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Fault / Lines 2001: Paintings and Assemblages by Katherine Fishburn

 Contemporary art is a confusing free-for-all. Paintings and sculptures are made with bizarre and sometimes perishable materials; conceptual artworks conjoin ideas and disciplines that have no obvious connection or affinity. There is no mainstream trend in art any more, as there was (or appeared to be) during the modernist era, roughly 1900-1980. The art world’s focus on one style at the time, the new succeeding the old, had a certain simplicity (if you ignored the contradictions), but it also stifled or hampered creativity that did not fit the stile du jour (which of course changed every few years). When abstraction was de rigueur in the 1950s, figurative painters felt that were treated as reactionary enemies; the abstractionist Philip Guston was reviled as a traitor to the cause for returning to figuration and even storytelling during the1960s, with the nation riven by racial tensions and the Vietnam War, for refusing, in his words, “to adjust a red to a blue.”  Now that the idea of the avant-garde army marching in lockstep is blessedly over, artists have more freedom and more options, although, truth be told, the myth of historical inevitability made for easier marketing in postwar America.

 If contemporary artists enjoy more creative freedom than before in today’s pluralistic, nonhierarchical art world, they do still have to forge their way and personal, eclectic, subjective style. The Maryland-based painter and poet, Katherine Fishburn, has created such a style by hybridizing or combining twentieth-century freewheeling Abstract Expressionist paint application, pure color from nineteenth-century Impressionists and Fauves, and even political and philosophical concerns, perhaps not immediately apparent to the casual viewer, but informing and expanding the meaning of her paintings and assemblages. Fishburn: 

 My inspiration comes from everywhere: from my studies of world history, biology, literature, philosophy and politics. From what I have discovered walking along the shore, wandering through fallow fields and hiking at high altitudes. Most important: it comes from encountering great art… Lee Krasner, Grace Hartigan and other female artists of abstract expressionism—also … the Spanish painters Goya, Dalí and Mirò.

The show’s title, Fault / Lines, reflects simultaneously the current societal and intellectual fractures in Western society (most notably in the USA)—and the uncertainty of contemporary life, a fundamental precept of the existentialists and their like-minded peers, the Abstract Expressionists; it’s a philosophical idea that has been around for millennia but was lost in the post-World-War-Two triumph of American culture and materialism, only re-emerging in the past two decades, after 9/11, when the myth of Fortress America tragically collapsed. 

 To express the complexity and contradictions of contemporary life, Fishburn creates, often without preplanning, oil paintings in which palette-knifed patches of strong color and abstract form vie with incised words invoking the artist’s concerns. The artist's immersion in “pushing paint around,” to cite an AbEx trope, would seem at first an incongruous fit with sociopolitical content, but these are personal artworks, not propaganda, even, perhaps, exorcisms, in a certain way. For Fishburn, laying the paint on “thick, with gouges and scrawls,” was “liberating. It was also a way to externalize the strong emotions I have about what is going on (i.e., wrong) in the world today.” The titles sometimes come after, “discovered,” and sometimes precede the painting process; clearly the immersion in painting brings to the surface issues lingering in the subconscious, as does all her art up to this point. According to her, she “resolutely mines the subconscious, making visible harsh truths and raw emotions that many in today’s world would disregard—preferring to avert their eyes and dismiss the difficult questions her work generates.” In addition, the titles are not always explanations of the abstract imagery: sometimes they are merely suggestive, or even in ironic counterpoint, as in Goya’s satirical Caprichos etchings. With their vibrant, bravura energy, the paintings catch and hold the eye of the art-centric viewer; but the sociopolitical messages contained therein, not always planned, make the images commentaries on public matters, or, in Latin, res publica, the etymon of our word ‘republic.’ They’re painterly abstractions that morph into covertly dissenting history paintings. 

Doctor’s Orders presents another Still-like abstraction, primarily in black and white, with patches of red, blue and purple. The word “script,” inscribed at top left, has a variety of meanings, from the common shorthand for prescriptions to handwriting itself, to money markers, to screenplays— and might also be seen as an homage to artists using writing in their works, from Miró (one of the artist’s favorite painters) to Picasso and Jasper Johns to Eric Wool. 

In Country is Fishburn’s response to the Vietnam War and its veterans, whom the artist taught at Michigan State University: “They were hungry to learn and soaked up everything I had to offer, unlike most of the other students in the class. They made teaching that damned course a joy—we both had a purpose. They had learned the hard and dangerous way the value of getting an education.”  The vertical-format painting presents an ambiguous slice of verdant landscape, set afire, undoubtedly based on the napalm and Agent Orange bombing campaigns designed to defoliate the jungle or rainforest, depriving the enemy of cover for weapons resupply.  A 45-degree right triangle is superimposed on the landscape, suggesting, perhaps, the use of military vectors and triangulation in target siting, also perhaps a pun is invoked as there was nothing “right” about the war, except for the Hawkish administration’s cabinet and the generals’ endless lies that we could win it.  “In-country” was GI slang for Vietnam (as opposed to the “the real world” of the US).  A perhaps long-forgotten battle waged early in the war occurred in The Iron Triangle (War Zone D). As Fishburn writes, “word-association is the name of the game,” so it is not farfetched to see an echo of the Bermuda Triangle, a so-called “wormhole,” where all at sea is lost—as we, too, lost the war to a well-organized rag-tag army of citizen soldiers who knew and loved their country far more than the arrogant American invaders, burdened down with their gear and heavy armaments—puzzled as to why they were there in the first place.

Nine Eleven was inspired by the lacy steel-girder scaffolding that remained standing after the towers had fallen. Fishburn writes that during the weekend that followed the attack, she drew in colored pencil a rough sketch of the horror, trying not so much to “understand it but to defeat it by creating something.” Her scene of national trauma is depicted semi-abstractly, as a welter of orthogonal blue-gray brushstrokes, surrounded by explosive flames of yellow and orange, all set against a darkened sky. The high-contrast gestural brushstrokes may suggest certain visionary landscapes of El Greco or the expressionist apocalypses of Franz Marc and Ludwig Meidner that seem in retrospect to have foretold The Great War.

As a postscript, Fishburn writes:

I guess maybe I am only recognizing now that I created “ships” to both escape the plague (by losing myself in the act of creating them) and to bring the outside world to me. I chatted with almost every vendor on Etsy from whom I bought the components of my creations; it was very social, one of the very few interactions I had with other people all year. Also, one of the first haunting images of the pandemic was the ironically named cruise ship, the Diamond Princess, anchored and quarantined at Yokohama for a month because it was infested, not with rats, but with highly contagious Covid-19 passengers. Conversely, there is Katherine Anne Porter’s 1962 allegorical novel Ship of Fools about the rise of the Nazis. Ambiguity and paradoxes delight me.

Charles Anselmo: Teatro/Moto: Photographs on Paper and Silk

February 20-March 28

Gallery Route One, 11101 Highway One, Point Reyes Station CA

Th-Sun 11-5, 415.663.1347 

Photography captures time, but in more ways than one. It freezes an instant, for posterity, but the images made by cameras and film (or digital sensors) capture not only the instant of their creation, but the time elapsed from past to present. Photographs are time machines or time capsules bearing messages from the past.

 The Bay Area photographer Charles Anselmo is is a connoisseur of ruins, like those eighteenth- and nineteenth century artists and photographers who documented the ancient worlds of Rome and the Middle East. Best known for his photographs of the picturesquely decaying infrastructure of Havana, made during over seventy trips during the past twenty years, Anselmo is decidedly old-school in his studied approach to carefully scouted and selected subjects. He carries a view camera and tripod, and shoots on 4x5 film, scanning the negatives for digital printing in large format on paper (traditionally and archivally matted and framed) or on silk (hung loose from curtain rods, and rippling with the slightest air current). The crumbling, neglected public buildings that he photographically preserves—both colonial-era baroque and revolutionary-era modernist in style—affect the contemporary viewer as the antiquarian etchings of Piranesi and the Romantic paintings of the Turner and Hubert Robert did their audiences, evoking melancholy about the depredations of time, and a pleasant sense of at least temporary immunity—of being an observer and survivor. Rose Macaulay describes such nostalgia—etymologically, the pain of memory—in her classic Pleasure of Ruins, as a pleasurable “self-projection into the past, ... observing the screech owl, the bat, and the melancholy ghost, and the vegetation that pushes among the crevices and will one day engulf.” 

Anselmo writes that he depicts “derelict sites, with the “broken structure and interiors engaging a dialog about the interaction of place, memory and the city's social context... Expressing their own visually inherent narratives, these disparate, fragmented realities remain disconnected from their original identities. Like the unknowable "essences" in Plato's Theory of Forms, the structures which began as perfected, idealized concepts are later reinterpreted, broken and repurposed under the weight of history as they become "phenomena," the sensory representations in everyday life.” He captures  “the dissonances of Cuba's urban landscape in ... decline as palaces and theaters become outside spaces, and the broken symmetries of grand structures are newly interpreted as subjective phenomena in a timeless archaeology of loss.” The photographs of Teatro/Moto depict the decaying grandeur of an abandoned theater built in classical European style a century ago, during Cuba’s colonial period. Anselmo:

 Nestled behind the extraordinary Baroque beauty of Havana’s restored Gran Teatro is the smaller, roofless Teatro Campoamor. For fifteen years I had walked by this remarkable relic, unable to enter due to its barricades and boarded doors. One oppressively humid day in July, 2017, I met the caretaker who had been living in the theater for twenty-four years in what had been a coat-check room. [The caretaker’s portrait is included in the exhibit.] I was overwhelmed by the beauty of the inner edifice magically overtaken by lichen and vines, its wooden stage turned into soil by many seasons of rain. Fifteen-foot tropical palms had been gifted to this interior from seeds driven by the hurricane winds of previous years, the gold gilt peeling from sensuously ornate plasterwork.

Anselmo’s large, hyper-detailed photographs and his prints on billowy Habothai silk convey the richness of faded architectural glory as it succumbs to time and nature —and to the repurposing of the past by the future. The Teatro Campoamor was transformed in the 1990s into a parking lot, or moto, probably serving patrons of the resplendently restored Gran Teatro, adjacent to it in Havana’s city center. The art critic Jorge Luis Aguilar writes that the Teatro, as a remnant of pre-revolutionary Havana, is something “we don’t want to see or remember,” but still a part of Cuba’s history and psyche. “Anselmo is a compelling seeker. He has wandered Havana’s streets innumerable times, like any Habanero. He knows Havana as very few do. He enjoys telling her stories, telling her dreams, ... with the smiles and the suffering.”

 Hypercapitalist America, which has in recent decades prided itself on market-based “creative destruction” and the enrichment of its elite while neglecting its crumbling infrastructure and the desperation of ordinary citizens, should observe, and draw the proper conclusions. Americans might also consider the totality of their history, not just its airbrushed grade-school-friendly mythology. In “Ozymandias,” Shelley evoked an ancient ruined royal statue reduced to two stumps of legs:

And on the pedestal these words appear:

'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away."

CHRISTINE MILLER HIGH: Vintage San Francisco

Avenue 12 Gallery

Christine Miller High (1911-2010) was a fourth-generation San Franciscan who painted San Francisco street scenes in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. High’s watercolors have a broad appeal that transcends their everyday subject matter— everyday for scenic San Francisco, that is; there is also, as we look back at old San Francisco, a nostalgic appeal, especially for San Franciscans familiar with the scenes, and perhaps of a certain age. (San Franciscans may be forgiven for being a little obsessed with The City for its looks: the abstract painter Mark Rothko, who lived here in 1949, said the most beautiful place in the world should be its art capital.)

The artist lived most of her long life in Marin County and San Francisco. She began her art education at Miss Burke’s School, and continued at the Fashion Art School, in the Scottish Rite Temple, also in San Francisco, with the Baroness Maria von Ridelstein (1884-1970), who strenuously advocated realism to her students: “Critics get excited by something new .... Hang an ism on it and call it a new style of painting. ... It is ridiculous—going to extremes doesn’t lead anywhere. We should come down from our high horses and say art is a language.... An accomplished artist talks with his painting.” That advice seems to have resonated with High, whose work seems close in spirit to the landscape tradition of the seventeenth-century Dutch Golden Age or the Ashcan School of American painting a century ago or the Expressionist landscapes of the Depression: her paintings are shaped by reality and emotion inspired by the motif rather than pre-existent symbolism or pictorial formulas—or isms.

High’s career is outlined in Edan M. Hughes’ monumental 1985 reference work, Artists in California, 1786-1940, a twenty-year labor of love in researching some 6600 artists through newspaper and magazine articles, business records, exhibition catalogues, and telephone-book cold calls to people with the artists’ surnames. Hughes cites 1910, just before High’s birth, as the date when California women artists, formerly confined to decorative paintings, began to take their work seriously and compete with men. High, whose plein-air watercolors of local scenes were a far cry from delicate scenes of domestic tranquility, exhibited locally, joined the Society of Western Artists, and was scheduled for a 1941 one-woman show at the de Young Museum, a signal honor for an artist not quite thirty, but one which sadly never took place because of the onset of the war.  But, as the saying goes, she persisted.

The seventy watercolors on paper that comprise Vintage San Francisco are, despite their years, surprisingly fresh-looking; they could have been painted yesterday, though High’s subdued palette and fidelity to reality link her work to her formative years rather than yesterdays isms. There are four thematic groups:

Icons, e.g., portrayals of touristic postcard cynosures like the Golden Gate Bridge, the Bay Bridge, the Japanese Tea Garden, winding Lombard Street, North Beach, etc.;

Neighborhoods, e.g., the Octagon House, Telegraph Hill, Sea Cliff, a produce market, Temple Emanu-El, and various gardens, alleys and parks;

Views: e.g., Lafayette Park, Inspiration Point, the Marina and Angel Island, the Sausalito waterfront, the San Francisco skyline, etc.; and

Waterfront: e.g., Fisherman’s Wharf, Sausalito Houseboats, the Embarcadero, etc.

The works are undated, so the thematic groupings above probably have no chronological sequence. I read recently that traditional Asian artists, because of their cyclical notion of time, did not date their works in Western linear time. I suspect that for High, working in series was never a concern; that she painted what she encountered and wished to commemorate by participating in it sympathetically. The paintings may seem unsophisticated to some, with technically ‘incorrect’ (but not ‘naive’) rendering, as in the paintings of the Henri Rousseau. Their virtues, as documents of time and place, of nature seen through the artist’s temperament, endure. —DeWitt Cheng

LYNN SONDAG: Cityscapes

Avenue 12 Gallery

If the title of this exhibition, Cityscapes, suggests panoramic views from some of San Francisco’s new apartment towers looming over its boarded-up street businesses, the subject matter of Lynn Sondag’s lyrical watercolors, however, is more bucolic. Sondag focuses on the northwest quadrant of San Francisco, north of Golden Gate Park, where she lives, and, to use John Muir’s terminology, saunters, with an observant eye. San Francisco—ineffaceably dubbed The City by San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen—is still a walker’s town, and these paintings reflect the artist’s strolls around the Richmond District, Lake Street (branded the Lake District by the real estate market seeking Wordsworthian nature-lover cachet), Golden Gate Park, Seacliff, The Presidio, Mountain Lake Park, Crissy Field, and Ocean Beach. Cityscapes comprises sixty-odd paintings from several series executed during the past twelve years, concluding with the Lake Street series from 2020,  depicting scenery only a block or two from Avenue 12 Gallery.

Sondag, a professor of art at Dominican University, grew up in the Midwest, and brings her love of nature to the Bay Area, famously rich in natural beauty and distinctive architecture. While the viewpoint of the paintings and their fresh immediacy suggest a plein-air, on-site painting practice, Sondag works from reference photographs, and reconstructing the scenes in her studio. (Photographers will note that her framing has the 2:3, 3:4 and 9:16 aspect ratios of digital SLRs. ) There is nothing photorealistic about her loose, atmospheric renderings, however, which seem to record her feelings about the scene as much as the facts of weather, architecture and foliage. The art historian Barbara Novak, describing the conflict in early American painting between realist and Transcendentalist impulses, between objective and subjectivity, cites the painter Thomas Cole, who worked from memory, trying to “get the objects of nature, sky, rocks,, trees, etc. as strongly impressed on my mind as possible ... [B]y looking intensely on an object for twenty minutes I can go to my room and paint it with much more truth than I cold if I employed several hours on the spot.... I become more intimately acquainted with the characteristic spirit of nature than I could otherwise do.”

If photography serves as Sondag’s sketch book, replacing Cole’s twenty-minute fixed gaze, the sense of place must surely be recorded in the artists’ visual memory, or, in Wordsworth’s words, “that inward eye/Which is the bliss of solitude.”  While watercolor is the perfect medium for recording color effects and spontaneity, it is not forgiving; it is inherently not amenable to correction or  adjustment, demanding decisiveness, experience and a vision or, in Sondag;’s case, an interpretive “emotion [to be] recollected in tranquillity.”

San Franciscans—especially of the wanderer-lonely-as-a-cloud tribe—are likely to have a strong affinity for Sondag’s evocative pictorial tone poems of our beloved peninsular paradise, which capture meteorology and mood more completely than any of the artist’s snapshots must manage to do. The camera never lies, but it’s only a machine. Sondag’s atmospheric paintings of sky overarching the domestic landscape may remind you of Turner (Sea Cliff V and VI,  Lake Street District 16^th Avenue, Presidio Drive ), and her architectural renderings may suggest Hopper (West Clay, Anza Trail I) as an antecedent or ancestor, but these art-historical resonances attest to a shared sensibility that finds visual analogues for feeling available to the attentive, transparent, Emersonian eyeball.—DeWitt Cheng