Marc Trujillo: North American Purgatory

Los Angeles based artist Marc Trujillo, whose first solo show at Hirshl and Adler opens on November 3rd, paints what he calls the "shared spaces of the everyday." He is attracted to "non-destinations," familiar places where vast expanses of concrete or linoleum numb the senses. "I'm captivated by the middle ground," Trujillo explains, "the purgatory of the world we've made and share as North Americans."



Marc Trujillo, "5901 Douglas Avenue," 2010, 11.5" x 19.5," oil on panel

Trujillo sees what he calls "visual potential" in mundane subject matter: big box stores, and fast food meals. Painting with a moral seriousness reminiscent of Chardin or Vermeer, Trujillo finds poetry in the gap between ubiquity and invisibility. He evokes both shame and awe in what he records, and uses formal intelligence to make the two conflicting emotions balance.




Marc Trujillo


Q and A: John Seed Interviews Marc Trujillo:

JS: Tell me something about fast food as subject matter; what are you seeing and thinking when you paint, for example, a KFC meal?

MT: I believe Auden's statement about poetry being the precise expression of mixed feelings. So what interests me about painting these is how I love them and hate them, just like with the more panoramic paintings I have a mix of awe and shame about them that makes me interested in painting them. I'm from a square state and have had a lot of fast food growing up, so it can be comforting and when I'm in the mood I can enjoy it, but them again it's a little disgusting and low grade. I didn't want to paint a KFC meal as a seen from the side: "still life as landscape." I wanted the viewer looking straight down at it; it's your meal.

Also, I wouldn't normally order the corn on the cob but it comes wrapped in foil which I wanted to paint, so my motives were also visual when I was ordering this meal.



Marc Trujillo, "Meal #2," 2011, 13.5" x 17," oil on panel


JS: Who are some artists that have influenced you? Where can we see their influence in their work?

MT: My main influences are Vermeer, Velasquez, and Rembrandt.

My paintings are fundamentally synthetic in nature, and represent not only the experience of direct observation, but also an appreciation and awareness of paintings and painters of the past. I swipe strategies to see what works for me.

When I see Vermeer's 'View of Delft' for example, my first reaction is emotional, followed by a desire to analyze what makes it a great painting. The scale is perfect, substantial but not imposing, so when I'm not sure what size a painting should be I'll use the 38" height of 'View of Delft' as a starting point and set the width of the painting according to my needs for the composition. Vermeer had to construct his moment and he took liberties -- in the reflections in the water for example -- with physics to get the moment he wanted for the painting.

The light in 'View of Delft' is very convincing; light is how you sell the fiction of the painting as a real moment. The artificial light in the spaces I paint is very different from the light in the old master paintings I admire, but my interest in conveying it clearly is the same.

Also Vermeer uses the vanishing point in 'Milkmaid' over her hand pouring the milk to help imbue a private moment with meaning -- the opposite of the kind of moments I tend to show and I'll invert his compositional strategy -- so in the parking garage painting for example, there's nothing under the vanishing point but concrete.



Marc Trujillo, "5711 Sepulveda Boulevard," 2010, 30" x 62," oil on canvas


JS: Is it fair to call your work documentary? What is your intention when you show us the kinds of generic places and spaces that you favor?

MT: It would be a misreading to call them documentary. They're real places, but I do a lot to them so that they could be anywhere; no palm trees for example. I'm from New Mexico so to me a palm tree says vacation or movie happy ending. Showing people things that can be part of their fantasy lives is a good definition of pornography. I want the painting to have a chance to be more of an experience than the actual place so that's one reason I pick places people don't go to be there. If I painted the Himalayas then the painting would function more like a postcard that reminds the viewer of someplace they would rather be.

The paintings are the acid test for all of the ideas I have going into them. Making the paintings is what defines the area of investigation for me, as opposed to starting with an idea and executing it. So my ritual is a cycle; looking at great paintings to define painting for myself, looking at the world to see what I think might make an interesting painting as I've come to understand and define it, and testing all of this by making the paintings themselves, which starts the process of investigation all over again.

The locations in the paintings are non-destinations, particularly North American kinds of nowhere, at once ubiquitous and yet largely unseen. These places give me the slightly sinking feeling that I know I'm somewhere, but not really there, present in an absent sort of way. In the mix of shame and awe that I feel, I am inspired by the potential for painting what I'm experiencing in the moment.

JS: What else should viewers understand about your work?

MT: I think the big thing that people misunderstand is that they see the paintings as being "Photorealistic." My paintings are built on drawings as opposed to being painted from photographs. In order to sort out how I want to convey what I'm experiencing in these spaces, I need to draw.




Marc Trujillo, 2nd preparatory drawing for 5711 Sepulveda Boulevard

For me making is thinking. This stage is vital as it's where I test the potential for painting a given situation; clearing an isle to keep the deep space open, changing the proportions of the space slightly and leaving in only the elements that convey my interest in the space and the figures that occupy it.



Marc Trujillo
November 3rd - December 3rd 2011
Hirschl and Adler Modern
Opening Reception -Thursday, November 3rd, 5:30 to 7:30 pm
730 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10019

F. Scott Hess: In Transit

Self-Portrait as a Masterpiece of Creation, 2011
oil on aluminum panel
30 × 24 inches

It must be exhilarating to be F. Scott Hess: he seems to have reached a point where his brush can take him just about anywhere he wants to go. The varied subjects, and hybrid realities of Hess’ recent paintings make them appear eclectic when seen together, but that just scratches the surface. His works actually have a tremendous psychological unity. They have sprung from the mind of an artist who is recycling and blending the richness of his actual life and infusing it with cultural memory and imaginative vigor.

Seriously, to be able to wake up in the morning, sip some coffee and think to yourself “Today, I feel like painting five female ballet students in leotards tossing the bloodless, hulking corpse of the French academic artist Bouguereau out a third floor window in La Rochelle.” Then, if you are Scott, you just head to the studio and make this whim explicit, riveting, credible and even slightly funny.

The Death of William Adolphe Bouguereau, 2011
oil on aluminum panel
24 × 36 inches

The painting mentioned above, “The Death of William Adolphe Bouguereau", is, among other things, a sly revenge fantasy. “I don’t care much for the content of Bouguereau’s work,” Hess acknowledges, “but the man can paint soft female flesh better than I ever will.” It is worth pointing out that in talking about a dead artist in the present tense, as if he is still alive, Hess has given us all a clue to the vitality of the forces and images – past, present, real and painted – that he can draw on. Most art historians have already tossed Bouguereau out the metaphorical window decades ago, but Hess clearly enjoyed doing it on his own terms, with humor.

Not only does Hess, project his fantasies onto the canvas with shocking technical aplomb, and a healthy dose of catharsis, he generally manages the complicate things a bit. In the case of “Bouguereau” the blue and white tones of the artist’s corpse play off the red drapery used the carry him to the window, and evoke the red, white and blue of the French flag. “But it was totally subconscious on my part…” says Hess about the apparent coincidence. That may be true, but what a well stocked subconscious Hess has.

In the past year or two Hess has dredged up references – consciously and unconsciously – from the Bible, Velasquez, Persian poetry, Bellini, Watteau, Sigmund Freud, the experiences of child-rearing, and the experience of being a child. Somehow, all of these things have been internalized, even sorted. “I generally just paint what I see when I’m not looking,” Hess comments.

"Art history, popular culture, literature, and the subconscious all simmer together in Scott's skull," observes his friend and fellow artist Peter Zokosky. “Scott's mental salad bar has more choices than anyone's, and he always comes away with something amazing.” The mental salad bar that Zokosky refers to is also well stocked with life experiences and travel.

In the artists own words: “I’ve been caught after sundown on the dangerous Zabol-Zahedan smugglers road where Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan meet, eaten a small yellow dog in southern China, and lived in an Anarchist-vegetarian-nudist commune in the Midwest. I’ve had coffee with spies and terrorists, lived over the back fence from the Pope, and witnessed the birth of both of my daughters.” Witnessing and experiencing are themes that Hess often strives to balance in his works.

Suzie Q, 2011
oil on aluminum panel
48 × 36 inches

In “Suzie Q,” a 2011 painting, a group of older men avidly stare at a nearly nude woman performing Cirque de Soleil style in a suspended metal hoop. If you stand in front of it for a few minutes you’ll find yourself staring at the woman too, then staring at those who stare. Yes, you are a voyeur. One of the things that Hess does is to let anyone who is strong enough take part in fantasy worlds that he provokes and evokes, and unashamed voyeurism is one of the pleasures he offers. If you aren’t convinced of this, have a look at Scott’s tiny panel painting “Morning Glory” and then get back to me.

The Colonel’s Daughter, 2006
oil on canvas
32 × 40 inches

When you view “The Colonel’s Daughter,” an emotionally complicated painting, you will again want to stare. Depending on your gender, and what you find attractive, you may also want to protect her, cover her up, or have your way with her. Like many of Hess’ best works “The Colonel’s Daughter” will arouse both your imagination and your id: it's the artist’s way of including you.

Mud Riot, 2011

oil on aluminum panel

12 × 16 inches

Hess likes subjects that allegorize violence and chaos. To put it another way, he has a dark romantic side. “Mud Riot” seems to borrow from Antonio Pollaiuolo’s 15th century engraving of ten male nudes slaughtering each other with axes, swords and spears, but Hess slyly bogs his battle down in calf-high mud. Even with their ancient weapons they seem familiar: are they our congressmen?

The Wave, 2010

oil on aluminum panel

36 × 48 inches

In “The Wave” water cascades through a window, but the woman it engulfs seems exhilarated. War and disaster, Hess seems to say, are both, among other things, universal human experiences. They are also transitions. They are also both darkly humorous, if you are a connoisseur of the human comedy. One of the things you have to appreciate about Scott Hess is that he doesn’t just study or comment on the human situation. Without hesitation or condescension he will portray himself in the midst of it.

Hess includes himself and one of his daughters in “Oblation,” a painting in which the pouring of water suggests an offering. Scott stands, shielding his eyes from the sunset, acknowledging his place in this particular cycle. Raising a child to adulthood takes a major portion of your life,” he comments, “or drains it out of you.”

In his “Self-Portrait as a Masterpiece of Creation,” Hess plays fair by posing nude himself behind the verso of a blank canvas. Lucien Freud and Frida Kahlo, present in the form of reproductions of their self-portraits, provide additional fuel for the theme of artist’s using the self-portrait as a vehicle for the insecurities of both the artist and the viewer. Hess is interested in Lacanian Gaze, the idea of a painting being a mirror that reflects back the viewer's own thoughts, and elicits the anxious realization that he or she can also be viewed. “In a way,” he says “I think the blank panel represents that, and also a deliberate lack of guidance on my part.”

Dark Horse, 2011

oil on aluminum panel

36 × 48 inches

“Dark Horse,” a recent oil that Hess is very fond of, depicts a nude woman clutching the reins of a black stallion charging through a snow covered birch forest. Yes, it has a connection to the tale of Lady Godiva, but it also is an essay on opposing forces: a black horse in a white forest, warm human flesh in frigid weather; motion in a still place. The rider is perhaps being chased, but there is a smile on her lips. Hess used some of Eadweard Muybridge’s classic stop action photos of horses to develop the running steed, and perhaps there is a visual pun in its “frozen” pose. It is a painting of extremes, balanced by poetry.

“I get along easily with everyone,” says Hess, “but always seem to unintentionally insult people during raucous intellectual debates.” It is an honest aside, coming from a man whose art can be both engaging and disturbing. Hess has a talent for conjuring up paintings that are challenging hybrids of the mythical, the historical, the allegorical and the universal. His works are imaginative fiction, each one a journey right to the edge of what might actually be true.

F. Scott Hess: In Transit
Koplin Del Rio
6031 Washington Blvd., Culver City, CA 90232
Exhibition Dates: October 29 - December 22, 2011
Reception for the Artist: Saturday, October 29, 5-8pm

John Frame: The Intuitive

"Fine art is that in which the hand, the head, and the heart of man go together"


- John Ruskin

On the opening day of "Three Fragments of a Lost Tale: Sculpture and Story by John Frame," on view through June 20th at the Huntington Museum and Gardens, I emerged from the darkly lit Boone Gallery into the bookstore to find a nicely dressed older woman looking at me expectantly. "Are YOU the artist?" she asked.





Artist John Frame Installing Characters from his "Lost Tale" at the Huntington Library
Photo: Carey Haskell

I told her I wasn't, and then pointed her towards Frame, who was outside, chatting with a few friends. If I hadn't already been introduced to Frame I probably would have also been scanning the crowd wondering "where is the artist?" The most striking thing about John Frame is that he doesn't have any of the tics, eccentricities or affectations that often mark artistic personalities. He fit right into the crowd.

An amiable man with handsome, patrician features, Frame could have passed for a San Marino attorney previewing the show, or perhaps an Occidental professor there for the white wine. Relaxed in conversation, and more interested in others than he is in himself, Frame comes across as man who is utterly comfortable in his skin. That is where it gets interesting.

Frame's ability to negotiate the real world -- the outside world -- is the flip side of his mastery of his own inner universe. Inside the Huntington's Boone Gallery are 35 completed characters, multiple sets and a working theatrical stage that have been hewn from Frame's imagination over the past five years. Committed to the idea that intuition is to always be respected, the artist's images are things that he guides into being without asking just what they are. The results are challengingly mysterious, and the approach leaves Frame utterly at peace with himself.

"I have to follow the lead of the work," he says.

"I think of Frame as a sort of mystic," says his friend, painter Jon Swihart. Frame's exhibition, says Swihart, is "...so ethereal, haunting and captivating, that while viewing it, I had the sense that nothing of the outside world mattered."

John Frame has been making sculpture in Southern California since the early 1980s, and has been taking his time in letting his ideas and methods evolve. "I'm 60," he comments, "and considering the alternative, not bothered by it."

Frame left Los Angeles in 2001 and re-settled in Wrightwood where he found a certain distance and quiet he had been craving. "I have a very removed life by today's standards," he says. In Wrightwood Frame busied himself with a number of commissions that needed finishing. He was also very involved in preparing for a retrospective being planned by the Long Beach Museum of Art; "Enigma Variations: The Sculpture of John Frame, 1980 to 2005."

The Long Beach show was a big moment for Frame, and also a kind of hinge. When it was over some Frame found himself artistically stuck until he sat up in bed one night at 2 AM, jolted awake by the idea of having his figures move. "It came as a single download," Frame told the LA Times. "It was all the characters, it was dialogue, it was sets, it was plot, it was story line -- everything, it was all there."

Dr. Jessica Todd Smith, the Huntington's Chief Curator of American Art, had seen the Long Beach show in 2005 and felt a connection to the work. Frame, in turn has long been fascinated by the Huntington's rare holdings of works by the English poet and visionary William Blake (1757-1827). When Frame made an exhibition proposal to Smith and her colleague John Murdoch in 2008 -- which included not only sculpted figures, but stop-motion film in which they came to life -- everything clicked.

"It made perfect sense," says Smith. To celebrate Frame's affection for William Blake, Smith also arranged for a show that runs concurrently: "Born to Endless Night: Paintings, Drawings, and Prints by William Blake Selected by John Frame." Presented in the Works on Paper Room of the Huntington Art Gallery, "Endless Night" -- for which Frame wrote the exhibition labels -- provides fresh insights about Blake, and also about just what Frame admires in his works.

"Through imagination," writes Frame about Blake, " he believed you accessed the Divine; in the act of creation you realized your purpose as a human being." Commenting on one Blake painting, "Hecate or the Night of Enitharmon's Joy", Frame notes: "...the symbolism remains completely mysterious to me, and is richer because of that mystery."

That quote says something about Blake, but it may say even more about Frame. He hangs on to mystery, and the richness it evokes, as best he can. "He has a deep reluctance to be too literal," says Jessica Smith.

In order to develop a checklist for "Three Fragments," Frame had to be prodded into naming some of his characters. "We curators are bean counters," Smith says self-deprecatingly. Still, out of respect for Frame's artistic process the figures on display at the Huntington have no individual labels. That seems fitting, since the exhibition represents a way station on an artistic journey of indeterminate length and destination.

The cast of his films is enchantingly odd. Many of the figures have features resembling those of wooden marionettes or dilapidated toys. Some are recognizably human, some are animal/human hybrids. When I asked Frame about his aesthetic influences, I was interested to find that many of them were literary:

"The most important things that have affected me long-term, aside from the writings of Shakespeare, are the works of other great authors like Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Emily Dickinson. The filmmakers Bergman, Kurosawa, Tarkovsky, and Fellini radically transformed my world when I was younger. It has probably been classical music, however, that most consistently fed me over the last 20 years or so."

I also asked Frame if there was anything in his upbringing that might have played a role in cultivating such an expansive imaginative range:

Grew up in a fairly backward Southern California household. My Texas-born father had only a third grade education and worked for the Santa Fe Railroad as a sheet metal guy. Not too much sticks out that would be very interesting. Went to work on the local dairy farm at 15 and have been working ever since. Moved 38 times between leaving my childhood home and the house we now live in.

One of Frame's motivations seems to be reclaiming the authenticity of the individual imagination. Among other things, it is a personal spiritual quest -- this is something he has in common with William Blake -- and he has an attraction to spiritual images that are untainted by religious orthodoxies.

For that reason, there is more than a hint of the occult in some of the rites, rituals and passages that have begun to appear in his films. One woman who visited the Huntington show later told Frame that she detected "...themes of seeking and seeing, burden, loss, damage, madness, wholeness, enlightenment, inhumanity, cycles, rebirth, controlled and controller - just to name a few."

Working in his 500 square foot Wrightwood studio, Frame carves, assembles, animates and even writes the scores for his developing films. John's wife Laura has contributed a great deal of sewing, and moral support for her husband's project. "My family is the best thing about my life," says Frame.

His youngest daughter Lily is a classical harpist who helps out with sewing and embroidery. Her husband, Johnny Coffeen edits Frame's films and created a short documentary about Frame's project which can be viewed at the Huntington. Ashley, his middle daughter, is a teacher and photographer who shot some of the images in the Huntington catalog and is credited "Ashley Fennell". Katherine, Frame's oldest daughter, is a speech pathologist and freelance editor. She reviewed and made changes to all of the text relating to the project including the catalog and the text panels currently on view with the Blake exhibition.




Devoting himself to film has created a few new, unique problems. One of the practical ones is that Frame, who has in the past supported himself by selling sculpture, has created a body of work that can't be sold. Fortunately, some of the photos he has taken of his cast are themselves works of art -- a selection of them are on view at the Huntington -- and the proceeds from the sale of photo editions will hopefully keep the lights on in Frame's studio.

When I asked Frame about any possible Hollywood connections, he was very reticent: Frame won't be the next Tim Burton anytime soon. Frame's primary responsibility is to his intuition, and to the world of images that it continues to conjure up. Whatever happens next, commercially, professionally and artistically, Frame will have to follow the lead of intuition, his muse.

"Like all truly great artists," comments Jon Swihart, " John has become so creatively empowered by inspiration that his work transcends what mere human intellect is capable of."

"My sense is that we are somewhere in mid-stream," Frame says of his ongoing project. "From the very beginning, it has been a gift."

Andy Warhol and Marshall McLuhan: The Artist and the Sociologist

A friend recently asked me what I think of Andy Warhol. Without hesitating, I replied that I don't care for Andy Warhol's art. Noting my friend's surprise I added that I do think Warhol was a genius, but not as an artist. I think of him as a genius in the field of sociology.

Later, as I searched the internet to find out if there were others who shared my view, I found no evidence of anyone else referring to Warhol as a sociologist. I did, however, find many references to the fact that he is a divisive figure:

"Depending on your point of view, Andy Warhol is the greatest American artist of the second half of the 20th century or a corrupter of art who destroyed painting and took us down the slippery slope of postmodernism."

- David Dalton

Andy Warhol "Self-Portrait," at the Warhol Museum: Photo © Anthony Cain


If I had to choose between those two views "corrupter of art" works best for me. I find many of Warhol's works chilling, and feel that his legacy has been largely negative. If, as David Dalton implies, there are many others out there who share that view, we haven't done much to dampen the art market's enthusiasm for Warhol's works.

As far as the art market is concerned, Warhol's reputation is solid gold. In fact, the dollar values of Andy Warhol's signature works have done exactly what gold has done: they have risen in reaction world fiscal instability.

When things are uncertain, the market seems to say, Warhol will outperform other investments. In a blog on the anniversary of the artist's death -- "The Top Ten Andy Warhol Prices" -- blogger Marion Maneker notes that seven of the top ten Warhol prices were achieved after the financial crash of 2008. The Warhol record of $100 million, achieved in a private sale for a photo-silkscreen image of Elvis Presley, repeated 8 times, occurred in October 2008, the same month that the world's financial crisis took off.

I don't see artistic merit supporting the gilded price range for Warhol's works. Personally, when Warhol stopped painting and began using photo-silkscreens as the basis of his imagery he lost me. There is something in the connection between the brain, the hand, the brush, and the canvas that I find essential to painting. So, Warhol in my mind made paintings without painting. Call me a reactionary, but Warhol cheated.

In my view Warhol's prices are tied to the fact that works of art have become financial instruments whose value is pegged to an artist's fame. Buying a Warhol celebrity portrait is analogous to buying a very, very expensive baseball card. A 1914 Baltimore News Babe Ruth rookie card is just a piece of cardboard with a printed image, but a good one might bring half a million dollars. A 1914 Chicago Federals Joe Tinker card, also a piece of cardboard, can be yours for about $200.00. Has anyone ever heard of Joe Tinker?

Fame gives items what I call a "relic value" and buying them makes collectors feel close to the fame of those they are associated with. The idea of relic value derives from the fact that Medieval collectors would pay quite a tidy sum for relics, i.e. an alleged finger-bone from Saint John the Baptist, a famous and much revered saint.

No other artist of the 20th century understood fame quite the way Warhol did: like a dead saint, he seems to have a firm grip on it even from the grave. Warhol depicted famous people, cultivated friendships with famous people, became famous, and in the context of our current society, achieved immortality. Quite a trick, don't you think?

Warhol's genius lay in his understanding of religion and sociology. In particular, the ideas that he intuited -- or borrowed -- about the changing role of art in a media society were devastatingly right. His grasp of the sociological changes going on around him informed his decisions to choose image over content and to speed up his production of works through mechanical methods.

He assumed -- correctly -- that more and more people were coming to share his abbreviated idea of what made a good painting, commenting: "My idea of a good picture is one that's in focus and of a famous person."

Warhol deserves credit for his insights, but so does the sociologist and media theorist Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) who Warhol once referred to as an "Honorary Muse." Studying the two men's ideas side by side is a fascinating exercise.



Andy Warhol and Marshall McLuhan: Photomontage by Photofunia.com

Warhol and McLuhan barely knew each other, but they certainly did know of each other.

McLuhan's groundbreaking book "The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man" was published in 1951, a year before Warhol had his first New York exhibition. It is hard to believe that Warhol, who had been working in advertising, hadn't at least heard of the book, which described in depth how film posters, comic books, advertisements and magazine covers exerted their persuasive powers.

McLuhan was known for his aphorisms, and many of them are dead-ringers in terms of mirroring Warhol's social and aesthetic observations. Warhol's famous quip that everyone would have "15 minutes of fame" in the future is believed to have been paraphrased from McLuhan. Another famous quote "Art is what you can get away with," has been attributed to both men, and there seems to be no agreement about who said it or who said it first.

It is interesting to note that in the mid-60s after Warhol and McLuhan did briefly meet, McLuhan later commented that Warhol was a "rube." Do I sense some competitiveness there?

Art historian Gregory Battcock, gives Warhol the edge:

"Warhol was, during the sixties, a visual Marshall McLuhan. Though more profound than McLuhan and more a person of his time, Warhol correctly foresaw the end of painting and became its executioner."

So, Battcock views Warhol as predicting the end of painting. What, one has to wonder was "killing" it? Mass media -- movies television and magazines -- all played a role, but art's real usurper, at least in Marshall McLuhan's view, was advertising.

"Advertising" declared McLuhan, "is the greatest art form of the 20th century." Warhol, of course, began his career as a commercial illustrator, and some of his earliest Pop works are deadpan copies of advertisements. Advertising in the 20th century did what religious art had done in the 13th century: it used its imagery and authority to create images that helped focus mass desires and beliefs. Of course, if you believe as I do that capitalism is a religion, the parallels are clear.

McLuhan who converted to Roman Catholicism, and Warhol, who was raised Catholic, were both very aware that the mass culture of the late 20th century was supplanting religion. In McLuhan's view, electronic mass media worked against the private and the metaphysical:

"Christianity definitely supports the idea of a private, independent metaphysical substance of the self. Where technologies supply no cultural basis for this individual, then Christianity is in for trouble."

He had that right.

Warhol's portraits, which critic Robert Hughes says stripped the idea of portraiture down to its "bare chassis" lacked any shred of the metaphysical. Complexity, in the form on allegory, iconography, or philosophical speculation, wasn't necessary in a media society. Just the bare specter of celebrity, processed mechancially, was all that many of Warhol's key images relied on. A passive aggressive artist if ever there was one, Warhol understood the chilling unquestioned authority of fame as well as any dictator.



Andy Warhol and Vladamir Putin: Photomontage by Photofunia.com

Marshall McLuhan says that "One of the effects of living with electric information is that we live habitually in a state of information overload." What Warhol, in turn, understood about fame is that it cuts down the number of people we have to be interested in to a manageable number. Celebrities are the town characters in our "Global Village" -- to use McLuhan's phrase -- and they replace the saints of earlier centuries.

Andy Warhol once said that Pop art was about "liking things." I have always found that quote ingenuous: in my view Warhol's choices of subject matter tended towards parody. Yes, he was fascinated by Marilyn Monroe's power as a celebrity/goddess, but the silkscreen images he created after her death make Monroe appear clownlike. This wouldn't surprise Marshall McLuhan who believed that "Antipathy, dissimilarity of views, hate, contempt, can accompany true love."



Warhol Marilyn by caksy, on Flickr

One of Warhol's most enduring revelations was that in a media society, connoisseurship is doomed. In a society with an all powerful, highly persuasive media, careful informed distinctions weren't necessary when choosing what to buy. All that people needed, however much money they had, were the right brands.

"What's great about this country," Warhol once said, " is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest." In today's global society plutocrats seem to be replacing aristocrats, and Warhol seems dead on that the world's taste has flattened. What does it take to become an art collector? Lots and lots of money, and if you need taste there are still advisers who will rent you theirs for a fee.

Of course, in the Warholian view, even the art advisers will be gone in a few decades: "Some day everybody will just think what they want to think, and everybody will probably be thinking alike; that seems to be what is happening."

The more I read Warhol's thoughts and predictions, the more strongly I feel that his legacy has been damaging. Using his strategies -- let others make your art, become a social figure, and do everything you can to manipulate your audience -- a host of other artists have transformed whatever fame they have managed into dollars.

Although you don't often see all these names on the same list, I think of Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, Mark Kostabi and Thomas Kinkade as second-generation Warholians. In the third generation you get Mr. Brainwash.

On the other hand, the more I read about Marshall McLuhan, the more impressed I am by his wisdom. He comes across as a complex and highly original thinker, as compared to Warhol who was a highly effective borrower of ideas. In fact, one of my favorite McLuhan quotes seems to be a warning for the future, where, as predicted by Warhol, where everyone will "think alike:"

"A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding."

Insight? Understanding? Those are essential qualities for a portrait painter, and perhaps McLuhan would have made a fine one. He and Andy Warhol should have switched jobs.


Marshall McLuhan: Photomontage by Photofunia.com

Jerome Witkin: Painting History, Memory and Fantasy

Jerome Witkin: Vincent Van Gogh and Death, 1987

Mixed Media Drawing, 84 x 48 inches



"Let's not forget that small emotions are the great captains of our lives."
-- Vincent Van Gogh, in a letter to his brother Theo

The painter Jerome Witkin -- a vivid conversationalist -- tells a great story. "Painters are quiet in their studio," he comments, "so naturally they like to talk when they aren't working." Here is one particularly remarkable story that Witkin, 72, told me when I called him to talk about the exhibition of his paintings and drawings on view at Riverside City College through December 7th:

When I was a boy, newly interested in art, my mother took me to the Metropolitan Museum. We looked around the lobby, and when we discovered that there were no art classes being offered, my mother lost interest. I begged her, I wanted to see something, so she let me go upstairs alone. The Met then wasn't like it was now: it was like a big warehouse for scholars.


When I got to one dark room filled with paintings I heard a tapping sound, like a cane on the floor. I was fearful, somebody was coming towards me. This guy came up to me -- he had polished shoes -- he put his walking stick on my sternum and pushed me down.

He told me 'Dirty little boys like you should not be in museums like this.'

Years later I realized who that man was: James Rorimer the director of the museum."

When Witkin told me that story, I couldn't help but notice how passionately he was re-living the emotions of that moment as he told it. Certainly, it is a story he has told many times in the more than 60 years since the actual event, and stories re-told over time tend to lose accuracy over time. They become personal myths, and even the most objective man will forget, alter, or heighten the details of history.

In telling me the story, Witkin wasn't just telling me about something that actually happened. He was also telling me an emotional truth: that what he felt while growing up still has tremendous force. He is an outsider, still feeling the fragility of his place in the art world, and in the world in general. No wonder that empathy -- for victims of the Holocaust, for those suffering with AIDS, for the disenfranchised -- is the basis of many of his most compelling paintings.

Jerome Witkin, of course, isn't a documentary artist. His images, like his conversations, are, deeply felt, and emotions matter more to him than objective facts. His intention is to be honest, but his honestly is about the passions of his life, and his empathy for others. Emotions are essential to Witkin: everything else is theater, and can and should be tweaked for dramatic effect.

When I took a group of community college students to the RCC Quad Gallery to visit Witkin's show, several of them were spellbound by a large mixed-media drawing: "Vincent and Van Gogh and Death." It is a riveting drawing, and when I spoke with him Witkin told me about how he managed to "hit the bullseye" and give the work its emotional charge.

Van Gogh was a real man, and Witkin respects that: he has been poring over Van Gogh's letters and paying rapt attention to the realities of the man's life. Witkin reminded me, for example, that Van Gogh was the second "Vincent" born to his parents, and that he lived with the strangeness of having the same name as his dead younger brother.

Witkin's staged the Van Gogh drawing in his studio, and the model who posed from him was a young man who felt right. A young man with "a red beard and intent eyes," Witkin mentioned to me that his model's real career was working with troubled teenagers. Sounding like a film director, Witkin related just what he had wanted the model to express for him:

"He (Vincent) is fighting his own sense of the weariness of life... questioning his purpose... always thinking about death."

Noting that "modeling is a performance" Witkin went on to tell that it "was a lucky day" when he had the Van Gogh drawing. "His hands were so strong," he says of the model, who sprawled on the floor next to a 45 automatic in a structure that Witkin says is set up "a bit like a confessional." Looking in at his model, in the dark, constructed space engulfed in the light of his studio, Witkin managed to draft an image that is both hallucinatory and emotionally credible.





Detail of "Vincent Van Gogh and Death"



The real Van Gogh shot himself outside -- a botched job that left him lingering for days -- but Witkin's Van Gogh despairs indoors. In some ways, Witkin reminds me of the director Oliver Stone: he will tell you a story that rocks you to the core, but you have to remember that what you are looking at is "art." The skull that Witkin's "Van Gogh" peers at is real, but its purpose in being there is to make the painting a "vanitas" which is a tradition that references the history of art.





Jerome Witkin: Pensione Ichino, 1997

Oil on Canvas (Three Panels) 53 x 120 inches


Witkin's three part painting "Pensione Ichino" also references art history: its triptych format originally was developed for Late Medieval altarpieces. That said, the storyline of the "Pensione" canvasses is secular and deeply personal. It started, says Witkin, when a still-life setup sparked his memory. "Let's make a game of this," he thought as his ideas began to coalesce.

First came an orange plastic bag and a box, then a plaster cast of a woman's body, then a lace glove, all illuminated by a clamp lamp. The lace glove became a trigger that brought back a series of memories that in turn triggered the artist's memory of a brief love affair he had as a young man.







Jerome Witkin: Pensione Ichino, 1997, Left Panel

As a 20 year old Witkin won a Pulitzer fellowship to study in Europe, and in Florence he stayed in the Pensione of an Italian widow, "Old Lady Ichino." Her pensione had a great location -- right across from the Palazzo Pitti -- but the old lady wouldn't serve dinner to you unless you spoke Italian. Witkin also remembers that it was impossible to date Italian girls: their protective family members guarded them too closely. He did meet a lovely French photography student, "a hot deal," and in the second panel of "Pensione Ichino" she appears, a stunning apparition who reveals herself as she lifts a negligee over her head. She was, Wiktin remembers, a woman who enjoyed being looked at.

The artist is also present in the center panel, but only by implication. His shirt and tie hang on a chair in the painting, but Witkin is also very much there in the role of the artist/onlooker, conjuring up a real woman's memory amidst the studio props. Her sensuality and tangibility come across as a kind of paradox. "Witkin's subjects seem, if anything, overly immersed in the clutter of lived reality," says writer Joel Sheesley.






Jerome Witkin: Pensione Ichino, 1997, Center Panel


The love affair didn't last long, and after a short trip to Paris there was a breakup. Witkin remembers being miserable afterward, feeling the lows after the high of the affair. Love, and the emotions that go with it are another prevailing theme in Witkin's life and art. In 1986 he wrote: "Love and its folly; its non-being hurts me. Yet this is what I want to paint about. The wanting of love, the giving of it. Love as a healer. Without it one dries up."






Jerome Witkin: Pensione Ichino, 1997, Right Panel

In the third and final panel a young man -- a surrogate for the young Witkin -- slips the lace glove onto his hand. It is a moment of sensuality recalled and also an angry moment. When I spoke to Witkin he pointed out that the painting handling surrounding the figure was raw and somewhat violent. "Putting the hand through the glove," he explained, "has to do with destroying the memory, doing away with it." The memory of his lover is also suggested by the plaster torso, now just a reflection in the oval mirror.

"Pensione Ichino" is about the evocation of a memory, and ultimately about the artist's need to control and even destroy that memory. The emotions he evokes in the process are strong and specific: so strong that it is tempting to call Witkin an Expressionist. The problem with that label is that Witkin has much more control of his emotional range -- and his drafting -- than most Expressionist artists. His effects and images are refined and calculated, and if anything he thinks more like a playwright than a painter. Calling "Pensione Ichino" a "drama in three acts" isn't far off the mark.

Syracuse University is now organizing a 40 year retrospective of Witkin's work, tentatively slated to open in 2012. The "dirty little boy" who was once pushed to the floor of the Metropolitan Museum by its director is now seen as a leading representational painter. Critic Donald Kuspit says "Indeed, there are few painters working today who have as consummate and vivid a sense of the human drama, in all its personal and social complexity, as Witkin does."

At one point in our conversation Witkin mentioned to me that a few years back he received an award from the director of the Metropolitan -- not the one who had confronted him, but a later one -- and that he managed to control himself and not tell the director to "Fuck off." Listening, I wasn't sure if I really believed everything Witkin had told me about the incident, but I had become totally convinced of his brilliance as a storyteller. His art is a masterful blend of history, memory and fantasy.

The forty minutes we spent on the phone went very quickly, and Witkin gave me a great deal to think about. Looking over my notes later, one comment stood out for me. "When you make a work of art," Witkin told me, "you don't know where it will end up." Coming from a man who understands that emotions drive our lives, our institutions and ultimately, history past and present, I took that thought to heart.


Exhibition Information:

"Jerome Witkin: American Master"
November 1 through December 7

The Quad Gallery, Riverside City
4800 Magnolia Ave., Quad 140
Riverside, CA 92506
Gallery Hours: Mon-Fri 10AM to 3PM, Thursday Nights 5:30 to 8:30 PM
951 222-8358

The work of Jerome Witkin appears courtesy of Jack Rutberg Fine Arts

Mari Lyons: Every Object Rightly Seen

Mari Lyons in her Woodstock studio



Mari Lyons turned 75 last week. She has been painting for more than 60 years, but says that she is still struggling to be free of certain habits. "In my studio I have paintings that go back to the 50's," Lyons explains. "I can't help but come to painting with an accumulation: you can never get rid of yourself."

It is a very modest self-assessment by an artist who, in truth, creates paintings that radiate a constant joy of discovery. "Almost everything in Ms. Lyons's paintings is animated, excited, and alive," says critic Lance Esplund.

Praise from friends doesn't seem to affect Lyons, who is unassuming in general. Although she paints passionately, she knows her own limits well. Writing about her current series "Sunsets/Hillsides" she says "I have worked on this motif on and off for nearly a decade and I cannot grasp its infinite complexities."

One of Lyons's favorite quotes comes from Ralph Waldo Emerson: "Every object rightly seen unlocks a quality of the soul" Lately, she has been looking out the three windows of her Woodstock studio, trying to "unlock" the secrets of her hillside. Even though she feels that her view isn't monumental -- "a modest forest of ash, hemlock, and pine" -- she is devoted to it. "Its just as hard and impossible to know a hillside as it is a person," she observes wisely.



Mari Lyons, Sunset Allegretto, oil on canvas, 36.5" x 49", 2009


"Sunsets/Hillsides" is about her meditation on the metaphorical potential of the landscape, and also about a kind of conversation with Paul Cezanne, an artist she discovered when she was 20. Of course, by that time she had already been painting for more than 7 years, and had more than a passing acquaintance with modern art and artists. Her education as an artist started early and has never really ended.

By age 13 her father was taking her Saturday drawing classes at the the California School of Fine Arts in Oakland. "Still and Rothko were there," Lyons recalls, but she mainly remembers an encouraging instructor named William Brown. She drew the model for 4 to 5 hours at a stretch, a remarkable thing for a 13 year old to be doing, especially in the late 40's.

At 15 Lyons took a summer painting class at Mills College taught by Max Beckmann, the German Expressionist who came to teach in the US after WW II. "It was a motley group,"Lyons remembers,"older women with canvas boards, some not very serious painters, and then one or two serious students," one of whom was the Bay Area artist Nathan Oliveira.

Beckmann, who spoke little English, barely noticed Lyons -- "Gut Kinder" was the only comment she remembers -- but he and his art made an indelible impression on her. When he showed his works to the class at the end of the term the symbolism escaped her, but the power and intensity of the works, their "truth," was unforgettable.

The following summer Lyons studied with Fletcher Martin, a representational artist who had been an artist/correspondent for Life Magazine. Martin was very encouraging, telling Lyons that she was "The best student he ever had." Later, he gave her a more patronizing compliment: Lyons remembers bristling when he called her "A significant woman painter."

When she attended Bard College, 90 miles north of New York, Lyons studied with Stefan Hirsch, a German emigre who had once created a controversial WPA mural depicting an allegorical figure of "Justice" as being mixed-race. She also took classes with Louis Schanker -- an abstract printmaker once called a "radical among radicals" -- and Ludwig Sander, an abstract artist friendly with Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline.

Lyons also spent six or seven months in Paris where she studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumiere, at L'Atelier Fernand Leger, and also at the Atelier 17 of famed painter/printmaker Stanley William Hayter. Although postwar Paris and its great museums made a great impression on her, Lyons recounts that she often felt "intimidated and lonely" in Europe.

After receiving an MFA in painting from Cranbrook in l958, Lyons, now married, moved to Ann Arbor, where her husband Nick was finishing a PhD. In four and a half years the couple had four children -- the first is Paul, named after Paul Cezanne -- but somehow Mari managed to have a one woman show at the Forsythe Gallery. After moving to New York City in 1961 Mari kept a studio in the corner of her bedroom, and regularly drew from the model with upper west-side artist friends.

It has been a rich, busy life, and Lyons has been the subject of over a dozen one-person shows in New York alone. "A lot happened in the intervening years," Lyons reflects, "but I always painted." That is an understatement: Lyons's eccentric and vivid depictions of nudes, cityscapes, landscapes, still-lives, and interiors have caused critic Jed Perl to remark that she "has staked her claim as the complete painter, the master of every genre."



Mari Lyons, Exploding Cherry Tree, oil on canvas, 30" x 31", 2009


Since her husband Nick sold his publishing business, Lyons has been spending more time in Woodstock, where the landscape motif has called to her off and on. Writing in the New Republic about Lyon's 2008 exhibition, Jed Perl noted the "unabashed color," and "buttery seduction" of her landscape canvases. He felt that the show was "more than anything else, about color becoming light."

The landscapes of the "Sunsets/Hillsides" certainly are about light, and also about joy. "When you are connected, you feel a joy in seizing some aspect of the real world," Lyons says. Using color in "patch-like juxtapositions, derived from Cezanne's color modulations," her painting "Exploding Cherry Tree" achieves an exuberance tempered by a net-like interlace of dark strokes.

Although she has consistently worked as a representational painter, Lyons doesn't mind letting her work veer towards abstraction. "The question of whether they are realistic or abstract is irrelevant," she says. One of the values she seems to have absorbed from Cezanne is that there is an inherent abstract order to be gleaned from nature.

When her show opens at the First Street Gallery in New York on November 2nd, Lyons hopes that those who view the show will share her "joy of discovery." Of course, she says gently, "No two people feel the same." It is a sage observation by an artist who doesn't pursue fixed meanings or try to impose them on herself or others. Searching, not finding is her strong point.

Mari Lyons explains her constant curiosity this way: "I'm mainly striving to go deeper into the mysteries and challenges of an art that is always elusive." Elusive they may be, but moments of connection, joy, and spirit flicker brightly through the branches of the painted trees on her painted hillsides.

All images courtesy of the artist and First Street Gallery, New York

Rod Penner: Rust on Poles, Crumbling Asphalt, Light Hitting the Grass

"I'm interested in the look of things and the quality of being there, a moment that is completely frozen with all the variety of textures; rust on poles, crumbling asphalt, light hitting the grass. The finished paintings should evoke contrasting responses of melancholy and warmth, desolation and serenity -- everything that is small town America." -- Rod Penner

Rod Penner hardly stands out in Marble Falls, Texas, a town of about 5,000 residents, 40 miles northwest of Austin. "I'm somewhat of a recluse," the artist comments. Generally speaking, Penner likes it that way. Since Marble Falls is mainly known for hunting, fishing, and drag boat racing, it isn't too hard for an artist to stay under the radar.

In New York, it is a different story. When his exhibition of "minis" -- six inch square hyper-realist paintings -- opens at OK Harris Works of Art in New York on October 23rd, Penner will be the center of attention, a situation he finds vaguely uncomfortable. Fortunately, his paintings are the real attention getters. His six inch square vignettes of small town Texas command a retail price of $8,500 each.




Rod Penner, "Clayton Dry Cleaners," Acrylic on Panel, 6 x 6 inches, 2010



Rod Penner, "Bait Shop," Acrylic on Panel, 6 x 6 inches, 2010

To put it another way, Penner's retail price is $34,000 per square foot. That is more than the median household income in Marble Falls, which is $30,800. Remarkably, what sells so well in New York is precisely the fact that Penner has captured "melancholy and warmth, desolation and serenity," in a way that many of his collectors feel characterized the small towns where they started out.

Penner, who jokingly refers to himself as "America's favorite Mennonite Photo-realist" grew up in a tight-knit family Vancouver, British Columbia. His father, uncles, brothers and cousins all worked or still work in the construction trade. His parents, who noticed that he liked to draw were supportive of his developing interest in art, and his father bought him art supplies. He met his wife Debbie, a native Texan, in his late teens, and they married in 1986 when Rod was 21 and briefly moved to Canada.

Building on methods he had learned in college, Rod began to experiment with Hyper-realist painting techniques. Not entirely satisfied by Photo-realist paintings that he had seen in person -- they looked much rougher than they had in art magazines -- Penner tried to take his technique further, in an even more exacting direction.

In 1988 the Penners moved to Richmond, Texas. Penner's first images of Texas reflect the sense of isolation and strangeness he experienced there. "When I first moved to Texas it was like another planet," says Penner. It was "alien, the weather, the landscape: I didn't know what to make of it." Still, he was determined to find his subject matter close by: neighboring towns like Sealy and Clifton gave him austere, characteristically American images to work from.

For an artist tremendously interested in texture and detail, the dilapidated state of the buildings he photographed and then painted gave him his poetry and his visual interest. Peeling paint, cracked asphalt and weeds breaking through pavement interest Penner the way that light reflected on water interested Monet. "I could never paint new buildings," he comments.

The somber, elegiac tone of his early Texas paintings reflects a number of things: his wife's grief over the loss of a brother, the "Last Picture Show" vibe of small town Texas, and Penner's own sober view of life. Then, in 1991, the same year that Penner signed on to show his work at OK Harris, his youngest brother died in a plane crash. Two deaths -- that of his brother-in-law and his brother -- made indelible impacts that Penner feels affect his world view, and his work, to this day.



Rod Penner, "Pink House with Big Wheels," Acrylic on Canvas, 36 x 54 inches, 1992

People don't appear in his paintings, but their parked pickup trucks and their children's big wheels scattered on the front lawn remind us that they are missing. With fierce objectivity, Penner paints portraits of Texas small town life without ever showing us a single human face.

Penner's work ethic is very strong: it has to be, as he is the sole supporter for his wife a homemaker, and for five children. He is up most mornings by 4:30 for some early painting, and perhaps a walk. After breakfast he is usually back in the studio until 5.

His method of painting is methodical and systematic. Working from photos that have often been adjusted in photoshop, he paints a small, defined area each day. When working on his "minis," which are six inches square, he typically needs 7 to 10 days, which means that he is painting at the rate of a few square inches each day. Larger paintings can take up to four months to complete.

He rarely goes back and corrects his previous day's work. Penner, in this respect, is a little like an Italian fresco artist of the Renaissance who covered a single square of plaster each day, calling it his "giornata" or day's work.

The ingredients for his paintings are shockingly simple: acrylic paint and water, applied on small panels, or on wet-sanded canvas for larger works.

Penner doesn't mind being called a "Photo-realist" but comments that if anything his works are "Photo-realism in HD." People familiar with his paintings note that he goes beyond his subject matter, and manages to infuse very strong feelings into his work.

"He is a master technician, "says painter Leonard Koscianski, " but he is more than that. His paintings are actually quite expressive. There is a significant difference between his photos and the paintings he creates from them."

Penner's dealer, Ethan Karp admires the revelatory aspect of Penner's images, noting that "They encourage the viewer to look at painting, landscape and subject with a sense of objective discovery, and deliver a revelatory moment of clarity and startled awareness."



Rod Penner, "Snoball," Acrylic on Panel, 6 x 6 inches, 2010
Penner's recent art seems a bit more optimistic than it did 20 years ago. Pictures like "Snoball," which portrays a snow-cone shack with a yellow topped cone is softened by his gentle sense of humor: it is almost a "Pop" painting. The gentle rivulets of water in front of the shack suggest something melting, a wry comment.

It turns out that Texas is a great place to raise a family, and the hill country landscape around Marble Falls, where the Penners have lived since 2002, is actually quite beautiful. Life at the moment is very good for the Penner family, and his online photo album is full of snaps of Arkansas river rafting, fishing trips, and football games. Austin is less than an hour away when big city pleasures are in order.

Rod and Debbie Penner have begun to collect some modest Hudson River School paintings, and Rod is building a new studio. Both are luxuries they could have hardly imagined when they started their lives together. "We are blessed," Penner acknowledges.

When New York collectors pay big money for one of Penner's painting they are getting a piece of Americana. Hard working, and dead on honest, Penner and his paintings take us back to places and values that somehow look more and more attractive and endearing over time. Penner's paintings don't just tell us about desolation and melancholy. They also have some things to say about grit, candor and endurance: American virtues.

Penner's choice of style is also looking prescient, as the art world is paying more attention to photo-realist and hyper-realist art. "There appears to currently be a growing awareness and appreciation of hyper-realist painting as a substantial and acquirable art form," says Ethan Karp.

According to Wikipedia, Marble Falls has produced three "notable" citizens: a rancher, a 2nd place winner on "Nashville Star," and an Olympic sprinter. Another listing needs to be added:

Rod Penner: A Hyper-realist artist known for his painstakingly honest depictions of small Texas towns.