Physicality of Picturing... Richard Shiff

7/24/2019 Physicality of Picturing... Richard Shiff

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Please quote this article as follows:

Richard Shiff, "The Physicality of Picturing", in: Sonderforschungsbereich 626, ed.,

Between Thing and Sign, Berlin 2010,http://www.sfb626.de/en/veroeffentlichungen/shiff.pdf

For the Index of Contents see:http://www.sfb626.de/en/veroeffentlichungen/thingandsign/

The Physicality of Picturing

Richard Shiff

For at least the past century and a half and continuing into the present visual artists

have shown acute sensitivity to the play of the material medium. They regard the medium

as if it were responsible for inventing the image, as opposed to tracing, graphing, or

otherwise reproducing forms already available elsewhere, whether outside in the physical

world or inside the imagination. When the play of the medium dominates pictorial

practices, abstraction in art acquires its modernist meaning.

One of the most obvious examples of medium-based art is the New York School painting

of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, the so-called abstract expressionists. The

stylistic label fits Pollock far better than it does de Kooning, who was never comfortable

with twentieth-century theories of expressive abstraction.1 He often spoke of his

picture-making as if it were a mimetic act of representing a specific human figure,

whether a person he was actively observing or, more likely, a body in a particular

posture, deftly remembered in strokes of paint (or ink or graphite). Following the

implications of de Koonings sense of his situation, we might agree that he was

representing a body someones body yet doing it through the sensations he felt in his

1See Willem de Kooning, "What Abstract Art Means to Me," in The Museum of Modern Art Bulletin(issue

18/ Spring 1951), 4-8.


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body. Depositing his mimetic marks, he left a double indexical trace: on the one hand, an

index of his movement; on the other hand, an index of the physical properities of paint.

Would it be fair to call de Koonings trace a form of self-expression, not so different fromwhat critics tend to attribute to Pollock? The answer depends on how we identify the

bodily representation de Kooning was creating whether that body was primarily

anothers or his. Was he showing aspects of how a body might look, an appearance to be

perceived visually from both physical and emotional distance? Or was he presenting a

condition experienced more intimately, corresponding to a degree of materiality properly

appreciated only by direct contact? Without much evidence, we often assume that an

artists emotional response to a body is adequately transmitted through whatever forms

happen to be rendered at the precise moment of feeling. Such forms signify engagement

with the represented object and a concurrent contact with the materials of representation,

while at the same time expressing or channeling the associated state of emotion. Marks,

colors, shapes, and linear directions that reproduce the look or effect of a body do so by

condensing, contracting, or otherwise reducing it to abstraction. Base and material by

nature, reductive abstraction intensifies those aspects of the body that it features; and, as a

result, such abstraction conveys correspondingly strong emotion. Under the conditions of

modernist, medium-based representation, it can be difficult to distinguish mimesis from

abstraction. Perhaps we have no need to establish any firm distinction, except when

investigating the ideological connotations of these two contrasting notions.

In 1966 de Kooning did a series of drawings made with his eyes closed (fig. 1). He

imagined the active bodies of others by stretching, compressing, and twisting his own

body. Using a motion-oriented procedure of this type, he gave a privileged centrality to

all points of contact between his hand and the paper. As a result of his working blindly,

the heads of represented figures would often strike the edges of the paper, causing the

artist to compress that part of the body and render the hair to the side, wherever there was

room, as if a real body were accommodating its volume to an overly confining space. In

effect, de Kooning was representing how a body looks to the sense of touch, his touch.

Wherever there was no figure on the paper that is, no drawing, just blankness there


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was neither expressive nor representational signification, if only because de Kooning

neither saw nor touched these surrounding spaces. Instead of drawing within a preexisting

field, he was discovering the enframing rectangle as a material limitation only when hereached its physical boundaries, the edges of the paper sensed through his hand. This

condition virtually eliminated the significance of the pictorial rectangle with respect to

any initial conception of the image. It severely reduced the degree to which an idealized

orthogonal grid might guide the composition.2

In certain ways, the difference to be perceived between de Kooning and Pollock de

Kooning as the more mimetic, Pollock as the more cognizant of a gridlike pictorial field

parallels the difference between Claude Monet and Georges Seurat, as understood at the

end of the nineteenth century in terms of an emerging theory of abstraction.3 Pictorial

abstraction could be substituted not only for the mimetic representation of nature, but also

for the expression of personalized emotional states, whether that expression came through

dramatic imagery or accentuated brushwork. Both forms of expression were subject to

charges of exaggeration and affectation. As a byproduct of the new, depersonalized kind

of abstraction, the constitutive figurational marks of a painting came to be identified

with their limited, physical materiality. Brushmarks ceased to perform metaphorically (by

dematerialized factors of resemblance) and began to perform metonymically (by adapting

to the material conditions of the pictorial environment). The elements of the pictorial

surface became abstract in the sense of being distilled from more complicated systems as

a purification of the means or medium. Whatever else a mark of paint represented, it

should behave like, and look like, paint. Artists striving to eliminate affectation made

certain that their marks would never pretend to be what they were not.

2De Koonings violation of the implicit field of orthogonals had a certain parallel in Pollocks work (as

well as in Franz Klines), for Pollock sometimes determined the outer boundaries of paintings by cropping,

just as a photographer might crop a print to improve its thematic focus, pictorial dynamism, or general

expressiveness.3On other aspects of the new abstraction, see Richard Shiff, The Primitive of Everyone Elses Way, in

Guillermo Solana, ed., Gauguin and the Origins of Symbolism(Madrid, 2004), 64-79.


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With an allusion to technical, material factors, the catalogue of a recent Seurat exhibition

establishes in a single sentence the divide between an earlier nineteenth-century mimetic

naturalism and a later nineteenth-century abstraction. Seurats art lies on our side of thishistorical break. Contrasting the effect of typical impressionist paintings to Seurats use

of a pointillist mark, the catalogue author Robert Herbert observes: Pissarros broken

brushwork, like Monets, incessantly changes direction and thickness, whereas Seurats

has a regularity that later appealed to modern artists penchant for the abstract and for

all-over textures.4Herbert puts the descriptive term all-over within quotation marks

because it amounts to technical jargon. All-over refers to the effect of uniformity,

integration, and wholeness that characterizes not only paintings by Pollock but also the

odd materiality of photographs, with their relatively uniform distribution of photographic

emulsion. In Pollocks case, as in 1949: Tiger(1949, fig. 2), the surface may be textured

and agitated but its aggressive character is present to about the same degree throughout. It

exhibits no coherent hierarchy of thick and thin, near and far, as a viewer might sense, for

example, in a painting by Delacroix.

Sharing this loss of hierarchical order (in fact, anticipating it), most nineteenth-century

photographs lie at the end of the spectrum of uniformity or all-overness opposite to that

of Pollocks painting: photographic images are all-over but not material. The surface

of Gustave Le Grays view of a picturesque oak in the Forest of Fontainebleau (1852, fig.

3) is thoroughly un-articulated in any material sense; or at least it gives that impression,

because it is (as we might say) untouched. Despite various kinds of re-touching that

may occur, the fundamental photographic image results from a regulated chemical

reaction, not the groping activity of hands with brushes. Painters hands are limited with

regard to precise detailing; problematically, artists often disguise their limitations by

developing flourishes, stylishness, and other forms of affectation. At the beginning of

photographys history, one of the great advantages attributed to this new technology was

its removal of the hand and elimination of the distracting variation that would appear

4Robert L. Herbert, Seurat and the Making of La Grande Jatte(Chicago, 2004), 58.


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whenever a scene was rendered by more than one artist. In this respect, photography

could claim a welcome objectivity, neutrality, and science of observation.5 Yet this

medium did have a peculiar materiality of its own, determined by the emulsion thatcovered the surface of conventional photographic paper. Look too closely at an analog

photograph or enlarge it beyond a certain limit: it becomes coarse and irregular like a

painting.

One of the most suggestive statements about Seurats technique refers in an oblique

way to the possibility that painting, like photography, could be untouched. The idea

comes through Flix Fnon, Seurats appreciative critic. Having viewedLa Grande Jatte

(1884-86, fig. 4) and other works, Fnon observed that no matter what Seurat was

painting, he knew that expressive accidents of the brush were of no use to him and that

his handling of the brush should remain the same throughout. This is certainly untrue in

the most literal sense, but we need to consider that the immediate context for comparison

was defined by the romantic emotionalism of Delacroix on one side and the impressionist

naturalism of Pissarro and Monet on the other side. Both romantic and impressionist

styles of painting featured accentuated brushwork.

In contradistinction, Fnon concluded that Seurats new pointillist style caused "manual

facility [to become] a negligible matter."6 Seurats painting appeared devoid of

flourishes, fancy handling, and finesse. There was something methodical (even

mechanical) about what Seurat was doing: hence the term "pointillism", referring to the

point or stitch in weaving, a methodical and anonymous practice of the hand. In weaving,

if the initial worker becomes fatigued, another worker can assume the task. Personal style

is not a factor. Seurat seems to have largely accepted Fnons representation of his

ideas. Yet he warned of the danger he perceived in having others join in this pointillism.7

If it were to become a recognized method, it would soon become its own style and next a

5See George Butler, letter to William Henry Fox Talbot, 25 March 1841, quoted in Larry J. Schaaf, The

Photographic Art of William Henry Fox Talbot (Princeton, 2000), 150.6Flix Fnon,Les impressionnistes en 1886(Paris, 1887), reprinted as "L'Impressionnisme", in Joan U.Halperin, ed.,Flix Fnon: Oeuvres plus que compltes , 2 vols. (Geneva, 1970), 1, 36-67.


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mannerism, losing all material integrity. Seurat insisted on two facts, somewhat

contradictory: first, the technique he used was personal to him; second, it was merely a

method or tool and nothing mysterious, nothing beyond common understanding. Whencertain admirers discerned a fanciful, ineffable poetry in this work (its presumed

emotional content), Seurat was quick to deny it: I apply my method, and thats all.8

To the impressionist generation of Monet, a flourish of the brush could signal the

freedom of the individual an individual who responded sensually and emotionally to the

immediate experience of things seen an individual unfettered by the methods and

systems of the art academies and the social hierarchies reflected by their teachings. From

Monets cultural perspective, there was nothing mystifying or pretentious in

incorporating an inexplicable flourish of the brush within a naturalistic painting, such as

the vertical zigzag that runs along the upper right edge ofA Stormy Sea(c. 1884, fig. 5).

Along with his eye, if Monet had a great hand and enjoyed showing it off, what might be

said about Seurat? Fnon may have believed that Seurats manual anonymity mattered

more than his manual personality, but such a distinction does not remove all skill from

the hand. To the contrary, one skill is replacing another skill. And the new skill holds a

very special place in the thinking of late twentieth-century artists.

Consider again the notion of all-overness, the surface that seems devoid of hierarchical

articulation. Things that lack this type of regulated articulation leave viewers to their own

devices. If there is a path to experiencing the painted image and deriving knowledge from

7Georges Seurat, letter to Paul Signac, 26 August 1888, in John Rewald, Georges Seurat(Paris, 1948),

115. Seurat did not make an issue of others failing to acknowledge pointillism as his invention.8Ibid. Allusions of a poetic sort appeared in literary interpretations by Seurats Symbolist supporters,

such as Paul Adam and Jean Moras; see John Rewald, La vie et loeuvre de Georges Seurat, in Henri

Dorra and John Rewald, Seurat: loeuvre peint, biographie et catalogue critique(Paris, 1959), lV. Latercomments by Seurats fellow pointillist, Paul Signac, suggest that the deceased painter had pursued to its

material extreme the impressionist method of using discrete, divided brushstrokes; see Paul Signac,D'Eugne Delacroix au no-impressionnisme, Franoise Cachin, ed. (Paris, 1978 [1899]), 122: La touchedivise, changeante, vivante, lumire, nest donc pas lepoint, uniforme, mort, matire. Here Signaccontrasts light (as concentrated and active) with matter (as distended and passive). Because Seurats

neutralized point is pure matter, whatever animation it manifests cannot stem from mimesis, personal

style, or manual facility. It must be animated by its own color-light, the abstract or pure element in the

material world as the painter experiences it. Yet the effect of light (its own light) never dematerializes

Seurats mark, which projects its specific size and density.


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it, this path is not obvious it has to be discovered, perhaps against a certain cultural

resistance. The image may have to be considered in relation to the medium in which it

appears, for the medium, having become resistant to providing an easy message, can nolonger be taken for granted. To some extent, this is what Seuart has come to signify to

later artists: in his pointillist style, he created images that induce viewers to understand

how the image has been made. This becomes just as important as the identity of the

image (its naturalistic feature) and how the artist revealed his personality through a

specific view (its expressionistic feature). In the process of this dual seeing (seeing the

medium as much as what the medium seems to be conveying), a viewer realizes that

every image or message is rhetorical, that is, every image or message is conditioned by

the nature of the medium that delivers the message.

Imagine viewing Seurats La Grande Jatte in terms of dots arranged according to a

relatively fine and precise raster, like that of a television screen. This cannot be the same

as viewingLa Grande Jattein terms of dashes, the elongated marks that Seurat used as

directional vectors to establish the contours and volumes of his human figures, tree

trunks, and similarly rigid objects. In any given area of La Grande Jatte, we are likely to

observe the result of Seurats having combined these two methods, which probably

correspond to two different campaigns in the studio. In 1908, his pointillist follower

Henri-Edmond Cross wrote the following: "The materials allow a certain thought and not

others ... Consciousness is limited to what the material allows."9Seurats two methods

allowed him to think his way through an act of picturing in two opposing ways. In neither

instance was his touch particularly personal. It was part of a method, as he said, not a

poetic affectation.

Although Pollock has been admired for personalized, expressive gestures, a kind of

poetic rhetoric of the self, this is not the way certain artists have seen him. Donald Judd,

for example, viewed Pollock as a painter who caused the medium to be regarded for what

it was in any given instance, as if it were representing itself, its own physical workings. In


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Pollocks art, "The dripped paint ... is dripped paint ... It's not something else that alludes

to dripped paint."10

Judd shifted his interpretive attention from what Pollocks mark of

paint might represent either a referential object or, more directly, an artists feelings to what the mark actually did or was in its materiality. The advantage to seeing so-called

abstract expressionist paintings in this manner is that the viewer escapes the habit of

applying familiar emotional states to an understanding of the work at hand. One has to

see the painting for what it is and make something of that seeing analytically,

emotionally, or however.

Bridget Riley is another artist who has resisted the conventional understanding of abstract

expressionist technique: With his tin [of paint] and splatter stick [Pollock] most

explicitly avoids any direct physical touch.11

Riley sets the word "touch" within

quotation marks just as Herbert, in the Seurat catalogue, does with all-over; touch,

too, is a bit of technical jargon. Here touch refers to the type of handling that Fnon

believed Seurat had eliminated the sensitive, personal, yet potentially affected kind of

touch. According to Riley, Pollock also removed it, for the sake of a new artistic

physicality and a renewed acuteness of vision.

It should not be surprising that Riley stresses this aspect of Pollock. She withdraws her

hand from the execution of her paintings, an execution to be accomplished by assistants

who follow the artists cumulative understanding, as derived through her many studies

specific to each work (fig. 6). Riley regards any "expression" of authorial identity or

"exercise [of] taste" as a distracting element in the viewer's perceptual experience.12

She

wants the actual [visual] content of the paintings to come through unchecked by any

kind of touch."13

This sounds like the bits we know about Seurats attitude, his element of

9

Henri-Edmond Cross, "Le dernier carnet d'Henri-Edmond Cross -- II" (1908-09), in Flix Fnon, ed., Lebulletin de la vie artistique(issue 3/ 1 June 1922), 255.10Donald Judd, "Jackson Pollock" (1967), in idem, Complete Writings 1959-1975(Halifax, 1975), 195.11

Bridget Riley, "Bridget Riley in Conversation with Isabel Carlisle" (1998), in Bridget Riley: Works 1961-1998(Abbot Hall Art Gallery), (Kendal, 1998), 8.12

Bridget Riley, statement to the author, 15 October 2002.13

Bridget Riley, "Practising Abstraction: Talking to Michael Craig-Martin" (1992), in Robert Kudielka,

ed.,Bridget Riley: Dialogues on Art(London, 1995), 60.


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expressive anonymity. With authorship moving to the background, materiality and

physical properties of all sorts move to the foreground. But this is not the kind of

materiality and physicality associated with conventional expressionism.

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, Chuck Close made unusually large portrait

paintings, such as Phil (1969, fig. 7), which he derived from gridded photographs. He

transferred what could be seen in the form of dematerialized photographic emulsion to a

type of painting from which he eliminated his personal hand. He accomplished this by

using an airbrush, waving it in front of the canvas like, as he often says, a magic wand.

As a viewer approaches near to these large airbrush paintings, the image disintegrates

into granularity rather like a photograph, yet curiously coherent in an abstract way,

because every little droplet has been controlled by an organic movement of the artist.

Making these paintings, Close was operating at a certain distance, just as Pollock had

when he dripped paint. He nevertheless remained very near to the canvas surface, also as

Pollock had near to it in bodily terms, near in relation to the scale of human action.

Close describes his result as if to recall the effect of Seurats drawings: he says that it

looks as if "an image moved in on a fog and fell into the painting."14

When asked to

comment on Seurat in 1991, he stressed the artists drawings: While you're aware of the

making, the artist's hand has almost disappeared. You're not quite sure where the edge

is."15

According to Close, Seurat drew figures just by using the texture of the paper and

growing with it."16

It seems then that Seurats elusive edge grows into or out of the grain

or weave of the paper, as if the hand hardly had a role to play. The two primary elements

of the drawing medium, the crayon and the paper, become remarkably integrated, so that,

rhetorically, the medium contains, rather than conveys or transports, the image. The

14Chuck Close, statement to the author, 1997.

15Chuck Close in Patrick Pacheco, "Point Counterpoint," inArt & Antiques(issue 8/ October 1991), 73.

16Chuck Close in Ann Temkin, ed., Chuck Close/Paul Cadmus: In Dialogue(Philadephia Museum of Art)

(Philadelphia, 1997), n.p.


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fading or blurred edges of Seurats Seated Monkey (1884, fig. 8) indicate the nature of

laid paper as much as the fuzziness of the animals hair.

Eventually, Close abandoned the use of his airbrush, and transferred images by hand fromthe gridded photographic surface to an overtly gridded painting surface. His grids became

ever more apparent as he increased their size relative to the dimensions of the format,

often setting them on the diagonal to create further tension between the developing image

and the structure of its ground. Close fills these grids with relatively large, anonymous

dots, dabs, and dashes. Even at a distance, a viewer notices the individual constituent

marks, certain to see not only the image they produce but also, as Close says, "the stuff

that makes it."17

The image seems to fall into or grow out of its supportive medium. The

serrated edge at the right side of the face ofMaggie(1998-99, fig. 9) reflects the nature of

the diagonal grid as much as it traces out the contour of the cheek, just as Seurats

monkey was reflecting the gridded weave of its paper.

In Seurats small wood panels, such as his study for Le Bec du Hoc(1885, fig. 10), there

are many instances of an utter collapse of the distinction between image and medium. No

doubt the small scale of these works encourages this type of effect, but analogous

conditions arise in Seurats larger paintings, and his later admirers, such as Close and

Riley, also generate such effects at a large scale, in both representational and abstract

work. In the Seurat panel, there is a single, tiny stroke of white just below the horizon

line and to the left of the rocky outcropping. The stroke amounts to a vertical within an

environment of horizontals. Below it is a much slighter bit of red, which appears to be

pigment, not a sliver of exposed wood panel, although the two can easily be confused. I

assume that this combination represents a sailboat, almost lost within the metaphorical

and literal sea of marks that surrounds it. And those marks, even though constituting a

larger representational field, are just marks like Pollocks. They are the all-over marks

that Herbert mentions if we wish to see them that way not because they resolutely fail

17Chuck Close, interview by Brooks Adams, "Close Encountered," inArtforum (issue 36/ April 1998),

135.


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to signify something larger than themselves, but because many twentieth-century viewers

have seen them in this alternative manner (at once material and abstract). Why? Perhaps

because the medium has become a problem. Again, why? Perhaps because of the shockof a succession of new representational technologies, some analog, some digital:

lithography, photography, the telephone, sound recording, cinema, television, computer

imaging.

In Seurat, as with Closes gridded paintings, we see the image but we also, quite

naturally, see the stuff. The stuff, the material factor, creates the image but evidently

resists letting it entirely loose in the world. It remains in its specific material form. The

surface of Seurats Le Bec du Hochas been activated not only by the artists incipient

pointillism, but also by a vertical scoring into the wood panel, a cross-graining that may

have been applied by a toothing plane. At the upper left corner, cross-graining is

particularly discernible, exposed in the way that the horizontal strokes of paint appear

punctuated by tiny, darker verticals. As a result, the surface acquires a visual texture

similar to that of Seurats drawings. It can enhance the representational image, as when it

suggests the choppiness or turbulence of the sea. But because the artists panels typically

also have a distinct grain in the horizontal dimension, which produces a subtle pattern of

ridges, the vertical scoring or cross-graining creates an abstract pattern of interference, a

supplemental sign of the resistance of the medium. Seurats full-scale, canvas version of

Le Bec du Hoc exhibits many little vertical strokes of paint within the predominantly

horizontal strokes used to represent the open sea.18

It seems that the painted verticals

substitute for the interference provided by the material graining built into the study on

panel.

Seurats method of applying dots of pigment often reaches its material failure point. In a

small panel study of the channel at Gravelines (1890, fig. 11), a single string of red and

blue marks defines the form of a lamppost. Given the scale of the rendering, this

18Seurat adjusted this painting in 1888 or 1889, adding its fully developed pointillist elements, which

include a number of dots of color, slightly elongated in the vertical direction.


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representational feature is too thin to accommodate a double string of marks. At several

points Seurat broke his marking sequence, perhaps to maintain a unifying effect of

luminous atmosphere created by differentiated hues that define not only the foregroundlamp but also the channel of water, the far shore, and the sky all pictorially behind the

lamp, yet just as much on the surface plane of the painting. As a result of the breaks, the

background of water and sky occupies some of the surface space where one would have

expected a linear continuation of segments of the lamppost. This is an absurdity if the

structure of Seurat's marking is to be correlated with the physical integrity and ordinary

visual appearance of a real lamppost. He seems to have respected a different reality, the

materiality of his medium: paint applied by hand, stroke by stroke, touch by touch. Do

the bright red spots that sit between the dark blues signify spots of light? Do they signify

a decorative pattern on the lamppost? Are they shifting the local color from blue toward

violet by means of optical mixture? The weave or grain of the marks themselves may

make it impossible to answer these questions definitively. Such is the nature of

perception: we perceive an image, but we also perceive stuff along with it; and the two

need not combine seamlessly. For clarity and convenience, we usually try to ignore either

one or the other of the two conflicting aspects.

Such ambiguity occurs also with Close, who is fascinated by it. Faced with the task of

rendering the frame of his eyeglasses in Self Portrait II(1995, fig. 12), he breaks both the

continuity and straightness of his line. This is how the situation appears to a viewer who

traces the details of the marking pattern. Yet, taken as a whole, the marks average out to

the all-over, continous representational effect for which, along with the stuff, Close

was aiming. His painting projects both the analog image and the digital stuff. When a

viewer stands back from this self-portrait, the analog effect may dominate; yet the digital

elements remain apparent as interacting fragments. Stand near and conditions may

reverse, with the digital elements now dominant. The sense of near and far, digital

fragmentation and analog integration, will vary among individuals. Every viewer,

however, will find it difficult to resist moving back and forth in front of Closes art,

having been induced to play with effects of focus and blur. To encounter this painting is


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to become involved not only in the artists own temporal process of making, but even

more so in ones personal time and space. Perhaps Closes central contribution is to have

shown how embedded the viewers body must be, even in ordinary acts of perception.

Closes process of painting is neither a trick nor a game. In retrospect, it makes us

conscious of the physical nature of the photograph with which he begins, and of the more

fundamental fact that any medium possesses its proper physicality. Both painting and

photography have resolution factors; and both must therefore have points of failure,

conditions under which consciousness of the medium will supplant consciousness of

either the representational identity of the image or its abstract formal composition. The

discipline we call art history need not be confined to the study of either the medium or the

representational image, each regarded in isolation. It can investigate the changing

interpretive conditions under which these forces interact. Closes art does what Seurats

did much earlier: it probes the relation of medium to image in forms relevant to the visual

technologies of its era.

Fig. 1: Willem de Kooning,

untitled (1966)


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Fig. 2: Jackson Pollock,

Number 3, 1949: Tiger(1949)

Fig. 3: Gustave Le Gray,

Gnarled Oak(1852)


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Fig. 4: Georges Seurat,

La grande Jatte(1884-1886)

Fig. 5.: Claude Monet,

A Stormy Sea(ca. 1884)


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Fig. 6: Bridget Riley,

Painting with two Verticals

(2004)

Fig. 7: Chuck Close,Phil(1969)


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Fig. 8: Georges Seurat,Seated Monkey(1884)

Fig. 9: Chuck Close,

Maggie(1998-1999)Fig. 12: Chuck Close,

Self-Portrait II(1995)


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tudes pour "Le Bec duHoc"(1885)


tudes pour "Gravelines"1890

Physicality of Picturing... Richard Shiff

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