Steven Mack: Artist’s Statement

There is a story about Sir Kenneth Clark stalking Velazquez in Geneva. He would slowly approach the painting until the image dissolved into a mass of brush-stokes and daubs of colour. He would then back-up until the paint coalesced, was lost, and the image was restored.

“I used to go very early in the morning, before the gallery was open, and try to stalk it, as if it were really alive…I would start from as far away as I could, when the illusion was complete, and come gradually nearer, until suddenly what had been a hand, and a ribbon, and a piece of velvet, dissolved into a salad of beautiful brush strokes. I thought I might learn something if I could catch the moment at which this transformation took place, but it proved to be as elusive as the moment between waking and sleeping.”

(Kenneth Clark, Looking at Pictures)

This is the spot that interests me. The spot where the image and the application hang balanced, object/image, and you can’t entirely dismiss either, and neither claims exclusive focus. You can’t be dismissed by Plato or Greenberg.

I did my undergraduate degree at an institution, and a time, when the object reigned supreme. The best parts of formalism were still visible through the plastic of the oxygen tent. The professors at this institution were just painters - technicians who passed along their craft in what was, in retrospect, almost guild-like conditions. We would paint all day, 8am – 5pm, and then head to the pub. Hours were spent arguing, cajoling, and congratulating each other about painting. When we were forced out of the pubs, we would grab a few hours of sleep and show-up to paint again @ 8am.

I didn’t realize what a privileged existence I was enjoying. Everyone was on the same page, and we had a standard to directly compare and compete with other, and with history. It’s nice to have a standard.

I moved on to another institution where the message was master. It didn’t really matter how something was said. Because we had a modicum of talent, suddenly our every thought was worth hearing. It was giving Paris Hilton a platform to babble about the war in Iraq simply because of her celebrity. Because we could paint/sculpt/write poetry/etc. we had that platform – God help us all. Suddenly everyone had an opinion about politics, God, love and life, and a platform to broadcast it. The way these messages were transmitted wasn’t important, it was the opinions that mattered. Needless to say, there was very little agreement on those messages. We had lost our common ground, and had nothing to argue beyond our overstated editorializing about issues we were ill-equipped to deal with, or cynical, suicidal comments on the process/media itself.

I’m working somewhere in-between. I’m working with a ‘qualified’ representational subject matter (see below), but in a way that it is impossible to be overwhelmed by it. I want my brush-strokes to be so bold that you can never, entirely, slip into thick monotony of the subject. At the same time I don’t want the reference to life to be totally lost, allowing the viewer to dissemble every work through Greenberian mathmatics.

I won’t forget the time that someone with an opinion was in my studio, dissecting my work, and trying to probe my psyche through my subject. An innocent, I held up a painting of a nude. “Oh that’s just a nude study”, he muttered, “that doesn’t mean anything”. This astonished me. The nude should be a highly telling subject. The whole situation – the relationship between the artist & model, the viewer and artist, and viewer and model, was just hanging there waiting to be plucked. Somehow the nude subject matter had allowed me to fly under the ‘message’ radar. This added a new wrinkle to my subject/medium theatre of operations. Some subjects were loaded, not by their resemblance to something else, but rather by the circumstances of their existence. Within the studio, they were disqualified from having any meaning.

Since this revelation I’ve limited my work to mostly nudes and still lives. Imagine the reaction if an office worker had, as a screen saver, a Playboy bunny. Next door, the other file clerk has the Venus de Milo as theirs. This is an interesting phenomenon to me. With every brush-stroke this decision has to be confronted. The mark is an unmistakable slab of zinc white or, with a little feathering, the highlight on a breast. This is my area of interest: Paint… no, breast… no, paint…

I use the same reasoning with the still-life. No one only sees the apple or the wine bottle. My hand grips the back of their neck until they see cadmium red and sap green as well.

Other things I’ve done, like the collaborative performance ‘Body of Three’ were actually comments on the creative process. Not in a cynical way as is popular these days, but in a, perhaps, naïve way. An optimistic way. This was the rationale for the title of my thesis desperate optimism (the lower-case type is deliberate).

This is the justification for my style and subject. I want paintings that are respectful of my craft, but don’t seal themselves in the rarefied air of the studio, inaccessible to everyone except like-minded alchemists.