Comments on: Maelstrom Gathering Energy: Milton Resnick in the Seventies and Eighties

By: Ken Greenleaf

Ken Greenleaf — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 00:17:43 +0000

I know very little about Resnick’s studio habits and have only come across various hunks of gossip about his personality, as one does, but the word ‘dutiful’ seems right for this show. I kept having a sense of someone reluctant to do the work but pushing on in the belief that it needed to be done. There is something honorable about going ahead in the face of doubt and for the sake of a better work. I don’t know if this was true, but it certainly felt like that when I was there and I accepted that sensation with some admiration.

By: Eric Sutphin

Eric Sutphin — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 03:50:30 +0000

Thank you for your response and insight into Resnick’s work. In this review I use “dutiful” to assert Milton’s persistent commitment to painting, not as a formal assessment of the works themselves. In preparing for the review I watched footage of Resnick at work in the 90’s and yes, he was quite loose with large house painting brushes and very fluid paint. In the work presented there are moments where Resnick’s “gusto” comes through, namely in the “Straws” works. Some of the paintings are however worked almost to the point of inertia, traces of bright pigment are evident beneath months of oil paint, so there seems to me a feeling of encasement or restriction. Resnick said himself that when a painting left his studio and went into the world it became something else. While anecdotal bits about Resnick’s studio habits are interesting (more of which I’m sure I can find in your book) I’m not convinced that they lead me to a deeper understanding of what he was after in his finished paintings.

By: geoffrey dorfman

geoffrey dorfman — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 22:25:30 +0000

‘Lightness of touch is gone, as loose handling is eschewed in favor of dutifully executed, plaster-like finishes,’ is not my impression of this work nor of the artist. The handling was always very loose, and Milton worked with very large brushes, often dipped into several colors at once, (unmixed) and moved the paint around with gusto and authority. The paint was all handmade and milled only once which made it unruly, and this appealed to him, as did working with different consistencies of paint more or less simultaneously. As heavy as these pictures are, half of the paint ended up on the floor. So terms like ‘dutifully executed’ which sounds like you’re describing a legal writ, not a ‘Maelstrom,’ and ‘plaster-like’ which implies an inert encasement, are really antithetical to the type of engagement this artist had with his art, and frankly the look of it as well. If you want ‘dutiful’, you can look at Robert Ryman.