They said, “You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are”
The man replied, “Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar.”
I’ve always considered Wallace Stevens’ poem The Man with the Blue Guitar, to be one of the great literary masterpieces of the Twentieth Century. Based on a painting by Pablo Picasso from his blue period, the picture shows a figure, “a shearsman of sorts”, bent over a guitar.
Throughout the thirty-three stanzas of the poem, Stevens refers to the guitar - an object that resolves the difference between the ‘world of the poem’ with the physical and metaphysical world - as something to be ‘tried on’, handled (like a tool), adjusted (moving between abstraction and figuration), and manoeuvred (an apparatus constructed out of place and space). Everything comes from and returns back to “This buzzing of the blue guitar.”
Painting is its equivalent, the things or properties employed - the surface, the treatment and methodology, and pictorial concept - assert themselves to find an exactness, to find a consciousness: a buzzing of a kind.
Painting though, and discussion about it, has to be seen within a current cultural pluralism, in which different disciplines, values, practices and even identities are striving for acceptance. Painting is very different from all the other visual art disciplines though - it is full of history, a history that can be liberating or crushing for the artist, and for an audience for that matter, and the current contemporary art world has shown a degree of reluctance to engage in a full and erudite critical discourse about painting (although it still has a bit of a love affair with it), largely because many consider the medium to be out of date, decorative or self-indulgent. Such ignorance undermines the unique capabilities of the medium in the right hands - a unique playing if you like - even more so given the chaotic, crass and rather superficial quality of the stream of images that invade our daily lives.
Things and the way they are played in the paintings of Nancy Cogswell and Laurence Noga at first appear to be quite different - Cogswell’s paintings employ a figurative construction of space, Noga’s a high Modernist abstraction, but although they are pushing from almost opposing positions, their paintings reach a similar ‘place’ but with independent and unique resolve.
All of Cogswell’s paintings refer to one object: a table with a drawerthat isnever shown in its entirety. It is an object with many layers of ideas - a bit like Stevens’ blue guitar. Cogswell’s architectural background is evident, given the design and spatial dynamics of her pictures, but these are not architectural paintings, to say that would be to underplay their atmospheric strength and the essential content that the paintings/pictures hold.
In False Flagging, two drawers have been removed from their ‘domestic sleeves’ and placed on top of the surface of the table. The striking sharpness of line and a recession of angular space is bold but subtle, and the unusual but extremely effective use of colour is hostile but inviting, and gives the picture an eerie or ghost like quality which is further imbued by light from the left and the shadows that lip the edges of the drawers, a sort of tapering reminding one of a sense of ‘joining’. On one level, the dark colour of the background plane feels at odds with the foreground, which drives into the ‘picture’, but on another level it is entirely in keeping with the picture because of the way it works with the luminosity of the coloured ‘slabs’. The surface too, is extremely successful. The picture has a strange kind of realism, slightly close to a photographic sharpness, but counter-pointed by the artifice of the ‘painting’ which allows the surface to catch an odd but compelling atmosphere. False Flagging reminds me of a tomb you might see in a Fifteenth Century Italian painting or a Victorian graveyard, where the monumental is a substitute for the deceased, or a section of a classical Roman building, depopulated of the sentimental sightseer who believes hesees history but sees nothing. In many ways False Flagging opens up an emptiness that can never be filled.
Laurence Noga’s Floating White Sap Green also has a strong sense of formal design, but very different from Cogswell’s - I think the formal and the design are found in the making of the painting. Noga’s ‘pictures’ are developed from the collages he makes, from exhibition invitation cards, such as Collage Number 4 - overlaid vertical strips in a panoramic format. They are reminiscent of stage or window curtains and are regarded as preparatory drawings for the paintings. When I first saw Floating White Sap Green I was immediately disturbed by the lack of pure symmetry of the white half circle at the far left of the painting, but realised quite quickly that the not so pure ‘drawing’ of this shape was essential to the success of the painting. In fact, it is a key element to a reading of the work, and despite the apparent abstract quality of the work I see Floating White Sap Green as a minimal figurative painting. The white ‘eye’ at the far left of the painting is the beginning and the end - everything comes from and returns to it, or rather tries to return to it. It seems to sit on the painting but is in the painting, and this curious arrangement creates a figurative, albeit shallow space. There is a sense of a game at play that has been suspended, as if freeze-framed like a scene from the Pressburger/Powell film A Matter Of Life and Death.
Floating White Sap Green is a diptych, but unusually the shadow of the join between the two canvases is a part of the work - the ‘line’ in the painting that makes oneaware of the edges of both canvases and which further gives onea sense that everything has been put or placed within the ‘picture’ in brilliant counterpoint to the quirky drawing of the white eye. In contrast to the simple warm white-sap green relationship of the left canvas, the right canvas is hot and cold, clean but intense. Light or heat radiate outwardly to the right and then suddenly stop, or rather sit on top of a cool flat cerulean blue. It is as if the whole painting is an oddly objectified depiction of a white sun, or the pulsating of an eye which only half stares back. The colour is also reminiscent of 1950s design, and this helps to slow everything down, or hold back the pace of such an imaginative image, a picture that is like a cartoon without the slapstick.
False Flagging and Floating White Sap Green do not play things as they are. The object in False Flagging has become something other than what is, and the objectification in Floating White Sap Green has made Noga’s apparent purer painting a figurative objectification of itself. Both paintings have a sense of completeness that shows their own history and emotional impact.
Cogswell also uses the diptych format, or ‘doubling’ as sheand Noga describe it. With Double 2011, the paintings are almost identical but sit about twelve centimetres apart from one another. One side of the open drawer sits on the picture plane, and the table top occupies most of the mid space of the picture. As with False Flagging, there is a dark background that allows the surface of the canvas to be visible, and when you look over the top of the side of the drawer, into the drawer itself, there is a strange looking object that is a boat - two red steam funnels are visible, as is the side of the boat, bringing sexual connotations to the picture. The colour of the drawer is predominantly pink with white lines or drawing adding emphasis to the balance of spatial planes. Everything about this painting suggests that it is about sex - the pink form of the table(containing and revealing), the red and white of the phallic steam funnels and masts (which also suggests lipstick). But it seems to me that the painting is more about the contemplation of sex, what the significance of sex is to one’s emotional intelligence, the whole business of opening oneself and giving oneself. And the serene, fine quality of the treatment enforces this interpretation. Given that both paintings are so similar in colour, design and rendering, I think that there is an intellectual reason for this piece being a diptych, perhaps to do with the moving image - an emphasis on the still - or perhaps to suggest an association with Fifteenth Century alter paintings. Either way, the difference between and similarity of the two paintings is subtle, intriguing and fundamentally intense, an embodiment of emotional loss and gain, of intellectual openness and closure, and of memory recall.
Things or objects visible in an open drawer are also in other paintings such as Sleeper Drawer I and Sleeper Drawer II. Although the drawer is more obviously a drawer in both of these paintings, the use of the open ‘contained’ space filled with a thing, is really mysterious and is an intelligent extended use of the central motif. It’s not entirely clear what is in the drawer when one looksdown, but I don’t think that is particularly important (although it is clear the ‘painting’ of this thing is of something). These are not pictorial narrative paintings - the content is more about the aesthetic charge of what the thing in the drawer is, articulated by the making - the contrast between the shift of emphasis of the design of the container (drawer) and the ‘painting’ which pushes to be ‘of’ some thing.
Containing the ‘painting’ is also a crucial formal element in Noga’s Curved Magenta Filtered Orange. The format is similar to Floating White Sap Green - I read the painting from the left to the right, starting with a flat area of purple that sits on a flat blue and which looks a bit like a torso in profile. The painting then changes gear, the eye travelling across vertical bands of colour, from various modulated blue/greys to a striking vibrant hot yellow (between which is the line marking the join of two canvases), through to orange, warm reds and magenta until the language completely changes at the end, something which feels less like a vertical band and more a like section or compartment - a white open field of disbursed paint, two paints reacting, wet into wet, giving this section an ‘accidental’ quality, counter-pointing the more consciously ‘painted’ sections. It is as if the last section or compartment defines the formal control and management of the whole painting that takes into full account the exactness of the surfaces and quality of the paint.
Aside from the aesthetic arguments about formal Modernist application and process, more recent commentators on abstract painting often define abstraction in terms of figurative associations. Curved Magenta Filtered Orange looks a bit like a television test card, and although I think this, along with the means of production, gives the painting a post-Modern argument, I find myself seeing Curved Magenta Filtered Orange as a picture with an odd depth of field, and this is also evident in Deep Pink Filtered Silver and Sap Green Filtered Silver. The free-hand of the drawing, the layering of the painting, the contain release of the vertical bands of paint in contrast to the open field of disbursed paint, and most of all the exactness of the colour relationships, creates a depth of field that is seen through the surface of the ‘painting’. There is a sense that a shadow or ghost of some thing or object is in the painting, not lying behind, not pushing to find a figurative form, but more as a signifier for the act of the hand.
And they said then, “but play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,
A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are.”
It’s hard to imagine that there will be a radical new style of painting or some avant-garde breakthrough, such as Cubism, in the Twenty-first Century, particularly given the recent focus on a detached means of production alongside an aggressive marketing strategy (almost as if the word art is now spelt: m o n e y). But then the Twentieth Century hare and tortoise like chase was never entirely always going to yield intelligent painting. The blue guitar of painting, the buzzing of consciousness, is something that has existed in great painting from all centuries, even as far back as the Medieval illuminated manuscripts. It is the objectification of the things and the way they are played that is essential to good and intelligent painting, and obviously the understanding of good painting. And it is ‘a difference’ and the intelligence of painting that seems so vital to the now.
When I visited Cogswell and Noga to discuss their work I asked what painters they were interested in or that they looked at on a fairly regular basis. There were some painters they both expressed an interest in, and some that were specific to one or other, and one can see ‘something’ of those interests and recognise some aspects of ‘other’ language in their works. However, they both definitely own their own language (the things and the way of playing), and the consciousness they have both constructed in their works (their buzzing) is very definitely present. Cogswell pushes, without entirely loosing, figurative space toward a more abstract space which, in most cases, creates a brilliant dialectic between what the thing is and what it is not, but through that finds or catches something inherent to that dialectic. And it seems to me that Noga pushes abstraction toward a figurative objectification of a thing, that thing being found in what the ‘painting’ is and what it is not. In that sense, Cogswell and Noga do not play thingsas they are, but play beyond themselves.
Peter Ashton Jones
2011
* Essay taken from exhibition catalogue.
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