“The artist’s central dogma was beauty, and beauty is protean.”

The painter Helen Frankenthaler died December 27, 2011, in Darien, Connecticut. Obituaries by The New York Times and The Washington Post construe Frankenthaler’s importance as the inventor of a “revolutionary” soak-stain technique in which poured paint unites with the canvas; a method which made possible the Color Field movement. That similar journalistic profiles would never focus the same attention on Rembrandt’s mystifying, heterogeneous technique, or da Vinci’s departure from buon fresco in The Last Supper, evinces the extent to which art in the 20th century has been defined in terms of ideas; even ideas fastened to events as miniature and ritual as the act of pouring paint from a coffee tin.

Helen Frankenthaler entered the art world at a tender age. In 1950, at 23, she was already going down on Friday nights to The Club on East Eighth Street, meeting with Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner and the other members of the New York School’s Abstract Expressionist movement, and falling almost immediately into a five-year relationship with the movement’s venerable philosopher-in-residence, Clement Greenberg. But more than simply clever and precocious, Frankenthaler was well-educated, well-financed, and serious. At 20, she toured Europe’s major cities, and at twenty-one, after receiving an inheritance from her late father, a Supreme Court judge, established her own painting studio in New York City while pursuing graduate-level courses in art history at Columbia University. In the coming years, Frankenthaler would see the treasures of Europe again, this time with Greenberg, examining masterpieces in Venice, Madrid, Rome, and London.

Frankenthaler’s love of art for its own sake, and Greenberg’s insistence that art appeal to the senses, doubtless helped inflate Frankenthaler’s lucid, self-contained, style. The paintings seem to be motivated by an interest in the beauty of paint itself—particularly the blooming effects associated with “staining” the canvas—and paint’s organization on the canvas. Small’s Paradise (1964), a bilaterally symmetrical puzzle of red and green, retains the inherent, visceral, qualities of paint—its sinuous, organic, contours, its pure color—but disciplines these elements in a classical design. Continents of green, red, pink and blue organize in a top-to-bottom asymmetrical figure in which massive, four-sided shapes in the upper half of the painting fragment into more delicate forms below; the two opposing sides sustaining equilibrium through contrast, and the entire, bouncing complementary field of red and green constrained by a dark band of blue at the appropriate spatial interval. Throughout her career, Frankenthaler’s interest in painting was pure, not sustained or clouded by political or existential ambitions, and without trailing polemics. “With any picture, on paper or on canvas,” the artist said in a 2003 interview with the New York Times, “the main idea is: does it work? Is it beautiful?”

By the close of 1951, Frankenthaler had already held a one-woman exhibition at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery and participated in “Ninth Street: Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture,” both in New York City. In 1959, Frankenthaler’s attention to pictorial organization began to gather its proper rewards. She received first prize in the Paris Premiere Biennale for Jacob’s Ladder, a painting, which, if lacking the chromatic interest of her later work, upheld Frankenthaler’s values of form. Just ten years later, the Whitney Museum of American Art would launch a retrospective of the 41 year-old artist. Subsequent retrospectives followed in 1986, at the Museum of Modern Art, and in 1998, at the Guggenheim Museum.

Frankenthaler, however, had been fortunate enough to enter the scene at an era congenial to the brighter and less philosophical products of the New York School. Her entrance coincided with a postwar spirit of optimism, the artist’s career riding the same channels as rock and roll. The work of Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko, contemporaries of Frankenthaler and the first and most famous actors of Abstraction Expressionism, had been nourished differently. All three had survived the spiritual and social assaults of two world wars, and both Newman and Rothko had, with their art, attempted to build an insulating system against them. Rothko claimed his solemn, economical canvases conveyed “tragedy, ecstasy” and “doom,” and that “the people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them.” But the painters’ existential defenses were not incorruptible. By the time Frankenthaler met Pollock in the early Fifties, his classic drip technique had already begun to subside, and he had resumed his alcoholism. In 1970 Rothko’s career would end with his death by suicide just as Frankenthaler’s work was ascending to maturity.

What impact Frankenthaler’s work has had on American painting is often summarized in a single anecdote. In the spring of 1953, Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, two painters from Washington D.C., took the train into Manhattan to visit Clement Greenberg. Coincidentally, Frankenthaler’s studio held the recently completed Mountains and Sea; a stain-painted, nine-feet-wide canvas inspired by watercolors she had made on the Canadian coast.

Pollock’s drip technique had already attained philosophical importance for theorist-critics Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg—Rosenberg construing Pollock’s trope as giving rise to “not a picture but an event” (Greenberg disagreed)—and technique had been raised to the proportions of an idea; technique no longer the handmaid to works of art, but works of theory. In this highly oxygenated universe, little 24 year-old Frankenthaler’s idea, her concept of paint poured onto unprimed canvas, exploded like a match. Frankenthaler, Morris Louis declared, “became a bridge between Pollock and what was possible.”

In one sense, the lavish attention paid to this event is unfortunate. It is true that Frankenthaler’s “invention” indirectly launched the careers of Louis and Noland who adopted it, and became the foundation of the Color Field movement; a movement comprising paintings, which, like Frankenthaler’s, were mostly luminous and stained. But to the extent that Frankenthaler’s soak-staining technique is praised for itself—as an idea—Frankenthaler’s true legacy is obscured. It is doubtful the artist would have regarded the technique as important—except in the classical sense of enabling a particular variety of beauty. Frankenthaler was always mainly interested in the formal relationships which Rothko dismissed as being not “the point.” Frankenthaler’s paintings, although perhaps lacking the imagination of Rothko’s misty, sublime work, is not constrained by allegiance to a particular mood or theory, and therefore free to radically change form with each instantiation. Frankenthaler never embraced the “moral and metaphysical” justifications of her circle because, of course, she simply refused them. The artist’s central dogma was beauty, and beauty is protean.

Amanda Johnson studies painting and philosophy and teaches a course on “the art of looking at Art” in Memphis, Tennessee. Her work can be found elsewhere including the online arts journal “The Curator”.

Continuum Fellow, Charlie Forrester, was recently commissioned by local college, Victory University, to conceive and paint a mural. The mural feature’s prominently their mascot, also conceived by Charlie, an eagle in flight. Charlie has worked the last month tirelessly to finish it. In the next weeks there will be an official unveiling ceremony; we will keep you abreast of the details. Until then, feast your eyes on this magnificence! The Continuum is tres-proud of Charlie.

http://www.thejohnnycashproject.com

This is exactly the sort of thing that the Continuum was formed to encourage.  -truly a fantastic idea and opportunity for artists around the globe to participate.   To fully understand the concept, be sure to read the “about” page.

Yes, what’s happening in Memphis is truly exciting in regards to its investment in the arts. I don’t know if it is related to a change in guard at the mayor’s office or something more elemental, but over the past 2-3 months I’ve heard word about 3 significant projects on the horizon: 1) The William Eggleston Museum, 2) The William Christenberry Center for the Arts and 3) an Artspace live/work project.

William Eggleston

Widely considered the father of color photography as high art, Eggleston is a Memphis native.  Eggleston’s work focuses on what he likes to call the “democratic camera” in which the lens favors the seemingly banal and mundane like tricycles, mailboxes, and people entrenched in the everydayness of life.  His work has been featured around the world including MoMA in New York and the Getty, to name a few.

The William Eggleston Museum will house the Eggleston archive (some 60,000 images) and a gallery to show both his and the work of other contemporary artists. It is projected to open in 2013. The primary developer, Mark Crosby, was also instrumental in establishing the Stax Museum of American Soul, also in Memphis.

Willam Christenberry

William Christenberry, a one time teacher of Eggleston at the Memphis College of Arts (MCA), who is a photographer, painter, and sculptor. He like Eggleston is  an artist of renown who has displayed work in New York galleries and the Smithsonian Institute. He has been featured on ArtBable, art:21 and NPR.

The news for this center is as of yet unverified, but comes from a local artist with ties to MCA. No dates have been given as to completion or commencement; I will try to give more details as I can.

Artspace

The mission of Artspace is “to create, foster, and preserve affordable space for artists and arts organizations.” Currently they operate 27 projects in 19 cities and 13 states. Most of these properties are what they call live/work projects, which are affordable residential housing units each with extra space to accommodate a studio. Each live/work project also has common spaces to encourage cooperation and community involvement.

Artspace has just closed their Memphis survey which assess the local need. There is no date available yet for this project, but their website claims that it generally takes 3-5 years to develop; so any where between 2012 and 2015, is to be expected.

Etc.

All exciting stuff. Beyond these things, the local artist community is growing and organizing. The Continuum is connected with over 80 local, Christian artists and creative catalysts. There are conferences on the horizon, projects planned, and a small stream of applications to join as a Continuum fellow. There are serious artists; committed artists, and I see excitement in the their eyes!

Homes of My Past is part of the Homesick exhibit at the Art Gallery inside LifeLink Church (1015 S Cooper St, Memphis, TN 38104); it is on display through November 4^th 2009.

The first thing noticeable about Rachel Lockridge’s paintings is the extreme vertical orientation of the pieces. They are in the most elementary critique simple, architectural paintings, and as such a horizontal direction seems far more a propos—assuming that the buildings are the subjects. These are not skyscrapers piercing the clouds; they are residential buildings gathered close to the ground, towered over by the local flora, and dwarfed by the vertical: the endless blue sky, the billowy clouds and the infinite regress beyond.

The philosopher, Paul Crowther, tells us that “a work of art enables the self to move beyond and outside itself toward another object”—providing a reconciled relationship with the world; “it is the space between Self and Other, the metaxu, the rich between.”[1] It is this space—this between—where we discover Lockridge’s true subject; it is the space, itself. For in it she finds reconciliation in all its forms; most notably though with her own, small world.

The space can dwarf us; it can make us feel so insignificant—so trivial. Or worse, it can prompt us to consider the emptiness, devoid of signs. We might walk away considering nihilism or a hopelessness rooted in our own smallness: our quaint dwellings swallowed up or unconsidered by the grandness of the infinite. This is the tension in her paintings—irrelevance, but looking closer it isn’t the sky that imposes this message rather it is the earth-brown homes firmly grounded and lost in the soils that they rest upon which forces us to consider the Biblical message “from dust to dust”. The giant mouthed sky 2/3 of each painting is not the threat, it is earth-boundedness which paws at each of us to make us its own.

The sky on the other hand, is richly textured with washes of paint: sometimes with clouds rising like steeples other times like panels of stained glass interacting with the delicateness of light. There exists a serenity in them that smacks not of emptiness but presence. If it is not seen at first it is because the presence itself seems allusive at times, but allusive because of its pervasiveness—the way something that is always around seems to disappear or at least becomes unnoticed simply due to its ubiquity. Alexander Schmemann writes:

All that exist is God’s gift to man, and it all exists to make God known to man, to make man’s life communion with God. It is divine love made food, made life for man. God blesses everything He creates, and, in biblical language, this means that He makes all creation the sign and means of His presence and wisdom, love and revelation.[2]

The largeness of the sky and its ubiquity do threaten but not the human element in the image; rather it threatens the earth-boundedness. Meaning trumps irrelevance in her paintings

And this is what Lockridge is hinting at: the home as sanctuary; a place where God is felt, communed with and made known; significance and meaning; a scene simple, straight-forward, and everyday that points back to God—providing value. It is always there but often our views need re-orientation. All the cosmos is a sanctuary from the most grand to the most banal if the lens is turned just so. Lockridge turns the lens to redeem her little insignificant patches of soil—what she calls “nostalgia…leaky windows and dirty sidewalks, the loud neighbors and pungent curry simmering next door.” A lens turned horizontal makes these just nostalgia with no greater purpose, but Lockridge sees God in everything and wants us to re-orient our lenses to move “beyond and outside” with her to see “His presence and wisdom, love and revelation” in nothing but the leaky windows and pungent curry sauce of the everyday: the divine food in the unexceptional.

[1]Daniel Siedell, God in the Gallery: A Christian Embrace of Modern Art (Grand Rapids Michigan: Baker Academic Press, 2008), 27.

[2]Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000), 14.

What I’m Afraid to Look At is part of the Homesick exhibit at the Art Gallery inside LifeLink Church (1015 S Cooper St, Memphis, TN 38104); it is on display through November 4^th 2009.

The 16^th century Baroque artist, Caravaggio, lived by the motto Nec spe, nec metu which translates, “Without hope or fear.”  Certainly, his contemporaries may have mistaken his bravado as indicative of some fearlessness, but on the other side of 5 centuries with the panoptic perspective that the corpus of his work provides, we can see it for what it truly was: a covering for the great fear that ate away at his soul. His life running and the pathos that he shared for the street urchin, sinner found in his paintings culminating in his final self-portrait “David with the Head of Goliath” help give us the reality and depth of this fear.

In the movie Donnie Darko, Donnie cries out “Why should we care about dead rabbits!” when discussing in his English class the book Watership Down. Why indeed; for rabbits have no fear of death; no fear at all, so their fate according to Donnie is inconsequential. The movie states that fear is an indigenous resident in our humanity, and unlike the animal kingdom, who engages their fear merely in the Darwinian concept of flight, our humanity comes face to face with fears so large, so powerful, so pervasive that they cannot be evaded; they swallow not only us but like a black hole everything that enters their orbit. Donnie realizes he must face them. Donnie Darko engages the reality of repressed fears and the many masks used to cover them up and flee from them. “Why do you wear that silly rabbit suit?” Donnie asks Frank the demonic looking 6 foot tall rabbit; to which Frank replies, “Why do you wear that silly man-suit?”

Masks, veneers, threadbare coverings—these are the first impressions when looking at Jessica Erickson’s exhibit: “What I’m Afraid to Look At”. Behind pie crusts, icing, diapers and wallpaper in idyllic settings in soothing pastels and muted colors we find hidden refugees, mutilated bodies, graveyards and viruses painted with coloring dyes. These are obscured enough to keep the focus not on the object of fear but on the covering each wears. Each is textured, rough and homespun—some created with homemade paper finely detailed and pressed with stampings, others from remnants as if found in some spare room craft drawer—all with the meticulous care of any creative and intent child. They are personal pieces, purposeful and constructed; such is the way we erect means to evade our fears; we use what is at hand, dress them up elaborately and hope they won’t peek through, but eventually they do regardless of how they are regaled. The contemplative observer should pause and note their own means of avoidance; they should ask, “How have I attempted such insulation?”

Erickson does not end her statement here; she calls her work momento mori, or “Remember you will die”, which historically are artistic works meant to help remind people of their own mortality. Her titles tell us that our mortality is at risk when we face displacement, disease, death or victimization. Thus, when confronted by these we seek the solace of our craftmaking psyches and the escape provided via them, but there is no escape. It lurks everywhere: in the innocence of childhood, behind the window looking in, in the fixtures we use to light our houses, behind the wallpaper and in the food we eat; our mortality is omnipresent, and the elaborate measures of our flight are—regardless of how clever—mere foppery. Consider the following poem:

Dear Atom Bomb,

I confess—you were my high school obsession.
You bloomed inside my chest until I howled. You shook me
with your booming zillion wattage. You were bigger
than rock and roll. I lost days to you, the way you expanded

to become more than even yourself. In Science-class
movies, you puffed men like microwaved marshmallows,
raked blood from their insides, and always I could feel
your heat like a massive cloak around my shoulders.

You embarrassed me. You were too depraved for dignity,
not caring whose eyes you melted, whose innards oozed;
you balled up control in your God-huge palms
and tossed it into the stratosphere. Oh, Atom Bomb,

I miss you. These days my mind is no incandescent
blur but a narrow infrared beam spotlighting
bounded fears: cancer in a single throat; a shock
of blood on the clean sheets; a careless turn from

the grocery store lot into the pickup with the pit bull
in the bed. Oh, Atom Bomb, come back. Take me away
from the twitch in my leg, the cracking lead paint,
the lurking salmonella. Sweep me up in your blinding

white certainty. Make me sure once again that
I’ll live till the world’s brilliant end.[1]

When one fear is gone another supplants it; we cannot shake them off. We can only come to terms with them. Erickson begs us to reconcile with our fears and our mortality.

In Aronofsky’s The Fountain, Tommy and Izzi quest to escape death through the Fountain of Life in one episode and in a more modern episode through science and medicine; these become their mechanisms for coping—their elaborate hoax for avoiding reality. It is in this single-minded pursuit that instead of prolonging life or overcoming their transience that the life they have is stripped of any value. Tommy away from his love invests his days isolated and alone unable to enjoy the very thing he wishes to save. The climax comes only when Tommy realizes the truth of the Grand Inquisitor, “Our bodies are prisons for our souls. Our skin and blood, the iron bars of confinement…All flesh decays. Death turns all to ash. And thus, death frees every soul.” Only after this realization is he capable of fully living.

The awfulness of this may cause the dilemma that Ransom faced in C. S. Lewis’ Perelandra:

My fear was now of another kind. I felt sure that the creature was what we call “good,” but I wasn’t sure whether I liked “goodness” so much as I had supposed. This is a very terrible experience. As long as what you are afraid of is something evil, you may still hope that the good may come to your rescue. But suppose you struggle through to the good and find that it also is dreadful.[2]

Consider truth here instead of goodness; it is the category that Erickson deals in and which to us may look as dreadful as Ransom’s “good”. And just like Lewis she does not give us a trite answer; for to do so would appear as much a fraudulent escape as she has already urged us to question. She emphasizes, instead, the truth of mortality, the reality of fear and its inescapable quality. She shows us a lens where by children prompt the macabre, where we eat the dead and where we are stalked by disease; it is gruesome; it is certain! What she does in a very Schafferian manner is force us to face this dilemma in order to ask the question, “What now?” Bravado means nothing, escape is impossible, fear prevails. Donnie is right; only in fear is there consequence. For fear forces one to engage in questions that truly matter and look for answers in transcendent categories rather than in masks of our own making. What the artist has done, is present us with a means not to name our fears—or fight them or solve them—but to grow accustomed enough to them that we might discover what’s beyond them—as the artist writes: “a truth that is stark and rich, bitter and sweet.” She asks us to remove our silly rabbit suits, to hold the mask like David presenting Goliath’s head and to discard all ten feet of its bluster.

[1] Pierce, Catherine. “Dear Atom Bomb.” Indiana Review 2nd ser. 30 (2009): 78. Print.

[2] Lewis, C. S. Perelandra a novel. New York: Scribner Classics, 1996.17. Print.