Selected Essays & Reviews
RESONANCES:
A conversation between Timothy Anglin Burgard and Darren Waterston
Timothy Anglin Burgard: You are a native Californian, born in Fresno, educated at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, and currently living in San Francisco. California, more than any other region of the United States, has long been the locus for idealized projections of the American landscape. And yet, while still attending art school in Los Angeles, you studied at the Academie der Kunst in Berlin and the Fachhochschule fur Kunst in Munster. How has your understanding of pictorial space been shaped by your experience of landscape in America and Europe, and by your study of their respective art historical landscape traditions?
Darren Waterston: “I have always been fascinated by the construction of pictorial space and the artifice of painted space, particularly as manifested in the evolution of landscape art. I think one key distinction between the European and American traditions of landscape painting is that the European landscape addressed the great literary, historical, and religious themes, while the Hudson River School landscape painters engaged in documenting the grandeur of the expansive American territories. Landscape for the new nation was alternately prosaic or poetic, but it was always possessive. It was a very territorial and entitled view of nature. This was very different from the European traditions of landscape painting, particularly the northern schools of Flanders and Germany, which have had a greater influence on my own work.”
“During my studies in Germany in the 1980s, I discovered the early sixteenth-century Bavarian painter Albrecht Altdorfer. His work was a revelation to me, as he moved landscape from its traditionally marginal or supplementary role to the center of the pictorial field and artistic consciousness. This emergence of landscape as an independent genre profoundly effected both painting and perception. It was Altdorfer’s remoteness and his departure from conventional realism that struck me. My earlier work was very influenced by this: nature was carefully observed, but not directly depicted, and it always retained a kind of visual instability.”
“One nineteenth-century American painter who did have a great impact on my early artistic development was Albert Pinkham Ryder. He idiosyncratically depicted a mythological space—often brooding and apocalyptic— in which nature became a point of departure for a different type of psychological investigation. Ryder’s work also inspired my interest in the representation of light, refraction, and atmosphere, all of which have been consistent concerns in my work.”
TAB: Despite your studies in Europe, your work seems especially sensitive to the pictorial traditions of Japanese art. I am thinking of your use of calligraphic brushwork, silhouettes that evoke rather than describe, and a striking use of positive/negative space and isometric perspective. How has your understanding of Japanese art shaped your thinking regarding non-Asian perceptions of representation, abstraction, and spirituality?
DW: “I have most consistently referred to the art of Edo Period (1603–1867) Japan in my work. Within this broad period of Japanese history, the Nanga painting genre has had the greatest influence on me. While the paintings often seem to lack an obvious narrative, they are compelling on many levels. A Nanga landscape presents a formal construction of a contemplative space in which nature is present, but is not an active protagonist. Often the entire pictorial space is filled with imagery, but only very subtle activity can be discerned. Sometimes the passage of time is expressed through shadow, water trickling, mist, or blowing leaves. There is nothing sentimental or idealized—it is a complete distillation. The Japanese conception of nature does not point beyond itself towards a spiritual reality. Nothing extends beyond what is seen, and there is no other dimension. What is material is also spiritual, even if the ‘spiritual’ is not readily apparent. The material and the immaterial are completely unified.”
“I also share the deep-rooted Japanese fascination with the grotesque, the bizarre, and the deformed— the stylization and contortion of nature. There is great beauty in this imperfection. It allows a way into—and out of—both nature and art. This is the concept of wabi-sabi: a Japanese aesthetic derived from the Buddhist assertion of impermanence. It is centered on an acceptance of the belief that nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect. I am always wary of an idealized perfection, so I prefer to alter the appearance of visual harmony by disfiguring it in some way. For example, I will render a seductive liminal scape only to corrupt it with a disembodied, corporeal gesture, or with an acidic wash, drip, or smudge. I think the most compelling forms are to be found in the grotesque, the mutating, and the improvisational.”
TAB: Although you live and work in San Francisco, I know that your experience of nature while visiting your house in Canada has played a formative role in your work. I find it ironic that many people feel compelled to travel to a distant locale to ‘see’ and experience nature with greater clarity, when your work suggests that nature is always with us—and within us. Do you feel that the conventional distinction made between animate and inanimate nature constitutes a false dichotomy, and that all of nature is alive—or perhaps even sentient—in ways that lie beyond our comprehension?
DW: “In the modern West, ‘nature’ is perceived and categorized as something or someplace outside of ourselves. The genre of landscape emerged only when our primal relationship to nature was lost and we found ourselves outside of nature, viewing it as a spectator. In this context, the representation of nature in art is meant to compensate us for our distance from nature as a lost source of the spiritual. The landscape—both in the world and in art— thus becomes a receptacle for—and projection of—our spiritual longings and desires. But it’s a very tricky thing, this loss and redemption through representation. Art should not deceive us into thinking that we are somehow making contact with nature or even with ourselves. Do we expect a transformative experience that will reveal something meaningful about nature, or art, or ourselves? Are we looking through a window or into a mirror?”
“I am deeply interested in—and connected to—nature, but I don’t have a romantic, fetishized relationship with it, and I don’t see it as an avenue of escape. My contact with nature allows me to focus my attention, to open all my sensory channels, and to register my place in it. It facilitates a shift from looking to seeing, as it is a place of study and contemplation. The abstraction in my work is derived from a rigorous observation of all natural phenomena, including the cyclical growth, evolution, and decay of the natural worlds without—and within—our own bodies. Either we are nature or we are seeking a lost nature. My work seeks to determine which of these possibilities holds greater relevance and potential.”
TAB: While you have acknowledged a debt to traditional landscape painting, your works appear to have gradually evolved towards capturing internal landscapes or mindscapes. The modernist roots of this exploration may be traced to the works of artists such as Frantisek Kupka and Wasily Kandinsky, who you have specifically cited as sources of inspiration. Have these artists been more meaningful to you for their role in intellectually deconstructing physical reality and pictorial conventions, or for their role in creating new visual vocabularies for emotional or psychological states—for transforming the physical into the metaphysical?
DW: “In my mid-twenties, I was very intent on my research in Theosophy and Eastern mystical traditions. Theosophy provided me with a new, synthetic way of looking at things, shifting my awareness to an underlying unity that linked otherwise disparate beliefs. Soon afterwards, I began to examine the works of Kupka, Kandinsky, and Mondrian, and found that they shared strong Theosophical ties. They commenced as representational painters, but gradually relinquished recognizable forms drawn from the external world in favor of complex improvisations that mirrored internal worlds. I began to explore ways to articulate intangible emotional states through visual forms, realizing that the physical traces of paint on a canvas could potentially hold an emotional resonance. This was enormously compelling to me.”
“The philosophical underpinnings of the work of Kupka, Kandinsky, and Mondrian also shaped my early ideas about the transformative potential of art and its potential impact on a receptive viewer. I set out to construct illusionary spaces that subverted or shattered the conventional picture plane, and that hinted at another dimension or reality, or a sensation of the infinite. Expressing the nature of this ineffable space requires abstraction, even when it is not labeled or recognized as such. I perceive this type of abstraction to be present just as much in a Fra Angelico sky as in a Kupka cosmological swirl. What remains fascinating to me is that so much of this exploration has occurred in paint.“
TAB: For much of the 20th century, the relationship between representation and abstraction was perceived as oppositional, if not mutually exclusive. However, your work seems to thrive on the permeable border between representation and abstraction. Are you drawing attention to these historical polarities, or are you interested in challenging their underlying assumptions?
DW: “What we perceive as ‘real’ or representational is actually incredibly mutable. Abstraction is inherent in every aspect of nature. As soon as we attempt to recognize or to represent what we think we see, a process of abstraction begins. Early abstractionists understood that ‘reality’ is inherently unstable because it can only be apprehended through the faculties of perception. Perception is not merely the physical registration of light, sound, or scent. The moving body and its organs shape sensory experiences to a human scale, and the brain then schematizes and processes them in ways that are quite distinct from the original raw data.”
“We cannot observe the world without changing it, and everything in the world is constantly evolving or dissolving. When I am looking at, say, a fir tree, perceptions shift, and it quickly becomes a complex system of forms, patterns, and repetitions: countless branches with countless cones and needles on each branch. Then it shifts again and it is purely abstracted: nameless. This is also the act of painting. The act of seeing is an interrelational experience because we are taking in everything around us. We are always relating to what is situated on the edge of our vision or comprehension. It is impossible to isolate 'the tree.' We are always relating ‘the tree’ to its immediate and peripheral surroundings—not to mention the numerous conceptions of a ‘tree’ that we access via memory.”
“So much of my artistic practice is about trying to disengage from material embodiment, to ‘represent’ that disengagement, if you will. I want my paintings to draw attention to the inherent, deconstructed nature of all things—to the multiplicity of our visions and the mutability of our perceptions. But the paradox is that I am deeply involved and implicated in the materiality of my work: my paints are irreducibly earthly solids and fluids.”
TAB: Much of your imagery has been described as ‘surreal,’ ostensibly because it seems to have no counterpart in the visible world. Does the perception of the visible world as 'real' and imagined or sensed worlds as ‘surreal’ strike you as a false dichotomy?
DW: “What we perceive as reality is in fact a product of the imagination as it attempts to give form and meaning to the world. Everyone’s reality is a mutable and malleable construct. When artists create new visual metaphors to reveal the invisible, they often are mischaracterized as being surrealists. Surreal art has come to mean anything that lies outside of standard pictorial conventions for representation, and there is a whole vocabulary of ‘surrealist’ stereotypes. In this way, the term ‘surreal’ has been emptied of its originally revolutionary content and rendered banal. But the original intent of the surrealist program was to liberate both the individual and society by giving visual and literary form to an exciting new interpenetration of waking and dream states.”
“I am always suspicious of dualistic definitions, particularly when it comes to the complexity of perception and what we perceive as ‘real’ or ‘unreal.’ For me, the creative act encompasses multiple fields of perception—not just the visible. Memory perception, intuitive perception, and sensory perception all play an essential role. Perhaps reality is a socialized event in which groups of people feel compelled to collectively decide what they identify as 'real.' I think reality inherently encompasses what many would identify as the ‘surreal.’”
TAB: You have described your desire to capture peripheral phenomena and bring them into the picture as follows: “I imagine I’m in the middle of a cylindrical enclosure, turning, searching. I stop randomly at one point and begin to paint there.” On a conceptual level, this hyperawareness of three-dimensional space evokes the omniscient, all-seeing view of a creator. On a more pragmatic level, this perspective would seem to transform the canvas into a translucent membrane that traps or renders visible otherwise unseen objects and forces. Do you see your paintings as metaphors for the act of seeing itself—and for heightened perception?
DW: “When I am working, there are countless events that take place in paint; these events enter into my field of awareness and I decide whether—and how—to respond to them. I am watching and waiting all the time. There is an elevated sense of immediacy and involvement, even in the act of waiting.”
“I do believe that art has the potential for expanding our perceptions of the numerous realities that constitute the universe. The optical world gives us information that we perceive as concrete, but the relationship between what we see and what we know is never absolute. Art can disengage visual logic and force us to use normally un-accessed channels of heightened perception. I am interested in the unstable boundary between the subject and the setting, if those two entities even exist at all. I see my paintings as an accumulation, recording multiple layers of visual information that have mutable boundaries.”
TAB: Your work often juxtaposes emphatically physical touches of two-dimensional, opaque pigment with seemingly three-dimensional, ethereal shapes defined by immaterial light. This juxtaposition renders explicit the alchemical process by which paint is transformed into image, but does it also illuminate the tension between the prosaic material world and the poetic immaterial world, as well as the transformation of action into thought, or matter into spirit, or light into enlightenment? Do you conceive of your work as a site for physical experience and spiritual enlightenment?
DW: “My paintings are the physical traces of an event. They are the distillation of a cognitive experience in perception, sensation, and intuition. It is an act of seeing, breathing, hearing, and feeling—but it is also an act of devotion. Sometimes through this devotion, there can be a complete disassociation of self, or rather the self surrenders to the sublimity of the non-self. These rare moments of sublime transcendence are not related to the 18th century conception of a sublime nature that instilled awe and fear in its viewers. This was the sublime that had the power to compel and, ultimately, to destroy us.”
“I am more interested in the experiences that exceed the human mind’s capacity to capture them in visual or verbal representations. In my work, I am interested in pointing towards that which is incomprehensible and, at times, beautiful and terrifying. The viewer will have his or her own experience of the work, informed by what only they can bring to it. Every work of art is multivalent, and it is difficult enough for artists to shape their own experiences and visions, let alone those of their viewers.”
TAB: Transparency is a significant element in your work—so much so that it seems to be a major protagonist in its own right. It often seems to appear in the form of protean and permeable molecules, cells, and liquids. Do you perceive the human body as being equally permeable to both physical and emotional resonances? Are you conceiving of the canvas as a skin or membrane that renders visible otherwise invisible—or at least unobserved—forces?
DW: “I do consider transparency, inversion, and projection in relation to my work. There are tangible substances that pass through us, the essential ingredients and by-products of the body—blood, urine, and tears. Then there are the intangible things the body gives up—speech, emotions, and a glance. Certain complex characteristics of the embodied human have no known physical location or mechanism. Certainly there is no physical site for something like memory, which I believe extends far back beyond an individual's lived experience.”
“A human being is a breathing, seeing, smelling, hearing, touching, tasting, desiring, and self-replicating creature. We project and we absorb. We have an outside surface and an inside surface and perhaps art is a way to pass through these layers or to reverse these two bodily linings, turning the body inside out. Like a canvas, the body is permeable—absorbing and exuding, opaque and translucent, resisting and revealing.”
TAB: You have stated of your work that, “if you turned your head, the painting might keep evolving.” This biological conception suggests that your work metaphorically encompasses the organic cycles of birth, growth, transformation, death, and rebirth. Rather than depicting a specific subject or object, the emphasis seems to be on the mutable process of becoming, rather than the fixed state of being. Does this conception of your work as being in a constant state of flux evade or preclude the possibility of specific meaning or interpretation?
DW: “My paintings are a momentary coalescing of qualities that are inherently unstable: perception, reality, and meaning. My works can function as metaphors for—or mediations on—transience and impermanence, but any meaning that I may initially imbue them with is as volatile as the materials of which they are made. I work from a highly contingent, intuitive framework that does not always immediately render specific meaning to me, let alone to the viewer. Painting is compelling to me because it can evoke endless possibilities of meaning, interpretation, and understanding that are different from my own.”
TAB: Although the practice is rare today, like artists of the past you arranged to observe a human autopsy. According to your description of this procedure, the subject’s chest cavity was cut open, exposing the internal organs, and his brain was removed and placed in a tray. Did this experience foster disillusionment or a greater sense of wonder regarding the seen and the unseen—the nexus of physical matter, mental consciousness, and intangible spirit that renders us human?
DW: “The autopsy I witnessed was an extraordinarily complex and emotionally demanding experience that raised many unanticipated philosophical and ethical questions. An autopsy is the most extreme form of physical intimacy imaginable, but it is one-sided, and not at all benevolent. Despite my deep veneration for the bodily remains, I found it impossible to escape the sense of violation—or even violence—inherent in the process. The most unsettling aspect was not the graphic physicality of the corpse, but rather the feeling that I was an intruder in another human being’s recently vacated body. This young man, who was alive only hours before, had been transformed from a sentient being into a scientific subject, incapable of granting permission—or forgiveness—to his interrogators, I being one of them.”
“This first-hand experience radically altered my previous perceptions of interior and exterior and the thin membrane that separates the two. What leaves the privacy of the human interior and enters the visible world—consciously or unconsciously—is simultaneously abstract and concrete, symbolic and scientific, dangerous and familiar, mysterious and ordinary, sacred and profane. Despite its infinite complexities, the interior of the body cannot account for what is invisible in the body: the human capacity for thought, language, emotions, and spirit.”
TAB: Linking the visual and the visceral, you have likened your painting materials to “visceral fluids that the body gives up like blood, urine, bile, semen or even tears.” Similarly, in describing the painting process, you observed: “When depicting something representational, whether it be a fern, insect or body part, I want each thing to feel as if it is made up of the same substance, the same lump of sod.” This leveling perspective is reminiscent of the vanitas worldview shared by Hieronymous Bosch or Pieter Breughel, who recorded artificial hierarchies of value, but also subverted them by reminding the viewer that all matter can be reduced to its lowest common denominator. Do you view this fundamental truth of the human condition from a positive, negative, or merely clinical perspective?
DW: “Our bodies are made up of liquids and solids. The idea of all matter, corporeal or otherwise, being reduced to its lowest common denominator has its origins in alchemy. Materia prima is an alchemic term describing matter that has been broken down to its most basic form. It is chaotic and volatile. It is all that is fecund, fetid, and rotting, yet it is ripe with potentiality and possibility. It is the genesis of all matter. In alchemy, that which is putrefied goes through a process of transmutation that changes the materia prima into gold or mercury. In many ways, this recalls the artist’s preoccupation with his or her materials, always working towards a negotiated transmutation of solid and liquid earth pigments into ‘gold.’”
“Historically, alchemy has existed in a liminal state situated somewhere between magic and science. However, alchemy was a discipline characterized by systemic and rational thought, internal logic, and an experimental spirit. It developed a system of analogies and correspondences that facilitated the discovery of certain otherwise hidden properties of materials, even though the explanations it gave may now seem irrelevant or inaccurate.”
“Alchemic terminology can be useful in describing what takes place in the painter’s studio as well. It can be used as a poetic way of describing the experiential painting process—the prefiguration and formation that occurs—without fully predicting the results of its experiences. Painting has a natural affinity with the concept of transmutation because there is the expectation that at some point paint will cease to be paint and become something else entirely. Perhaps painting is the great accomplishment of alchemy. Paint itself holds the possibility of meaning, waiting to signify.”
Timothy Anglin Burgard