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Philip Guston
"Slope"
48" x 60"
oil on canvas
1979
I was asked by Gallery Aferro in partnership with the Newark Museum to be part of "Through the Eyes of Gallery Aferro Artists." The idea was to respond in some way to an object on view at the Newark Museum. I chose “Slope,” the painting by Philip Guston because Guston is an artist that I really admire and he has been very influential on my own work. My presentation is a discusson on Guston’s influence on artists. I decided to "get the word out" that I was interested in communicating with artists that were influenced by and/or studied with Philip Guston. I contacted one friend then put a call out through Facebook and ArtistRoundTable (an online art opportunities group) to find artists. I also contacted artists in the Newark Community. Artists that were interested in participating wrote a statement about Guston’s influence or I interviewed them. The artists participating range from emerging to mid-career. Three of the artists were students of Guston and one of the students continued a friendship with Guston until his death. One artist is a performing artist, another artist has only seen Guston’s work in reproduction and two of the artists live on the west coast. This process resulted in this online statement-exhibition and will also be used as a hand out at the presentation - discussion on March 13, 2016 at 1:30pm at the Newark Museum.
I want to thank Gallery Aferro and the Newark Museum for allowing me to have this opportunity. Thanks also to Randy Hemminghaus, Gary Garrido Schneider, and Carole P. Kunstadt for suggesting artists that might be interested in participating. I also want to thank the artist and art librarian Robert Lobe for suggested reading and for the conversation on Philip Guston and to Michael Dal Cerro for his huge help on this project. I also want to thank the artists that participated, Charlie Hewitt, Sara Klar, Alex Talavera/Hieronymus Bogs, Carol Radsprecher, Gloria Rabinowitz, Erik Sandgren, Anthony James Cotham, Linda Pearlman Karlsberg, Jo-El Lopez and Mary Zehngut.
Patricia Dahlman
Charlie Hewitt
"Calypso"
23" x 16"
woodcut print
2011
In 1968 Charlie Hewitt went to a summer art program at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York where he studied under the artist and teacher Philip Guston. At Skidmore, Guston introduced Hewitt to the New York Studio School in New York City and made it possible for Hewitt to attend school there. Hewitt said Guston was a very generous man, emotionally intelligent but very insecure. He said Guston was interested in everything from politics to Krazy Kat cartoons to high art. In his teachings Guston pushed painting from the soul, not painting as formula. Hewitt was very influenced by Guston's work and said he made more Gustons than Guston. It was hard to get of rid Guston's influence. In New York, Hewitt worked as an assistant to Adolph Gottlieb and both Hewett and Gottlieb attended the opening of Guston's critically trashed 1970 exhibition at the Marlboro Gallery where Guston first showed his new figurative Ku Klux Klan paintings. Hewitt said people were shocked and Gottlieb said it was embarrassing to see Guston show his emotions that way. With so much criticism this of course was an extremely hard time for Guston. During the following years Hewitt said Guston painted paintings about Guston's fear of dying. At the very end of his life Guston painted paintings of cherries and Hewitt felt Guston had reached a plateau in this work. Hewitt was reminded of an art history lecture that Guston gave of his 100 favorite paintings that included a painting of cherries on a pewter plate by Chardin.
Carol Radsprecher
"Monroe Place As Is"
inkjet drawn in photoshop
limited edition of 25
12" x 12"
2015
I first became aware of Guston and the power of his work, but it was probably in the 1980s or so. I liked his abstract work, but his Klan-centered (and other) work blew and continues to blow me away, as it has for so many others. It resonates with me because if its ineffable qualities that I can't put into words. What I can say is that, first, his compositions (to use a perhaps-old-fashioned-word): the way the figures are so heavily rooted, many times on the lower half of the canvas; how direct the paintings are; how he managed to make cartoony characters that were so very alive and poignant and funny and surprising, all at the same time. I guess here I'm talking about more than his compositions.
I love his fleshy, dirty pinks and deep reds and browns, and his color palette has influenced me (as has his general way of making paintings). Love the brushiness and roughness of his paintings. Love and admire how he managed to insert topical issues (the racism of the Klan and our country in general during the years of segregation, for instance) into his work---well, more than just "into," as much of his figurative work had an in-your-face aspect. I love that, too.
As I wrote briefly, sometimes I see too much of Guston in some of my work, although perhaps that influence is not so obvious to anyone but me.
Erik Sandgren
"Millennial Fish"
acrylic on panel
24" x 28"
Guston has impacted me significantly: precisely because his return to figuration was such a strong positive example to me of the importance of following an inner-directed expressive arc for artistic exploration and discovery rather than falling into the trap set by the market system for art.... I was very impressed by the drawings he presented to us at Yale Summer School in which distinctively trembling and tentative lines documented his first excitement at re-discovering the objective world after decades of the also lovely abstractions. Moving past his gallery obligations and esthetic dead-end his painterly renewal, discovery and exploration involved re-visiting, re-discovery and return. The unspoken aspect of this is that what could be examined more carefully is his departure from those earlier narrative paintings under pressure of the mode-of-the-day art world demands to work in the Non-figurative mode of the day. His whole biography interests me.
Along these lines he is an example of an artist whose late work embraces his earliest work and this is a wonderful thing. I also learned from his admiration of Piero de la Francesca and his ongoing faith in the magic and aspirations of truly great fine art and the ongoing value of the masterpiece - an stance so easily denigrated in an era that privileges "process" and "series" over culmination.
There's a good biography of Guston- written late eighties/early nineties I believe. I forget the author.
Guston's being and mannerisms were so heavily imbued with cigarette smoking and nicotine that his forms feel that way to me and thus remain distanced from me. Its as if i can smell the stale smoke. I feel his figures and objects to be confined, leaden and slow and trapped in a hermetic world... this quality is so inseparable from other aspects of the work that it is irreducible. In that sense his work is deeply urban in its underlying sensibility and thus very different from my own motivations.
Alex Talavera/Hieronymous Bogs photo J. Barnabas Lake
"The Smell of Dirt"
A few ways that Guston has influenced my thinking:
The canvas as a stage for the interaction/directing of personal iconography/object
Self-portraiture as one of the actors/objects in the scene (interior landscapes/dream-scapes (da-da, surrealism)/poetic in-scapes), His presence felt in the scenes like a stage director
Willingness to suspend judgement and control of the story, allowing the objects/actors to influence the scenes and high jack the plan, willingness to be surprised.
The dance between high and low art, abstract expressionism vs. comic books, mural vs. graffiti, conceptual vs. intuitive (habitual), brush vs. smudge, rich color vs. mud, comedy vs. drama, life vs. death vs. purgatory, art vs. relic
Compositional balance relies more on poetic balance than formal composition (objects as words & metaphors in relation and contrast to one another changing or growing with each reading)
Gravity/weight/heaviness of material the word, even the air seems heavy
Linda Pearlman Karlsberg
"Amidst Lotus V"
18" x 12"
oil on panel
2015
www.lindapearlmankarlsberg.com
Linda Pearlman Karlsberg studied with Philip Guston and James Weeks at the Master of Fine Arts Program at Boston University from 1973–1975. Karlsberg had regular critiques with Guston and remembers his intensity. In these sessions Guston reacted most vocally to work that embodied a personal place that was uniquely each student's own. He had big expectations for students and responded viscerally and strongly to work that he felt expressed an authentic voice. His appreciation was heartfelt. Guston could just as easily and impactfully dismiss a painting, part of a painting, or a whole collection of work as failed. Karlsberg noted that Guston was never malicious, but recalled that the honesty of his engagement made students feel profound disappointment if he assessed that the student hadn't successfully worked out the pictorial and structural elements in a work. Guston was a strong force. He loved to talk and share opinions but was not impressed with himself. He was open and approachable and had an excitable appetite for ideas and conversation. This more common gregarious side at times gave way to a brooding melancholy. He spoke often about his struggles in his own work to find the image and to resolve the dilemmas that he encountered while painting. Around the time Karlsberg studied with Guston the painter’s return to figurative work had prompted considerable controversy and often scathing criticism. Karlsberg and her fellow students admired Guston for his resolute independence and courage in following his own convictions. The students were aware that his position in the New York art scene was precarious and that he was quite isolated because of his shift. The resulting financial pressures forced Guston to return to teaching, and Karlsberg and her fellow students were the beneficiaries of his intense engagement with their artistic efforts and the stimulating reverberations of his artistic intellect.
Guston, whose energy and intensity overshadowed and commandeered all, was a formidable and larger than life force; and yet at turns he was a fragile and vulnerable fellow traveler. His university visits left students with lots to digest: philosophical and great literary ideas to wrestle with, startling artist critiques to work through, and questions about life and art making to stare down.
Sara Klar
"Je Suis Juive, I Am You (Talmud Dreds And Tefling Bindings)"
5' x 7'
acrylic, talmud pages, teflin and mixed media on canvas
2015
Philip Guston's bravery is what drew Sara Klar in.
His leaving his assured position as a second generation abstract expressionist artist to search for subject matter more direct to his life, to let go of his painting language to find another, to paint his own anxiety mirroring the times he lived in. This gave her hope.
The outcome, the immense power of his late work masterpieces, demonstrated the worthiness of acting out the courage of one's convictions. Guston twinned super-realism, his cartoonesque shapes and characters massing on his canvases, with virtuoso handling of paint. This foundational understanding from previous Ab-Ex days - giving meaning to a red near a blue, pink, black - each stroke communing with the next, rendered beautiful, his honest, ungainly depiction of the messiness of his humanity. This was his greatness.
For years Klar painted canvases that read to the viewer as abstract. She described them as encoded narratives, omitting that her process of layering paintings on a single canvas and digging into the heavy paint with razor blades, was the intense physical manifestation of her intense emotional process of psychologically de-layering the tribal mores of the Fundamentalist Jewish culture she was raised in.
For Klar too it became critical to tie more directly her art and her life by being overt about her religious past, a move very difficult for her. For hiding in full sight in her youth had been her means of self-preservation in a society where overall individuality was perceived as a threat to the community and her risk now for finding and asserting her own truth was further ostracization by her family.
And what was her own truth? That she had let go of all connection to Judaism her heritage, not out of choice but as an escape from a spiritual death an annihilation of Self, caused by the rigid dominion of the patriarchal system under which she as a female was powerless. Also, that the tribalism of her youth perpetuated conflict by instilling an "Us and Them" mentality. A chance for peace in this divisive fractured present existed only by according respect for difference while at the same time finding commonality.
Learning from Guston, Klar's new work Je Suis Juive, I Am You, (Talmud Dreds and Tefilin Bindings) takes governance over the Talmud, the all male religious text of laws controlling all aspects of Jewish life by forming the Talmud's pages into "Talmud Dred's a bridge from her past to her present and a salute to the culture of her urban-Black neighbors in her new hometown, Bed-Stuy, BKLYN.
Anthony James Cotham
"Untitled"
3' x 4'
acrylic on masonite
2015
It’s easy for me to recall particular images painted by many of the heroes that helped guide and shape my current voice but one image in particular sticks with me, more as a mystery and a life goal really. A painting that I’m certain was titled, The Flood. It was black, sparse and big (I assume big since I’ve never seen any of Guston’s works in person). I often try (and fail) to find this exact painting in coffee table books and online when I get that urge of nostalgia. It was crucial for me. It showed me something crude, yet recognizable, something open-ended but not vague. And bold. It was exactly what I needed to hear at the time and it’s still something I strive for every time I stand freezing in the studio at night.
The painting I saw must have been The Deluge; but that painting does not look quite like the one I remember. It’s pretty close. I think that the painting I actually saw (not the one I was looking at) might not really exist. What I saw that day must have been some secret whisper. Some hint of life that comes with great works; that little bit of a spark that is left over. Embedded in the work regardless of media.
One aspect of that remembered vitality that speaks most clearly to me is the authority and fragility with which content is conveyed. Guston’s works show someone who is looking and finding what it is they have to say. And once they’ve found it out, once they’ve built that statement, everything else is cut away and you’re given only what is important. This is very much different than someone who assuredly sets out with a plan to make a specific statement. You can see Guston’s struggle to find what is on his mind in the layers and re-workings, the remnants. That 'building up' is fundamentally human and speaks of a real longing, an ongoing search.
In some regard a painting built up in this way is every bit a mirror of a life lived, choices made, mistakes made. And in the end you’ve got a story for better or worse that tells everything about you (or at least something fundamental if its not everything). That searching is everything to me in painting. And I would be so lucky to make a painting as big and black and bold as that one I think I saw one time in college.
I have a few more topics I could hit on (Guston’s development of a personal pictorial mythology of self exposition, and his adherence to a very personal set of symbols, a youtube video I watched one day, and that book by his daughter) but I feel I’ve already tipped my hand as a mildly uninformed fan boy.
Gloria Rabinowitz
"Opposing Clouds"
encaustic
11 1/4" x 9"
2005
http://beautyartyoga.newyorkartists.net/gloriarabinowitz-portfolio/
I studied with Philip Guston from 1975-1977 at Boston University when I was getting my MFA in Painting. Philip Guston influenced me greatly. At the time, he was doing his late works, which the galleries shunned at the time. The paintings were very personal to him. He always stressed to his students that they should find their personal expression/meaning and to be true to it. The criticism he had of my work was that it showed I was a "good student". I had to find something deeper that I wanted to express through paint -- not just technical facility. He was a tall, towering figure who was gentle and powerful. He spoke to his students from the heart. We all respected him tremendously. There were only 20 MFA graduate students in the entire program. Ten first year students and ten second year students. I was very fortunate to be one of five who BU accepted outside the students the accepted from their undergraduate school. Many of us were given full graduate fellowships (tuition free). I didn't have to pay anything for my degree. James Weeks, a Painter from California, was teaching there as well.
Jo-El Lopez
"Watch My Back"
36" x 48"
acrylic on canvas
2012
I enjoy his work and his use of the color (pink) or pinkish. I also see his work as an artist as non traditional hyper realism and it reminds me that art does not have to be. (Hyper real) because of that, I try my hardest not to create in realism but try to tell my story in a more abstract form. I don't copy his work but his style and process has been very influential.
Mary Zehngut
"Untitled"
24" x 16" x 8"
acrylic on moulded board and wood
2016
The painter Alice Neel said, "Art could be called the search".
Philip Guston was engaged in "the search" throughout his life and in the process captured the imagination of a generation of artists, myself included. I was first exposed to his work when he was a guest speaker at my art school in the 1970s.
Students at the time saw the art world in terms of isms -- abstract expressionism, minimalism, photo-realism, etc. Students were encouraged to find one's artistic style, create a consistent body of work, and get hitched into the stable of a gallery.
Guston presented himself as a successful abstract painter, painting and showing in a respected gallery. But he went on to illustrate his progression to new, personal figurative work. He explained the reaction to the changes, which included being shunned by his gallery and some of his friends.
His story came as a shock and a revelation to us young students. But his evolution as an artist made perfect sense in a fundamental way. Isn't art supposed to be about creativity, growth, personal exploration, or in other words, "the search"? I admired his strength as a creative force and just loved the new direction. The imagery -- funny, goofy and dark, his color palette – unique; and the rich depth acquired from years of abstract painting emergent as a new song.
His statements in paint opened up a new conversation in visual art that led to the neo-expressionist period of the 80s and more creative freedom beyond.
A quote from Guston:
"There is something ridiculous and miserly in the myth we inherit from abstract art. That painting is autonomous, pure and for itself, therefore we habitually analyze its ingredients and define its limits. But painting is 'impure'. It is the adjustment of 'impurities' which forces its continuity. We are image-makers and image-ridden". (Wikipedia)
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