Elizabeth Peyton

Jarvis, 1996
Oil on Panel 27.9 x 35.6 cm
Whitechapel Gallery 2009

This painting is typical of her work during her ‘rise to fame’. She dropped the small intimate works on paper of historical figures in 1995 and focused on painting. These portraits predate the images of her friends and take the form of tributes by an adoring fan. Despite the distancing effect of working from photographs, the intimate scale, delicate brushwork and directness of touch communicate a romantic love for her subjects and the accompanying anxiety.

This portrait of the singer Jarvis Cocker is a rare composition in her work in that the subject is engaging in eye contact. Typically the skin is bleached to near white and the features are idealised with ‘Rossetti’ lips.

Her colours are clear and transparent and applied in thin loose strokes on primed board. The red-violet of the jacket is set off wonderfully by the touch of lemon yellow in the background. The New York Times critic Roberta Smith accurately describes her style as a strange blend of ‘part Abstract Expressionism, part Renaissance miniature, with a touch of Pre-Raphaelite romanticism thrown in for good measure’.

The panels for her paintings are masonite, which is only available in America (invented in 1929). It is made from wood chips steam blasted and pressed into boards without the use of glues and binders. The nearest we have is medium density fibre (mdf) board which uses formaldehyde resin as a binder. The panels are about 2cm deep and are covered with very thick layers of acrylic primer. This has been applied with a scraper of some kind (I used to use a credit card) and the thick paint runs over the edges and the ridges in the surface become an integral element of the artwork.

In conversation with Steve Lafreniere, Peyton has an interesting response to his comment that there is a great deal of melancholy in her work…

“It’s not so much sentimental. It’s just that time passes. I am constantly thinking about it, and kind of obsessing about it. How things change, how I change, how there’s no stopping it. But when I’m painting, I’m very unaware. I’m not thinking about any of these things. It’s this other place. I know that sounds like mumbo-jumbo” (2)

Yes it does, but I think that despite her denial it sounds like a sentimentality for the past and that her paintings both acknowledge, but also try and arrest the march of time. The fact that she separates herself from these feelings when she paints implies that her painterly expression is stylistic or synthetic rather than emotional. In other words she uses the tropes of expressionism to evoke a reaction from the viewer rather than it being felt, say in the working of Van Gogh or Munch.

(1)Smith, Roberta Blood and Punk Royalty to Grunge Royalty NY Times 24 March 1995

(2)Lafreniere, Steve A Conversation with the Artist, Elizabeth Peyton Rizzoli International Publications 2005 p252

©blackdog 2009

Adolph Menzel

Room with a Balcony, 1845
Oil on Cardboard. 58 x 47 cm
Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

I regret missing the chance to see this painting in 2001 when it was shown in the London National Gallery in the exhibition of 19thC paintings Spirit of an Age: Paintings from the Berlin Nationalgalerie. Menzel is perhaps best known for his work as a “court” painter following the history of Prussia from the time of Frederick the Great (since Menzel did the illustrations for a popular book on Frederick's life) to the splendour of the court of King Wilhelm I.

This painting of an interior shows a different side of his artistic talent. One of a number of oil sketches from the 1840’s that explored his Berlin apartment and the views from its windows. Painted purely for his own pleasure, these uncannily modern works are argued to presage the French Impressionists through its use of light and the loose brushwork. Menzel didn’t go to Paris until in 1855 he visited the Exposition Universelle and saw Courbet's 'Pavillon du Réalisme' and is painted 30 years before the exhibition of impressionism in 1874.

Not having seen the painting yet I cannot comment on the paint handling, but it does look as though he has applied it freely using a variety of brushstrokes that suggests objects rather than closely defining them. Despite being a classed as a sketch (it wasn’t shown until a commemorative exhibition was held at the Nationalgalerie in Berlin after Menzel’s death in 1905) it is signed and dated on the front indicating that he felt that his surroundings were a valid subject to paint rather than just an exercise. It is unusual for a painting of an interior of this period, to be neither occupied nor a formal study for a still life. This invites us to focus on the atmosphere of the room rather than on a subject within it.

The balcony doors are open and the curtains billow inwards on the breeze through the window. Today that could be read as a sexual metaphor, but I suspect he was just observing reality rather than trying to imply any moral narrative. The edge of a rug intrudes into the image from the left and a streak of sunlight brightens the floor and shimmers on the empty wall. It is a strange patch of light and suggests that a picture that was hung on the wall has been removed. There are two formal chairs turned away from each other either side of a long mirror in which we see the reflections of a sofa with a gold-framed picture hanging above it. For me it is the positioning of these chairs that give the painting a melancholic aura; whether intended or not I read them as a metaphor for an uncommunicative couple, facing away, and arguing despite the languid quality of the light suggesting a beautiful summer’s day.

©blackdog 2009

Peder Balke

Peder Balke
Northern Lights, 1870s
Oil on Panel 20 x 10cm
National Gallery, London
19 January 2015

I was in the National Gallery waiting for my timed slot for the Late Rembrandt exhibition and thought I would kill time having a look at the free exhibition of the work of Norwegian painter, Peder Balke. An artist almost unknown outside of Scandinavia, that I had never heard of, using similar techniques to those I developed as part of my recent PhD thesis! One of those rare pleasant surprises that still happen from time to time.

Peder Balke was born on the Norwegian island of Helgoya and was one of the few artists to venture to the far North of his native land for inspiration. He explored the Arctic Circle and painted the frozen spectacle of the most remote regions of Norway for the rest of his life. His early style that offered him some limited success was represented in the exhibition, but the majority of works were from after 1850 when he had withdrawn from commercial painting to focus on a career in politics.

I have selected one of the latest and smallest works in the show to review. Measuring only 10x20cm, this small irregular shaped painting on a wooden panel epitomises the effectiveness of his technique. Balke sets the scene by applying thin washes to depict the sea and sky divided by simple opaque marks to create a horizon of bleak mountains. Into the night sky he conjures the spectacle of the Northern Lights by vertically scraping away paint revealing the white ground below. The reflection of the lights on the surface of the water and pictorial depth is accomplished by using this technique horizontally. A final flourish is the addition of four boats of various sizes with a few marks and erasures giving perspective to the painting and accentuating the loneliness and isolation of the drama. This tiny painting becomes a metaphor for the despair of the artist’s soul, his career as an artist forgotten and even omitted from his obituary.

Whilst the division of the space into receding horizontal planes owes a debt to the compositions of Caspar David Friedrich; the use of simple motifs, freely painted on a surface unified by a minimal palette and his technique of removal of paint to effect light sets him apart from his generation of Romantic landscape painters. The fact that these landscapes were painted some 40 years after he had visited the far North made this idiosyncratic style both effective and appropriate to capture his memories of the sublime landscape. Contemporary painters such as Luc Tuymans (simplified motifs / palette) and Elizabeth Peyton (bold brushwork / the ground as light) have used similar approaches to signify loss and memory in their work. However, neither of them conveys the boundless isolation with their metaphors as consistently as Balke achieves in his late work. 

An online book of my own works based on The Caravan as a motif is available should you wish to see how I arrived at a similar technique to that used by Balke in his later paintings.  Just proves that no matter how original you think you are, there is nothing new under the (Midnight) Sun!

Peder Balke was at the National Gallery, London, WC2,
until April 12, 2015
(44-020-7747 2885; www.nationalgallery.org.uk)