I stood in front of my highest bookshelf and stared at the top shelf where many of the books and catalogues that I began collecting over thirty years ago and haven’t looked at much in recent years reside; but I did not take any off the shelf. Instead I returned to the studio and I thought about who and what was up there. From what is on the shelf what do I still look at when I go to a museum or gallery? Am I being drawn to look for purely nostalgic reasons, or because I am still discovering something in the work that I had not noticed before? Finally, what up there on the shelf comes through in my current work, what might I think about while making or looking, and why might I find it relevant to me still today?
This is the book I pulled off the shelf.
It is the catalog for the retrospective exhibition ‘Milton Avery’ at the Whitney Museum of American Art [1982] curated by Barbara Haskell (1).
Two things jumped out at me as I looked at the cover after taking the book down off the shelf. First, the price tag made me aware I had purchased the book at Strand during a trip to NYC in the late 1997 while I was living in Europe and the price, $12.50, would have been a splurge for me on that trip. Second, although it is a paperback and not the biggest book on the shelf, it is 224 pages and slightly bigger than a sheet of standard size paper; but I not only carried it back to Germany with me, I moved it back to The States a couple of years later and continued to tote it along through three more moves around New England. These two things signified to me that the contents has a particular value to me because I’ve carried this book with me. When I sat down on the sofa with the book and opened it a third thing quickly became apparent to me.
I’ve never read it.
I have looked through it many times and the images are very familiar. But as I read about Avery, his life, his paintings, I realized I have never read anything about him before, at least anything of great detail. Other than knowing when he lived, approximately, and that he was from New England, sort of, I had no knowledge of his background, what he said, or what others have said about his painting.
Yet as a painter I have had an interest in his work since probably 1983. I remember finding a much smaller gallery catalogue that is packed away in a box somewhere and a postcard of the painting White Rooster (2). I was attracted to the image and its superficial simplicity. The colors, a landscape of pinks balanced by a blob of white and a blob of blue, highlighted by bits of red, yellow, green, brown and gray. The flatness of the forms, which despite lacking in detail were not lacking in complexity. Milton Avery’s paintings contain a complexity that always leaves me, the viewer questioning the relationships generated within the picture plane. Is the rooster and the hens standing in the landscape? Or is the landscape engulfing the birds as they scratch away like a wave comes over swimmers wading in the shallow surf as the tide turns from low to high? How far away is the blue tree, the green forest, the mountains? Are they embedded in the landscape or floating before it?
Milton Avery’s paintings interest me still today because of his ability to express the paradoxes of life through a formal, painterly language grounded in abstraction. It is by looking at (reproductions of) his paintings that I first became aware of figure-ground reversal and begin to apply it in my own image-making years before I would ‘learn’ this concept formally. Avery shows these paradoxes not only in the formal structure of the paintings, but also in the way in which he used color to further examine the relationships developed between forms, the figure and the ground; these traditional ‘painterly’ concerns which in modern abstract painting develop(ed) the content in the work. Finally I am and have always been attracted to how Avery constructed the paintings through thin, scumbled layers of pigment, sometimes scraping away to reveal the layers of color and/or the often raw canvas beneath.
I no longer know which painting of Milton Avery’s I first saw live and in the flesh. I suspect it was probably Sea Grasses and Blue Sea at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in October 1987. It is a relatively late painting, completed seven years before Avery died (3); and despite the clearly identified subject, a seascape, it does not seem to differ all too much from the Abstract Expressionist and Color Field painting of the New York School from that time. But there is something in the painting that does make it stand out as not being of those particular styles or school. Whether it is the title, a big clue to what the artist intends to be seen; or the too bright colors, or the scumbled layers of pigments mixing on the canvas; the painting, as described on the MoMA website results in coming “close to abstraction”, but is still not abstraction.
When I first saw this painting I might have seen other landscapes and seascapes by the artist in reproductions, but I was more familiar with his portraits and traditional genre paintings--such as White Rooster, still lifes, and ‘everyday scenes’. I recall reading Grace Paley’s short stories during those years, the covers of which often featured a reproduction of a painting from Avery, such as Conversation, or a painting from Edward Hopper, with whom Avery has many biographical similarities; yet Milton Avery stylistically appears quite far to the other end of the spectrum from Hopper, at least at first glance.
When I think back to and picture in my mind the drawings, paintings and prints I was doing between 1983 and 1987 I see many portraits and genre works; light on detail and heavy on the play between forms and the resulting shapes and spaces. The work was very derivative of Avery, although at the same time I was also looking at many other 20th century artists and movements, particularly the German Expressionists and Robert Motherwell. I was also making a lot of steel sculpture under the influence of David Smith. My looking was focused on seeing the positive and negative spaces created by a solid...black paint, black ink, a piece of steel...and a negative...white paint, a color, the space around the block of wood or the piece of metal. In its way this all ties into my formal interests in Milton Avery’s paintings.
I still find myself today in moments when I am staring off into space when I am not focused on any one thing, when I am just looking, asking myself ‘what am I seeing?’ Am I seeing the white blade of the ceiling fan, or the white ceiling around it? Maybe I am seeing the space where the two meet, the edge that contains the positive and negative, both the figure and ground with no indication which is which. When I am looking in this way I am not seeing what something is in particular, but rather what the relationship is between things in general.
Aside from learning the basics of identifying primary and secondary colors via the color ‘wheel’, I had at that point no formal introduction to theory. Theory would not come my way until a number of years later, by then I had seen not only a number of Avery’s paintings, but also paintings from many others up close and not just in reproduction. Color and the application of paint can never be accurately gauged or understood completely by viewing a reproduction; it is possible to understand something, however slightly, about the intent of both on part of the artist as long as we are willing to accept that what we understand might be partially or even completely untrue.
When I think of how I mix and apply color I generally do so with the intention of building a perceptible color through thin layers of dried paint one on top of the other as opposed to mixing the pigments wet-on-wet, ‘alla prima’ into each other, or by blocking out fields and forms in flat, premixed colors. Sometimes I’ve only built the color through layers of washes, other times I’ve brushed or drawn on with markers layers of paint to create a net or cell-like structure. I usually keep things pretty thin. O I sand or scrape away layers, and then apply some more. The goal being that the color will mix in the eye of viewer; not by means of an artificial system of benday dots, pixels or even Seurat’s pointillism, all of which place colors separately next to each other or overlapping slightly in order to create an optical ‘mixing’ in the viewer’s eye. I look to build a perception through layers of paint, like skin cells, not quite transparent, but you know that the colors you perceive are formed by what lays beneath.
Pulling all of these elements together I am aware what peaked my initial interest in the paintings of Milton Avery thirty plus years ago remains key to my explorations of identity through the act and art of painting today. The ways in which Avery painted, the playfulness between figure and ground which enables the viewer to view the parts individually and simultaneously within the whole of the composition, the way color is developed to strengthen the relationship, highlighting both difference and similarity, and the materiality of the paint not as a thick, viscous glob, but a thin layer that together with many more thin layers creates the whole painting, these are what I find appearing in my own attempts at painting today.
As I finally begin to read up on Milton Avery and his painting I am discovering there are many other parts of his painting that do not interest me, do not appear in my own work, things I just don’t relate to. But the three key elements I mentioned seem to be crucial to what has held my attention as well as what has made Avery’s paintings a part of the American catalogue of 20th century painting in spite of the independence in style and association of the work and the artist from whose hand, eye and mind they came forth.
(1) Haskell, Barbara, and Milton Avery. Milton Avery. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art in Association with Harper & Row, 1982. Print.
(2) The painting is in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and I would not see it in person for at least another seven years.
(3) 1965