: witness the St Ives painters of the early twentieth century. Barbara Hepworth stood at the edge of a cliff with her eyes closed, arms spread to the wind, drinking the salty air, and Peter Lanyon lay facedown inhaling the rugged Cornish soil (I tried this on the Great Lawn in Central Park, but the police made me leave). My hero Glenn Gould conducted in the air while standing before the ocean and sang Gustav Mahler lieder to cows, while Albert Pinkham Ryder took long walks along the Battery of Manhattan to study the moon.
My paintings present the landscape in the same way I learned to see it, by lying on my belly with my chin in the dirt, foreground so close I can taste it and background far away. No middle ground. Seeing from a bug’s-eye view instantly compresses space, like closing an accordion, and makes the viewer complicit in reconstructing the landscape; I provide the close-up and the far away, and the viewer supplies the middle. This is nothing new. The Canadian Group of Seven painters from the 1920s and 1930s eliminated middle ground in order to give the spectator the impression of being in direct proximity with the raw power of nature.
Imagine any landscape painting and you’ll see a fixed view of a place, which automatically implies someone standing there gazing at that location. The painting acts as a stand-in for the solitary viewer experiencing the landscape. I am obsessed with fixed views and study paintings by Thomas Eakins and George Caleb Bingham because their conceptual rigor is compressed into carefully crafted views. Their paintings are not depictions of motion but subtly articulated affirmations of place. No past, no future, no story. There’s no such thing as narrative painting because we don’t know what the painting looked like before, nor can we anticipate what it will look like in the future; it is eternally immediate. Why force painting to do what literature, film, and theater do better? We are not storytellers but image-makers. Images begin and end motionless.
Peach Man
Anyone who grew up in 1970s Myrtle Beach will remember the Peach Man, a sunburnt farmer with a crew cut who sat on a wooden crate in front of Chapin & Co., our local grocery store, selling the sweetest peaches in the known universe. Townsfolk also referred to him as Wart Man because of his dubious ability to cure warts with the touch of his fingers. A skeptic, my mother wanted to see for herself and had me hold out my hand. He mashed his thumb against a colony of warts in my palm, and a week later they vanished.
“Are these peaches local?” she asked.
“No ma’am, they’re from a mile away.”
Thus began my love for regionalism. American Scene painters from the twenties through the fifties were guided by what the anthropologist Clifford Geertz referred to as “local knowledge” and based much
of their philosophy on the belief that “To know a city is to know its streets.” Painting is local knowledge; it is the evidence of its creation, eternally in the present tense. The Peach Man’s awareness of orientation was so resolute that any place beyond the crate under his denim-clad butt was foreign. I am still trying to paint as well as he sat.
That experience also taught me about the ways in which we ascertain truth; two people see the same thing from different vantage points. Art bundles two truths simultaneously, one visible and one invisible. In his sculpture Dove, William Edmondson used direct observation and drawing skills to render the appearance of a bird. However, his genius was in breaking down visible appearance to reveal a deeper truth that relies less on visual accuracy than on personal and cultural experience; the second truth can only appear when the first one vanishes, when one thing slips into another. The beauty of a work of art is that it has no real purpose other than to slip, dilating our eyes in the process.
Position
Growing up in a resort meant working in the hospitality business. Every teenager should do restaurant work because it embodies most of the skills they’ll need in adult life, such as collaboration, presentation, and how to swallow food without anyone knowing. Plus, you get to say “griddle” a lot. I started busing tables in a restaurant called Slug’s Rib at thirteen and was instructed to say that I was the manager’s son when asked my age by shocked tourists. The first girl I kissed worked there. She was sixteen. One busy summer night we snuck out of the kitchen and stood on the bank of a river that flowed behind the restaurant. She yanked me by the ears toward her face and commanded me to “open my mouth.”
I worked in a different restaurant every summer. By nineteen, I was a kitchen assistant in a Japanese restaurant called Nakato, where part of my job involved taking the trash to the Dumpster at the end of that evening’s service. At eleven o’clock, while the last tables were enjoying coffee and butterscotch sheet cake, I’d push a leaking garbage can full of rotting tuna across the gravel parking lot into the thick Carolina night. The dead weight forced me to rest every few feet, when I would utter to myself, “Here I am.” The world was spinning, and things were happening everywhere, but the density of the trash heightened my awareness of being in that place at that moment and, like my mother’s floating camellias, filled me with a rage to live.
Painting is the same. You make a few adjustments, and here you are. Other people look at it, and here they are. I still think of my paintings as bins full of warm, rotting tuna that I must push from one place to another so I can get home and go to bed; it sure makes them a hell of a lot less precious.
A landscape painter must be aware of the viewers’ positions both physically (where they stand) and conceptually (how they will mentally project themselves into the spatial arrangements). Are the viewers included in the composition, or do they bring themselves to it? For example, a landscape by Philips de Koninck and a ceiling fresco by Sebastiano Ricci imply the footprint of the viewer in their compositions; we see the world from a fixed vantage point determined by the artist. Ad Reinhardt’s black paintings and Frank Stella’s protractors do the same thing, but use the tactile certainty of materials instead of pictorial illusion to mark our physical location in the room. The painting becomes a proxy for our eyes as opposed to an experience to which we bring them. Looking at a painting is active. We project our vitality into its world and, like a hologram, that world should be complete regardless of our changing position.
Pollock’s Studio
On a sticky August afternoon, Katie and I took some friends to visit Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner’s studio in Springs, Long Island. The house and grounds were unremarkable, but Pollock’s freestanding studio was arresting. All gazes were focused on the floor with its lassos of drips, but I barely looked down, for this was not an altar for genuflection but a place to work. I was looking for outlets, checking ventilation, imagining where the refrigerator would go, and wondering if you could get Indian delivered. Every studio I’ve ever been to has drips and splatters, and this was one more on that long list. I abhor the term “drip painting”—people pay too much attention to Pollock’s technique, how he painted as opposed to why; I don’t think of Lucio Fontana as a hole puncher or Fred Tomaselli as a pill pusher. Pollock let process lead him until technique vanished for an overall experience that washes over us. Focusing on drips is missing the extraordinary power of those paintings. We know that Pollock looked at aboriginal art, Tibetan painting, and the fluid webs of Janet Sobel, who was painting with sticks and drips in Paris in 1945. Mark Tobey was making all-over paintings before 1946, and perhaps Pollock saw those too, but where he took it is more important than where he got it. Pollock worked his later canvases on the floor, which took them from the Western tradition of easel painting into realms of Tibetan sand painting and ritualistic dance, allowing him to be in the image.
Whether brush, knife, squeegee, or broom, a tool is simply an extension of the body and intellect of the artist. Paint is not only the delivery system for ideas, but the flesh and blood of them, as William Carlos Williams wrote, “No Ideas but in Things.” That said,
Pollock’s control of materials was stunning, and any Bozo who says, “I could do that” is full of clown shit. They couldn’t, and, more important, they didn’t. I want to unroll eleven feet of unprimed duck on the cold floor, give them a gallon of black enamel and a stick, and say, “OK, dazzle me.”
Not just anyone can be an artist; it takes intent, execution, rejection, failure, Tylenol, and endless practice. That’s before you can even think about showing in galleries. You must also possess extraordinary empathy, circumspection, resilience, and the sense of humor that comes from living an insensible life. Then, it all must be woven into a cohesive, visually compelling body of work followed by another, and another. Not so easy. The comedian Steve Martin said, “It’s easy to be great. It’s hard to be good.”
Moreover, an artist must have a working relationship with solitude. When I was seventeen, I stayed alone in my bedroom doing what every horny teenage guy does: making classical drawings. I drew until my wrist hurt, switching from my right hand to my left, sometimes using both. I drew on every surface I could, even squeezing out multiples until I couldn’t produce anymore. Although gifted and talented, I still couldn’t call myself an artist. I had to live life to have something to say.
Pablo Picasso was an exception. The breadth and pathos of his early Blue Period paintings, like The Tragedy (1903), reveal a sophistication and empathy rarely seen in a twenty-year-old. I have looked at a lot of painting and keep coming back to his staggering genius. Genius is one of the most overused words in our language. Someone who scores high on an IQ test or can recall data with the accuracy and speed of a computer is not a genius but simply has proficiency with numbers, an aptitude for testing, and terrific potential. However, genius is measured by achievement, not potential. Don’t promise us; show us. Picasso was a genius, but he also worked harder than a choirboy in a porn shop.
An artist is a person who lives in the triangle which remains after the angle which we may call common sense has been removed from this four-cornered world.
—Natsume Soseki
Front Room.
Back Room.
I love being fooled. Whether a carnival huckster, con artist, pickpocket, or infomercial salesperson, anyone who hides behind the armor of a carefully rehearsed routine fascinates me. My obsession with infomercials started as a child, and Ronco was my favorite; any problem in the world melted away when the Pocket Fisherman commercial came on. That voice, part carny talker and part uncle, was Ronco founder Ron Popeil. I applied my tip money toward buying the Pocket Fisherman and other miracle inventions like the food dehydrator, Inside-the-Shell Scrambler, and GLH-9 Hair in a Can, which I used in a painting. I wonder who owns that hair-piece. I even wrote fan letters to Mr. Popeil and received cordial replies.
When I type the word Ronco on my MacBook, spellcheck changes it to rococo, and I gri
n from ear to ear. Infomercials skillfully manufacture desire, which is itself a form of tension, a one-sided longing for that which is craved. If you look beyond the chocolate sipping and ass pinching, you’ll find that eighteenth- century French Rococo painting is full of such tension. François Boucher, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Jean-Antoine Watteau, and Nicolas Lancret painted desperate, lustful pictures, using frivolity to mask melancholy as if something cherished were coming to an end. Rococo images are often dismissed as trivial, pastel-hued, and decorative, three things I happen to love. They are also highly skilled paintings by successful artists. With brushstrokes that glow as if painted with liquefied silver, a Fragonard embodies the conceptual framework of its message, one of fragrant luxury, classical reference, loss, and sexual fantasy.
Some critics and instructors use the word decorative pejoratively, as if severity and discord make a painting good. They probably couldn’t make a successful decorative painting if their powdered pink cheeks depended on it. What they fail to recognize is that the will to decorate doesn’t only arise out of levity and frivolity, but also out of doubt and uncertainty. Reality is questioned, reexamined, and improved through the process of ornamentation. I believe that it’s impossible for an artist not to reflect his or her times; however, art is not a mirror, it’s a container. Everything goes in, but only the artist decides what to reveal, and how; the painter Robert Motherwell said, “It’s an intellectual decision to paint emotionally.” Painting should be more than eye candy, but every painter should know how to make really good candy. Studying decorative arts can help an artist integrate disparate elements into a cohesive whole that delights the eyes. Pleasure is, itself, content.
Clear Seeing Place Page 4