represent

Jim Mott’s way of unknowing

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It’s hard to imagine a less picturesque subject than the Inner Loop, a channel of traffic that circles and threads its way through downtown Rochester. It might be an interesting route for an F1 race at some point, but it wouldn’t strike most painters as a promising place to search for beauty. In Common Ground, an astutely curated show of Jim Mott’s paintings and Andy Smith’s photographs at Lumiere Photo, Mott’s views of the Loop (originally exhibited at RoCo in 2011) serve as an anchor for understanding what he’s up to. Paired with his paintings of the High Falls and the Rochester skyline, these larger paintings, often with wide, panoramic dimensions, offer a wonderful path into Mott’s work in general. The exhibition is more comprehensive than it looks at first glance, with fifty paintings by Mott on view. It essentially serves as a retrospective of his work from the past 20 years.

In Downtown River View, Mott uses office buildings, along with a bridge over the Genesee River, as a way of structuring the image geometrically. At the same time, he relieves the rigor of that grid with the organic shapes of trees along the river banks and the Genesee tumbling across the bottom of the painting. Throughout the image, Mott simplifies what’s being depicted and minimizes his detail, in a sense making as few marks as possible to capture the reflected light that gently illuminates most of the shadowed scene while striking the higher buildings, bringing them into bright relief against a pale blue sky. Mott’s strategy is to leave most of what he sees ill-defined.

Avoiding definition is his way of life in an even broader sense: he doesn’t try to define what he’s doing as a painter. His approach is apophatic: eliminate thinking to make discovery possible. I’ve heard him say, only part joking, many times, “I don’t know what I’m doing.” Each time he begins a painting, he relearns how to capture the scene and his approach is never a repeatable series of technical moves; it’s always an improvisation. Mott believes that pushing toward tighter definition shifts the viewer’s attention away from the light and the wholeness of the world he shows and more toward individual objects in a way that essentially extinguishes the life of the painting. He’s basically an Impressionist, but with a grounding in later 20^th century art.  In his painting of Rochester’s skyline he was thinking of Morandi’s boxes while rendering the office buildings. Morandi does come to mind not only in the angular simplicity, but in the landscape’s restrained luminous color. Mott typically paints on a gray or black ground, often letting the ground remain visible around many of his marks and his color is usually even more restrained than Fairfield Porter’s, an antecedent whose work seems to inform Mott’s approach as much as or more than the work of any other predecessor.

My favorite painting in the show is Inner Loop North Sweep, another canvas with a panoramic aspect ratio. Mott worked from a photograph he took while being driven around the Loop. Again, most of the scene remains in the shadow of the cement embankment to the right, a remarkably unlovely element of Rochester’s highway system. On the other side of the canvas he shows the cement Jersey barriers dividing opposite lanes of traffic. What binds these two homely elements of the scene is the horizontal sunlight shining over the embankment on the right, through the railings along the top, casting shadows of those railings on the concrete barrier to the left. That highlighted spot of direct sunlight in the bottom left corner, as well as the pale blue of the sky across the top of the painting show the viewer that it’s either early or late in the day, not the golden hour, but a little before or after it. That light—as in his other paintings—becomes what is most precisely defined. After some viewing, it’s apparent that the headlights of approaching cars reflect off the surface of their lane ahead of them, so some overnight rain hasn’t quite evaporated yet. It’s a wonderful image of a very fleeting moment, something glimpsed through the window of a moving car, as well as conveying a time of day and an entire season. The whole image, something that would have been seen almost entirely in a pragmatic way while moving from Point A to Point B is observed with great, diligent affection, with depths of feeling this scene wouldn’t typically evoke in someone driving through it. As a result, even the unsightly embankment and the Jersey barriers become beautiful without ever looking like anything but the sand and rock that constitutes them. Mott is willing, if not eager, to paint any scene. As Jim put it quite simply to me at another time, in an offhand, throw-away remark: “I love everything.”

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The right quality of attention makes something interesting. Not the other way around, as most of us tend to think. Ordinarily you make things interesting to command attention. Yet street photography and Japanese haiku poetry, for example, arise out of humble attention paid to what’s usually overlooked. What’s being indicated can be unremarkable and ordinary, but the quality of attention involved in creating the image reveals something lasting in even the most trivial, mundane moments. Most marketing and entertainment rests on the reverse principle. If you make something interesting or beautiful, people will be attracted to it. True enough, but usually this means relying on all-too-familiar routines for getting attention. This sort of attention travels on rails laid down in the past. (Think most of social media, especially influencers, and most news reporting now, which has become utterly predictable and lifeless.) Western painting got to this point before the Impressionists. It was repetitive and dull though occasionally captivating. When anything is done well, it works. It warrants attention. It can be hard for a viewer to look away. But it’s a numb, lifeless and repetitive—not to mention addictive—kind of engagement.

Great painting works the other way around. It holds your gaze as a result of the attention invested in its creation. Chardin made a coffee pot and a bulb of garlic as captivating as anything else he could have painted, because he conveyed what they were, exactly as they were, having looked at them for days, or weeks, or however long it took to paint them. Van Gogh did the same for a pair of peasant shoes. Those paintings aren’t spectacles. They are quiet and humble, in a painting guided by feeling. Whatever story they might suggest is so tentative as to be inconsequential. There’s no way to see the painting as anything but the outcome of contemplative attention directed at the insignificant being of a coffee pot or a pair of boots. The painting is alive. It doesn’t signify anything but what you can recognize immediately, without having to reason about it. If a good painter, for example, offers sustained awareness to, say, an old train station, as Charles Hawthorne advised, or any of ten thousand other overlooked things, those subjects will become interesting.

At a simple level, part of what makes a representational painting work is simply the magic act, the skill and craft: how did someone get a layer of opaque minerals to do that? Hyper-realism is invariably arresting. I’m always astonished at the work of master hyper-realists. What you see feels almost more accurate than what you would see with your own eyes looking at the actual objects. In a way, these painters are paying such intense sustained attention over such a long time that the power of that attention invests itself into the paint: but mostly it’s the marvel of their technique, their ability to make you forget the paint, that invites you to keep looking.

Work that makes you see through the paint and yet still be aware of it as paint (which is often work that leaves aside precise definition) is porous with little spaces where the viewer’s imagination needs to work. It’s stimulating in a way that isn’t passive. Impressionism relied on this as does so much of Western painting since the advent of modernism. The Impressionists, while making the act of seeing itself their preoccupation, found themselves discarding what academic painting had been doing, making paint convey mostly heroic or historical narratives. They captured ordinary scenes with ordinary light in a way that hadn’t been done before, except maybe by Vermeer. Painting that light, no matter what it illuminated: this must have struck people at the time as something equivalent to selling bottled water. What could be more common and less interesting than light or water? But Impressionism led to everything that has happened in Western art since then. It was a different way of paying attention to experience. Everything and anything was a potential subject. It had no agenda. You can detect a narrative in some Impressionist work: a party, a ballet, some hipsters drinking on a waterfront, a bartender gazing at the man who would capture her in oils. But these narratives aren’t the point. The implied backstories aren’t heroic or important, but serve only as means to convey a certain time of day in a certain human or natural environment. (In Manet, the ambiguous narratives matter more.) The environment, the world, is what’s seen. This alone made Impressionism revolutionary—this abandonment of meaning and significance. What the painters achieved had more to do with their discovery that seeing, as a foundation of everyday life, mattered as much as, or more than, any particular thing seen. Absolutely any subject could be used for a painter to achieve this. What the act of seeing conveyed was subliminal, not a subject available for rational or purposeful instruction or analysis; the paint embodied something whole, a season, a time of day, a mood or a moment of reflection, and ultimately a tiny glimpse of life itself, a totality incommunicable intellectually but there to behold in a painting, as it would be in a passage of music.

 

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Mott’s statement for the exhibit is characteristically plain-spoken and articulate:

Growing up, I had a quote from the English painter John Constable posted in my bedroom: “We exist but in a Landscape.”  I’m still learning to appreciate the landscape, the spaces and places we move through, not just as our surroundings but as our essential context as human beings.  We and the landscape are integral parts of a great wholeness. As a painter, I’ve been motivated by the possibility of finding and sharing glimpses of beauty, meaning and significance in this arrangement. I’m particularly drawn to ordinary, unlikely, and neglected landscapes – which, often enough, happen to be the very settings we live and work in. My part of this exhibit includes a selection of paintings from 20 years of socially-engaged art projects – all aimed at connecting myself and others to a deeper sense of the beauty in ordinary life, and to a greater sense of belonging – to place and community – through the exploration of shared, everyday landscapes. Plus I’m including some new paintings, the beginnings of a body of work focusing on parks and other public places where people from all walks of life mingle.

The retrospective offers many rewards. Mott’s most distinctive work is well represented: most notably a view of Lake Ontario in Charlotte, the High Falls, all of the Inner Loop paintings, a glimpse of Cobb’s Hill at night, a park scene in Memphis, and a triptych of Wellesley Island beach visitors that has visual references to Seurat’s painting of La Grande Jatte. Several of Andy Smith’s photographs are marvelous as well: That’s Grate! and Apocalypse Broad Street are standouts. His view of Broad Street with clouds so low they eclipse the top of office buildings in fog contrasts the precise clarity of detail at street level with the indefinite haze erasing the upper floors of office buildings, looking less like the end of time than a teleportation of Rochester to the Scottish Highlands. It’s ordinary and otherworldly at the same time.

As with Fairfield Porter, Mott doesn’t paint to convey ideas, doesn’t make his images illutrate of social or political theories, though his project, his way of making paintings, for decades has been rooted in Lewis Hyde’s writings about gift economy. His work as an itinerant painter, routing his trips so that he stays in the homes of people willing to barter room and board for a painting, gives him a way of directing his attention as a painter in a humble and accessible way toward the locality where these hosts live. He tries to show them their home. Leaving behind paintings of their region or neighborhood, while making the work affordable for the ordinary people who put him up, he bypasses the entire structure of the contemporary art market that turns paintings into an alternative to corporate securities or precious metals in a way that often makes art feel like a branch of finance. Mott’s politics lean much further left than mine do, but his politics aren’t  inherent in the way he depicts the world—which is grounded in his spirituality. The economic rules he follows require him to trade his paintings for an affordable way to create them. (I should point out that you don’t have to let him stay in your home to acquire one of these paintings: these can be bought quite affordably.) His worldview applies to painting as a life activity rather than being a philosophy the painting is meant to signify. It’s a refreshing approach. What the paintings convey, themselves, is political only in how readily he has made them available, not in what they make visible to those who have the eyes to see what he shows us.