When I was younger, I had to answer the question that every artist must resolve: "Now what? What do I paint?" This was difficult for me. It made me think about an end purpose for drawing or painting, and that forced me to confront a big gap. I believed there had to be some kind of "artistic purpose" but I thought that my skills and desire to paint were not integrated with any such purpose. I just wanted to make images and paint. My work of the last twenty years exemplify how I resolved this dilemma
When I am looking at the blank canvas and starting the painting, I do so with only a vague idea of how it will end in mind. I begin by drawing a figure or two, and then I proceed to oput paint on the canvas. This act and effort of painting becomes the "artistic purpose."
The figures are almost always nude, pretty equally divided between men and women. Some are self-portraits (in which I am clothed!). Occasionally I put inanimate objects in the pictures, and several depict still-lifes without figures.
Typically, I choose a drawing I have already made from the model, which I transfer by eye (i.e., not by squaring up or other mechanical means) to the canvas. Sometimes this results in distortion; if it is noticeable, I then have to choose specifically to change it or keep it. The figures are drawn in a naturalistic style with a simple, fluid line, but usually they are not fully modeled.
Often, my pictures include two or more figures who have no narrative relationship to each other. They occupy painting space, not pictorial or representational space. Relationships between the figures can be inferred, but I usually do not intend any explicit relationship besides the formal. Any other inference would mostly come from the imaginative participation of the viewer.
In my first pictures in the 80s, the space of the painting was defined by abstract color areas or shapes, some hard edged, others blurred and brushed. In a number of early paintings (e.g., the "Couples I, II, III, and IV"), I divided the canvas into two equal halves, right and left, with a single figure in each half and the break or border between them quite distinct.
Since the mid-1990s, I have painted some of the figures in a deliberately primitivistic style. For inspiration, I turned to African masks and effigies, rock art, cave art, medieval European manuscript illuminations and stone carvings, ancient Middle East art, and other non-Western art. I did this partly as a way of breaking out of the habits of my art training in naturalistic representation. I also did it to introduce the kind of pattern and linear qualities of these sources, which I admire and which tend to be more evident (to me) in art that is ‘alien’ than in familiar art.
Also in the last few years, I have begun to rotate or invert some of the figures in a painting: they are upside down or turned sideways in relation to the other figures. There is no particular reason for this (with the exception of "To Be Looked At from the Other Side," which is an overt allusion to Duchamp’s famous glass construction). I am aware of Borofsky’s famous upside-down expressionist figures from the 80s, and I took a hint from them. But because I don’t know much about what he did or meant by doing them, there is no significant affinity between mine and his.
When I first painted a figure upside down, something happened: I had to rotate the canvas. Sometimes I would do that as I painted at the easel, but often I put the canvas flat on a worktable and walked around it (or turned it by hand, whichever was easier). Turning the figures upside-down and rotating the canvas had the practical effect of taking the figures out of naturalistic or representational space and putting them into painting space. The painting space, as I call it, is the surface of the canvas painted.
I paint figures drawn in line with little modeling first. Then I paint the rest of the canvas ("the field") in color and shapes that are independent of the figures. In the process of painting like that, I mostly brush in the color areas against the outline, rather than painting the outline in the wet paint or over the dried color areas (although there is a little bit of that). In the development of a painting, occasionally the color areas coincide with the representations, and I exploit this ambiguity, letting the colors represent, for example, the light falling on the planes of a cheek or chest or modelling the roundness of an eyelid or nostril.
For the most part, I don’t care what colors I use, except that they look good together, their hue and value and chroma serving to enhance the whole picture. Color holds no symbolic value for me, and so I don’t attempt to impart a feeling based on a scheme of color significance.
I believe that all humans perceive figural representation without confusion. I believe that there is a pleasure in the recognition of representation, and further, that there is a very high emotional connection to an image of a human, especially a nude person. I employ this visceral connection to the image of another person and the erotic provocation of a naked figure to infuse the painting with pre-existing strong emotions. But I don’t want to build on these emotions by portraying eros or bathos or pathos. Instead, I want to exploit the viewer’s aroused but unfulfilled desire by taking the representations into painting space.
In "painting space," as I call it, art prevails. Pictorial relationships govern the sentimental or narrative "meaning," if there is any. The desire to embrace a complete picture and the satisfaction of recognizing that the artwork is whole, I believe, overwhelms any references and sympathetic connections to the represented scene. Even eros is harnessed by art. Regardless of the degree of tantalizing allure in the painted model, the sensual forms of the painting subvert the perturbations of desire, the painted surfaces sate the appetites and fill the emotions with the sense of completion and fitness. Because the representations are unreal, the viewer knows that the only tangible and sensible part of the painting is the painting itself, not the "things" in it. We don't expect to eat Cézanne's fruit nor sleep with Freud's naked figures, and so we don't look for the fulfillment of those desires. What we do expect, though, is the fulfillment of the desire to see a whole painting, a surface or an object that is held out to us as a complete thing, including its visible surfaces.
For me, the emotional impetus is not the figure as such, but my satisfaction in the painting of the entire canvas, in the painterliness of brushwork, in the sinuousness of a line, in the play of one color against another, and even in the audacity of the inverted figures.
My titles are straightforward. There are no arcane neologisms, no mystical references, no serial numbers. "Man Woman Middle Passage," for example, plainly names the content of the painting (the "middle passage" denotes the figures on the left, which resemble cargo diagrams of slave ships). "Orans" refers to the posture of the arms in the right-hand figure. "Black Man Dorla" playfully puns on the figure (which might be perceived as a black man) and the black nebula in the shape of a lozenge (a mandorla) behind the figure. "Woman with Two Figures (Mary)" describes the main figure (a woman) and two small figures, and the implication is Mary (named) with Adam and Eve (implied).
The works of the Abstract Expressionists, abstract colorists, and "color field" painters are important. The space (or "field") of Pollock, Rothko, Still, Motherwell, Reinhardt, Newman, Olitsky, Poons, and others is the way the colors operate optically and the way the shapes are organized. Most of these artists have described something about why they painted as they did. Rothko spoke about tragedy, for example, and Newman used his "zips" to activate the pictorial space. Tobey had white writing. Olitsky and Pollock painted with the very large canvases on the floor. What happened was a painting space that was not a Renaissance window, not a continuation of the viewer’s space, not even a correlation between the space in the landscape and the brush marks (Cézanne) or the paint mark and the retina (Seurat).
(c) 2003. Michael Brady
