Contrasting Ship Series by Feininger & Dean

Recently investigating the artwork of Lyonel Feininger, I was struck by recurring theme of ships in his pieces held here in San Francisco. He seems captivated by the image of a ship at sea, coming back to it numerous times over at least 24 years from Hanseatic Fleet (1918) to Peaceful (1942). These works are essentially studies of composition and shape relations and, though they vary in energy, err on the side of stillness and permanence, emphasized by the frequent use of woodcuts. Though also of ships, Tacita Dean’s 2002 piece “Chere Petite Soeur,” could not be more different in nearly every way from Feininger’s studies.

The overall mood of Dean’s piece is intensely dramatic, and it instantly involves one as both a viewer of art and the reader of an unfolding story. The blackboard as a base layer literally establishes the foundation of a dark, ominous mood, that plays through the entire piece. The rendering of the ship(s) at sea is done so convincingly in chalk that the viewer is teleported to the scene, immediately involved in the danger taking place. The presentation of the piece as a diptych involves the viewer even more, creating a sequential story left for the viewer to complete.

The overall composition of the piece is powerful in both parts of the diptych, with dramatic contrasts of light and dark, chaotically varied use of line evocative of the storm the drawing depicts, and a strong horizontal orientation that accentuates the left-to-right reading of the two panels as a story. As the viewer moves closer, the technique and the medium become more apparent and are, in fact, quite surprising. Reading from a distance almost like a painting, the drawing itself is actually chalk on blackboard. In addition, the sweeping movement of the composition as a whole seems contradicted by the realization that each panel is actually a set of four smaller frames, meticulously delineated from one another.

Indeed, this closer investigation of the piece almost makes the initial intensity and drama of it recede as the viewer begins to question the essence of what exactly s/he is looking at? Perhaps this is not a story at all; perhaps we are not to have been “transported” to another place and time.

Perhaps, as Vitamin D suggests, the piece is about memory. Memory, like each panel of the diptych, is pieced together as we live our lives. In many cases, these pieces are disparate and not logically associated, like seeing your spouse in a dream about your childhood. However, particularly dramatic memories can be unforgettable, and traumatic ones tend to be relived with great clarity. Oddly, the small notes written into the piece create a technical sensibility, as if we are looking at the blueprint of a memory methodically reconstructed in all its intensity.

Finally, there exists the great irony of the piece, that it is drawn upon a blackboard that, while essential to the piece’s dramatic mood, is a surface meant to be erased. It leaves the thoughtful viewer with the notion that, after all this methodical reconstruction, the piece will simply disappear, as if it never was. What then, was the true purpose of it in the first place?

Emerging Artist: Tony Maridakis

"Lone Tree II" is one of Mr. Maridakis's recent works and is on display at 95 Third St. in San Francisco.

In the first of the Dead Dog Cafe’s Emerging Artist series, I will be discussing the background, inspirations, and motivations of the thoughtful surrealist painter Tony Maridakis of San Francisco.

Mr. Maridakis would have you think he has only recently discovered his talent for painting, but this guy has been a prodigy from the start.  Most people can lay claim to having some lost talent for drawing, painting, singing, or magical instrument playing from yesteryear, but few actually had their art exhibited publicly, much less in as well-trafficked a locale as the San Francisco International Airport.  Indeed, Mr. Maridakis’s groundbreaking painting using found objects (sponges) was so displayed when he was a kid.  Not only was the medium cutting edge, but the topic was sharp and contemporary: a quizzical exploration of the Miss America pageant.

Such talent is hard to come by, and even harder to contain, so what is it that took Mr. Maridakis decades to return to such an apparent love for art?  Like many of us, the soul-crushing mores of society distracted him from the truth and dragged him down a path beckoning money, security, and approval.  Despite the clear signage–promotions, success, raises–along this path, Mr. Maridakis began to feel increasingly lost and muddled.  His mind tormented with too much left-brain-driven thought about work, he sought refuge in the right side of his brain, which had somehow had the presence all along to surround Mr. Maridakis with a fine collection of artwork and artist friends.  From this foundation, he took his first steps just over ten years ago to reclaim his calling as an artist by taking a painting class.

Like any artist ascending the shambles of a crumbling past unsupported by the glories of art, Mr. Maridakis has been cautiously methodical, lest he slip and fall into the abyss of his formerly droll life.  Though his intent all along was to paint abstractly in oil, he began with watercolor, seeing a progression from watercolor to acrylic to oil; and with paintings true to life, with another progression in mind from realistic to surreal to abstract painting.  Initially just exploring the medium, Mr. Maridakis eventually lay the foundation for his current painting through this important phase of his work, as I described in a previous post.

Despite finding through watercolor the template for his current work by 2001, Mr. Maridakis did not fully release himself to explore his art until four years later.  In 2005, he found himself working at the Art Institute, where he had made sacrifices to contribute to the important work of and surround himself with artists.  At this time, he began to take classes there and traveled to locations that inspired his work, most recently spending about a year in Argentina.  He is continuing his art education right now through UC Berkeley’s post-baccalaureate program.

Mr. Maridakis counts as influences Van Gogh, El Greco, Volkov, Earhart Richter, Sonja Echart, Liberti, the latter two of which are Argentinian inspirations doing abstract landscapes and surrealism, respectively.  His work can be viewed online.

3arly 3xplorations: The Watercolors of Tony Maridakis

In Tony Maridakis’s (reviewed as an emerging artist here) early paintings, all done in watercolor, are the clear signs of a budding painter exploring the boundaries of the medium and searching for his own artistic aptitudes.  Mr. Maridakis’s work at this early stage already exhibits the tri-partite themes for which his work has presently become known.  Exploring subjects from still life to landscape and approaches from realistic to abstract, Mr. Maridakis experiments with different combinations thereof to find his strengths.  This essay discusses the two phases of his watercolor painting, their relationship to his current work, and his noteworthy watercolor masterpiece Colonia I.

• Early Watercolor: These initial efforts are exemplified in Plastic Gold Fish (1997), Tapestry (1996), and Vineyard (1996).  Here we see Mr. Maridakis experimenting with the basic elements of watercolor as a medium in three distinctly different paintings.  Plastic Gold Fish strives to be true to reality, capturing the visual character of a fish as one might see it in life, with correct proportions, a sense of shape, coloration, and depth.  In contrast, Vineyard is a more playful articulation, paying more heed to vibrant color and active gesture than holding to a crisp, realistic form.  Although this latter work becomes more abstract, that abstraction comes in through the act of simplified painting rather than in the selection of the image or the actual content of the painting.  An entirely different type of abstraction is apparent in Tapestry, a painting based on extremely simplified forms that seek not depict a unified landscape scene but rather strive to carve out their own space in this broad array of color and shape.  Flat in its depth, Tapestry brings the viewer’s attention to the relationships between the shapes and colors.  It builds a vaguely realistic object from the variety of semi-realistic forms and abstractions, but the point is clearly not to depict a work of woven art in painted form.  Here, Mr. Maridakis has taken his watercoloring from realism to abstraction within the course of his first year of handling this medium.
• Late Watercolor: Mr. Maridakis’s work progresses over the next few years, taking similar scenes but pushing them in the opposite direction of how he had painted them before and laying the foundation for his current paintings in acrylic and oil, as can be seen in Baccus (2001), Vineyard II (2001), and Landscape I & II (2001).  As if to demonstrate his aptitude for all varieties of style, Mr. Maridakis takes the gestural and colorful Vineyard I scene and renders it more delicately with muted colors.  The forms themselves are placed and shaped similarly; the hill for example remains a simplified form comprised of three straight lines for the horizon and serving more as a palette upon which the Mr. Marikdakis paints the patterns of the earth rather than an indicator of depth or shape.  However, the painting seems entirely different in its mood on account of the changes in color and gesture.  Baccus can perhaps be associated with Plastic Gold Fish as straight-forward still life renderings, but again Mr. Maridakis takes the style in the opposite direction.  Where Plastic Gold Fish showed subtle depth and form, Baccus focuses boldly on simplified, flat, pattern-like shapes of the glass and grapes.  As with the earlier Vineyard I, the gesture in the painting is clear, and, though the palette is limited only to black and white, the use of these colors is bolder.  Finally, though the association might not be apparent at first, the Landscape I & II pieces can be seen as a progression of Tapestry.  Although the scene is clearly based on life and the viewer can sense the implied depth, the painting is not about creating a sense of space but rather showing vibrant and colorful shapes, each bearing its own weight in the composition and coming to the fore in its own right, just as in Tapestry.  This relationship is made even more apparent through observation of the lower portion of the painting where a patterned, tapestry-like segment has been directly pasted over the original and least vibrant section of the original painting.
• Relationship to Current Painting: Although Mr. Maridakis discusses only two groups of paintings in his Artist Statement, it is generally accepted by the art world that his work today falls into three categories, each of which is an outgrowth of the distincts areas of exploration during his watercolor phase.  The “Lone Tree” series is clearly a continuation of “Vineyard I” and “Vineyard II,” taking the image of trees on a hill, paring it down to one simple tree, and imbuing the painting with symbolic meaning through the surreal coloration and nearly archetypal imagery.  His “Estudio” series–including “Estudio en Azul,” “Estudio en Amarillo,” and “Estudio en Divinidad“–is an extension of “Bacchus,” which might have been called “Estudio en Negro y Blanco.”  In these, Mr. Maridakis again makes color, contrast, and fluid brushstrokes the focal points of his canvas, but this time the art is seemingly devoid of any basis in reality.*  Finally, Mr. Maridakis’s “Landscape I & II” serve as ample prelude to his noteworthy “Océanos Imaginadas” series, all of which show a landscape with limited foreground and divided near the middle of the painting by a horizon.  Although the elements of tapestry and patterning are less apparent, they are still present in these surreal paintings in a number of ways, including the repetition of the oblong oval shape, the patterning effect of the stones on the ground, the disconnection between the light between the sky and the earth, the separation of the paintings into smaller scenes, and finally the overall organization of these paintings as a tryptich.
• Culmination of Watercolor Painting: I would be remiss in discussing Mr. Maridakis’s watercolors without calling attention to Colonia I, his singular masterpiece of this era in his painting.  In this painting, we see all of the themes and styles of his prior watercolor coming into balance.  Depicting a colorful building running along an inviting avenue, Colonia strikes an interesting balance between still life and landscape.  Certainly, the outdoor scene with trees, buildings, and marked depth perspective can be considered a landscape, but the building itself consumes so much of the painting that other traditional elements of landscape painting, such as the sky and the foreground, are given very little space.  Indeed, the painting might also be considered a still life of a building, despite the lack of fruit and tablecloths in the scene.  The painting also strikes a balance between the realistic and the abstract.  The viewer does not question the scene’s “realism” overall, as the composition itself depicts this street scene quite realistically: the building recedes to the horizon correctly; the trees seem to arrange themselves in the right places around the facade; and the lighting seems consistent across the painting, creating a sense of depth that makes the painting sit well from a distance.  However, each element taken alone becomes abstracted and has more in common with Baccus than Plastic Gold Fish.  The trees are spherical clouds of painterly dabs within which in branches are nearly if not entirely lost.  The building itself is like a colorful painter’s palette cut into the shape of a building and placed on the page, such is the variety of brushwork and playfulness of the stroke.  Finally, the cobblestone street defies the rules of perspective, falling away before the viewer as it is painted as a flat array of rectangular blocks of muted color.  It is in this latter segment that the tapestratic approach of both Tapestry and Landscape I & II is most apparent, but the painting overall also possesses the same overall sensibility, placing simplified but individually vibrant shapes next to each other.

Patterning, shape relationships, vibrant color–all of these components that are to become signatures of Mr. Maridakis’s work are apparent in balanced form in Colonia I.  It is no surprise that he came back to this painting in Colonia II, but it is a surprise that the original is not up for sale on his online store.  This painting marks not only a culmination in his early watercolor paintings but also a turning point as he subsequently begins to explore acrylic and oil painting as noted above.

* For those who question the relationship between such “abstract” art and “Bacchus,” clearly derived from life, Mr. Maridakis’s “Comet” serves as an adequate middle ground, showing his transition between realism and abstraction in this strain of his work.

Flexner’s Drawing: Kind of Like Seurat but Very Different

Ronald Flexner’s portrait of a man, depicted below on the right, owes much to Seurat’s techniques in creating value but departs from Seurat in its thematic qualities of the depiction of time, the monumental scale on the page, and the level of intimacy.  This brief commentary reviews Flexner’s piece in terms of its thematic principles and visual style with a particular emphasis on its comparison to Seurat.

Flexner’s portrait clearly borrows from the visual style of Seurat but varies significantly from Seurat in its depiction of time.  The extremely granular nature of the drawing gives the viewer a sense of a seemingly infinite number of points of light, and any linear elements to the composition are lost in their accumulation.  While this approach readily falls into Seurat’s school of pointalism from purely analytical perspective, placing Flexner’s portrait side by side with an early sketch from Seurat like the one below makes the “point” even clearer.

Pointalistic Sketches: Seurat’s Seated Nude and Flexner’s portrait both rely on the variations of small points of light and dark to create value and form in their drawings.

Despite the similarities in visual affect, the two drawings vary considerably in how they depict time.  Seurat’s figure is still, almost sullen, perhaps having waited too long.  Although the image might seem to capture an instant in time, the figure seems as if it could have been in this same pose for hours or even days.  Even the lighting around the figure echoes its form, as if the air has settled in for the wait as well.  Flexner’s figure, on the other hand seems to have been caught in the moment.  Perhaps sleeping but about to turn over, perhaps breathing in or accepting a kind caress, the figure is still yet about to move, captured the very moment between poses.  The drawing seems more reminiscent of a grainy photograph taking in a mere instant than the patient, thoughtful drawing by Seurat on the left.

Also different from Seurat, Flexner’s portrait seeks to monumentalize in exquisite detail an ephemeral moment in time as completely as possible in a number of ways.  The portrait zooms in on the figure’s head such that it does not even fit on the entire page, creating a dramatic scene of an otherwise perhaps ordinary moment.  Flexner uses graphite as his medium, creating an extremely granular quality to the portrait and a sense that nearly every pore has been attended to.  This granularity extends to the entirety of the drawing, creating an almost tactile visual effect to the very air depicted around the figure.  Flexner is so effective in the depiction of a singular moment in time that the figure seems nearly to be breathing inward at the very moment portrayed in the drawing.

Despite the monumental scale of the head on the page, the granularity of the sketch lends itself to a intimacy that is carried out in other ways as well.  The sense that the viewer is sharing this moment in such specific detail with the subject of the portrait even as the subject seems unaware of the viewer’s gaze creates a remarkable intimacy to the portrait.  This intimacy combines with the monumentality of the portrait to relay a certain sensuality: the eye is drawn to the curve of the neck, the cheek that recedes into darkness on the lefthand side, the chin that softly lies across the center of the drawing.  The portrait could have been monumental in an imposing way, but Flexner keeps the harsh angles of the face off to the side so they are not the focal point of the drawing.  Instead, the portrait monumentalizes a sensual moment that engages not only the eye but nearly the viewer’s senses of touch and smell.

I must confess my interest in Flexner’s drawing was not deeply considered: his drawing jumped out at me, and I decided I’d think about the appeal later in writing this commentary.  It was actually through my master sketches of Seurat that I came to truly appreciate Flexner’s drawing.  I tend to rely heavily on line accumulation to create value, which leads to a somewhat dynamic, shifting form on the page.  Seurat and Flexner are both using media that rely on line accumulation but their attention to detail is so fine that the lines are completely lost in favor of the soft focus on varying points of light and dark across the page.  They are able to achieve a level of stillness and intimacy that is usually absent from my own drawings but through media I feel comfortable using and can fully appreciate.  Hopefully, I will be able to take these observations and execute them in my own drawings in the future.