A common assumption about
painters called Photorealists, and this includes Ann Goldberg, is that they are
obsessed with technique and getting paint to minutely reproduce visual
reality. But like most common assumptions,
this one is not necessarily true.
Another name for "common assumption" is prejudice - the
mistake of judging people and things by what they look like. In visual art, prejudice is the mistake
that comes from not judging things by what they look like. That's what happens with Goldberg and
her paintings. Because of
insufficient looking, assumptions have been made about what she is doing. And I think it's been gotten all
wrong.
Goldberg isn't a
Photorealist. When you really look
at her paintings she is only a tenuous Realist. The impulse to paint in a deceptively realistic manner -
today we would say in a Photorealist manner - predates the modern camera by
millennia. From the Roman
naturalist and writer Pliny the Elder we receive the story of the famous Fifth
century BCE contest between the painters Zeuxis of Heraclea and Parrhasius of
Ephesus to determine which of the two was the greater artist. When time came to reveal their work
Zeuxis confidently drew aside the veil and showed his painting first - a
picture of grapes that appeared so luscious and true that birds flew down from
the trees to peck at them. Zeuxis
confidently asked Parrhasius to pull aside the curtain from his painting, only
for Parrhasius to reveal that the curtain itself was the painting. Zeuxis was forced to concede defeat,
and is rumored to have said, "I have deceived the birds, but Parrhasius
has deceived Zeuxis." That to
me sounds like something that could be called Photorealism.
Admittedly Goldberg paints
from photographs, but she is neither producing a detailed representation like
that of a photograph, nor representing familiar things as they actually
are. Not when you really
look. Why not then paint directly
from the object? Goldberg won't
for many reasons. There's the
difficulty of controlling the conditions of light for the time necessary for
her to paint a picture. Through
photography she can quickly and spontaneously compose. She's attracted to the cropping,
flatness, and shallowness of focus of photographs which she uses
compositionally. And even though
painters have been using photography since its discovery, it still lends a
sense of modernity. So why doesn't
Goldberg just show the photographs from which she paints? Precisely because she is not a Photorealist. Because that would be too precise. Goldberg's paintings aren't so much
about how much they look like the reality from which they're painted, but how
they differ from it. More proper
is to simply call her a still-life painter. The late art historian Meyer Schapiro said that the objects
of still-life painting are "often associated with a style that explores
patiently and minutely the appearance of nearby things - their textures,
lights, reflections and shadows".
The objects of Goldberg's paintings are the everyday, but their subjects
are the abiding values of light on objects, and of the capture and
transformation of beauty. What is
particularly germane to seeing what Goldberg does is recognizing what Schapiro
describes as the "subtle interplay of perception and artifice in
representation". In other
words, how and what we see and the tricks we use to capture it, or in other
words again, representation and abstraction. Goldberg's paintings don't give the illusion of reality,
it's the illusion of precision. White
Tea-Set is convincing in the
painting of its sleek, white porcelain vessels - firm, modern,
architectural. Yet in the cup the
swirling tea and cream are like sky or water. Next door in the bowl the short choppy strokes of the sugar
are like drapery or landscape. A
fluid abstraction in a cup. A
Cezanne in a sugar bowl. Such a
gulf separates these distinct ways of handling paint yet there they are side by
side.
There is a factualness to her
paintings which is continuously slipping away. She performs an up and back between concentrating now on
representation, now on abstraction.
This isn't an unusual observation when looking at a painting. We have learned that every painting by
every artist is made up of strokes and smears which we can look at for their
aesthetic qualities alone.
Representation doesn't preclude abstraction. Goldberg however makes this oscillation a conscious part of
her painting so that we can never get completely comfortable, can never relax
in our looking at them. Just when
we do there is something we bump into which is jarring or even clumsy. But if we trust Goldberg, and trust is
essential in art, we will give her the credit she deserves of believing that
she has blocked our way on purpose.
In Mussels With Lemon
most of the shells are painted with a similar degree of verisimilitude. They have a continuity of surface and a
convincing concavity and convexity.
Look, however, at the shell just below the mid-line on the right. Here there's no convincing continuity
or illusion of surface. Instead
it's broken and daubed with as much bare as painted canvas. With its rose highlight it's as much a
miniature Impressionist painting of a sunset on water as anything else. Like the Impressionists, her concern is
with objects not resolved close up, but only at a distance, even if for her
it's a near distance. For the
Impressionists that might be twelve inches, for Goldberg two. Up close it's the marks that are
important. Her inclinations are at
once to Realism and Abstraction and confirms her saying, "I like my work
to take on the painterly significance of an expressionistic stroke as
exemplified by De Kooning, but at the same time retain realistic and
photographic qualities at a distance."
Ann Goldberg paints as she
does, not from an obsession with technique, but because this is who she
is. In an unstable, unsettling
world, can trying to set it right and to fix its relationships through the
arrangement and painting of its objects, be interpreted as a defensive or
coping strategy? A dreamed
for wholeness and security?
Psychology is not unimportant in looking and thinking about art. This is not to say that works of art
are always mirrors of the artist's personality and character as was believed in
antiquity - a belief revived in the Renaissance and since then gone in and out
of fashion - but that they are always an expression of some part of it, no
matter how evident or hidden.
Former mathematician, former architect, ordering the world, figuring out
its equations, its sums and balances, comes naturally to Goldberg. But just as in the real world,
Goldberg's painted world doesn't resolve itself into elegant equations. There are uncertainties and anomalies
and paradoxes. We see them in Olives
in Glass Bowl where colors and
shapes dissociate themselves from the objects they are supposed to describe and
pull themselves out of the spatial relationships they are meant to define. Look how the red of the pimento at the
center right seems to push itself forward through the bowl and how the star
shape at the lower left, that telltale mark of the pitting machine, looks
misplaced and floats away from the olive it is supposed to be a part of. In front of our eyes, Goldberg's world,
and therefore our world too, pulls itself apart and is redefined not in terms
of objects and spatial relationships, but in terms of Goldberg's most important
value - beauty.
http://www.anngoldberg.com/
