THE VISIBLE WORLD
AMY WEISKOPF`S STILL LIFES ARE THE RESULTS OF INTENSE INVESTIGATIONS INTO THE ACT OF SEEING THERE IS A CALM VERGING on preternatural serenity in Amy
Virginia Campbell / Southwest Art
Dec 01, 2004
AMY WEISKOPF`S STILL LIFES ARE THE RESULTS OF INTENSE INVESTIGATIONS INTO THE ACT OF SEEING
THERE IS A CALM VERGING on preternatural serenity in Amy Weiskopfs paintings of vegetables, fruit, fish, cheese, bread, eggs, the occasional flower, random insects, selected vessels, and kitchen implements. The atmosphere of contemplation is so pronounced that, even within the exceedingly polite tradition of still-life painting, these pieces seem invested with a focused reverence. Somewhat miraculously, though, the stillness of these still lifes does not interfere at all with their being dynamic, suspenseful, perplexing, ironic, and, at times, flat-out funny.
In a recent painting titled FETA CHEESE, WHITE TURNIPS, AND WHITE COCONUT, for example, a hard-boiled egg sliced neatly in half sits lined up amid many shades of white so that the bright yellow disks of the yoke seem to form the irises of a pair of eyes that may have had a previous existence in an animated cartoon. In a piece from 2001 called STILL LIFE WITH BEETS, a dusty pile of soporific beets is mildly upstaged by two Italian eggplants that sway in place as they stand on their tips and lean precariously against the wall, not to mention a scattering of small, lemon-yellow squash that all seem to have recently passed out. The mystery of Weiskopfs ultra-composed, beautifully painted work rests in the question of how timeless, otherworldly calm arises out of paintings whose elements have so much attitude.
"It is all a matter of observing," says Weiskopf. She happens to be talking about the key to understanding how color can be deployed to various effects in a painting, but her statement, in its generality-it is not unlike what financial genius Warren Buffet says about his investment strategy: "It`s simple, but it isn`t easy"-applies to her core approach to art. Weiskopf does not paint from imagination; her raw material is the visible world. Her true subject, though, is the act of seeing; her ambition is as elevated as the objects in her paintings are mundane. The process by which the eye discerns and discriminates as it navigates and identifies the tangible world wholly consumes her creative spirit. She reports back her findings in the form of paintings that play with the impulses her investigations have uncovered. To a great extent, her paintings tell us, the eye seeks out opposites and gradations of opposite; she prefers the latter. Nothing quite as on-the-nose melodramatic as the extreme light versus extreme dark of chiaroscuro interests her as much as bright versus dull, slick versus smooth, abstract and geometric versus specific and organic, two- versus three-dimensional, slightly nearer versus slightly farther away. Weiskopfs knowledge of how the eye feasts on these distinctions and how the mind enjoys the tension of resolving ambiguities is inversely related to the limited universe she chooses to paint. Those sleepy beets and that eggplant with rhythm reflect enormous awareness of how our eyes go naturally to what piques and pleases them. For a clinician of pleasure like Weiskopf, the still life is as good as-no, actually better than-the less pure world of landscape or figurative study.
No matter what Weiskopf happens to be talking about in her brisk, articulate manner, she tends to speak in terms of what she especially likes and even loves, as opposed to whatever she doesn`t like or is indifferent to. "I like verisimilitude," she says, for example. "I love that a flat surface can convince us of another world." It all comes down to pleasure. The great turn-of-the-20th-century painter Pierre Bonnard instructed himself in his journal, "Draw your pleasure-paint your pleasure-express your pleasure strongly." He would not have bothered to remind himself about that if it were easy to do. Pleasure is notoriously elusive and all too easily leads to or turns into its opposite, but that complication aside, it has not even been a respectable motivation in art for much of the last century. WeiskopPs overt concern with it is still suspect in many quarters.
WEISKOPF WAS BORN IN 1957 when heroic abstract expressionism had gone mainstream and Jackson Pollock was almost a household name. She grew up in suburban Chicago, the daughter of an architect father and housewife mother. From a very early age she wanted to be a painter, a profession she knew about because her aunt was a painter, as was a close family friend, and her father painted as well. "My parents could not have been more encouraging," she says, and that encouragement led to her being precociously familiar with the great Chicago Ait Institute`s collection. She was drawn from the beginning to Monet, Van Gogh, and C茅zanne (whose work remains a constant to which she regularly returns-"It always keeps my feet on the ground"). In Washington University in St. Louis, she found a school that pleased her enormously ("I was so happy in every way there," she says with her characteristic enthusiasm for things that please) and delivered to her much of what she wanted to know. One of her professors, Edward Boccia, taught her, she has said, "to love paint and have a real respect for the picture plane." Another, Barry Schactman, taught her how to draw and create volume in two dimensions. By the time she had been accepted into the master`s program at Philadelphia`s Tyler School of Art, she was deeply involved in figurative painting with expressionist leanings. Her inspirations were Matisse and Soutine. Then she got serious about pleasure.
"The person who made the difference was the painter Bruno Civitico," she explains. "He told me, `Your paintings are all over the place."` Civitico advised her to set up something to paint, observe it scrupulously, and just paint it. She set up a still life and really looked at it. And looked. And looked at the looking. "Painting still life didn`t start out as an intellectual decision," she says. "It was an immediate and satisfying thing. It was thrilling for me. I could sit there for hours."
Still life was not broadly considered a thrilling genre in the late 1970s. Though representational painting had begun its comeback from modernism and abstraction, conceptual art had become heir to pop art, and there was a lot more talking than painting going on in academia and the art world. Overall, Weiskopf summarizes dryly, "In grad school it wasn`t evident to people-fellow students or teachers-why I painted the way I did." The immediate satisfaction and sense of tightness Wciskopf felt in painting realistic still life was strong enough to fend off both the herd mentality and reigning academic assumptions that pressed in on her as a young artist. "You always have to build a wall between yourself and what`s going on around you," she says. But when she went to Italy for part of her study, she found so much that pleased her in the place and the art that she traded the wall for an ocean and spent the next nine years living in Rome.
There she had extraordinary, inspirational painting all around her, both historical ("I love the early Sienese painters") and modern ("I can never get enough Morandi"). She became an accomplished formalist whose compositions orchestrated sophisticated visual tensions. She learned to position a collection of, say, gourds and squash on a simple flat surface against a simple, shallow background in such a way that their relational complexity was not less riveting than that between some saint and his tormentors in an Old Master tableau.
IN MANY OF WEISKOPF`s PAINTINGS, the dynamics of her fruits and vegetables are just plain funny. Humor is, of course, as suspect as pleasure in many circles, which doesn`t keep it from being basic to the psyche. The thematic strain of traditional still-life painting known as Vanitas-which, depending on the time and place in which it was played out, represents the ephemeral nature of life by directly or indirectly invoking death, or by reveling in the deliciousness of the senses-has inspired Weiskopf to some eerily funny moves, like hiding a wasp in profile on a big, white coconut. But even when the laughs are more overt, as when a green tomato teeters on the edge of a white saucer perched insecurely and improbably atop a dark earthenware pitcher surrounded by emu eggs, they are never cheap. They are half in homage to past masters like 16th-century Spanish painter Juan Sanchez Cotan (who would, without the slightest intention of irony, hang a cabbage from a string to create a perfect crescent-shaped composition with a cut melon and a protruding cucumber on a ledge) and half in a genial nod to the contemporary viewer that the artist`s delight in the beauty of natural objects is being conveyed through sheer artifice.
When Weiskopf returned to the United States in 1991, she did so, characteristically, because of something she liked. "I never intended to be an expatriate," she explains. "I like Americans too much." She settled in New Orleans because the man who would become her husband had a teaching position at Tulane University, and that sensual, exotic city pleased her so much that she remained even after getting divorced. "New Orleans is such a wonderful city to make art in," she says, but it is especially wonderful when you do it only half the year and spend the other half at your home in a small Tuscan town near Sienna. The two locations make for a subtle difference in her paintings. "The light changes, of course, but the effect of that is an elusive matter," she says. "The light itself is more diffuse in the humidity of New Orleans, but I have northern windows and I work in a large industrial space. The paintings get more austere and modern. In Italy the light is harder and drier, but I have southern exposure, and I paint in my house where the feel is more rustic and domestic. Lately I`ve painted the view outside the window behind the still life I set on my sill, and the Tuscan landscape is so bizarrcly perfect it looks like someone already painted it.`
Whether created in New Orleans or Tuscany, Weiskopfs paintings are almost instantly recognizable as her work. The idiosyncratic style of composition explains some of that, but it`s the serenity countering the idiosyncrasy that completes the signature, the artist works a month and more on each painting, beginning with a charcoal sketch, which she then effaces down to a ghost of itself, proceeding through a fast color study in paint, which she then scrapes down to the surface, moving to detailed, small brush elaborations done object by object ("You have to paint the fish all at once-it rots," she says), and finishing later with a varnish.
The final painting displays no hint of the effort; its brush strokes are smooth and dedicated to depiction. You`re left to respond to all the invitations coded into the colors, shapes, and spaces on the canvas-the appeal to your heart made by the way a slightly bottom-heavy grapefruit hugs the side of a blue vase that is its perfect complement in shape and color, for example, or the sense you get that if you could touch any of the objects you are looking at, it would have the reassuring, soft vibration of human skin. In these distillations of the exquisitely observed perceptual world, the serenity of essential life seems to reign.
Weiskopf is represented by Hackett-Freedman Gallery, Sail Francisco, CA, and Hirschl & Adler Modern, New York, NY.
SIDEBAR
"I LIKE VERISIMILITUDE. I LOVE THAT A FLAT SURFACE CAN CONVINCE US OF ANOTHER WORLD."
ILLUSTRATIONS
OPPOSITE PAGE: STILL LIFE WITH BEETS, OIL, 20 脳 27. THIS PAGE: FETA CHEESE, WHITE TURNIPS, AND WHITE COCONUT, OIL, 12 脳 22.
OPPOSITE PAGE: STILL LIFE WITH BEETS, oil, 20 脳 27. THIS PAGE: FETA CHEESE, WHITE TURNIPS, AND WHITE COCONUT, oil, 12 脳 22.
EGGS, BREAD, AND MOTH, OIL, 14 脳 15 戮.
STILL LIFE WITH SQUASH & SALAMI, oil, 13 戮 脳 18.
AUTHOR AFFILIATION
Virginia Campbell, the former editor in chief of Movieline, has also written for Elle D茅cor, Departures, and Traditional Home.
COPYRIGHT: Copyright Sabot Publishing, Inc. Dec 2004. Provided by Proquest- CSA, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Only fair use as provided by the United States copyright law is permitted.
PROQUEST-CSA, LLC- MAKES NO WARRANTY REGARDING THE ACCURACY, COMPLETENESS, OR TIMELINESS OF THE LICENSED MATERIALS OR ANY WARRANTY, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED.
THERE IS A CALM VERGING on preternatural serenity in Amy Weiskopfs paintings of vegetables, fruit, fish, cheese, bread, eggs, the occasional flower, random insects, selected vessels, and kitchen implements. The atmosphere of contemplation is so pronounced that, even within the exceedingly polite tradition of still-life painting, these pieces seem invested with a focused reverence. Somewhat miraculously, though, the stillness of these still lifes does not interfere at all with their being dynamic, suspenseful, perplexing, ironic, and, at times, flat-out funny.
In a recent painting titled FETA CHEESE, WHITE TURNIPS, AND WHITE COCONUT, for example, a hard-boiled egg sliced neatly in half sits lined up amid many shades of white so that the bright yellow disks of the yoke seem to form the irises of a pair of eyes that may have had a previous existence in an animated cartoon. In a piece from 2001 called STILL LIFE WITH BEETS, a dusty pile of soporific beets is mildly upstaged by two Italian eggplants that sway in place as they stand on their tips and lean precariously against the wall, not to mention a scattering of small, lemon-yellow squash that all seem to have recently passed out. The mystery of Weiskopfs ultra-composed, beautifully painted work rests in the question of how timeless, otherworldly calm arises out of paintings whose elements have so much attitude.
"It is all a matter of observing," says Weiskopf. She happens to be talking about the key to understanding how color can be deployed to various effects in a painting, but her statement, in its generality-it is not unlike what financial genius Warren Buffet says about his investment strategy: "It`s simple, but it isn`t easy"-applies to her core approach to art. Weiskopf does not paint from imagination; her raw material is the visible world. Her true subject, though, is the act of seeing; her ambition is as elevated as the objects in her paintings are mundane. The process by which the eye discerns and discriminates as it navigates and identifies the tangible world wholly consumes her creative spirit. She reports back her findings in the form of paintings that play with the impulses her investigations have uncovered. To a great extent, her paintings tell us, the eye seeks out opposites and gradations of opposite; she prefers the latter. Nothing quite as on-the-nose melodramatic as the extreme light versus extreme dark of chiaroscuro interests her as much as bright versus dull, slick versus smooth, abstract and geometric versus specific and organic, two- versus three-dimensional, slightly nearer versus slightly farther away. Weiskopfs knowledge of how the eye feasts on these distinctions and how the mind enjoys the tension of resolving ambiguities is inversely related to the limited universe she chooses to paint. Those sleepy beets and that eggplant with rhythm reflect enormous awareness of how our eyes go naturally to what piques and pleases them. For a clinician of pleasure like Weiskopf, the still life is as good as-no, actually better than-the less pure world of landscape or figurative study.
No matter what Weiskopf happens to be talking about in her brisk, articulate manner, she tends to speak in terms of what she especially likes and even loves, as opposed to whatever she doesn`t like or is indifferent to. "I like verisimilitude," she says, for example. "I love that a flat surface can convince us of another world." It all comes down to pleasure. The great turn-of-the-20th-century painter Pierre Bonnard instructed himself in his journal, "Draw your pleasure-paint your pleasure-express your pleasure strongly." He would not have bothered to remind himself about that if it were easy to do. Pleasure is notoriously elusive and all too easily leads to or turns into its opposite, but that complication aside, it has not even been a respectable motivation in art for much of the last century. WeiskopPs overt concern with it is still suspect in many quarters.
WEISKOPF WAS BORN IN 1957 when heroic abstract expressionism had gone mainstream and Jackson Pollock was almost a household name. She grew up in suburban Chicago, the daughter of an architect father and housewife mother. From a very early age she wanted to be a painter, a profession she knew about because her aunt was a painter, as was a close family friend, and her father painted as well. "My parents could not have been more encouraging," she says, and that encouragement led to her being precociously familiar with the great Chicago Ait Institute`s collection. She was drawn from the beginning to Monet, Van Gogh, and C茅zanne (whose work remains a constant to which she regularly returns-"It always keeps my feet on the ground"). In Washington University in St. Louis, she found a school that pleased her enormously ("I was so happy in every way there," she says with her characteristic enthusiasm for things that please) and delivered to her much of what she wanted to know. One of her professors, Edward Boccia, taught her, she has said, "to love paint and have a real respect for the picture plane." Another, Barry Schactman, taught her how to draw and create volume in two dimensions. By the time she had been accepted into the master`s program at Philadelphia`s Tyler School of Art, she was deeply involved in figurative painting with expressionist leanings. Her inspirations were Matisse and Soutine. Then she got serious about pleasure.
"The person who made the difference was the painter Bruno Civitico," she explains. "He told me, `Your paintings are all over the place."` Civitico advised her to set up something to paint, observe it scrupulously, and just paint it. She set up a still life and really looked at it. And looked. And looked at the looking. "Painting still life didn`t start out as an intellectual decision," she says. "It was an immediate and satisfying thing. It was thrilling for me. I could sit there for hours."
Still life was not broadly considered a thrilling genre in the late 1970s. Though representational painting had begun its comeback from modernism and abstraction, conceptual art had become heir to pop art, and there was a lot more talking than painting going on in academia and the art world. Overall, Weiskopf summarizes dryly, "In grad school it wasn`t evident to people-fellow students or teachers-why I painted the way I did." The immediate satisfaction and sense of tightness Wciskopf felt in painting realistic still life was strong enough to fend off both the herd mentality and reigning academic assumptions that pressed in on her as a young artist. "You always have to build a wall between yourself and what`s going on around you," she says. But when she went to Italy for part of her study, she found so much that pleased her in the place and the art that she traded the wall for an ocean and spent the next nine years living in Rome.
There she had extraordinary, inspirational painting all around her, both historical ("I love the early Sienese painters") and modern ("I can never get enough Morandi"). She became an accomplished formalist whose compositions orchestrated sophisticated visual tensions. She learned to position a collection of, say, gourds and squash on a simple flat surface against a simple, shallow background in such a way that their relational complexity was not less riveting than that between some saint and his tormentors in an Old Master tableau.
IN MANY OF WEISKOPF`s PAINTINGS, the dynamics of her fruits and vegetables are just plain funny. Humor is, of course, as suspect as pleasure in many circles, which doesn`t keep it from being basic to the psyche. The thematic strain of traditional still-life painting known as Vanitas-which, depending on the time and place in which it was played out, represents the ephemeral nature of life by directly or indirectly invoking death, or by reveling in the deliciousness of the senses-has inspired Weiskopf to some eerily funny moves, like hiding a wasp in profile on a big, white coconut. But even when the laughs are more overt, as when a green tomato teeters on the edge of a white saucer perched insecurely and improbably atop a dark earthenware pitcher surrounded by emu eggs, they are never cheap. They are half in homage to past masters like 16th-century Spanish painter Juan Sanchez Cotan (who would, without the slightest intention of irony, hang a cabbage from a string to create a perfect crescent-shaped composition with a cut melon and a protruding cucumber on a ledge) and half in a genial nod to the contemporary viewer that the artist`s delight in the beauty of natural objects is being conveyed through sheer artifice.
When Weiskopf returned to the United States in 1991, she did so, characteristically, because of something she liked. "I never intended to be an expatriate," she explains. "I like Americans too much." She settled in New Orleans because the man who would become her husband had a teaching position at Tulane University, and that sensual, exotic city pleased her so much that she remained even after getting divorced. "New Orleans is such a wonderful city to make art in," she says, but it is especially wonderful when you do it only half the year and spend the other half at your home in a small Tuscan town near Sienna. The two locations make for a subtle difference in her paintings. "The light changes, of course, but the effect of that is an elusive matter," she says. "The light itself is more diffuse in the humidity of New Orleans, but I have northern windows and I work in a large industrial space. The paintings get more austere and modern. In Italy the light is harder and drier, but I have southern exposure, and I paint in my house where the feel is more rustic and domestic. Lately I`ve painted the view outside the window behind the still life I set on my sill, and the Tuscan landscape is so bizarrcly perfect it looks like someone already painted it.`
Whether created in New Orleans or Tuscany, Weiskopfs paintings are almost instantly recognizable as her work. The idiosyncratic style of composition explains some of that, but it`s the serenity countering the idiosyncrasy that completes the signature, the artist works a month and more on each painting, beginning with a charcoal sketch, which she then effaces down to a ghost of itself, proceeding through a fast color study in paint, which she then scrapes down to the surface, moving to detailed, small brush elaborations done object by object ("You have to paint the fish all at once-it rots," she says), and finishing later with a varnish.
The final painting displays no hint of the effort; its brush strokes are smooth and dedicated to depiction. You`re left to respond to all the invitations coded into the colors, shapes, and spaces on the canvas-the appeal to your heart made by the way a slightly bottom-heavy grapefruit hugs the side of a blue vase that is its perfect complement in shape and color, for example, or the sense you get that if you could touch any of the objects you are looking at, it would have the reassuring, soft vibration of human skin. In these distillations of the exquisitely observed perceptual world, the serenity of essential life seems to reign.
Weiskopf is represented by Hackett-Freedman Gallery, Sail Francisco, CA, and Hirschl & Adler Modern, New York, NY.
SIDEBAR
"I LIKE VERISIMILITUDE. I LOVE THAT A FLAT SURFACE CAN CONVINCE US OF ANOTHER WORLD."
ILLUSTRATIONS
OPPOSITE PAGE: STILL LIFE WITH BEETS, OIL, 20 脳 27. THIS PAGE: FETA CHEESE, WHITE TURNIPS, AND WHITE COCONUT, OIL, 12 脳 22.
OPPOSITE PAGE: STILL LIFE WITH BEETS, oil, 20 脳 27. THIS PAGE: FETA CHEESE, WHITE TURNIPS, AND WHITE COCONUT, oil, 12 脳 22.
EGGS, BREAD, AND MOTH, OIL, 14 脳 15 戮.
STILL LIFE WITH SQUASH & SALAMI, oil, 13 戮 脳 18.
AUTHOR AFFILIATION
Virginia Campbell, the former editor in chief of Movieline, has also written for Elle D茅cor, Departures, and Traditional Home.
COPYRIGHT: Copyright Sabot Publishing, Inc. Dec 2004. Provided by Proquest- CSA, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Only fair use as provided by the United States copyright law is permitted.
PROQUEST-CSA, LLC- MAKES NO WARRANTY REGARDING THE ACCURACY, COMPLETENESS, OR TIMELINESS OF THE LICENSED MATERIALS OR ANY WARRANTY, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED.
