11.1.21

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There’s a couch, usually white and largely defined by the line between the upper and lower cushion.  Your eye might rest there, a place where your body might as well.  It’s a very minor border, but here it's amplified, wavering between a sharp crease and a softer line of shadow, digging into the cushion/the canvas/the wall, carving some space.  I’ve been working on it.

    Also pictured (in parts) are a still life painting by Jane Freilicher from 1974 titled One Cat, Two Fish, a Tazo tea graphic depicted by shadow, other bits of shadow, and in the upper corners, glimpses of pale yellow wall.  It’s all plausible.

    The Freilicher painting stands out.  It’s irreverent and detrimental to cut her work, or to combine it with anything else, and especially with allusions to Tazo, former subsidiary of Starbucks and now Unilever.  It might also seem both brash and lazy to use her work towards my own, and to attempt to copy sections. I agree!  But I want to paint a different type of painting (different from my stack of white couches).  Specifically, her type, which, without fanfare, casts a wide net without leaving home.  It spans still life, interior, and cityscape.  It takes stock of the surroundings, and memorializes without romanticizing.  At turns both grand and humble.  Common objects and familiar downtown views combine, creating unwieldy subjects Freilicher tackles without hesitation. Full-frontal !  I want to adopt the role of viewer and student while in the process of making.  Further, I don’t want to hide that desire.    

    The painting One Cat, Two Fish depicts a dense scene: a line of windows showing a jumble of downtown buildings, and before it, a tabletop covered loosely in layers of cloth (white and underneath, patterned ochre).  Resting on the cloth is a pitcher with a modest bouquet, a vase of grapes, three rolls of bread, the cat and fish promised by the title, and a grander bouquet in a metal stein.  There’s a lack of editorializing in what’s depicted, and how; Freilicher renders detail with care but not fuss.    

    I attempt that approach, but with repetition, undermine it.  One Cat, Two Fish becomes another repeated subject - simplified and cropped, edited from a freewheeling paragraph into a single phrase, a member of a whittled vocabulary: the right side of a couch, a bit of wall, a bit of shadow, and now, a still life painting in part, offering a platter of fish, a bouquet, a black and white cat, and the table they occupy.  I maintain the colors and something of the joy of rendering, and although I mostly lose even the semblance of a roving eye, there’s a different freedom.  I arrange and rearrange the set of components.  The still life hovers above the couch, the still life occupies the couch, the couch occupies the still life.  And it ranges otherwise: the still life is an expressive painting, a set of objects, a graphic, a quote.  The couch as well: a piece of furniture, a blank canvas, tentatively mapped, and another particular form: a folded torso, clothed and embellished.  Failing to cast a wide net, multivalence persists in what remains. Churning scraps.