One of the many artists and writers mentored by Bob was Stephen Westfall who generously helped edit this piece from a much longer transcript. artcritical joins me in thanking Stephen for his efforts in this endeavor. ES

ROBERT BERLIND: NSCAD [Nova Scotia College of Art and Design] [Berlind’s first teaching gig after graduating Yale] was a stronghold of conceptual art. And that was my first direct exposure to a lot of people who were involved with it and I found it very interesting. I was painting portraits at the time and I don’t think they knew what to make of it, except I think they thought it was conceptual. [laughter] And I painted everybody. Turned out that probably the most interesting people around were, you know, friends, students and faculty. And after two years I decided it was time to leave and I came to New York and I found this place for $250 dollars a month.

ELENA SISTO: No kidding? Oh my God.

[laughs] It was raw, this place.

When was this?

In 1976. And I got back all of my taxes that I had paid to the Canadian government because it was not more than two years.   The exchange rate was good at that time, so I came with about $11-12,000 dollars and was able to get started. And then I did gigs. I went out to the School of the Art Institute in Chicago and did a month. And a year later, NSCAD asked me if I’d come back to teach a foundation course because somebody was leaving. I said okay, and eventually started showing. A friend said, “You should be having a place to show your work and a place to publish your writing and a place to teach. ” And I got them all within a fairly short time.

Amazing

I was amazed.

So who were you showing with?

I first started with Alexander Milliken on Prince Street. I had a few shows there. Then I went to Jeanne Siegel on 57th and then I went to Tibor de Nagy and then I went to Findlay Fine Art.   I’ve left that and so now I don’t have representation. But I had a lot of shows in New York during the course of that time, and outside of New York. And I had—what was I painting? From the portraits, I got into painting spaces in rooms, windows and reflections in windows at night and so on. And those were the first paintings I did in my studio, which then had the old windows so it was kind of an interesting reflections, and looking through and painting the reflection at the same time. And it was clear by this time that my interest was really in probing perception itself and those situations where you see more than one thing at a time, like seeing through a window and seeing a reflection and seeing the window itself, you know? I thought how do you do that?

So you’re seeing three things—

Plus whatever—

Plus then you intermix them in ways that—

You find ways of trying to make that distinct. And sometimes with a portrait involved. In fact, I discovered how to deal with the glass by doing a portrait, and it was my peripheral vision that kicked in.

Oh yes, I see what you’re saying.

So I did a whole series of night paintings of windows, and then moved through the windows and made night paintings in the country and in the city outside.

What year are we at now?

1980, 1981. And I did a large series of night paintings, some of them very large, one up to fourteen feet. And—where did that go? Then I started doing them in the daytime. I mean it just opened up, you know? So I was painting mostly outside by that time and we had a place upstate.

 And you always paint from perception?

I always had, yeah. And I would go out and do a small—if it was very dark, dark, dark, I’d make a, just a rough charcoal drawing and come inside and make a little oil study, and if I had something, it would become a larger painting. And I stayed with that basically or I’d do a little painting outside. And I sort of fell in love with painting in a new way because every move you make counts for so much.

And I realized that’s what I was doing in the portraits, actually too. Because I had been doing pencil portraits for a while and rather stylized, and at one point I was working on somebody, earlier when I lived in New York, and I had a young woman, a Haitian woman who would sit for me sometimes. And one day she had her hair in curlers, these big curlers. And she was very pretty and I thought she looked like a princess, and I asked if I could paint her and she had to check with her family because this was not considered right. And I started a big painting of her. And I was having trouble with the drawing, getting it right, and then I started working directly with the painting. And I thought, this is amazing, it’s so much faster than drawing and says so much more, and everything you do counts in such a deliberate way. And I loved that. And that was really counter to my earlier idea about painting, which is about an abstract configuration that may or may not have a subject. So I loved that that my perception was leading my marks. And I was in love with that idea that it’s happening right now.

That ultimately—and I think going to Japan was part of this, many years later, in 2011. I got interested in the more synthetic aspect of Japanese culture. Which is to say, you’re doing a lot of different things and putting them together in a quite deliberate fashion. And I thought, well, that’s more conceptually controlled.

You mean “synthetic” in the sense of somewhat—

Synthesis of different things.

In the sense of synthetic cubism ?

Yes, it’s a synthesis of different perceptions, and perhaps even materials. And really, Japanese culture seems to me like that. The language is like that and the food is like that and one thing modifies another in interesting ways. And it wasn’t so much any painting that I saw. I always loved the Ukiyo-e woodblock prints and I studied that and made some while I was there. I’d go out and draw every day. I couldn’t set up and paint in the temple complexes, but I would draw the gardens and parts of buildings or whatever struck me. Toward the end of my time there, the rice paddies started coming up. I’d seen them being planted. I came back with some studies and drawings and photos and did mostly that for a couple of years once I got back.

Now, we’re coming close to the present, right?

Yeah. This was 2012, 2013. The paintings that you saw in the American Academy and that you’d seen here were all done here. A few of the first ones were done there. It hooked me. It related to things I had done before and I kept thinking, well, okay, that’s probably enough of this, and then I’d have an idea for another one and have to proceed. They’re part invention, part synthesizing different drawings or studies I had made and part inventing as I went along. I used to think if I really knew how to do something, it couldn’t be authentic. It was just repeating Abstract Expressionism. Not that those guys didn’t do exactly that but—You can spot any Ab-Ex painter from a block away because they have a signature for that and a way of handling paint and so forth.

Okay. Yeah. Which was against their ethos in a way.

But the idea was—Irving Sandler tells this story about being at the club one time and somebody standing up and saying, “When I approach that blank canvas, I have no idea what I’m going to do. It’s all, you know, just leaping into the void. I have no idea what’s going to happen. ” And someone said, something like “After twenty years? ” [laughs]

Oh, that’s great, yeah.

So that’s the end of Abstract Expressionism. [laughs]

When I was at the Studio School, I have this very great, very vivid memory of Rosemarie Beck sitting on the stairs going down into the drawing room, going like this, “Oh, it’s not possible! It’s not possible!” Meaning, you know, it’s not possible to make a painting.

Right. Right.

[laughs] I didn’t have the nerve, but I wanted to say, “Why are you teaching then,” you know? But that brings up a good subject, which—

It was a real shift in attitude.

It’s a real shift in attitude and, actually, when I was there, we were considered—if we thought about the market at all, we were considered dirty. But within a few years, all of those teachers were sneaking back up to us and saying, “Well, how did you actually get a gallery? ” you know? But there was a time period in the 1940s and 1950s where—the idea was not really about making money from your work. And then people started making money from their work. But along with the extreme of something like the Studio School or the Abstract Expressionist ethos came a certain attitude towards process, right?

And still very essential to my practice really. I think process is crucial.

So you’ve got that throwing yourself to the universe and finding your way back sort of?

No.

Well, I mean the ethos of the Abstract Expressionist, you know, in psychoanalytical terms would be to get yourself down into your unconscious, get lost and find your way out again.

Right.

And in that process, you’re making a painting. And then on the other end of the scale you’ve got people who are, you know, painting for the market. They already know what they’re painting. They have signature paintings. Someone can order a painting before it’s even painted—the waiting list. So bringing those two together without losing—it’s a very difficult balance to bring the integrity, even if it’s a little bit corny and a little bit false, maybe a little bit exaggerated, of the Abstract Expressionist ethos and then the practical considerations of needing to sell your painting in order to make painting.

Sure.

I mean the 1950 and the 1940s were the only time in the history of painting when people thought it shouldn’t be sold.  

That’s right, sure.

So for you, how have you resolved that conflict over time?

Well, I taught for years. I didn’t depend on sales. If I had something sold it was great, but it was gravy. I wasn’t ambitious. I wasn’t in New York until 1976 in a kind of really constant way. So I was very unprofessional in that way. I mean it wasn’t virtuous. Finally, it was not paying attention to something. But what continues to be true is that you have parameters within which you can work naturally, in some way that really connects to your proclivities, your abilities, your talents, your interests, so that whatever you’re doing, you probably find, well, you work certain sizes of painting. And if you get out of that suddenly you can’t make the moves that you’re used to making. If I am working on a painting and it’s the wrong size, I can’t get it.

Yeah. So in other words, you get lost but you’re lost within the parameters. So there’s a safety in knowing your parameters.

And if you lose that then you don’t know what you’re doing. And a lot of artists don’t know where they connect to what they’re doing, however good it might look.

Yeah.

Your work is very specific in size.

Mine?

Yeah. Very specific, and it wants to be that size and it doesn’t want to be—I mean if it got three times as large. But it wouldn’t be the same painting at all. So you’re working at a scale where you can feel it through and stay in touch with the entire image in every respect. And if one doesn’t find that it’s not going to feel right, either to the painter or I think ultimately to the viewer.

Well that brings me to the next question, I believe, because your parameters are obviously not only size. How would you describe what the parameters are that you work within, in every sense? Like the way you set up your studio, the way that you listen to music, how much stimulation you need from the outside . . .

I find I work best now in some seclusion. It’s great to be Upstate and in my studio and nobody sees the work until there’s a bunch of work. And somebody said, “Well, what is your inspiration? Where do you get your inspiration from?” And I think you get it from working. That’s where I really get the, you know, the forward drive, doing something and questions start to arise and possibilities and your appetite increases.

At the Studio School, painting was treated almost as if it was a calling rather than a profession. We spent eight hours every day and every night and on the weekend in the studio. And then when we weren’t in the studio, we were in the museum, and when we weren’t in the museum, we were in the library.   When I go into my studio, my ideal is to just sort of putter around, clean up, do things and not even notice that I’ve started painting. And then, you know, when you finish what you have to finish, you stop. And that takes many hours at least five every day, and many more than that. Do you feel similarly to that?

I do when I’m on. And when I’m off—like this winter, I didn’t do much work because my health was so bad. And then barriers start to get put in place somehow. I become more critical of what I’ve done, of what I’m thinking about doing, because all I have is my mind to think about it at that point, Then it’s very good to see some work that I love, you know, somebody else’s work—

To get your juices flowing—

Or just find a way in. And usually when I start, it’s right there, it’s just waiting for me. But I feel the obstacles and so I’ll be in a place where, oh, you know, maybe I’ll just take a nap or I’ll read or I’ll do yard work or I’ll do something else, where I find myself resisting, to a certain point, getting in to it. Because I know once I’m in it, it’s like, it’s consuming, you know?

I read a great Matisse quote, which I’m paraphrasing it, but he said, “You have to work every day all day long in order to be irresponsible enough to do what you need to do. ”  

Isn’t that great?

Because you don’t even know that you’re taking a risk at that point, that you might lose something if you pursue something.

That’s quite true. Because when you’re aware of taking a risk, it’s in relation to who you think you are.

That’s a good point.

You know, and who you think you are, that’s always beside the point in a way, isn’t it, for real work?

It’s totally beside the point.

Guston made this famous remark that when he goes in the studio, art history is there, his teachers are there, his critics, everybody, and then one by one they leave the studio. And then he said, “And finally I leave too. ” And then it’s clear time—then you’re in the zone to really work.

Yeah.

There’s a point where I don’t even know I’m painting. You just work, you’re just doing—you look and you know what to do next and you just keep doing what you need to do. And then you back off and you think about it, or somebody comes in the studio and you talk about what you do and you conceptualize things that didn’t necessarily come out of any clear plan.

So what else do you have to have in order in your life and in your studio in order to be creative?

Well, it helps once I’m on a trajectory, once I’m plugged into something, I would just go outside, look around and see something interesting and paint that. And I would discover what was interesting about it. It wasn’t just that it was pretty. It was that some issue emerged in the course of it. But it wasn’t with a lot of planning. I might have a notion I want a deep space or I want a certain kind of structure, but it wouldn’t necessarily be what I’d find. So I just followed my instincts and my pleasure in painting, or attraction to a difficulty, whatever that might be. For a long while I did images of water without ever thinking about water as my subject. I just like this play of reflection.

The rice paddy paintings?

The rice paddies as well. You can see the bottom, you can see a reflection, you can see a ripple, you can see something floating on it. And I did a lot of paintings of just that kind of a situation: streams or ponds or whatever in the country. That was already about more than one thing going on at once. And back to those windows, the things that keep attracting me were things that escape complete mental control in a way. There’s something going on that puts it in the now.

Something ambiguous, yeah.

And that itself had been a shift from an idea that, you know, the Impressionist idea that you’re just painting a field of vision. I thought Porter in a way extended that, though he was doing other things as well. And I thought, no, because a field of vision depends on what’s in your mind.

Yes, of course.

I mean that was Cézanne’s break, after all, from Impressionism, that it depends what you’re looking for or how you’re looking. So what you really see is not just how you’re painting or what it looks like. It’s how you are looking. So that ultimately that becomes a subject—not too self-conscious, hopefully, but that becomes a subject. And so you’re painting. I guess we’re all working on what it’s like to be alive in this world today, how we experience that in the most vital way that gets us actually doing something and tangling with it and wrestling with it and whatever else we do with it. And so painting requires a heightened desire to be painting.

As far as talent goes— I’ve always been very diffident about my own skills. I started a little bit later in school, you know, and I always thought, well, there are people who are so fluent — John Singer Sargent, to take an extreme case. And not that I want to make Sargents, but there are people who can just—a Rembrandt—have a thought and do a little squiggle and it’s all there. And I thought, God, I’m a long way from that. And then I realized, now, wait a minute, anything you really want to do, you can figure out how to do it. You know, I used to worry about, oh God, how can I mix those colors, I never kept track. It takes two minutes, I can mix anything—you know, thinking I won’t know how to, but it happens. So the difficulty of something is not an issue for me.

Do you premix your colors before you paint?

Sometimes I do. I intend to do it more for large paintings.

You intend to do it in the future or you always intend to and it doesn’t work out?

Well, I have intended to also but sometimes I can’t wait. [laughs]

Robert Berlind: Kyoto/Cochecton at Lennon, Weinberg, Inc. January 9 to February 13, 2016
Elena Sisto: Afternoons at Lori Bookstein Fine Art, March 17 to April 23, 2016

The post “What You Really See Is How You Are Looking”: Robert Berlind Interviewed appeared first on artcritical.

At the recent memorial service for Robert Berlind, who died December 17th after a long illness, friends and family members spoke movingly of Robert’s profound generosity of spirit, his equanimity, and his unflagging determination to experience life’s gifts even in his last weeks.

Over a fifty-year career Berlind produced an expansive and refined body of work that was rooted in landscape, reflecting a scholar’s knowledge of the history of art, and a contemporary artist’s relentless effort to understand how we perceive and integrate the visible and interior worlds. This effort was almost entirely camouflaged by the deceptive simplicity of his work, and yet it could be sensed in the considered organization of forms, and in the tensions he created across the surfaces and within the layers of his paintings.

The movement of Berlind’s vision reminded me of the gestures of a Tai Chi practitioner, gradually encompassing all dimensions of space (and time). We sense the scanning and tracking motion of his eyes as he sought and isolated particular fragments of the landscape. The artist Mary Lucier, Berlind’s wife of 22 years, beautifully captured his tight concentration in her video Summer, or Grief (1998), as his head moves quickly back and forth between the motif and the canvas he is painting. This working method resulted in a way of saying – through his paintings – Here, look at this. Pay attention—this snow shadow, this shivering reflection is really magnificent.

Berlind’s particular contribution came through the manner in which he superimposed layers of space and distance, foreground and background, as though the substances within each spatial level were compressed under a microscope’s cover slide, or seen through sheets of Mylar, one above the other. This layering and flattening of the levels of space contributed to a straightforward coolness and precision in his work can bring to mind Winslow Homer’s ravens waiting to attack a fox in the snow, or his hunted ducks careening above waves in mid-air. For me, Berlind’s approach to pictorial depth also metaphorically suggested that all things are (ideally) created equal, and that the hierarchies we impose on life are essentially artificial and divisive.

His ingenuity also came through in his articulation of the edges of things, either softened by movement or distance, or crisply delineated—as in the branches of Studio Roof #4, 2015, a painting to be shown in his scheduled solo exhibition next month at Lennon, Weinberg, Inc., his New York gallery. In the monumental (5 x 17 foot) Passage (2007), Berlind created a shimmering grid of interwoven branches and fluttering leaves that alternate between blurred and crisp focus, not unlike the dizzying sensation of watching a filmmaker pulling focus. Berlind’s mastery of subtle color reflected his affinity with such peers and mentors as Harriet Shorr and Robert Kushner, Alex Katz and Lois Dodd, but his greens were the envy of many painters, as he captured the symphonic range of hues reflected in stream beds, rice seedlings, and winter branches according to their position in the light, the time of day, or the season.

In addition to his work as a distinguished professor, and writer of art criticism, Berlind was also a supportive colleague in quieter and less visible ways. One day in 2005 while crossing Fifth Avenue I bumped into Bob as we were both heading up to see his exhibition at Tibor de Nagy. With his flashing blue eyes, laugh lines, and regal elegance Bob always resembled an 18th-century portrait of Voltaire. Immediately launching into animated conversation about studio problems, we became so engrossed that we almost got run over by a taxi.

Remarkably, Bob made a recording of his thoughts on dying and expressions of gratitude to be played at his memorial service, a gesture that conveyed the tremendous grace and awareness possible within loss. He will be remembered as an artist who was always interested in locating what was most alive in others’ work, and who scrutinized the world with searching curiosity, devotion, and love.

Robert Berlind: Kyoto/Cochecton opens Saturday, January 9, 5-7 pm, at Lennon, Weinberg, Inc., 514 West 25th Street, New York.

The post Deceptive Simplicity, Regal Elegance: Robert Berlind, 1938 to 2015 appeared first on artcritical.

This article, from 2006, was originally published at The New York Sun and is posted here in tribute to the late Robert Berlind on the eve of his solo exhibition at Lennon, Weinberg, Inc., opening in Chelsea Saturday, January 9, 2016.

Robert Berlind at Tibor de Nagy, Elizabeth Neel at Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert

The phrase “American-type painting” was coined by Clement Greenberg in the 1950s, in relation to Abstract Expressionism. With hindsight, however, that style looks both remarkably consistent across national boundaries and individualistic within the New York School. A stronger case can be made for an American-type realism that emerged in the postwar period, one alive and kicking to this day. I am referring to a frank, open, painterly naturalism based upon perception but as concerned with the fluidity of vision as it is with stasis: This almost cinematic sense of movement gives a whole school of landscape painting its unique, Yankee twang.

The tradition is probably rooted in a few strong individuals. If you imagine them as clusters of trees (which, almost symbolically, is a common motif among the painters I’m thinking of) then the tallest is Alex Katz — even if he is less known for his landscapes than his portraits — with Fairfield Porter, the late Neil Welliver, Jane Freilicher, and Lois Dodd as neighbors. Porter was Mr. Katz’s senior, but there has never been any doubt that the sense of inner light and the bravura smoothness first came from the younger painter.

Like Cornelia Foss, another painter currently showing, Robert Berlind could be thought of as a branch that teases the gaze as he flits between the upper rafters of these thicker trunks at Tibor de Nagy. (This could equally apply to George Nick, who recently signed up with Tibor.) In polite circles one tries not to describe an artist as a leaf off another man’s tree (as Oskar Kokoschka once dismissed Picasso, in relation to himself!). I point to this commonality not to question the originality of these painters, but to show that their style is part of a broad, collective endeavor specific in an enriching way to a time and place. Freshness can be a tradition.

Equally striking as Ms. Foss’s homegrown influences is her Frenchness. Her beachscapes in particular, painted in the Hamptons, bring Matisse and his disciples Marquet and Manguin to mind. Mr. Berlind also has a French connection, though in his case it cuts deeper into tradition: Delacroix, Courbet, and Cézanne are frequent visitors in his intellectually complex, deceptively charming works. Ironically, Mr. Berlind’s images, while more referential than that of Ms. Foss, also seems more casual.

Mr. Berlind often strives for the nonchalance of a snapshot. In this respect his work more closely resembles the painted Maine landscapes of Rudy Burckhardt than Mr. Katz’s mode of cropping, which is always aligned to the glamour of immediacy rather than quirkiness of chance. Mr. Berlind seems to look for the meaning within the slice of nature he has uncovered, rather than impose it by the a priori fact of making it his composition. This must have been what Irving Sandler had in mind when he wrote that Mr. Berlind “does not seek his subjects; they happen to him.”

There is a consistency of vision in Mr. Berlind’s paintings, such as this new group of work from the last three years, but there also is considerable variety of speed and touch, as if each subject demanded a different approach. He can veer from tight, meticulous, draftsmanly application to almost luxuriant scumbling; from obsessive faceting, in which each stroke is given specific weight and measure, to a kind of bravura flourish of serpentine strokes (Cézanne one moment, Sargent the next). The choice doesn’t seem the result of some inner caprice, but rather, on each occasion, a phenomenon caught his attention and demanded specific treatment.

Mr. Berlind has a great love for the reflection of trees and light in agitated water. “Stream and Rocks” (2004) is a tour de force within this genre: you get the contrast of solid, actual fixed rocks and the ephemeral film of reflectivity sluicing around them. Such an occurrence in nature obviously draws upon hidden reserves of virtuosity. But Mr. Berlind is never a show-off, always preferring his painterly plainspokenness: American-type painting has a stiff upper lip.

Mr. Berlind is insistently un-photographic: He is not about freezing a moment in time, but also avoids the modish Gerhard Richter-style smudge that suggests a camera overwhelmed by movement. Instead he brings fresh verve to old-fashioned means, demanding from paint a sense of the plasticity of time.

***

Elizabeth Neel’s must-see debut solo at Gasser and Grunert offers a radically contrastive response to landscape to that of Mr. Berlind and his tradition: There is nothing in her temperament to suggest puritan empiricism. She paints what seem at first to be neo-romantic jungles and forests — dense, wild, pulsating with life and danger. An accompanying text by John Reed informs us that the artist culls all her images at random from the Internet. Maybe the World Wide Web, in its chaos and unlimitedness, is a kind of contemporary wilderness: The locus of the sublime. Nature or ’net, however, Ms. Neel is herself a force of nature, painting with a majestic, violent bravura that recalls de Kooning and Francis Bacon.

Her work also bears a striking similarity to certain British painters from the 1980s that I’d be very surprised if she is aware of — Maurice Cockrill, Ken Kiff — as well as the Australian landscape painter Sidney Nolan. Perhaps there is a kind of eternal recurrence among modern romantic painters of exuberance when they are drawn to nature and its archetypes.

The wonder of her images is that with all the splash, splutter, scumble, pouncing, and dabbing going on there is amazing chromatic clarity. Many of her effects make you aware of the surface, yet she builds dense intimations of deep space. This comes about through an extraordinary balance of big, restless shapes and gestures, on the one hand, and tight, finessed detail on the other, with the washed out and the painterly fearlessly juxtaposed. It is very rare to encounter such a combination of energy and assurance in a young painter: Ms. Neel looks, literally, like an old master.

Berlind until July 8 (724 Fifth Avenue, between 56th and 57th Streets, 212-2625050).

Neel until June 18 (524 W. 19th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-807-9494).

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Robert Berlind, Eleanor Heartney, and Mark Stevens joined David Cohen to discuss Hans Haacke at Paula Cooper, Nancy Spero at Galerie Lelong, Duncan Hannah at James Graham & Sons, and Barbara Takenaga at McKenzie Fine Art.

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