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.