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.