Empathy, Religion and the Other: the art of Henry Ossawa Tanner

The show of Henry Ossawa Tanner currently at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts is focused more on his religious paintings, and almost not at all on his paintings of Black American genre subjects. Of these, the most famous is the painting “The Banjo Lesson,” which was shown during the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s 1990-91 show of the artist’s work.

Alas, there are only a few of those American genre paintings, for when Tanner left the U.S. for France, he became a painter of religious paintings, and intriguingly, the life of the Muslim quarter in Palestine. In Paris and his retreat north of there in Etaples, he notices the religious life of Christianity in the town square; he pictures fishing as fraught with religious symbolism and metaphor; he paints the supernatural glow of a cool redemptive light that usually visits a humanized world of warmth. Even his early quick portrait of his father Benjamin Tanner, a Bishop in the A.M.E. church, already shows a cool turquoise blue crucifix resting on the breast of the bishop in an otherwise warmly lit ambiance.

The humanism of religious people is part of this work’s power, but there are other aspects and ways to its unfolding. The empathy with the other by which he tells the tale of redemption is exemplary. Christ for him is a wonderfully magician-like, mesmeric, tall individual. He is indeed a miracle worker, and his disciples are shown in two different responses to Christ in the painting “The Pilgrims of Emmaus:" the wonder-filled face of astonishment, and the purpose-filled seriousness of deep conviction. Neither of these two understands the mysterious figure seated before them. The grapes on the table tell the proverb of their struggle, their wisdom to come, even their martyrdom. They have yet to endure much in order to understand and imitate the magician of metaphysics.

There is inherent in Tanner’s view the appearance of the other as a mystery and private fact of life. Women are, in these paintings, the real religious figures of divinity, deep understanding, and human empathy. The woman standing behind the disciples in “The Pilgrims of Emmaus” seems un-needful of redemption. The mother teaching her son in “Christ and His Mother Studying the Scriptures” seems a true source of love and wonder. The mother in “Mary” looking down at her infant, or off into the light that visits the manger in “Holy Family,” or into the tomb abandoned by the risen Christ on Easter in “The Three Marys,” each seems fully human, fully realized, and without any needs of zealotry or theological conviction.

There is so much to notice about this record of human thought, how it actually differs in the sexes as they struggle to understand, or do something about, the fate of living and dying. In the great painting “Return from the Crucifixion,” the stragglers – mostly women – trudge from the scene of the three crosses, over a precipitous landscape of three different lights. The one they tread toward us is a gnarled and knotted hill of despondent grief, the middle one a landscape of dried streambeds searching their lost ways toward nowhere, but the far bluffs catch the promise of day’s last light under a warm blue sky. How has the story of what we are left with after the execution of Christ ever been better portrayed?

As to the great painting of “The Resurrection of Lazarus,” I must first applaud it along all these lines mentioned above. Every figure in this painting is perfectly drawn and painted to show a story of human emotion, thought, experience, concern. The light of day coming from the cave entrance is strangely cold and filled with the blaze of justice and divine truth – a truth of power and miracles, but not easy sympathies or understandings. The light in the crowd, the light of Christ and Lazarus and the human scene at the grave is warm and sympathetic. All eyes are turned in fear, or hope, or grief to the missed loved one, and he – does he actually awaken in this painting, sitting propped up in his grave as if tiredly making his way back into life? Or is he actually succumbing to death in the presence of his family? Isn’t this what this great painting is actually about? Not the act of rising, but of dying? And in this moment of mortal passage, what isn’t miraculous about the presence of love, a love that rises even from the grave to live eternally? This, the soul of the person, this tender Lazarus, his hand falling in weakness to its knuckles by his side, this man so unlike a disciple, so uninterested in the miracle itself, only gently conveyed to the pity of us and Christ for our consideration and love – this is our most successful meeting with the other. For these are not people like us in any other way than their humanity. Their dress is different, their living arrangements are different, their climate is different, their hair is different, and yet we love them and understand them.

Sermons in words can only get us to think of these things. Paintings like these make us feel the truth for which sermons are written. There is no difference between a miracle and a painting, and when we were children and felt these things were true about paintings, we knew a truth before we were ever taught why it is true.

And so we come to this art to know that the human being is a miracle in a miraculous place; the place of those exquisite nocturnal skies, as the one in “Christ and His Disciples on the Road to Bethany” that Tanner spreads out in their infinity, yet close to the playing out of our dramas and concerns. It is both sincere and modern, this view that seems to be about religion, but is actually about inclusion, and scrutiny, and the reckoning with strange powers, and the overarching family of our large and enduring human love, our world-wide community.

John Sevcik

Henry Ossawa Tanner: Modern Spirit
at The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
Broad and Cherry Streets,
Philadelphia, PA

Show continues until April 15, 2012

Lynne Campbell, Celia Reisman, and Christine Lafuente

Lynne Campbell and a series of her paintings


An interesting thing about this show is its frequent reference to nature, and how the artists relate to that subject in the way they paint.

All three are known to frequent Maine, but only two seem to use motifs from that landscape. In Christine Lafuente’s work, oil paintings of dashing brio imbue often quiet scenes with a passion and energy that upends the themes of gray with the thrill of painting. Seeing is as exciting as something very youthful in us, these paintings say, and they notice color as a blazon, as something startling and enlivening.

For Celia Reisman, scenes of Maine are a chance to create wonderful rhymes of shape, a chance to simplify form and detail into lovely abstractions that inter-relate across the painted surface. Neither painterly-ness, nor impasto, are her objectives, but a modest stepping away, a replacement of realism with something embroidered out of the real. If there are Platonic shapes and colors, then this is the artist of those. Her edges remember the lilt of line, emphasizing that we follow the way nature and human arrangements compare and contrast with each other, even in something as subtle as a house edge, a lily garden and the landscape beyond, which she holds together in a certain light and design.

For Lynne Campbell, the idea of Maine resides in not being there. She equates thinking of with simultaneity. Were she in Maine, she might well be thinking of a wildlife refuge near home, imagining how life goes on in a space we know, but cannot be present in, except by the reverie of painting. The sense of a movie, of time passing from one stage into another, interests her. Time is her distance. This is worth knowing, because it explains the duration and way of looking her paintings encourage. Like Haiku, they seem simple and brief, yet one lingers in their silent grace, appreciating the visible world we often over-number with details and thereby give up as chaos. To her the woods are woods, not single trees blinding us to the ensemble. And yet she picks a focus, and relates something to that. As in Celia’s paintings, and Christine’s, there is a relation between parts that makes us feel, in this case, the serenity of nature’s order.

To see like this, and for these reasons, we require artists as guides in the visual adventure of life on earth, and the life of our spirit.

John Sevcik

At Morpeth Contemporary
Hopewell, New Jersey
Since November and continuing within the Holiday small works show

Lynne Campbell, painter

Wingohocking (bluejay), 2008, by Lynne Campbell

The art of this painter, with which I have been familiar for many years now, is perhaps hardest to write of, because I have seen all of it, and because I am so close to the artist. I must be careful not to read into the paintings things I know about the painter, and yet, to explain the artist is sometimes a help in appreciating her art.

While still a student at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Lynne began an interest in the square format, not that she hadn’t created in another format, but it was this shape she began to explore as a window. Notice that the equality of the sides is a very even and calming equilibrium between the vertical and horizontal. It resolves at the outset what classical composition must struggle to obtain. Unlike classical composition, which balances horizontal and vertical by increasing the meaning of the vertical, Lynne’s composition begins in a state of harmony. The implied vertical distance, supplied by classical art’s belief in the divine (think of John the Baptist’s finger pointing upward in Leonardo DaVinci’s painting), or in mannerism’s exaggeration of the vertical (as in El Greco’s figures, streaming heavenward), here is made equal to the horizontal. Such paintings could only be created in an age of post enlightenment; it sees into the world according to nature’s equidistance from us.

Sighting (silently), 1993, by Lynne Campbell

In her early paintings in this format, Lynne Campbell used the occurrence of manmade structures in the natural or wild landscape as evidence of the mathematical sublime – a term De Chirico used to describe the metaphysical effect of certain large manmade structures in the world and in his paintings. Whatever marks time, or endures time, would give him that effect, thus the clock’s presiding over statues or classical ruins, with a train crossing the horizon far off. Time and timelessness keep track of each other, emphasize each other, in those paintings.

untitled, 1995, by Lynne Campbell

Entry, 1996, by Lynne Campbell

For Lynne Campbell, who especially loved De Chirico’s paintings then, the mathematical sublime was visible in oil tanks, or water towers. The water towers became an important motif, after the interest in oil tanks seen in refineries. These early compositions had high horizons, and the sources of oil and water seemed to require that. They were studies of the earth as a source of one or another elemental fluid.

Return, 1997, by Lynne Campbell

With the water towers, an eventual shift took place, and the horizon moved to the bottom of the composition. Water’s other source, the divinity of air and weather, became acknowledged, and it is about that time that she and I became bird watchers. With that interest a new motif became her obsession, the sighting of a bird.

And now I will explain how like Agnes Martin these square, abstracted skies, become. They contain the slenderest piece of horizon. There is the equilibrium of the format, and then there is the placement of the bird in that context. The way the space is divided, the way the line of flight enters, or predicts its passage, all balance in a remarkable way. The object of each of these compositions, whether they include energy or the stasis of humidity, is an extraordinary serenity.

Late, 2004, by Lynne Campbell

The serenity of nature is not what she implies in these paintings, but the serenity of the onlooker. She is showing a certain viewpoint, in which we are at the moment between dwelling on a sky-filled landscape and noticing a passing bird. The sense of the cosmos, of the allness of the sky has us absorbed, and the bird noticed is placed in an incredible fit within the viewer’s universe. It is not locked-in so much as released-into. The environment and the inhabitant are as one, imbued with the spirit of each other. It is in this way that the older classical vertical direction has been made imminent. One can see spirit right there before oneself. Centuries of science and understanding have brought us to the potency of the present. These are paintings possible after Emily Dickenson, and after the general awakening about the fragility of the environment. They are a discovery coincident with that which holds that life evolves from its surroundings, that context matters, and that passage moves through the creating air of our life.

Wingohocking (goldfinch), 2008, by Lynne Campbell

Observations like these are timeless because we can understand they were always true, even if they now seem recently new, beginning the wave of the present age. While in the city, the birds were part of the urban environment, passing over rooftops with the complete ease of belonging. Now, though still in the city, they constitute a series named for a street that in Lenape means “a good place to plant.”

Edward Sozanski has termed them visual haiku, admitting their spare means and profound effect. As poetry does, they awaken us to a sense of being, and a state of awakened bliss. Though many are summer or winter visions, they grant that first truth of seeing the spirit of life, the spirit most of us assume each spring when we wake up to the sky and the weather in a state of bliss. If a Buddha were to come as the face of nature, he would make us compassionate in the way these paintings of our nature make us feel.

My current art show at Fleisher

Here I am in front of two paintings -- Horizon Event on the left, and Hero Meets Leander on the right.

The show is called Myth and Landscape, and it runs until February 9, 2008, at the Samuel S. Fleisher Art Memorial, 719 Catharine Street, Philadelphia, PA. The gallery is on the second floor. For hours and directions you can call 215-922-3456

Here's a photo taken at the opening. On the left is Allison Whittenberg, and on the right is Barbara Torode, two Philadelphia poets.

Here is my wife, the painter Lynne Campbell, at my show.

Both my and my wife's art can be viewed at tothestudio.com

The Art of Michael Carr

 

                                          

                                                                         Beach Radio by Michael Carr

         

Sunday, November 11, 2007 Saw the Absolutely Abstract 2007 show at The Philadelphia Sketch Club, where Don Brewer won first prize for his photograph of a concrete sidewalk/patio. Bill Scott and Barbara Zucker juried. While Bill Scott is an abstract artist, Barbara Zucker paints landscapes. Each of the artists picked 50 pieces separately, and Don’s was the one and only overlap.

Mike Carr explained his beautiful piece, vertical, green, clean. It looks like the new Comcast building, but is divided into a frequency, like waves coming to shore, as seen from an airplane. It is about some giant wave in Fiji that kills surfers, or did, until surfboard technology caught up to it somehow. The wave in question has an explosive forward blow that knocks surfers over. Here the new surfboard is an orange rectangle dipped deep into the painting. In little squares at the top there is a gray and white sampling of storm clouds, and squares sampling shore buildings. It is symbolic, sculptural neo-cubism, related closely to hip-hop or Dj inspired sampling, as well as to Pop Romanticism of life in the new age, as well as a kind of futurism – one which displays a faith in the minimal yet colored architecture we are beginning to see in the city.

He seems to be saying that an activity like surfing, or an experience like hearing the radio at the beach (the beach radio painting of a couple years ago) is as constructed and mighty a purpose as the tallest building built. This indicates how buildings are an outgrowth of some primal life-force all human activity shares in, or originates, and not something lowered into our midst that makes everyday recreations and reveries less important. He takes the large for something large-living in us. And he is the template of all these celebrations he shows us. Like a writer writing what he knows, he shows us a painter painting what he knows and how deeply he knows it is present and of its time. He shows how the human spirit – which he has in abundance – creates all the manifestations of these times. He elevates what most would regard as the lesser epics of life (an hour, six hours, of surfing) to the status and statues of, corporate and civic life. No one else has this civilization so clearly marked out in its best terms, nor so well understood as an almost Mediterranean ideal, although here the civilizing sea is either the Atlantic or Pacific. Shouldn’t this work come to be understood and appreciated quickly in California and the islands of Hawaii? No less so right here.