{"id":1916,"date":"2010-12-02T03:12:36","date_gmt":"2010-12-02T03:12:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/173.254.55.177\/~paintiu3\/?p=1916"},"modified":"2010-12-02T03:12:36","modified_gmt":"2010-12-02T03:12:36","slug":"interview-with-stuart-shils","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/paintingperceptions.com\/interview-with-stuart-shils\/","title":{"rendered":"Interview with Stuart Shils"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\nStuart Shils 2010<\/p>\n

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“If the painter is open to the world, everything becomes grist for the mill, even things one doesn\u2019t expect or even doesn\u2019t consciously like or want. It\u2019s not a matter of what is \u201cimportant\u201d in the terms of the \u201creal\u201d world \u2013 money, new car, Armani suit. Maybe painters, poets and dreamers fill their head with very ordinary things that hit us like big waves \u2013 fleeting light on the sidewalk is a big deal as can how a tree in late October looks though a steamed up window after getting out of the shower on a cold morning. We really want the ordinary and unexpected to visually stop us dead in our tracks.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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Painting Perceptions is very fortunate to have Stuart Shils<\/a> agree to this interview and to share with us his influences, process and his many profound insights into perceptual painting.<\/p>\n

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(Please note: for anyone possibly interested in a workshop with Stuart Shils in San Diego, hopefully sometime in the late spring or early summer 2011 please email me<\/a> for leave a comment with this post. You may also find out information on workshops with him through Stuart Shils’ website<\/a>)
\nThis interview was conducted via email with Larry Groff (LG) and Stuart Shils (SS)<\/p>\n

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LG<\/strong> You studied at Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in the late 70’s setting and your work has evolved from a traditional style to a more Modernist sensibility. Who and\/or what were some of the greatest influences in shaping your growth as a painter?.<\/em><\/p>\n

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SS<\/strong> Influences? Oh, where to even begin except in the fields of early memory. Cinematic glimpses and cropped sequences of very ordinary moments from childhood are like a string of mystical pearls worn close to the chest, whose feeling and luminosity precede who actually were formal \u201cteachers\u201d; and all this long before going to museums, galleries or even thinking about making \u201cart\u201d. What really matters? – the surface and color of scrambled eggs that came with a breakfast one morning while with my parents in Atlantic City when I was quite young; the passion with which my grandfather ate fresh sliced oranges, the juice dripping down his chin; the light coming through someone\u2019s hair in French class in 8th grade; discovering the texture and structure of an opening, crashing chord on the B side of a Kinks hit when I was 13.<\/p>\n

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\n(click for larger view – true all images in this article)<\/p>\n

As painters we all have the equivalent of parental figures whose shadows are long and persuasive and often very problematic, and then after one leaves home (which is never quite a clean cut done deal anyway) a multitude of other influences accumulate like an evolving stamp collection.\u00a0 And there are chemical\u00a0actions and reactions within the mix, which is really the way it has to be if you are going to be open and also passionate. What might be unassailable truth and absolute certainty one day, five years later may not even be part of the conversation. If the painter is open to the world, everything becomes grist for the mill, even things one doesn\u2019t expect or even doesn\u2019t consciously like or want. It\u2019s not a matter of what is \u201cimportant\u201d in the terms of the \u201creal\u201d world \u2013 money, new car, Armani suit. Maybe painters, poets and dreamers fill their head with very ordinary things that hit us like big waves \u2013 fleeting light on the sidewalk is a big deal as can how a tree in late October looks though a steamed up window after getting out of the shower on a cold morning. We really want the ordinary and unexpected to visually stop us dead in our tracks.<\/p>\n

In terms of actual teachers, my initial and very powerful influences were (in this order): Doris Staffel, Francis Tucker, Arthur De Costa and Seymour Remenick, most of whom almost no one beyond Philadelphia or New York will have heard of, they were not hipsters or New York luminaries and some even without extensive exhibition credentials. But that sort of thing is irrelevant and on me, each in their way, left a distinctive impression. And it was often not as one would expect. For instance, Arthur De Costa was a very traditionally oriented painter and I remember as my work began to change in the years following PAFA where I was a conservatively minded student, I spoke with someone who had been a member of another camp at school and hostilely disliked my teacher on ideological grounds (we were all very factionalized politically), and he said sarcastically, well I saw your new painting and I wonder what your De Costa\u00a0thinks of what has become of you!\u00a0 Meaning, now that I had departed from the obvious or more superficial sprit of De Costa\u2019s work, he would have disapproved. But in fact, to the contrary, over that first decade out of school, De Costa was extremely encouraging, not at all trying to keep me tethered to his manner or point of view. What kind of parent wants the children to be just like him or her?<\/p>\n

I suppose in terms of close painter friends whose spirits or works were influential, (while there was Sam Clayton when I was a student), perhaps in the early years out of school the most profound influence was Bill Scott, the first abstract painter (in this case I mean specifically someone who didn\u2019t make paintings of \u201cthings\u201d) I got to know well and whose sensibility and use of form helped reveal a still hidden world to my eyes. Remember that as a student I really thought abstraction (non objective painting) was a bunch of nonsense and the work of disingenuous intentions. Within my circle there was a kind of historical\/fundamentalist zeal, we thought (so to speak) that God was on our side, and for the most part we didn\u2019t look at anything after Courbet. Ok, Sargent was a big deal to us, and maybe occasionally Edward Hopper but he seemed (then) lightweight compared to Dosso Dossi or Carolus Duran!<\/p>\n

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In the early 90\u2019s not long after we had met, I was walking with Bill through the Princeton Museum and he pointed to a Guston from the abstract gestural period, a beautiful golden\/ochre-ish painting, the sort of thing I never<\/em> looked at (then), but for whatever reasons my eyes were receptive and it struck me as a lyrical and eloquent canvas, obviously not \u201cabout\u201d something, but very much about itself (as all good painting must be). Getting to know Bill\u2019s work and his point of view really turned my head around with regard to re evaluating how to look at paintings and beginning to realize that words like abstract<\/em> and realistic<\/em> were being used as ideological clubs by perhaps frustrated people and really didn\u2019t really define the crux and, were not such useful dichotomies. And as Whistler said, there are only two kinds of paintings, good ones and bad ones.<\/p>\n

In more recent years, the work of Ken Kewley has been a revelation. And not in the most obvious ways with regard to color and composition, although that of course; but the exuberance and optimism that saturates the work strikes me as a much needed reminder of many things. Over the years, dealing with the market place, galleries, considering the words of critics and analysts, listening to what this one or that one likes or wants, it\u2019s possible to forget what the original mission was, why we enter this path in the first place. To me, Ken\u2019s work floats in a rare ether of sustained delight far, far from that \u201creal\u201d world madness (that we would all do better to forget<\/em> about), and his visual cultivation and poetry strike at the heart of joy and deep feeling. Big things come in small packages, one just has to take time to slow down and tune in.<\/p>\n

But in addition to all this, there was something else looming large. For the first many, many years out of school I worked primarily outside (absorbing and translating form as a quality of abstraction), and exposure to the light of day<\/em> had enormous impact, something that I\u2019ll try to describe. The accumulation of sensory experience, the layering of all those hits from going out every day and just looking and dreaming into visual time and into the palpability of painted space, just letting the eyes and mind wrap themselves around form in air and light space, and letting all of that get wrapped around the eyes, contributed to an encyclopedic repository of visual resonances, (packed tightly like the veneers of baltic birch plywood), that were beginning to add up to something beyond just painting objects or scenes. When out on the street painting buildings, or in the landscape painting fields, wrestling with converting it all into two-dimensional form took over as a process of abstraction first, and pulled my mind away from what the things\/objects were. And over those years, the main priority became, almost without even thinking about it, how to organize forms within the two dimensional working space; in other words, first and foremost, how\u00a0to compose, not \u201chow to\u201d paint a house.\u00a0 It was like going all the time to the gym, constantly working, and then one day you realize you have so much more endurance or stamina, and that the deltoids now really have a different articulation. But this is for the eyes not for the pectorals or deltoids. The process of sustained work is transformative, and the things that go through our minds are like a daily litany – where are the lights, where are the darks, what colors are they, what shape are they and, where and what are their edges like? And, how does it all fit together and maybe most importantly, what does it feel like and how do you feel about it?<\/p>\n

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But for me this process is not over, and I tell my young\u00a0students here that the only difference between us is that I have made more paintings but please<\/em> don\u2019t think that I really have any idea what I\u2019m doing. Just like them, I\u2019m also on the side of the mountain, hooked up to ropes, hoping the landslide doesn\u2019t come or if it does, to ride it out. Over the last 20 years, the force and challenges of the landscape itself, being in it and having to deal with its complexity – (and i don\u2019t mean landscape as a calendar clich\u00e9, I\u2019m thinking more as a formal abstraction and along the lines of massive sensory impact) \u2013 has been the<\/em> greatest influence, my most<\/em> significant teacher. It was gradual, and some things came first, without which I would not have been a position to fully engage or understand. 13 summers on the Irish coast really blew my fuse box off the wall (in the best sense) and the timing was perfect. Even though I had been outside for 12 years already, It seemed at first like a ridiculously difficult undertaking, and on arriving there i soon realized that I had a choice – either I was going to stay and put myself in front of it and risk being changed, blown over, or broken in two – or more likely, as it slowly appeared, initiated into some quality of relationship whose time had come. It\u2019s weight, pulse, elegance and mystery, both informed and reassembled my expectations about everything.
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On that coast, I laid myself out like on the doormat of the palace for years (or even I was the doormat itself sometimes), as a receptive servant, not as someone who has come there to make nice pictures to take back to galleries waiting to sell, not at all that.\u00a0 (Actually when painting gets to that point, although we could make a list of successful painters we know working with market mania production in mind and making lots of money from it), actually, when things begin to sell, it\u2019s time for some sober interrogation and a step back. My dealers of course would kill<\/em> me for making such a statement, but it\u2019s a very tricky, double-edged sword that one must<\/em> learn how to handle to one\u2019s advantage. We know that the market place is a blessing and a curse and the most important thing is not to be at all influenced by what is happening out there and to find the light inside and follow it fiercely because once it\u2019s lost it may be a long time if at all before it comes back.)<\/p>\n

So to extend the discussion on influence, the entire knot of experience on that coast eventually had two sides, ironically there was another aspect to it\u2019s teaching and that relates (very briefly for here) to why I had to stop going there, and for now to leave behind that extended train thought. In 2006, by necessity, much of it related to my responses to market\/dealer expectations, and to a certain kind of obsession among painters over this place (that I was perhaps partially responsible for developing) the whole business of making images to be sent to the market place became anathema as did the issue of speculation about what anyone would like. Actually, before then I had never given such things a moment\u2019s notice, and the idea of painting speculatively for the market (whatever that is) seemed way off. To make paintings about what someone else likes?, come on! I really didn\u2019t want to hear anymore about what this one or that one thought about my work and, I sensed it was time to close the door to the interior of my own passions. I knew who my friends were and weren\u2019t and, that the holiness of the conversation underway for 13 years on that secluded coast was threatened. So, time to change paths.<\/p>\n

BUT I would never have anticipated that the next piece to come along, would once again raise the bar of ambition and desire so high, and that the dry, chromatic airspace as well as the very solid forms of Umbria and Tuscany in the summer months, would haul my eyes into an opera as different as day is from night. Look, it\u2019s not because these places are \u201cpretty\u201d or quaint that I go, but because something visual happens there (like a chemistry between people in love) and I go to sit still in a few spots with brush or pencil in hand, for sustained exposure, for extended opportunity to make inquiry.<\/p>\n

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\nLG<\/strong>
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What does working from direct observation in the landscape offer you that working in the studio cannot? I’ve seen where you make monoprints in the studio, could you ever paint from memory or drawings in the studio?<\/em><\/p>\n

SS <\/strong> For me, direct observation in front of nature has always been like the vast treasury in the kings palace, where the gold and precious metals dazzle the eye and we can go in there and bask. But NOT because of anything related to how pretty<\/em> nature is. So maybe this is a good point for a digression to explain a little bit. Years ago I heard the distinguished Irish archaeologist Dr. Seamus Caufield speak about the relationship between the meanings of \u201clandscape\u201d vs. \u201cscenery\u201d. As I remember he was describing a scene from years ago when a journalist, who was covering the evacuation of some local people from their homes on Horse Island near Belderrig in Co Mayo, asked a local man who was being moved away, \u201cwell how do you feel about leaving such beautiful scenery\u201d?\u00a0 And the local man looked around (to what would be to us a hauntingly beautiful place) and said, \u201cwell I don\u2019t see anything so good about this, the sea has taken two of my son\u2019s\u201d. The point Caufield was trying to impress upon us (this was at an opening for a local art show in County Mayo) was that landscape and scenery are two different animals. Landscape<\/em> has to do with deep, resonant power and scenery<\/em> is about pretty places, nice on the eyes. In this case, the Horse Island locale was landscape not<\/em> scenery. Some of us go out to connect with landscape resonance, which basically means mood, feeling and abstract strength not with pretty picture material. I\u2019ll go on more about this later. Look, for those of us working within the shadow of the mimetic impulse (making images that have close relationship to things seen), it is a perilous path, always risking pretty pictures, because as Wolf Kahn pointed out some years ago, lets face it, landscape is pretty; but as painters there is another agenda, we are after something else a well.<\/p>\n

So following school, I went out into the light of day, and for exposure to the kind of compression one encounters when working with the dynamics of immanent change and shifting time and light; within that something different from the studio can happen, much more urgent given the need to think and act fast. Of course we don\u2019t have to fall asleep in the studio, hardly, and that is the challenge. But for me, given my education and the academic state of mind, it required going outside where everything was in flux to realize that the quality of attack is mostly a state of mind and that it is we who determine how we paint and not something out there. (Francis Bacon was painting in the studio not in a snowstorm although his state of mind was often snowstorm like.)<\/p>\n

And I still go outside, but in fact now spend much time during the year working in the studio. A few years ago, with new questions rising to the surface, I had to try something different. When anything becomes too easy, I like to cut down a tree so that it falls across the path and then figure out how to get around it, regardless of whether it takes me off in a completely different direction. Everyone doesn\u2019t like that, but it\u2019s part of the fun. I still spend all the summer outside, and really need to, trying to understand what a place is made of, how am I to respond to it or to myself, and then what am I too make it into two dimensionally. It has nothing to do with the market place but with much broader requirements, with the need for renewal in front of something that can hold me accountable and responsible.<\/p>\n

As an art student, I was trained by looking at things and painting or drawing them, over and over and over for 5 years and somehow that extended ritual of looking, as a regimen, as a way of life, as a practice from which I could then grow into and out from, that idea of looking and making a direct response became an embedded\u00a0 habit, and has always been at the center of my concerns. And it is still the acid test in way, the struggle and joy to which I return in order to get straight and also very intoxicated at the same time.<\/p>\n

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What I\u2019ve learned along the way since leaving school, and I\u2019m relearning this all the time, is that I need to look at the painting as much as\u00a0looking \u201cout there\u201d.\u00a0 That first<\/em>, comes the painting, and that no list like accumulation of information is going to grab the eye unless eventually, or really from the very beginning, issues of \u201cform\u201d takes highest priority. From the first touch of the brush, in which the surface is divided between one part and another, the dynamics and structure of pictorial space (and I don\u2019t mean in any way related to realism) is more real than what is \u201cout there\u201d. But that is a very difficult thing to learn and I\u2019m still trying to figure out what finish and resolution mean and what a painting is. Having been trained\u00a0as a student with such an academic focus posed a paradoxical challenge, which I only understood in a way after the fact. Kind of like tying someone up in chains and then asking them to get out. I often feel like it\u2019s taking a long time to get out, finding little clues along the way and over the last few years, one answer has been to spend a lot of time away from the direct face of nature, with my back to the nature, as in the monotypes and more recently the studio paintings.<\/p>\n

What we do in front of nature is our own business and it\u2019s not like we have to be \u201cfaithful\u201d to all that we see, and unlike a photograph, absolutely SO much is accessible when we spend time looking at something concrete with which our eyeballs and minds can make intimate contact. Whether it is one meeting or many, aspects of form begin to emerge as we press and coax, it\u2019s like a relationship in which it takes a little bit of time before you can look at each other sustained straight in the eyes, or not much time, depending on what is going on; and what comes out of that is different than either the person or place. This idea<\/em> of \u201crealism\u201d being perpetrated in some schools and ateliers is a kind of ideological hoax used to impress students who really don\u2019t understand history and are maybe too young or too inexperienced to be able to identify their own feelings. Was Piero a realist or how about Morandi? Perceptual precision<\/em> or accuracy<\/em> of looking or feeling has nothing to do with making a careful inventory list or with piling up rationally observed details – just because something is there doesn\u2019t mean we need it.<\/p>\n

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Last summer, in Italy, one morning I was out painting and I saw a friend drawing down the hill in the vineyard and although the forms in her work may have some root in feeling coming from contact with nature, by no stretch of the imagination does her work reflect what anything looks<\/em> like per se, the forms are not illusory or imitative of anything, they seem to be about themselves. So that morning she had gone out drawing, into the nature, and even from a distance I could see was periodically, actually often, holding up the pencil to make critical assessments of angle and direction, sense of proportion – as if, as if, that kind of thing was important! And it was and is, even for someone very much abstracting (because abstracting is the core of the whole business anyway), and out there in front of things, one turns to close observation as a way of getting closer. The point is that when we go outside, why are we there if not to engage honestly with a certain kind of understanding that reveals itself In many ways other than imitation<\/em> of nature or copying.<\/p>\n

Initially, I went outside as an alternative to studio work, a refreshment to what seemed like stultifying, predictable routine. I never intended to stay out; it was just a pause. But being out in the light of day knocked my head off, the immensity of everything seemed like a dream, so much possibility and the opportunities offered by spaciousness and shifting light were very exciting. For many, many years I worked outside only, as if it were the only way. I never thought I \u201cknew\u201d enough to go back to the studio and \u201cmake it up\u201d. Well, that is a state of mind because; it\u2019s all made up anyway, right, even when directly in front of the motif. I mean, this idea associated with notions of painting as telling the truth<\/em> is self-deception. Degas had a lot to say about all this, about the painting being mostly invention and artifice. And as Oscar Wilde reminded us, the only thing \u201creal\u201d is the painting itself.\u00a0 We have no obligation to take everything as is, nor can it be done, and nature will not allow herself to be captured. But in a strange way maybe we get closer to nature when we are not directly in front of her.
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LG<\/strong> What role does the drawing play in your work. What are some things you think about when making your small notebook pencil drawings. Do your paintings follow the drawing closely or is the drawing just a point of departure, an entry into the motif?<\/em><\/p>\n

SS<\/strong> Yes, drawing is really the heart of what I might call perceptual<\/em> craft and, it is an entry into the motif.\u00a0 But even more than that it\u2019s a door into itself\u00a0 – which is different<\/em> than the motif – it\u2019s about<\/em> the motif on the one hand, but also about its own process of inventing an independent world of notations on the page, and those things are inter related but not exactly the same.\u00a0 A motif cannot really exist until it assumes graphic presence, otherwise it\u2019s just an observational anecdote, a conceptual tourist moment, NOT an active reconstruction of a glimpse of awareness. So what this means is that a \u201cmotif\u201d, \u201cout there\u201d is not just one sided or passive, it requires our<\/em> response to make it substantive. Until something goes down on paper nothing really exists. Unless I put the pencil to the paper I really don\u2019t exist either; well what I mean is that I really can\u2019t understand where I am or what my relation is to something or someplace unless it\u2019s given form other than just saying, oh isn\u2019t that nice over there. Of course the material world \u201cout there\u201d exists but when we draw we are\u00a0not only remaking it<\/em> (by way of our own sense of modulation and point of view) but we are remaking ourselves as well. There is so much freedom in working on paper, I feel like a kite that has escaped its string when doing almost anything on paper with pencil or crayon or some kind of stick dipped in ink.<\/p>\n

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LG<\/strong> What are the compositional strategies you think about when you first sit down to paint.<\/em><\/p>\n

SS<\/strong> Well I know this may sound ridiculous and like an excuse for getting out of an explanation, but I don\u2019t plot my way into painting as a tactician or strategist and the idea of compositional strategy doesn\u2019t sit well with me. I didn\u2019t study illustration at school and in fact, I\u2019ve always been oriented to not consciously doing any of those things because they very easily become shticks and limiting, and I\u2019ve tried to keep my work as simple as possible in terms of very low-key pictorial appeal. I\u2019m interested in, and this is intentional, a kind of painting that doesn\u2019t necessarily say, \u201chey you, come on over here\u201d. And I realize that might make for boring paintings, but the mundane and ordinary is very intriguing and I have tried to avoid self conscious calculation, especially with regard to what people might like or what might \u201csell\u201d. I\u2019m aware though of the fact that perhaps my work is confined by it\u2019s own limitations but i can only find my way in or out intuitively, not by planning.<\/p>\n

Ok, I\u2019m the first to admit how ironic it is that to closely understand what we are doing in the visual world we must develop and strengthen our analytical verbal and conceptual skills to find words for not only things seen and made, but also for intangibles like how something feels.\u00a0 And one of the things I try to emphasize as a teacher is a certain kind of totality of awareness for so many different tiers of the painting experience. But to tell you the truth, and I mean this in my own life, not in the classroom, when talking to some painters or reading magazines or some exhibition catalogs, I get tired at a certain point of all the blah, blah, blah because so much is about words, concepts or strategies for getting attention.<\/p>\n

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When working, mostly I try to absorb what it is I\u2019m looking at, to try and feel it inside and then see how it takes form on canvas by dictating to me what it wants me to do.\u00a0 Of course I\u2019m aware that this sounds all too simplistic and, that I cannot tell a student \u201cwell just paint like you eat\u201d, and that in fact (and not ironically) I\u2019m bringing an extreme analytical self awareness to bear. During the early summers on the Irish coast, I realized that I worked best in a kind of trance state. But that is not as detached or vague as it sounds, of course behind every effort is an awful lot of analytical interrogation and inquiry, mostly I try to approach painting by way of the senses, and my desire is to kind of bite into the place as if it is either a ripe melon or someone\u2019s delicious arm. And I don\u2019t mean that to be funny. Sure I closely and extensively consider aspects like the structure of spatial movement within the painted space, organization of forms and tones, how the eye is moved around by way of color shapes and qualities, editorial and perceptual hierarchies, etc, but at a certain point I\u2019m also doing something else and not \u201cthinking\u201d. If I start to think in certain ways it undermines intuition and leads to things I\u2019d rather avoid, like what some people say or will say about the painting and with regard to that, maybe even someone I want to throw down a well. While in a setting with students I can be as analytical and as confrontational as anyone, when it comes to an explanation of my own work the quote that always comes to mind from de Kooning is when someone asked him how do you paint and his response was, do I ask you how you make love with your wife?<\/p>\n

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LG<\/strong> What does “significant form” mean to you in painting. How far are you willing to edit nature to get this form or structure in your painting. <\/em><\/p>\n

SS<\/strong> I remember conversations during the early years out of school, with my friend and teacher Seymour Remenick, about the idea that subject matter was not the same as content. Around school, in several ideological camps, there was a sense that what one painted was important. For instance, going down to South Philly and painting the oil refineries was hip and relevant, as opposed to doing a still life which was considered to be kind of old fashioned. I believed this stuff. I remember there was even someone I knew who did paintings of white dogs biting black dogs, or was it the other way around, black dogs biting white dogs? As if that somehow made it important. You get it – hint, hint – racial issues. And I remember someone else\u00a0told me that if you put black people in your paintings it would carry more weight than say if you paint suburban houses.\u00a0 Ok, all these matters of race and meaning are weighty ones and sociology is a deep discipline, but the painter swims in very different waters.<\/p>\n

Subject matter, or the \u201cwhat is it\u201d part of what an image is, on many levels really doesn\u2019t matter, it\u2019s the excuse for something else, the smearing around of pigment. Or let\u2019s say, it\u2019s not the primary motivation. The basements of Italian museums are filled with Flagellations of Christ but why do we pull our hair out with such pleasure in front of ones by Piero and Fra Angelico? Not because of the story, because all those guys are doing the same story; it is because of how they have told the story, in form.\u00a0 I\u2019ve seen students cry in front of Piero and Giotto, students who have no idea what the \u201cstory\u201d is that\u2019s being told. So there must be another story right? And that is the narrative of form, how the picture is built abstractly. Not what is it, but how is it? Where are the lights and where are the darks, what color are they and what shape are they and, what are the edges like? And of course this implies, how do they all fit together, what is the formal unity in which all the parts contribute to? And from all that, emotion, impact and ultimately meaning, all flow.<\/p>\n

When we work either outside or inside, there is no obligation to what we see in terms of how much to edit or not to edit. That depends on what we want from or want to do in the painting. Nature is overabundant, simply too much information, way, way, way too much. And as Whistler said to his students, \u201cPaint what you see and wait until you see what you paint.\u201d Meaning, that it is not simply a matter of painting what we see because we indiscriminately see too much and the more we look the more we see and it all gets piled on top of itself as an incoherent disordered collection of observations. This is the fallacy and pitfall of the idea of realism. Was Giotto a realist, or was Piero a realist or how about Praxiteles or Pisano? Even someone like Canaletto, who paintings are full of lots of information, didn\u2019t paint what he saw in terms of copying – he organized, composed, and rearranged, like a kind of conceptual Photoshop.\u00a0 We use nature as we need to and that means, we leave out a lot, we suppress, accentuate, modify, re tune, magnify, etc, we are after all, making a painting and not pasting down the actual nature itself.<\/p>\n

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To simply accept everything \u201cout there\u201d is like a visual terror unleashed on our minds by misuse of camera mentality and by the application of certain kinds of post enlightenment scientific measuring principles – and now, by the regimens of the reactionary ateliers that perceive modernism as somehow the destruction of painting, all this has left us really confused. (Don\u2019t get me started.) Our job as painters is to dream ourselves away from the idea of representation as a stale inventory list, leave that to people who work in banks and actuarial offices. We want to be unreal, to be artificial, synthetic, to make an imaginary invention built around consciously composed structure, rooted in various ways to what is seen but also about stimulating feeling, mood and desire. I am drawn to a painting not because of the accuracy of the information retrieval system or because it looks like something polite from 300 years ago, but because of how it knocks me off my ass by way of the passion of it\u2019s appeal. And for me, that is only by way of form, not through nostalgic or sentimental story telling. I love the early work of Jacob Lawrence, the Migration Series and of course he is telling a story, as Piero was telling a story, but it\u2019s the graphic impact of those paintings that rivets our eyes, and that is his genius as a storyteller. Lots of other people told that story with words, but his strength is the image as an inventive composer.<\/p>\n

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LG<\/strong> Many painters today working from observation, especially the popular “plein air” painters, are drawn to paint picturesque scenes in an impressionistic or naturalistic style. Your work differs sharply in that there is an attraction to views that inspire more abstract painting ideas rather than sentimental notions of a beautiful landscape. Can you say something about the importance of avoiding Kitsch or sentimentality in landscape painting.<\/em><\/p>\n

SS<\/strong> I really know very little about the world of \u201cplein air\u201d painting as it is practiced in America now, so I should probably keep my mouth closed on this issue. Where I was educated there was no exposure to that school of thought, and I suppose that the people I have been hanging out with all these years live in a different world.\u00a0 But in my travels I have seen some evidence of what goes on. Look, there are many ways of making paintings and we all make choices along the way. One thing I have found in the plein air movement is that a lot of people teach technique in the service of making a predetermined finished product maybe without much room for driving off the road\u00a0into unexpected discovery because there are established models of what is right, and that is what most practitioners are striving for.\u00a0 And that is ok because it is like that with many things, but in a way I\u2019d like to see more curiosity that breaks out of the predictable.<\/p>\n

Kitsch is a seductive and complex issue and America seems adrift in kitsch and the thing is that\u00a0unless one has access to the kind of renewal that comes with looking at very fine work in museums or galleries, kitsch becomes normalized. And it has nothing to do with economics or class, kitsch and mannerisms of all sorts are pervasive in every stratum from high to low. And kitsch is closely related to subject matter and attitude,\u00a0but also to the use of paint itself. Like, there is certain kind of sleazy painting done with the palette knife that before we even have any idea what it is we are looking at, our stomachs are turned by revulsion to the kitschy use of the knife. Ok, this is very difficult ground to walk on and I don\u2019t want to insult anyone or to say this kind of painting is better than that kind. But from coast to coast, Kitsch abounds, in academies, ateliers, tourist galleries, and in even not tourist galleries – it\u2019s like a disease that spreads while we sleep and I don\u2019t know what we can do about it other than gird our loins, wash our hands or use protection.<\/p>\n

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LG<\/strong> There is a common visceral attraction to paintings that successfully captures a sense of place and light, like the light in Corot’s Italian plein air landscapes. Lessor painters might paint light, forms and space just as convincingly but their work is weak and uninteresting when compared to a master like Corot. What pushes painting out of being merely competent and into the realm of exceptional?<\/em><\/p>\n

SS<\/strong> This issue of what makes a painting just ok as opposed to what make another exceptional is not a matter of mechanical technique, but it has to do first, with the ability of the painter to feel deeply and as Joan Mitchell said, to have \u201caccess\u201d to herself or himself – to have access to feeling and deep response and then to know how to put that into concrete form.\u00a0 And like comparing Mozart to Solieri, there is no comparison. Solieri wasn\u2019t bad but Mozart was more than good. Similarly, a lot of guys are fantastic guitarists and work in recording studios on albums for other people who may be more well known, and these guitarists have supreme technique, maybe even better than the musicians whose albums they are recording. But they will never have that sort of unique independent career because at the end of the day, while they are supremely talented mechanics they are not really inventive poets. And there are of course good paintings and bad paintings, and some of the bad ones are not so bad in terms of technique, but they are not inspired and without that, there is only so much time in the day. Just go and visit many of the contemporary ateliers rooted in fundamentalist interpretations of the past, the are very earnest in the evidence of labor, focus and determination, and there is good \u201ctechnique\u201d, but they are terribly boring. Also, let\u2019s not forget that both Hitler and Mussolini liked a kind of art not too far removed from what is taught at many of these ateliers which is a mostly, as was then, profoundly disappointing kitschy, serious misinterpretations of classicism. We should try to remember that the message from the old masters is NOT to do as they do. None of them want us to paint pictures that look like theirs – they are offering much deeper messages and currents of meaning and visual thought for us to absorb and to consider, it is not<\/em> about superficial style.<\/p>\n

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LG<\/strong>There has been wide interest in your outdoor painting intensive workshops, including advanced painters far along in their careers. I’ve heard from a number of painters that your workshop significantly helped to jump-start and re-think their painting process, as I can attest from my own experience with your teaching this past summer. You don’t teach formula, method, or technique but instead teach far more valuable ideas like the importance of visual clarity and unity. Please tell us some of what you offer with your intensive \u201cThe Structure of the Visual Moment\u201d workshops.<\/em><\/p>\n

SS<\/strong> If anything, my class is designed to promote several levels of visual and conceptual clarity and not with making any sort of product, nor with any sense of preconceived \u201cfinish\u201d or polish. I\u2019m not interested in results that relate to putting in all the details, learning how to finish, pretty picture making or something to take home to impress the grandmother (so to speak).\u00a0 And the last thing in the world I want is to teach anyone to paint like me, God forbid. Ironically, the thing is that I don\u2019t even know how I paint. Or if I do I\u2019m trying to forget that and relearn something else.<\/p>\n

In these classes I try to address issues of perceptual organization and then the process of invention on the two dimensional work surface. Translating what we make of what we saw into something graphic is at the heart of the matter, and of course to being supremely conscious of and responsible for all the moves from beginning to end. If someone wants to learn \u201chow to\u201d make a certain kind of picture, or a \u201clandscape painting\u201d, please know in advance, this is not the place for that. By way of holding the brush while looking out into visual space, we are more interested in addressing qualities of perception and recognizing the large, looming issues behind what we are doing and what we are after. First we are making a \u201cpainting\u201d before it is a \u201clandscape.\u201d<\/p>\n

If I \u201ctaught\u201d or emphasized technique or method I might be offering a quick\/superficial fix that in the long run would be deceptive and not work. It might feel like a short term satisfying solution but it wouldn’t offer anyone the analytical musculature needed for carrying on in their own lives expect for copying what someone else does. Working in front of nature is full of immense opportunity but I really don\u2019t expect anyone to necessary go home with anything fully resolved, it\u2019s too much information being presented and it all takes time to digest. I always tell people, what they will have is a seed in a peat pot surrounded by soil and they need to take it home and make sure it\u2019s watered and kept in the sun.<\/p>\n

Remember what Corot said, “When one follows another, one is always behind.”<\/p>\n

LG<\/strong> Thank you again Stuart for taking the time to share this with our readers. If anyone is interested in taking a workshop with Stuart Shils you can contact him directly through his website<\/a> (in the teaching section). If you live on the West Coast or wish to travel to San Diego next Spring or early summer you can leave a comment here or send me an email.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Stuart Shils 2010   “If the painter is open to the world, everything becomes grist for the mill, even things one doesn\u2019t expect or even doesn\u2019t consciously like or want….<\/p>\n

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