Two In a Space

When I think about the figure in art, I commonly turn towards the portrait with its ability to draw me in both visually and emotionally, Rembrandt's selves come to mind...

or Lucian Freud's works.

I have this little black book put out by Phaidon of five hundred self portraits ranging from Durer to Courbet, that I've shown students a million times, always entranced by the power of the human face.

...great images of the isolated or singular figure throughout time, but what about images of two figures? How does that change the dynamic of the picture plane, of the spaces between and around the figures physically, emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually? How does narrative alter?



This summer and now into the fall, I'm beginning a small series of two figures in space:

They are bright initially... the girls are warm and lovely...but there's a current of joy, combined with unease, and this duality of strength and uncertainty is visually present in their gestures and gazes. I begin the drawings to learn more about them. Drawing uncovers and dissolves barriers.




David Hockney:

Otto Diz:

Egon Schiele:

Gentileschi:

Some pairings came to mind easily like the deeply engaged Kollwitz images of mothers with their children, bereft and charged with a physical awareness, a spatial magnitude, ... a weight so heavy as to drown the viewer in this pain.

I remember my mother always admiring Cassatt's pairings. I think I looked to them as well because they lent energy to both the figures' emotional lives and to the drawing's surface with its engaged marks, driven color, and presence. I could imagine myself as a mother in both Kollwitz's and Cassatt's worlds. Neither negated the other's reality.

Lautrec's chatty, alive couples on the other hand, are neither heavily emotionally weighed or parental in nature, but they still gather us into his intimate world...surfaces and spaces are genuine, and the invitation real.

The angst ridden Giacometti feels with a need. His tension is palpable within the surface texture and squeezed parameters, and those tensions enter the viewer as part of us, viewing his work:

while R.B. Kitaj's exhuberant, active surfaces and diagonal twists gives rise to personal voice:

clashing with Hopper's determination and stability, his cool refusals:

Paula Rego's loud, powerful, and physical narratives...

contrast to Cezanne's comfortably angular, conversational cardplayers,...the Van der Weyden, Degas, the wonderfully intimate Bishops, and detached Grant Wood...

Michelangelo carved the spiritual and emotional force of the Pieta into the building of Christ's small form. Held within Mary's engulfing triangularity, the spirit of the three in one is sheltered momentarily, saved within her geometry to be resurrected again.

Raphael Soyers' work is alert, snappy like a turtle but still generous:

All engage the viewer at meaningful levels. Other images were remembered over time, those to do with love, conflict, sexuality, and fear too,... theatrical and ambiguous narratives, tense and unresolved emotions, images of faith and humanity set in intimate and sometimes separated, distanced settings of two.


Alice Neel:

Sigmund Abeles:

Rodin:

Jerome Witkin's surfaces twist and bend, break and remold:

while Da Vinci's softly roll:

El Greco slashes:

while Cadmus's wrangly, driven marks and forceful diagonals push:

Steve Assael's proximity of figures to viewer, gathers:

and Gabriel Laderman's distorted, angular, fluorescent lit environments heave the sitters and viewers alike, attacking, threatening, shouting...and we listen, we feel this turmoil:

and finally to quiet... to the poetic surface of Antonio Lopez Garcia's family scene. Tension still exists in the sliding planes, but the decibal is lowered and breathing slows with it:

Philip Pearlstein's cold and dismal palette sets in like winter:

while Stanley Spencer's placement of these two figure's embarasses. There's a strange fascination with so much information and I need to look but want to protect or at least comfort, and can't manage either, as far away from these two as I can be in such close proximity...:

Jim Dine has a sense of mortality and humor:

Caravaggio's force is brilliant in the dark:

Goya's an amazing hammer:

La Tour's chisels:

Kiki Smith's perennial sense of sadness, is both visceral and internalized,:

while Lucian Freud's immense physical and evocative weight sits on the viewer:

The figure calls universally.

From the past to contemporary works and back again, our senses, intellect, emotions and psyche are moved, alerted, sunken and risen again.


The blatant, sensual, diving in of Rubens energies makes me know I'm breathing in the loudest but most wonderful way (ignore Eakins disdain of him, love them both!:

Eakins:

Elizabeth Peyton's vision is one of distanced dreariness, a submerged dullness, a muted emptiness that carries its own weight aside from the elegant lightness of mark:

Renoir:

Klimt:

Rubens:

Saville:

Two carries.


I recently worked on this double portrait of my husband and I.

Images move from whirling, decorated, flattened, sculptural, clear, diffused, careful, detailed, painterly, internal, external, intimate, cold, warm paintings and sculptures. They redefine what we think we know or see, to make us see with greater care...they make us look.

Beal:

Dali:

Eric Fischl:

Swoon:

Frida Kahlo:

These strange and wonderfully embedded images are fraught with figural complexity, dramatic and sometimes isolated space, with a powerful range of scale and light, and the psychological and emotional potential of two climbing under our skin.

Ron Mueck: