Collaborations with my Subject Karin Clarke Gallery, August 2006

Collaborations with My Subject

August 2006

THIS SHOW ASKS THE QUESTION: how do we explain the difference between a highly accomplished, successful work of art (in other words, a really good painting) and a painting that is more than all of that—a painting that represents an artist’s finest work, a painting that can rightly be termed “great”?

Let’s begin by recognizing that the terms “good” and “great” as applied to art carry heavy baggage. Some would say that these terms represent subjective judgments that are little more than expressions of individual preference or bias. Is David McCosh a greater painter than Carl Hall? Is he a greater artist than the sculptor Jan Zach? Is a great painting by McCosh as good as a great painting by Marsden Hartley? Or is a good painting by Hartley better than a great painting by McCosh?

We’ll leave those meaty questions for another day. For present purposes, I’m using the terms “good” and “great” as a way of assessing the relative success of McCosh’s various paintings, not as a way of ranking them against the output of any other artist (as entertaining as that might be).

The question that gave rise to this show really came from my study of McCosh’s large body of work, first with his wife, Anne, as my guide, as I prepared a retrospective of his work for the Maude Kerns Art Center in 1988, and then in the last several years, as I worked on the series of shows this gallery has presented. McCosh did many good paintings. But what is really striking are the occasional pieces I would find in the stacks, such as those in this show, that are simply off the charts. There’s no question that McCosh was a highly skilled painter who had mastered the fundamentals of pictorial structure, color harmony, balance, tension, and the like. And that explains all the really good paintings he made. But why are some of his paintings dramatically more successful than others? What makes some works so vivid, so charged with energy that they practically leap off the wall? How do we explain them? And why didn’t he just make great paintings every time out?

I don’t know that McCosh ever answered these questions. If we take him at his word, his paintings began with his careful observation of his subject. He looked for what was unique and distinctive. He painted what he saw in his subject that he found no where else. But there must be something more that explains how his

Figure 9. Vincent van Gogh (Dutch, 1853–90) Cottage Garden, 1888 Reed pen, quill, and ink over graphite on wove paper, 24 x 191/4 inches Private Collection

Figure 10. Vincent van Gogh (Dutch, 1853–90) Nursery on the Schenkweg, April–May 1882 Black chalk, graphite, pen, brush, and ink, heightened with white body color on laid paper, 115/8 x 231/16 inches Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bequest of Walter C. Baker, 1971

great paintings came to be. If McCosh’s art was simply a record of his observations, why are some of his paintings so much more vital than others?

One quality that the paintings in this show share, which is a hallmark of great paintings by any artist, is their extraordinary vividness. What does it mean for a painting to be “vivid”? It means that the painting, in some significant sense, has a life of its own. By that I mean that the artist has responded so completely to his subject that the painting is no longer a representation or rendition that the artist controls. In a sense, this exceptional vividness comes from an energy that the artist has tapped into that is not his own. It’s an energy that comes from the subject, or perhaps more accurately, it’s an energy that comes out of the artist’s collaboration with his subject.

What I am describing is by no means unique to McCosh’s art. Consider, for example, the drawings of van Gogh. Compare his fine descriptive landscape from 1882, Nursery on the Schenkweg (fig. 10), with the amazing Cottage Garden (fig. 9) from 1888. Nursery on the Schenkweg is a beautiful, carefully made work, with fine sensitivity to the broad planes and rhythms of the Dutch landscape. This is a very good drawing by any standard, but work like this doesn’t explain how Vincent became the best known, highest priced, most widely loved artist of our day. Cottage Garden does. It explodes off the page. It has the clarity and elegance of Nursery on the Schenkweg, but its emotional intensity is of an entirely different order. Van Gogh responded so strongly to this richly varied garden that he kept working and striving to bring it to life on his sheet. The more he worked, the closer he got to the energy in the garden that he found so compelling. Imagine how carefully, how precisely van Gogh must have

Persimmons II, n.d. Watercolor and charcoal on paper, 151/8 x 21 inches Collection of Joan Darling-Jones and William Jones

looked at this scene to place its many plant forms on his page. But the remarkable aspect of this drawing is that he found the rhythm of this garden and then merged his own work into its natural flow. As an artist moves from objective analysis of his subject to becoming absorbed into its very movement and structure, the barrier that separates him from the subject fades. The artist actually begins to draw with his subject. He has discovered, and is now in a real sense collaborating with, the essential character that made the subject so compelling to him in the first place. Achieving empathy with a subject, as van Gogh did in Cottage Garden, can make a good work great.

This show includes three subjects by McCosh that illustrate this point. 1. Still life paintings that represent McCosh at his most controlling. Here, he manipulates and even creates the subject matter of the painting. 2. Landscape paintings where McCosh is at his loosest and most free. The landscape provides the inspiration, the point of departure, and the touchstone for the painting. 3. A special group of figure studies, where McCosh paints a subject that is traditionally very controlled in a quick and intuitive manner.

Figure 11. Along Horse Creek, n.d. Watercolor on paper, 171/2 x 231/2 inches Private Collection

Still life paintings can tell a story by depicting objects that take on the character of artifacts of a person, a place, or an era. McCosh uses still life to explore the relationship between forms and color, much as abstract painting does. Objects that are visually interesting because of their shape or color are selected by the painter, placed in a setting, and then moved about almost like chess pieces on a board to create the relationships that the painter depicts. That sounds pretty academic, and it often is, but the still life paintings in this show go beyond a study of balance and form. We can see McCosh becoming totally engaged in moving and manipulating his objects until he found a balance that was just right and which called for exactly the deft paint application he used in these pieces. Still life paintings can be handsome and beautifully controlled but ultimately stiff and lifeless. What’s special about these paintings is the free and easy balance in them. This most artificial of subjects resulted in paintings that are among the most natural and organic works McCosh ever made.

We are used to seeing energetic, lively McCosh landscapes, but the paintings in this show are unusually vivid. Of the many studies McCosh did of his beloved Horse Creek, a mountain stream in the foothills near McKenzie Bridge, where he and Anne had a cabin, the

two in this show stand out. Along Horse Creek (fig. 11) practically dances with a spirit that must have come from the play of light and shadow and sparkling water on a sunny, summer day. We can imagine McCosh sitting on a rock, so wrapped up in recreating these images and patterns that his painting just took off on him. This isn’t a simple record of his observations; this is the day itself, the light, the color, the shadows, and the sun, in front of us on the page.

Figure painting, for a classically trained artist like McCosh, is the most careful and exacting of all subjects. So where did this show’s loosely painted, sensuous nudes in a lush landscape come from? In 1938, McCosh was invited by his friend (and former classmate) Francis Chapin to teach and paint with him at the Art Institute of Chicago’s summer workshops in Saugatuck, Michigan. When McCosh left Chicago in 1934 for Oregon, his career and Chapin’s were pretty much on equal footing. Both were considered promising young artists with the potential for big careers. Four short years later, Chapin was on his way to realizing that potential. He was a well-regarded teacher at the Institute and the director of its Saugatuck Institute, he was gaining a national reputation for his painting, and he enjoyed strong sales at high prices in good galleries. McCosh’s career, measured by gallery sales and reputation, was slowed by his move to Oregon. He was troubled that he couldn’t even get Chapin interested in selling a painting to the museum in Eugene because the amount he had to offer ($300), which McCosh considered a nice sum indeed for a painting, was peanuts to Chapin. McCosh wondered if a part of the reason that Chapin was getting so far ahead of him was because McCosh had tightened up too much as a painter, maybe because he was so pre-occupied by his teaching at the University, but also because he no longer had colleagues around him like Chapin. So he decided he would try something new at Saugatuck. He hired a model he thought was especially fine and made arrangements to paint her in a landscape setting. He also made up his mind to throw caution to the winds in these sessions and paint as quickly and intuitively as he could. And the paintings in this show are the results. He was delighted, and even liberated, by them. It’s easy to see why. Nude in Saugatuck (fig. 12), with the form of the model reflecting the landscape setting, has a vitality that is completely apart from much of the genre painting McCosh was doing at the time.

I suspect that each painting in this show resulted from a process that for McCosh was unusually engaging. The process of selecting and establishing the still life model, becoming deeply involved in a landscape situation, or forcing himself to paint quickly and intuitively, drew him in, and in each case he submitted in some significant way to the energy he found in his subject. A master painter like McCosh is a master at controlling the elements of his craft. But the great paintings of a master often seem to be those where he gives up complete control. They seem vested with an energy that is not entirely his, an energy that results from collaboration with his subject.

Figure 12. Nude in Saugatuck, n.d. Watercolor on paper, 131/2 x 201/2 inches McCosh Memorial Collection; MMC.0553

Goat Herd and Cacti, 1959 Watercolor on paper, 91/2 x 14 inches Private Collection

Nelson Sandgren, master painter, good friend and mentor, died earlier this month. Nelson loved painting completely – he loved everything about it—making it most of all, but he also loved the intellectual challenge of trying to figure out what it all meant. We spent some very fine hours together talking about art, trying out ideas, struggling to explain the inexplicable. Nelson was proud of his heritage as a student of David McCosh at the UO in the 1940s. He faithfully attended the McCosh shows here, even when travel wasn’t easy for him. Everyone who was at the McCosh gallery talks will remember Nelson’s joyful, insightful, impromptu comments. Nelson would have liked this show—he would have loved using this wonderful art as a springboard to wrestle with audacious ideas about how it came to be. This show is respectfully dedicated to his memory.