Figure Painting: Nicole Eisenman’s Another Green World

Nicole Eisenman, “Another Green World,” 2015, Collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art

I’m inspired by paintings, and by painters as well. They can express a cultural moment, a zeitgeist in two dimensions that always aims for more. They know what came before in painting and they offer up what they don’t know but believe is coming after. Each generation gets to rediscover the landscape, the abstract, the figure.

I was thinking of that famous Mark Rothko quote: “A painting is not a picture of an experience, but it is the experience”— for him, the path into that experience was using color to bury light and space into the picture plane and reveal the deeper mind. A psychology even. Lately I’ve been drawn to looking at figures in space, and more importantly noticing the space between them. I see figures on sidewalks in parks, bodies moving underwater in pools, people reluctantly socially-distanced indoors, or gathering freely on outdoor terraces. The Covid pandemic has put literal distance as well as a psychological space between us. It has been exhausting and ironically, a little claustrophobic in the way we have had to retreat from each other physically.

Reading a piece on the painter Nicole Eisenman in the New Yorker, I was struck by her painting “Another Green World” and the figures in it. She paints a house-party scene: figures crowd on the couch and around the charcuterie on the wooden table, spilling out onto the terrace. Someone is at the door; there is barely any space but come in, there’s always room for one more. Each figure is painted with not just an identifiable body but a personality with a color temperature and ambient light. It is not the sublime ‘oneness’ of Rothko. The painting is a plurality, a city, many pulses, many voices that embrace, kiss, flirt, relax into each other’s presence. They are curious, we want to know these people, be seen by them, move through them, grab a red cup and introduce ourselves. Even the introverted facet of ourselves is ready to watch what is about to happen.

Because we are in the painting already: holding the red cup under the disco ball; we are blue, kissing the topless woman; we are glowing and unknowable, sitting on the back of the sofa; we are reading the liner notes to the Brian Eno album, (from which the painting takes its name) a little flushed from the second beer.

The painting is an ensemble, everyone is important, and that togetherness is what I remember like a nostalgia, and look forward to again. It feels like an intimate reveal even if someone is buried under the coats in the sleeping loft and your friend is sitting on the floor, unable to put his phone down.

I have taken enough art history classes that a part of my brain wants to analyze: are the figures representational of painterly movements (Fauvism? Gauguin? Munch? Francis Bacon? Blue Picasso?) Should we compare and contrast to other party scenes (Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party? Matisse’s Joy of Life? How about Toulouse Lautrec’s At the Moulin Rouge?) No, let’s not. We’re fine hanging out here. We haven’t been out in so long, we don’t need to go anywhere else. Hey, We’ve missed you too. You look great. Really.

Discovering Andy Goldsworthy

Imagine a work of art that is so ephemeral it is itself almost not there, and yet the very nature of the work brings what is there into focus, making it more present, more “there”— communicating this presence more than words ever could, communicating meaning sometimes playfully, sometimes forcefully, but always primally, instinctually.

I recently viewed a pair of documentaries on Goldsworthy, a British environmental artist and sculptor: Rivers and Tides, from 2001 and Leaning into the Wind, from 2018, both directed by Thomas Riedelsheimer.

The documentaries are a great way to accompany him into these landscapes, watch him work, listen to him struggle to define what he does, and then let the work speak for itself, in its own language, mute or deafening loud, proclaiming a foreverness in stone or a soft,fleeting thing taken by the breeze or washed away by light drizzle. Photographs are the recordings of the ephemeral works, and there are many published books I’m discovering as I scratch the surface on what he’s done.

He uses found items in situ, the leaves, branches rocks, water, ice, clay, and either gives them spirit or releases their spirit in a way that we can share, I’m not sure which.

Goldsworthy is the guy that walks through the landscape, forest or jungle or mountainside, and notices things. He has a sense of time that seems exponentially off from the modern world. He is interested in spaces made by nature and people moving through those spaces and waking us up to them. If nature is a component to the spirit of a place, Goldsworthy wakes us up to that spirit, gently, bringing out through his work what I would call the humble sublime. You could think him childlike, the way he plays at what he does, the way you sense that there are no boundaries or rules to his play, the near innocence of it. But what he does is not a child’s game, not when the result is at turns this beautiful or heartbreaking or breathtaking. You do have to slow down your modern sense of scheduled time, with its calendar notifications, with its itineraried agendas and general impatience to get things done. Goldsworthy seems to show that if you can do this, you will be rewarded.

On a bright Sunday in April, days after the azaleas and dogwoods have blossomed, I walk down the path in the garden and notice the moss that we’ve let spread over the pavers. So green. Greener than the grass. The reds and pinks of the flowers are startling next to this green. So, Goldsworthy-style, I sit down and lay the azalea blossoms down, picking out the stamens (?), tearing the ring of petals once so I can lay it flat on the stones, circling a patch of green moss. Red closest to its complement the green, then fuchsia, then the pink with the fuchsia spray, then white. You begin to notice the stems and green cup where the petals spread, and the yellow tip where the pollen sits, and the actual dewdrops on the petals. Birds perch nearby, wondering what I’m doing. As does the dog, confused by my stillness. The sun has moved a bit into late morning, and then spotlights my wreath. I take a picture before the playful breeze carries it away.