|
Chapter 2: Universal
Focus
|
|
|
Don
Eddy returned to California from Hawaii in 1969. At this juncture, he
began the systematic exploration of formal problems and related issues.
What are the qualities that make art; what is quality in art? The re-introduction
of the figure and objects into the visual language of art had been challenge
enough for the artists of the '50s like Fairfield Porter and the Bay
Area group. Yet, it was illusionism that posed the greatest challenge
to the qualities of modernity, newness, and originality - features that
are always part of the prescription for vitality in art. After the experiments
with the Waiting
series, Eddy
decided to jettison the human figure altogether, and to confront pictorial
illusionism head on. A remarkable alchemy was brewing as he began
to identify those aspects of picture making that appealed to him.
The cerebral, intellectual rigor of Conceptual Art and Minimalism
was enticing. It offered a route out of the emotional quicksand of
instinctual response, hyper-emotionality and expressive activity favored
by Abstract Expressionists; however, it did not satisfy a need, or,
better a compulsion to craft objects. He was attracted to the surfaces
and the artifice of the work of certain classical masters of the past.
Those of Raphael and Ingres, in particular, held the anticipation
of discoveries of other sorts. The other ingredient enlivening the
mix was the camera, and the potential it offered as a tool in the
creative process.
The new Realists, Eddy among them, were using the camera for a variety
of reasons, the most obvious of which was for gathering information.
Some of the new Realists (for example, John Baeder, Robert Cottingham,
Richard Estes, and John Register) had come into the fine arts from
the commercial arts where they had been ad men or graphic designers,
and where photography and offset lithography were an important component
of layout and printing. Pop Art’s ironic “take” on
mid 20th century materialism, mass production and the replicated image
was not lost on the new Realists either. (Footnote
6) Commercially produced photographic
images such as postcards, magazine photos, billboard signs, and even
family snap shots, became a focus of attention not only for their
seemingly accurate representations of the function of sight in the
world at large, but because emphasis was being placed on them, in
and of themselves, as objects. Malcolm Morley had articulated the
condition most clearly in a group of paintings that appeared to be
blown up reproductions of travel brochures and picture postcards;
in their quirky modernity bound up with the timeliness of the images,
representational imagery seemed within reach. (Footnote
7)
Much of the history of pictorial space has been given over to resolving
the issue of illusionism, that is, of recession into depth and three
dimensionality. Optics, vanishing points, linear and aerial perspective,
and devices such as grids and the camera obscura played key roles
for long periods of time under the hegemony of classical art in its
many guises. With the steady ascendancy of photography in the culture
at large, and specifically in the arenas of the commercial and applied
arts, as well as in the fine arts, it is no surprise that the photograph
should play a significant role in the emergence of a later 20th century
realist style that depended upon the reformulation of issues regarding
pictorial space. (Footnote
8) For Eddy, the photograph became
a singularly important reference point through which to examine the
nature of pictorial space. From that starting point, a series of interrelated
observations began to unfold. A photograph is a two dimensional object
with a mechanically produced surface. Photographs can objectify, distance,
and neutralize “subjects”. Photographs are concerned with
depth of field; in contrast to linear perspective, only a certain
segment of the photographic image - a focal plane running parallel
to the picture plane - can be in focus. That which is in front and/or
behind that plane is out of focus. The depth of that plane depends
on the 'f' stop and curvature of the camera lens. Photographs are
based on monocular vision. Those taking pictures usually concentrate
on some subject of interest; their tendency is to centralize the subject,
leaving outer parts hanging. In this there is an unconscious reference
to the casual. Inherent in photographs is a tension between the flatness
of the mechanically produced surface and the representation of volume
and spatial recession.
Eddy had a seemingly unrelated experience that reinforced the possible
application of these observations to the structuring and content of
his paintings. While in Hawaii, Don had seen an exhibition of the
work of Hans Hofmann, noted member of the New York School. What impressed
him most was the unadulterated artifice of Hofmann’s push / pull
theories of color and form; in other words, how convincing the spatial
tensions were in Hofmann's completely synthetic compositions. Eddy
also perceived and responded to an uneasiness in Hofmann’s work
between beauty and irritation. Somewhat ironically, Hofmann, leading
member of the New York School, became an important reference point
for Eddy, especially through the mid ‘80s. (Footnote
9)
There were other mediating factors that influenced Eddy in the paintings
he produced from late 1969 into 1972. He continued the formal study
of Art History that he had followed at the University of Hawaii, once
back in California. His own obsessive-compulsive personality drew
him to the flawless surfaces and high technical refinement of paintings
by Raphael and Ingres. In the context of the influence of photography
on Eddy in this moment, it is interesting to note that his encounter
with the work of these master painters was, at the time, exclusively
through reproductions - color offset lithography. He has realized
since, having seen the artists' work in person, that these reproductions
heightened both the sense of perfectly executed surfaces and the apparent
equal attention given whether to the most important or to the smallest
details. (Footnote 10)
Master paintings mitigated by commercial printing methods affirmed
the flatness of the photographic surface, favoring artificiality at
the expense of illusionism. Commercial printing forced even closer
evaluation of other situations highlighted by photography, especially
that of focus and of where we place attention as we view things. If
every element in a picture is presented in sharp focus, that is with
equal attention to detail, then some real conditions that belong to
both photography and vision - that is, limited focus and limited ability
to give equal attention to detail - are violated. Eddy found and began
to use the terms universal focus and, its corollary, selective inattention,
respectively, to describe those conditions.
In the fertile matrix of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, Don
devoured images. The safe distance from the vortex of totalitarian
fashion, provided by his University years in Hawaii, had allowed him
to reference new styles through art periodicals. He refers to himself
at that time as a ‘scavenger with an uncanny sense of creative
misunderstanding,’ able to glean what was necessary from disparate
sources to help him focus his own highly creative impulses. This is
the backdrop against which Eddy (lead by his various interests in
photography, Hofmann, and classical traditions) began a pictorial
dialectic focused through exploration on the ramifications of diverse
avenues of inquiry into the properties, or particular qualities, belonging
to ‘pictorial space.’ In his consequent search for innovative
solutions, he, along with other of his highly astute Contemporary
American Realist colleagues, is a true heir to the late 19th and 20th
century avant garde explorations into the nature of vision, of color
and form, and of the third dimension. (Footnote
11) At the level at which the formulation
of these new solutions took place, Eddy is not only heir to but joins
the ranks of masters who, through such endeavors, have cemented for
art history a continuity that has and continues to unfold. In fact,
certain solutions reached by Eddy count among the important contributions
by later 20th century artists that are an endorsement of their place
in the history of art. Explorations of the sort made by Eddy into
the reconfiguration of the visual language of the third dimension,
especially as they impact the evolution of style, link him across
time, not just to the contributions of the late19th and early 20th
century artists, but to the very earliest attempts begun millennia
ago by the cave painters when the idea struck to impose images on
two dimensional surfaces.
In his Hawaii years during his stints photographing tourists, Eddy
had wandered through airport parking lots, letting his eye and lens
alight on old friends, the cars. Fenders, bumpers and surfaces which
had been his canvas at Eddy’s Garage, now moved onto his easel
and provided the new ground and imagery for what might be considered
the true starting point of his professional career. The subtle curves,
sleek lines, and highly stylized elements of favored models of high
and low brow automobiles alike, found their place, not in the automobile
manufacturers’ battle over design appeal but as protagonists
in a complex game of perception.
|
|
|
|
|
Figure.
6 Don Eddy, Bumper
Section XXI,
1970, acrylic on canvas, 34 x 48 in.
private collection.
|
|
Canvases
such as Bumper Section XXI
(Fig.
6) and Bumper Section XIII
(Fig.
7) feature grilles, headlights, highly lacquered surfaces, reflections
in chrome bumpers and the like, masterfully articulated and interlocked
into taught surfaces. The elements are intentionally cropped abruptly
and are organized to suggest color fields, grids and elasticized abstractions.
Levels of visual dilemmas and delights unravel in the highly defined
elements that read more as form fancy than as details of classic cars.
The grilles conjure thwarted Albertian perspective grids. Black functions
simultaneously as form, shadow or void. Geometries flirt as sets and
subsets of inverted rectangles and circles are relieved by the meandering
line of a bumper into whose shinny chrome surface the car reflects itself.
Our eye works its way across the picture surface tempted in vain by
the reflection in the bumper or the slightly tilted grille to resolve
the forms into familiar volumes and space. A lone tree in Bumper
Section XXI serves
as an innuendo of nature’s space. However, just as the car is a
self-reflection, so is the pictorial space. The restrained palette of
the perfectly rendered surfaces becomes a surprisingly vital surrogate
of traditional illusionism, in spite of its dependence on Eddy’s
limited three color system. And, notwithstanding their Ingres-like sensuous
polish, line and poise, Eddy’s Bumper Section compositions have
embedded within them visual enigmas that lie somewhere between Minimalist
Frank Stella’s “What you see is what you see” and the
complex visual paradoxes of such Popsters as Johns, Rauschenberg and
Rosenquist. (Footnote 12)
There is something also of the quality of Pop Art’s transpositions
- of challenging and changing conventional ways of representing and
seeing - in Eddy’s masterful, artful manipulation of car parts.
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
Figure
7. Don Eddy
Bumper
Section XIII,
1970
acrylic on canvas, 66 x 48 in.,
private collection.
|
|
Fig.
8 James Rosenquist
I
love you with my Ford,
1961, oil on canvas, 82 3/4 x 93 1/2 in.
Moderna Museet, Stockholm
© James Rosenquist/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
|
|
|
|
|
Fig.
9 Tom Wesselmann
(Landscape series) Landscape
#5, 1965,
oil, acrylic and collage on canvas, 84 x 144 x 18 in.
collection of the artist.
© Tom Wesselmann/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
|
|
Pop
Art was in fact an indisputable source of inspiration for Eddy, especially
the images of Rosenquist, who along with other of the Popsters had incorporated
cars into their image making process. From the moment in the early ‘60s,
that Jim Dine planned a “Car Crash” Happening, and that James
Rosenquist and Tom Wesselmann planted Fords and VWs onto their monumental
canvases, Americas love affair with the automobile found its point of
entry into the vocabulary of the Fine Arts. (Figures 8 & 9) Such
consumer-driven pride in the display of prized possessions and property
was not, as such, new to the Fine Arts. Certainly from the 15th century
on, prosperous families proudly commissioned some of the best painters
to record their villas and manor houses, their prized pets, horses,
carriages, and their tables overflowing with exotic foods, flowers,
or objet de vertu. However, the subliminal hedonism embedded in the
old master paintings was splendidly camouflaged by flawless technique,
artful composition and vibrant palette. Response to the same sorts of
base values sparked much of the vitality and viability of Pop Art, with
the distinction that the message - respecting 20th century sensibilities
- was delivered overtly through bold and lively description of the banal,
the vulgar, and the common place in mid 20th century material culture.
Pop's message also addressed issues related to social strata; mass production
had equalized society by making formerly very costly, limited edition
items available to a large segment of the population. The 'mass age'
and simple form, replicable by mass-production replaced the thoroughbred
and the handcrafted carriage; and the Post War Popsters went about the
business of formulating an expressive pictorial vocabulary consonant
with the phenomenon.
Pop’s successors, the Photorealists responded in kind. Virtually
half of the practitioners catalogued in Meisel’s
anthologies of Photorealism incorporated
cars, trucks and motorcycles into their work as significant pictorial
elements, while Richard McLean, painted horses, in less than a couched
reference and response to paintings by Stubbs and other artists of the
British sporting picture. (Footnote
13) Though it is not our place in this discussion to analyze further
the specific intent or message behind each of these artists’ use
of the images of cars and horses, it is important to position Eddy and
his colleagues within this historical context. There is an inherent
logic in Eddy's response to and unique manipulation of images of cars,
especially in the context both of his own history with cars as well
as with their popularity in commercials and in society at large in the
‘60s and ‘70s.
The main difference between Eddy’s Bumper Section paintings
and the car paintings of Rosenquist and Wesselman (and for that matter
of Pop in general) is Pop’s intentional emphasis on the artificial
(i.e., unnatural in an affected way, simulated) and Eddy’s intentional
emphasis on artifice (i.e., skill, ingenuity, craft). Each holds lessons
for the viewer about the role of art and the nature of experience. Many
Popsters, in the manner of the Rosenquist and Wesselmann images illustrated
in our text, imitated or even incorporated the cursory mechanical techniques,
formats and materials of the commercial arts (of billboards, newsprint,
packaging, etc.) into their work. There is often an air of irony in
the cursive, or dismissive, handling of materials and surface. In contrast,
Eddy's paintings of Bumpers
are already informed, not as much by social commentary, as by genuine
internal refinements that depend in good part on a systematic program
of investigation into the function of vision. In the balance struck
between the aesthetic coherence of technique, composition, and image
on the one hand, and innovative medium and message on the other, Eddy
bridged classical tradition and late 20th century modernist concerns.
(Footnote 14)
The choice of car bumpers or spaghetti as the subject matter of paintings
surely provokes consideration of the parameters by which an image enters
the general fund of art history as high art. The fact of the matter
is that from the very beginnings of art the subject matter of daily
life was part of the picture, in the sense that artists could choose
to incorporate it into their work. Examples that we are now comfortable
with are easy to find: they are a part and parcel of Egyptian and Greek
Funerary art, of Pompeiian wall painting, of the relief sculpture on
Gothic Cathedrals, and of easel paintings from the proto Renaissance
of Giotto onwards through Joseph Wright of Darby and the Social Realists
of the 18th, 19th centuries, to the Ashcan artists, the Bay Area Figurative
Artists, Fairfield Porter, and the Wyeths of the 20th century. The argument
depends not solely on the nature of the subject, but on issues of modernity,
or timeliness, as it relates to style as well. The manner in which the
image is described and configured is also as important a factor as whether
the subject matter is lowly or noble. The impact of the changing zeitgeist
of modern historical societies must also be taken into account and,
along with it, the societal shifts that had taken place by the 17th
century. These changes in society allowed the ‘subjects from daily
life’ to move from auxiliary matter in the crafting of paintings
into primary subject matter. Furthermore, the techniques, materials,
colors, formats and the like used by the artist lend further viability
to the significance of the image as a signal of its society and its
time. Finally, what message does the image actually carry? The fascination
lies in the unbounded innovation and scope of true artistic creativity.
|
|
|
In
the next paintings, Eddy’s elaboration of the Bumper Section
theme gained in complexity. In Ford H
& W, which represents
a section of the windshield and hood of the car, Eddy began to
flirt with transparencies as well as reflections. (Fig. 10) We
see into the car itself through the windshield, while a nearby
building (the external world), is reflected on its surface; that
reflection of the building changes character as it over-spills
the windshield onto the shiny, but nontransparent hood of the
car. We catch only a glimpse of what might be referred to in terms
of our sensory perceptions, as the ‘real’ space of the
external world, in the upper right corner of the picture.
|
|
Fig.
10 Don Eddy, Ford
H & W,
1970, acrylic on canvas
48 x 66 in., collection of the Haggin Museum, Stockton, CA. |
|
|
|
In
Bumper Section XXIV, 1970,
the rear section of an orange Volkswagen intersects the fender
and wheel of a white one, while other VWs are captured in reflections
in the bumper and hubcap respectively. (Fig. 11) The convex shapes
of the hubcap and bumper distort the surfaces and space of the
reflections, which consequently read more like a scientific anomaly
than a mirrored image. This is especially true of the elongated
reflection on the bumper of a car so stretched in length that
it suggests a ‘Futurist’ attempt to convey motion. The
reflections are further fractured, like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle,
by the VW logo in the center of the hubcap and by the complex
bumper assembly. The last play of this particular game with surface,
reflection and space is made along the edge of the bumper where
the reflected and ‘actual’ pavement meet. The encounter
forces another anomaly. The pavement reflected in the bumper seems
more real than the flat white area in the 'actual' pavement -
that reads more like an independent field of local color than
as a pictorial or illusionistic element. The gradual flattening
of the gray-brown shadow into solid black shifts its function
as well to that of a color field.
|
|
|
Fig.
11 Don Eddy, Bumper
Section XXIV,
1970
acrylic on canvas, 31 3/4 x 23 in.
private collection.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Fig.
12 Don Eddy, Untitled
(4 VWs),
1971
acrylic on canvas, 66 x 95 in., private collection.
|
|
It
is no surprise that in this period, Eddy would subject the system of
traditional one point perspective to similar scrutiny. Untitled
(4 VWs), 1971, is perhaps the first painting by Eddy in which
he employs traditional pictorial recession. (Fig. 12) Untitled
(4VWs) is
a monumental canvas. The VWs represented are virtually life size, much
like the ones in Pop artist Wesselmann's painting, don't miss Eddy's
own version of the open road in the bumpers in the foreground. (refer
Fig. 9) Hung properly, the viewer would have a sense of being part of
the pictorial environment; his eye would be positioned approximately
at a level corresponding to the vanishing point, exactly where Leon
Battista Alberti would have liked it, and a series of pictorial conditions
would lead the eye to it. (For Alberti, see Footnote
15) In this case Eddy chose the accentuated,
dynamic curve of the hoods of the monumental white Volkswagens to draw
the eye across them and to the repeated images of the orange VWs behind.
Their sharply reduced scale and deep orange color assists in luring
the eye further back into the painting. However, just as the viewer
begins to settle into the rhythm of this masterful pictorial recession,
that rhythm is violated by the encounter with a flat grid, in the guise
of a garage door that blocks further recession into depth. The placement
of a white Pontiac in front of and parallel to the garage door, at 90
degrees to the Volkswagens, further obstructs the sequential diminishment
of like multiple forms (the cars), and imposes a compositional interrupter
as well. Not accidentally, the hubcap of the front wheel of the Pontiac
is positioned precisely where the vanishing point would have been located.
Instead of allowing the point of an imaginary perspective triangle to
resolve visually, this geometric equivalent of sight is caught in the
complexly shaped reflective surfaces of the convex and concave curves
of the hubcap where it is partially lost, partially transformed, and
directed back at the viewer. These reflections, caught in the hubcap,
are a knowledgeable, clever reference to the tradition of paintings
within paintings (and to the corollary message that painting has its
own discrete spatial organizing principles). That the hubcap is intended
to be a significant pictorial element is signaled by the subtle modification
of the black and white tire encircling it into a framing device of perfectly
delineated concentric circles. Like many California artists, Eddy had
studied the stark ground and hard edged shadows that form under the
glaring light of the Southern California sun. In Untitled
4 VWs they
are transformed into yet another pictorial foil, providing a tension
between traditional illusionism (the articulate handling of spatial
recession and of chiaroscuro description of volume) and the assertion,
in unmodulated black and white, of the flatness of a Motherwell-like
‘actual’ two dimensional picture surface.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Fig.
13 Don Eddy, Tom
Williams Used Cars,
1971
acrylic on canvas, 66x 80 in.
private collection.
|
Fig.
14 Don Eddy, Bus
Stop,
1971
acrylic on canvas, 66 x 80 in.
private collection.
|
|
|
|
In
Tom Williams Used Cars, 1971, more
florid color adds yet another visual dimension and level of pictorial
dialogue. Eddy again plays with the concept of a vanishing point by
negating its presence. (Fig. 13) In this case, the carefully described
form of a green light post is imposed on the picture surface in the
center of the painting. One of its vertical moldings divides the painting
exactly in half, obliterating any possibility for recession into depth
at a point were a vanishing point might be placed. In fact, we are hard
put to find a vanishing point anywhere in the painting. The suggestion
of balance and mirror imaging implied by the bold division of the painting
into two equal parts is also disrupted by the seemingly random, accidental
placement of the other objects in the foreground and background. For
example, the central positioning of the green post is offset by a discordant
echo in the white sign pole to its left. The three cars nearest to the
viewer are minimally offset from points that would represent regular
increments across the picture surface; they are also skewed diagonally
in relation to each other. Compositional tensions and agitation that
disallow the resolution of anticipated balance have replaced conventional
pictorial illusion. The eye, forced into the background not by vanishing
lines, but in search of balance, nonetheless, only finds itself in the
midst of syncopated subsets of the condition of the foreground picture
plane. At the whim of color, a bold rhythm struck by the primary red
and yellow, and, secondary orange and green of the foreground cars and
center pole holds only momentarily, ultimately to be dissolved by the
sugary artificiality of the pastel tones that overtake the rest of the
picture surface.
It is worth noting here that Eddy imposed artificial color in his paintings
right into the mid ‘80s. With these paintings of the early '70s,
he began to use it as an important formal and compositional element,
especially to reinforce spatial shifts and anomalies. The function of
color in Eddy’s work will be considered more fully in Chapter IV.
Bus Stop, 1971, combines a variety
of anomalies. (Fig. 14) The familiar tension between abstract figure/ground
relationships and illusionism is granted by both the unyielding geometric
rigor of the green bench and its raking, cast shadow (borrowed from
the earlier Waiting series),
and by the ‘naturalistic’ environment of the Chevrolet parking
lot. At one such boundary between the realms of abstraction and naturalism,
a rail and pole intersect, suspended in a spatial limbo reminiscent
of Magritte. The motif is echoed in the Chevrolet sign lifted on poles
above the roof of the building behind it. Under the pretext of glaring
light not only the pavement, but the powder blue sky is reduced to a
flat stretch of color, which does not just frame the sign but filters
into the interstices between it and the building, trapping them, so
to speak, in a single plane. Here too color - the orange red, and yellow
of the cars on the lot, and the green of the bench - has a dual function.
It works in concert with the dimensional forms which it describes (in
other words, its nuances convey volume), and, it functions as an independent
agent that pulls the eye in a different way across the surface of the
painting. The gently curving surfaces of the fenders, hoods and roofs
of the cars on the lot seem to have cajoled the commanding Cartesian
space to give way here and there to an elliptical universe.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Fig.
16 Don Eddy
Untitled
(Volkswagen and Pontiac),
1971
acrylic on canvas 48 x 66 in.
owned by Ludwig Collection; Museum of Modern Art, Vienna.
|
|
|
Fig.
15 Don Eddy
Bumper
Section XXIII,
1970
acrylic on canvas, 48 x 34 in.
private collection.
|
|
|
Don
devoted several canvases to the simulation of a condition often encountered
in photographs. His motive was to call attention more specifically to
our awareness of the nature of vision and perception. In Bumper
Section XXIII, 1970, the foreground most unexpectedly drops
out of focus. (Fig. 15) In a stand off between two cars in Untitled
(Volkswagen and Pontiac), 1971, the background surprisingly
drops out of focus, precisely at the gap between their bumpers where
we would expect a recession into depth. (Fig. 16) (Art historians of
the baroque might refer to this condition as a pregnant moment.) Subtle
games of distortion continue in fragments of the 'real' world caught
on the bumpers, fenders, hubcaps and doors of the cars.
The primary aim of structuring such contrived spatial tensions and anomalies
in the paintings under discussion was to call attention to an essential
condition of vision and perception. Eddy refers to this condition as
'universal focus,' and to its corollary as 'selective inattention.'
In the paintings, Bumper Section XV,
Untitled (Four Vws) , Tom
Williams Used Cars, and Bus Stop,
every element in the paintings is described with microscopic precision.
This condition of hyper focus belongs to artifice and to the making
of art. It does not represent the manner in which the world of sensory
perception actually formulates images; it does not function according
to the rules of nature, nor the power of interpolation which takes place
between perception, recognition and concept. Bumper
Section XXIII and Untitled (Volkswagen
and Pontiac) are
a foil for this condition, born of the necessity to articulate (even
if only in a precious few paintings), the ‘truer’ aspect of
the nature of perception. The exercise was important because it brought
awareness to the discomfort attached to viewing picture planes of a
painting that are just slightly out of focus, underscoring a primary
reason that artist's don't favor this condition. Interestingly enough,
however, this is a condition that we find tolerable in amateur photographs;
it is even sometimes used to create mood in art photography. It is also
a condition that we encounter when we look through the viewfinder of
a camera, as we select focal length and 'f' stops. It is, ultimately,
a real condition of the way we see the world around us. We tend to focus
on one or another thing, but not on everything equally. Eddy refers
to this 'truer' condition of visual perception as selective inattention;
it describes the fact that we rarely are aware of, nor focus on, everything
in our field of vision in a single instance.
We might take a moment here to summarize our observations thus far.
Eddy’s response to American culture, especially that of the middle
class, represents a sharp divergence from the course set by the Popsters
in the sense that his imagery was not a parody of a ‘commodity’
driven society. However, it did come out of an understanding that for
art to make sense in its time it needs to refer to its moment on all
levels, including that of subject matter. The rationale for the reference
point and use of the camera and photography held implications that extended
further than identified in much of the early literature on Super Realism
or Photorealism. (Footnote 16)
The challenge and pleasure for Eddy was to shift common, everyday objects
and experience into a more highly refined style by subjecting it to
a personal, very individualized intellectually based, aesthetic rigor.
His impulses were driven not just by investigations into the nature
of painting, but by creating situations and posing questions through
which he could examine the nature of experience. To the point here is
the fact that, at this time, Eddy had available to him a series of lectures
by Alan Watts, noted author on the subject of Eastern mysticism and
Zen. Consciousness, attentiveness and the nature of experience were
central themes in Watts's writings and lectures. Eddy found a paradigm
for his own work in Watts's teachings. Informed by such concept, his
paintings, in their own right, were charged as instruments of consciousness-raising,
of a call to be attentive to one’s own level of attentiveness.
They were meant to function as a visual corollary of spiritual expansion.
Such considerations had lead Don to articulate the concepts of ‘universal
focus’ and ‘selective inattention’ both conceptually
and pictorially; these concepts have remained fundamental to his work,
and to an understanding of it. (Footnote
17)
|
|
|
|
|
Fig.
17 Don Eddy, Private
Parking X,
1971
acrylic on canvas, 66 x 95 in.
collection St. Louis Museum of Art, St. Louis, MO.
|
|
|
A
bold series of paintings entitled Private Parking
(I - X) feature
the repeated image of Volkswagens in parking lots. (Fig. 17, Private
Parking X) The now familiar generic monumental volumes (as
in CARS) presented in high key elementary colors, and sporting reflections
become the ‘ground’ for yet another inquiry about surface
and recession. Each painting in the series describes a variation on
perspectival recession. As each was completed,
|
|
Eddy
painted chain link fences and signs across parts or, all of the
entire pictorial surface, calling to mind a brilliant device employed
by Raphael in the Liberation of Saint
Peter , 1513. (Fig. 18) Raphael's fresco depicts the
moment in which an angelic messenger, who appeared to the imprisoned
St. Peter breaks his chains and leads him to freedom. Raphael
superimposed a two dimensional black grid in the form of the grate
of Peter’s prison cell on the fresco surface perhaps to underscore
the struggle between good and evil, but surely also to heighten
the illusion of the extraordinary display of sources of light
- divine, nocturnal, and torch light. The ominous black grate
is a brilliant foil to the message of deliverance. Technically,
it is an ingenious response to a suggestion given by a gridded
transfer drawing. In its dual role it is a spectacular device.
|
|
Fig. 18 Raphael,
Liberation
of Saint Peter,
1513, fresco
Stanza Eliodore, Vatican (detail)
|
|
|
|
|
|
Fig.
19 Edouard Manet, The
Railway,
1873
oil on canvas, 36 5/8 x 44 7/8.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.
|
|
Artists
use their materials to convey idea. Their philosophic or ontological
grounding can permeate their creative process right to the crafting
(techne) of objects, through the merging of aims with what certain ideas
and materials can yield. In picture making, the painter is acutely aware
of the physical surface he will transform and exploit - through concept,
composition and technique - for its expressive potential. Centuries
later, Edouard Manet employed a device similar to Raphael’s foil
of iron grate in The Railway
1873.
(Fig. 19) It is likely that Manet knew Raphael’s famous fresco.
He, too, imposed a two dimensional, linear black grate over ephemera
- in Manet’s case, however, it was smoke and steam. But the context
has shifted dramatically. The space of the New Testament and of miracles
has given itself over to modern day Paris and to questions posed by
industrialization. The woman with the puppy sleeping comfortably in
her lap looks up from her book confronting us with a tempered gaze that
offers no answers. Is she a personification of some aspect of feminine
nature challenged by modernity? At the same time, the young girl, faceless
and with her back to us, gazes through the black fence into the train
yard below, to the future perhaps in the guise of billowing smoke pouring
forth from the mouth of the new, but unseen, deus ex machina, the steam
engine. The distinguished art historian, Robert Herbert, noted of Manet’s
painting that the oblique compositional rendering and interrupters were
the expression of the shift of patterns of associations forced on the
city and its people by industrialization. (Footnote
18)
Eddy’s daring replacement - behind a decidedly two dimensional
grid - of Manet’s ephemera with a Volkswagen signals as radical
a shift as that made by Manet from Raphael when he replaced a New Testament
miracle with an image of a society in collision with industrialization.
One of the overarching characteristic dynamics of the later 20th century
is the post-war democratic, commodity-driven society of suburban America.
Common to the artists we are discussing is the grid-like, two dimensional
barriers that function on multiple levels. On the simplest level the
barriers set up a dialogue about planes, space and illusionism; on a
more profound level the barriers underscore underlying messages about
systems of values and beliefs. Eddy's Private
Parking series
- and its indisputable later 20th century environment - though less
obviously so, does beg these issues. Incremental recession into depth
is now challenged by diagonal lines, in the form of lozenges, drawn
across the entire surface plane of the painting. To insure the jolt
intended by the diagonal grid of the chain link fence, Eddy hand-painted
it onto the otherwise flawlessly airbrushed surfaces. Chain link is
a base, readily available fencing material, commonly used in our society
to delimit commercial and private property alike. Behind the fence is
a car - a symbol of potential mobility in a society where mobility is
as essential to daily activity as are meals. The sign on the fence and
the license plate behind the fence tell us that with plastic and a car
the American dream - mobility - is ours. As an expression of artistic
intent, we are confounded by an image more seemingly passive than Manet’s
woman, but which haunts us in its scale and subtle uneasiness. The tension
between surface and illusion beckons investigation of the hidden message
embedded in the apparent nonchalance of the subject matter. That investigation,
if engaged with patient scrutiny yields insight in what might otherwise
be construed simply as a visualization of a reductive (in the sense
of simplistic) environment conveyed by a figural artist with a Minimalist
/ Hard Edge spirit. The deeper meaning relates to freedom, democracy
and barriers, both perceptual and economic, spoken skillfully not in
an esoteric visual language, but in a simple and direct one.
|
|
|
|
|
Fig.
20 Don Eddy,
Harley Hub,
1970
acrylic on canvas, 28 x 28 in.
private collection.
|
|
An
extraordinary little painting entitled Harley
Hub, 1970, is a summa of sorts of the conventions we associate
with pictorial space and its expressive potential. (Fig. 20) It is a
self-portrait of the artist, camera in hand, crouching to bring his
lens to the level of the convex surface of the motorcycle wheel hub.
The natural world is adumbrated in the trompe l’oeil projection
of the wheel’s chrome covered fork and spindle. Otherwise, space
is artificial - instead of the picture surface yielding a recession
into depth, it carries a reflection of recession which must logically
be understood as wrapping itself across a curved, convex surface. The
requisite distortions guide the reflected image along the inside curve
of the ‘hub’ and assure no hint of a vanishing point. The
playful repartee between convex surface and implied convex lens references
conditions associated with the application of monocular vision in painting
from Alberti’s visual pyramid to the modern day camera. The image
of the artist, with camera in hand, is a reminder that all pictorial
systems dependent on monocular vision require optical aids, whether
they be one or multiple-point perspective vanishing lines, or the camera
obscura and the like. (Footnote
19) Flat white is called to service,
as in many of the paintings in this period, to create tension between
the inherent two dimensionality of the web of spokes partially framing
the hub, and the canvas surface with the allusions it holds to ‘real
space’ and the third dimension. In fact, there is no ‘real’
space at all in this painting.
|
|
|
|
| Encoded
in Harley Hub is
a discrete yet pointed
reference to the renowned, masterful Renaissance self portraits in convex
mirrors by Jan Van Eyck, in the Arnolfini Wedding,
1434 (National Gallery, London) and Parmigianino, Self
Portrait in a Convex Mirror, 1524. (Footnote
20) These Old Master paintings call to
mind the early investigations into perspective, optics and the aims of
painting to be a mirror and window of the natural world. Respecting the
rigor of their specific style and training as well as the shared compulsive
drive to exacting detail and exquisite finish, each of the artists, nonetheless,
demonstrates an intuition and desire to push beyond the limits of their
pictorial systems in the special reference to mirrors, lenses, convex
surfaces and mirrors. Van Eyck's mirror also became an ingenious service
to the message of the painting as evidence of the artist’s presence
as witness to a wedding. The young Parmigianino used the mirror not only
to self-reflect, but to occasion intentional distortions in the name of
the maniera. Don Eddy, in a momentary pause between precis and
point of departure, asks the viewer to reflect anew on the symbiotic alliance
between timely art, artistic creativity and vision. |
|
 |
|
Fig.
22 Don Eddy,
Pontiac Showroom I,
1972
acrylic on canvas, 80 x 66 in.
The Robert B. Mayer Family Collection, Chicago.
|
|
|
These
lines of inquiry by Eddy, translated into 20th century concerns, reached
a climax in such paintings as Cadillac Showroom,
1972, and especially Pontiac Showroom I,
1972, where he pulled out all the stops. (Fig. 22) The automobile, autonomous
protagonist of the car series we have been exploring, now finds itself
behind, and simultaneously reflected in, the plate glass showroom windows
of car dealerships. In brilliant plays of transparencies, solids and
ephemera, we look into, on and/or through sets and subsets of walls,
glass, ‘actual’ space (inside and out), reflections, signage,
framing devices (window mullions and sections of tiled wall), dense
and brilliant color, light and white - all orchestrated with great finesse
into an elaborate fugue. Pontiac Showroom
represents not only a climax, but a threshold leading to the artist’s
next avenue of investigation into the nature of painting and perception.
|
Ý
