patternsthatconnect

Terry Greene recently drew my attention to an open letter from David Rhodes to Philip Guston. Then I saw this other letter from Rhodes to an artist whose work I have been getting to know recently: Moira Dryer. His letter at brooklynrail.org tells of a visit to Carol Szymanski and Barry Schwabsky in New York, seeing a small gouache by Dryer (photo) and being impressed by it. He comments on her approach to painting, about her influence on abstraction and regrets her passing (she died in 1992, when she was only 34 years old). He seems to agree with a comment I found by Bob Nickas that “she managed to make abstraction feel vital again” at a time when it no longer seemed as urgent or vibrant as it once did.

Here’s a picture I took of her wonderful painting entitled The Vanishing Self Portrait. I have written about it before, when I compared it to two other “abstract portraits”.

Moira Dryer, Vanishing Self Portrait,

I wondered if there were any of her paintings in UK collections, and so far I haven’t been able to find any (please let me know in ‘comments’ if you come across one). Instead I found this video at Rough Cuts of a painting show at Harris Lieberman N.Y. where we get to see one of Dryer’s paintings (at 2.50 and between 6.38 and 7.07 mins). In his commentary, James Kalm doesn’t tell us if it has a title. He does bring our attention to the handles attached to the sides and says that’s common for Dryer. Like the tree stump in the one above, they emphasise the support. With the tree stump I feel reminded of the connection to nature, there’s no getting away from it even in abstraction. With the handles, it is more the process of painting Vs utility that I connect to: was the stretcher held by the handles and tilted to control the flow of wet paint? I doubt it, but I like that the artwork gets me guessing about that.

For Dryer, painting is theatre, performance, and in both these paintings it seems appropriate to be thinking about how they were made. In The Vanishing Self Portrait the brush strokes, (or possibly erasure strokes) look gestural, I imagine the artist extending her arm from one end of the canvas to the other. Then I realise that it’s probably too wide to have been made that way. But here I am, considering the making of it and speculating about the details of that performance, whilst clearly seeing its results directly in front of me.

If your workplace had John Hoylands on the wall would it become a place of joy?

In an office where I sometimes work there are a few Hoyland limited edition prints from the 80s and 90s.

Early in the morning, before most people get to work, I sometimes go and view them.

Mostly they just get ignored,

They are in meeting rooms,

Unlooked at, they just ‘brighten up the place’.

I am enjoying this one a lot just now

It reminds me of one of Hoyland’s paintings from around the same  time this piece was made (1986).  The painting is entitled ‘Lust and Luxuries’ 1984 (it is reproduced in issue nine of Turps Banana, accompanying an interesting interview with Hoyland by Peter Dickinson) and is reminiscent of a plate of cakes. The workplace print (is it a lithograph?) looks more abstract than ‘Lust and Luxuries’ yet it does have plate of food associations for me. Does it for you?

I think it also has face associations. I don’t want to see the towards-violet shape near the bottom edge as a mouth yet I do.

A friend with synaesthesia once said to me that he knew paintings were good when he wanted to eat them!

When it’s not abstract colours and shapes it’s a plate of food or a face with a mouth possibly ready to eat a plate of food. I have the feeling that I am not supposed to be thinking in terms of associations in relation to Hoyland’s oeuvre, and at the same time I wonder of these food and eating associations are part of what makes the print attractive to me. Or maybe I have an oral fixation and I’m saying a lot more about me now than I am about the picture.

…according to John Grinder and Carmen Bostic St, Clair the territory isn’t even the territory, (Whispering in the Wind page 25). They use the term First Access (FA) for the point where we gain access to information about the world through our sensory systems. The information received at FA is already a map, though we are accustomed to think of it as the territory. The vast majority of what is out there never reaches our senses, and the information that does reach us is also transformed. FA is the product of these transforms or mappings. Grinder/St Clair use the abbreviation F1 to refer to the set of mappings that occur before FA.

Then there are the linguistic transforms that take place after FA, the mappings that we usually refer to when, with Alfred Korzybski, we say “the map is not the territory”. Grinder/St Clair use the term F2 to refer to these transforms, our linguistically mediated mental maps.

It seems to me that abstract painting is particularly well placed to explore the pre-linguistic, F1 transforms or mappings or representations, that occur between the events of the real world and our visual perceptions (It can and does also explore F2 mappings as does figurative painting).

Glow Grid: abbiedawn, 13 05 11, Acrylic on Canvas, 61cm x 61 cm

The coloured discs you really see in this painting are not out there in the external world, they are not on the surface of the painting. Neither are the 49 bright white discs that appear in the centres of the squares (especially when you look slightly sideways). They are part of the F1 transforms, mappings or representations that take place between the world out there and FA. I suggest that whilst that’s so for everything you see including the canvas, knowing that these colour/shapes exist only in our  F1 mappings shows us something about that mapping process. I think the painting is helping us to model colour.

Something else about these subjective/colour shapes that intrigues me is that we see the discs as perfect circles. Although the drawing is inaccurate we see the discs as if they were accurately rendered… your eye is more accurate than my hand. Your representation or map is, in this respect, more accurate than the territory.

There are apparently three types of sign: icon, symbol and index. When you take the sign information out of the sign so now the signifier role has gone, is it still a sign? Form only, no subject. Process only, no content. Is it still a sign nevertheless?

For the recent series Sign Out, the Polish-born photographer Josef Schulz, now living in Düsseldorf, photographed aspects of the American commercial landscape and then stripped out the lettering. The vantage point of each photograph doesn’t allow for further context. Do you still recognize the form? Has stripping the language off each sign robbed it of its function, or do the shape and colors still manage to communicate? I’m fairly certain that t … Read More

via Visualingual