PAINTERS ON PAINTINGS

Barbara Friedman on Merging and the “Extreme Middle”

Aug 15, 2020

I’ve noticed in myself and among my friends that keeping yourself locked up at home encourages every kind of rumination, especially on the condition of being alone and what it was like to be around other people and when that might happen again.

So it’s not surprising that a piece of writing I’ve been affected by during this isolation is Jack Whitten’s ruminative Notes from the Woodshed (Hauser & Wirth, 2018), a log of his studio jottings made over the course of several decades. There are a lot of passages I might cite, but one I keep coming back to is Whitten’s talk about the “extreme middle,” which he calls the place where the “I” is located. It’s a resting place where “the concrete placement of format” can coexist with the accidental. He makes the “I” out to be “a resting zone … a meeting place.”

Whitten’s reflections on the “I” as negotiated middle ground are visibly at work in his 2008 self-portrait Entrainment.  Underneath it I’ve put a very recent painting of mine, Enjambment. I’ve always loved this self-portrait of Whitten’s, but I only noticed its actual name when I was pulling it up for this essay. I’m amused that the painting of mine that I wanted to pair with it has such a similar one-word title.

Jack Whitten, Self Portrait: Entrainment, 2008, acrylic collage and eye glass lenses on canvas, 29 1/8 x 23 inches

Barbara Friedman, Enjambment, 2020, oil on linen, 44 x 55 inches

My Enjambment is an oil painting whose underpainting became the protagonist. Rather than covering up what I thought would merely peek through occasionally, I let the initial alizarin orange layer become the scaffolding of the painting. It only needed a few pieces of opaque blue and one eye to become a Pinocchio, just as Whitten made his painting a self-portrait by merely collaging two glass lenses into the middle of a mosaic of twinkling acrylic tesserae.

Another painting I’ve been thinking about is by Dorothea Tanning, one of the overlooked so-called “Women Surrealists.”  I’d never paid much attention to Tanning; but last year at the 2019 Armory show, the Alison Jacques Gallery presented her “historical works.” Tanning’s 1976 painting Evening in Sedona, in particular, really got to me.

Dorothea Tanning, Evening in Sedona, 1976, oil on canvas, 44 7/8 x 57 1/2 inches

I find something irresistible in the strange shape created by the figure and the massive dog with his hidden dark eyes (or are there two dogs?) against the brooding sky. Maybe because being cooped up in an apartment makes me crave the natural world, I’m discovering that odd creatures are spontaneously appearing in my paintings and connecting to each other in unexpected ways. This merging speaks to me, and obviously to Tanning too, who was quoted as saying “I think I have gone over, to a place where one no longer faces identities at all.”

The enforced isolation, and a social life that exists in two dimensions, have made me appreciate the sight of living forms draped over each other, as in Tanning’s painting but also as in this new one of mine:

Barbara Friedman, Cross Purposes, 2020, oil on linen, 51 x 25 ¼ inches

This sense of endless time has made me more patient. It is easier for me to wait for incidents and imagery to reveal themselves though my process.  On page 120 of Notes from the Woodshed, Whitten writes, “I want this raw material to be my playpen… a means of doing anything I wish…to exercise every fantasy, myth, every feeling of the absurd within my grasp.”  I want all that too. During this chapter of such uncertainty, I let forms appear in their own time. They keep me centered and hold each other close.

Barbara Friedman, Family Man, 2020, watercolor on paper, 16 x 12 inches

Barbara Friedman makes painterly paintings of unreliable narrators in scenarios that are unsettling both narratively and formally. Reviews of her work have appeared in the New York Times, the New York Sun, The Irish Times, Newsday, Art in America, ARTS Magazine, and Artweek. She lives, paints and teaches in New York City where she has been a professor of art at Pace University since 1983.

HYPERALLERGIC

A View From the Easel During Times of Quarantine

July 3, 2020

This is the 167th installment of a series in which artists send in a photo and a description of their workspace. In light of COVID-19, we’ve asked participants to reflect on how the pandemic has changed their studio space and/or if they are focusing on particular projects while quarantining. 

Barbara Friedman, Manhattan, New York

My studio is in our Financial District apartment in downtown Manhattan. The building is 300 yards from the World Trade Center, and given that we moved in a year before 9/11, I have always found the location uncanny. The studio’s windows take in the Federal Reserve, Morgan Chase, and, down the street, the Stock Exchange. What’s an art studio doing here? It’s that much weirder these days when our apartment has become the limits of our world. But I’m grateful for this place to work, and my studio has made itself the center of the home. My husband and I use it as a makeshift gym every morning; in other ways, too, it’s a harbor that overflows. This photograph captures its surreality — men working outside windows (Federal Reserve beyond them); paintings; laptop; books; camera; tripod; severed doll’s head — corralled chaos that finds its way into the work I’ve been doing. During the pandemic I have continued a series of dystopian oil paintings, but also recently started making amorphous watercolors. Both bodies of work are about spillage in every sense of that word, appropriately for the studio that my life has spilled into and will be flowing through for who knows how long.

Jason McCoy Gallery

Drawing Challenge X

June 17, 2020

We are thrilled to announce Nandini Bagla Chirimar, Barbara Friedman and Helen Oji as the featured contestants of our Drawing Challenge X which was inspired by words from Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail," written on 16 April 1963. We would like to thank the artist Tony Moore for submitting these lines.

"History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helped to perpetuate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it."

- Martin Luther King, Jr., 1963 -

Barbara Friedman, Pass the Duck, 2020, watercolor and oil on paper, 12 x 16 inches

“I started with amorphous pools of pigment and worked toward Martin Luther King's words, "caught in an inescapable network of mutuality." The duck came first. Only then did I find the two faces on both sides of the negative space surrounding the duck. The faces are close, like people's heads in "Pass the Orange," where you hold an orange under your chin and then tuck it under the next player's chin. Only now it's mouth to mouth, and the orange is a little duck. The game is being played as a game of social mutuality. You have to keep from hurting this living thing but you also have to bring it to someone else who won't hurt it. There's a fine line between doing your share and giving another person your share to do. The image connects with King's alert to that ambiguity between taking responsibility and shifting responsibility, an ambiguity also reflected in the title with its echo of "pass the buck."

- Barbara Friedman, 2020
www.barbarafriedmanpaintings.com

Painters on Paintings

Barbara Friedman on Lisa Yuskavage and “Harnessing Shame”

January 19, 2015

Lisa Yuskavage, Faucet, 1995, Oil on linen. 72 x 60 inches

“Okay, go ahead and look all you want, but it’s going to be unpleasant for both of us.”
– Lisa Yuskavage in an interview with Mónica de la Torre in Bomb magazine[i]

I was reminded of the mutual discomfort of intense looking when I heard a friend talking about the movie Tiny Furniture. He resented having been “made to look” at the character that Lena Dunham played.

Maybe it’s no coincidence that when Lena Dunham was eight years old her mother took her to visit Lisa Yuskavage’s studio,[ii] because Yuskavage’s paintings subject their viewer to that same close and unbudging attention, so that you feel you’re being made to look.

To me, that’s what’s wonderful about Yuskavage’s paintings. I can’t remember the first one I saw or how old I was, but I loved how ferociously it held my eyes. (Then again I like having salt rubbed in my wounds.) Here was an allegory of discontent with its own twisted beauty; a feminist Pontormo as funny and sad as it was smutty.

In her Bomb interview Yuskavage elaborates on the relationship between the paintings and her subject matter. “I saw them [the paintings themselves] as similar to a pubescent girl who does not like to be looked at, but can’t help but being pert and vulnerable at the same time. The images are representations of what the paintings would look like if they were to become human.” [iii]

Identification is a complex process where Yuskavage’s paintings are concerned. She pictures the paintings identifying with their own subjects; at the same time Yuskavage looks like many of the figures she paints. For an invitation to one of her shows she even used a photograph of herself, backlit by a very red setting sun, and it could have passed for one of her paintings.

Many contemporary women artists have reclaimed the depiction of the female nude as Yuskavage does. And many of today’s painters combine high and low sources: in her case, soft porn filtered through Baroque and Color Field painting. But few other artists allow the image that results to be as insistently human.   Yuskavage has said that “for the purposes of working, harnessing the shame is about being vulnerable to the creative process”[iv] – the painful content leading to a more unmediated presentation.

Then too there aren’t many other artists who handle paint with the same dexterity. Yuskavage’s reverence for her medium has been much remarked upon, and it should be. Her Bonnard-like palette with its lemon yellows, lavenders, magentas, and lime greens; with her sumptuous modernist painterliness; her old-master rendering techniques; her candied chiaroscuro and over-the-top highlights: In Yuskavage’s paintings these make for a perfect marriage between form and content.

Consider the way that Yuskavage uses Rembrandt’s disappearing edges to underscore her characters’ pained exhibitionism. Her subjects put themselves on display, but parts of them always seem to fade away in the surrounding haze. The poignant coral-colored painting Faucet stages the fading-away lusciously, bathing the young woman it represents in a peachy sfumato. I wonder what Rothko would have thought of this candied monochrome. Would he recognize himself even a little in its near-heavenly luminosity? He might scorn the comparison, but I see the kinship between them.

Not only the disappearing edges problematize the Faucet girl’s body. There is a disturbing tension between how delicately Yuskavage paints the girl’s stomach and how distended it is. It’s also disturbing that the painting is cropped just above the girl’s crotch, and the cropping is certainly deliberate. It’s interesting to note, as a companion to Faucet, that in the much later Triptych a woman’s crotch stands center-stage, while the rest of her body is barely visible. And speaking of missing parts: we only see one of the Faucet girl’s eyes, and one ear. These are parts of her standing in for the girl not as formalized synecdoche but in a metaphorical reminder that we’re not looking at all of her.

I found it very hard to choose which of Yuskavage’s pieces to focus on in this essay. I’m captivated in one way by the early poisonously-sweet monochromes like Faucet – those paintings have a singular power – in another way by the ones that came slightly later, likeGood Evening, Hamass, with the lurid glory of their flamboyant skies, their orgasmic sunsets, and the bouquets reminiscent of Odilon Redon’s hallucinatory flower pastels. Then there are the more complex, multi-figured dramas of recent epics like Triptych, with its forbidding onlookers and to-die-for greens.

In fact a lot of what I love in Lisa Yuskavage’s work is not contained in Faucet, but I choseFaucet because it’s the one in which I see my teenage self. The young woman is wearing a shrug that covers her rounded shoulders, her barely visible arms, and not much more. Her breasts are heavy and lopsided and their nipples point in different directions. The faucet high above the girl points one way and its shadow points askew, in an echo of her breasts, as if the viewer needed to be reminded that nipples are faucets. Hard to see, hard to be seen: embarrassment all round.

I think of my 19-year-old boyfriend’s ridiculous poem for English class, “Her Breasts were Larger when We Met,” right after I’d had a breast reduction. Here I was, confused by my out-of-control body, and he got creative about how he felt looking at it.

But then Yuskavage describes embarrassment as a clarifying agent. Maybe Lena Dunham would agree. I know I do. And Faucet in all its peek-between-your-fingers awkwardness invites me to keep staring, however embarrassed I am.

Barbara Friedman, Head below Collar (Big Collar 7), 2014, Oil on linen, 60 x 48 inches

[i] Mónica de la Torre, “Lisa Yuskavage,” Bomb 117 (Fall 2011), p. 86.
[ii] Calvin Tomkins, “A Doll’s House,” The New Yorker, December 10, 2012, p. 34.
[iii] De la Torre, “Lisa Yuskavage,” p. 86.
[iv] Ibid.