Wifredo Lam/200,000

The Warrior (Personnage avec Lezzard)
Wifredo Lam, 1948.  Oil on burlap. 

In a lecture given by abstract expressionist Robert Motherwell in 1949, he refers almost in passing to the American racism suffered by prominent Cuban surrealist Wifredo Lam:

The conditions under which an artist exists in America are nearly unbearable; but so they are everywhere in modern times.  Sunday last I had lunch, in a fisherman’s inn in Montauk overlooking Gardiner’s Bay, with Wifredo Lam, the Cuban and Parisian painter, who is half-Chinese, half-Negro; he has difficulty in remaining in this country because of the Oriental quota; I know he is humiliated on occasion in New York, for example, in certain restaurants.  He kept speaking to me of his admiration of America, asking me what American painters thought of this and that, and I answered as best I could; but a refrain that ran through his questions is less easy to answer, whether artists were always so “unwanted.”  I replied that I supposed that artists were more “wanted” in the past when they spoke for a whole community, that they became less “wanted” as their expressions because individual and separate; but since I had never had the sensation of belonging to a community, it was difficult for me to imagine being “wanted.”  This is not wholly true; we modern artists constitute a community of sorts; part of what keeps me going, part of my mystique is to work for this placeless community.  Lam and I parted advising each other to keep working ; it is the only advice one painter ever gives another.  — from a lecture given during symposium “French Art vs. U.S. Art Today”, Provincetown, Massachusetts, 1949

I take Motherwell’s point about not feeling part of a community and therefore “wanted”.  But I wonder if he might have more easily imagined being a part of a community if he had been part of one that was “unwanted” by birth, rather than being the White son of a banker who put him through Ivy League universities.   

We have now passed 200,000 dead from covid-19 in the United States.  This persisting catastrophe is welded to another constant in this country:  the systemic racism that continues to shape our national outcomes.  Those who doubt or deny the prevalence or lethality of the pandemic must surely be insulated from communities of color, where the losses are outrageously high. 

Is it possible that at least a portion of these deaths do not constitute a crime against humanity, in the face of careless and, now we find, perhaps purposeful neglect on the part of the Trump Administration?   Will they never be held accountable for those lives lost?  

It is a long, long path, this journey out of our national racism.  Maybe we’ll never get there.  But along the way are the gravestones of now 200,000 Americans dead of covid-19, among them far too many people of color. 

Plague Faces No. 12
2020.  Acrylic on canvas. 12 x 16 in.

I paint this series to recognize those who have died or suffered grave loss in this crisis, and, further, to accuse those who have knowingly, willfully, or carelessly pursued polices, actions, and inactions that allowed these deaths and suffering to happen and who continue to do so at this moment.

To respect the inquiry

 

Untitled (9 5 20)
2020.  Acrylic on canvas, 11 x 14 in. 

It’s been difficult to keep perspective in the studio lately.  Now that I have more time to work I’m producing a lot, and it’s dismaying how much of it is really not very good.  The piles of failed or misfired work jumbled everywhere has at times left me with a sense of actual nausea, almost a vertigo.  Today I had to remind myself that the inquiry  – the process of undertaking things I don’t know if I can do, journeys whose destination is unclear – is necessary and must be respected on its own terms.  I have to remind myself that it is the hunt into the unknown that matters — the only way to find what might be there, that which one can’t dream of yet but can only feel.  And of course, even when one fails to capture anything worthwhile, that quest is nevertheless how one learns, develops skills, understands what one has or has not mastered. 

The work above I feel good about.  It’s one of those that gave me subtle leads from the beginning about what step to take next, leads I had the sense to follow, and in the end it gives me a deep satisfaction.  It has that “complex of qualities whose feeling is just right…”.   For me, at least.  I really couldn’t guess if anyone else might find it worthwhile; it is a handicap not being able to show original work to others for extended periods, such as we’re trapped in now.  One more reason for the difficulty keeping perspective. 

Riot in the Garden

Riot in the Garden
2019.  Acrylic on paper, 11 x 14 in. 

From last fall.  Posted because color, abundance, life.  Thought we could use some right now. 

From the Infinite Background of Feeling

Madame Curie
2020.  Acrylic on canvas, 8 x 10 in.

Small canvas finished last week.  Brushed black over rolled white and yellow ochre.

The renowned abstract expressionist Robert Motherwell, whose work I much admire, was eloquent on the role of feeling in art:

The aesthetic is the sine qua non for art:  if a work is not aesthetic, it is not art by definition.  But in this stage of the creative process, the strictly aesthetic — which is the sensuous aspect of the world — ceases to be the chief end in view.  The function of the aesthetic instead becomes that of a medium, a means for getting at the infinite background of feeling in order to condense it into an object of perception.  We feel through the senses, and everyone knows that the content of art is feeling; it is the creation of an object for sensing that is the artist’s task; and it is the qualities of this object that constitute its felt content.  Feelings are just how things feel to us; in the old-fashioned sense of these words, feelings are neither “objective” nor “subjective,” but both, since all “objects” or “things” are the result of an interaction between the body-mind and the external world.  “Body-mind” and “external world” are themselves sharp concepts only for the purposes of critical discourse, and from the standpoint of a stone are perhaps valid but certainly unimportant distinctions.  It is natural to rearrange or invent in order to bring about states of feeling that we like, just as a new tenant refurnishes a house.

…[The artist’s] task is to find a complex of qualities whose feeling is just right — veering toward the unknown and chaos, yet ordered and related in order to be apprehended. — Beyond the Aesthetic (1946)

Endurance

Cleopatra’s Complicated Flotilla
2019  Acrylic on paper, 9 x 12 in. 

So it’s complicated, Life.  These days.  Hard.  So let’s not talk about that, for just a moment. 

Instead, here’s a favorite painting that’s not hard.  Two winters ago I was trying out some new brushes on some cheap watercolor paper, and the results amused me.  Things just kept happening and in the end I was quite fond of it, so much so that it actually hangs in my studio.  Partly to remind me of things I can do when I’m stuck, and partly just because it makes me feel good, which is always handy when you’re working on stuff. 

In these cursed days of dread and sorrow let’s remember that the rich and powerful Cleopatra had her hard times, too, rather famously.  As has Egypt, though it still endures, after a fashion.  And, of course, the Nile is the very definition of endurance, Aswan Dam notwithstanding.  The long view is very helpful these days, I find.  It may not tell you better times are ahead, but at least it reminds you that bad times have always been part of the deal.  

Paradise in Flames

November 2018 (Paradise)
2018.  Acrylic on canvas, 12 x 16 in.

Unlike for so many in the far-western states right now, our air here in the Joshua Tree area today is clear, the skies blue, the mountains in view – all swept clean by a wind from the north last night.  The smoke from the El Dorado fire, which had made our air dark and thick the last few days, is now just visible on the horizon far to the west.  I don’t expect this to last.  But I’m grateful for it, and wish I could share it with so many around our states right now who are covered in smoke or running from fire, anxious at visions of the apocalypse.

The town of Paradise, California, has been evacuated again ahead of the North Complex fire in Butte County.  In November two years ago, during those days of shock, horror, and grief over the terrible Camp Fire that killed 85 people in Paradise, I created this work.  It was hard at that time not to feel a dread-filled presentiment about the future for all of us in California.  I am so grateful to our state, local, regional, and, yes, federal agencies that plan year-round and work so hard fighting fires to keep us safe.  The job gets tougher every season.

Pursuit of the Sun

Pursuit of the Sun
2020.  Acrylic on canvas, 10 x 20 in.

From late July, before I went away.  Another of the “bell poems”.  I’ve developed several of these works now, but I’m still not sure if they constitute a collection.  At the same time I’m also working on some square canvases with the same large black calligraphic gestures, but those seem to be going in a different direction.  So…still in exploration mode.

Negative Shapes

Granite I
2020.  Acrylic on canvas, 14 x 11 in.

The work informs the work.  I started the “Granite” series this spring not long after concluding “Plague Faces”.  The crossover in technique is easy to see:

Plague Faces No. 17
2020.  Acrylic on canvas, 12 x 16 in.

I start by creating a complex surface (in both these examples largely with rollers), then use a single color to paint away everything that’s not the shape I’m foregrounding.  “Negative shape” painting, a common technique.  It can bring the work to a magical conclusion, but you have to have faith that it’s going to come together because in the meantime it doesn’t look like much.  I liked “No. 17” a lot, and found a way very soon to go there again in “Granite I”, a totally different subject.