Principal Juror – Trevor Richardson, Director, Herter Art Gallery, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Editor's Comments - In this current issue of New American Paintings, we are presented with the work of forty artists for whom the practice of painting and drawing as a means of developing ideas and images is a common characteristic. Through their investigation of the aesthetic and conceptual possibilities of image making on a two-dimensional surface, they have demonstrated an impressive range of intellectual interests and formal concerns that serves to emphasize the multi-faceted nature of contemporary visual culture. The result, one hopes, is a collection of compelling works that will help underscore the continuing role of painting and drawing as a vital and provocative vehicle for artistic experience.

Inevitably in a body of work of this kind, where the principal focus is directed at the artists of a particular region (in this case the south-east), there is a tendency to look for patterns, traits, or distinguishing characteristics which collectively serve to define the artistic practice that takes place there, setting it apart from other regions of the country. If such characteristics do indeed exist, I was unable to detect them here. However, if the final selection does have a certain coherence and identity despite the broad range of work it encompasses, it is not because it defines anything (a group, a school, or particular trend), but rather because it reflects something––namely a set of attitudes that address themselves in different ways to the depiction of space.

This, of course, should not be surprising. Space is an extremely important component of our physical experience in the world. It presents us with a set of basic polarities for organizing frameworks of perception and the psychological effects they invoke. It represents a continuously contested territory over which private and public interests meet or diverge. It constitutes a habitat for behavior patterns and rituals, as well as a setting for stories and interests, individual and communal, deriving from these considerations. These have gained purchase on the intellect and imagination and have remained a more or less constant theme in Western art from antiquity to the present day.

An example of this impulse may be found in the work of Raul J. Mendez, who employs landscape as both the setting and context for his whimsical and eccentric paintings. Vexingly placeless, they make a direct appeal to our capacity to project ourselves imaginatively, inviting us along on journeys across vast desolate tundras, peopled by tiny figures engaged in deadpan, and often cruelly humorous, scenes. There is a distinct undercurrent of melancholy in his paintings, mediating as they do the often disturbing condition of interpersonal human relationships––especially between groups or communities. Similarly, Ian Brownlee employs landscape as a device to capitalize on our basic impulse to weave images into narrative. In his paintings, the use of perspective to create an unexpectedly dramatic spatial illusion permits us entry into what appears to be an independently existent and self-sufficient “world” located neither in the past nor the present, but always slightly out of reach and continually open to interpretation.

A somewhat different conception of space is evident in the drawings of David Bailin. Here, instead of being confronted with a vast panorama in which diminutive figures are seen to grapple with their fate, we are presented with austere, claustrophobic, uncertain rooms in which neither time nor place is fixed. The psychologically-charged interior spaces, such as in the drawing “Apparition,” serve as the context or “stage” within which Bailin’s solitary figures appear engaged in the enactment of some private ritual, the precise meaning of which is left deliberately open ended. Jeremy Hughes is another artist whose depiction of interior space has a decidedly introspective quality, one that invites speculative interest on the part of the viewer as to its meaning. In paintings such as “Men’s Room,” the grip on our psyche is achieved, in part, through the artist’s ability to engage the viewer’s emotions, memory, and intellect, holding them in a tense and surreal suspension, which can only be read and deciphered through associations related to, or implemented in, the mystery created by the artist.

Many painters have found in architecture a “stage” or “space” with which they can experience the physicality of boundaries, of exits and entrances, of penetration and resistance, of its axial relation to the up and down. Such concerns are paramount in the work of Judy Rushin, who seems preoccupied by motifs that allude to architectural structures––particularly those used to identify and inflect the movement of open planes and spaces. In “Doing Nothing at the Zoo,” for example, the appeal resides in the visual tension that is created through an uneasy coexistence between the “abstract” and the “real,” which, coupled with an abrasive physicality, adds a semantic and iconographic richness to the image. Like Rushin, the paintings of Julio Garcia also refer to architecture, but in a more restricted way. In “Anywhere America No. 1,” Garcia annexes the formal vocabulary of architectural drawing, particularly diagrams of city plans with their rows of orderly gridded streets, and uses them as the basis for extrapolating a series of flat, irregular, abstract shapes that somehow manage to acquire a mysterious new meaning and purpose. For conceptional abstractionists such as Garcia, the task is to infuse old modernist forms––such as the grid––with new content, reinvigorating anachronistic non-objective form by re-objectifying it, indeed, humanizing it––making it once again emotionally vital and resonant.

One of the major currents, which informed American landscape painting in the nineteenth century, was the cult of the sublime. The sublime came to represent what appeared as awesome in its grandeur and immensity, and the overall effect that those qualities came to exert on the viewer’s sensory responses. Something of the historical associations that have attached themselves to notions of “the sublime,” together with the “near-surreal,” persists in Caomin Xie’s precisely rendered yet thematically elusive paintings. In “Still Image 106, Fog on Ocean,” the process of meditative concentration combined with a painstaking precision enables the artist to achieve a strange conceptual distance that, paradoxically, renders his painted seascape less real and more abstract.

A more prosaically descriptive conception of “landscape” is offered to us in Alan Ludwig’s “Mountain View.” Here, Ludwig invites the viewer to participate in an experience of landscape that finds expression in a graphic language characterized by a reserved and formal elegance. Despite its apparent austerity, Ludwig’s work embodies a rich poetics of place, which, through a process of distillation, achieves a measured ritualistic deliberation that insulates us from any easy, romantic union with nature.

In its more refined form, the genre of still-life painting calls for a recognition of the object in terms other than a mere physical thing or its more or less convincing imitation. These attributes are apparent in Joanna Catalfo’s painting, “Camera and Calla Lilies,” where the relative oddity of the juxtaposition, coupled with the centrality of their placement, confers upon the objects an enhanced importance. The dry and exact pleasure with which Catalfo’s paint covers the surface, its luminosity, even its neatness, creates a feeling of preciousness which further contributes toward the feeling that we are in the presence of something unreal or slightly mystical. Markedly different in spirit and conception is “Reichenbach Porcelain,” a still-life painting by Hooper Turner. Here, the artist employs the media’s weapons of persuasive words and pictures as a vehicle for a subversive post-modernist sensibility, in which a precise realism is combined with bowdlerized textual overlay, to imbue the painting with a feeling of unease, anxiously at odds with the bland images of middle-class consumer culture it depicts.

The unique capacity of abstract painting to excite an ideational and emotional response not only on the retina, but which also inheres in the mind, continues to provide a powerful source of inspiration for many artists. These attributes are manifest in the work of Sarah Sharpe, whose paintings are about feeling and the ways in which feeling can nourish formal and informal relationships. They are also about color and the ways in which certain shapes summon certain colors. The passage of time, as well as a feeling of transience, is eloquently expressed through the artist’s command of her medium and its transformative powers. Jennifer Palmer and Erin McIntosh have also evolved a highly personal mode of expression within the syntax of contemporary abstract painting. Their works are filled with dichotomies, with tensions that are psychological as well as physical. They abound with the marks of bodily involvement in the process of painting, with their sheer physicality initially demanding a visceral and intuitive, rather than a strictly intellectual reaction.

In conclusion, I would like to state that I was pleased with the standard of the work submitted. As juror, I made a conscious effort to ensure that my judgments remained as disinterested as possible. However I suspect that some, inevitably, were the result of subjective preferences. One also had to contend with the problem of making decisions based upon slides, a photographic medium which at times can be notoriously unreliable in terms of its ability to accurately record the visual characteristics of art objects. My commiserations therefore go to those artists who did not make the final cut––but there will be other contests and other jurors.