I ran across this image of a painting by David Hettinger, an accomplished Realist who lives in Illinois. I was immediately struck by the fact that the model’s pubes are “trimmed”, something that seems to immediately qualify the work as being “of the moment.” It reminded me of a series of drawings that I saw in the early 1980s at Vose Galleries in Boston, a series of nudes by William McGregor Paxton. The figures, all female, were pretty conventional save for the fact that they all wore high heels. These were done probably a few decades before the famed Vargas Girls graced the pages of Playboy magazine.

It started me thinking about the ambiguous relationship between nudity and sexuality in art. After all, the figures from the Classical period were usually devoid of pubes at all, and it was said that the great Victorian art critic John Ruskin had his marriage to Effie Gray annulled on the grounds that her having pubic hair was a deformity. This story is obviously apocryphal, but telling nonetheless with regards to our cultural history. Continue reading »

Diana Crane’s sociological treatise “Transformation of the Avant-Garde: The New York Art World, 1940 – 1985″ was first published in 1987. In this work she attempted to apply the tools of her discipline to a subject that has proven elusive and mercurial. She documented the introduction of new art forms, including abstract expressionism, pop art, minimalism, pattern painting and contemporary figuration, and traced their dissemination and ultimate acceptance within the institutions that constitute the Art World, in both New York and the broader national context. Of interest to figurative and contemporary realist painters was her account of the failure of the figurative painters of the late 1960s and early 1970s to gain traction within the gallery and museum community, especially outside of New York. Along with this institutional neglect came an absence of serious critical attention and dialogue.

A case can still be made that the figurative work produced at that time presented the most challenging critique of contemporary visual culture then available. There is no doubt that the movement, such as it was, has bifurcated and grown, spawning many different sub-movements and recombinant variations. Much of this has taken place in somewhat isolated enclaves, where the artists have proceeded with their respective cultural labors unaware of much of the work of their peers. This critical and infrastructural blackout has itself played a substantial role in the development of figurative and realist styles in the last quarter of the 20th and first few years of the 21st centuries. Some artists have become even more deliberately isolated, in an attempt to recreate the support mechanisms and training methodologies of the latter part of the 19th century, in some cases adopting similar historical and lexical affectations. Others have been content to view figuration as simply an extension of abstraction, emphasizing formal qualities over cultural meanings, and downplaying referential content. These two factions share much more in common than their adherents realize. Continue reading »

LITTLE FOOTPRINTS, Don Ealy, oil on canvas, 16 X 20, ©2007

My friend the painter Don Ealy passed away on Sunday. I met Don when I was a pre-teen. He was married to my sister Marcia’s best friend, Mary “Babe” (Alward) Ealy, and Don had been close to Marcia’s first husband, the painter John Thamm. I recall visiting Don and Babe’s place on 7th in Spokane, just East of the downtown area.

I occasionally saw them on infrequent trips to Spirit Lake, where they have lived for the last several decades. Don painted in a little studio behind their house. It was full of canvases and coffee cans half filled with turpentine, a real painter’s studio. He loved to paint, and he loved to talk about painting. He was an extremely warm person. Once I ran into him, after not seeing him for many years, at Davidson Galleries where I was showing. He seemed to pick up our conversation where we had last left it, and it was as if I had just seen him the day before.

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UNTITLED, John Asaro, o/c, 40 X 32 in., 2007

I was thumbing through a new issue of Art In America when I happened upon a full page ad with a photograph of a grinning artist standing in front of a large painting of three swimming female nudes. The painting looked interesting, and the ad copy read “Figure painter with large body of work seeking new representation in spacious gallery. New York, Los Angeles, or Chicago.” The ad included the usual contact info: website, email, phone, in that order.

I have to say that I found this ad interesting on a number of levels. Art in America is usually devoid of anything of real interest to a painter, and this copy was not different in that respect. I wondered why an artist with such an evident level of accomplishment would have to spend several thousand dollars in an attempt to interest a gallery in his work. The more I looked at the ad, the more ambivalent my feelings became. Why only New York, Los Angeles or Chicago? The painting itself seemed to be very vigorously painted, but brought to mind the paintings by David Hockney of swimming figures with submerged distortions. And something about the grinning countenance of the artist reminded me of a painting by Richard Dadd, one of his “Watercolors to Illustrate the Passions” titled “Want the Malingerer.” In Dadd’s painting the viewer is looking down a long road leading into the city. A group of beggars, including a dog with a pewter cup in its mouth, are leering out at the viewer from the left edge of the road. Their grinning faces reek of desperation.

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The Potato Patch aka Garden, Shinnecock – (William Merritt Chase – circa 1893)

I’ve been engaged in a lengthy discussion via email with my friend the artist Wm Dubin, regarding the nature of purism in painting, and in watercolor in particular. I think that it’s an interesting subject, and so with Wm’s permission I reproduce it here in its entirety, with minor edits to enhance readability.

Wm Dubin: I really hope you get into watercolor. At this point, I don’t know anyone who is doing it. Of course if you just use it to imitate oils, I still won’t know anyone who is doing it!

Yeah……… I’m a goddam purist!

William Elston: I hope that I don’t disappoint you as a watercolorist, but I am anything but a purist. In fact I’ve never really understood the purist aesthetic. By what means does one set of decisions become the accepted standards that a purist follows? There are oil painting purists that will not work with any white other than white lead, because “that’s the way the old master’s did it.” But Titian used white lead as well as chalk for his whites. And he couldn’t use Titanium White, because in his day there was no such thing. Who is to say that he wouldn’t have used it if he could? These same “purist” painters have no problem using the Cadmiums, a relatively recent invention, and none of them grind their own pigments the way the old masters did. Some purists don’t use photographs because the “old masters” didn’t. Again, the old masters didn’t have cameras, but they used techniques that modeled perception in the same way that the camera does. And when cameras did become available, many that we consider masters took advantage of them; Sargent, Eakins, Dagnan-Bouveret, Degas, Meissonier, Sir Albert Moore, etc. etc. I won’t mention all of those purists that are proponents of black oil medium, copal varnish medium, Maroger’s medium, etc.

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Realism as a richly descriptive language is rarely considered as language. It has the virtue or bane of being transparent to the consumer. When an art lover sees a realist painting that represents the Grand Tetons they exclaim “that’s the Grand Tetons!” Of course, it is a painting of the Grand Tetons. This transparency accounts for much of the magic of realist painting, and by magic I mean the power of painting to communicate in a profoundly compelling way.

Some of my earlier excursions in painting were the result of an infatuation with first the Surrealists, then later the Symbolists. The idea that the objects and images of painting could refer to unconscious contents, or that the actors of a drama could stand in for realities that just barely lent themselves to such oblique representation, this was the gist of art as far as I was concerned at the time.

APPARITION, William E. Elston, oil on canvas, copyright ©mid-1970s

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My friend Henk Pander’s exhibition has opened at Laura Russo Gallery in Portland, OR. Henk is one of the Pacific Northwest’s finest Realist painters. He is a Dutchman, trained in Amsterdam, and comes from an extended family of celebrated Dutch painters. He has been living in Portland since the mid 1960s, and has been a prominent force on the Portland cultural scene since then.

The current work can be divided into several related threads, and develops themes that have been of concern to Pander for several years. There are still lifes, disaster paintings, and some newer works that have resulted from a collaborative public art project with the Portland Fire Department. Two of the largest paintings depict the aftermath and cleanup of the World Trade Center site after the events of 9/11/01.

The 9/11 paintings are a continuation of the disaster theme that Pander has been exploring in series like the “New Carrissa” and the “B-52 Graveyard” paintings of a few years ago. All of these subjects have deep political implications, although none deeper than the 9/11 tragedy. SHADOWS, 2005, is a monumental painting that depicts the 9/11 cleanup site from a somewhat elevated view. The raked sunlight and cast shadows, twisted metal and pervasive dust, all convey an impression of deep sadness. The air itself seems poisonous, with its bouyant acidic clouds. The second of these paintings, HUDSON RIVER, 2002, is an arial view of a barge being loaded with debris that was once the World Trade Center. The composition is simple, and emphasizes the coffin-like shape of the partially loaded barge.

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The portrait considered as a representation of identity seems to be as problematic as the elusive quality that it purports to depict.
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There is nothing wrong with the contemporary glass movement that could not be remedied with the judicious administration of a ten pound sledge.

Paul Havas recent paintings, at Gordon Woodside/John Braseth Gallery in Seattle, present an interesting array of new landscapes, and an engaging departure from previous work.

Many of the new works stress the horizontal visual structure of vast landscapes, with the careful modulations of field and waterway, the gentle curving silhouettes of island and distant mountain, presenting compliment rather than counterpoint to the lazy ornament of cloud.
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