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This DIALOG TOOK PLACE ( APRIL 2005 )

(Mark Stone)

Mark and I have been working together for the last couple of months putting together a web zine about art. Its given us both a chance to discuss our various interests in painting. We have very different approaches to the practices and appreciation of painting and it makes for an interesting dialog.

I believe painting to be at a cross roads. In my work I began to understand this in the mid 90s. I felt hemmed in by the rules regarding what made an abstract painting. I could not find an expressive vehicle in the high mannerism of the time and I absolutely did not want to repeat a style of painting that was being critiqued by the current generation. Additionally the world was changing at such a great rate. Electronic culture via programming was changing all the rules. Painting, a static, hot (in the McLuhan sense) medium was having difficulty staying relevant to the culture. Video, movies and computers were engaging the culture in ways that painting could not - in real time and sensual depth. This was confirmed for me by the reactionary styles of painting (both abstract and figurative) that proliferated in the late 90s and early 2000s winding up in a photorealistic type of painting that has stagnated the painting.

New painting boiled down to a few things. I felt that painting had to pump up its "hotness" factor. By that I mean it had to make the viewer work the painting. There is a madness for drawing among artists and aesthetes that is a direct outcome of televisual culture. It is found in the open structure of the drawing allowing the viewer to enter the picture and finish it. This is evident in old master drawings as well as contemporary works. Its about visually thinking or creating idea space. For the viewer its a kind of visual interaction or conversation. I thought this was much the same as a video game or a computer program. The viewer becomes the artist. For me this entailed painting in a drawing style. Using hand techniques like cross hatching and shading allowed me to flatten and open the image at the same time. This technique was once used to define form and space (a visual experience) I could now use it to define time and touch (a tactile experience.) I am visually reversing the historical sequence in order to redefine how a painting comes together.

Another interesting aspect of the programmed culture is the ability it has to move forward and backward through time and space. One can view several points of the same scene from different angles with each sequenced in different speeds and directions. Additionally one can zoom in or out creating fantastic distortions. By further developing the programming using sonic readings or magnetic imaging the scene can be seen through. How does one adapt these sequences to a static painting. For me I found that I could depict this easily through abstraction. By going back to Matisse and Picasso I was able to marry Fauvist line sensibility with cubist spatial composition incorporating 21st century programming sequences. My paintings look forward to an abstraction based on programming rather than made by programming reprocessed with programming.

Abstraction is the legacy of the 20th century and it is the best way to deconstruct the lens culture that infects painting today. Everything is being worked through the computer – images are uploadedand the outcomes are printed or painted – but these are merely reproductions of the computer generated image. If these are made by hand they are said to have "quality" and this has brought on the mania for artists with superb copying technique. It has also brought a mania for materiality. The dematerialized computer generated image is reconfigured in thick paints or delicately brushed surfaces. For me this smacks of the academic and is reminiscent of the bourgeois values inherent in the salon painters of the late 19th century. Abstraction was the counterweight to this overblown tradition. Abstraction pushes the boundaries of painting, moving beyond the slavish juvenile need to illustrate or replicate.

(Mark Wiener)

(Mark Wiener)

Not unlike MARK STONE I think that electronic culture has provided an edge to my work.

I like reflecting on my first versions of abstractions. When I was a child sitting on the beach. I would squint up at the sun, and see images engraved on my eyelids.

I liken the digital surface tension we see on a daily basis to the imprint left from the sun on my impressionable eyes.

Unlike Mark am not driven by the understanding of art history and its cultural
residue.

I find that the everyday experiences of just the simple things in life drive my visuals. I am naive in an academic way and I find Stone's dialog enlightening and reinforcing.

We have one obligation with our gift of visual thinking, and that is to be truthful to what we see and what we reflect in our work.

I would like to talk about the obligation a little. We who have this God-given way of seeing and breathing must not think about doing, but simply, do.

As to conversation...Mark S. and I walk from gallery to gallery, museum to museum, discussing the way we look at this residue of fine art. A curious thing has been happening to my way of interpreting those canvases. For years they have meant one thing for me, but through this experience that meaning has evolved.

Mark S. talks of mannerism, abstract expressionism and so on. I have found that by not knowing what the reviewers and academics have said about "fine art" brought me to a much better place in my own work. The reason is because all that history was seen with their eyes. Seeing the "classical" body of work with my own eyes, in this time, has engendered in me a newfound understanding of the forms that have engrossed me for the past 40 years, re-engaging me, shedding old perceptions. The period of my present involvement has a new skin - thicker maybe, but definitely more resilient.

In closing, when I look at Ad Reinhardt's concepts, I hear his name, I don't see his work.

websites:
Mark Stone
Mark Wiener