Seeing over thinking
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It has to be nearly impossible to sound pretentious when writing about candy, but I can probably find a way. My intent in painting images of gumballs and taffy and Chiclets leaves little room for grandiosity: I love these sugar delivery systems for their utter insignificance. But talking about any sort of painting since the advent of modernism is difficult to do without sounding like a self-important smarty pants. So, if I do, I ask in advance for your pardon (pardons are getting handed out left and right these days). Sounding obscure and difficult is just a part of the predicament of visual art since the late 19th century, as Tom Wolfe suggested in The Painted Word: we feel the need to philosophize about it. I like painting taffy for a number of simple reasons, mostly because I can lord it over a piece of taffy like a sculptor working with a tiny chunk of modeling clay in a translucent wrap, both of which—taffy and waxed paper—can be arbitrarily shaped and positioned. It’s raw material for an exploration of color, value, form, light, space, volume and line. Its interest is purely formal and visual and sensory for me. (More on this later, because it’s not as hedonistic as it sounds.) By sensory I don’t mean the memory of sugar and flavor. I rarely eat candy. My relationship with candy is that I buy it and abuse it by neglecting it for a time until I reshape and/or rewrap it and then keep adjusting until it looks fit to be photographed. (Often though it’s what I can’t change that determines the character of the image.) I have let hundreds of pieces of taffy sit in bags in my studio for years, each piece deliquescing though its waxed paper wrap. Sometimes I dig into these sticky grab bags for a few pieces I’ll need for a new painting before it completely decomposes. As salt-water taffy ages, it actually extrudes itself into little lobes and globes of hardening sugar water, apparently oozing through invisible pores in the paper. It ends up looking afflicted with deformities. And, after a few years, even when stored in the freezer, some flavors become soft as burnt marshmallow. If you unwrap a piece, it just sticks to the paper and stretches into tendrils like newly chewed gum or Neo’s mouth in The Matrix.
This mutability actually points to the other reason I like taffy. When it’s new, it’s like hardened Play-Dough or modeling clay, with sharp little interesting crags or dents and creases you can adjust just slightly. When it’s new, you can unwrap it cleanly to rewrap it with a square of fresh waxed paper from the supermarket for an entirely new element of drapery that can be modified to look like a Futurist sculpture. You can control much of what will present itself to the viewer: the candy offers itself as raw material to be molded, twisted, pressed, plumped, balanced, squashed and generally manhandled into an image that somehow looks unified when depicted in paint. But I can modify things only up to a certain point. Too much reworking and some element of simplicity gets lost and it becomes shapeless.
All of this came to mind after I’d written recently about William Keyser’s sculpture where he combines found objects he pairs with other components he fabricates. Someone categorized my paintings as planned. Actually, the only planning is in buying the taffy: after that I take what I find and reshape parts of it until I realize I have something that works. It isn’t working from a plan, but working in the dark toward something that becomes recognizable as an image I want to paint while I struggle to come up with the source image. It later occurred to me that Keyser is a creative cousin to another favorite artist of mine, Susie MacMurray, whom I interviewed at Danese Corey in Chelsea before it closed: in their work, they both transform overlooked or common things to find a form that has resonance for them. Bill innovates by pairing what he finds with what he invents. His three-dimensional bricolage triggers various associations. It MORE