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Neil Anderson- Statement "Traveling the Plane" As a painter I continue to embrace the tradition of abstract painting because I believe that the essence of painting is found in building and refining the surface of the canvas with shape, color, and line, the architecture of the plane. All the work in the exhibition was begun the same way. I placed concentric
circles on the square canvases and concentric ovals on the rectangular
works. I used the contrast between these curved shapes and the rectangular
form of the canvas itself as the structure from which to begin painting.
In "Landscape After Taiga," for instance, I have returned to
that tall rectangle, a form I continue to find compelling, whose dimensions
suggest a door-- a door through which one does not pass. In this painting
the concentric circles and ovals are superimposed on the rectangle while
contrasting linear elements divide the plane into a series of zones. These
intersecting elements define and redefine the negative areas creating
the final balance between the conflicting parts to make the whole. In
this and other paintings in the series, I worked with colors, which in
their intensity, defy illusion and define the plane on which they lay.
Negative shapes are brought forward causing those linear elements that
would naturally advance to recede. These issues of figure and ground are
the same ones that have always occupied painters. I seek a visual complexity
whose order only becomes apparent after extended seeing.
Neil Anderson "Traveling the Plane"- essay by Sid Sachs Neil Anderson is a wonderful abstract painter. As such, he is a member of a club. The Club of Abstraction. But what does that mean? He is part of the great stream of twentieth and twenty first century artists who believed that abstraction, the transformation of the chaos of the visual world into its purest forms is transcendent, spiritual, and the true path that art should take. A hundred years ago it was a political statement to drop narrative, to include the forms of all societies and times, to include those outside and children because the innocent eye was better than those beholding to the patronage of the nobility, churches, and power. In our present tumultuous age this seems somewhat anachronistic and utopian, out of step with the politics of our vicious era. Now- now- we need the quick fix of sound bites, the immediacy of the internet, an instant tallying of the results. After one caucus an election is settled. Our "artists" practice taxidermy and puppetry, convinced in their economic and aesthetic cynicism that the buyer is a child, easily distracted by the shock of the view. It doesn't help abstraction that under the rule of Clement Greenberg
and the formalists, narrative was forbidden. The visual statement was
supposed to stand for itself as an optical truth, as a pure talisman against
the kitsch of demagogic and political murals. Nearly two decades ago, Anderson used to make more representational works but still with an eye to purity and abstraction even then. His canvases depicted beds of leaves aligned parallel to the picture plane, as if viewed from above. This was the flatbed picture plane. There was no story there, no iconography of leaves. The leaves made patterns and bound by their contours, figure/grounds were defined in a very formal way. He sought the essential forms that were buried in the random collection of gathered material. The leaves gave Anderson a starting point to enter the picture, much as numbers or letters gave Jasper Johns a place to begin. In effect, Anderson was making a stillife of the landscape. He still is, of a sort. Slowly over the years those leaves coalesced into planes and the ground into a second plane. Planes crashed into patterns, wove a Rorschach textile of complex arrangements so subtle as to almost be a palimpsest. Anderson developed techniques that were only his, blotting and scraping paint off the canvas to push the lighter residues back into space, working with a variety of copying and projecting means to generate large masses for the grounds. These are his methods alone and I think the fact that he works in relative physical isolation in the woods in central Pennsylvania allows him the privilege and mandate to slow down time and develop at his own speed. He is not beholding to anyone in the woods. He is Emersonian and Thoreau and painter in one. This is not to say that these works are innocent or naïve. On the contrary, Anderson knows exactly what he is doing. He has shown consistently for over four decades, been shown at MoMA and the Whitney and is in major collections. His isolation is the same as the Abstract Expressionists in the then rural Hamptons, or Brice Marden in Eagle's Mare. Getting away means working at one's own speed, learning from the self. These new paintings are the brightest and most accomplished in his career. Instead of flatness, the new paintings have developed a typology, a map or maze of paths out of brushstrokes and the path of the hand. They show broken arcs, ovals, or circular motifs like targets that meander, stop and start again. These arcs come and go under and over planes so complex visually that their origins are obscured in "the architecture of surface." There is no beginning, only immanency. On top of this is an overlay with tracks and improvisational strokes branching, like an organic version of Broadway Boogie Woogie. These paintings are a dance of chaos and order, dancing, ducking, kept in the air like a supreme juggling act. Their geometry of circles on square supports morphing into rectangles is there but jazzed up by his new palette. Color and form are in a tense balance. And this saturated color darks almost blacks, cranberry, anarchistic oranges, plums is superbly sophisticated. They are both naturalistic and synthetic in equal parts. You can tell that Anderson is a veteran as you just don't arrive at color like that, touch like that it takes years to understand and perfect and experience art and the process of its making to produce work like this. You can see that he more than a passing knowledge of some major artists: Matisse, Diebenkorn, Marden, and Winters. The paintings acknowledge this lineage, nod and go beyond them. These are not pastiches or derivative. These are arguably the best paintings of Anderson¹s career; radiant, playful, joyful, serious. I hope you will spend the time to look at these works. They return you to the woods, the very Eden of the eye. These are very fine works indeed.
Neil Anderson - Statement "The Elements" The material I have chosen to record is limited to natural phenomena simply because it is the material at hand and because the irregular, unpredictable forms I have chosen to explore are found in that material. While I began working from a pre-determined process the result actually looks unexpected. After a time of doubt, inspired I suppose by reading too much commentary about the millennium, I am once again sanguine in my devotion to the craft of the painting. I embrace the idea that the simple spreading of pigment over a surface will again generate the visual energy necessary to captivate those who have had an abiding fascination with the craft of painting.
Interview between Neil Anderson and Roger Rothman (Summer, 2005) Roger Rothman: To begin, how does this series of work relate to the last series you showed at Bridgette Meyer? Neil Anderson: The Elements is a move away from the irregular forms of the last show at Bridgette Mayer toward a more architectural structure. The material I photographed to begin the work was chosen for the linear geometry the shapes suggested. In addition I have added photographic fragments from popular culture that reflect similar formal arrangements. As these fragmentary images are layered, new ones are added while others disappear. In this way, figure-ground relationships are established. Studying the meeting of forms in Mondrian's paintings was the origin for the construction of my own work. In the case of Mondrian, the broader black lines of his beginning drawing are gradually refined by the way he paints the white up to the black edge thereby defining both the black bars and the white or colored areas. In the painting, Fire, for example, the final shapes were there early on, but remained obscured until the end. The point is that image was not imposed from some outside source but emerged in the process of daily work on the painting. It seems to me that this idea of placing emphasis on the process can be traced to the Abstract Expressionists. RR: Nature has been an important influence in much of your work, not only in this series of paintings, but in others. How do you consider this influence, in light of our contemporary technophilia? NA: Nature is a fact in my life, it surrounds my studio, it's what I see out the window, so it's not surprising that it would appear as a source in my work. However, I would say, the history of painting would be the important influence and "nature" is simply the occasion. The emphasis on craftsmanship in painting would appear to be a reaction to technology. The handmade quality of painting would appear anachronistic in our culture, however I remain convinced that the phenomenological experience it fosters is for me compelling. Whatever painting has to say will finally be indistinguishable from the practice of that craft. The simple, unmediated quality of painting can be seen as an antidote to the electronic world of technology. The stillness of painting seems out of touch with current culture yet its direct appeal to the senses, its phenomenological qualities, make it for me continually compelling. RR: Can you talk some more about your relation to painters like Mondrian and the Abstract Expressionists? I'm particularly interested in your thoughts about your commitment to abstraction. What does it mean to you to hold to a set of modernist, perhaps even strictly Greenbergian, values and practices at a moment where such values and practices are considered by many to be outmoded by those of postmodernism? NA: I believe I can be called an unrepentant modernist. In architecture, for example, I believe the best of "Postmodernism" is built on modernist notions of formal refinement and minimalist esthetics. I find inspiration in Frank Stella's Black Paintings, Brice Marden's working approach in the Grove Series and the exploration of paint as paint in Terry Winters. I don't particularly see these artists as representing "Greenbergian values" His historical materialism has mostly to do with his intellectual background in Marxism .I don't think working painters share such a deterministic view of history. I am reminded of Barnett Newman's analogy between artists and birds, and art historians and ornithologists. For artists the enterprise of painting is more physical than interpretive RR: Yet I find a number of significant differences between your work and that of Stella, Marden and Winters-as well as with the that of the major figures of Abstraction Expressionism. The more I consider your work, the more I'm drawn to what I would call its "mannerist" or "rococo" aspects. There is a refined delicacy of touch that I don't find at all in fifties Abstract Expressionism, and that seems to me entirely different from the type of mark-making found in Stella, Winters and Marden. NA: My connection to the Abstract Expressionists involves the notion of improvisation, that definition of painting which says meaning is found in the process, that all parts of the surface are equally interdependent and that any spatial illusion is limited to the actual layers of paint. They were very conscious of removing anything recognizable so nothing would distract from the action of the paint itself as it moved across the surface. "Delicacy of touch" in my work can be assigned to my idiosyncratic obsession with formal refinement, that obsession which finally concludes the improvisation. Your definition of "mannerism" as refining an accepted definition of painting, in this case abstraction, could be illuminating when applied to my work. In fact most of the abstract painters I know could be said to be working in the "manner" of the great breakthroughs of Abstract Expressionism. RR: You describe your work with terms like "improvisation," "process," "discovery," "suggestion." I wonder if there is an ethical, component to your interest in these elements, or if the concern is purely aesthetic. And if it is purely aesthetic, I wonder if you consider this withdrawal from the political as itself an implicit political statement? NA: I set up formal circumstances; certain kinds of structures,
color groups and ways of applying paint which determine the direction
in which the work will unfold. Formal ideas are included and excluded
along the way. As little as possible is predetermined; there is always
room to be surprised by the unexpected. I work with the conviction that
merely executing the process will ultimately bear fruit. You could assume
then that I believe in the integrity of this process as an end in itself,
separate from other ways of thinking. My position is not so much a withdrawal
from the political as an assertion of its irrelevance to the craft of
painting. If you wish, that in itself is a political assertion about
preserving the integrity of painting. See Ad Reinhart. Neil Anderson "Temple - Template"- essay by Kenneth Baker We hear it said often that we live in the golden age
of biography. Great literary projects by Isaac Deutscher, Leon Edel,
Peter Gay, Richard Holmes and others appear to bear it out. ---Kenneth Baker ---------------------------------------------
NEIL ANDERSON "Temple - Template" by Joseph
Jacobs Neil Anderson is showing works from two recent series of paintings at the Bridgette Mayer Gallery in Philadelphia. One series, Whiteness of the Whale, was inspired by reading Herman Melville's Moby Dick. Chapter 52, "Whiteness of the Whale," focused on the broad implications of the color white, from the appalling to the sublime, and white figures into most of the paintings in Anderson's series. The second series was inspired by a 2001 trip to Japan, and the titles of the paintings are taken from Buddhist Temple sites. The two series share a similar dedication to paint and
abstraction. Ironically, the pictures begin with representational objects,
since the artist gathers organic materials that he then photographs
and projects onto the canvas. He then develops the abstract qualities
of his projection, playing shape and texture off one another and developing
the composition as he puts one layer of imagery over another. His ultimate
subject matter is the pure experience of paint, which he finds parallels
the transcendentalism of Melville and the spirituality of Buddhism.
Joseph Jacobs |