Eileen Goodman, Lauren Garvey and Aubrey Levinthal at Gross McCleaf Gallery

 

Aubrey Levinthal, Foggy Table, oil on panel, 16 x 16

 

We went to see Lauren Garvey, Aubrey Levinthal, and Eileen Goodman’s openings at Gross McCleaf. Levinthal is like the Bonnard of Philadelphia; her transparent paints and reliance on bright, visionary underpainting that gleams uncovered  gives these still lifes a euphoria and splendor.

 

Lauren Garvey’s abstract paintings make a more introspective impression – mysterious, lower chroma meditations that leave charm behind for something interrogative. They are deeper than Jasper Johns’ abstract painting, but share his confrontational nature, as if to say “what’s this” of something the viewer can come to know, but not understand.

 

Eileen Goodman’s realist watercolors display the abstract organization of objects prepared for painting. The added element is done for color and because it can be included. They then have a relationship akin to the crowd and a showy outsider. The tone, however, is somber, making these outsiders conscious and tragic as an Ayn Rand heroine (if there is such a thing; if not, there should be).

 

Gross McCleaf Gallery

127 S Sixteenth Street

Philadelphia, PA 19102

Oct. 2 – 26, 2013





Bill Scott at Hollis Taggart Galleries

 

 

                                              The Fourth Cherry Tree, oil on canvas, 65 x 34 in.

 

The 21st Century has arrived, and this is what it consists of -- the imagination and empathy of color. What Cezanne did for the apple, Scott does for the viewer. This is partly due to something Rothko took us through on his own behalf, for his own suffering. But the result of painting after another half century of modernist development has landed in America from a unique and apt shore: the city of Philadelphia.

The difference might be said to be a shift in the last two years from opaque to transluscent paint application. It might be said to be a shift from lower chroma to high chroma paint mixture; but none of this is as important as the unique experience that continues from the former paintings, but blooms into undeniable transport.

This empathy of tender, brave and luminous paint, a shimmer of radiance lighting the mind, is as new as the iphone is to the telephone, yet just as human. What you have before you is a symphony without elegy. Nothing is impossible to imagine in a state of joy like this. There is no ballast, just lift. The eyes are upward, they see for you around corners, they see the sound of the surf in the sky, in a bath, in the reconfigured impressionism of Renoir.

You can't really say impressionism, or realism, leads to this; they lead to each other; or better yet, they stem from the same inner source of the artist's inspiration. That one artist can give us such light is like saying a man can be the helmsman of dawn.

Joy and the ode to joy is all!

In Arcadia
Bill Scott at Hollis Taggart Galleries
3 October to 2 November 2013
958 Madison Ave.
New York, New York 10021

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

Remembering Martha’s Vineyard and Wade Johnson

Atlas Was a Woman, oil on canvas, 12" x 14"
I was painting something partly from memory at the base of the Edgartown Lighthouse a week ago. The day before, I had sat there and seen a woman go out on the beach and spread a blanket, which billowed briefly as she flung it out in the wind and the sun. I had noticed how it conversed with the sails on the horizon, showing a kind of signal apropos of Penelope, perhaps, and the others of Odysseus. Or maybe she is Atlas, and Atlas is a woman. I had long ago considered something about a picnic blanket and the map of the world to be synonymous when we are very small children, and our mothers produce all the geography of our early life, first in the astronomy of their own body, and then in these quadrangles, which they come to occupy later, perhaps alone, as this sun bather was about to do.

And as I painted, I was listening instead to the wise man of the lighthouse converse with my wife, Lynne, somewhere behind me. Their voices would waft in and out of my consciousness, as painting makes one deaf at times, and I marveled at the calm and intelligent and passionate strains of this Thoreau of our times – a certain Wade Johnson, as I would later meet him – the lighthouse keeper, and in his own words, the light keeper of that little place in the world.

He would point out that people from all over the world came here, and he didn’t care which side of politics they were on, when he sent them upstairs to witness the view, they came down different. He called it the Wow factor, which brings us all together in the experience of wonder. He said that in life, this vestige of architecture that was originally created for hope and rescue, for the reckoning to safety by early mariners, was still performing its function in a charged political climate.

He thought the thing to do was bring people together in this way, around the drive to preserve and save this place, and our shared world. He would address his charge of public responsibility onto Conservative and Liberal equally. He would trick some into going up for free, on his invitation, and he said that no matter how hard the case of “what, me pay for that [lighthouse, public project, your salary]?” a visitor suffered, he would always pay as he left, softened by the solvent of sun and far-sightedness into a wiser persona.

I think it is not only the landscape they saw up there, which moved them; perhaps also the fact they had to duck through a little opening at the top to get on the walkway around the light that humbles like an old monastery door in Greece; and perhaps it was these things together with the time it takes to reflect on the voice and the man who waits below. The ideas of Wade Johnson are so articulate, so freshly wholesome, so knowing and yet hopeful, so innocent, yet so ready to reason. He is highly educated, but stands in the commons, delivering the citizen’s news to his fellow citizens, enlightening and uplifting them, at a moment when the world seems a financial jumble.

One by one, the world’s citizens look from Wade Johnson’s lighthouse, and before they leave they have a bit more confidence about what can still be done. His is a kind of Common Sense which is native to the people of our country. A little more cooperation, a little more trust in reason, and we might move forward once again.

I have pleasantly, industriously, sometimes in frustration that opened into progress, spent a few hours painting, lulled by the conversation that drifted over me. Perhaps this leant the painting its particular bliss. I think an earnest voice, a clear voice, a calm and wise voice, is what we need. This is not a man of impatient lectures, nor a man who sees the world as a tomfoolery of hoaxes wrought on us by scientists. No, our tradition of wisdom and common sense, of thoughtful and considerate passion, of hope in the present as well as the future, is created every day the lighthouse keeper is at his post.

Wade Johnson sees the boats into the harbor and the vacationers back to their play. He oversees the center of the world, the way Thoreau considered Concord Paris. It is just as important to be intelligent where you stand. It doesn’t require a stage, or a special province, nor the city as such. And yet, a lighthouse is a signal – the one where you can find him. This is a sample of America, this is a hope in the world.

Me, Wade Johnson, and Lynne

August 21, 2011
-- Philadelphia

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

Life and the City

Michael Bartmann next to one of his paintings


Michael Bartmann’s paintings at Rosenfeld Gallery this month reflect an ongoing interest in the architectural side-stories of modern urban landscape. These industrial spaces are often views of underpasses, or views from inside abandoned factories that open somehow. Both sorts of views share the idea that a wall both interrupts and opens to another space. In some cases his paint examines a wall as a means to express a certain slice of space itself.

His method of layering paint creates enigmatic distances punctuated by scratchings, scrapings, or thickly applied pigment. Amid the overall earth tone of these powerful yet quiet pieces there is a nice sense of color work, which leads one toward the light of day in some area of the painting.

This seems to confront an oppressive notion of confinement with release. The architectural element often presents us with a sort of Platonic ideal, which the overall tone and color work also seem to debate. Is this beautiful, or sublime? Is a repeating pattern of daylight cast in receding perspective depressing, or does the change in that light promise release and redemption?

In most cases the paintings also remind us of the structure of space, of how it outlasts usefulness, of how a sort of enigma remains behind in our midst capable of evoking the mathematical sublime. As sea shells have a beauty that outlasts their lives, these parts of a city have the noble imprint of some mighty purpose, capable of Roman arches, straight edges, and a function ultimately given over to transparency. What we are reminded of in the end is how daylight reclaims the man-made shadows of these constructions, as water does the confines of a shell.

Also on view are Thamer Dawood Sudani’s colorful abstractions that seem to narrate life force as a light filled with incipient symbols, language, and lamp-like exuberance. His family’s story of escape from Iraq gives these hopeful canvases a particular poignancy and heroism. They speak to the question of the invincible human spirit. Only one piece seems able to afford to place this exhilaration in the context of what must have been lost, but, in their way, both artists here deal with what can be dealt with in the appropriate timeline of their experience. In both cases we are surprised at the phenomenon of expression and experience, and moved by the power of the imagination to focus that experience at its most vital and necessary questions.

Until January 31, 2010

Michael Bartmann and Thamer Dawood Sudani at
Rosenfeld Gallery
113 Arch Street, Philadelphia, PA 19106
215 922 1376

The Sleep of Reason and other oracles of art

The sleep of reason was the condition Goya named as beginning the grotesqueries and nightmares he witnessed in his extraordinary book of etchings called Caprices. Even the sardonic use of a lighthearted term shows the nuance of what it means to abdicate thoughtful responsibility. It is also a defensive term to underplay the strength of his indictments via the harrowing journalism of his eye and the wickedly ironic titles of those images. It is not surprising that Goya’s intense realism, his honesty, his risk in speaking out, was rewarded with exile – the one place, short of death, the free artist is allowed to go when taking up a critique of society.

To condemn cruelty in the way Goya does, and aristocratic self-indulgence, is a way to make specific the grand pageant of Christian suffering as a matter in his own time. By contrast, Breughel’s oblique criticism of the depredations of the Counter Reformation in Flanders (The Slaughter of the Innocents) is a more cloaked critique that used a contemporary depiction of ancient martyrs to shame the sadists of his day. Goya’s modernism is in his avoidance of this age old method of creating historical metaphors in painting. Goya depicts the disordered state of his own world.

It may well be that when all are subjective, when all are in the thrall of some cruel insanity of belief-based hatred, that the subjective response is one of reclaiming reason, reclaiming the objective state. Who can see this way, and from what position?

Goya’s privileged position as painter to the King’s court was similar to the access Moliere achieved in the French King’s court of his day. Both men were allowed to grow in their worldly and moral satires, because those kings were themselves enlightened enough to share some of those opinions and allowed themselves to be entertained by others. Similarly, in Breughel’s life, a prince bought most of Breughel’s paintings, enjoying their views of the lives of peasants.

In our later age, as kings and court were closed as offices of patronage, someone like Caspar David Friederich, who celebrated the social revolutions in Europe of 1848, became an outcast. A few years later Edvard Munch was jailed for knowing an important anarchist. These are the steady drumbeat of art as conscience, and society does its best to prefer aesthetics to truth and subjectivity to reason. It is perhaps more interested in applying reason in the aid of subjective states than the other way around. Classicism is a nice example of rational depictions of what are irrational stories. Throughout the Christianization of Classicism, or really the classicization of Medievalism, we still see the artist decrying the destruction of kindness by oppression, and celebrating the victory and hope of the soul. In such storytelling, the good outlive the evil in repute. In that tradition, in my lifetime, a Pope helped undo the cruelty of an oppressive system of government by symbolizing the suffering of God, or the soul’s intention, in society. He suffered both exile and attempted murder. When there was a pause in his exile and he appeared in Poland, the chief of state’s knees shook with fear on meeting the Pope; such is the force of truth and the woken state of reason.

The dogma of Christ is nothing but love and tolerance. The many smaller dogmas by which people conflict themselves violate the example of Christ and the spirit of the greatest Dogma, which is born of the love of mother and child, the love of spouses, the love of lovers. Love is a human knowledge of humanity so extraordinary that it is enshrined in Divinity, which may as well exist, so strong is our feeling for what is true and good in us. The essential friendship of people, which can be destroyed by lies and hatred, is a likewise sacred thing toward which great literature and painting urge the viewer.

The fallen and the risen both know this thing in its true light, or in the shadow from which they envy it. It is as universal a knowledge as many lesser truths like counting and spelling, and so also undergirds religions and the toilings of philosophers, even if their disputations lead to a negation of their original motive.

An artist is the likely liquid of a modern age, able to pass among people without a seeming office or position of power, only a commentator off to one side seeking to please by beauty and truth, and discovering the time living in us. Almost by accident a shock occurs. Like Columbus still, we are shocked by the great distance west to Asia, and shocked by the intervening discovery, not able to recognize what, in fact, we have discovered, nor how to treat the people we encounter.

In the sleep of reason there is enough wrong to supply delusion on a mass scale, but the objective state in our subjective nature reveals enough that is eternal and true to bring us up again, and again, generation after generation.

This is the meaning of culture, its long repetitions, its rediscoveries, its persistence in the face of cruelty.