{"id":5523,"date":"2015-03-07T20:52:53","date_gmt":"2015-03-07T20:52:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thedorseypost.com\/?p=5523"},"modified":"2015-03-06T12:51:09","modified_gmt":"2015-03-06T12:51:09","slug":"pp","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thedorseypost.com\/?p=5523","title":{"rendered":"PP"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Still<\/a>

Still Life<\/em>, David P. Jewett, oil on linen on board<\/p><\/div>\n

This stove is painted with a soul–there is as much beauty and religion in this painting of this black iron stove as in any of your so-called religious paintings. That is sacred–you have put your heart in it. One of the greatest things in the world is to train yourself to see the beauty in the commonplace . . . a freight car or a wash line of clothes . . . \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<\/em>— \u00a0Charles Webster Hawthorne<\/em><\/p>\n

At two recent exhibits in Maryland, I saw paintings far quieter and more subtle, and therefore a lot more emotionally compelling, than the superficially clever, high-priced spectacle that routinely flows through the art market.\u00a0It was a genuine relief how these shows created the sense of an uncovered tradition in the practice of visual art reaching back into the 19th<\/sup> century (and maybe further), a tradition where less is more, where the small trumps the huge, and silence is more inviting than showmanship. At first the paintings can look familiar and comfortable, as if they were witnesses to the past relocated into the present and given new names, but when you apply some sustained viewing to them\u2014and listen to someone like Matt Klos<\/a>, the curator for A Lineage of American Perceptual Painters<\/em>, which just closed at The Mitchell Gallery<\/a>\u2014these painters can be surprising, unpredictable, and revelatory. Even the oldest, historical work Matt assembled for the show in Annapolis felt alive, fresh, and even\u00a0offbeat, offering qualities I hadn\u2019t noticed before even in a few of the paintings I’d seen in the past.<\/p>\n

I met Matt a number of years ago when I began exhibiting at Oxford Gallery<\/a> here in Rochester, where Matt grew up. I liked his work immediately and began to follow what he was doing over the past five or six years. I wanted to ask him more about how much effort was involved in putting the show at Mitchell together, but we didn\u2019t have enough time to do that in the three hours we spent together, too busy talking about the work and exchanging thoughts about painting in general.\u00a0Theshow is built around the premise that Charles Webster Hawthorne and\u00a0Edwin Dickinson<\/a>\u00a0are the patriarchs\u00a0of perceptual painting. Dickinson was born in Seneca Falls, about an hour\u2019s drive from my home here in Pittsford. In\u00a0his short essay for the exhibit, Matt\u00a0suggests how hard it can be to define what perceptual painting is, using Dickinson’s own work as an example: \u201cSometimes (Dickinson) painted quickly and sometimes slowly over the course of years. Some of the work was significantly abstract and some highly realistic. Some paintings were dreamlike and poetic while others were mathematical and geometric. When taken as a whole, Dickinson was a painter who seemed more interested in the connections of things (objects, people, landscapes, history, and stories) than in the divisions between them. His art was that of wholeness.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Anderson\"<\/a>

Anderson<\/p><\/div>\n

The \u201cschool\u201d of perceptual painting can be as hard to delimit\u00a0as Dickinson\u2019s own work. Matt showed how it began, with Hawthorne<\/a>, from whom Dickinson learned painting. I\u2019ve always felt that Lennart Anderson<\/a> and Fairfield Porter<\/a> are the two other key influences in\u00a0this group, both of whom were well-represented. Putting Dickinson, Anderson and Porter side-by-side is enough, alone, to show how broad a category perceptual painting can be. After our visit, Matt sent me a pithy overview of the “lineage”: “Perceptual Painting hearkens back to Hawthorne and his influences, American impressionism and William Merritt Chase, and the painting going on at the time, Duveneck with the Ash Can school and Albert York and American visionary painting, the Tonalists, and even Inness as a more painterly parting of the ways with the Hudson River School, which was the prevailing American style of the early 19th century. Although it may be hard to imagine now\u00a0that these painters were anti-academic . . . anti-establishment at the time. Dickinson’s influence can be traced through Lennart Anderson and George Nick, his most influential students. Porter and Downes, although having no real ties with Dickinson, have both ‘moved the meter’ for many contemporary representational painters as is evidenced by those in this exhibition.” This summary is a good riposte\u00a0to those, including me, who wonder if\u00a0\u201cperceptual painting\u201d is mostly an umbrella under which to assemble what are simply examples of good painting, period. The heterogeneous collection Matt drew<\/p>\n

\"Porter\"<\/a>

Porter<\/p><\/div>\n

together did suggest that this category leaves room to do some very different things and still be in the fold, or at least huddle for warmth around its edges. Some of the work I saw fell outside the core of what I’ve come to think of as\u00a0perceptual painting, since I first spotted examples of it from contemporary practitioners. Which means, I think, that it\u2019s easier to say what it isn\u2019t than to describe exactly what qualifies as PP<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Without question, it\u2019s representational and it\u2019s painted. Which gets me nowhere.\u00a0So maybe before I describe what I think is the core ethos<\/em> of perceptual painting\u2014and I think that\u2019s easier than trying to define it with a set of invariable rules\u2014I\u2019ll offer a checklist of what it isn\u2019t, like a good Hindu sannyasi subtracting everything extraneous from his list of concerns on the\u00a0path toward wisdom.<\/p>\n

It isn\u2019t (with occasional exceptions):<\/p>\n