Andy Brumer & Wendy Gittler,
Drawing Without Models
College of Notre Dame, Belmont, California

Jack Foley

The essays in this catalog deal with some of the most interesting American art currently being produced. Two of the artists, Joseph Slusky and Chip Sullivan, are Bay Area residents. The other two, George Lloyd and Abby Shahn, reside in Maine, though Lloyd and Slusky were Berkeley neighbors twenty years ago and have kept their connection. Though compact—one wishes it were longer—Drawing Without Models contains two excellent essays and some fine reproductions of these artists' work.

The catalog begins with a quotation, dated May 25, 1854, from Eugene Delacroix's journals:

They think that they will be true when they vie with nature in her aspect of literal truth; it is the reverse that occurs; the more literal their way of representing, the flatter their work is and the more it shows the absolute failure of rivalry. The only thing that one can hope to arrive at is an equivalent. What we are called upon to make is not the thing itself but the semblance of the thing; moreover it is for the mind and not for the eye that we must produce our effects.

The two essays collected here document these artists' insistence on "the absolute failure of rivalry," the collapse of the mimetic aspects of art. Lloyd, Shahn, Slusky and Sullivan are, in Yeats's much-quoted phrase, "literalists of the imagination." Remembering his conversations with Slusky during their close association in the seventies, Lloyd comments in his "Forward"—pun intended—that the "dual strands of architecture and poetry are, I think, still predominant in our work":

In our conversations of years past, we constantly remarked upon the primacy of the imagination in the context of our art-making endeavor. Indeed, the central and unifying theme of Drawing Without Models is that each of [the] four artists in the show is, in his or her own way, a kind of latter-day Romantic. In the light of their respective imaginations, they have contrived to produce, not the literal appearance, but rather an "equivalent" reality or "semblance of the thing."

Wendy Gittler's essay on George Lloyd and Abby Shahn begins with the assertion that the "pictorial universe" of these artists "is based on a conceptual and imaginative reconstruction of the physical world that is transformed into a language of associative forms, shapes and lines." Again the insistence on the imagination and on the fact that this art is directed to "the mind" (which is of course not to say that it is without emotional impact).

Gittler describes Lloyd's drawings as "enclosed within an architectonic schema that entraps activities, personages and memories"; they are a "lexicon of Cubism," "revealing trails of markings and pentimenti." Given the "age-old struggle between line and color," she "wonders whether color wins out in these drawings." Lloyd, she writes, is attempting to balance "the geometry of Minimalism with organic forms and the process-oriented directions of the Abstract Expressionists and Bay Area figurative artists"—no small task! "Thus, the ever recurrent leitmotif of polarities returns...in Lloyd's visual dialogue between structure, color and emotion." His work creates "a pictorial vocabulary able to house [the artist's] multiple contradictions— mediating his love of order, chaos, humor and metaphor."

For Abby Shahn, writes Gittler, "any artistic endeavor is primarily a personal journey outside of both academic traditions and encompassing aesthetic credos": she explores that precarious balance between figuration and abstraction stating: "Over the years I've hovered between figurative and non-objective art. I don't feel there is an impenetrable boundary betweeen figurative and abstract art. For one thing, I believe that all painting is abstract and I always find there is an illusion of space that is a kind of realism."

Shahn "speaks primarily of her involvement with non-Western art" and "emphasizes the need for abstract elements in a composition, in order to restrain the almost mythic power of the human form." In some of her pieces "animal forms assert their magical spells amidst a vast field of shapes, colors and lines. These animal heads are ‘summoned from within,' revealing other aspects of the self." Shahn's pieces are, writes Gittler, "evocative, rhythmic fields."

Andy Brumer's essay on Joseph Slusky and Chip Sullivan begins with the observation that "of course, these works were not drawn from models; nothing on earth looks like them!" Brumer acknowledges that Slusky "is well known for his highly imaginative, elegant and masterfully crafted hand-painted metal sculptures": "Viewers will recognize Slusky's sculptor's sensibility, as well as his indomitably inventive and poetic spirit, at work in his drawings...They also reflect [the artist's] jazzy, spontaneous, and improvisational method of working."

Discussing Slusky's "curious link between sculpture and landscape," Brumer quotes the artist's statement that "For me, drawing and sculpture are interrelated...pen and ink, colored pencils, and mixed media become the means to explore possibilities and combinations not so easily attainable in assembling sculpture." One drawing, writes Brumer, "presents a pair of legs tottering on a fragmented palette-shaped torso, which in turn balances itself on a set of gymnastic parallel bars. Then, like so much of Slusky's work, the image transforms itself into something else again. In this instance, it becomes a boat that transports both artist and viewer down imagination's endlessly supporting and always nourishing river."

That fact of metamorphosis—the possibility of representation rather than representation itself—is present in Slusky's sculpture as well. Looking at the drawings one thinks a little bit of some of the more or less abstract (and constantly transforming) landscapes of George Herriman's Krazy Kat. Throughout Slusky's work, Brumer asserts, one finds "a blend of assertiveness, warmth, humor and tenderness," all of which are an echo of "the artist's compelling personality."

"Chip Sullivan's pen and ink and watercolor drawings of fantastical landscapes exude a mythological aura," writes Brumer, "an abstract integrity and Surrealistic serenity":

Much of the pleasure that these works yield comes from a sense that Sullivan has excavated, discovered, perhaps stumbled upon sacred ground. Thoughts of "The Emerald City" from The Wizard of Oz, or of the lost kingdom of Atlantis, or of the literary lands of Xanadu or Shangri-La...Indeed, when speaking of early influences on his drawing, Sullivan enthusiastically mentions the wonderful art work he encountered as a kid in comic books (Wally Wood and Will Elder's work in Mad Magazine gets a particular accolade).

Sullivan, a colleague and friend of Slusky's, was trained as a landscape architect, and the idea of the garden often appears in his drawings. "Sullivan's ‘anti-gardens'," writes Brumer, "spring from a more intuitive and internal fount" than those of landscape architecture. "They display the wildly romantic notion of boundless inventiveness and explosive power and place their faith not in limits, but in the 19th century poet William Blake's credo that ‘energy is eternal delight.'"

Brumer neglects to mention that Blake was also a visual artist—one who combined text with visual elements, just as comic books do. Indeed, comic books are a link with childhood and a kind of way station between one's subjectivity and the world. Sullivan's elegant, architectural fantasies thrust us into precisely that space in which the "real" is always in doubt, always forming itself in the consciousness of the beholder. We know that the "image" we see doesn't "really" exist. Yet it awakens such longing!

Tiny as it is, Drawing Without Models is an important book for understanding current developments in painting. For Slusky, sculpture is a mode of architecture—or perhaps architecture is a mode of sculpture. For Lloyd and Sullivan—the names are resonant in the history of architecture!—drawing itself is architectural. Aren't the architect's sketches modes of art?

All these artists are dealing with the problem of "the image"—a problem which is central to the history of art in the twentieth century. To what does the painted "image" refer, and how does it refer to it? All of them are exploring "that precarious balance between figuration and abstraction." All of them tend towards "an equivalent," "the semblance of the thing," rather than to the thing itself. It is not surprising that Sullivan, Slusky, and Lloyd are drawn to poetry—because the problem of the image has been playing itself out in language as well as in painting and drawing.

This is William Carlos Williams' famous, puzzling poem, "The Red Wheel Barrow":

                   so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.