Seeing over thinking
1
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 conveys a kind of minimalist formal surprise that hangs together and often hints at something beyond itself, an idea, an animal, a situation. It’s abstract but also suggestive and partly recognizable. In a similar way, I find a couple pieces of taffy and try to pair them together by modifying the shape of one or both, maybe unwrapping and re-wrapping, and then adjusting everything: the little nubs that keep the pieces from biting together squarely (like upper and lower teeth being shaped after dental work to mesh properly), the amount of twist in the paper, the angle of those wings on each side of the candy, and so on. I have no preconceived image in mind when I start, nor am I entirely in control of the outcome: some of the physical qualities of the original candy persist while others have been manipulated in various degrees. I can put hours into this process trying to get it “right,” which is a quality my solar plexus responds to, not my brain. I discover it by trying and failing, trying and failing, adjusting and starting over and then adjusting again until it all works together in a way that triggers a warm little yes in the vicinity of my heart. It’s isn’t eureka. More like, Oh yeah, now that I want to paint. I’m like Richard Dreyfus who doesn’t know he’s building a mountain in his living room until he recognizes what he’s working toward. But in general, it’s always two or occasionally three pieces of salt water taffy stacked like a cairn, and in the end it usually suggests something beyond itself. But that something arrives at the end; it isn’t there as a schematic from the start.
After all of this is done, I take photographs with my Nikon, often many many photographs, using natural light and lately the slight addition of incandescent bulbs from the opposite side. Primarily I use indirect, ambient light through a single window. Direct sunlight doesn’t work. I use a macro lens to get sufficient detail but this presents issues with depth of field and I can adjust the f-stop only so far to deepen the field enough to put everything in the little scene entirely in focus. The focal space is very shallow. But it’s usually deep enough. (I haven’t tried focus stacking; maybe at some point.) The goal is to achieve sharp clarity without hyper-realistic detail. I don’t paint for strenuously granular detail. I rely on photography to paint in a classic way: laying down areas of uniform color of various hues and values and then working only enough detail into these areas for the image to emerge with a presence that feels alive. I aim for two qualities in the finished painting: unity and life.
2
The quality of what I do depends partly on the quality of the source image where so many creative decisions have been made already in making the object and then in photographing it. Getting the right shot feels like tuning a piano. Lots of little discrimating adjustments until it hums properly. I have taken photographs that please me when I glance at them and then, the following day, I see a dozen things wrong with them. In my last session with the camera, I spent three or four hours coming up with four images, for four paintings, and then put the pieces into the freezer to preserve the exact shape. As I’d feared, the following morning I was dissatisfied with all of the shots. So I brought the same eight pieces of taffy out of the freezer in my garage and set them up in the same way as the day before. I worked on the speed and f-stop settings and decided to leave two small incandescent light fixtures shining faintly onto the side opposite the one lit up by the window. It all worked in a dramatically better way. I’ve learned to freeze what I achieve with the objects themselves so I can redo what was done before but with different light or camera settings. All of this is incredibly “set up.” But the setting up involves so many involuntary constraints and so much unpredictability it’s also somewhat random. The most difficult work remains even after the photograph becomes something that gives me that little stir of eagerness: the hardest part is pushing paint around.
If all of this groundwork is done carefully, I’ll experience the flow I’m enjoying now with the current painting: everything about the image requires intense concentration to get right, and while some areas have been a problem, it isn’t enough to stump or discourage me. The problems have been solvable by going back repeatedly to rework the trouble spots as I’m able to recognize they aren’t quite right, which comes from studying the painting over days and weeks. The background looks like a simple uniform color but I will have put down three layers of paint just to get it right by the time I’m done. (Seeing exactly what’s there, rather than what you think is there, is half the challenge of painting.) You see a patch of slightly greenish yellow in shadow and you think you’re seeing yellow itself: painting requires you to disengage from what you recognize as the color of an object from the actual hue that hits your retina. The same is true with a photographic image. It takes time to “read” it. Some days the work on my current painting takes less effort than I would have expected, even though I feel as though I’m working more slowly and carefully than I did on less satisfying taffy paintings in the second half of last year. The sense of slowing down enough to spend exactly as much time as needed on any small area rewards the effort with results that propel me eagerly back to the canvas the next day and train me to work more economically. So slowing down often ends up taking less time, in the long run, paradoxically. It’s all about surrendering to what’s clearly required but working smartly in terms of eliminating levels of detail that have no bearing on the presence of what the viewer will see when the painting is done. Unified and alive. Not high definition duplication of every last detail.
3
I think of painting candy as pure painting. Something so inconsequential and trivial puts all the emphasis on the paint and the basic visual properties of the work. There’s no room for thought. Painting taffy has become my daily work again after a hiatus last year when I took a detour to work on two large paintings that together required half a year of effort. One was a one-off representation of a complicated dream and the other was a painting of our driveway at the end of a summer rain, wet and shiny, with my barefoot grandson at the center of the image eating a Popsicle standing in front of his father’s Kia. It has been hinted that the painting is too cute for serious consideration. I’m not persuaded, but serious consideration isn’t the point of painting: delight, revelation, and new ways of seeing are the point of “pure painting.” Cuteness wasn’t a factor in the same way that the taste of taffy is entirely irrelevant when painting an image of it. I liked the composition, the preponderance of gray, the backlit scene with daylight glancing off the wet blacktop, and the concentration of color along the top with only the figure at the center to echo that color. The fact that the image had charm wasn’t even a consideration. It was casual, momentary, real and full of a seasonal moment, like a Japanese haiku. The other large painting, “George’s Dream,” was almost exactly the opposite: a confession, more or less, of my faith as an Eastern Orthodox Christian and my fascination with the legend of George and the Dragon. For me, it is full of the spirit and the light of the Renaissance, not only with its religious or philosophical content, but also its bright illumination, its nearly shadowless scene and sharply delineated forms. Everything in the image has some kind of significance; exactly the opposite of my approach to painting over the years. The fewer signifiers in the painting the better: that has been my rule. The post-rain image was part of a series of paintings of moments in daily life I’ve been doing in various ways—a way of recommitting myself to this intermittent series in the hope of getting back to it when I’m not doing taffy. The taffy ultimately represents for me a response to my love for 20th century abstraction: reworking a very restricted and simplified compositional format using variations in color, light, line and form. When I’m painting candy, I’m thinking Rothko, Braque, Stella, Nolan, Martin, and Frederick Hammersley. The same thing over and over, but with significant variations: and what’s conveyed is closely akin to what’s conveyed by instrumental music. In their own way each taffy painting is also a dream. It’s deeply enjoyable to dream this way.
This is where hedonism isn’t a factor, though pleasure is the currency of painting. If I don’t enjoy looking at a painting, I don’t spend time with it no matter how “significant” or “important” it is thought to be. A good painting pays for my time by giving me the joy of looking. In his writing, Dave Hickey sprung that obvious necessity on the art world thirty years ago or so and scandalized quite a few people who thought appreciating art was akin to eating your broccoli. But pleasure isn’t the point. The sensory experience of looking at a finished taffy painting, for me, triggers associations with experiences, times of day, seasonal moments, inner peace or turmoil or struggle, almost any kind of life experience. I began painting candy because it offered a repetitive format for presenting color harmonies—also as a way of satisfying my love of abstraction without abandoning my commitment to representation—and, after years of doing it, and while migrating to taffy, it began to suggest more than just the musical tones of combined colors. It’s almost a representation for me of states of awareness: the visual sensations somehow conveying what a landscape painting conveys through more conventional means. At some point, I have to tackle a long piece on Proust, because he’s so central to how I understand what art can do. Proust’s experiences with involuntary memory—the famous moment with the madeleine at the start of his novel for example—aren’t just a phenomenon of memory, but for him are what art is meant to do: embody and convey a world immune to intellectual deconstruction, through the experience of one small part of it, where the microcosm and the macrocosm reverberate at the same pitch. In those moments you have an inkling not of what you are doing or why you are doing it, but of what and who you are, of what life is, across time. I get tiny glimpses of those insights by finishing a painting of taffy and it’s something far beyond pleasure. It’s closer to reverence and joy. The necessary pleasure of gazing at a painting is only what lures me to look long enough to stir inklings of something so much greater.