more on Edward Corbett

Corbett’s paintings are abstract, but do have a certain resonance of nature/landscape. Occasionally there is a horizon line, but generally it’s something about his paintings’ expansiveness that echoes something of the western landscape.

Again I identify with this imperative. I feel continually inspired by nature and yet reluctant to retain any specifics. Just because the painting was based on a photo I took of wildflowers doesn’t mean it’s about wildflowers. And frequently I’m afraid that naming the source (when I can remember it) will deflate the viewer. As in a viewer says to me, This is a lovely painting, and I say, Yes it’s based on a crate of rotting apples, I found the way they had either retained some of their round form or decayed and softened away from it really interesting. Or if not disgusting the viewer in this way, something like telling the way a magic trick is done, like it might make the painting more mundane, as in the viewer says, This is a lovely painting, all these colors and the nuances of light, and then I say, Yes, it’s based on some stones in a creek.

So I want to avoid making the paintings this specific. Not necessarily grand in the way Corbett aimed to do, but to use painting to capture the sublime elegance of nature.

Here’s Landauer on Corbett:

He seems to have been especially fascinated by its primordial element, the inhuman image of eternal nature. Corbett insisted that his images not be understood as landscapes in the literal sense; rather, they were intended as poetic renditions of imagined or remembered experiences in nature

And here’s Corbett:

I have no intention or desire to illustrate the nature around me; my wish is to express some quality of experience in relation to nature, some quality of self-awareness, deriving perhaps, paradoxically from the responsiveness to a vastness and inhumanity of environment. The painting of a particular mountain in order to represent its geological uniqueness, or even its special beauty and grandeur, would not interest me . . . Rather than to choose the mountain or any other specific fact of nature, grand or small, as my subject in painting, I myself prefer to be chosen.

Corbett worked from memory rather thank photos as I do. Either way it’s about the aspects of nature that resonate with you than the specifics. I suppose that there are any number of landscape painters that might say the same, except that they also enjoy the challenge of trying to represent the local colors, at least some of the recognizable specifics of the moment. I very much enjoy the work of the Canadian figurative artist Heather Horton, but find it a bit confounding when she refers to rendering an awkward wall color behind a sitter. I think why not pretend that the wall was painted green instead of white, who would know.

So rather than painting scattered stones in a shallow creek as they are I start by trying to echo some of the naturally occurring aesthetics of that moment and then depart from them in order to enhance them in a more considered design. Hopefully anyway.

Edward Corbett

As I mentioned previous I recently enjoyed reading about the Abstract Expressionist Edward Corbett. In the late forties and early fifties he felt that praising the importance of the psychology of the artist over the art itself was resulting in ugly paintings. And while there was a lot of context for this ugliness, the war, existentialism, damaged emotional psyches, etc, that it would be much nicer if artists still painted beautiful paintings. Guernica is about an awful event but it’s still a beautifully achieved painting. In his words, “there is enough ugliness and neurosis in the world without putting it down on canvas.”

So Corbett’s call to action was to make abstractions that were beautiful. Rather than saying that since Ab-Ex was blazing a new trail it could ignore and vilify the history of art, that it could still incorporate it. Just because it was a new type of expression didn’t mean it was exempt from the long held principles of aesthetic design. Whether you think figure painting is dead in the present doesn’t mean that Rembrandt isn’t still beautiful.

From the Corbett monograph by Susan Landauer:

Corbett strongly disapproved of the concept of Action Painting, agreeing with Reinhardt that “any painter peddling wiggly lines as emotions ought to be run off the streets”. For Corbett, such intentional lack of discipline was both fraudulent and self-defeating. “Painting is always improvisation because you don’t have the thing already created . . . Rosenberg’s idea is so easily distorted to mean a kind of unconscious, unfocused act or movement with tools on a surface which one hopes or presumes will have some kind of meaning. I don’t think it does. I think random markings by anyone or random actions are the opposite of what leads to art. Art is design. It is intentions, careful concentrations, acute awareness. Art is purposeful. It is not accident.

Which is to say that even if you approach the canvas with a zen beginner’s mind and start slapping paint, later you need to come back to it as an editor. You may have chosen a particular red-violet at random, but now you have to decide what to do about it, leave it, excise it, expand. You have to consider it in context, how do these forms fit together, do these lines move the eye around the canvas well. Since you may not have started with a specific intention you can ask yourself Have I achieved want I wanted to achieve, but you still need to ask What have I achieved and do I like it.

And while I don’t like all of Corbett’s work, I really identify with his imperative. Painting non-objectively and yet retaining some classical elements of design.

the New York School

I recently read a monograph about the (mostly SF based) Abstract Expressionist Edward Corbett. I like some of his paintings, but many veer to close to color field for my taste, or at least to appreciate in book form. Despite my lack of exuberance over his paintings I found his thoughts about paintings, and the analysis of his paintings by Susan Landauer to parallel my own feelings about painting in many regards. I will have more to say about this monograph, but today I wanted to consider my paintings in relation to Corbett’s hate for action painting. He was friends with many of the key New York School, but disliked the idea of emotional improvisation, preferring to emphasize the necessity of design and concept.

While I share some of his sentiment towards action painting, I can’t help but feel that it’s somewhat contradictory to praise design exclusively over improvisation when working in an abstract mode. I think about rhythm and balance when I’m planning a painting, as well as throughout its progress, and I like my paintings to be more refined than gestural, but clearly I do not qualify as classical in any sense. Since I’m not classical in composition or content, I must have something in common with the energy and gesture and improvisational nature of Action Painting.

When I paint I am very unenergetic, usually I am sitting, and there is as much time spend blending the marks I’ve made as making them. The most movement I engage in is walking ten feet away to examine the painting from a distance, then walking in close to make a quick brushmark to indicate something I want to change, then pacing back to consider what I’ve just done. The paintings themselves have a fair amount of energy, they sit somewhere between field painting at one end of the spectrum and all-over paintings at the other end. My aim for the past two years has been to make more complicated paintings and by making things complicated some of my paintings do veer close to the “overwhelm you with sensation” of say late-forties Lee Krasner. This gives me some trepidation because I want there to be subtlety and passages of stillness, but enough movement to keep the viewer interested. So I’m not exhibiting Pollack/De Kooning style kinetic energy when painting, but the paintings themselves have plenty of energy.

I also strongly reject the New York School of psychological/emotional mark making. I don’t think I am conveying emotion in my gestures or that the gestural process of painting is revealing me as a person, nor is it a cathartic excision of psychology or experience. There is a wonderful Portland area artist Jolyn Fry whose best work in my opinion are her Bloodlines figure series, which by her explanation were created by meditating on events and emotions and letting those recollections come out of her through color and gesture. I appreciate the results of this method, but I feel no connection to that practice. A slight caveat here that my painting are expressionistic, but their subject is not me. I am painting aesthetically and not emotionally.

And improvisation versus design. Well this is another compromise, though mostly I fall on the design side of the spectrum. I don’t approach a blank canvas with nothing in mind and then proceed to paint the first sensation or explore through automation. I do a fairly thorough mock-up, which is my term for digital studies that I create. But I use the mock-up for at most a quarter of the painting process, then I let the painting proceed on its own inertia. Once the painting starts to gain its own life it usually has as much going wrong as working well, so the middle half of the painting process is about addition and omission. With periodic spells where I stare at the painting and make lots of notes, such as too much yellow in upper third, omit dangling bit off lower left blue form, add more neutral greens, etc. I then spend many hours trying to enact these design notes. By the time I added and edited these notes into the painting, there are a new set of problems to consider.

So I agree with Corbett that the New York School probably got too much respect and for some of the wrong reasons and its dominance in the teaching of art since the fifties has had some unintentional effects on the art scene, moving art away from providing pleasure and allowing consideration by audience, to supporting the artist as being as or more important than his or her art. The artist’s psychology and thematic intention and other things that provide context to the work being necessary to appreciating the work because it doesn’t have enough elements design and enough aesthetic principles to stand on its own. But all of the rhetoric and context aside I still enjoy many aspects of the paintings from the New York School, and find parallels between their work and my own. So I guess enjoy what you can and ignore the rest.

back to work

I’ve finally had a reasonably productive painting week. But it’s still been a couple months since I’ve finished a piece larger than 6x6 inches. I have several that are making significant progress, but the only one that’s really close to being done is one that I previously declared as being finished that I’m reworking. It doesn’t exactly feel like progress. As usual I have plenty of new pieces that I want to start, but with POS three months away I should really be churning out the polished work about now.