Remembering Sir Anthony Caro

By Kyle Gallup

Photo: Rex features from the post, Wise words: Anthony Caro, in The Telegraph.

I don’t look back. I look forward. But I think my job and the job of all serious artists is to keep culture moving, to keep sculpture moving." Anthony Caro at the Metropolitan Museum Roof Top

 - Anthony Caro quoted in CultureGrrl, October 25, 2013.

The news of Sir Anthony Caro’s death last week at 89 was startling for me. I knew him for over thirty years and I wasn’t prepared to say goodbye. From what I’ve read he was busy working in the studio until he died.

To so many artists, Tony showed abundant goodwill and an inclusive view of art and art-making. He conveyed a sense that we were all in this together. These qualities are what drew me toward him when we first met.

My initial encounter with Tony's sculpture came in 1980, at Boston’s Christian Science Plaza where twenty-three works from his ‘York Sculpture’ series were presented by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts for the city’s ‘Jubilee 350’ celebration. Later, I heard his commencement talk to the graduates from the Boston Museum School where I had enrolled as a transfer student and then tagged along as he gave critiques to more advanced students who were waiting in their studios to engage with him about their work.

 What he offered to all those who came in contact with him was a way to think about art, and the process of creating, as something personal yet large and deeply connected to the world. Art for him was something indelible, permanent, and real. I believe this gracious view grew from his generous spirit and desire to make a contribution.

Tony had a clear and concise way of thinking about process, and one’s connection to art of the past in all its variety and its visual, expressive possibilities. He mined all kinds of art and culture, calling forth universal themes, reworking them and making them new. He conveyed this, not only through his work, but also in studio visits with other artists. He encouraged others to look at the world with an open mind, to engage and connect with it. His interest in sharing ideas made talking with him a pleasure, always lively and interesting. I was fortunate to twice attend Triangle Workshop, the two-week summer residency that he founded in upstate New York. While working there, if an artist asked, he’d come around and make suggestions, never saying too much but hinting at possible ways of approaching a piece differently.

Triangle spoke to his sense of art-making as a collaborative enterprise. Even though Triangle met for just two weeks every year, it was a way for him to foster community. The workshop allowed him to share his passion for exchanging ideas. He was keenly aware of the isolation artists feel because we spend so much time on our own in our studios, and he related to this personally. He may have felt this in his own life as a young artist working in England. He relished the opportunity to travel and make changes to his working methods after meeting American artists.

Tony encouraged me to write to him and his wife—Sheila Girling, an abstract painter—in London to let them know what I was doing in my studio and what was being shown in New York galleries. I don’t remember exactly what I wrote about in my letters, what questions I may have asked him, or the views of art I may have offered, but he always answered my letters with long thoughtful replies. I’ve saved his and gone back and reread them over the years, always surprised by his honesty about himself, and his kindness and encouragement to me.

On trips to New York, Tony and Sheila visited me when I lived in Union City, New Jersey. It was way out of the way, but they somehow made it through the Lincoln Tunnel to my place there on Summit Avenue. They spent time looking at my work, bought pieces for their collection, and even enjoyed cubano sandwiches from the bodega across the street from my apartment. When I think of all the time and thoughtful support they showed me over the years, my sadness at his passing lightens. Anthony Caro spent his life creating art. He never tired of experimenting and sharing the richness of his experience with other people. I hope some day I will meet a young artist and offer the kind of open-hearted encouragement I received from him over the many years we were friends.

So long, Tony.


Kyle Gallup is an artist who works in collage and watercolor.

Katherine Bradford at Edward Thorp Gallery

By Kyle Gallup

Midsummer Night, 2012, Oil on canvas, 61 x 69 inches

Upon entering Katherine Bradford’s show at Edward Thorp Gallery it’s easy to see why so many painters love her work. Her color shines like a beacon across the canvas, illuminating her stories, both whimsical and mysterious. Her approach to painting feels open and considered, never automatic.

The lush surfaces reveal under-painting and a sense that she is searching for her subjects, allowing them to reveal themselves slowly through the painting process and within their own invented time. The layering becomes part of the narrative and gives the work depth and spontaneity.

Ship Blue/Red, 2011, Oil on canvas, 32 x 28 inches.

I admire how Bradford is able to balance abstract elements with figurative images, both sharing equal time, neither losing their distinctive differences while adding a fluid interrelatedness. One example is “Ship Blue/Red.” A bright, emblematic red shape of paint thrusts down into the middle of the canvas from the top-left edge and crosses paths with the lacy transparent mast of a passing ship momentarily anchored by a black hull on the bottom edge of the painting. This is a bold yet delicate picture.

Superman Responds, Night, 2011, Oil on canvas, 48 x 36 inches.

In other works, opaque whites and pinks share space with modulated darks and light up all the other colors. There are sassy orange and yellow dots, and aqua blues that become sky and sea. Gravity free, small floating or falling superheroes are suspended in richly painted grounds or fly through space from one end of the canvas to the other.

Long Flight,  2011, Oil on canvas, 66 x 84 inches.

Ships come into being both flat and with volume, magisterial, and brightly lit. The shape’s edges navigate the ground color from which they emerge.

Bradford is exploring different pictorial ideas from one picture to another but for me, the narrative aspect to the paintings is what unifies them. She’s a visual storyteller with a celestial sense of light and a deep reservoir of ideas.

Sargasso, 2012, Oil on canvas, 56 x 66 inches.

Kyle Gallup is an artist who works in collage and watercolor.

A Fleeting Impression

By Kyle Gallup


Today my world is black, white and gray. I’m kept company by an image of a single, mercurial cloud hanging in the summer sky and hovering above buildings silhouetted by an overhead sun that makes every edge feel razor sharp.

I’ve begun working on a series of altered prints, images of a sunny view outside my studio window. Drawing on top of the prints with pencil, I intend to change the character of each print by building up the surface and creating a quiet, visual drama in each one. Retreating into my dark, book-lined room, I’m set up on a long, craggy table. Sequestered from the outside, I hope to find some peace of mind in the process.
 
While working I’m watching an early episode of the 1960’s TV show “The Fugitive.” I’ve taken to this program, obsessed with it and the idea that a man on the run with little more than the clothes on his back and a few dollars in his pocket can survive.

It’s 1964 and America feels different than today. The small towns, filmed in black and white, which Dr. Richard Kimble passes through, have main streets with mom & pop stores, huge cars, and children playing in the streets. A person wanting to lose himself, hide or find a job can easily thumb a ride into town for a couple of weeks and then be on his way.

While listening to and considering the dangerous situations that Richard Kimble finds himself in I take time to build up graphite on the paper. It’s slow going and my pencils need to be sharpened every few minutes to give me as much control as possible.  With the porous, soft material I create depth and density. I especially like the feeling of rubbing the steely-colored dust with my fingers, making the darks as black as possible.

Thoughts of temporality run through my mind, as I consider how a single cloud can take shape and change form many times over, positioning and repositioning in the vastness of the sky. This floating presence has a relationship to the buildings around it making it feel organic and weightless. The cloud’s fleeting, rootless character is captured by my use of technical means—its identity caught for posterity in a diaphanous, bright white in my final drawing.

I can bear to watch Richard Kimble endure hiding out, getting double-crossed, captured, and escaping again and again because I trust that at the end of his journey he will find what he’s looking for—the one-armed man who murdered his wife. He will finally be set free from the pain and desperation that have plagued him for so long. I watch David Janssen’s solid, subtle, truth-filled performances without disbelief even while I doubt that a fugitive today could hop a freight, assume many aliases, and persuade people of his innocence.

Though our lives are constantly in flux, I take comfort in the thought that as quickly as a cloud passes across the sky, a man on the run can find momentary refuge. The message is simple: change carries a particular kind of freedom and can be expressed and accepted as an end in itself.  The key? Living and creating in the moment.

Kyle Gallup, Cloud #1, 2011, 11 x 15 inches, graphite on lithographic print on paper.

Kyle Gallup is an artist who works in collage and watercolor.

Notes on Faith, Hope, Trust + Desire/ Sketchbook page

By Kyle Gallup

Click to enlarge

Kyle Gallup is an artist who works in collage and watercolor.

Falling in Love with a Rock

by Kyle Gallup

Kyle Gallup, Rocky Beach, 2010, watercolor on paper, 12" x 16"

As summer returns and I emerge from the cocoon of my studio, it’s time to look outside. Painting from life is a way for me to clear my head and keep my eyes sharp. I’ve done this as long as I can remember.

In my early teens I was intent on immersing myself in the landscape, seeing what I could make of it; pencil drawings of a dappled Ozark light, watercolors in Ireland with its pastoral green patchwork dotted with fallen stone castles and cemeteries, Maine’s coastal rock-strewn beaches. Landscape painting has romanced me, connected me with a grand tradition and masters of the sublime.

It’s hard to say how chronicling light and color in nature has effected my studio work. What I do know for sure is that the process of laying out paint on my palate and putting loaded brush to paper is at once a challenge and freedom like no other. Translating the scene on to paper, the natural world becomes entertainer, teaser and sometimes taunting muse.

Beginning with bold washes of transparent color helps me to set up what’s most important, a simple outline or pathway to the thrust and weight of any scene. A passing cloud on an otherwise clear, blue-sky day adds interest or a shadow in the heat. Swaying silver-topped trees and gullies of dark, deep green conjure Corot or the rough, barked-edge of a tree in the foreground brings to mind Van Gogh with his precise, pen-to-paper intimacy, making his way up and down the gnarled trunks, getting to know his pollard birches. 

Vincent Van Gogh, Pollard Birches, 1884, pencil and ink heightened with gouache, 15" x 21", (Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam)

I find myself in the middle of the most exciting visual happenings from one moment to the next. There is complexity, nuance, sound, weight, depth and clarity that exist separate from me. There are edges and colors that induce hallucinations, sounds of the wind, birds calling to their mates, laughing, shouting children in the distance. All these gently pierce the ebb and flow of life.

Getting to know one’s place within the whole scheme of things can have its risks, like any great affair. Searching and seeking out those things that are most moving, getting close to the heart of the scene, the bend in the road I can not see beyond, the allusive, pastel horizon between sky and sea, finding form in the boldest gray faceted rock that sits shiny wet, in the sun.

Discovering the shape of things can take me to the edge, make me feel compulsive about getting it right and knowing all there is to know. Mixing a dark clay color looks one way on the palette and then another way on the paper. How does that rock sit so firmly there? It must be a give and take, from observing eye to paper. A bond forms as I try different ways of getting at the truth of the rock’s presence. The way the sand and other stones sit nearby, the sunlight hitting the lightest side, bringing out it’s dimpled, indented mass. When I see a relationship that feels close to what I am looking at, I’ll take a break.

The next day, and the day after that, if I’m lucky enough to be in the same spot, looking at the same rock on the shore, I’ll feel smitten. A friend awaits my attention. I am finally able to caress the rock on paper with all its colored variations and know its structural shifts. The rock now sits in my mind and has given its self over to my knowledge and understanding of it.

Hudson Beach, 2009, photo credit: Philip Turner

Kyle Gallup, Hudson River, NYC, 2009, watercolor on paper, 9" x 12"

Often I’ll take several photographs of where I have been painting, a record keeping, just in case I have the opportunity to return. I have returned to familiar spots to find trees, rocks, and shorelines unchanged and then I take up where I left off. Old friends in the landscape make themselves known after a brief, getting-reacquainted period. Or sometimes I review my photographs of the scene and look closely, trying to understand how I could have been so involved with a seemingly unimposing rock on the beach.

Kyle Gallup, Study for Coney Island Landscape for John Baldessari 2011, graphite, ink, lithographic prints, painted paper on wood panel, 9.5" x 13.5" (Click to enlarge photo.)

Kyle Gallup is an artist who works in collage and watercolor.

Editor's note: On my request, Kyle Gallup included her own studio work in this post.

                      --Charles Kessler

Picasso: Guitars 1912-1914

Pablo Picasso, Guitar and Cup of Coffee, spring 1913, Cut and pasted wallpaper and colored paper, charcoal and chalk on colored paper, 25” x 14 ½ “ (National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.)

By Kyle Gallup

“Picasso: Guitars 1912-1914,” currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art, is a bridge into the past. Walk into the exhibition and be immersed in Picasso’s creative process. Here, Picasso is thinking and working like an inventor. 

I’ve always been most drawn to Picasso when he approached his work through his extraordinary skill and originality as a draughtsman. During this period, I see him thinking and drawing his way through a new kind of space and his relationship to it, making it his own. The fluidity of his collage-drawings with their variety of shapes, lines, materials and subject matter, tells me that Picasso was having a very good time. Guillaume Apolinaire sums it up best in “Modern Painting,” from Der Sturm on February 20, 1913: At times Picasso has renounced ordinary paints to compose relief pictures made of cardboard, or papiers collé’s; he was guided by a plastic inspiration, and these strange, coarse, and mismatched materials were ennobled because the artist endowed them with his own delicate and strong personality.

Pablo Picasso, installation in the artist’s studio, Paris, December 9, 1912 or later, 

Gelatin silver print, 3 ⅜ “ x 4 ½ “ (Private Collection).

The exhibition should be a special treat to all working artists who consider experimentation and exploration in our studios to be highly important in making the best art that we can. Picasso does it with gusto and freedom, unafraid of the new territory he is staking out. I enjoyed seeing all the work but what I especially relished were the photographs that Picasso took of his works-in-progress. In one large photograph of his studio, paper scraps and glue pot are left sitting on a bed as he takes the photo. There is also a huge roll of canvas leaning against the back wall, three charcoal drawings, four collage drawings incorporating Le Journal scraps, and other papers and his constructed cardboard guitar. This photo shows he was looking for many different ways to spatially represent the guitar that he had just constructed out of paper.  He was trying to make his process as real as possible and photographing his work helped him distance himself from what he was creating. 

Pablo Picasso, Photographic composition with Construction with Guitar Player and Violin. Paris, on or after January 25 and before March 10, 1913. gelatin silver print, 4 ¼ “ x 3 ¼ “ (Collection Clark Winter)

Photography was integral to Picasso’s process. He used photography as a tool to gain perspective and as a way to manipulate his images. In the exhibition there are four small photographs of a composition that Picasso set up in the corner of a room—a sort of installation. In the first snapshot, he set up a small round-topped table with a wine bottle and teacup. A wall poster with large letters partially revealing his name hangs on the wall near some stretched canvases. On the back wall hang a guitar, collage drawing and paper scraps partially covering it, integrating the real and the constructed. In each of the four photos, Picasso alters the picture. 

Pablo Picasso, Photographic composition with Construction with Guitar Player and Violin. Paris, on or after January 25 and before March 10, 1913. Cropped gelatin silver print with ink, 3 1/16 x 2 5/16" Private collection. Photo: Objectif 31 © 2011 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Two of the four images are very surprising and if you aren’t paying close attention, you might miss their significance. In one, Picasso uses his photograph of the still-life he set up and cuts it into a shape and re-photographs it on a white background. There is also a small sepia-colored snapshot [above], tiny at 3 1/16” x 2 5/16,” and titled “Photographic Composition with Construction with Guitar Player and Violin.” Again, it is the still-life composition that he has been working with, only this time Picasso uses ink to make a drawing on top of the photo that responds to the composition he has created in real life. It may seem like a minor thing, but to me it shows that Picasso was trying in every way he could imagine, to expand his sense of what this new space could be. Though it would be decades before it became common practice to draw or paint on top of a photograph, here is Picasso, determinedly stretching his creative possibilities almost one hundred years ago.

When I consider all that Picasso accomplished in his lifetime—the tremendous breadth of his undertakings—I feel dizzy, like I’m standing on shifting ground. When I viewed this exhibition, it prompted me to pause and imagine him sailing through time clutching a fine, silver-meshed net in his fist, combing the starry sky. This exhibition shines a spotlight on Picasso’s innate abilities, intelligence, and the exceptional creative spirit that propelled art forward into a new and expanded universe.

Kyle Gallup is an artist who works in collage and watercolor.

On the Ground with Cezanne

Paul Cezanne, 1906, Photograph by Ker-Xavier Roussel

by Kyle Gallup

Viewing “Cezanne’s Card Players” exhibit currently at the Metropolitan Museum was like visiting with a dear friend. The show renewed my thinking about Cezanne’s painting, and in a personal way. I appreciate anew the totality of his vision and the intimate relationship he had with his Provencal landscape.

In Aix for the summer

Having painted in Aix for a summer some time ago, I know what the light, color, and heat do to the landscape. It makes things shimmer. The glare from the Mediterranean sun on the rocky dry land, makes everything very hard to read visually. If you stand anywhere in Tholonet, looking south, north, east or west, you’d feel like you were inside a Cezanne painting. He painted what he saw. He kept his paintings open while he worked to accommodate what he was looking at. Cezanne’s color comes right out of the landscape. It’s very complicated light and color to translate onto canvas or paper. I believe he struggled with it everyday. I’m sure of this. I also think that by the end of his life, he did have doubts—you know when you’re looking at a landscape for a long time and know it really well and then you take your painting back into the studio to look at it, but it doesn’t have the feeling of all you saw and wanted to capture? This probably disappointed him.

Paul Cezanne, Chateau Noir, 1903-4, oil on canvas, 29 x 36 3/4 (MoMA)

Cezanne’s handheld palette

I can’t emphasize enough how difficult it is to paint outside in the bright sun of southern  France. It flattens everything out. It simplifies forms. You must squint to see color differentiations. When looking at a Cezanne landscape painting, I try to imagine what his palette might have looked like at the beginning of his workday and then, at the end of the day. He may have laid out all his warm colors on one side of the palette—let’s say raw sienna, burnt sienna, naples yellow, red ochre, vermilion and some lead white. On the cool side, he may have had ultramarine blue, cobalt, viridian, and a small amount of peach black. By the end of the day the opposing colors would have met in the middle of the palette, mingling with their counterparts, becoming grayed-down with all the mixing and cross-mixing he was doing. He would also add a little white to build opacity or to make color tones lighter. Cezanne was very careful with black in his paintings, and used it sparingly. He used it to emphasize the volume of the brushy tree greens, adding density and mass. He also used black to extend the various dark greens to their darkest tone, being careful not to turn them black like the shadows.

Daubing color, master mixer

Cezanne daubed color onto the canvas with relatively small brushes while accommodating the ever-changing light and shadow. Observing how transient light affected the color, he structured his pictures accordingly. Cezanne’s skies have green in them. It’s from the nearby tree colors he had mixed. His paintings have grayed down oranges that turn to delicate purples, gray-purples. He was a master mixer. With all the deep analyzing of the color he was seeing while working, he never let go of his emotional connection to his subjects. At times, his bunches of trees would dissolve into a mass of brush stokes of color, and buildings became the most beautiful and satisfying orange cubes in all of painting history—if he only knew.

Living, breathing, painting

Cezanne approached painting in a direct, personal and modern way. He had the courage to leave areas of his canvas unpainted in a single picture. Sometimes I forget that when I look at Cezanne, but who else was doing this at that time? He touched the surface with deliberation over and over, building up the color in some areas, almost modeling the faces or hands in a portrait. But at the same time he would leave sketchy flat backgrounds to flow into the more modeled areas. Cezanne was very aware of the canvas surface as a living, breathing space on which to work. His sensitivity to the surface was acute. It gave him an opportunity to try again.

Fini for now

A century of painting history separates me from Cezanne, yet his work speaks to me today. The freshness of his paintings, their quiet emotional pull and my understanding of all he wanted from the work sustain me. At the end of his life though he was probably unsure of his accomplishments, I hope he was still gratified by the attention and respect the next generation of artists had for him.  I’m guessing he had a few respectful visitors. He must have felt somewhat satisfied by the many years he had to work day in and day out pursuing his personal dream. For me, no artist has crystallized light this viscerally or made color so tangible.



Kyle Gallup is an artist who works in collage and watercolor.

The Architecture of Color “Modern Life: Edward Hopper and His Time” Whitney Museum of American Art

Edward Hopper, The Barber Shop, 1931, (Neuberger Museum of Art)

By Kyle Gallup

The faceless, gold-rimmed clock hangs silently on the wall of the shop. A manicurist leafs through a magazine awaiting her next client. A smooth, aqua-glass table holds the instruments of her trade. The barber in his white jacket, back to us, cuts the hair of a customer. His featureless reflection is muted, a fuzzy oval in the mirror. The painting offers us a momentary look inside one of the city’s many barbershops, and we become observers of the placid scene.

A harsh light shines through the window throwing the interior into a bright white, casting cool purple shadows into the imagined space. Is it the midday sun shining in the window, or is it perhaps early morning? Peering outside, the buildings on the street are dark, showing only the slightest punctuation of windows in their facades. A solid, yellow curtain on the window holds back darkness outside. The stair banister of acid yellow-green heats up the interior. Its ornate scrolled metal, transparently painted in tones of brown and purple, angles into the shop, echoing the purple shadow cast into the room by the outside light. The light and shadow—cool and warm, bright white to dark tonalities—color the painting vividly. Edward Hopper uses the architecture of color to create an atmosphere we enter as viewers of his paintings.

Color is the dominant character in Hopper's work and it's what leads me into his world of cityscapes and small town life. Color and light inventively structure his scenes. They reveal solidity of form while creating ambiance and abstract relationships suggestive of time and place without making specific reference to it.

Edward Hopper’s work has long captured America’s imagination. His paintings have become iconic and he is, in popular culture, the painter of the Everyman. The idea that Hopper painted loneliness and alienation as the human condition has practically become a cliché. However, I believe this idea is actually outside the realm of what he thought or cared about. His interest and attention were in the color and light, geometry and space, making order in a rapidly changing world; a nineteenth century boy in a twentieth century world.

As a young man (b.1882) Edward Hopper lived in Paris. He visited museums and made drawings and paintings around the city. He was very interested in Degas’ work. Hopper took from Degas the idea that he could use intimacy as a way for the viewer to enter a painting, though he executed it differently. While Degas was the master observer with an eye for intimate moments with his subjects—the many sensitive drawings and paintings of ballet dancers and the pastel drawings of women in the bath, for instance—Hopper forges an intimate bond between the viewer of his paintings and himself. He paints his figures simply. Yet, their purpose within the composition is abstract and connected to his formal concerns. The figures go about their mundane tasks and do not have the monumentality that the buildings and urban scenes around them express.

The bond of intimacy with the viewer Hopper creates allows us into his world. He wants us to glimpse what he sees. When we look at his paintings we become a voyeur like the painter himself. Hopper exploits his figures, whether it’s seeing the naked pastiness of their skin through an apartment window or watching them go about the humdrum existence in which they are caught. His paintings are cool and lack human warmth—they remain emotionally remote. His figures are mannequins, lonely placeholders in a formal, finely orchestrated world. It is Hopper’s color that continually gives his paintings fullness and connects us to the inner workings of his private world.

Kyle Gallup is an artist who works in collage and watercolor.

The Open Road: John Baldessari at the Met

John Baldessari, Aligning Balls, 1972(Photo from C-Monster.net)

By Kyle Gallup

We are at the crossroads of new ways of thinking about art, and the making of art. Boundaries that have delineated traditional art practices, and so many of the art movements of the last century—Modernism, Conceptual Art, Pop Art, Formalism—to name four — are outmoded. Walking into the John Baldessari exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum, the viewer enters an expansive world, a country waiting to be discovered. Though he is known as a conceptual artist, he uses traditional forms—photography, painting, collage and video—in his work. He finds a perfect tension between the idea and its manifestation as an object in the world.

For me, viewing so much of his work in one place was like diving into a crystal clear pool. His deeply honest and transparent approach to art-making sets him apart from his peers, students and followers. His concepts dictate his use of materials. Baldessari focuses on a few things most important to him: ideas, words, and photography. He steps back, taking his hand out of the art-making process but without sacrificing his sharp eye for putting disparate elements together.

I liked many of the works in the show; one of my favorites was “Aligning Balls” (1972). Baldessari sets himself the task of photographing a red ball thrown up into the air. This forces him to act quickly without regard to properly composing a photo. This piece is a selection of more than thirty small snapshots of a tiny red ball suspended in a calm field of blue. Sometimes there is a cloud afloat in the sky or a treetop nestled on the edge of the image. The pictures are delicately strung together with a drawn dark chalk line on a wall. One must get right on top of the pictures in the small-scale work, creating intimacy with the piece as an object. This is in contrast to the expansive space within each photograph. Round-headed nails, the same size as the red balls, pin the glass-covered photos in place, reinforcing the reality that the installation is itself an object in the world.

His video pieces, though appearing rough and gritty, have a beauty in their repetitive simplicity and honesty. They have a thing-ness about them, much like watching a firefly trapped inside a jar with air-holes punched in the lid. (Baldessari's 1971 video I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art can be seen on vodpod's website.)

As an artist, I am still in the process of making sense of Baldessari’s work and the meaning it holds for me personally. For others who plan on seeing ”Pure Beauty” my advice is to take your time, go slowly, and surrender yourself to each of the works as you come upon them and you will be rewarded over and over again.

Kyle Gallup is an artist who works in collage and watercolor.

Letter to Jackson Pollock

Lee Krasner, Untitled, 1949 Oil on composition board, 48 x 37 in. (MoMA)

 By Kyle Gallup

October 7th, 2010

Jackson Pollock
c/o MoMA
11 West 53rd Street
NY NY  10019

Dear Mr. Pollock,

Congratulations on the inclusion of your pictures in the new “Abstract Expressionist New York” exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. I’m writing to let you know how much I like your paintings. Admittedly, I was a little nervous about seeing the show. In the past, I have had intense feelings of competition when I’ve seen your work. Feeling like I might have the urge to stand up on one of the benches in the museum gallery and shake my fists at your largest, most dominant pictures, I steadied myself the night before thinking of the eighteen years I spent painting large scale, my canvas stapled to the floor.

I’m proud of those years and of the work I made. I learned how to create unity and an open picture by pushing color around and making decisions while being inside the painting process. I think you would be pleased to see how many painters today create paintings out of the open structured space that you and your contemporaries discovered and mastered. There is beautiful, skillful work being shown at this moment in galleries all over New York that is indebted to all of you first generation Abstraction Expressionists.  Thank you for opening up that world to me, and other artists.

I know it wasn’t easy. I can sympathize. No money, having nightmares about Picasso, feeling the need to be in the studio each day working, finding your way through the painting while shedding parameters that were used in the past must have been both difficult and exhilarating. Even now, painting abstractly can sometimes feel like being naked in the wilderness but also like standing on the highest mountain looking out over a vast, lush landscape.

I should also mention, it’s hard to make the transition from work in the studio to being outside, in the real world. How do you let go of all it takes for one to muster the courage to confront the blank canvas while working, to then being just a regular guy in the world?  I’ve learned how to make that transition and I imagine you struggled with that too.

Please let your wife, Lee Krasner, know how much I liked her painting, “Untitled 1949” in the show. The painting called to me with an urgent whisper from across the gallery, “Come over and take a good look.” Seeing the picture, feeling its intensity with those smoky grays and whites, with the dabs of orange, yellow and blue leading my eye, summoned me with their hum. As I looked at the picture, the whisper became many voices. An important conversation was being conducted but what was actually being said I could not discern. It was like being in a room just before a toast is given, a conference of women talking just before the glass is clinked and the voices quiet down.

I want to be part of that conversation and I felt included when I looked at Lee’s painting. So Mr. Pollock, that’s what time does, it widens the circle of participants allowing more artists into the discussion.

    Thanks again, and best of luck with future exhibitions.

Yours truly,

Kyle Gallup   

Kyle Gallup is an artist who works in collage and watercolor.

Matisse: Another Look at “Radical Invention”

Cezanne, Three Bathers (1879-1882)

 By Kyle Gallup

As the final days of the Matisse exhibition, “Radical Invention 1913-1917,” at MOMA
draw to a close, I wonder if I have anything to add to the rich volume of articles, reviews and interviews surrounding the show. I’ve seen it four times. Each viewing has brought me an inner calm allowing me to see more deeply into Matisse’s workings and accomplishments as an artist. The paintings themselves openly display their maker’s will and serious pursuit. Matisse’s inventive drawing, color, touch and experimentation can be endlessly described and discussed. For me, I continue to go back to the unexpected bonus of the small Cezanne bathers in the first gallery, the picture that Matisse held onto through hard times and throughout most of his career. Everything that Matisse needed was in that picture. He created his life’s work out of it.

Matisse bought “Three Bathers” (1879-1882) in 1899 from Vollard for 1200 francs. After nearly four decades living with the painting, in 1936, he donated it to the Petit Palais, Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris. In November that year he wrote a letter to curator and author Raymond Escholier (1882-1971), stating plainly how important the painting had been for him over the years. 

"In the thirty-seven years I have owned this canvas, I have come to know it quite well, though not entirely, I hope; it has sustained me morally in the critical moments of my venture as an artist; I have drawn from it my faith and my perseverance; for this reason, allow me to request that it be placed so that it may be seen to its best advantage...I know that I do not have to tell you this, but nevertheless think it is my duty to tell you so; please accept these remarks as the excusable testimony of my admiration for this work which has grown increasingly greater ever since I have owned it."

He looked at “Three Bathers” for sustenance. I believe he also saw in this painting, and in Cezanne’s pursuit of his particular vision, an example of how his own artistic search might be sustained. For Matisse, extracting essential elements directly from “Three Bathers” allowed him to maintain a direct connection with Cezanne and to explore new aesthetic dimensions of his own. There lies the tradition of French painting and the seeds of what was most modern. Matisse knew it without a doubt when looking at the elder artist’s work.

Each painting seems to find Matisse touching the canvas brush stroke, by stroke, building up flat areas of color, articulating the surface. He’s feeling his way through and around the paintings. He draws and paints the figures, modeling form with his brush by working and reworking the linear edges of figures which finally creates a kind of volume that is integrated with the flat surface of the painting.  In still other paintings in the exhibit, Matisse defines flat areas with his drawing. He paints and repaints allowing the under color and transparency of earlier layering to come through. The surface always breathes even after many alterations. His connection to the picture’s surface and color is always close at hand.

Matisse sculpts his three-dimensional figures, helping him better understand form. His working process of adding and subtracting allows him to finally leave what is most essential to the sculpture he is working on. This is also true of his process while he paints. In the series of small black prints, Matisse uses a delicate white line to animate the black field.

Matisse transforming his sculpture Back (II)  into Back (III), May 13, 1913. Photograph by Alvin Langdon Coburn. Archives, International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House, Rochester, New York

For Cezanne it was a dogged pursuit of visual perception—light and form—translated onto a flat surface. Matisse’s quest was much more tactile, workmanlike, a sculptor in paint finding a way to create form, almost willing the paint to create volume while maintaining flatness and integrity of the surface. In the final painting of the show, “Bathers by a River” (1916) he is able to shed the articulated figure for the complete flatness of the figure on canvas.

In their bold and determined working processes, the artists’ work offers inspirations to new generations of artists.  Though I don’t have an extraordinary small Cezanne or Matisse to hang in my studio, there are shows like “Radical Inventions,” which remind me of painting’s importance. Or I can make a visit to MOMA or the Met, answering the need to take a step back from one’s work and review the grand past.

Kyle Gallup is an artist who works in collage and watercolor.

The Expanding Vision of Charles Burchfield

Charles Burchfield, An April Mood, 1946–55. Watercolor and charcoal on joined paper, 40 × 54 in.. Whitney Museum of American Art

By Kyle Gallup

Charles Burchfield was a singular, inventive artist who painted American landscapes with a deep feeling for the natural world around him. He stayed true to himself throughout his career, translating his experience of nature into watercolor paintings that reflected  sounds, light and weather and his own inner emotional terrain. Throughout the decades he painted, he made changes in his imagery and art-making process to better express the monumental influence nature had in his life.

Entering the new Burchfield exhibit, “Heat Waves in a Swamp” at the Whitney Museum, I am immediately confronted by a young master of watercolor. The year 1917 is what his admirers dubbed, “Burchfield’s Golden Year of Painting.” Looking at the work, I think it must have been a fulfilling period for him. The immediacy and individuality of each image is depicted with ease. One painting after another is fluidly drawn and washed with clear light and color.  I imagine that everyday he must have seen images all around him that he wanted to paint. The first rooms are full of eerie looking houses, gardens and backyards taken over by the buzzing of insects, looming churches with ringing bells, rain-filled landscapes and sunny days in the field.

By the twenties, Burchfield is painting images of what was then popularly known as the American Scene. His watercolors turn darker and more opaque as he tackles images of abandoned scrap yards, ships, foreboding industrial landscapes and lonely houses on small town streets. As magnetic as these paintings are, nothing compares to the shift he makes in the forties when he begins to expand his smaller, earlier paintings into large, ambitious watercolor landscapes.

“Two Ravines” (1934-43) and “The Coming Spring” (1917-43), beckon me to look deep into these long-evolving pictures. The experience of looking at them differs greatly from that of his earlier work. The earlier paintings seem to keep me at a distance, looking at the scene, exploring his watercolor technique through his watery brushwork and drawn line.  These two paintings are bigger in scale, more physical. Burchfield works the surface with his brush, covering and modeling every area densely. When looking at the paintings, my eye travels inside the picture, over the moss and fallen leaves, over the rocks, and felled branches, up hills, through flowing water, and into the light and dark trees in the distance. These paintings feel so complete that the experience of looking at them is one of stepping into the picture itself. Now, I sense not just the insects, sunlight, the wind and dark shadows, but the artist’s own presence, as he painted and became one with the landscape in front of him.

At this point in Burchfield’s career, I suspect he must have felt less satisfied with his ability to go out into the field and create another watercolor scene. He needed to search for more, and get more out of each painting for himself. The current exhibit does a good job of explaining and illustrating how Burchfield expanded his earlier themes and paintings. With diagrams next to several paintings in the show, there is an intimate sense of the challenges he set for himself in particular works.

The painting, “The Sphinx and the Milky Way” (1946), yet again expands the boundaries of his technique and ideas. This painting moves past the conventional depiction of a landscape at night. A house is tucked behind animated foliage, flowers and flying insects, stars flicker and form constellations in a thickly brushed and mottled night sky.  Again, I  hear the insects buzzing and feel the thick night air. Its fantastical quality is something that the artist explores throughout the last years of his life. The last gallery in the Whitney includes large watercolor paintings like  “Glory of Spring (Radiant Spring)” (1950) and “Gateway to September” (1946-56) and “Dawn of Spring” (ca. 1960s). The paintings have a sweetness that is not present in his work from earlier decades.

Charles Burchfield, Glory of Spring (Radiant Spring), 1950. Watercolor on paper, 401⁄8 x 293⁄4 in. Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, New York

After years of exploring and translating his deep and intimate connection to nature, he makes otherworldly paintings that reflect his quasi-religious or spiritual view that would have represented a new kind of fulfillment in his work. Burchfield’s last decade of paintings are often described as cosmic.  I think these paintings allowed him to align his internal passions with a more universal and abstracted view of the natural world around him. He was less interested in the scene before him, continuing to broaden his vision while uniting his internal passion for the visual, spiritual and experiential roles nature held for him.

Kyle Gallup is an artist who works in collage and watercolor.