Beyond Description

Beyond Description Sugarlift Gallery, New York City · AUGUST 4-SEPTEMBER 2, 2022 Figure Ground Gallery, Seattle · AUGUST 4-SEPTEMBER 30, 2022

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This catalog was produced in conjunction with:

Beyond Description curated by Eric Elliott and Jordan Wolfson August 4-September 2, 2022: Sugarlift Gallery 508 W 28th St New York, NY 10001 (617) 981-2370 www.sugarlift.com August 4-September 30, 2022: Figure Ground Gallery 122 S Jackson St, Suite 250 Seattle, WA 98104 (206) 641-7254 www.figuregroundgallery.com Catalog design: John Goodrich

Front cover: Wilbur Niewald Still Life with Onions and White Drape (detail) 2016, oil on canvas, 26 × 32 in.

Courtesy Haw Contemporary

This page: Stanley Lewis Houses on Jekyll Island (detail) 2

2017, acrylic on canvas, 23 × 34 in.

Courtesy Betty Cuningham Gallery

Beyond Description Curated by Eric Elliott and Jordan Wolfson

AUGUST 4-SEPTEMBER 2, 2022 Sugarlift Gallery, New York City

AUGUST 4-SEPTEMBER 30, 2022 Figure Ground Gallery, Seattle

Human beings have been making two-dimensional handmade images for tens of thousands of years. The great project of Modernity provided the opportunity for radical, personal, creative experimentation in form.

Individual, first-hand experience became paramount as a source, and through the impact and influence of painters such as Monet and Cézanne, the investigation of perception, and its relationship to being, became a key element.

Modernity as a cultural era ended approximately fifty years ago, but the possibility of painting, and its attendant exploration of the interconnections between seeing, marking and being, as a vehicle for deep human engagement, continues unabated. This exhibition was curated with those concerns in mind, and heart.

The exhibition presents 18 painters in dialogue with the visible world, seeking to translate felt perception into paint.

For them, meaning is located in the form itself, derived and generated in the relationships between the artist, the motif, and the painting. Each painter sees the world through their own particular lens, yet all ask themselves how it is possible to bring colored mud to life, and what that might say about the world we live in, and what it means to be human.

— Eric Elliott and Jordan Wolfson

Image:

Alix Bailey David Baird Eric Elliott Dean Fisher Zoey Frank Ann Gale Catherine Kehoe Diarmuid Kelley Stanley Lewis Ying Li Ruth Miller Wilbur Niewald Osnat Oliva Stephanie Pierce Edmond Praybe Christina Weaver Mathieu Weemaels Jordan Wolfson

Jordan Wolfson Interior with Three Chairs XIX (detail) oil on linen, 48 x 42 in.

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Left:

Ruth Miller Melon, Curtain, Green Tea Pot (detail) 2018, oil on linen, 14 x 20 in.

Beyond Description According to one fanciful account,the Renaissance

began at the moment Giotto mischievously painted a realistic fly on a panel; it was so true to life that his teacher Cimabue tried to swat it.

History, of course, is never quite so pat, but we may still be struck by the underlying presumptions of this account: that the purpose of painting was to duplicate nature, and it succeeded when it fooled the human eye.

This presumption proved, in fact, remarkably durable. In a fabled contest in the fifth century BCE, Zeuxis proved his mettle by producing a painting so life-like that birds pecked at it.

Parrhasius surpassed this with a painting that fooled a human—namely, the hapless Zeuxis, who tried to lift its painted-on curtain. Nearly two millennia later, according to legend, the teenage Leonardo da Vinci earned his chops by painting a dragon so realistically that it startled his unsuspecting father. Even as a multitude of schools and styles flourished in later centuries, the goal of tricking the human eye continued in the genre of trompe l’oeil painting. (A master’s thesis could be written on which more faithfully

recorded nature, the trompe l’oeil illusionism of William Harnett, or the ordered classicism of the great still life painter Chardin.)

Today, we may be more inclined to agree with Delacroix’s dictum, “Exactitude is not truth.”

Indeed, strolling through a museum and absorbing the likes of Giotto, El Greco, Turner, Monet and Picasso, we may well conclude that there are as many truths as there are artists. After all, a painter’s challenge is not to duplicate life— a physical impossibility—but to find its most evocative equivalent within a pictorial discipline.

We know that through a vitalization of forms, a painter can lend compositional weight to invisible sensations—like gravity—and as well as to perceptions experienced in time—such as human movement, or even a vase’s stretching neck. Through these means, a sum of impressions—visual, tactile, cognitive—can become animate, in a single, stilled image.

So many of the powers of painting begin where mere depiction ends. They lie beyond description —and this, of course, inspired the current

exhibition, which curators Eric Elliott and Jordan Wolfson have organized as two concurrent installations. The eighteen participating artists include the much-esteemed veterans Stanley Lewis, Ruth Miller and Wilbur Niewald, as well as younger and mid-career painters from around the country and the world. Work by every artist will appear in each installation. Very sadly, Mr. Niewald passed away this April 30, having continued to paint in the studio up to his final days.

The strategies of the artists in “Beyond Description” take many paths, including investigations of the processes of seeing and representing, exploring the materiality of the painting medium, and fragmenting and rebuilding the observed in time and space. But every painter, in his or her fashion, examines what it means to see the world today, and re-make it on canvas or panel.

Like the traditional masters, Wilbur Niewald largely honored the factual proportions and arrangements of his motifs while imbuing them with pictorial vigor. One has to see his paintings in the flesh to fully absorb their eloquence of color: the way, for instance, his hues substantiate the clustered energy of a pile of apples, and the sweeping enclosure of fabric, in “Still Life with Onions and White Drape” (2016). Niewald’s forms don’t depict, they embody, so that in his landscape from 2019, a complex of trees faces us as a tangible wall of green, anchored between receding land and strip of sky.

If Cézanne’s soulful investigations echo through Niewald’s canvases, they can also be felt, a little more distantly, in the paintings of Ruth Miller.

This artist’s colors are heightened, and her forms more inclined to assert their abstract independence, but all in order to serve a greater truth in a painting like “Shell, Bottles, Green Tea Pot“ (2018), in which every volume and spatial interval is measured against a rhythmic whole. The viewer palpably senses the spindly rise of a bottle, pepper shaker, and other verticals from various points on a table, and between them the luminous, curving masses of shell and teapot.

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Stanley Lewis, too, honors the observed world, capturing in “Tree and Houses, Lake Chautauqua” (2015) the looming density of a tree’s overhead boughs and its sturdily supporting trunk. Given the artist’s raw, improvisational attack, with thickly layered paint and re-attached portions of canvas, the coherence of such an image is all the more remarkable.

Its bucolic subject and dark palette may recall Courbet, but—befitting an artist of Lewis’ generation—its surface suggests something much closer to the restless probings of de Kooning.

Though differing greatly from one another, the paintings of Niewald, Miller and Lewis all reflect a certain earthiness of approach and a faith in observed nature. Many of the other painters in “Beyond Description“ share this approach, among them Alix Bailey, who models every volume—as if inviting the viewer’s touch—in complex compositions of figures in light-filled interiors; though impassive in their expressions, her figures become irrefutable presences.

Mathieu Weemaels, working on a smaller scale with simpler subjects—a single, empty chair, or two or three objects before a mirror—employs denser, jewel-like colors to achieve a poetic, almost otherworldly intimacy. Dean Fisher animates his figure paintings and still lifes with an attack at once analytical and empathetic, summarizing broad aspects in atmospheric hues, and then zeroing in on the telling details of curling fingers or a teapot’s gleaming highlight.

Favoring an overhead view, Edmond Praybe brings an especially subtle sense of illumination to his still lifes and single figure painting, taking advantage of a raking light that disperses precise, muted shadows across complex scenes; the circular rims of plates and cups punctuate these pulsing fields, like craters viewed from a passing satellite.

Catherine Kehoe’s paintings may be tiny, but they powerfully demonstrate how color and line leverage each other. Their blocks of intense, thickly applied color re-create, plane by plane, the workings of light to define volumes and

spaces; each element is unabashedly pigment and object. In subtler fashion, Christina Weaver’s affection for both nature and visual pattern comes through in close-up views of flowering plants and tree trunks. In one especially radiant moment, a yellow-green records the weight of sunlight pressing from behind an upturned leaf. Osnat Oliva proves herself the most lyrical of cubists, turning light-suffused still lifes into faceted, dream-like veils of color. In Ann Gale’s painterly portraits, the unaffected becomes the beautiful, the forms of her figures—their volumes, illumination, even their relationship to the viewer—emerging, viscerally, from vivid scatterings of color. And, in terms of gestural vigor and intensity of hue, Ying Li’s paintings have the final say. At a glance, their slashing strokes of full-bodied color test the limits of our cognitive powers. Linger a moment, though, and worlds of pathways, trees, clouds and blossoms emerge, each poignantly located in shifts of hue.

Intriguingly, the paintings that come closest to “realism,” at least in terms of naturalistic modeling, refrain from taking the final representational step. With richly atmospheric colors, David Baird’s paintings beautifully evoke the volumes of plates, grapes, lemons and eggcups, but small portions of each canvas—often conspicuous ones—are left unfinished. The still lifes and portrait by Diarmuid Kelley, which feature the most precise modeling of all, leave bare sections of canvas around his exquisitely modeled subjects, like the deserts surrounding the radiant bustle of certain Southwest cities. Juxtaposing the compellingly rendered and the indeterminate, the work of both artists suggest the transiency and fragility of all painted representations.

Such paradoxes of visual experience serve as other artists’ starting points. Eric Elliott’s objects gradually dissolve in his series of images of cups and other ordinary objects; what is crisp, volumetric, and anchored—“real”—in a first version turns slowly, painting by painting, into clouds of luminous hues: a devolution into visual essences. Jordan Wolfson’s series of paintings of a single interior range intriguingly from clear, vivid delineations to sheer tapestries of pigment; the conversation between a chair, rug, wall and window emerges and then dematerializes into layers of atmospheric color. Stephanie Pierce’s renderings of everyday items—a studio wall, window view, or simply objects placed flat on a table, all articulated in richly naturalistic hues— acquire a stuttering intensity through ghostly doublings (and sometimes triplings) of their contours. Zoey Frank’s complex compositions of real scenes are abstracted to varying degrees; a wide-angle view of a single loft apartment realistically depicts its disjunctive spaces and geometries, while a painting of a pool-side scene, repeated in side-by-side versions, teems with figures that fragment (in the left half) and re-integrate (in the right). In all these paintings, one’s left to wonder: are the worlds of objects coming, or going—or both?

Our surroundings do not stay still, and neither do we. Our understandings and even our perceptions shift with time, place and vantage point. But as “Beyond Description” reminds us, human perceptions can endure, captured as individual visions, and expressed through the unique discipline of painting. In this exhibition, the results ultimately speak for themselves, as varied, intense and eloquent as the artists themselves.

—John Goodrich June 2022

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Alix Bailey

I paint in order to discover a world that is invented through close engagement with my subject. For many years I have been painting people in a six by six foot space in my studio that is bathed in natural light. What I like about painting large life sized paintings is the way I connect to them with my whole body.

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Above:

Young Group 2020, oil on linen, 80 x 68 in.

Opposite:

Alannah and B 2019, oil on linen, 60 x 66 in.

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Above:

Natasha Seated II 2017, oil on linen, 58 x 38 in.

Opposite:

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Alannah in Mori Dress 2017, oil on canvas, 70 x 36 in.

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David Baird

My work is focused on the translation of perceptual experience into pictorial representation. Throughout this process, the sensuality of experience is in constant tension with the materiality of the paint. Any pretense of fidelity to the visual experience is inevitably betrayed by the artifice of painting.

Resolving this tension becomes the subject of every work. Like an inverted excavation, the accumulating layers of pigment contrive to unveil that perceptual moment, delicately balanced between the familiar and the unfamiliar where a whole is made of separate parts.

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Above:

Reclining Nude 2022, oil on linen, 24 x 36 in.

Opposite:

Still Life with Grapes oil on canvas, 12 x 12 in.

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Still Life with Seashell oil on panel, 12 x 12 in.

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Still Life with Bread oil on linen on panel, 16 x 16 in.

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Eric Elliott

Structures of my everyday life are inspiration for exploration into the nature of reality. I see the objects in my compositions not as things but as an interconnected network of abstract shapes. Every still life is approached with this same intent, but I am interested in how subtle differences in approach can give diverse interpretations.

We all see the world through different lenses, and for me it is a question of which lens I will see the world with today.

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Above:

Still Life in Pink and Orange #2 2022, oil on canvas, 10 x 12 in.

Opposite:

Still Life in Pink and Orange #1 2022, oil on canvas, 10 x 12 in.

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Still Life with Blue Spray Bottle #1 2022, oil on canvas, 24 x 18 in.

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Still Life with Blue Spray Bottle #2 2022, oil on canvas, 24 x 18 in.

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Dean Fisher

My paintings respond to our surrounding physical and sensual world, such as how light and air reveal form, color, and texture. The quality of the tracks of the brush as it passes through the paint conveys the excitement and joy of intense looking.

I strive to organize my visual perceptions of these qualities into a cohesive and compelling structure. The composition and painting’s surface are where the artwork’s expressive potential lies, which in my opinion, transcends subject matter and the narrative.

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Above:

Figure/Garden oil on panel, 48 x 48 in.

Opposite:

Still Life with Sunlight oil on panel, 24 x 48 in.

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Above:

Still Life from Above oil on panel, 36 x 22 in.

Opposite:

Josephine at Home oil on panel, 48 x 24 in.

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Zoey Frank

Recently I’ve been using scenes from everyday life to investigate the formal aspects of painting: pictorial space, color, composition. As part of my investigation of these formal aspects of painting, I’ve also started using abstraction and introducing arbitrary planes of color to solve compositional problems as they arise. As the painting develops, the surfaces of the paintings become crusty with the layers of changes I’ve made over time.

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Above:

Nantucket Windows #1 2021, oil on linen on two panels, 34½ x 42 in.

Opposite:

Interior with Bananas 2021, oil on canvas on two panels, 36 x 92 in.

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Above:

After the Pool 2021, oil on linen, 72 x 132 in.

Opposite:

Nantucket Still Life 2022, oil on linen on panel, 20½ x 47 in.

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Ann Gale

I work from observation, over extended periods, accumulating marks of color, trying to document the sensations of flesh, light and space, as well as the psychological and visual pressure of my own gaze. In recent work I have focused on the fragile and momentary nature of perception.

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Above:

Portrait, Strange Collar 2022, oil on Masonite, 14 x 11 in.

Opposite:

Portrait, Blue Birds 2022, oil on Mylar mounted on panel, 14 x 11 in.

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Gloria Blue Band 2022, oil on canvas, 48 x 42 in.

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Arch 2022, oil on canvas, 48 x 42 in.

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Catherine Kehoe

The more I look, the more I realize that nothing is as solid as my mind imagines. It takes a long time for the scales to fall from my eyes so I can discern the relationships between things. This experience comes together in the abstract language of shape, color, and paint. The web of sensations in my visual field is a mystery I cannot fully grasp. The intersection of painting with this sensory experience yields surprises every time I go there.

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Above:

After Raphaelle Peale

oil on panel, 6 x 6 in.

Opposite:

Self-portrait No Glasses

oil on panel, 5 x 5 in.

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Above:

Brick House oil on panel, 5 x 5 in.

Opposite:

Little Jacket oil on panel, 10 x 8 in.

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Diarmuid Kelley

The work I make is always painted using direct observation and can sometimes take many weeks to complete. I hope that all those hours compressed into one image add to the richness of the painting. However, in many ways the subject of the painting is not the motif itself—an apple, a chair, a figure—but the dialogue between each new work and the long history of painting from which it draws.

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Above:

Pears on Blue Cloth 2020, oil on linen, 16 x 16 in.

Opposite:

Aubergine and Pepper on Pink Cloth 2021, oil on linen, 14 x 15 in.

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Above:

Tomatoes on Pink Cloth 2021, oil on linen, 12 x 16 in.

Opposite:

Sevastopol 2021, oil on linen, 14 x 181/8 in.

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Stanley Lewis

It has always been the same thing. First, I am controlled.

Then fear of failure builds up. I look out at the landscape and ruin everything. Then, I feel better and start over, on top of the mess I’ve made.

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Above:

Tree and Houses, Lake Chautauqua 2015, oil on canvas, 23½ x 36 in.

Courtesy Betty Cuningham Gallery Opposite:

Wagon, Table, Chair, Fall 2011, oil on canvas, 19 x 22 in.

Courtesy Betty Cuningham Gallery

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Houses on Jekyll Island 2017, acrylic on canvas, 23 × 34 in.

Courtesy Betty Cuningham Gallery

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Yard in Summer 2015, acrylic on cardboard, 18¼ × 28 in.

Courtesy Betty Cuningham Gallery

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Ying Li

There is a pathway that enables the artist to travel across time and space.

This form of travel empowers an artist to create in the moment, to see with an alternative perspective, observe, and obtain insight from another dimension. My training in Chinese painting and calligraphy have helped me to form a brushwork that is both free and disciplined. The paint becomes a living and breathing entity between earth, sea and sky.

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Above:

Bee Keeper’s Farm, Castro Marim #3 2020, oil on linen, 18 x 24 in.

Opposite:

Fort George River 2022, oil on canvas, 18½ x 19 in.

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Above:

Bee Keeper’s Farm, Castro Marim #5 2020, oil on linen, 18 x 24 in.

Opposite:

Duck Pond #2 2020, oil on linen, 30 x 40 in.

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Ruth Miller

I’ve been involved with still life my whole life. I return to the same objects and arrangements over and over and sometimes the things I paint give themselves up quickly, but often they do not, and I have to settle down to a long pursuit during which looking, memory, and desire all play a role.

I hope that if I do justice to the subject, the geometry and the form will be revealed, and the painting will look back at me with all the force of a portrait.

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Above:

Small Green Teapot 2022, oil on canvas on board, 7¼ x 10¼ in.

Opposite:

Pumpkin, Coffee Pot, Shell 2021, oil on linen, 16 x 24 in. .

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Shell, Bottles, Green Tea Pot 2018, oil on linen, 18 x 24 in.

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Melon, Curtain, Green Tea Pot 2018, oil on linen, 14 x 20 in.

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Wilbur Niewald

For more than fifty years I have been painting from nature. In the fifties and sixties I developed the oil paintings in the studio from drawings and watercolors done at the site.

In 1970, I began working entirely from direct observation of nature—in this context all that we see. My objective is a study of nature and I make corrections to conform to the subject that is before me. In my self-portrait I am looking in a mirror continuously correcting and working on the painting for a relatively long time. I am not interested in the narrative and conscious symbolism. I do not think of getting a likeness to the person but only the likeness to the form—the color and the drawing that I see. For me, painting is a very personal expression. It is a continual learning experience which has no end.

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Above:

Still Life with Onions and White Drape 2016, oil on canvas, 26 x 32 in.

Courtesy Haw Contemporary Opposite:

Self Portrait 2015, oil on canvas, 32 x 23 in.

Courtesy Haw Contemporary

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Stlll Life with Apples 2021, oil on canvas, 18 x 15 in.

Courtesy Haw Contemporary

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Pine Trees in Loose Park XXIII 2019, oil on canvas, 26 x 32 in.

Courtesy Haw Contemporary

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Osnat Oliva

I’m not satisfied with painting only from observation anymore. I am seeking for something beyond it—compositions that suggest something more abstract, more enigmatic.

In my recent works I’m combining several subjects into one motif and creating a new synthesis.

I’m drawn to complex compositions, full of shapes and movement, and seek to vary my painting language and achieve a more textured, and rich surface. The world is full of pictorial motifs, and I constantly refine my senses, identify, and hunt for them in my own way.

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Above:

Still Life with Flowers and Lemon oil on linen mounted on wood, 19½ x 15¾ in.

Opposite:

Composition with Still Life oil on linen mounted on wood, 14¼ x 15¾ in.

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Above:

Composition with Still Life oil on linen mounted on wood, 15¾ x 19½ in.

Opposite:

Still Life with Flowers oil on linen mounted on wood, 19½ x 15¾ in.

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Stephanie Pierce

My observation-based paintings explore interrelationships between light, time, and perception, and how reality can be represented as it is reconsidered over time. The paintings are a record of ongoing transitions, rather than a seamless illusion of a single moment. When the paintings have a complicated, buzzing visual intensity, and verge on hallucinatory, I step away. Simultaneity, coalescence, or crystallization of an emotional light are the result of the unmapped course each painting takes.

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Above:

went down like shadows

2020-21, oil on canvas, 64 x 50 in.

Opposite:

waves

2020-21, oil on canvas, 8 x 8 in.

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Above:

bird 2020-21, oil on canvas, 8 x 8 in.

Opposite:

i, cloud 2017-18, oil on linen, 64 x 50 in.

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Edmond Praybe

I have collected my still life objects over many years for both their visual qualities and their connection to memories of specific events, places and people in my life. In my work I use still life as a vehicle to simultaneously explore rigorous, direct observation and formal abstraction. The internal logic of structure, rhythm, shape and color in my paintings is as important as a sense of fidelity to the motif.

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Above:

Silent Sounds oil on linen on panel, 39 x 24 in.

Opposite:

Still Life with Red Glass oil on linen on panel, 20 x 20 in.

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Above:

Actaeon

oil on linen on panel, 24 x 48 in.

Opposite:

Ritual

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oil on linen on panel, 60 x 48 in.

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Christina Weaver

Flowers and foliage provide rich opportunities for the study of color, shape, form, and light. Painting them “en plein air” is an immersive endeavor that presents its own set of challenges and pleasures. The ever-changing nature of living subjects, represented in their outdoor setting, requires and enables a surrender of control. Fleeting light, transient weather, and moving components confuse the painting process. Collected observations become memories the moment they are depicted, and quick decisions must be made as to what stays and what is sacrificed. The direction of the image is unpredictable, and the painting emerges as a layered document of both subject and experience.

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Above:

Dogwood 2022, oil on linen on panel, 24 x 18 in.

Opposite:

Purple Aster 2021, oil on linen on panel, 6 x 6 in.

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May Rhododendron 2022, oil on linen on panel, 20 x 20 in.

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Pumpkin Patch

2022, oil on linen, 24 x 20 in.

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Mathieu Weemaels

My paintings represent simple, mundane objects. A chair, a table, a mirror…

But the real subject is elsewhere, not visible: silence, solitude, contemplation, light, that particular light of the north, typical of Belgium. Though I am very attached to figuration, I am looking for radical compositions, which may seem abstract at first glance. I consider myself an abstract painter, in meaning and form, who represents objects.

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Above:

In the studio oil on canvas, 31½ x 27½ in.

Opposite:

Chaise au tissu rayé oil on canvas, 27½ x 365/8 in.

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Composition à la chaise oil on canvas, 33½ x 255/8 in.

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De l’eau sur les toits (water on the roof) oil on canvas, 33½ x 255/8 in.

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Jordan Wolfson

My work is an exploration of the experience of presence, through making marks in relation to what I am seeing—the perceived motif. The experience of presence brings a dissolving of the distinction between the subject and the object, between me and the world. Paintings have the ability to resonate and catalyze this experience. I’m interested in making paintings that elicit this collapse.

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Above:

Interior with Three Chairs XIX oil on linen, 48 x 42 in.

Opposite:

Interior with Three Chairs XXVI oil on linen, 25 x 22 in.

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Interior with Three Chairs and Stool III oil on linen, 28 x 25 in.

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Interior with Three Chairs XX oil on linen, 25 x 22 in.

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Special thanks to Sugarlift Gallery in New York City and to Figure Ground Gallery in Seattle for their support with this exhibition and catalog. Our thanks as well to Betty Cuningham Gallery and Haw Gallery for their indispensable assistance. Much appreciation to Colorado Mesa University for its financial support.

A big thank you also to the anonymous contributor who helped make this catalog a reality. And thank you to John Goodrich for his excellent essay and catalog design.

Right:

Eric Elliott Still Life with Blue Spray Bottle #2 (detail) 2022, oil on canvas, 24 x 18 in.

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Beyond

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SUGARLIFT GALLERY, NEW YORK CITY / FIGURE GROUND GALLERY, SEATTLE