JOSEPH GOLDYNE: Imaginary Falls

JOSEPH GOLDYNEJOSEPH GOLDYNE IMAGINARY FALLS

Santa Barbara, California

Produced in support of the exhibition JOSEPH GOLDYNE: Imaginary Falls in Charcoal, Oil & Ink held at Sullivan Goss from October 28–December 23, 2022.

Text and layout: Jeremy Tessmer

Photography: Lauren Wilson & Jeremy Tessmer

Cover & Inside Cover: WATERFALL DRAWING 9, 2021-2022

x 13¼

Cover: FALL, 2019

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17

inches | charcoal on paper Back

17¾ x 6 inches | monoprint

JOSEPH GOLDYNE

IMAGINARY FALLS

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IMAGINARY FALLS

The hand of the artist leaves a unique and telling trace, but you must know how to divine the nature of the individual from the marks they leave. Oil paints on a surface may divulge certain things about their creator, but not always. Paint conceals. Paper tends to be more revealing, especially so with a translucent medium. But to know the artist from the marks they make, you must be one of those people who has taken the time to study–to really and actually look very carefully–at those objects we call art. It takes practice, which is also to say, patience and discipline.

As such, it is no longer a fashionable thing to talk about. There are so many other entangled topics that compose our critical dialogue, and these are often fun and engaging. An added benefit is that you needn’t examine a work to participate in the conversation. (But you might want to read the explanatory text.) Appreciating the hand of the artist is not unsophisticated–in fact, quite the opposite–but it is not exactly au courant. To know the particulars and the meaning of an artist’s hand, you must bravely tread into the provinces of the connoisseur or the seasoned curator, or even–oh no!–the collector of old master drawings. As a matter of fact, art restorers are often experts in such things, too.

Now, it must be admitted here that there are plenty of other vital concerns for those who make paintings and drawings. Plenty of artists do marvelous things that purposefully obscure the hand. There is, at this point, a whole tradition of painters who pour their medium. There is another lineage who chase graphic flatness, using tape to form their edges, for example, and media that dries texture-free; and to be clear, worthy and beautiful results can certainly be had from these techniques.

Another breed uses the hands of others to make works, and still another type employs processes that more or less obliterate all evidence of how their works are made. And it will not surprise anyone to learn that a whole range of plausible critical theories support and encourage these approaches. The joy of art is its variety after all.

But while Joseph Goldyne may appreciate these other approaches, they are not his. His is a lifelong interest in the hand of the artist, in the textures they leave, in their line quality and brushwork.

Early in his career, Joseph became particularly well-known for his monoprints. The etching process allowed him to obsess over the singular quality of his lines. The monotype allowed him–as it had allowed Degas in the late nineteenth century–to work and rework his medium to get his desired textures and strokes, since liquid media won’t absorb into the non-porous printing plate. For reference, wash a sheet pan with soap and a little water. It is quite marvelous to draw and redraw shapes in the suds. You will quickly understand the joy of making a monotype.

The artist’s fascination with surface effects has always been balanced by an interest in images, but his interest in both is in the particularities. The quintessential mid-century American designer Charles Eames famously quipped, “The details are not the details. They make the design.”

Bauhaus legend Mies van der Rohe upped the ante, proclaiming, “God is in the details.” As any creative can tell you, J. Alfred Prufrock’s lament is all too familiar, “And [there is] time yet for a hundred indecisions and for a hundred visions and revisions.... which a minute will reverse.” Not always, but often, great art lives and dies in the melee of these small decisions.

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Since his first exhibition of monoprints with Quay Gallery in San Francisco in 1973, Joseph has sought to inject older notions of artistic virtue into the realm of contemporary ideas and aesthetics. Mastery concerns him as much as innovation. It could be argued that these early works were taken in as contemporary because they gave license to the postmodernist’s sense of play, to anarchic collisions of style and to art historical pliability, but they also celebrate both the craftsmanship and attention to detail of centuries past as well as the modern premium on individual expression. (Think first of Rembrandt and then perhaps of Cy Twombly or Franz Kline.) An exciting tension built up between these apparent opposites. The artist wrote to me of his interest in “building on the tradition, not wrecking it.”

Such was his practice and career: thirty plus years of print-making, drawing, and painting with oils,

pastels, watercolors, and ink with an expansive and idiosyncratic parade of imagery. But then in 2005, Joseph began to work on waterfalls with increasing focus. A few years later, it evolved into a kind of self-imposed challenge–variations on the theme.

With the waterfall images, the primacy of how they are done naturally overtakes what they are. What are they? They are imaginary waterfalls. True, some plunge down from dizzying heights past largely undifferentiated rocky cliffs, while others find their way down past trees and boulders. Some falls dissolve into the mist while others are stark. One or two even indicate buildings, and the water falls both day and night. The light can be wan or rake across or shine from within. In other words, there is abundant variety in both approach and materials. But if one decided that falling water was of no particular interest–itself, a dodgy proposition for a planet that equates water with life–a viewer would still be leaving untold riches unclaimed by ignoring their formal qualities out of a disinterest for the subject. It’s not just a question of what, but how.

Enter the sudden decision to explore his theme in charcoal–the focus of the 2021 suite of works that make up the bulk of this new exhibition. The artist himself cites the genesis as the 2019 Morgan Library exhibition of portraits in charcoal by John Singer Sargent, but I remember our correspondence about the black conté drawings of George Seurat being shown at the MOMA from years before. (The two materials look quite similar at first blush.) I also remember that in 2016, he sent me a copy of Noir:The Romance of Black in 19th-Century French Drawings and Prints. If the seeds were planted early, the first substantial growth didn’t arrive until 2019, when Goldyne saw what Sargent had achieved in charcoal in the last two decades of his life.

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above : Skin and Bones: Stubbs and Courbet Rendezvous at Ornans, 1975 | etching, aquatint, monotype

Goldyne writes:

There, in fifty portraits of friends and talents, he provided evidence of what a great gift can make of light and shadow, for aside from having an uncanny sensitivity to just where a line should land and what a line should describe, Sargent summoned what I call graphic ‘weather’ to his assistance in capturing his subjects. It was this ’weather’ in the form of darks and lights, not mere shading or modeling, but often a churning brew of strokes and erasures (he used little knotted bits of bread as erasers) to bring his heads into brilliant identity. Yes, for Sargent, the eraser was a mark maker as much as a hunk of charcoal.

So besides formal innovation, what do these waterfalls give us? To start, there is the mystery of how the gestural energy in the “churning brew” of the artist’s mark-making resolves from abstraction into a recognizable boulder, eddy, or the sparse vegetation that grows at high altitude. Some will feel the pull of Romanticism, with the premium it places on heightened emotion and the pure beauty of the natural world. Others might think of worldbuilding, the remarkable ability of certain people to conceive of huge and impossible spacesin astonishing detail–especially as these ‘worlds’ are more often rendered today on computers. I think of Edmund Burke’s 1757 treatise A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful and about what it might mean to engage with the sublime at this moment in history.

Burke felt that the sublime was one of the highest and most important qualities in visual art, but one must remember that he wrote about his ideas at the dawn of the Romantic period. The idea was to invoke awe or even terror, to place humanity in its

proper relationship to the powerful and implacable forces of Nature. Burke wrote, “Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, ... or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime.” Volcanoes were obvious subjects; so were storms. Cue the lesser-known John Martin and the celebrities John Constable and J.M.W. Turner. The American Hudson River School follows close behind and any number of our nation’s leading painters have considered how to paint the power and complexity of rushing water. One thinks especially of Frederic Church, Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Moran, and Thomas Hill.

Burke also thought that it was important to convey an immensity that transcended the limits of human understanding. Ambiguity was important, too, since it served to humble the viewer by reminding them of the limits of their understanding of the world in which we find ourselves. Anything that thwarted one’s ability to “perceive [its] bounds,” or that could not be seen “distinctly” could conjure that “terrible uncertainty of the thing” that likewise put us into contact with the sublime.

Burke writes: The passion caused by the great and the sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is Astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended...

Immensity and ambiguity run through the majority of Goldyne’s waterfalls, even when the image is relatively small. These giant waterfalls represent powerful, elemental forces. One might survive standing in the rush of some of the falls depicted here, but most would crush or drown. His use of charcoal then deprives us of the colors we might

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to recover from PTSD, or to quit smoking, or to make peace with the reality of fatal ailments. The sublime experience reminds us of our real place in the universe, which is both incredibly special and also quite small. It adjusts our perspective, which is a noble goal for art.

use to know the scenes better. In his paintings, we have to make due with the bristly texture of the brush to guess at the surface of the cliff or to apprehend the tree line at the top. Taking the precise measure of these imaginary falls is not entirely possible, which is the point. You might call it strategic ambiguity. Joseph paints and draws that way to leave room for the imagination to breathe, but in so doing, he leaves the door open to the sublime.

Finally, a word about the meaning of the sublime at the end of 2022. It has been interesting to see the word used again in popular and journalistic quotations from medical literature, especially as it pertains to new and controversial psychedelic therapies. The sublime experience is cited in these articles as especially useful for those trying

Of course, the Western Romantic tradition is not the only appropriate aesthetic reference here. Japanese scroll painting–especially that associated with the nineteenth century Shijo school of Kyoto–and maybe even Chinese ink painting also pertain. These feel especially salient when one considers that Joseph has spent much of his life in the San Francisco area. Early Chinese immigration to work on the Western spur of the railroad built not only a famous “Chinatown,” but an obvious and long-lived interest in integrating some of their distinctive aesthetics into the local culture. The largest “Japantown” in America was also in San Francisco. As a consequence, Joseph’s interest in these artistic traditions has always seemed natural. His art is global in its purview, but highly relatable as a product of the Bay Area’s distinctively cosmopolitan visual culture, too.

Hopefully, a sense of the multitudes contained within these singular stripes of light has begun to form in the mind. English and American Romantic art are in there, with all attendant appeals to the sublime and the transcendent. Japanese scroll painting, with its emphasis on fluidity and simplicity, is in there too. Particularly astute viewers may also discover Joseph’s fascination with the untapped pictorial potential in Barnett Newman’s Onement 1 canvas of 1948.

I saw these charcoal drawings for the first time in September of 2021 on my last trip to the artist’s home and studio in Sonoma. Standing over a table in the library, Joseph opened a portfolio to reveal one exquisite drawing after another. I fell in love at first sight. At long last, the Gallery is excited to share these works with the world.

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above : [detail] Waterfall Drawing 23, 2021

8 WATERFALL DRAWING 15, 2021 17 x 13¼ inches | charcoal on paper signed lower right

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10 WATERFALL DRAWING 16, 2021 17 x 13¼ inches | charcoal on paper signed lower right

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x 13¼

12 WATERFALL DRAWING 21, 2021 17

inches | charcoal on paper signed lower right

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WATERFALL

17 x 13¼ inches |

right

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DRAWING 5, 2021-22

charcoal on paper signed lower

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WATERFALL

17 x 13¼ inches |

lower right

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DRAWING 9, 2021-22

charcoal on paper signed

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WATERFALL

17 x 13¼ inches |

right

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DRAWING 18, 2021-22

charcoal on paper signed lower

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21 [DETAIL} WINDFALL II, 2014

22 WINDFALL II, 2014 72 x 18 inches | india ink and oil wash on gessoed belgian portrait linen over board signed on back

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DAYS ,

24 RELIEF FROM THE RANT OF JEALOUS

2021 72 x 18 inches | india ink and oil wash on gessoed belgian portrait linen over board signed on back

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26 [DETAIL} RELIEF

FROM THE RANT

OF

JEALOUS DAYS,

2021

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SPACE AND TIMELESS, 2021 36 x 18 inches india ink and oil wash on gessoed belgian portrait linen over board signed on back

IN THE DRAWER

The Imaginary Waterfalls kind of make their own path while they are being created. As nature responded to the forces of wind, water and weather in encouraging a fall of water, I was able to respond to the imaginative thoughts at work during the making of the drawings.

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- JG

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