The odyssey of the gods: the art of Henry Bermudez

 There is an experience to the art of Henry Bermudez that initially baffles us. It is clearly rife with symbols of a religious nature, but why?

My earliest sense of Henry’s work was that it was surrealistic, and I have long held the appearance of surrealism to be a sign of a troubled time. To me, European surrealism was an invention that envied the power of religious art. By its own manifesto it attempted to reintroduce the mysterious and magical aspects of gods and spirits. 

In my eyes, that wasn’t what the surrealists achieved — even Da Chirico, who is my favorite, achieves the metaphysical, but the gods are missing. Much of European surrealism amounts to the dilemma that began the movement: a kind of “Waiting for Godot” by visual means. 

But off in the ex-colonies of Spain, a very different thing happened. There the religion of the conqueror and his conquered religions entered into strange embraces. The mystical believers among the natives entered into syncretisms that sometimes offered hope and peace, even in dangerously innocent ways. 

Henry Bermudez becomes the pilgrim of all these gods, searching the world on an odyssey to map the odyssey of the gods. He is the only person like that that I know. Even without having had to leave the socialist demise of his native Venezuela, Henry would still have had enough exploration in his life to be the friend of all the gods. 

In this way, Henry Bermudez is the international artist, but for more reasons than only his travels. He has fashioned a quest for the meanings of history, for the substance of why people acted with belief but behaved like monsters. 

You should have a gentle man like this at the United Nations, or at least his art, for it is a record of the knots in our hearts. Nothing can really be understood or propitiated without facing his forest, his gold diggers’ sky of gold, his Aztec feathered serpent wrapping itself around Giotto’s crucifix to die out of love for its people by imitating the religion of Columbus. You would really break down in tears to realize the impossible knots of pain the gods go through for us, trying to save everyone from all sides, but failing so much. 

These are very fragile codices. Henry’s work becomes more and more made of paper cutouts, hung on the wall by push pins, ready to travel again, rolled up for easy and lightweight transport. The spirit gets light, the soul ascends to somewhere else. The gods decide and try to set things right. 

From “Four Essays”

Essay1. Some thoughts on perception, modal thought and drawing

(Early in the essay below I refer to the discovery of a sort of limit to perception that consists of 5 to 7 things. We have conducted experiments in the past, as have scientists before us, that demonstrate the eyes can only recognize or count 5 to 7 objects at a glance.)

When I was a student at the Academy, a friend who would later be best man at my wedding gave me a New York Times article about a study Oliver Sacks had done of an artist who had suffered a minor concussion from a bicycle accident. The patient had showed up complaining of a loss of his sense of color vision. The world to him was now a matter of light and dark, a black and white photograph of gray tones. 

Studying one individual with a brain-accident induced malady is pretty much the early history of neurology. In this instance, the injury to this painter’s brain revealed a very interesting and fascinating pathway artists and viewers of the world use. 

Apparently, the rods, which are light/dark receptors in our retinas send information to our brain separately from the information our color sensitive cones do. Not only that, but the black and white receptors (the rods) send their information in first. Whether the circuit length is shorter and thus requires a briefer moment to travel, or whether color detection itself is slower, I don’t know. But the effect in the brain, which we experience as an instantaneous duality of values as well as color is actually layered in time. The black and white version draws a picture, which the color sensitive cones then fill in, almost like a coloring book picture. 

While this has little to teach us about making art, it does explain why we can both comprehend and independently enjoy things like black and white photography, or non-polychromed sculpture. And it also explains why artists have long ago separated drawing from color, building the drawing first in order to cover that with paint of appropriate color. Many of you may have heard of glazing, or grisaille underpainting, which is then layered with thin washes of color. There has been a natural division of labor sponsored by this branching set of visual data that comes from our eyes. 

It wasn’t until the Impressionists stepped outdoors into the sunlight that painting took on the sudden all-at-once nature we and children both know about. Color itself changes as it turns in the separate colors of daylight, here reflecting a bluer version of itself and there a more yellow version. By this means an alert observer can record the changing color field before her and realize — without resorting to value — a picture of form and space. Now, we would be foolish not to include some value differences as well, because for one thing, our paint colors don’t all come with identical values. The blues are often dark, and yellow is brilliant. Of course, to some degree, that also reflects the value ratio between the blue sky and brilliant sunlight. 

You will also notice something interesting  when you are out at night. Perhaps you remember this as the pageant of nature when you watched a sunset in summer and went on sipping wine into the night. What happened in that interval besides bliss? You will remember that the color receptivity of your eyes went from a stunning maximum during sunset, to an almost black and white monochrome of dark blues and greens. Is color simply a weaker signal in physics, or do our eyes not detect it as well as light and dark? 

Cameras devoted to study this use films and filters to study particular regions of the spectrum. These tell us that of all the radiating signals and reflections in the universe, we “see” a very small section of the entire spectrum. The part we see is spread out in rainbows, which you will be happy to know were not understood by Aristotle. But because he described the colors he saw in rainbows so oddly, we might conclude that he may have been color blind. And not only he, but Homer, the Greek poet of the Illiad and Odessey, may have not seen the color of the sky. I only have the evidence of a linguist for this last opinion of Homer, because blue has no name in those works, suggesting the color was unknown to its author. We do know that Homer was aware of a form of blindness brought on by stress — almost a form of visual amnesia. So there may indeed be some special reason Homer knew something might be wrong with his own vision, but that is only a half-hearted suggestion. Cases of battle blindness have been observed throughout history. But let us not dwell long on this. 

I want to return attention to the notion of modal thought. Oliver Sacks postulates a model of the brain that is separated into modes of thought. You might consider this the question of what does the mind do in the brain? We all have this ability to enjoy black and white drawing, apart from color, so those two modes can be enjoyed separately or together. But what about sound and drawing? While we are busy with a spatial task such as drawing or painting, the ambient sounds around us easily fade into silence. A radio seems no longer to be on, and time ironically both slows down and speeds up. If a phone rings, we wake up, but for much of our work the mode of thought that absorbs our attention is on the task at hand. 

That tells us something important about how we are thinking. The right brain is too strict an idea of the brain’s organization, but in a loose way it gathers the notion of modal thought into a label we can use. 

I want to address the notion many of us have had that drawing the way we have been is somehow linked to our subconscious mind. I have an appreciation of what we seem to mean by that term subconscious, but I would like you to know that visual thought is not subconscious. It is actually equally conscious to our word-ear mode of thought, and often more adroit and faster to process things. 

As one example of what I mean, I quote a footnote in Oliver Sacks’s memoir concerning an experiment on thought and brain. The details of the study do not matter as much to this discussion as the record of timing and motive. Here is the quote:

“It was at Mount Zion that Libet performed his astounding experiments showing that if subjects were asked to make a fist or to perform another voluntary action, their brains would register a ‘decision’ nearly half a second before there was any conscious decision to act. While his subjects felt that they had consciously and of their own free will made a movement, their brains had made a decision, seemingly, long before they did.”

If you relate this evidence to how unusually random you think you were as you drew, and then how you felt you were getting to something, and then how you pulled up and stopped, you will realize that something more deliberate than vague unconsciousness may well have been guiding you. Because this exercise in drawing is made to baffle the left brain sense of let’s-go-slow-like-a-sentence-goes, we also attempted and usually achieved a global view of the drawing space — that all-at-once notice of everything there. 

So here is what we have been proposing: that there is a discreet number of things we can see in one glance (5-7), on which the notion of composition must rest. That there are only a few basic compositions used in human history, and that visual art, right from its expression of composition has gotten the age it is in just right. 

When Jackson Pollock paints all over, he is painting one object made of many parts. That unity (a formal art term we will discuss) is the one thing we notice at first. Remember that even though composition can rest on as many as 5 to 7 elements, it doesn’t have to. Anything less than 5 is all the better. Photographers among you may have heard of the rule of three in composition. When you take in a view from the beach, it is easy to see how the world naturally arranged itself into the rule of three: the beach, the water, the sky. But wait, here come two people crossing the view and another in the water. We now have 3+2+1, or, if you view them as a couple, 3+1+1. In either case, we are still within the compositional framework of 5 to 7. Now you might say to me, there are 14 people in the water. At that point we consider it a crowd, which in the glance of things we again categorize as 1. 

Of course, we love to walk up to paintings and study them in isolated vignettes. There your crowd dissolves into a constellation of figures, and they must compose themselves in ways we find appropriate to what we intend. 

So we have established some matters of perception that are always with us, and the notion of self-isolating modes of thought that assist us in focus and special creative tasks. But what about the higher reasons for art? What of this knowledge will ever create the overwhelming response in our audience we should rightly want to achieve? Haven’t we all been moved, especially when quite young, by art? And why is it that otherwise sane people can be heard crying and weeping during part of an opera? What is all this about? And is emotion like that not due to thought? Yet, who is thinking? And what is the empathy that makes such experience in the face of art possible?

I will leave this for you to wonder about. If you have theories, and I know some of you  must, don’t hesitate to send them to us. We will be returning to this discussion further on in the course, even if silence prevails right now. 

And please send me your projects, in drawing, or painting, as you are emboldened to trust your visual mind, and the speed at which it thinks. I look forward to everything you do. 

All the best,

John Sevcik 

Aphorisms, after reading Plato

Art is a form of discovery.

Where knowledge ends, art begins.

At the limit of seeing, a universe unfolds.

Facility will never blunder into a new world.

There is no evolution in art, just a succession of different artists.

What is behind the painting? What is inside the artist? What is inside us as human beings?

“Who are we, where have we come from, where are we going?” Gauguin)

What is the now?

If time stops in a picture, is that moment infinite?

If memory exists, why not a glimpse of the future?

Socrates claimed artists are possessed by a divine madness — inspiration.

Manet, described by his model, worked in a mad attack everywhere on the canvas at once.

The speed of the eye’s idea has been glimpsed in the work of photographers. It is as brief as a second, maybe a fraction thereof.

Paint for money and you will have money.

If you would study, study what you do. There is a truth and magic to each person.

The deepest things are the most protected property we own. Most people would prefer to remain private.

Art is essentially a profound vulnerability. You open yourself to view, and feel criticism will follow, but people appreciate you instead for speaking up for them, for showing the way.

What is this way we are curious about? Why does it stun us to see certain paintings? Why have we woken up? Why were we sleeping before?

The mind returns to elaborate, but the idea comes all at once.

The most difficult part is the waiting.

While we are waiting, the mind is working in secret.

The more you allow, the more you will do.

Leo Castelli began with one artist, then that artist’s friends, and so forth. Friendships curate everything, the way love curates the human genome.

Just because there is a sequence, doesn’t mean it is progress.

Individuals each bring something unique. This is the true cause of discoveries.

You were born as a new discovery of human life. So you will turn out in some way or another.

Life is a technology higher than anything else. It is protected by the force of cuteness. Love is its engine; tenderness its power.

Socrates spoke of two kinds of art: copies of copies and a philosophic creative art. The higher of these is the latter. And that is not all: such art serves the muse and knows the idea of beauty as well as the good.

There is a mystical source to inspiration which is best cultivated through the act of surrender. This makes art difficult to a person in the throes of ego. The evidence for this is that just when a writer or artist feels bereft of ideas or depressed or in a low ebb of energy, the fallow field blooms before him as if animated by some other force outside himself. Composers of music especially navigate between the antipodes of creation and uselessness.

John Sevcik

The Restless Spirit

Salon style art exhibits — why do they seem to work in Lascaux, but not in modern times? Is it that the framing of paintings, as well as rooms, makes too much of the repetition of the right angle? Is it that the proliferation of painting styles has less unity than the millennia-constant style of the ancient cave dweller?

Or is there something else, more pernicious to art styles and more stimulative to experimentation present in the salon style show? What, after all, happens when we assemble a wall of paintings by different hands in a large gallery? Our eyes begin a natural critique which speeds through our nervous system far in advance of any words we can conjure to describe it. The result can easily be a malaise, caused by the feeling that one or another painting subverts the high opinion we hitherto had of another that hangs next to them. Alone without companions nearby, that painting had once held you enthralled, but now, what tinsel and trifle is it when compared directly to a masterpiece next to it? And that masterpiece then falls by comparison to another painting above it? Horrors — soon an entire century of painting comes into question. 

It is perhaps this natural result of collective comparison and contrast — this free market in aesthetic criticism — that gave rise to modern painting in the first place. Perhaps without the 19th century's love of public displays of art filled rooms, without its Lascaux-like hallucinogen of nudes and drama and still lives and landscapes, without the exuberant wish to top plenty with even more plenty, without the never enough willpower of impressing to the maximum, without these drives, perhaps our young artists would never have cracked the code of their own discontent with what had already been done in art. 

It is exciting to think that more fascinating comparisons are in store for us, if we ever subject the twentieth and now the twenty-first century's art to a similar treatment, cheek and jowl, up there salon style, to encourage or irritate as the case may be. Perhaps the great reassessment of art and art history never really happened in the 1950s as we are told, but that the earthquake of reassessment happened a hundred years earlier.  

Un-compared, untested, unquestioned modern masterworks hang in isolation rooms, either enormously large to fill the eye and deny any room for comparison, or separate from the questioning appearance of any other styles of painting. Where in this have we really embraced critical thought, granted appreciation freely and autonomously instead of been forced by a megalomaniacal cult of one artist at a time being placed in the temple of our eye? 

Art history is perhaps only this worship and its discontent. The comparison will come along from time to time. The results will be creative and unpredictable. And all of it is exciting, for we are seen in our art and need it for steering. Don't ask me how or why, but this seems one of the existential truths of the human condition.

John Sevcik

Patrick Connors at Gross McCleaf Gallery

In the mid 1970's I met Patrick Connors at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, when he was a student and I was a young playwright and poet. His canvas, as I remember, was given to vague imaginary beginnings that had atmosphere and spirit in them, and a sublime feeling. He was, I felt, a romantic in the modern age.

As this exceptional show demonstrates, Patrick has since evolved to indeed become a new American Romantic.

Patrick's gift is devoted to the Philadelphia landscape, as George Inness was at first uniquely motivated by Montclair, NJ.

If you want to revel in the unique feelings of this romantic city that invented Independence and the Constitution, the rights of man and a devotion to learning, the life of economies and the life of the soul, you should check into the vision of this artist.

More is meditated on in this show than you will find at most galleries. There is a series of larger paintings that center on Laurel Hill Cemetery,  one in particular like an Arnold Bocklin, but also showing some debt to Daniel Garber's quarry paintings in its composition. These are not lessons in influence taken for technical reasons, but in the drive to evoke our native mystery of nature and civilization.

And then there are the small paintings that arise like transcendent moments of twilight over the Schuylkill River. These are some of the most affecting views I have seen of this lovely river's spirit. If you look at these paintings, you can feel why it is good to live here, and how much this region offers the sustenance of the soul.

Patrick Connors
Reveries
April 5-28, 2017
At Gross McCleaf Gallery, Philadelphia

Fred Danziger at Roger LaPelle Galleries

Fred Danziger began as a studio artist with some profound concerns about the nature of man. As the years passed, he leavened this into witty canvases that posed visual and verbal conundrums. They resembled Cornell Boxes but they were almost entirely painted, sometimes including a real object or two. He has always been leery of what he thinks of as the wilderness of the New York school and its attendant gallery system. That early vision of robotic and tortured anatomy perhaps made him an artist who couldn't see the charm of abstract expressionism.

As such, his last three years have been spent seriously practicing plein air painting. This is the work
in his current show at Roger LaPelle Gallery here in Philadelphia, his eighteenth show at the same gallery over a long career.

What is immediately moving about these paintings is their open wonder at the world, given us via Fred's gentle and non-ironic eye. These are clear visions of a grateful and innocent heart. They have an almost folk simplicity, combined with color work that is sophisticated, yet not obtrusive to the intent of showing and seeing.

This is a vulnerable show, not pretentious or self-important, yet by that grace it amounts to all that matters in art. The artist whose work will always beguile us is one so beguiled with the world in front of him.

This is a refreshing show that I am glad to have seen.

"Maine: place and time"
Recent paintings by Fred Danziger
Roger LaPelle Galleries
Philadelphia, PA
Dec 2, 2016 – January 29, 2017

Leigh Werrell, Bettina Nelson and Mary Putman at Gross McCleaf Gallery



Beware the Bear, by Leigh Werrell



Leigh Werrell's paintings and Bettina Nelson's collages share the show's title of "A Likely Story," one of those clever word plays that has an ironic as well as earnest reading. Likely stories abound, and the seeking is a large part of the fun. It is why I write these occasional blog reviews.

Leigh Werrell's paintings include gouaches that notice life in the sense of environments peopled with explorers. People are simple, and the world is complex, you might think at first, while looking at these charming works. The paintings seem apropos our time and human experience. The charm is a little like the charm of Sarah McEneaney or Katherine Bradford.
 
One of the overlooked compositional schemes is that of cave paintings. Using a naturally occurring architecture of surprise turns and mysterious peril, those artists long ago made early installations. The caves were ready museums devoted to exploration and surprise discoveries, even the sort one makes in dreams. So it can seem that our era has revived installation, while also inspiring some new idea in the painter's notion of composition.
 
Leigh Werrell's paintings authentically and originally trace the adventure of youth in a new world, something art refreshes in us, but here really lets us notice and feel delight in. Her paintings may arise from that milieu of installations as well as the sense of a world filled with discoveries and discoveries to come.

Bettina Nelson uses the process of discovered things in her beautiful, small collage pieces. They achieve enough imagery that the mood can be assigned to both subject and means as an abstract expression.

The gallery itself is one of the more complex art spaces in the city of Philadelphia. The visitor ascends from street level up a central stairway. The furthest of the galleries repeats the strong classical aspect of that first ascent by the powerful one point perspective paintings of Mary Putman.  The way there meanders in a route of discoveries. Even the racks in another gallery upstairs from this add to the exploratory excitement of a visit. This architecture helps choose the work, and it is an interesting journey of contrasting and complimentary exhibits.
 

For information and the gallery's complete show http://www.grossmccleaf.com/currentexhibition.html