Painting With Fruit: Carmen Argote

"Did I tell you about
my mother's avocado ado?
She grew it from a pit.
Secretly, slowly in the dark,
it put out grub-white roots
which filled a jelly jar.
From this unlikely start,
an avocado tree with bark
& dark green leaves
shaded the green silk
which shaded me
throughout my shady adolescence."
 - excerpt  from "Fruits & Vegetables" from Fruits & Vegetables by Erica Jong, New York, Holt, Rinehart & Winston: 1971.

A tactile art, swirls of fruit as the ultimate finger paints, is the piquant art of Carmen Argote.

"My father mentally inhabited two sites in Guadalajara while living in Los Angeles.  One was an empty lot, and the other was Mansion Magnolia where he envisioned himself working. These two sites created for him, and by extension for me during my childhood, an ever-present feeling that Los Angeles was a temporary situation. I have felt the coexistence of these spaces throughout my life." - Carmen Argote

(Mansion Magnolia is a neoclassical mansion in the center of Guadalajara, built in 1904 as a residence it rhen became a hotel and restaurant.)

These disparate notions of what makes a home propel the artist Carmen Argote in her work. How do we inhabit places and spaces?  She uses materials symbolically, drawing on a rich backstory of everyday use - avocados, pine needles, coffee, and the cochineal dye used to decorate blankets throughout Central America.  The citrus fruit that Argote is working with in the photograph above was picked in the garden of  Mexican muralist Jose Clemente Orozco while she was in residence at his studio. The results are included in  her current solo exhibition at the New Museum in New York City "As Above, So Below." Its title is taken from an aphorism suggesting that the terrestrial world is a reflection of the celestial world.

Carmen Argote was born in Guadalajara, Mexico and now lives in Los Angeles, the city where she spent much of her childhood. 

Images:
1. Itzel Hernandez Gomez, photograph - Manajese con Cuidado,  Carmen Argote working on citrus, preparing the exhibition As Above, So Below, courtesy of the New Museum, NYC.
2. Carmen Argote - Searching with the Fingers, 2019, avocado on linen over panel, Instituto de Vision, Bogota.

Inspired by Lascaux: Elaine de Kooning & Eric Chevillard

I. Although she is better known for her portraits (1918-1989), Elaine de Kooning was a painter of vivid and vigorous abstraction; for her abstraction was definitely an expressive mode. Her aim for her more abstract work was this: "I wanted a sense of surfaces being in motion."  

Cave #24 Red Oxide Wall is one in a series that de Kooning called "Cave Walls," inspired by the cave paintings of Lascaux.  Of her first visit to Niaux in 1983, she  recalled how impressed she had been, saying, "the walls, even those without paintings, seemed to bellow with animal forms."  As a child, Elaine had loved to draw animals.

De Kooning believed that she had seen the origins of Abstract Expressionism in the ancient cave paintings.  "There's...a tremendous immediacy about the cave work which has much more to do with today's art, than, with, let's say, the Renaissance art."  The textures, cracks, and bulges of the walls resembled her own painting techniques, her use of strokes and drips and layering through collage, all in  a single work.  In Cave #24 Red Oxide Wall  thick strokes of red, white, and blue rush downward, and are scattered about at bottom by  forceful black strokes that suggest a bull in full charge. Here, as in all of Elaine de Kooning's abstract paintings, nothing is static.

De Kooning became a regular contributor to Art News in 1948 and. although she, like her husband, was a painter, she was pigeon-holed as an art critic. Again, like her friend Lee Krasner, de Kooning's efforts to taken seriously for her art were impeded, not helped, by her marriage to a famous male artist.  As the old saying has it:  marriage is only big enough for one and a half persons and guess which one gets the lobotomy?

II. "The end of prehistoric times was precipitated by the advent of writing....in brief, prehistory comes to an end when rhe story begins." - Eric Chevillard

And the beginning of the rewriting of prehistory began in 1940 when an eighteen year old boy found an opening in a wall of rock that led into the caves of Lascaux in southwestern France.  Historians had studied remnants of the early Roman settlements in the Dordogne for a long time but the revelation of Paleolithic artifacts pushed the region's first known habitation back some two million years.

When the caves were opened to the public , entering along with the thousands of visitors were light, moisture, microbes, and fungi that began to degrade the wall paintings. Eventually the French Ministry of Culture came up with a plan to stabilize the precious artworks by creating an alternative series of faux-caves, complete with copies of the Lascaux paintings.  When reality gets turned upside down, is there anything that fiction can add?  Enter Etic Chevillard.

If Chevillard's fictional worlds seem at first far removed from our own but then, without our being aware of how it happens, their orbits begin to run in parallel with the known world or even collide with it.  This is the world that appears in Chevillard's Prix Feneon prize winning novel The Crab Nebula (1993) whose protagonist, a man named Crab, may be out of his mind but he greets the possibility with genial curiosity.

This modest, off-the-cuff lecture does not have as its sole aim the clarification of the meaning of my trade, nor is it intended as the proof of my credentials in the matter; its main purpose is rather the additional reprieve it allows me by justifying my reticence to get down to work..."

These are the first words the protagonist addresses to the reader. Is Boborkine an archaeologist, a tour guide to the caves, or a clerk in the gift shop?  And who is Professor Glatt?  Archaeologist or art historian, but definitely "the most authoritarian authority in this field." At the end of this novel that manages to be both dilatory and succinct, we are no closer to understanding the cave paintings than we were when we began.

Eric Chevillard (b.1964) and the postwar French writers of the Nouveau roman (Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, et al) and Eric Chevillard (b.1964) share a  trait that perplexes and irritates their critics -  a lack of structure.  But, unlike the unleavened seriousness of his predecessors, Chevillard is a writer of cheerful absurdities are elliptical but not indecipherable.  "Man will only ever address himself to man, in a closed circuit, man finishes man."  Suitably then, Prehistoric Times ends with our protagonist, a man who closes himself up in a room to contemplate the afterlife of paintings he has not yet painted.

To read an interview with Eric Chevillard by his translator Alyson Waters....

For further reading - Prehistoric Times by Eric Chevillard, translated from the French by Alyson Waters, Brooklyn, Archipelago Books: 2012.

Image: Elaine de Kooning - Cave # 24 Red Oxide Wall + 1984 + acrylic and  collage mounted on paper,  Cindy Lou Friedman & Rick Friedman Collection, Southampton, NY.

Ostend,1902: Leon Spilliaert, Resident - Stefan Zweig, Visitor

"A day of travel like many others over these past years. Is it because the world shakes on its foundations that one is so used to living in perpetual movement? Is it a premonition that a time is approaching when countries will erect barriers between them, so you yearn to breathe quickly, while you still can, a little of the world's air?" - Stefan Zweig, from his journal, dated 27 September 1935, (translated from the German by Will Stone, 2010)

More than a century separates us from Stefan Zweig yet these lines could easily have been penned yesterday.  Zweig, who was Jewish had fled continental Europe to England in 1934, but in 1939 as war came to England he moved on to the United States, ultimately finding uneasy refuge in Brazil, where he and his wife Lotte Altmann committed suicide in 1942.

Two young men, born in the same year, and full of promise.  One, the artist Leon Spilliaert (1881-1946) paces the shore by the sea wall late at night when his ulcers brought on insomnia and drove him out-of-doors.  The Viennese writer Stefan Zweig was twenty-one when he came to Ostend in 1902.  At twenty-one Zweig had already published five novellas and was well on his way to earning a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Vienna.  As for Spilliaert, just finding his vocation, his  would be displayed next to Pablo Picasso's in 1904 in Paris.

They also shared a mutual friend, Emile Verhaeran (1855-1916).  A prolific poet who was born in the Flemish part of Belgium but went on to write in French, Verhaeren was nominated for the Nobel Literature Prize six times. In his art criticism he advanced the merits of young Belgian artists including James Ensor, another Oostendenaar.  Spilliaert went to work for Verhaeren's publisher Edmond Deman in 1903, where the successful poet inspired and encouraged the tentative painter.  The first of many biographies that Zweig would write on Verhaeran, was published in 1910.

The two favorite occupations of the summer visitors were not swimming and sunbathing but were instead  gambling and racing, racing of all sorts, cars, yachts, horses, and dogs.  There was a febrile quality to their pastimes, as Zweig related in "The Season in Ostend" how, in 1901, when the gaming rooms had to closed the Belgian government proposed to award the town millions of franc in compensation for their losses.

It was only when August ended that the ordinary face of Ostend became visible: the fishers pursuing their marginal living and the ships coming and going from the deep water ocean port.  After repeated bombings by the Germans during the Second World War, the grandeur that had been summer at Ostend was replaced by a drably uniform modernism.  The sea wall and the long pier jutting optimistically into the Atlantic are still there, as Spilliaert as wondrously as painted them.

There is more about Leon Spilliaert at Blue Apple, Green Sea.

Image
Leon Spilliaert - De Windstoot (The Gust of Wind),  idia ink, watercolor, gouache, on paper, Mu.Zee, Ostend, Belgium.

Jasper Cropsey: Trenton High Falls

" This mode of study productive of knowledge  - it makes a man a botanist, a geologist, he is not satisfied seeing things merely upon the surface.  He studies deeper.  The knowledge he gains is communicated to his work, so that while it possesses beauty as a work of art, it is scientific and historical, scientific from the. great character that pervades it, and historical because of the truthfulness with which it represents the country..."

 - Jasper Cropsey, from as essay "Nature and Art," New York Art Union, August 24, 1845.

Jasper Crpsey often remarked that his goal in creating landscapes was to capture "nature as she is."
The original sketch for Trenton High Falls (1880) appears in a sketchbook that Cropsey carried with him during the years 1855-1856.  You can see traces of his architectural training in the detail and precise placement of his markings in this rendering of the upper falls. I can attest to the accuracy of the work: I have visited Trenton on one of the two weekend of the year that the area is open to the public. The architectonics of the horizontal rock formations are the terraced bench that the waters foam and swirl over, above, and below.  The trail that Cropsey walked to the top of the falls was laid out in 1822 with funds provided by Joseph Bonaparte, brother of France;s Emperor Napoleon

There are many waterfalls in upstate New York named "High Falls."  The Trenton High Falls are located on West Canada Creek which flows south from the Adirondacks to the Mohawk River east of Oneida Lake.   Before Europeans arrived, the Haudenosaunee called the falls Kay-a-ho-ra, or "slanting water."

The terraced levels of the falls are remnants of centuries of geological movement.  The limestone and the locale have contributed the name Trenton Group to the limestone bed that extends from upstate New York to Minnesota. It is a sedimented stone rich in fossils: Concularia, an ancient "armored' jellyfish; spiny-skinned starfsh and sea stars; cephalopads (shelleed mollusks with tentacles); snails and tiny moss animals.

Cropset made frequent sketching trips to such locations as the White Mountains of New Hampshire, Greenwood Lake and the Ramapo Valley in New Jersey and Canada during the 1850s.  Later he would make engravings from some of his sketches   Cropsy was one of the most accomplished draftsmen among the artists of the Hudson River School, as you can see.  Although he was strongly influenced by Thomas Cole, Cropsey's "truth to nature" was much less fanciful than Cole's  roamntic and allegorical paintings.

Jasper Cropsey (1823-1900) was born on Staten Island and began to sketch what he saw around his family's farm as a fragile child, often kept home from school by illness.  Trained as an architect,  Cropsey turned to the study of watercolor and oil painting at the National Academy of Design and exhibited his first landscapes at age twenty-one, soon abandoning his architectural practice.  He was a member of the Art Union, a group founded in 1839,  dedicated to teaching art literacy to the citizens of the young nation. 

Forgotten after his death in 1900, Cropsey's work was rediscovered in the 1960s when there was a revival of interest in the Hudson River painters.  His home "Ever Rest" in Hastings-on-Hudson was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in the early 1970s and now includes a gallery devoted to Cropsey's work.

This oil painting by the Danish artist Ferdinand Richter shows the entirety of the falls in Below (Trenton) High Falls.  Painted in 1858 while Richter was on a four year visit to the States, at a time when picturesque waterfalls were becoming popular vacation spots, it is one of most beloved and reproduced works from the collection of the Munson-Williams-Proctor Art Institute.

Note: If you are in the Mohawk Valley and would like to visit Trenton High Falls, visit Town of Trenton for information.

Images:

1.Jasper Francis Cropsy - Trenton High Falls, 1880, watercolor, and graphite on woven paper, 1880, Munson Williams Proctor Art Institute, Utica.
2. Ferdinand Richter - Below (Trenton) High Falls, 1858, oil on canvas, Munson-Williams-Proctor Art Institute, Utica.