Tad Wiley
Recent Paintings
Published on the occasion of exhibition 18
in the room for Painting.
10.5 x 8 in. softcover; 75 pp.,
26 color
reproductions
$34.00 + applicable tax and shipping, available from the gallery
Foreward by George Lawson
Interview with Charlotte Mouquin
Interview with Glenn Goldberg
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Tad Wiley
— foreward by George Lawson
New York painter Tad Wiley’s recent oil-based enamel paintings on wooden panels continue to explore the themes and approach of his works on paper in the Water Log series, exhibited here last September. Although his methodology—luminous color on an armature of flat architectural drawing—remains essentially seamless between these two bodies of work, Wiley has managed to broaden the range of his motif in the new paintings, while deepening their level of free association. The paintings evoke, both through their iconography and the calibrated tone of their internal light, the stoic spirit of the Northeastern Seaboard. Wiley works in a vernacular that is pre-linguistic, but nonetheless of a kindred spirit to nautical literature, such as that of Melville. His use of pentimento and thinly washed glaze conjures up surfaces we associate with proximity to the shoreline, and place him in the broad company of modernists inspired by the ocean, from Whistler to Pinkham Ryder to Diebenkorn. There is also an affinity to the polychrome carving of the Pacific Northwest’s Kwakiutl in his curvilinear forms, his symmetry and the frontal stance of his imagery. These are ambitious works in the cast of the heroic generation of American painting. From seminal influences, Wiley has wrought a highly individuated art. I feel privileged to be showing these new paintings. My thanks to Glenn Golberg and Charlotte Mouquin for their insights, and to the artist for his generous assistance with this exhibition.
The Joining Point
— Interview with Charlotte Mouquin, April 7, 2010
Charlotte Mouquin: I would like to discuss the motifs of form in your work and where they came from.
Tad Wiley: I started looking at modernist paintings when I was young, and specifically Mondrian. I was fortunate enough to be able to come into New York and go to the Museum of Modern Art. I don’t think I understood them but I immediately had a connection to them, something that I recognized as speaking to me. Maybe it was the comfort of the straight lines, the boundaries, the right angles and the simplicity.
Perhaps it was the order. Life can be chaotic.
Absolutely.
Mondrian’s work informed me at first. I have a very clear memory of making a painting before high school, overlapping circles and squares, a lot of primary and secondary colors. It was all pretty flat. That flatness was important too, not like looking out of a window or creating a Renaissance space. I was creating the modernist flatness with the surface.
Is that flatness almost intimidating to the viewer?
It really presents a different idea; you’re not looking at a representation of something, you’re looking at a reality that is based on some other reality. Maybe later on you go back and think, oh that’s a window or the streets of New York City, like Broadway Boogie Woogie, or whatever, but I didn’t see it that way. I just saw color, space, and light. A lot of light. Other paintings in that museum really struck a chord with me, works like, Pollock’s One, and Barnett Newman’s large red horizontal, Vir Heroicus Sublimus, which is so beautiful. At the time there was also this Motherwell painting with a huge expanse of blue, maybe 10 x 30 feet and there was this charcoal, right-angled U form, like part of a doorway, and that was it, this incredible expanse of blue with this little bit of a form, or maybe just a gesture. That opened a world of scale, that paintings could be an environment, that you could actually immerse yourself into this thing. Certainly all of those early feelings about painting were about revelation for me.
Other early influences?
I had a teacher in high school that encouraged me. He was a watercolor painter that worked from nature. I got interested in watercolors and started to paint from nature, but I found it difficult to connect my natural surroundings with painting that way. I also had a teacher later in boarding school who showed me how to build a stretcher and stretch canvas. I have to say I really delved into the Abstract Expressionist School at that point. I was in love with this heroic ideal, this myth of the lifestyle of having a bare loft in New York City and painting big paintings.
How did the jump happen? Was there an art school experience, formal training?
I didn’t really go to art school. I went to SUNY Purchase, in the Visual Arts Department, and this was my only two years of formal art school, although I did independent study mostly when I got there so I don’t think of it like that. I had the experience of making these very geometric works in the early part of my high school experience, and then wholeheartedly delving into the Abstract Expressionist movement, and started to splash paint around on big canvases as a junior and senior. At college in the 70’s I fell into looking at Brice Marden, Robert Ryman, and Robert Mangold, those three painters, and a lot of sculptors. John Chamberlain, certainly Serra, Michael Heizer, so I think I was very much interested in the idea of strong form, making an impression, the physicality. It was abstract, everything I looked at, circles, squares.
Well, it’s so universal, a universal language.
The geometry goes back to Mondrian, and nature ultimately, because geometry is in nature. It goes back to the Bauhaus and the ideas are a map. It’s a map for thinking, a map for living, and it’s a map for my journey I guess. I was attracted to that strong form and I was trying to get it into my painting at the time. I started making shaped canvases that were three-dimensional so that you could look at them from multiple viewpoints. What interested me was you weren’t looking straight onto a rectangle. I always liked Frank Stella’s early paintings. He really brought together elements of architecture, sculpture and painting, very clearly. Modernism really takes up physical space, and that was important to me.
Where were you working at the time?
At Purchase. I had one wall in a room half the size of this studio, and I was sharing the room with three people. I made the paintings as big as the wall I had to use. The wall was 8 feet high by 12 feet long, but I could only back up about 6 feet to look at these things. Most of the paintings at that time came out of the observations of shadows—the drama of the setting sun, and the shadows created on the architecture at Purchase. The architecture of the campus is really interesting. It was planned as a mall, an entire expanse of brick.
I think of brick cubes.
Yes, it’s like a bad Louie Kahn. It was interesting to me. I really got into the architecture of geometric forms and how the sun would play on them. On this roof off the third floor atelier, I would crawl out at sunset and on the wall of the Neuberger Museum you get these incredible shadows that would come off the roof of the library and make these pyramid type forms. I started sketching them to incorporate those lines into my work. I could join them together to make this repetition of form, separated by space. That’s when repetition started to come into my work. I did a lot of paintings there using that form. At some point I stopped painting on canvas; I realized that I could translate my ideas more quickly if I actually took a piece of wood and cut the form out. So I didn’t have to draw it anymore, I could cut the form out itself. That was a huge shift. This new form was flat, but it had more direct activity with the surrounding space.
So these are shaped wood panels?
Yes, I was cutting them out on the band saw, and then painting them. Later, when I moved to New York, I would take a plank, a 2 inch-thick slab of sugar pine, draw a shape on it and then cut out the shape and change the angle. When I put the cutout shapes back together it was no longer flat. The flat slab of wood was gone, and what was left was something that would move in and out and side to side in space.
These were very sculptural, then.
Yes, and there were certain totemic aspects being created and repeated. I was just as much involved with sculptural aspects of cutting, sanding and prepping the wood forms as I was painting them. When I got to the city and started in, the first pieces I made were of this same form. I spent a summer making drawings and seeing what I could do with it. I was listening to a lot of jazz at the time, the improvisational side to it, and the rhythm, putting these pieces together so they would have a rhythm to them.
Sure. Like visual beats.
That’s a good way to put it, visual beats, so they would all have a relationship going back and forth, there would be a dialog, and the color would heighten the movement to define the dialogue. I started getting more complex with how I would build these pieces, so there was a lot of construction. Part of my youth was spent working with my dad. Aside from sailing boats, he liked to build them from scratch. I learned to do that, so I had some facility with wood working, and I naturally gravitated towards it, and I use it to this day. I enjoy the aspect of building panels, and I think it actually contributes to my process of understanding not just geometry, but the hand-made.
You have seen the work completely from start to finish, creating the entire process.
It’s true, building a very personal and specific, active object. Going back to Mondrian, a lot his pieces, the smaller works, have these white frames around them, and it seems to me that he built them. He made this presentation of the painting within this nicely handmade panel and it is a very conscious choice to make this frame. So it’s not just a frame, it’s really part of the work. I like that idea that it’s about the whole thing, which gets back to the idea that the painting is an object. I differentiate between shape and form—form being more three-dimensional and shape being more two-dimensional—having the shape, but being on a flat panel and having a solid three-dimensional feel. I like this idea of confrontation on the wall. I stand up I look at it. I am not on all fours looking down at the ground. If I was, I would probably be making sculpture more than painting. You’re really in contact with the earth on all fours. On two feet we are much more in contact with the sky, with the horizon.
Sure, I hadn’t thought about that before.
With paintings there’s no surrounding distraction. You can zero in on something, or it can zero in on you. I also really connect with this feeling of paint that flows and relates to gravity. I want the paint to be very liquid for it to move.
So this helps with the layering of color also?
Yes, because I do work with fairly thin paint. Sometimes more paint ends up on the floor that on the panel. I use an oil-based enamel. I was used to working on wooden boats, with this tough exterior glossy paint that would preserve them. I got really into this marine enamel that I would order directly from the factory and it came in a bright range of colors that worked so beautifully with the wood.
The boating experiences you had growing up relate to your work, thinking about horizon lines, especially thinking about where the openness of sky meets water?
We did a lot of trips where you would be out and wouldn’t see land, maybe 100 miles out and you wouldn’t see land for days. That is a very different experience of seeing ocean and sky. In the vastness of water and sky in those areas, when something appears on the horizon, a little speck, you really notice it, say a sail of another boat. Closer to home, things that stand out, a building, a bridge, a ship in context with the atmosphere, the way light hits it, it’s all around. It’s about a combination of something engineered by man that reflects nature in a way that really presents itself as something the eye is directed towards.
It’s almost like man or artist organizing nature to make a product.
I think about the houses that the indigenous tribes of the Pacific North West built. I studied their culture quite a bit, and looked at a lot of artifacts, totem poles, artwork, and mortuary poles, and the houses. There is incredible logic, a simplicity and beauty in the way the timbers are put together, so creative, perfect and functional. A long house made of huge cedar logs becomes a living environment that can envelope people giving a sense of protection living within the structure. Everything they did was about their spirituality, their connection with animals and the earth, the water, and the great power, essentially.
Let’s talk about some of the geometry that we see in the paintings now, with recent paintings. I am looking at the small green painting behind you, which seems to have the silhouette of a house shape, could you tell me about this?
Okay, this painting, Black Ladder [p. 37] It refers to the painting, it’s not black, but I like the words, and the two rungs that seem to be ascending. There is a movement in the piece, using the pyramid shape, moving upwards, showing the ascent. If you wanted to literalize it, it could remind you of a ladder, but I also like that it reminds me of the Frank Stella painting, Black Adder, which is made of three intersecting triangles, a brilliant painting using black red and blue. I think the rectangle is perfect for painting. It’s the best place to start because you already have four lines and four corners. You can move from there, line things up with edges and make another line, which makes more forms; it becomes an inward exploration, but uses the given structure of the rectangle. Marden talks about the plane as almost a sacred thing because painters have been using it for so long, and I accept that as a given starting point.
What about symmetry?
In a lot of the works you see here there is a bilateral symmetry, where one side is pretty much the same as the other, so I am splitting it down the middle. In some paintings, I try to get away from the regularity of symmetry. I work a lot with the edges of the painting.
In Black Ladder is there the idea of a house shape? Also several paintings in the room remind me of filmstrips in a way, that we are seeing the picture change through a vertical strip or cycle.
There is a section of something continually running. That goes back to Brancusi and The Endless Column. I use the idea of continuation. Obviously repetition comes in there, where your mind wants to complete the next shape, even if it’s not there.
It’s human nature.
Exactly, we see the sun coming up, or the sun coming down, or the moon. This always looked to me like a phase of the moon in repetition. Working recently, there has been a shift to a horizontal divide, more like a landscape feeling, even though the rectangles are still vertical.
I definitely see that. The small green one here definitely makes me think of a landscape, and these new larger works here. Do these have names?
This one is called Kuroshio [p. 47] which is a Japanese name meaning The Black Tide. It’s the largest ocean current in the Pacific; it runs up the East coast of Japan, and joins the North Pacific current along the Gulf of Alaska, basically it is the body of water that is analogous to our Gulf Stream. So this is called The Black Stream. I just use the Japanese word. This painting next to it is called Clearing [p. 49].
So is this coming from a water reference as well?
They are both coming from a very strong water reference, using deep water and deep sky elements as a sense of place. I really wanted to explore not only the form, and the horizontal and vertical movement of the form but add the idea of atmosphere in each piece. In that way I tried to get as much color in the low range of blue, black, with the white, where they would be able to resonate with each other to evoke a much stronger emotional, psychological feeling of the abyss or the thermocline. We are always on the surface pretty much as humans, but the abyss is down there.
Speaking of this philosophy, this reminds me of the title of your upcoming show. Where does this idea for a title come from? How does it fit in?
Yes, The House of Consequence. I was in Mexico in December, the Yucatán coast, where I go frequently—its an amazing spiritual place. I had the wonderful experience of going through the Temescal, which is the Mayan version of the sweat lodge. Intense steam is created in this tight enclosed area and it is pitch dark. Indigenous cultures in the Americas have this relationship with rocks as being their oldest living ancestors, and I love this reference because it’s obviously so grounding. The leader of the group talked about the House of Consequence. For me The House of Consequence is about our actions and the results, good or bad. Every aspect of our energy produces results. Our actions have consequences. For me this is a transformative group of paintings, and it brought me back to the feeling of being in the moment when I am painting, that every mark I make, every color that I use, every gesture, has a consequence.
How much control do you feel you have over the consequences?
I don’t feel like I want to have a lot of control over what’s always going on. I feel like the painting has a power over me as much as I have a power over it. It’s telling me what to do. There is a dialogue. I don’t want to impose my will on it but I want to be open and aware of the moment that I am in and what is happening there. The aspect of living in the moment with a spiritual sense, is all a part of The House of Consequence.
What is title of the exhibition coming up in San Francisco at George Lawson and what are you putting in the show?
It is going to carry over from the show that was there in September, which was called Water Log, two words, that’s important. Water Log, not as in soggy wood, but as in a narrative. A narrative of water, of the effects of water, its feeling, or perhaps, a journey over water, and this was shown in a collection of works on paper. Looking through the works, to me it is like a record.
Or a captain’s log? Relating to your experiences on the water?
Like a ship’s log, having a log of the journey. At the same time I like the fact that water leaves its trace. Water leaves its own record in the tide, waves, wakes and flood lines. If you go to any area of the shore where there is a tide, at low water you’ll see the mark of where the high water was. Because I work with the paint in a very fluid way, in a runny, rainy, watery, way, it relates to water being constantly in motion, fluid, but at the same time you can look through its multiple layers, its depths. It’s all about refracting light, reflecting light, and complex atmospheres.
For the California show last September, you showed works on paper? Drawing?
Works on Paper, I make a distinction, because they are basically paintings on paper and I work on them on the wall. I started them in Montauk when I was at the Edward Albee Foundation in August 2008. It felt like a solid body of work that I could put a title on.
Fifteen were hung, and it turned out to be just what I wanted it to be, a visual diary in a way, a daily ritual. I worked a long time on them back and forth over months, but they had a nice feeling of a book or a diary.
For the show coming up in June, will you be showing part of the same body of works on paper? Are you going to send some paintings on panels over?
Some of the paintings I am sending to California will be a continuation of the theme of Water Log, but on larger panels, and other pieces as well, CB [p. 33], and Blackfriars [p. 35], which is named after the bridge in London, a bright red, white, beautiful steel bridge that crosses the Thames. My inspiration for CB was being in Paris and seeing Brancusi’s incredible studio. Paris is a city of bridges and I connect with them for their architectural strength and their utilitarian beauty.
So those are directly coming from bridges?
Not directly. I use the arch. I use the positive and negative form and they each form one another basically.
I find when I am looking at your work that there is continually a flip of the figure/ground a far as what is coming foreward or falling back, a bridge, or a half-moon, there is continually that flip of shape. It sounds like these elements continue with your life philosophy that is much larger than just painting.
That’s a good observation, the fact that it’s neither one nor the other, that it is both the positive and the negative at the same time. Maybe that’s good, that it’s not so clear, that it’s ambiguous. There is the mystery in the fact that it is both.
Some of the paintings have arch forms. I am thinking of a mid size dark purple with white arch forms on the side. [Fresnel, p. 8]. It doesn’t seem like a palm tree or totem pole or something like that, but our conversation about the segment of the archway made me think about the Coliseum. It flips in my own vision and still has that repetition that keeps the painting undulating.
When you look at the negative there, the arcs are intruding into the dome shape or the moon shape., a kind of carving out that goes back to the notch forms and puzzle pieces focusing on the joinery of form that I was doing a lot of in the past.
This came from the boat building experience so the themes are continuous.
Yes it came from a lot of boat building and a lot of cabinetwork, of fitting something in at the joining point. Like in Japanese furniture or architecture the joining point is crucial structurally and visually.
The rectangles that you are using now, they are all vertical, is that coming from a direct relationship to human scale?
It’s a direct relationship to my body I would say, yes.
I would like to hear from you about the paintings where there is more of a horizon line repetition verses a vertical or sideways silhouette.
I have taken the elements and stuck them on their end. Instead of the arch being on its foot rather than its head and expanded from one side to another, some of them have a much more figurative connotation.
I guess this is coming back to Mondrian again as far as the gridding because with the vertical canvas and the upward motion, and in some of them that upward motion is turned perpendicular to the stance of the rectangle, with the flow breaking the boundary by extending the image past the frame or rectangle.
I am looking at the verticality of this, but I paint with horizontal strokes. It is a new thing in the work, to be using the horizon line. In the work before this, there was always a verticality, a movement from top to bottom, and also the flow of the paint. It felt natural to paint up and down. When I was using more of a viscous paint that’s the way it would run. Here when I am painting horizontal, it is much more of a conscious effort to have the feeling of the paint going that way which is counterintuitive. If I laid this flat and started painting that way it would be a lot easier.
It would, but you don’t do that. Why?
Because I don’t like that relationship to the painting.
That would be like painting on all fours.
It would be like painting on all fours, so here I work with the horizon in the new work. It’s something new.
House of Consequence
—Interview with Glenn Goldberg, April 18 & 19, 2010
Glenn Goldberg: Could you talk a bit about the cause, which I understand as the beginning, or one could say the purpose or motivation of these works? What causes the start?
Tad Wiley: There is a motivation for me to make a certain work, I suppose that could be a reason, but actually it feels more like a notion, or suggestion. De Kooning talked of the glimpse, which I feel is very accurate as to motivation or inspiration. Those instances of enlightenment, lets call them, come from very mysterious places, but mostly I feel they come from the sensual world, from the interaction of my senses as opposed to my linear thinking.
Am I right in thinking that the conclusion is what we call a painting and the reason or argument is how it gets made?
Yes, I think one could say that, though the painting might only be a transitory conclusion. The consequence is really what one is left with upon interacting with the painting, not only in its finished state, but also in its working state.
It sounds like feeling is what drives the decision making as you proceed in a painting. Is it possible to speak about the ingredients of feeling, or what feeling is comprised of? What contributes to your vessel of feeling?
The ingredients of feeling are mostly associated with memory and specifically the memory of sensations. My impressions based on what I sense daily are filtered through me and outward in a way that causes me to make concrete choices as to what I create. Your choice of the word “vessel” is perfect, vessel being a container and a conduit at the same time. Certainly for me when the container of feeling is full up, it has to spill over and flow out. Seeing the effect of light and atmosphere interacting with solid forms in nature contributes quite a bit to that vessel for me.
You rightly make the distinction between things and images. The paintings are obviously constructed, built from a series of physical decisions that proceed foreward and accumulate. Is there room made for associations of a certain kind, and if so, what associations are you most accepting or comfortable with?
I am comfortable with any association really, though I never make paintings to impose any associations. Associations are subjective and up to the viewer. I can only bring my intentions to bear on what might happen in the course of making a work of art. I never want to exert too much control or have a plan in the execution. The painting takes on a life and will of its own in a way. If I resist a certain flow or tendency that becomes evident during the process, the results are usually not satisfying and feel untrue to nature.
When you speak of a house and that which surrounds a house I receive a poetic reference point for your works, what is inside and what is outside. The metaphor includes both the man-made and the natural. I imagine from your writing that you are consciously attempting to limit the natural associations yet simultaneously include it in the realm of what you call feeling. Am I accurate in thinking that?
I see the contents of the house and its surroundings as being both man-made and natural. The interior would be mostly comprised of things both practical (furniture) and non-practical (decoration). These can be fabricated, but the interior can also hold a feeling, which in some instances is very palpable and usually a product of the energy inherent in the physical contents of the interior.
I know that you grew up around fabrication. If I remember correctly much of it was fiberglass, as opposed to wood, metal or steel. Is that part of your youth part of your work? You also grew up around the water, with much time spent sailing and fishing. Are those experiences contributors to your work?In a very direct yet complex way it is possible for me to see the fiberglass as the house and the water life as the nature I was referring to earlier.
There were always tools lying around the house, and my Dad had a wood shop where he worked on various projects. He was always messing around in boats, mostly wooden boats. I think he built his first one very young, and he was an exceptional draftsman. I grew up as a child mostly on Cape Cod, so I did learn how to handle a boat and navigate very early. It was just part of the territory. Sometimes I think salt water runs in my veins, literally. In any case, water, the sea, does inform my sense of equilibrium and give me a reference to live by.
You are perpetuating language in your paintings, the language of painting itself, a language that arguably is at risk of extinction as we continue foreward in time. You refer to this language when you discuss the plane as well as the rooms in the house: form, color and surface. Is it possible to talk about what this language is, where it comes from, and why it is important to keep it alive?
The language of painting is an accurate term, because I sometimes see the forms I create as a vocabulary of sorts, one that you might play with like word play, or poetry perhaps. Paintings can be verbs, they can be active, but for me they are still primarily specific objects that create their own visual dialogs. I don’t think painting is going to become extinct anytime soon, but it is still a pretty traditional art form. I am a hands-on type. I want to be linked to all aspects of the creation of the work. Each stage is personal and thus relative to the end result. I have been interested in taking photographs recently with a digital camera, but I am not a photographer. I don’t feel the same connection to images as I do to real things made. Tangible elements for me have more power inherent in them. Images by themselves don’t possess energy, which it is attached only later; whereas, objects are imbued with energy by their creator. Certainly nature is pure energy. There are no images in nature.
Could you talk about the idea of resistance in painting, or what you are forced to do as you proceed? It seems clear that a big part of your work is one of responsibility, or doing a thorough job.
My only responsibility really is to truth, in thought and action hopefully. It’s not easy. It requires a certain amount of focus and intention, intention without wavering: but of course it must encompass life, and the reality that life is. If I pay attention to my senses in the moment, I can usually accept reality in all its chaotic grandeur.
Is intimacy and a desire to bring the viewer close, part of your intention?
Viewing a painting can be an intimate experience, surely; it can be personal, and no two people are going to have the same experience. I would say that yes, painting in the manner I do does draw one in and once that happens, more is revealed. I make paintings that communicate at different distances. I relate to the all-at-once glance, where you are hit with a striking combination of forms and colors. At the same time I work hard at the subtleties and getting a surface that is built up of many layers of color and texture, which one does have to see up close. It’s like the lighthouse when you see it from far off at sea. You head towards it, and it’s a beacon guiding you in. After a while, the contour of the land rises up and recognizable forms appear, the focus sharpens and you start noticing the details and richness.