Donald “Roller” Wilson. What can I say? One-time prof at the U of A in Fayetteville. Collected by celebrities. Known frequenter of the coffee shop at the public library. Really weird website.
Donald “Roller” Wilson
February 15, 2008 by Sam K
Posted in Painting | Tagged chimpanzees, dogs, Donald Roller Wilson, Fayetteville, surrealism, weird | 54 Comments
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that website is freakin awesome… sloane is gonna plotz over this work.
You know, sometimes you just gotta cook up an egg or two, pour a hot cuppa, and put on your ruffle collar and gigantic flower arrangement hat. Just to feel normal for a minute.
the three eyed kittys top all. because of their innocence, of course. all the other paintings KNOW how strange they are.
someone should start an artist’s grant program that would pair up a needy neutron bomb landscape painter with donald “roller” wilson, who would paint chimps dressed up like princesses into apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic landscapes.
i’m sorry but that neutron bomb descripton just continually makes me sick to my stomach. barry [gealt] created that term as a response to the hordes who were lopez minded. and maybe uglow minded. he hates that stuff. but paintings are paintings. FIGURE or no figure. how many 4-5 figure kitchen table slumped in the chair beer card game arms raised paintings can we look at?
in this corner, from rackstraw downes, wearing the white trunks, and weighing in at 235 pounds.”neutron bomb!!” and in the opposite angle it’s “4-or-5-figure-kitchen-table-slumped-in-the -chair-beer-card-game-arms-raised painting” hailing from balthusland, in the chartreuse trunks and coming to us at a whopping 487 pounds…. FIGHT!
….flawless victory….
I really don’t think Barry Gealt can claim credit for coining the term. I’ve read it in texts on Estes, and heard it from the mouths of people who have little or no relation to Indiana University ideas. At MU, we had a visiting artist named Ricky Allman in to talk, and he said that the implications of his unpopulated landscapes always came up whenever he gave a talk, and he his idea about it (working up the space to not leave room for the figure) echoed Barry’s, but Allman had no direct or indirect connections to Barry that I’m aware of.
Barry is no subtle wordsmith and tended toward blunt and overly generalized criticism. There were some subtle ideas under there, though, for those that looked. The point was not to hate on a certain painter or two, or their followers. The point was to hate on any methodology of painting that allowed the maker to become dumb, passive and not engage in a full investigation of the possible expressive content of the space or subject. (His occassional threats to break the arm of students over-using the palette knife are another manifestation of this same general idea about painting, I think.)
A lot of the neutron bomb painting is overly literal and passive, while any urban environment is exciting, stimulating, dirty, disgusting, toxic, dangerous, etc. Something’s not right, there.
Painting is painting, sure. But unimaginative, unresponsive, univestigative, unexpressive painting is not the same as a painting that has all those qualities. I think that was always the point, and it made to the figurative painters as well as the landscape and occassional abstract painters.
And I’m not talking about the top tier of painters here. Uglow, Lopez, Estes even. Those guys made pointedly people-less paintings. The absence of figure is expressive. It’s the followers. (And if we’re all followers of one thing or another, I’ll take the side of imaginative quirky followers over passive and unexpressive followers anytime.)
i don’t mean “versus” but “difference”. the difference between painting that is interested in form and response. and painting that is interested in the subject, or theatre. theatrical. balthus is theatrical, but is also formally expressive. balthus is concerned with the construction of the painting, the rhythm. how the parts move together. lot of feeling to that end. as opposed to eric fischl, for example, who is not. but is interested in something theatrical. imagist. rackstraw downes is not really interested in expression, or color. not very interesting. someone like stanley lewis is interested in expression, construction, color, on the other hand. feeling and subtlety. figure-for-figure’s-sake bothers me.
Back on topic for a sec. Can someone please tell Mr. “Roller” Wilson that Jessie Fisher is snooping around looking for his kittens?
(not a week goes by without a Jessie Fisher reference does it?)
thanks for the clarifications chris….
the bottom line for me is that the expressive potential, possibilities of form were rarely, if ever, discussed (you know where). Construction and color, for example. Instead, the idea, or the subject, or the grandeur of the work was seen as important. wouldn’t a passive imitation of Tiepolo still be melodramatic, quirky maybe, etc.? a passive imitation of morandi would be dead color, composition. just a few ugly gray bottles. grand figure painting of local color and un-felt compositions (how else to put that?) are unexpressive from a formal standpoint. painters like sickert, porter, uglow, dubrow WERE hated. and these are formal painters, not theatrical narrative painters.
I guess my experience was different. Everyone I worked with in Bloomington discussed construction and color, linked to expression and idea. I can only recall one of seven faculty that didn’t like the artists you mentioned.
I want to go one step further, see if I can turn this discussion back onto the topic of the post here. On this blog, almost all the really good, multi-faceted debates in which a lot of different ideas circulate have been related to posts of quirky, theatrical paintings. Why? I’ve opened the floor on some of the more expressive formalists–painters whose work I really love. I’ve put forth questions for the audience. Still we just get pronouncements not discussion. We get name-dropping, malignments of some evil Art World that supposed to be out there, and the attempts to debate have been immediately called personal. Why? I’m tempted to put forth the opinion that theatrical painting may actually be more relevant to human experience than expressive formal painting. I didn’t think that before I started the blog, but I’m starting to get a feeling here…
interesting. what do you mean by ‘human experience’? sounds close to the ‘human condition,’ to bring up another oft used IU term. (this term was used by 1 out of 7 faculty members).
I want to say it boils down to “one appreciates Matisse or they don’t appreciate Matisse”. Or something of the like. People see what they see. Art historians who love work that is socially or historically minded, but see Matisse as just someone who makes pleasing paintings (and use the painting-as-an-armchair quote to support that view).
or…what about Painting experience. in other words: Seeing. Painting that is about seeing. seeing the world in visual terms, and seeing the painting in constructive terms. what is human experience? the world experienced by non-painters, or painters when they are not painting?? I wonder if my experience with paintings that excite me is much more than realization. like, “yeah, they get it..”…or, the recognition of a familiar, seeing someone that is part of the brethren, etc.
now i am starting to think of emotional response to formal aspects of a painting as being like a smell that brings back memories. not that they are same thing, but the ‘way it hits you’ being similar to both experiences.
also, isnt it just the case that a theatrical painting gives us more to talk about? a book club experience. hollywood movies have a range of actors and types in them, a variety of male, female, age, race, demeanor, so as to attract a larger audience. More people talking about an episode of LOST than…some art-house flick. There is a much larger response to someone like John Currin (and everyone has a thought on his work) than a Bonnard bathtub painting, or a small Lennart Anderson still life. And there just isnt as much to say about that still life painting. not in the long run. expressive formal is less appreciated. different painter’s eye at work.
i don’t know why we can’t have both.
hell, i know i have both, and more. so does lennart anderson, for that matter. so does antonio loepz garcia. many of the great theatrical painters have made some damn good quietly formal paintings, devoid of the human element (caravaggio, anyone?). likewise i think that few of the neutron bombers are absolutely removed from ethos and pathos. i think dubrow is one who’s got significant pathos to his formalism. there are plenty of others.
and there are many painters of space and light and land that do not create that sense of absence – ann loftquist for example. yeah, she’s out in nature, but still – there’s a felt richness there (same with george inness). scott noel often seems to have more warmth and seen-ness to his pictures that do not contain figures than in those that do (at least to me). hell, wyeth does both the human absence/object focused scenes with as much power as his investigations of figures and individuals.
the thing is this: it’s not an either/or situation. i would seriously question my direction if i only produced massive theatrical pictures in a particular vein, and nothing else. similarly, if i only made quiet “empty” formal pictures all the time i’d be a little concerned as well. as it is i want to do both and more. the investigation and engagement is what matters. i think roller recycles things a lot, but he’s engaged. he’s constantly pushing things around for himself. i think that’s the biggest thing i’m looking for from students, colleagues, and the artists i look at.
I’m very suspicious of the ‘you get it or you don’t’ idea about. Sounds elitist and cult-ish. Using the word brethren seems like confirmation of these suspicions.
And I think it’s wrong to limit painting to only the experience of seeing (and to dictate too much which types of seeing are acceptable). Looking back at art history, I think memory and the sensation of touch have been as important to paintings as seeing has.
yes. we can have both. no argument there. MY argument is with those who champion the theatrical over the formal. theatrical WITHOUt the formal. Grand subject matter, ambitious scale (or not), but without any feeling for the forms (color, shape, plane, light, air, weight)..or how the parts move, and relate to the whole. THAT is what bugs me.
and formal doesnt mean quiet or empty. it means formal, as in understanding, expressiveness, meaning, an appreciation of the abstraction of the work. We get this from Poussin, Rubens, Titian AND the stanley lewis ballpoint pen interior. Titian is about how we move through the painting in a formally expressive way, AND life and death, heaven and hell.
i don’t mean to sound elitist, or cultish. i associate those terms with a more conscious decision: “Nelson Shanks is the end all, be all.” But I am talking about things like taste, connoisseur…its just a matter of fact that not everyone gets cubism, for example. or has an eye for proportion, or appreciates a fine wine. maybe those things can be learned, maybe not. and (not that you are arguing it), I really don’t agree that it’s all art. that everything in a gallery or on a canvas is art. or is in the medium of paint. If I did have to choose, I would claim elitist over its-all-art ala Warhol, etc.
i am confused about your take on Lofquist: are you liking her or no? I feel she is really a gallery painter working from photos and some plein air sketches. more about producing volume than anything else. It starts to sound like, with the word ‘absence’ that a painting with no figure is an empty room. a vacuum.
finally, I don’t limit painting. not to the experience of seeing. I am saying merely “hey, what about that part of it!?!” painting about seeing is just as viable (but maybe only to PAINTERS….at least more than not). ‘Dam, look at the color of that crusty wall!” is more exciting to me than “Pave paradise, put up a parking lot” suburbia-ism, for example. both might be, but one is more exciting to me. The idea is to try to paint that excitement. express it, with color and paint. people march down the street over a photo of a crucifix in a jar of urine, but not for the gray in morandi.
it sounds a bit like you ARE saying that it is either-or. This week the painter made the big figure painting, and next week the painter made the quiet, empty, formal still life with no human presence. SEEING IS HUMAN PRESENCE. so is expression. rhythm, light, movement , color…are all human expressions. i think of paintings, early paintings in particular, of someone like Bo Bartlett, who creates a large figure painting rather like a Line-up of Characters. “There is the cop, There is the crying kid, There is the black guy, There is the screaming person” and so on. Grand Narrative Idea, Life and Death, but no feeling for the composing, the music. Matisse big dance mural at the Barnes, the other way around. anonymous dancers, beatiful music. ….no, not everyone appreciates that…but we all have feelings about a cop bashing some guys head in. which one is reporting, and which is constructing?
who was advocating for theatrical without the formal or formal without the theatrical?
i think roller wilson has both, though he’s tacking toward the theatrical side with a good bit of irony, humor, and just joyfulness put in there as well.
Or advocating for malls without the theater?!?
Actually, I’m really glad to see someone staking out the position that John is staking out here. It needs more advocates. I’ll leave my challenge on the floor, for more people to write in and argue for the paintings that run further up the formal/poetic/expressive side. Especially in a way that goes beyond just trash-talking the rest of the Evil Art World.
May be it’s self-explanatory, but could you all give those of us who are non-IU people a definition of “Neutron Bomb” paintings, as you are referring to it? I feel like the there is a contextual aspect to the term that I’m not quite getting here.
People-less landscape or cityscape paintings. as if the neutron bomb killed off the population but left the city intact. no humans to be seen….
i also think the term came to be a sort of cautionary slogan meant to warn painters against dealing only with formalist concerns rather than humanist issues in their work. at least that’s how i started taking it. in that: the human element had been willfully removed in order to cool off the implications of an emotional content or agenda.
i am completely confused by the trajectory of this thread, which i just took a good half hour in reading. i would be interested to hear the input of some people who look more exclusively at non-objective art in light of these same concerns. we keep getting bogged down in subject matter as the source of either formalist or ‘theatrical’ avenues in painting. even in the sense that it seems a number of the comments have pointedly attached formalism and/or theatre to the motif: as if the motif engenders a one-or-the-other approach.
i certainly can’t offer any more on this issue than has already been offered up. but, i do often think about the impulse to make a picture of something: what it means. as little kids most of us had a crayon placed in our hands and what did we do? we drew. with no concern for the formal. not yet at least. the formal stuff is mostly learned. does that make it any less true to intention within the work of mature artists…probably not, but the impetus does stem from a different source. and it means different things culturally as well. different cultures = different formal constructs. it’s language is all. so, if i don’t understand someone else’s language and syntax, i hope i wouldn’t dismiss them on the basis that i simply don’t possess the appropriate filters through which to make sense of them.
…and this one might go with the question chris put out on the floor about painters that find themselves treading deep in the waters of one-or-the-other: i really love munch. all of munch. even the scream. i mean, the guy had it pretty spot-on with that one. *identifiable reality*
I agree that Munch is great, and frequently underrated/underrepresented.
The problem with having specialized knowledge or understanding is it’s inherently exclusive to a large group of people. To deal in human narratives is, in one way, to throw non-specialists a bone. To create the opportunity for dialogue instantly, even if it’s not a dialogue that hits at all possible levels. To not make appreciating something complex and enriching immediately chore-like.
It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t make a painting without people. It means that to do it well–truly successfully–one has to exceed making merely ‘competent’ work, which, incidentally, is the problem with a lot of five-people-in-the-kitchen paintings, or whatever you want to call them. Suburban bodegones. If there’s a formula, you have to transcend the formula.
I would disagree that Downes isn’t interested in color. If I were to guess, his paintings take 3 or 4 months for the sake of color. This is noticeable especially in the later work, which is considerably more painterly and less ‘dry’. Also, the subject matter is more thematically engaging, yet pointedly without people.
The tricky thing about using Matisse to justify an allegedly ‘formalist’ work is that Matisse probably wouldn’t defend it unless it was bright and declarative and life-affirming.
I think it’s fine for a painter to be expressively aloof, but that painter shouldn’t get pissed off when 99% of the people that ‘get it’ do so because they make the same kind of work.
It’s oddly poignant to me that this thread is taking place on the Roller Wilson post, because I remember when I saw his work for the first time (a book of it, at my parents’ house, years ago), I thought it was somehow lesser because it didn’t seem to be in obvious conversation with the capital-P painting pantheon. It pays out immediately, and you don’t have to be a painter to ‘get it.’ It’s funny, absurd, but it doesn’t really explain itself.
keep it going…..fun
I still feel the need to say that I am not a believer in either-or, nor am I saying that anyone here is advocating an ‘either-or’ stance. BUT I think the either-or thing was advocated-slash-preached by some folks back at we-know-where…
Supposedly Cezanne said it took him about all his life to realize that painting is not sculpture. not the same concerns as sculpture. A painter is not a sculptor…..I wanna say that a painter is not a playwright (to continue the theatrical). AS a rule, A playwright usually has a person or two (or many..or just one) in mind when crafting their play. otherwise, when the curtain rises opening night the audience gets a view of an empty stage. Maybe props are on the stage, maybe not. But some play, huh?
If we look at paintings from the point of view that figures are important (because people are important), and paintings need people (AS A RULE, not all the time, but “usually need” to “should have”),….then we end up seeing people-less paintings as being empty. or “mere”. and THAT is what I am hearing people saying above. Not that no one here doesnt like still lives, etc. BUT that formal concerns are quiet, mere, lesser than Humanist concerns. THIS is what is being said here. And it was drilled into the heads of alum from you know where. (exaggerating, but see my point).
A rumor at the Pennsylvania Academy of the art had that some years ago, at the beginning of the annual student show at the the end of the year, the Champion of Classical Figurative Painting Martha Mayer Erlebacher walked through the student exhibit literally crying out: “WHERE is THE FIGURE!!”
That is really the sort of thinking I am talking about. WITH figure is automatically lofty in content and ambition. Without figure=dead, too close to evil abstraction, etc.
Remember, I am making a point. I am well aware the Erlebacher, for those that know her work, paints still lives.
And I never think that ANY painter is EITHER-OR. Matisse is not. But Bo Bartlett is. (I said any PAINTER….)
If we give Barry credit, we realize that to criticize paintings as being neutron bomb is to call them imitative and empty. (to paraphrase Chris from above). We have seen plenty of folks say “I like Lopez” and climb up on the roof to paint that view in an attempt to recreate Madrid.
Adding a figure to a painting is like Duchamp ‘adding’ a snowshovel.
the problem is the figure being painted to the point of mere recognizability (is that a word?). We paint the figure til it looks like the figure: looks real, looks like volume, proportion, relative anatomical correctness, likeness (does it look like that character I have in mind), gesture (is the figure making the necessary meaningful gesture?), space (is the figure ‘sitting’ in space, not floating, etc.?). Now, THERE is the figure. Don’t you see it? It exists, and is saying something important.
But that is not how Rembrandt painted that side of beef. Says Soutine. the side of beef hanging on the hook is not important, in and of itself. Not socially, politically, spiritually. Soutine says no, the side of beef is not important. BUT the WAY that the beef is PAINTED is important. THe WAY it was painted is telling. The feeling behind the painting (act of painting, making of the painting). Nothin to do with style.
before we realize that we could write essays that explain that the beef IS a figure, that the beef is a metaphor for MAN, I just want us to say that the meaning is not THERE in the metaphor, but in the painting of the painting. THAT is form. THAT is expression. Not the subject, the thing, the figure….but the WAY it was painted. To put into words makes it sound like proscription. or if we make it painterly it makes it meaningful. actually i mean the other way around. the paintinf of the painting is meaningful, and that makes it painterly…
Auerbach repaints that head a zillion times because that similar feeling is not quite realized each time, for him. Not because he screwed up the proportion, or got the shadow color wrong, or the ear too small, etc. but because the feeling is not yet right. the way the parts come together. if we appreciate a painted head by auerbach, hopefully it is because we respond to those feelings, in the paint. not the fact that the figure is important. Maybe it is the painters son, daughter, wife, or could be the pope. or could be the figure is a metaphor. but it is not the figure, it is the way that it was painted that makes it meaningful.
we can’t seperate that from the subject.
art historians see Mondrian as being about art historical challenge (the most abstract to date) or social statement (the city….as seen from an airplane above). Painters see Mondrian as a painter….trying to get it right. Like Manet scraping out that head 57 times, Coldstream and Uglow’s obssessive searching for proportion, Matisse constantly reworking that dance mural, Giacometti destroying and building back up, Diebenkorn, Cezanne, Titian, Degas, Pissarro, Renoir, Corot building like a soap bubble, Leland Bell constantly repainting the rhythm, George Nick scraping out (or not)….Mondrian painting and repainting those rectangles and lines to the millimeter. Looking for just the right expressive tension. That is what I am getting at talking about Form. expressive form. The meaning in the music of the painting. that aint quiet. definitely not ‘mere’.
Vincent Desiderio, David Salle, Mark Kostabi, John Currin, Rauschenberg, Robert Longo, Ron Mueck…for example. All may be interesting, may be important, may be great craftsman, may be great designers (and they are not evil, Chris), but they are not coming from the same place. They are not about the feeling, the music, the way it is painted. the WAY it is painted, the Feeling behind the marks. We don’t respond to them the same way.
;
Okay, the last time I brought up Hickey, it sidetracked the discussion into the Hickey Phenomenom, as opposed to the actual meaning of the words that were quoted, but.
I actually like the theme of Air Guitar much more than Enter The Dragon. It’s central message, I believe is that art needs to be engaged with the larger culture surrounding it, not just the culture of other painting (or the culture of making paintings, or being a painter).
I still question how much painting for painters does this.
One quick aside: I’m the one who touched off this discussion by jokingly bringing up the neutron bomb, but I see a couple of other folk dropped the H-Bomb: Humanism. I kknow we got some folks up there up on their critical theory–anyone gonna jump on the relevance of humanist thinking in a contemporary context, related to contemporary artworkx?
(One other aside: I think the Jerry Saltz Phenomenom is really much worse than the Dave Hickey Phenomenom. As least the ideas behind the actual words that Hickey used to write come into play. People just seem to scan Saltz for the names–I’ve never heard anyone talk about any ideas he writes about, just the people who’s work he writes about.)
Also, thanks, Sloane, for calling us out on the IU insider-y-ness.
And, Jen, do we get bogged down in subject matter related to form all of the time, or just when we get on this people-less painting kick?
any specific Saltz or Hickey. I don’t know enough about these people. I assume I have read them, definitely know the names. knowing more on my point can help me see where you are coming from.
if its me, im not talking about painting for painters. just painting. its joe blow the painter, not clinton/obama the policy makers. Edwin Dickinson walks down the path, sees the light on the rocks, paints the painting. that’s all he can do. Chardin wants the plums dancing. Miles Davis plays those notes. …are they concerned with the larger culture? in the work, or only, maybe, in their everyday lives. But they just respond to what they respond to. It’s just about what painting is, not what it should be. painting has no social importance. that doesnt make it less meaningful. if we say that it should be socially significant then we ARE implying it is less meaningful. THAT again, is the mere-ness of the formal expression idea. I don’t know if that is good or bad, elitist or populist. But that thinking comes from outside the loop. “we don’t want little susie/johnny to grow up to be a hermit. a social misfit” not talking about van gogh here. but that poets, musicians, and painters are drawn to make things… naturally. those things may or may not talk about the status quo, our predicament, the human condition, the world at large. Doesn’t have to. Painters are great cooks.
(Hickey: Enter the Dragon, Air Guitar, lots of essays, monographs–has written a lot on beauty in art, which has led to a lot of writing and exhibits and art about the idea of beauty
Saltz: used to write about art for the village voice, most of those articles are available at artnet.com/magazine; some personal favorites are “The Richter Resolution” and “1557: A Space Oddysey”)
um, maybe i was being tricked for two years, but did we all go to the same grad school? cause i had a completely different experience than the one that is being suggested over and over again above. i felt really supported by all of the faculty. in slightly different ways of course. and yes, at times they contradicted one another, but so they should. and i never felt as though the information was contesting for my allegiance to one school of thought or another. and even the two ‘dubrow’ people offered me a lot of enthusiasm even when my work sharply departed from the ‘expressive formalism’ that they enjoy (if we are going to label things and people).
chris, i think there is a somewhat natural impulse to look at form in terms of subject matter (or that relationship in reverse). and i think you’re right: we are going to jump to that read more readily when we sense that the human element is missing or that the painting is amiss because of its absence.
but i would also argue that sometimes a painting can seem amiss because of its presence as well. as in: a painting that feels detached and formalist but whose artist employs the use of the figure and speaks about it in terms of emotion/poeticism etc. alan feltus comes to mind. i was really surprised to hear him discuss almost exclusively humanist issues when he spoke about his work. issues about love and sex and beauty and age. it was pretty mushy stuff. and it increased the dissonance factor for me in an odd kind of inverse relationship way (based on my own familiarity with the above argument being posited in a certain light).
i felt supported in the long run. there are different experiences. i felt very supported at various times. i dont mean it to sound so cut and dry, this school vs. that one. i am really trying to talk about connections not seperations.
things were said (and i will stop being so I U Insider-y after this): Sickert, Uglow etc., Dubrow, Lopez as mere reporters. Manet compared to Photography. Chardin compared to photography. Neiwald as mere imitation. actually sitting in the back of the room banging one’s head on the wall in response (non response) to a Lopez-Head/student.
There. I said of it. end of bashing. but these were part of my experience. I disagree with them, and respond.
my larger point just has to do with the reasoning behind this thinking. imagist vs. formalist. contextualist vs. formalist.
nothing personal to anyone there, or here…
[EDITOR’S NOTE: we didn’t all go to the same grad school. but the majority of comments on this post are from people who graduated with an MFA in painting from Indiana University Bloomington since 2001. this by no means implies that the opinions of individuals who do not meet the above criteria are unwelcome here, in fact, jus the opposite is true.]
formalist is different than formalist. not formalist like ellsworth kelly, barnet newman, greenberg school. rather just form. just painting. cezanne. pissarro. corot. NOT ISM. Roger Fry’s ART. Clive Bell. We appreciate the Corot landscape through a (lack of a different or better term) Formal read. the way the parts move together. This IS NOT something Detached. Form IS poetical and emotional. the color in the bonnard is Form. but not formalist (morris louis, etc.)
i understand painting as a form. i understand the difference between the ‘ism’ and its nature as something naturally imbued through the activity of painting.
to clarify: sometimes it is just interesting to see how the artist describes the character of work in contrast to the assumed knowledge that i (as the viewer) bring to it by virtue of the act of looking and posturing.
Here’re some things that might be too late to add.
It seems like at issue here is a pretty unavoidable aspect of living: that we are constantly surrounded by facsimiles and seldom the real thing. We’re swimming in reverberations. Imagey paintings bloom in this reverberation, like melodies sung by a thin voice. They need it. They can’t mean the same thing without it.
I think the phenomenon you mention regarding the discussions here, Chris, is the phenomenon that some experiences just don’t translate in the reverberation. A good bar band, for instance (it does happen, I’ve seen it two or three times) is only that good at the bar. Or camping. Or cooking. There’s a reason cooking shows have to be extreme, cartoony, in some way or other. Some paintings spawn words. Some paintings only spawn words, and not deeper, less dissectible responses. Some paintings only spawn deep, non-dissectible responses.
I think it’s telling that many people who get deeply invested in ‘formalist’ work (I’m using the term for convenience’s sake, hence the quotes) often speak in very general terms. They’re implicitly acknowledging there’s no substitute for the experience of making the work, and seeing the work firsthand. Like Fugazi said when asked what their songs ‘meant’: “the lyrics are printed, what else do you want?”
nice closer, sam
thanks for the clarification, Jen
i really meant my response to yours as such, didnt mean to sound accusing, etc.
john, the clarification was only to let you know that i got the difference. and i understood your need to clarify in your response as well.
man sam, that last statement is fantastic. most definitely.
Well, thanks, Jen and John.
I appreciate your thoughtfulness throughout this discussion–it’s life-and-death stuff for painting, if you ask me.
If I’ve been guilty of egging on this discussion a little bit, it’s because I agree with that statement, Sam. I kind of fear that painting for painters becomes a kind of priesthood, for a religion that no one wants and that it’s really important to find terms to sustain a dialogue that keeps that from happening. Thanks, everyone!
So changing the subject…who are the celebrity Roller Wilson collectors? I’m thinking Roseanne Barr. Hillary and Bill?
Robin Williams is one, I think.
Give me an extension on that assignment, if you would.
Robin Williams IS one…
wikipedia says:
He is also well known among celebrities such as Carrie Fisher, Jack Nicholson, Diane Sawyer, Harrison Ford, Paul Simon, Dan Aykroyd, Steve Martin, Kevin Kline, Phoebe Cates, and Robin Williams.[citation needed]
not that these people have all bought his stuff. and hey, look at that list….where did Kevin Kline go to school, I wonder??
So does this mean he’s painting/selling again? I was under the impression he was only doing commissions for his celeb friends. Just wondering. I’m a really big fan of post-apocalyptsasy, so please, keep these kind of Neutron Bomb convos up and at ’em. And I’m eating a shepherd’s pie with chick peas in it so my day just keeps getting more interesting.
I don’t know what he’s up to, officially, (except when I see him drinking coffee at the FPL Arsaga’s, but then that’s half of Fayetteville). I just wanted to talk about his work a little, recent or not…
Yeah, I think we owe Mr. Wilson a re-post sometime soon. I, at least, pledge to try to stay a little more on-topic
i have to say: is neutron bomb really the same as post-apocalyptic? odd nerdrum’s post-apoc backdrops have a specific meaning. they are POST something. while, if lopez and rackstraw are neutron bomb, its for a different reason: they are painting the stillness, or the things that don’t change, don’t move, including both figures and clouds.
It may not be, but finally I’ve got something to say that ties the discussion back to D”R”W’s paintings:
You finally did it! Goddamn you all to Hell!
it took me a sec, Chris. but pretty good one. funny. i got it. course wouldnt it be really the third installment with ricardo montalban….?
apocolypto vs. neutron bomb
i was thinking Mad Max vs. Warhol’s Empire State Building
Roller absolutely ROCKS. I bought his book, “A Strong Night Wind”, way back in the mid-90’s when it first came out. His technique is insane…I don’t know of anyone else that can give such meaning to flying pickles, cigarette butts, and monkeys with gigantic asparagus tips tied to their heads.
Wait, if you’re Donald Roller Wilson, why didn’t you get a free copy of the book?
[…] Lasansky, Ivan Albright, some of the wackier Regionalists, Peter Saul, the Imagists, AfriCOBRA, Donald Roller Wilson, James McGarrell, and on and on. Through most of the last hundred years, there’s almost […]
I read through all of these comments, hoping SOMEBODY would mention — the three-eyed kittens are not Roller’s work. I’m very familiar with Roller’s work, have known him most of his career, he’s married to my sister, and he has never painted three-eyed kittens.
Just had to say it!
you know, you’re right – it’s been so long since this was posted, i’m not sure how this came to be. please forgive – offending kittens removed.