my background and intent as a painter of nonfigurative or abstract pictures

Leonardo

My Background and Intent as a Painter of Nonfigurative or Abstract PicturesAuthor(s): Jan WundermanSource: Leonardo, Vol. 14, No. 4 (Autumn, 1981), pp. 305-307Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1574609 .

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Leonardo, Vol. 14, No. 4, pp. 305-307, 1981 Printed in Great Britain

0024-094X/81 /040305-03$02.00/0 Pergamon Press Ltd.

MY BACKGROUND AND INTENT AS A PAINTER OF NONFIGURATIVE OR ABSTRACT PICTURES

Jan Wunderman*

1.

In 1965, I spent the summer in Provincetown, Massachu- setts, with a dozen or so artists and friends. Over a period of two months, interviews were recorded on tape by Dorothy Sechler for inclusion in the Archives of American Art of the Smithsonian Institution, Wash- ington, D.C. Our work differed widely and ranged from Realism to nonfigurative abstraction to Pop Art. Each interview led to lively discussions. We were asked what we had gained from our art education, and each voiced basically the same complaint: It had been narrow, boring and dissatisfying.

In the early 1940s, a four-year course at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, California, highly academic in approach, engendered in me and some of my classmates a sense of restless frustration, the cause of which I did not then understand. Later I realized that too much emphasis had been placed on narrow interpretations of color theory and of rules of pictorial composition and on memoriza- tion of names and dates in art history. Little attention was given to, say, the qualities of Leonardo da Vinci's drawings and paintings. Impressionism was highly regarded but Cubism was dealt with as a 'communicable disease'! The degree of skills acquired in drawing and in oil and water color painting of figurative subjects was estimated by how closely one's pictures resembled those made by the supervising teacher. Individual exploration was not encouraged or even tolerated.

Those of us in the group who had been educated in private art schools or in university departments reported essentially the same experience: inhibition of inclinations to originality by stress on formulas of the past. We agreed that most of what we had learned had little to do with the later direction of our work. Few reported having an inspiring teacher or being part of a stimulating group of students.

During my art student days, I was married to Frank J. Malina, whose views of visual art, science and technology were then mainly incomprehensible to me. As often happens, they had an influence on me much later, especially his enthusiasm for stretching boundaries and his joy in exploration. I was also very fortunate to have met Man Ray, Maya Deren and some European architects and designers who had sought refuge in the U.S.A. before World War II began. The War changed one's life and one's thinking, and the development of the atomic bomb and of rocket missiles inevitably had an impact on the work of many artists.

*Painter, 41 Union Square W., Rm. 806, New York, NY 10003, U.S.A. (Received 18 Aug. 1980)

In observing the approach to art of the artists from Europe, it became clear to me that contemporary trends in the visual arts were barely touched upon in art schools. I, thus, found myself torn between figurative Realism, Surrealism and nonfigurative or abstract art. More and more I was attracted by highly abstract figurative and by nonfigurative painting, but my teachers ridiculed my attempts to work beyond the boundaries they had chosen. Once a teacher of painting of live models showed one of my efforts to the class with the comment that he could not decide whether it was a very good copy of a bad painting or a very bad copy of a good painting. He told me to make another one in which the anatomical parts of the body were assembled the way nature meant them to be.

Southern California was then a clear, bright, sun- drenched world: mountains, deserts and ocean. Purple- tinged shadows in early light and warm earth tones became a part of my palette and still are. Much of my aesthetic satisfaction stems from colors. Frequently, I begin a painting motivated primarily by certain color combinations that strongly affect me. The forms of mountains and of deserts also have had a definite influence on my work.

Art writer Dore Ashton has said: 'A painter of Rothko's generation takes it for granted that space-time is a valid "subject" for a painting' [1]. I am of the generation of artists that followed Rothko's, a generation reflecting the rapid changes in ways of life in the U.S.A. and traumatic world events. Many of these artists have inevitably been influenced by a sense of fragmentation, dislocation of self and anomy. Yet, some events and new technology have given rise to positive developments in the visual arts.

2.

After completing art school, I persisted with realistic figurative painting - and then in 1946 I went to New York City. Abstract Expressionism was considered there the most innovative and important style by many painters and by the local artworld of critics, commercial galleries and museums of contemporary art. The paintings exhibited by, for example, Rothko, de Kooning, Mother- well and Pollack gave me delight. They were of a kind and of a scale that appealed to me.

In 1950, while studying with Reuban Tam at the Brooklyn Museum Art School in Brooklyn, New York, I finally shed the narrow approach to painting I had acquired at the art school in Los Angeles. I found Tam an exceptional teacher, one who took as his primary responsibility the strengthening of each student's approach to painting, whatever it might be. Standing behind one of us at work, he would gently say 'Go on, take a chance... give yourself permission to be wrong... take a

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Jan Wunderman

chance, you might be right'. I believe this is the way one should be encouraged to become a painter.

In the way that painters develop a personal sense of color they develop a preference for depicting certain forms observed in life and nature. The canyon walls and mountains I had realistically depicted in early works were the forerunners of forms related in appearance to those in organic matter in the works that followed. I also changed from pictures with geometric perspective to provide an illusion of depth to depictions of an essentially flat, shallow character, which Matisse had explored so well.

My paintings, whether figurative or nonfigurative and whether presented in a realistic or a highly abstract way, have been based on a strong structural composition. But in those I am painting now the depicted forms are in many instances ambiguous, much as forms can appear in nature-unexpected colours and forms are juxtaposed. I want viewers to reconsider what they first see in a picture.

I draw both in broad strokes with brushes dipped in ink or in acrylic paint on large pieces of paper or in minute detail in pen and ink. Proceeding from a drawing to a painting, I change much in the original drawing, often omitting parts of it entirely. A painting has only its origins in a drawing.

I do not draw on a canvas before I begin a painting, though it may be based on a drawing. I do not wish to apply colors within areas bounded by lines. Although even the first brush stroke represents a decision, I regard it as tentative. I place a canvas I have stretched and gessoed (large ones ranging from 1.5 x 1.5m to 3 x 2m) on the floor and onto it pour, push and stroke acrylic paint from cans of water-thinned acrylic paint to produce patterns of washes. Then with large brushes, squeegees and sponges on long handles I shape the washes. The water-thinned acrylic paint does not dry quickly and is translucent, which I desire at this stage. When the first layer is dry, I apply another wash in another color to deepen or to soften the colors of certain areas or to add new shapes. At this stage the structure of the composition is established, but it may be modified. Then I place the canvas on an easel and back on the floor, perhaps alternating several times until I feel I can complete it to my satisfaction on the easel. (Smaller sized paintings I alternate between a table and the easel).

I have devised the above procedure to minimize hard edges of painted areas one tends to obtain with acrylic paint. At the easel, I paint with acrylics thinned with water just enough so they will not run down the face of a canvas. Sometimes I finish a painting with oils; for which the acrylic paint, when thoroughly dry, serves as a durable base. I have not used retarders and gloss mediums for acrylics because they produce changes in color values. One must not apply acrylics over oil paint, even when it is dry. I find that oil paints are far more vibrant in color and that the colors are clearer when mixed.

3.

It is not as easy for me to describe how I arrive at decisions as to what to paint and as to the manner of presentation-appeal to mysticism and inspiration is often made, but I dislike the terms, as they mean little if anything to me. Evidently, one's ideas come from a huge reservoir of information based on what one has experi- enced and felt, much of which one is no longer consciously aware of. I find it difficult to separate ideas from the process of painting, and, as so many painters have remarked, once a painting is underway it almost directs its own solutions. Inexplicably, at times the

unintended is more germane to one of my paintings than the 'knowing' that preceded it. Matisse, recounting a conversation with a friend, was referring to this when he said: 'In art truth and reality start at the point when you no longer understand what you are doing' [2]. It is release of strict control that allows one to explore new artistic possibilities. Without exploration, one repeats oneself- monotously applying the same solutions one has tried and found comfortable.

The energy and concentration required for exploratory work is considerable. If I paint while distracted, the result is sure to consist of trite and uncohesive fragments. Reuban Tam's goadings to 'take a chance' encourage one to look beyond what one thinks one knows and so to release some inner process that underlies artistic originality and innovation. It is this aspect that I find one of the most challenging in the work of a painter. To the degree that I am successful in using my resources and in recognizing the unexpected, I feel one of my paintings is successful too.

As regards the exploratory spirit, D. T. Suzuki writing about the Zen koan expressed it very satisfactorily for me in the words: 'Ta Hui was never tired of impressing in his disciples the importance of having satori which goes beyond language and reasoning, and which bursts out in one's consciousness by over-stepping the limits of consciousness. As your concentration goes on you will find the koan altogether devoid of taste, that is, without an intellectual clue whereby to fathom its content... When all of a sudden, something flashes in your mind... its light will illuminate the entire universe' [3].

4.

Reproductions of four of my recent paintings are shown in Figs 1-3 and Fig. 4 (see color plate). The painting entitled 'Tachee' (Fig. 1) was the last and largest of a group of small paintings completed by the end of 1978. The painting was begun with five or six separate pourings of acrylic paint. It was the first of a group of paintings in which I was particularly interested in textures one could provide with this technique.

'Acoma' (Fig. 2) is a good example of a painting made by pouring acrylic paint and controlling its flow to produce some irregular 'hard' edges. The background and initial shapes were produced with two separate color

Fig. I. 'Tachee', Canyon Series VIII, acrylic on linen canvas, 111 x 137cm, 1978.

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My Background and Intent as a Painter

Fig. 3. 'Moenave', acrylic on cotton duck, 111 x 132cm, 1979-80.

Fig. 2. 'A coma', Canyon Series II. acrylic on cotton duck, 137 x 137cm, 1979.

washes with the canvas on the floor. The central square areas were then put in with it on an easel, and these were given a final color wash.

'Moenave' (Fig. 3) is one of a number of paintings in which rock forms led to a depiction of forms of the type found in organic material that do not touch the ground. They seem to float, despite the fact that they give the impression of objects much heavier than air. These paintings remind me of asteroids or of rocks quietly and endlessly moving through outer space. This is another in the group of paintings in which I was particularly interested in textures.

The painting 'Sedona' (Fig. 4, see color plate) was begun, with the canvas on the floor, by the applications of pink, blue and yellow acrylic paint to parts of the surface and leaving the remaining parts bare. The reds were applied at an easel, and then, on the floor, a dark maroon

wash was added in the upper left corner. Finally, at the easel again, some of the reds were intensified and others were deepened.

I do not enjoy assigning titles to my works. I attach no particular significance to them and chose them mainly for reference purposes. Since much of my artistic inspiration stems from the time I spent in the Southwest of the U.S.A., I choose Amerindian names of areas, town and mountains whose sound I like.

References 1. D. Ashton,A Reading ofModern Art, Revised Ed. (New York:

Harper & Row, 1969) p. 21, 2. P. Reverdy, Matisse in Light and Happiness, in Last Works of

Henri Matisse (New York: Harcourt, 1958). 3. D. T. Suzuki, Zen Buddhism (New York: Doubleday, 1956)

p. 143.

307



Top left: Miriam Sacks. 'Movement in Space'. hand-woven tapestry, canvas, wool, cotton, silk, raffia andLurex thread. 150x 120 cm, 1967. (Collection of Mrs. Beryl Chilty, St. Hugh's

College, Oxford, England) (Fig. 1, see page 272) Top right: Brian Shaffer. 'C-Saw', steel bow saw, chipboard, steel and brass gearbox, polyvinyl acetate paint, disc dia. 73 cm, 1973.

(Fig. 6, see page 279) Center: Jean-Pierre Charriere. Example of kinetic sunlight images

produced by the Heliochromic System. (Fig. 4, see page 296) Bottom left: Jan Wunderman. 'Sedona', acrylic on cotton duck,

127 x 101 cm, 1980. (Fig. 4, see page 306) Bottom right: Ewa Kuryluk. 'The Outline of My Shadow', acrylic

paint, canvas, 1.5 x 1.2 m, 1978. (Fig. 1, see page 265)



























my background and intent as a painter of nonfigurative or abstract pictures

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