EVOLUTION OF AB EX

ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM: NOT DEAD, JUST EVOLVED

 

Abstract Expressionism was an  art movement on the trend line of Modern & Contemporary   Evolution. (Evolution is used here in a non-perjorative way, or to denigrate the past but to indicate a transition from one era to the next.)  Just as it was an outgrowth of an artistic trend, so it was a nidus for further movements.  This trend line began in the mid 18th Century with Manet and led to the Impressionist who desired to paint the view at a fleeting point in time, not with a homogeneous color palette, but the multihued and variegated color patterns altered by light and atmosphere.  The Fauves took this one step further and painted not what they saw but what they felt about what they saw.  Thus instead of realistic or local color they improvised with arbitrary color to expression these feelings or expressions, e.g. a blue face or a yellow sky, etc.  Kandinsky continued this concept and ultimately painted the first non-figurative painting of just colors to express his emotions.  Much later Mark Rothko began painting horizontal multilayered bands of color with great luminosity and depth and is considered the epitome of Abstract Expressionism.  Other Abstract Expressionists like Motherwell, Stil, Frankenthaler, took this 'color field' approach in different directions and utilized the emphasis of scale with epic proportions.  This period of the 1950's to 1960's was supplanted by the phase transitions of Rauschenberg and Johns with 'Combines' appropriated designs and led into the era of Op Art, Pop Art, and ultimately Installation Art.

 

The basic tenets and techniques of Abstract Expressionism did not die out or  fade away but metamorphed into a more contemporary fashion.  One example is artist Enrico Embroli of Albuquerque, NM.  One sees in his paintings the remnants of Rothko's horizontal multilayered color bands, yet evolved from just a linear horizontal view to  verticals and curvilinear forms.  At times he references the color patches of Cezanne and Gauguin.  Embroli not only scales these color swaths with added curvilinear forms he adds to them a heavy impasto with scrapings and trowel marks lending great depth to the paintings.  In this context of color field paintings he often adds a small patch of another color, sometimes complementary or rarely very disparate.  This shocks the eye, jolts the consciousness, and forces one to concentrate visual acuity onto a particular place in the painting.  All the while it almost physically coerces the viewer to pause and contemplate the painting longer and in a different and almost hypnotic way.  In some paintings there are almost pre-historic pictographs, occasionally resembling the glyph paintings of Bulgarian artists.  They add a visual interest but simultaneously interrupt the flow of emotional release generated by the powerful colors and composition, almost a respite from one's self analysis.

 

Embroli evolves his own painting.  He attaches constructed canvases together creating a diptych or triptych of sorts.  These attached panels are often of a single color with or without embellishments of texture, and often of a totally different material such as metal attached to canvas.  These multipaneled art constructions now bridge the gap between flat art and sculpture, not in a bas relief way but a dramatic scintillation as if the viewer's eye is oscillating between two and three dimensions.  It causes one to ponder the variation in art, to realize we interpret paintings in a three dimensional way though, for the most part, they are only two dimensional.  Thus the art argues for and simultaneously against the truth of our perceptions - not only of art, but our emotional and aesthetic response to it.  How to see it, how to understand it, how to appreciate it.  These duopolies of thought processes have plagued mankind for eons - mind/body, real/imagined, good/evil, art/non-art, etc.  His art is not just beauty, from composition and line, but an adventure in color and an adventure in self-analysis; a review and conscious re-evaluation of who, what, and where we are.  It is an  intellectual and emotional testimony to the power of art.

 

C. Lawrence Decker

Art Consultant

ART OF KEITH SCHALL: ENCAPSULATION OF MODERN ART

 

 

 

 

An Encapsulation of Modern Art

The Works of Keith Schall

 

A focus on the aesthetic Keith Schall's art is a sensual delight, however to miss the opportunity to view it as a survey of modern art history is to miss its depth, intensity and scope. After investing some time with any of his paintings and "Machiavelli's Princess" (2006) in particular, one comes to appreciate its complexities and references.  At first one garners the bright palette and unblended brush strokes of such masters of Impressionism as Monet and Renoir.  Yet one also notices the Post-Impressionists use of arbitrary versus local colors of the Fauves like Matisse and Derain.  Yet somehow his use of color is also reminiscent of the pure Expressionists coloration beginning with Kandinsky (the first painter to use pure color as expression without any figuration or representational references ).   He seems, at first, not to refer to the Dadaists as DuChamp or Picabia, nor to the Surrealists as Magritte and Ernst.  On deeper penetration he does so by his swirls, daubs, and most especially an almost 'stream of consciousness' in his painting technique.  This also denotes the views of the more recent Abstract Expressionists as Rothko and Pollack, not only in the freedom and coloration but also in their concepts of "action painting".  One can feel the energy and physical dexterity of whole body involvement with the brush strokes, the use of empty spaces, and the "overall" use of the canvas without limitations of foreground-middle ground -back ground (\which began with Manet and reached its zenith with the Cubists Picasso and Braque).  Schall's  historical journey seems to end at the Abstract Expressionists.  Yet, his constructed canvases can be interpreted as a reference to the more contemporary melding of sculpture and painting such as Rauschenberg and Johns as well as to recent contemporary installation art.  He even moves beyond the accepted frame of the picture, as a rectilinear or ovoid construct, and thereby relates to the more painterly Post-Modern artists.

 

On a more integrative approach to modern culture his art is a fusion of related artistic media.  Painters have for generations attempted to align and interpret their art with great poets, writers, and musicians of their time.  Many even wrote impassioned manifestos to detail their import and reflection on contemporary art and society.  Schall has more concisely aligned these artistic media -literature and art - in the apparently simplistic though actually involuted methodology of the nomenclature of his titles with all of their literary and musical allusions.  Further, the constructed canvases noted above, can be seen as homage to another artistic media, architecture.

 

 

 

This historical amalgamation of the arts deserves greater thought and discussion.  Thus Schall's art deserves, not just a passing glance, but a more determined and thorough introspective view.  His work can be seen in Sedona (Goldenstein Gallery), Scottsdale Galleries, and many private Southwest collections.

 

 

By C. Lawrence Decker

RESURGENCE OF BEAUTY: ART OF KATHLEEN KINKOPF

The Resurgence of Beauty: The Art of Kathleen Kinkopf

Art is most difficult to define but it has always evoked the ideal, the beautiful, the aesthetic. That is until the last century. Even though Courbet and Monet in the mid-eighteen hundreds painted real verses the unreal subjects, the paintings displayed the mundane as heroic and worthy of a Salon exhibition. Art diverged from these standards with the rise of modernity - rising middle classes, ease of transportation, and communication, photography, art galleries, and auction houses - of the late 19th Century. Art became an Impression, then an Expression, and ultimately pure color and led to Abstract Expressionism/Action Painting of Rothko, Pollock and their colleagues. Yet still it retained a sense of the aesthetic, if only in the arrangement of line, color, and composition. The art world shifted once again and diverged further from the beautiful with the Combines of Rauschenberg and the targets, flags, and numbers paintings of Johns. Art even lost the object itself with the Conceptual Art of Sol Lewitt and others where the concept, the written instructions and words, became the art. No longer was beauty or the ideal a prerequisite. This reached its zenith with Installation or Earth Works Art wherein a pile of bricks is considered art because of the story behind the pile, the concept (and because it is located in an Art Gallery or Art Museum). Art continued on this path with toy like, almost kitsch figures of Murakami or the embalmed sharks of Hirst or the plastic and Lucite boxes of Judd which became "high art".

The art market proceeded similarly along these lines with astronomical price tags on this art facilitated by the money available from the tech boom and the hedge fund managers of Wall Street. The financial crises of late have dramatically slowed this seemingly inexorable path. Granted, many of these works continue to reach ever greater prices. There, however, is an undercurrent evolving, a subtle reversion to beauty, the ethereal, the aesthetic, the ideal. There has always continued a submerged focus on beauty, but it is now coming to the forefront.

One artist exemplifying this is Kathleen Kinkopf of Albuquerque, NM. Her earlier works were imbed with mythological references, often rendered in an almost Italian Surrealist manner with an overtone of almost graphic artist clarity. Her artistic evolution is to one of pure painting of beauty while maintaining the mystical and ethereal. Her more recent figurative paintings of Asian appearing women with their formalistic costumes and incorporation of three-dimensional ornamentation are stunning. But even more amazing are her horse portraits displaying the beauty and mystic character of these majestic creatures. They are in a class of their own. One stares at these paintings mesmerized by their ethereal beauty. Though realistically portrayed the emotional responses they evoke go well beyond the actual presentation of the animals themselves. They engage one in the almost supernatural qualities of the depiction. They speak to one's soul, one's desire for the ultimate beauty, and the ideal. These portraits supercede one's concept of the real and become super-real. Not paintings to view in passing but those which demand a prolonged analysis, evincing the innermost contemplation, almost an exercise in self hypnosis.

These paintings can be seen in many Southwest private collections as well as the local Lanning Gallery .

C. Lawrence Decker

Art Consultant

APPROPRIATION ART

APPROPRIATION ART:

 Evolution of a trend and its legal, ethical, and moral implications.

 

 

Appropriation is the taking of a thing or concept for one's own use.  In art, appropriation consists of using another's objects, concepts, or images in the creation of a new work.  The current legalities of this depends on infringement, fair use, parody, and intellectual property rights.  To some extent all artists appropriate by using materials, concepts (e.g. vanishing point perspective) and more currently images.  The Cubists are often credited with the first use of appropriation by using newsprint, wall paper, etc. in their collages.  Duchamp enlarged on this by utilizing "ready-mades" as his "Fountain" which in fact was a urinal turned upside down and hung on a wall.  This was denigrated but not because of appropriation as the materials could be considered "fair use"  and parody.  But then Duchamp created "LOOQH" painting a copy of Da Vinci's "Mona Lisa" but with a bigger smile and a mustache seen as a parody. Further, since it is universally easily identified with Da Vinci, no attribution is necessary.  Rauschenberg accelerated this with his found objects used in his "Combines", once again using found or ready-made objects, but taking them out of context of their primary use and incorporating them into art was considered a non-competitive use.  Similarly Johns appropriated preformed designs such as flags, targets, and numbers for his art.  Warhol was more direct when he copied flower photographs not his own, to create silk screens.  This led to threatened legal actions and thereby a monetary and presumed royalty settlement.  Lichtenstein used an enlarge pixellated comic book look without actually copying a particular image.  Sherman photographed herself in simulated movie stills, and sometimes directly appropriated by photographing actual photographs of Walker Evans. 

 

As the ease of copying others art via digital techniques and internet availability, issues of legality, morality, and ethics become more important and pervasive.  Legalities aside, the issue of intellectual property rights and the morality and ethics pose a broader range of issues.  Is it sufficient to provide attribution ?  Compensation? Permission? Remember Rauschenberg's "Erased DeKooning" is very legal, ethical and moral since the original DeKooning work was given to him for the purpose of 'erasing' and thereby contained attribution (by title), permission and compensation (a gift for that purpose). 

 

Many more recent artists are neither given attribution, receive permission, nor are compensated and thus the artwork crosses beyond the ethical and moral divide and becomes a legal issue.  The courts provide one solution, however, an expensive and time consuming process, especially for often non-wealthy artists, thus subverting property rights.  There almost needs to be a code of ethics for artists and for those who traverse this code a sort of banishment or at least a non-recognition of their 'art'.

 

C. Lawrence Decker

Art Consultant