THE WATERCOLORS OF PAUL FEELEY will be at Gareth Greenan Gallery in New York this September:

 

1961 Rafina IV (Greece)
11 1/2" x 15 1/2"

Garth Greenan Gallery, formerly Gary Snyder Gallery, is pleased to announce its inaugural exhibition, Paul Feeley: 1957–1962, an exhibition of paintings, watercolors, and drawings at 529 West 20th Street. Opening on September 5, 2013, the exhibition is the first presentation of Feeley's work in a New York gallery since 2008. Twelve of the artist's brightly colored abstract paintings will be on view, as well as a selection of related landscape watercolors, none of which has ever before been exhibited. A fully illustrated catalogue—Feeley's first since 2002—will accompany the exhibition, with an essay by David Anfam.

The exhibition and its accompanying publication provide an overview of the artist's work from 1957 to 1962—a time of intense formal, as well as technical innovation for Feeley. Although classically derived, Feeley's paintings from this period are looser, more gestural, and less emblematic than his better-known work from the mid-1960s. In works such as Ios (1957) and Caligula (1959), exaggerated drips and sensuous looping forms cascade across washy grounds. They are frozen gestures of sorts, uncertain in their ability to maintain their gleefully overblown proportions. In later paintings like Untitled (1962), the forms gradually solidify and become more evocative of things in the real world—Mediterranean landscapes and Islamic tile decoration, for example. The actual ebb and flow of the paint stops and the compositions become more settled and architectural.

Born in Des Moines, Iowa in 1910, Paul Feeley studied painting at Menlo College, Menlo Park, California and the Art Students League. After completing his training, Feeley began teaching, first at Cooper Union (1935–1939) and later at Bennington College. The artist remained at Bennington for 27 years (1939–1966) and founded its celebrated art department. Committed to the art of his peers, Feeley exposed his students—among them, Helen Frankenthaler—to many of the most significant artists of his time. In addition, while at Bennington, he organized the first retrospective exhibitions of Hans Hoffmann, Jackson Pollock, and David Smith.

Throughout the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, Feeley had solo exhibitions at many prominent institutions, including: Tibor de Nagy Gallery (1954, 1955, 1958, New York), Betty Parsons Gallery (1960, 1962, 1963, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1970, 1971, 1975, New York), and Kasmin Gallery (1964, London). During this period, his work was also featured in important museum exhibitions, such as Post Painterly Abstraction (1964, Los Angeles County Museum of Art), The Shaped Canvas (1964, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum), The Responsive Eye (1965, Museum of Modern Art), and Systemic Painting (1966, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum), among others. In 1968, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum mounted a memorial retrospective exhibition of Feeley's work. More recently, his paintings have been shown at Lawrence Markey Gallery (1997, 1999, 2002, 2007, 2013, New York and San Antonio) and Matthew Marks Gallery (2002, 2008, New York).

Feeley's work is featured in the collections of major museums around the country, including: the Detroit Institute of Arts; the Fogg Museum, Harvard University; the McNay Art Museum; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Museum of Modern Art; the Smithsonian American Art Museum; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; the Wadsworth Atheneum; and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Garth Greenan Gallery is pleased to represent the Estate of Paul Feeley.

Paul Feeley: 1957–1962 will be on view at Garth Greenan Gallery, 529 West 20th Street (between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues), through Saturday, October 12, 2013. The gallery is open Tuesday through Saturday,
10:00 am to 6:00 pm. For more information, please contact Garth Greenan at (212) 929-1351, or email garth@garthgreenan.com.

I made another great discovery while visiting the Gibbs Museum in Charleston: the watercolors of Stephen Mueller, 1947-2011.

1947-2011

1947-2011

Article on Art and the Brain in the New York Times, April 12

Gray Matter

What the Brain Can Tell Us About Art

By ERIC R. KANDEL

Published: April 12, 2013

THIS month, President Obama unveiled a breathtakingly ambitious initiative to map the human brain, the ultimate goal of which is to understand the workings of the human mind in biological terms.

Jonathon Rosen

Many of the insights that have brought us to this point arose from the merger over the past 50 years of cognitive psychology, the science of mind, and neuroscience, the science of the brain. The discipline that has emerged now seeks to understand the human mind as a set of functions carried out by the brain.

This new approach to the science of mind not only promises to offer a deeper understanding of what makes us who we are, but also opens dialogues with other areas of study — conversations that may help make science part of our common cultural experience.

Consider what we can learn about the mind by examining how we view figurative art. In a recently published book, I tried to explore this question by focusing on portraiture, because we are now beginning to understand how our brains respond to the facial expressions and bodily postures of others.

The portraiture that flourished in Vienna at the turn of the 20th century is a good place to start. Not only does this modernist school hold a prominent place in the history of art, it consists of just three major artists — Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele — which makes it easier to study in depth.

As a group, these artists sought to depict the unconscious, instinctual strivings of the people in their portraits, but each painter developed a distinctive way of using facial expressions and hand and body gestures to communicate those mental processes.

Their efforts to get at the truth beneath the appearance of an individual both paralleled and were influenced by similar efforts at the time in the fields of biology and psychoanalysis. Thus the portraits of the modernists in the period known as “Vienna 1900” offer a great example of how artistic, psychological and scientific insights can enrich one another.

The idea that truth lies beneath the surface derives from Carl von Rokitansky, a gifted pathologist who was dean of the Vienna School of Medicine in the middle of the 19th century. Baron von Rokitansky compared what his clinician colleague Josef Skoda heard and saw at the bedsides of his patients with autopsy findings after their deaths. This systematic correlation of clinical and pathological findings taught them that only by going deep below the skin could they understand the nature of illness.

This same notion — that truth is hidden below the surface — was soon steeped in the thinking of Sigmund Freud, who trained at the Vienna School of Medicine in the Rokitansky era and who used psychoanalysis to delve beneath the conscious minds of his patients and reveal their inner feelings. That, too, is what the Austrian modernist painters did in their portraits.

Klimt’s drawings display a nuanced intuition of female sexuality and convey his understanding of sexuality’s link with aggression, picking up on things that even Freud missed. Kokoschka and Schiele grasped the idea that insight into another begins with understanding of oneself. In honest self-portraits with his lover Alma Mahler, Kokoschka captured himself as hopelessly anxious, certain that he would be rejected — which he was. Schiele, the youngest of the group, revealed his vulnerability more deeply, rendering himself, often nude and exposed, as subject to the existential crises of modern life.

Such real-world collisions of artistic, medical and biological modes of thought raise the question: How can art and science be brought together?

Alois Riegl, of the Vienna School of Art History in 1900, was the first to truly address this question. He understood that art is incomplete without the perceptual and emotional involvement of the viewer. Not only does the viewer collaborate with the artist in transforming a two-dimensional likeness on a canvas into a three-dimensional depiction of the world, the viewer interprets what he or she sees on the canvas in personal terms, thereby adding meaning to the picture. Riegl called this phenomenon the “beholder’s involvement” or the “beholder’s share.”

Art history was now aligned with psychology. Ernst Kris and Ernst Gombrich, two of Riegl’s disciples, argued that a work of art is inherently ambiguous and therefore that each person who sees it has a different interpretation. In essence, the beholder recapitulates in his or her own brain the artist’s creative steps.

This insight implied that the brain is a creativity machine, which obtains incomplete information from the outside world and completes it. We can see this with illusions and ambiguous figures that trick our brain into thinking that we see things that are not there. In this sense, a task of figurative painting is to convince the beholder that an illusion is true.

Some of this creative process is determined by the way the structure of our brain develops, which is why we all see the world in pretty much the same way. However, our brains also have differences that are determined in part by our individual experiences.

In addition to our built-in visual processes, each of us brings to a work of art our acquired memories: we remember other works of art that we have seen. We remember scenes and people that have meaning to us and relate the work of art to those memories. In order to see what is painted on a canvas, we have to know beforehand what we might see in a painting. These insights into perception served as a bridge between the visual perception of art and the biology of the brain.

So how does our brain respond to portraiture? As we look at a portrait, our brain calls on several interacting systems to analyze contours, form a representation of the face and of the body, analyze the body’s motion, experience emotion, and perhaps, empathy. Along with these instantaneous responses, we form a theory of the subject’s state of mind.

The brain’s representation of faces is especially important to the beholder’s response to portraiture. Our brain devotes more space to reading the details of faces than to any other object. We react strongly to the expressionist works of these Viennese artists, in part, because our brain contains specialized cells that respond powerfully to the exaggerated facial features these painters portrayed.

Moreover, the sense of stimulation we often experience when we look at a portrait is thought to be due in part to the activity of “mirror neurons.” Signaling by these cells in the motor areas of the brain can make us perceive the actions of others as if they were our own.

All of which goes to show that the real “eye” of the beholder is the brain itself.

Eric R. Kandel, a professor of brain science at Columbia University, a senior investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and a recipient of the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, is the author of “The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind and Brain, From Vienna 1900 to the Present.”

NYT Article on John Singer Sargent

An Article in the New York Times, Thursday, March 21:

Examining Sargent’s Shift From Oil to Watercolors

By JUDITH H. DOBRZYNSKI

Published: March 20, 2013

BY the time John Singer Sargent reached his mid-40s at the beginning of the 20th century, he had long been saluted as the best society portrait painter of the Gilded Age. But he was having a midlife career crisis.

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

"Carrara: Lizzatori I," a watercolor by John Singer Sargent in 1911.

Brooklyn Museum

"In a Medici Villa," by John Singer Sargent in 1906.

He was a darling of established critics, but to up-and-coming artists, he seemed old-fashioned. Around 1900, he put down his oils and turned to watercolors, capturing landscapes, gardens, exotic locales, and people at leisure, at work and at rest, often on his travels in Europe and the Middle East. Experimenting with unusual compositions and new techniques, he reinvented himself aesthetically.

Sargent never did convince modernist artists that he was one of them. But the curators at the two museums that bought many of those works a century ago are hoping for a different outcome when “John Singer Sargent Watercolors” goes on view, first at the Brooklyn Museum on April 5, then at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston on Oct. 13. The exhibition brings together 93 of Sargent’s best watercolors from 1902-12 for the first time.

“These were years when he was very experimental,” said Teresa A. Carbone, the curator of American art at the Brooklyn. Sargent was living in London, where watercolors were highly prized. His, though, were different from those of British watercolorists — more gestural, for one thing, and mystifying for their use of opaque watercolors at a time when they were typically translucent.

The lush results are not only “very beautiful,” Ms. Carbone said, but also innovative in ways that are just now being appreciated — even by her and Erica E. Hirshler, senior curator of American paintings at the Boston museum, who collaborated on the exhibition.

Ms. Carbone planted the seed for the show in 2008, with an e-mail to Ms. Hirshler. “We were besieged by requests for loans of the Sargent watercolors, and I thought we ought to think about what we wanted to do with them ourselves,” Ms. Carbone said. Her first thought was, why not unite the two collections? Ms. Hirshler agreed.

“Then it became more interesting,” Ms. Hirshler said, as the two curators began their research. Among the things they discovered was that these works represented Sargent’s own “vision of himself as a watercolorist at a very important moment.” As such, they were far from tangential to his career.

Sargent, “an obsessive traveler” in the words of Ms. Carbone, would sit with his brushes and watercolors on his journeys, capturing the scenes before him, often from odd angles — low in a Venetian gondola, for example. He made dozens and dozens of images, many in a series, intending to keep them himself. When he allowed some to be exhibited in London in 1903, 1905 and 1908, they elicited mostly good reviews. But they were never for sale.

Then, in 1908, his friend, the Boston artist Edward Darley Boit — whose family was the subject of Sargent’s renowned 1882 painting “The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit” — wrote to him. Boit proposed a joint exhibition at the Knoedler & Company gallery in New York. Sargent eventually agreed, probably to help his old friend’s career.

As Ms. Hirshler recounts in her essay for the exhibition catalog, he wrote to Boit that “sketches from nature give me pleasure to do + pleasure to keep + more than the small amount of money that one could ask for them.” He did not want to be bothered by repeated requests to see them.

Relenting slightly, Sargent raised a possibility: “... I really do not care to sell them — at any rate not piecemeal. If by any chance some Eastern Museum, or some Eastern collector wanted to buy the whole lot en bloc, I might consider it.” His watercolors, he declared, “only amount to anything when taken as a lot together.”

Sargent selected 86 watercolors and packed them off to New York, where they drew glowing reviews and crowds of viewers. Knoedler, aware of the artist’s wishes, contacted museums in hopes of making a sale.

The Brooklyn Museum quickly made an offer for 83 of the watercolors (three were truly not for sale). Sargent hesitated, wondering if Boston, where he had more patrons and closer ties, was interested. Boit and his brother called the Museum of Fine Arts there, but its bid came too late and was smaller. Brooklyn won the trove for $20,000 (about $500,000 in today’s dollars).

Soon Boit proposed another joint exhibition, and Sargent agreed. The date was set for 1912. This time, the Boston museum raised its hand early in the preparation for the exhibition, and before the opening it bought 45 watercolors for about $10,800.

As visitors to “John Singer Sargent Watercolors” will see, the two collections are very different.

Brooklyn’s works are mostly smaller, freer, more expressive. Almost none are signed. Knowing that his next works would land in Boston, Sargent made them larger and more finished, and signed them.

“They are all just a delight,” Ms. Carbone said. “We don’t tire of looking at them, and people will experience that when they come. Some of the subjects have pictorial depth, but not a lot. It’s all about Sargent’s immersion in the process.”

They are all spontaneous, she added, but it’s also clear that Sargent “worked the sheets very aggressively. There are nuances, shifts in technique.” Many, like “In a Medici Villa,” from 1906, show Sargent as a master of reflected light. Some, like a series portraying the marble quarries above Carrara, border on the abstract. What he didn’t paint is often as interesting as what he did.

One of Sargent’s favorites, “Bedouins,” from 1905-6, was shown and critically acclaimed twice in London before he sent it to New York. It shows two tribesmen, with faces sharply rendered; their garments are suggested as if the watercolors dissolved.

Some are reminiscent of his oils. “The Cashmere Shawl,” from about 1911, is one. It depicts a woman in a white dress and patterned shawl, an example of his use of the wax resist technique, which left some spaces perfectly white. “It’s a phenomenal work,” Ms. Carbone said. “It’s close to his regular portrait practice, but the whole sheet is executed all the way to the edges. It’s freer.”

In Brooklyn, the museum engaged a watercolorist to demonstrate six of Sargent’s watercolor techniques, including wax resist and scraping, in videos that will be shown on small monitors in the galleries.

As they view these works, visitors will see, as many contemporaries did, that far from stagnating, Sargent was innovating in his watercolors. Yet it’s easy to understand why appreciation of them faded. By 1910, abstract art was budding in Europe and America.

A year after Sargent’s second exhibition at Knoedler, the momentous 1913 Armory Show in New York took place, changing everything in the art world. “His modernism becomes old-fashioned very quickly,” said Ms. Hirshler. Sargent’s reputation declined, and it wasn’t until the 1950s that his oils came back into favor. Now, perhaps, is the time for his watercolors to regain their renown.

WATER COLOR WORKSHOPS AT CCSF IN APRIL

I Have two workshops coming up this April and hope you can join me.  Register early for a discount!

 Introduction to Watercolor:
Class #: AR425 Register Now

Watercolor is a beautiful and versatile medium which has recently been embraced by contemporary art practice. It is suited for larger studio work, for quick journal and travel sketches, or for painting in plein-air. In this workshop I will work with both beginning and intermediate students through one on one instruction, as well as introduce you to all aspects of watercolor materials and techniques such as color, transparency, texture, wet into wet; and for more advanced students, composition, structuring a painting, using color effectively, and more advanced notions such as making the "white" the focus of a painting (which is very effective in watercolors since the white will bolster the presence of the paper). As always, I like to expose students to different artists working in different styles.  The class is concerned with helping you find your own voice within the painting experience.

Cost: $135 (if registered up to one week before the class begins)
Day: Tues.        # of meetings: 5
Date(s): 4/9 - 5/7
Time: 6:30 PM - 9:30 PM
Location: Fort Mason, Bldg B     Rm: 203

I will also be teaching a class, Painting with Water media, that broadens the focus on exciting mediums and materials used to make a watercolor painting.  This semester I want to focus on working on mylar, and both acrylic and traditional inks. More on that below:

Class #: AR478 Register Now
The purpose of this class is to engage you in a laboratory of contemporary practice using water based media such as watercolor paint, gouache, and ink. The spontaneity and luminosity of water based material on paper is unsurpassed. You will begin to set up experiments that will lead you to your own unique visual language. Methods of critical analysis, color literacy, contemporary painting issues, and basic painting methods and skills will be introduced. There will be slide lectures, suggested exhibitions and readings, and group interaction through critiques and shared experience.

Cost: $150
Cost: $135 (if registered up to one week before the class begins)
Day: Thurs.        # of meetings: 5
Date(s): 4/18 - 5/16
Time: 6:30 PM - 9:30 PM
Location: Fort Mason, Bldg B     Rm: 203
Material fee (pay to instructor):  $10

CCSF INTRODUCTION TO WATERCOLOR WORKSHOP

My Introduction to Watercolor Workshop starts Tuesday April 9. This five week workshop consists of daily lessons and assignments that progressively improve your skills and knowledge. The class will encourage and enlighten you on your search for a balance between ideas and forms that best give voice to your paintings. Whatever the level of your experience, you will be encouraged to approach your painting with vigor and an open mind through the ebb and flow of technique and personal vision.

There is a discount on early registration :)

John Singer Sargent (American, 1856–1925). The Cashmere Shawl, circa 1911. Translucent watercolor and touches of opaque watercolor and wax resist with graphite underdrawing, 19 15/16 x 14 in. (50.7 x 35.5 cm). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Hayden Collection—Charles Henry Hayden Fund. Photograph © 2013 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

John Singer Sargent Watercolors

 

JOHN SINGER SARGENT WATERCOLORS AT THE BROOKLYN MUSEUM

A great opportunity if you're in the area to see these splendid watercolors!

Here is the write up from the Brooklyn Museum website:

This landmark exhibition unites for the first time the John Singer Sargent watercolors acquired by the Brooklyn Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in the early twentieth century. The culmination of a yearlong collaborative study by both museums, John Singer Sargent Watercolors explores the watercolor practice that has traditionally been viewed as a tangential facet of Sargent’s art making. The ninety-three pieces on display provide a once-in-a-generation opportunity to view a broad range of the artist’s finest production in the medium.
Brooklyn’s thirty-eight watercolors, most of which have not been on view for decades, were largely purchased from Sargent’s 1909 debut exhibition in New York. Their subjects include Venetian scenes (The Bridge of Sighs), Mediterranean sailing vessels, intimate portraits (A Tramp), and Bedouin subjects (Bedouins). Boston’s watercolors, purchased in 1912, are more highly finished than the Brooklyn works. They feature subjects from his travels to the Italian Alps, the villa gardens near Lucca, and the marble quarries of Carrara, as well as portraits. The exhibition also presents nine oil paintings, including Brooklyn’s An Out-of-Doors Study, Paul Helleu and His Wife (1889) and Boston’s The Master and His Pupils (1914).
New discoveries based on scientific study of Sargent’s pigments, drawing techniques, and paper preparation are featured in a special section deconstructing his techniques. Select works throughout the exhibition are paired with videos that show a contemporary watercolor artist demonstrating some of Sargent’s methods.

JUST ADD WATER: Watercolor Exhibition at Studio Quercus

STUDIO QUERCUS

JAN 12 – FEB 16, 2013

Also open for Oakland Art Murmur

Just Add Water

A survey of Bay Area artists who use water-based media on paper.

Artist’s Reception: Saturday Jan 12, 4–6pm

About the Exhibition:

Studio Quercus is pleased to present Just Add Water, a survey of Bay Area artists who use water-based media on paper. The show, featuring works by eight artists with widely varied approaches, opens January 12 and concludes February 16.
Water-based work, employing watercolor, gouache, ink, or acrylic, traditionally has been used to explore ideas that might later be fully developed in oil on canvas. However, the spirit of experimentation and exploration that is associated with works on paper can be beautiful and inspiring, and is echoed by the artists featured in this show.
The featured artists — Amy Wilson Faville, John Fadeff, Michael Hall, Scott Hewicker, Alex Jackson, Carrie Lederer, Kara Maria, and Francesca Pastine — offer a broad overview of what is possible in water-based mediums.

Watercolor Paintings in the Barns Collection & Winslow Homer at the Philadelphia Museum of Art

I had a great time in Philadelphia last November looking at Art.  I was able to visit the Barns Collection. I saw a fantastic Winslow Homer exhibit at the Philadelphia museum, Shipwreck! I also saw "Dancing Around the Bride," which included some conceptual watercolors by John Cage and Marcel Duchamp.

The Barns has amazing work by Charles Demuth, and Paul Cezanne amoung others.  Here are some images from that collection:

charles Demuth

charles Demuth

Jules Pascin

American and Bulgarian, active in France, 1885–1930

Offering to Venus (Offrande à Vénus)

1922Watercolor, gouache, graphite, and brown ink on thin paperboard18 3/4 x 16 3/4 in. (47.6 x 42.5 cm)

 

 

French

Red and Blue Flowers and White Daisy

c. 1840Watercolor with graphite underdrawing on parchment9 3/16 x 7 1/4 in. (23.3 x 18.4 cm) 

 

 

 

 

Paul Signac

French, 1863–1935

Genève

1919Watercolor with graphite underdrawing on thin wove paper7 3/4 x 11 1/2 in. (19.7 x 29.2 cm)

  

Paul Klee

 

 

 

Paul Cézanne

French, 1839–1906

Trees (Arbres)

c. 1900 (possibly earlier)Watercolor and graphite on laid paper12 3/16 x 18 11/16 in. (31 x 47.5 cm)

Paul Cézanne

French, 1839–1906

The Coach House (La Remise à Château Noir)

1890–1895Watercolor and graphite on wove paper12 3/8 x 19 1/16 in. (31.4 x 48.4 cm)

 

Paul Cézanne

French, 1839–1906

The Coach House (La Remise à Château Noir)

1890–1895Watercolor and graphite on wove paper12 3/8 x 19 1/16 in. (31.4 x 48.4 cm)

 

IMAGE FROM "SHIPWRECK!" AT PHILADELPHIA MUSEUM OF ART

Work from Painting with Water Media Class

Christine Kibre: mixed media collage | watercolor | photo transfer

 Chloe Meyer: ink, watercolor, gouache

Juan: acrylic pour | mixed media

 Sharon Esker: three mixed-media collages

David Baxter: Tantric watercolor

Wengechi Mutu at Suzanne Veilmetter Projects

Wangechi Mutu has a show opening at Suzanne Veilmetter Projects

Flowers by Kim McCarthy

Kim McCarthy at Morgan Lehman Gallery.

Fred Gutzeit Interview

/Interview with Fred Gutzeit

The Crux: A Conversation with Fred Gutzeit (Part 1)

Posted on August 31, 2012 by Lynn Maliszewski, Contributor-at-Large

Fred Gutzeit, WORK GLOVE–7-18-86, 1986, watercolor on paper, 30″ x 22″ (image courtesy of artist’s website)

Fred Gutzeit‘s transition from his earliest explorations of pattern in the 1960s to his current output has it’s roots on the Bowery. He has the momentous ability to be both absurdly aware of his contemporaries while riding his own theoretical momentum. Gutzeit has always been one to mutate forms. Artistic triumphs and defeats are opportunities to realign his curiosity with his work, and this can often mean a completely new direction. I spoke with Gutzeit and attempted to acquire the understanding of where he’d been and where is going next. 
Lynn Maliszewski: So what are you working on right now?
Fred Gutzeit: I am grappling with how to be the most natural in doing the SigNature series. I’ve frozen and stylized gesture in these paintings. I consider it a classical way of thinking, where you take something and you shape it to get it to some kind of ideal. I balance it out by working with a process where my line and thus hand gesture aren’t too controlled; the line is imperfect. Right now I’m concerned with what I call ‘color buzz.’ I’m working with color like a musical chord. I’m not concerned with the gestural, physical performance part of it. It’s not Richard Anuszkiewicz and it’s not Willem De Kooning. I’m falling between the cracks as far as what the process is, but I live with that because I have an idea of developing a statement with color and developing the forms. That trumps the gesture for now. That trumps the gesture for now.

LM: Your abstracted landscapes were the first works of yours I connected with. They were flat, amoeba-like renderings of energy, which has been a thread in your work since from the digital renderings to your current SigNature series. What role does self-control play in taming such wild moments?
FG: Making art is making things clear, so you have to control things in a certain way. Painting, for me, is organic and implies a kind of process where you can do something and change it and develop it in the spirit of Matisse or Manet. It’s not just creating the finished object. The finished object is important, but it’s that past of the finished object that makes it a painting. But there doesn’t necessarily have to be paint. The painting itself might be photographed, digitized, shifted around on the computer, looked at again, changed with more paint or by pasting something onto the canvas, whatever gets it to that feeling of completeness.

Fred Gutzeit, LM – SigNatureWC (artist proof), 2012, watercolor on board. (Image courtesy of the artist)

LM: What gets the creative juices flowing?
FG: A good night’s sleep, going out on a good date, being on vacation or reading something. When I sit down to paint I usually pick up right where I left off automatically. When I’m looking into it and trying to solve problems, I’m thinking of all kinds of ideas. Too many ideas come up when I’m painting. This has been the process for almost as long as I’ve been working in art. Extra ideas are kind of maddening because I can’t work on everything at once so I jot it down in sketchbooks throughout the years. There was a time when I would get in a state of frustration about what to work on. Ideas were all over the place. In 1994, I started a sketchbook, re-drawing pages from earlier sketchbooks. I’ve never written poetry, but I’ve had one poem I was trying to write for decades and it starts out, “Stitches, Bridges, Words and Vision.” That’s as far as I got, but I thought it might be an interesting group show. They’re like money in the bank and my process now is cashing in the bank account. I’m looking back at the sketchbooks and pulling things in.

LM: You’ve been a practicing artist for nearly 50 years, and you’ve embraced a number of styles and modes of production. Can you tell us a little bit about your train of development?
FG: When I first really settled in New York in 1967, abstraction was the thing to do. I really wanted to be hip so everything I did was voiding the figure in some way, but I implied the figure by including work gloves. That was the human element. I wanted to make a comment on industrial society and products and so forth. I would see work gloves as I walked down the street, either left there or thrown away, and it resonated. I thought my work gloves might refer to something that’s been done, an act completed. I had a whole collection of them and I did installations with them. The work glove was a product, but it was an anti-product. It was my idea of conceptual art. Believe me, nobody understood it. Then I started making objects out of the work gloves. I got a bunch of cotton gloves that I soaked in acrylic then built them up. Everything that I put on them was like an analogue for activities that had been part of that glove. I did a series of those in 1968, and then I did them again in 1979, 1980, 1981, 1982. I was teaching a course at the University of the Arts, then the Philadelphia College of Art, and it was everything but painting so I figured I would learn how to do installations myself. The work gloves were like building blocks I could mix.

Fred Gutzeit, WORK GLOVE #m77, 1984, acrylic paint on glove, 11” x 8” (image courtesy of the artist’s website)

LM: In certain incarnations they feel like amputated digits, paralyzed and useless. But you shifted them into this moment of positivity, where they were morphed into an object of beauty, a trophy of hard work. They also fluctuated, even in your own language, between being sculptural independents and painterly components.
FG: Right, the installations defined the space with objects and the gloves transformed when they were placed in different places on the wall, climbing up a column, or attached together to make a screen. Then I was walking down the street in the West Village and looked through this fence and saw a bunch of kids playing off in the distance on the playground. Looking through the chain link I saw bright jerseys and different colors, and became aware that that was all I could see. It started me on a whole series of painting the chain link which, at the time, was my way of being a Minimalist. It suggested an idea about society for me, where fences make good neighbors. I was working within severe limits and defining a space in a simple, geometric way. I would show one link in the painting with a different color or texture behind it. The link was like a neon light line. This implied psychology to me, Freudian psychology, where the link was the ego, the linear idea, and the field was the unconscious. I think it’s re-emerging in my way of dealing with a line. Now the line comes from people’s handwriting, taking the initial out of their signature and placing it on a field.

LM: The fence defines, and the viewer must then consider which side of it they are on. Sounds like an internal conflict many young artists must consider regularly. Without the line, you’re floating in ambiguity in relation to space and that isn’t necessarily the best thing.

Fred Gutzeit, Chain Link series (image courtesy of artist’s website)

FG: Right. I was talking about these things when everyone was seeking freedom. When I was working out these ideas trying to come out of Minimalism, I was thinking about limits. I thought that I was all over the place. I needed something to define my methods. Now I’m working with a line and I’m limited to the form that somebody else generates but I’m taking it and shaping it. I’m still trying to keep to the spirit of the person’s gesture and not change it completely. It’s my play on identity and simultaneously a newly created identity. I was thinking of these as having the same kind of truth and identity as somebody’s hair-do. You can take on a particular look and you can decide whether it’s somebody’s profound personality or not. Although we are really quite different, I kind of admire Andy Warhol for the identity he could create. Whatever he did, it seemed like it just unconsciously happened.

LM: The SigNatures feel conceptually similar in their flashy aesthetic that is really more of an obscuration of identity. The slickness fools you into thinking design, but it does more to make the subject ambiguous than it does to reveal who they are in the way graphic design might.
FG: Portraits are vehicles for commentary but can consider many different aspects. Chuck Close, for example, never referred to his work as “portraits.”  He was at Yale and the spirit was abstraction, so he named them process paintings when he started out. What amazed me was how his process developed. In his film, he talked about his painting technique and I was recently struck by the sentiment. When he starts the painting it’s just kind of random colors. He’s not really fussy about it, he’s putting colors down he feels might work in larger blocks. You’re reading it like you would a Seurat at a distance, where the colors pulse together. Then he goes in and, on the colors that are there, say there’s a cerulean blue, he might go and take a light yellow blob over there, and they mix and make a light green from a distance. He’s nuancing the colors. He might take a color that’s totally wrong and add another color to it and make it right. I think this is a great painting process, where you have your idea at the beginning and you can kind of let it unravel, then work into it to bring it back into focus. I’m trying to apply it to what I’m doing. He’s working within this extreme limit for the portrait that he’s doing. You can’t make it go all over the place spatially, you can’t make it go all over the place as far as color goes. He managed to inject creativity into two naturalized techniques, generating these fantastic colors that ring.