It is an interesting story how Stanley and Evelyn came to collect my work. They had been collecting art and I remember them complaining of the experience in the difficulty of gaining insight into collecting contemporary art. It was a very small art group in NYC and gaining access was hard. My gallery in the 1980's, The Anne Plumb Gallery was in fierce competition as a gallery and we were conscious of this need for openness to be successful. This same feeling continues today in this note.
In 1993, Stanley, Evelyn, and I taxied to my studio on the Brooklyn waterfront in Dumbo.
( We heard a boom on Canal Street which we later heard was an attempt to cause havoc at the World Trade Center. We safely skirted this scene as we spent then the afternoon in my studio. Looking on the internet this occurred on February 26, 1993, at 12:17.)
They bought a group paintings that made a representation of my ideas at the time. They have been in their homes for almost twenty years. Stanley has yielded to making gifts of five of the paintings he bought in 1993, needing to clear the Potomac house where the paintings were hanging.
I am writing the below, mainly to tell some of the story I refer to above.
I may have guided Stanley and Evelyn to certain paintings as I pulled one after another out of my racks. I say this now as some narrative seems to have emerged which is not a surprise finally as I was always stringing together some story even in the apparent abstractness of my work.
I make a yearly drive to New Mexico, and last month as I drove from NYC, I visited Stanley in Silver Spring, MD to discover he had three painting yet he wanted to try to sell.
The above landscape painting with blue sky was a third of the group, in another collection.
The Still Lifes with Sunflowers here, were made in 1990. I made similar things in the 1970's but did not feel I was talking to any one with them in the Manhattan galleries. I changed to the predominate, Black and White Landscape such as The Wind in the Reeds, made in 1990.
I had been making the still lifes again since 1988, when in 1989 the blown up Sunflower became an emblem in my large Studio Paintings of the coming to an outer light coinciding with what I had seen as a more inner abstract light in the earlier Black and White paintings up to this time.
So the still lifes were the catalyst of this profound move to the outer reality which I embrace even today and continue making out of doors paintings more in landscape form which are the first step in an idea for most of my Studio work.
I had begun making these still lifes with Paul Georges in the early 1970's. We would go to the Beach and make paintings while others swam and fished. It was part of the life we had enjoyed each summer. I stayed with the family at their home in Bridgehampton, from 1972 to 1975. The paintings joined the tradition of Fairfield Porter and Jane Freilecher, Paul being, I thought the strongest of them.
I drifted away from these out of doors paintings as I made my own way finding in the Black and White studio painting a space I could talk with, in the new 1980's NYC art world which was taking off again.
Again what becomes important about these still lifes is that they are the best of many, probably twenty exist and most are in collections, as these were very popular paintings.
Federal Reserve, Washington DC,
The still lifes influenced the painting for instance in the collection of the Federal Reserve, in Washington DC, titled, Two Days Two Lillies.
I had for some time also used a lily in still lifes I made. The flower made an outer flag of color presenting a startling surface coming from the Black and White romantic space, and resultant feeling of Epiphany.
Mint Museum of Art in Charlotte, NC
In the Painting at the Mint Museum of Art in Charlotte, NC., the idea of the changing season and time of day is in play. I became immediately aware of this poignancy of light as I painted these still lifes into the Evening light. Later this realization became a series of paintings titled the Four Seasons. I realized that each moment was continually dying into the next.
Where these paintings are directly connected, is in the larger studio work as, "these things you presented to me, Paumanok." The large 9 x 12 foot painting now in the collection of the Art Museum of Southern Texas, Corpus Christie, TX.
Art Museum of Southern Texas, Corpus Christie, TX.
The figure arranges what I now see as a profane Altar by the Bay, as the earlier 'spot' of color has become a full blown image of poetic content with this developing narrative painting.
The figure always had a Whitmanesque quality to it as I had been interested in Whitman since the 1970's. I knew he maybe had composed those very words which are the title, above on that very beach. Paumanok meaning 'that fish shaped Island', one can see the echo of these words in the promontory behind.
What galvanized the sunflowers in my mind and work was when I read that Van Gogh had also been reading Whitman when he painted his Sunflowers. His also to be a profane altar piece, where one painting each flanking another painting of a modern woman. It was a Whitmanian idea of finding the sacred in the everyday. Also Whitmanian was the idea of each part making up the whole and every part of that whole, alive.
San Antonio Art Museum in San Antonio, TX
As I traveled to The San Antonio Art Museum in San Antonio, TX to see the last painting on my southern trip, I wondered how this painting joined in the story I relate. I quickly saw that the pink stripes were probably found through a color I had mixed painting a landscape in the dusk and waning light. This being a metaphor for a tragic moment in our world or as I had reflected upon-- maybe a hopeful morning.
I think thoughts like this become the Mythic space I have been interested in. The Mythic joins us all at a level deep enough that we all enjoy. I use the poetry of Whitman and Stevens to voice such thoughts in paintings that Idealize this universal as American. I've always liked the idea of an ‘American’ painting, what ever that changing idea might be.
The series after Singer of the Sun which was the title of the Paumanok paintings, was Villa of the Sun where I tried to put together these ideas more abstractly into a cycle of what might have been fresco in another culture of an “as if, fiction” of a world that could or might be.
A last thought is of these two still life paintings utilitarian use. A painting can be sold as it leaves one person's life and enters another. This painting can be seen as a decorative object where the economic exchange is more on that order of commodity.
Though what one must know and remember what are three important ideas. One is of the painting's formal integrity; discovered in its relation to the forms of art history. Two is the contexual meaning and gravity there in. And finally, the feeling one gets as if this is important or not.
These are the real reasons for the artist to make such paintings.
A museum is the repository of such exchanges of a spiritual and poetic level which makes it difficult to put a price upon.
The real worth is the knowing that any of this conversation holds true and then has the possibility as the conversation continues with other paintings through time. One knows if one was ever in the conversation or not and is paid in full with what I believe is a enlightened soul or spirit.
