Stations Project

Artist Statement

As I sat down to write, the phrase "I am the man, I was there, I suffered." came to mind. That man seemed to be Achilles, Odysseus, maybe Aeneas, or Christ. These figures mirror feelings it seems we harbor in our lives. The words above were written by Walt Whitman. I have also been fascinated by Wallace Steven's critical description of the Hero as in his poem, "How does one stand To behold the sublime, To confront the mockers, The mickey mockers..." These thoughts contain pathos, they have created our literature, they create the hero that creates our selves.

I went to Italy to see the Frescos of the early Renaissance in 1972 when an art student at the School of Visual Arts in NYC. I came back naively thinking that I wanted to do just that, make the National Epic. I loved the flat, hard, modern surface of Piero della Francesca, Giotto and Mantegna. The figure and the narrative, had been out of fashion in art for some time. I soon understood the reasons and felt similar. It stayed in the back of my mind.








I went back to the landscape for itself. It was not long before I realized that any particular thing focused upon became a kind of figure or idea of that landscape space. This seemed an image of what a thought was in the mind. The grasping of the idea seemed a going back into the reeds to retrieve the figure. I put this forth as a metaphor for the idea as well as for painting itself. I equated the making of a figure with this idea and in my paintings put a line around the figure to formally distinguish it from the deeper space as it achieved the surface. The fitting together of this content or idea along with it's form or figure became the predominate idea my work.

At first I worked in a more abstract manner, using the forms of abstract expressionism. It was apparent to me how figurative these abstract forms were and I had no problem restoring the contents I felt necessary for art to continue. Later my juxtaposition of differing painting styles side by side, of figure and abstraction coinciding, made the puzzle of images and thoughts I was pursuing. I saw a moment's truth evolving into continually changing feelings or beliefs. I began to see a revolving reality cycling from one ending becoming new beginnings.












In the last series of paintings I completed, Paumanok Reeds, I retain a feeling for the particular place. It is the poetic bay beach of Long Island. Paumanok, is the Indian name Whitman used meaning "fish shaped island." The reeds are the thing which stands out as I paint there each year. The reeds contain crickets that sing in a way lending a mystery to the place which as I would paint pointed to the greater mix of reality itself. In the last juxtaposition of paintings the figure seemed to peer into these reeds, into that mystery they share with the stars, with reality itself. In the fragmented works he seems to now fall into that difficulty or impossibility of understanding.

I realized this idea long ago, in the painting of a landscape out of doors. This activity led me to see how everything really is, constantly changing . The wind, the sun and season. The clouds, leaves, waves, passing became a symbol and image of this reality to me.





These ideas extend from the figural content of the Hero to the form of the more abstract Stations. I thought of Christ's fall and getting back up; 1, 2, 3, times, part of this revolving reality. The thoughts, moments, segments of a life measured, the marking, making a description a formal representation of this passion.

Framing the Stations Project

There is a propelling forward, yet a containment of motion.

New Blue Stain

I decided I wanted the blue squares to be lighter, so I used a light blue gesso let it dry and then a oil stain on top.

A Note on The Stations of the Cross by Gregory Botts Carter Ratcliff

A Note on The Stations of

the Cross by Gregory Botts

Carter Ratcliff

In 2011, Gregory Botts completed a group of fourteen paintings. Medium-size

and rendered in tones of black, white, and gray, these canvases can be seen as

abstractions — and dazzling despite their somber palette. Diagonals inflect right

angles, right angles modulate curves, curves enter into complex negotiations

with one another. We could stop here, with a contemplation of the power — and

the subtlety — of these forms considered purely as forms. This would be a bit

disingenuous, however, for Botts fills his paintings with recognizable things. There

are hieroglyphic indications of reeds and trees, intimations of mountains and cloudfilled

skies, and forms we decipher as parts of the human body: legs, a head covered

with a wide-brimmed hat, an entire torso. These fourteen paintings show a person

traversing a landscape.

I pointed to their strength as abstractions not only because this strength is formidable

but also because it is crucial to the artist’s purpose. Without their formal brilliance,

these paintings would have no hope of standing up under the pressures brought to

bear by interpretation. Entitling them Stations of the Cross, Botts challenges us to

understand them in three intertwined ways: as purely pictorial, as subtly referential,

and — the most demanding — as transcendently spiritual. Traversing a border region

between the abstract and the figurative, Botts’s Stations grapple with a theme

that has been central to the Western tradition since the late Middles Ages — the Via

Dolorosa or Way of Sorrows that brought Jesus to crucifixion and death. The somber

palette of Botts’s series deliberately recalls the Stations of the Cross that Barnett

Newman painted in 1958-66, using only black and white and the color of unprimed

canvas. For Newman and his generation, which included Jackson Pollock and Mark

Rothko, abstraction was something like a moral imperative. They dispensed with

narrative, as well. Newman said that the fourteen canvases comprising his Stations

did not represent a progression, as in traditional renderings, which begin with Jesus

condemned to death and end with him laid in the tomb. Rather, Newman intended

each canvas to evoke, in its own register, the moment when Jesus cried out, “Lema

Sabachthani?” “Oh, Lord, why have you forsaken me?”

In 1950, Henri Matisse painted a version of the Stations in a chapel in Vence, a

small town in the south of France. Though the fourteen stages of the Via Dolorosa

can be distinguished — in fact, they are numbered — Matisse clustered his images on

a large wall, producing a composition that encourages us to see it in full in a single

moment. Like Newman, Matisse worked against narrative. Their disinclination to

tell stories is nearly all these two artists have in common, yet it forms a strong bond.

For all their differences, Matisse and Newman shared the modernist tradition, which

emerged, in part, from a rejection of storytelling. A proper modernist painting inhabits

an absolute now, a moment of time outside of time.

Impatient with proprieties, Botts does not want to exclude anything from

painting — not the figure, not landscape, and certainly not narrative or the poetry

that gives us our most enduring stories, legends, and myths. In a statement

accompanying his Stations, Botts quotes a line from Walt Whitman’s “Song of

Myself”: “I am the man, I suffer’d, I was there.” Newman, too, invokes this man,

the one who asks God why, having created me, have you abandoned me to this

suffering? His Stations of the Cross are a tragic lament. Botts’s Stations invite

us to feel in concert with the individual struggling to traverse a landscape that is

formless, perhaps annihilating, until it is shaped by those very struggles. Though

Botts does not deny suffering, the mode of his art is less tragic than heroic. He

imagines Whitman’s man as “Achilles, Odysseus, maybe Aeneas, or Christ.” Or as

Whitman himself, the archetypal American pilgrim, whose pilgrimage is a life-long

act of creation.

An act that begins, for a painter, with a mark on a blank surface — a gesture in

a void — and continues until the successive marks, in their variety, arrive at

coherence. Intelligibility. Meaning. And yet, no matter how convincing any one

painting may be, its meaning is partial. There is more to be said or, better, more

to be done, and so the artist continues through the landscape of possibility, as

in Botts’s Station of the Cross.

In his first Station, a bar of dark blue runs along the left-hand edge of the canvas.

This blue geometry — the series’ only departure from the range of black, white,

and gray — reappears in some but not all of the other Stations. Its shape and

position changes, and then, in the last painting, this abstract shape settles along

the right-hand edge, as if it, too, has completed a pilgrimage. Reading a heroic

motive into this migrating shape, we achieve a full sense of these artworks, their

power to integrate form, image, and epic theme. Moreover, we arrive at a sense

our own imaginative powers. We share in the artist’s sense of transcendent

possibility. We become, if only temporarily, incarnations of his heroic protagonist.

Drawings

Second stage of Oil Paint

Its hard to tell in these pictures but they have been all repainted in oil, adjustments made and I'll probably go with this. I remade Stations 6 and 10 to make more of a movement and add to the tumbling effect.

The Proximity to the Cathedral

makes it all seem like I am interested in the Religious function.

But as Freud said, I think,-- something like, "religion is poetry turned wooden."

Last entry made me think of Piero

Who is never that far from my mind.

Expulsion from Paradise

A friend suggested Massacio as an example of the Pathos the Stations contained.

I looked them up to find that one of my most beloved images is changed by restoration to what seems more of a Fra Angelica. This my first impression.

It is a poignant example how every thing changes. The Last Judgement of Michaelangelo was changing to the point of not being able to be seen at all, now again is changed in it's cleaning.

So these examples of fresco that first influenced me so, now contain a different lesson.

I remember when I last saw the Massacios or I guess I didn't see them as they were undergoing this cleaning. There was a big corporate Olivetti sign in the Church declaring them as the sponsor of the work!

Anyhow reality keeps changing and certainly our's is vastly different from Massacio's time but it seems the restorers wanted the Massacios to be more modern, more like us.

Story in a Line

The line of a cartoon has an immediacy which hasn't seen since the Midieval times. Van Gogh rediscovered it again for art, see below.

A cartoon reminds me of the way an idea is discovered and -- then works, I mean believed. I like the under notation which is in deep space, like wandering.The flat shape or color then comes forward and it is lassoed by the thickening line and-- bang on the surface as what is meant!



I think Van Gogh was not a very facile drawer. He really had to struggle and he at one point would scrawl a line around something he was trying to draw to make it "be".

Gauguin was doing something similar and it went back and forth and soon became part of the post impressionist style, of a line surrounding color. Actually maybe going back to a borrowing or validation in Medieval style or folk art.

Now Matisse and Picasso carried this line forward. Picasso definately locating it's beginning in Spanish Illumination of Medieval times. They exaggerated it and it got thicker, wider more aggressive.

I think it has to do with the idea of going back in the mind--into the forest of possibility and coming back with something-- drawing a line around it-- making something more definate.

Mondrian is a special case started out pretty traditional but with Van Gogh's line and kept exaggerating and exaggerating--till his line that meets a most modern surface as in later Lichtenstein.

American Fresco

...is a title I've toyed with. Not for these Stations but for the Paumanok Reeds, last years work, of a similar gravity which the Stations are growing out of.

I began my exploration in the 1970's as an artist visiting all the frescoes in Italy.

I have always harbored the naive sentiment that-- I wish I could do that.

I love Piero and Giotto, Massacio and Mantegna. Fra Angelica and Signorelli.

I liked the chalky hard surface which makes a shallow negative and positive space of painting.

I liked how the unrestored brokened out sections lent an abstraction to the whole. Here I have taken that formal relation as a aspect of reality in ever changing moments, which art tries to preserve.

Any way I've said more of this else where, it all seems to come together.

New Beginning

I've painted over now in oil the under surface which finally little is seen of?

I've knocked them back to the sea. A funny analogy.

They seemed to come so fast I distrusted them.

In an old master painting one "knocks it back" with a sienna stain. I dislike that illusionistic method and instead scrape the surface then paint over it. There is still a sense of what is under and I think the surface just gets stronger.

So I'm just starting over rethinking each step once again.

Wanting to insert a level of, the leaves in between somewhere.

Im also using oil paint now so it all slows down.




And back into the Reeds.

A Single painting #2

For some time now, in different guises my paintings have been about the juxtaposition of three painting surfaces.

1. A Utopian forward looking formal reality ( the blue square) that here is actually seen in it's negative phase, though it still comes forward to meet the 2nd surface which is--

2. A surface of present Reality which is constantly changing and affected by the Future (Utopian or Classical) and Past (Romantic) relationships.

3.The past or Romantic is the underneath or drawing, the distance, what is gone into-- to find, maybe a dream.

So these three surfaces interchange spaces and in fact I suppose are seen as One. One surface is constantly dying into another. Reality being in this scheme a constantly changing thing.

This above form is the content of the work which parallels many or most literary narratives from Romantic to Classic.

It is in fact the Western Romance Quest itself which goes back into to find. Finds and brings back an Idea and in painting connects this Idea to a Surface which is painting.



I found this validating reality, unselfconsciously in my painting of the 1980's. This spacial journey became a narrative in my work and returns to a more abstract reality once again.

I made a series of paintings in 1993 called Villa of the Sun, which used this scheme as, Fate, Freedom, and Power, a triad I discovered in Harold Bloom's description of American poetry through a schematic idea from Emerson's criticism.

Fate is the winter phase of reality. Freedom, the poet at height in the Sun. Power is the fall into Sunset and the position of the Sublime. The is a counterpoint with the seasonal motif which this journey shares.



This three part reduction made a kind of triad which reminded me of a Duccio painting I knew.

This cross configuration is interesting compared to the recent "Stations". Then it was about a horizonal "passing" juxtaposed to a vertical--stop! or here! A realization or resultant light from epiphany or sublime like experience.

A Mythology Reflects Its Region.

A mythology reflects its region. Here
In Connecticut, we never lived in a time
When mythology was possible -- But if we had --
That raises the question of the image's truth.
The image must be of the nature of its creator.
It is the nature of its creator increased,
Heightened. It is he, anew, in a freshed youth
And it is he in the substance of his region,
Wood of his forest and stone out of his fields
Or from under his mountain.

—Wallace Stevens, A Mythology Reflects Its Region.

Of course it is not "about" this anymore than it is about any particular narrative. I hope it exists for itself as painting.

Paintings In Order of Stations

Select for larger image.

The paintings follow the form of the Stations more than the specific content.

My own figure who I've called Crispin after the Wallace Stevens poem, The Commedian with the letter "C". It is about the impossibility or difficulty of this type of depiction. The figure blends with a Walt Whitman like representation walking the Bay Beach wondering or wandering through the reeds, leaves or grass.

It's finally about the painting. Here there is a mystery of different spaces-- colliding and ordering themselves, into positive and negative surfaces.

Commedian as the letter "C"

Here follows some lines from a long poem by Wallace Stevens.



Nota: man is the intelligence of his soil.

What counted was mythology of self

Could Crispin stem verboseness in the sea

The salt hung on his spirit like a frost,

some starker, barer self

Crispin
Became an introspective voyager.

Crispin beheld and Crispin was made new.

He came. The poetic hero without palms
Or jugglery, without regalia.
And as he came he saw that it was spring,

His western voyage ended and began.

Was he to bray this in profoundest brass

Scrawl a tragedian's testament?

proving what he proves
Is nothing, what can all this matter since
The relation comes, benignly, to its end?

1 through 7 and bottom row 8 through 14

The top are 1 through 7 and bottom row 8 through 14.

and new step

A Sketch

The "place" of the American Poem

It has been said the 'place' of American poetry--Is the beach, the line between the land and sea.

Im using the East Hampton, Long Island, Bay Beach and Ocean here.

Here is Stevens in Decorations in a -- Cemetery


In the far South the sun of autumn is passing
Like Walt Whitman walking along a ruddy shore.
He is singing and chanting the things that are part of him,
The worlds that were and will be, death and day.
Nothing is final, he chants. No man shall see the end.
His beard is of fire and his staff is a leaping flame.

William Penn

Something strange I've just discovered. I had to go back to PA to get my birth certificate a few years ago.
These images are from the State Museum we used to be taken to as a boy in Pennsylvania.

Different images of another Hero

From a little museum in Taos, NM.



In a dress, as a farmer, looking like the Quaker William Penn of my own youth in Pennsylvania --from cartoon to tragic. Many figures seem to blend to one.