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There ought to be a law against taking the easy way out when it comes to titles for posts. But there isn’t, at least as far as I know, and so I did, because what is driving my typing fingers this afternoon is the book review I just finished reading in a recent issue of Apollo.
Are you familiar with Apollo, the International Art Magazine? It covers contemporary and classical art, with gorgeous reproductions and intelligent text. Even the ads (Alte Pinakotek München; Brafa Art Fair; Galerie Bernard de Leye, Brussels) are classy and educational. Here I have the January 2024 issue, with an article on the Congolese photographer Sammy Baloji, another article on the last days of Vincent Van Gogh, and a book review that caught my attention, The Slip: The New York City Street That Changed American Art Forever.
From that book and its reviewer, I quote: “Place is an undervalued determinant in creative output” and “Artists were drawn to that liminal space like filings to a magnet.”
The space was Manhattan, and the Slip is Coenties Slip, where Lenore Tawney, Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, Jack Youngerman and Agnes Martin all came together to work in the 1950’s. But the same could be said about Maine, a state that is not so undervalued as a determinant, and very much a liminal and magnetic place that continues to draw artists from around the country. (If you are that person to whom I recently commented that I was tired of reading about artists and their practices, I take it all back and am going to order the book when I finish this post.)
One bright morning last week, as I was working the NYT crossword, I looked up to see that the sun was doing strange things to this west facing painting over the wood stove. The painting depicts a space populated with odd figures. From what appears to be a green mountain range at the very bottom of the picture, red and blue rock forms float in an earth-toned emptiness. A red zigzag rises from the central rock into the void, wrapping across and around a naked tree trunk. A blue possum is perched in the lone fork of the tree, its prehensile tail wrapped around the trunk. To the left, in a vertical space, dark purple, a statue of the monkey god Hanuman looks out across his shoulder to where across the void, a Hindu devata with long earlobes and a serpentine headdress appears in a rectangular opening. Above her head, a green stem pierces concentric circles and proffers what looks like the sail of an ancient ship. Above that, another mountain range, and above that, a clouded sky. Nowhere can you be sure whether this is Mount Kailash or some place on solid earth.
What I saw when the rising sun was just right, was that the lower half of the painting was overlaid by a woodland scene with an iconic Maine cabin, itself painted blue, like something out of a Marsden Hartley picture or a William Wegman postcard. Was it magic? No, but it caused me to reflect on the cabin itself, which is a newish tool shed built within the past 10 years. Why did it seem so perfect in this setting? I recall being upset at the time when my neighbor built it, because I never like to see yet another building going in so close to me. I prefer the fantasy that I live in a pristine woodland with no evidence of humans anywhere around. The reality is I live on Route One, where there’s plenty of activity, and I benefit from most of it.
I thought about the difference between reality and an imagined experience, the gap between the quotidian tool shed and the inspirational blue cabin I saw reflected. For some artists, the reality of Maine life offers subject matter à go-go. For myself, I need to transit through some liminal place—with woodland gods as guides—before I come to the cabin in the woods. Am I a filing to a magnet? A moth to the flame? Somehow when I first fetched up in Maine I knew immediately that I was home. Thirty years of trips to the PO and the grocery in winter weather have not diminished my love for this place and I am still sustained by the rhythm of the natural world around me, still in need of metaphor and woodland spirits to guide my hand.
The book is The Slip: The New York City Street That Changed American Art Forever, by Prudence Pfeiffer. Available through Bookshop.org.
The print review is “Up Our Street: Tim Adams is charmed by a group biography that makes the link between place and creativity,” Apollo, January 2024, author, Tim Adams, critic for the observer. Online may be paywalled. I hope not.
The painting is Patrick Donley’s Untitled, acrylic on paper, c. 1995. Patrick and I were co-directors at Zephyr Gallery in Louisville back then. You can learn more about Patrick here, and about his project, Groundhog Archeology, here.
Hello Nature: How to Draw, Paint, Cook & Find Your Way, was exhibited at Bowdoin College Museum of Art in 2012. Wow! It’s been that long ago. Revisit it here because it was wonderful, as is the exhibition catalog.
Marsden Hartley’s Wood Lot is part of the Phillips Collection
Jack Youngerman’s photo of the artists at Coenties Slip plus more about the place and its history is online at untappedcities.com.
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