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In 2012, Leila Philip and Garth Evans set out to challenge themselves as artists. Philip, an award-winning prose writer, wrote poems. Evans, an internationally renowned sculptor, made watercolors. Water Rising tells the story of this remarkable collaboration. Philip’s realist poems—about nature, beauty, love, and loss, set amongst Evans’ abstract, deeply hued, layered watercolors, create a book which is more than just a gorgeous read and a visual feast. What emerges in this book is a stunning and original collaboration, which, as Worcester Art Museum Director, Matthias Waschek, points out in his introduction, extends how we think about the relationship between painting and poetry.

As part of our Poetry for Art series, artcritical is honored to present three poems and watercolors from this collaboration. Water Rising is published by New Rivers Press, November 2015. For our sampling of this publication we have chosen the title poem, “Here” and “In the Drawing” with watercolors that appear in proximity to those poems on the printed page.

As Carter Ratcliff, the distinguished poet and art critic, writes of this collaboration:

Leila Philip’s poems are intricately accurate about the look and sound of natural things, the grand sweep of the seasons, and the elusively textured emotions that unite two people in a single enterprise. She is a particularly subtle kind of realist. Garth Evans, a non-figurative sculptor, is seen here as a watercolorist transposing the grand forms of his three-dimensional work to the flatness of paper. Her representations and his abstractions do not, at first glance, seem to have much to do with one another. With attentive reading and looking, however, we begin to perceive in his imagery intimations of specific things–qualities of light, shifting structures of space–and, in hers, openings onto vast, unnamable matters of hope and the flow of time. Each is as much an abstractionist or a realist as the other, and Water Rising joins their work in a magnificent unity.

Leila Philip, a regular contributor to artcritical, is the author of three previous books, including The Road Through Miyama (Random House 1989, Vintage 1991), for which she received the 1990/PEN Martha Albrand Special Citation for nonfiction, and the award-winning memoir A Family Place: A Hudson Valley Farm, Three Centuries, Five Wars, One Family (Viking 2001, Vintage 2002, SUNY 2009). Philip has received numerous awards for her writing, including from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Garth Evans is a British sculptor with an international reputation whose practice is central to the narrative of British sculpture. His work is included in major public collections, including: The Metropolitan Museum, Museum of Modern Art, NY, the Brooklyn Museum, Joseph H. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Tate Gallery, Victoria and Albert Museum, the British Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia, among many others. He is the head of sculpture at the New York Studio School.

Water Rising by Leila Philip and Garth Evans. New Rivers Press, $50.00 / Hardcover/60 pages. ISBN: 978-0-89823-336-0

To learn more about this collaboration and its environmental mission, please visit to www.water-rising.com

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“Garth Evans, Watercolors” at Lori Bookstein until January 7 (37 W. 57th Street, 212-750-0949).

“Lisa Hoke: The Gravity of Color” at Elizabeth Harris until December 23 (529 W. 20th Street between 10th & 11th Avenues, 212-463-9666).

“Alfred Leslie 1951-1962: Expressing the Zeitgeist” at Allan Stone until December 22 (113 E 90 th Street between Park and Lexington Avneues, 212 987 4997).

David Reed and Garth Evans are improvisors at the top of their form. Where Mr. Evans is like a laid back pianist tinkering away at a set of variations in a warm, quiet bar, Mr. Reed is the last of the big bandsmen, high in style, decibels, and spirits. Mr. Reed is showing new paintings at Max Protetch, Mr. Evans a set of watercolors in the project room at Lori Bookstein—in their different ways they both have us rethinking one of the most cherished dichotomies of the painting phenomenon: transparency versus opaqueness. Each is fascinated by the spatial depths and related emotional resonances of color and materiality. Each uses technique at a high pitch to play depth against surface, closure against ethereality. But the differences between them come down to more than mere mood or means.

Mr. Evans is the more old-fashioned of the two. You can tell right off that he is primarily a sculptor. It is not just because there is always a figure set against a ground (in his case geometric shapes rather than anything anthropomorphic). There’s also an awareness of the expressive value of roughness; although the page is saturated by watercolor used counter-intuitively with almost chalky, pigment-rich earthiness. There’s little instance of the watercolorist’s traditional love of the naked whiteness of the paper, and yet the support has presence: its physicality is played off against the illusion of receding space, achieved with billowing, brooding, pulsating color. The geometric forms have a complexity that subverts the space around them, tucking themselves back and forth within competing picture planes.

Mr. Evans is consumate in his skillful use of the medium and profound in his play with depth and surface, but there is something strong and honest about the use of material; we see through it to form. Mr. Reed, by contrast, is a wizard, a pyrotechnician with paint. He wows and disconcerts with his layering techniques. Where an Evans is spatial, a Reed is spacey. The former is rough on the edges, but you see what you are getting; the latter is silky smooth and slick, reveling in enigma. One is about form, the other style.

With Mr. Reed, the retina feels like its being seduced by a jelly-fish. His complexities of temperature and speed throw the eye about with a tricksiness of baroque proportions. His squiggles manage to recall at once medieval drapery and Bronx graffiti: Martin Schongauer meets Kenny Sharf. Actually, at his best he recalls Sargent in his painterly panache. Where Mr. Evans carves out strong, solid, albeit spatially ambiguous forms, Mr. Reed’s highly energetic, slippery, ethereal squiggles are much more about sensation as an end in itself, about perception than that the perceived. Observers have often remarked how his paint looks photographic. Like a photograph, we see right through the paint to the image it evokes, and yet his image IS the paint—philosophically he is as slippery as his squiggles, which is just the way we like it.

Lisa Hoke has seemed in the past an amusing decorator whose trademark motif would soon exhaust itself. Her installation at Elizabeth Harris puts paid to that: it is good, true and beautiful. She follows on neatly from Mr. Evans and Mr. Reed, not just because of a shared affection for serpentine forms and rich chroma. She has found a strategy to saturate the gaze without teasing the mind. Building effective, rich patterns from banal yet gorgeous means.

She recalls Antonì Gaudi in this regards: as his walls are encrusted with shards of gaudy, glistening ceramic, hers postmodernize the found object while preserving its jouissance with a vocabulary consisting, primarily, of two elements: found paper coffee or soda cups and plastic beakers quarter filled with paint. These are massed to form blocks of color, the cups protruding sculpturally, the beakers swirling into swathes of pure surface. These elements bring to mind the pioneers of painterly digitalism, Seurat and Klimt. She isn’t just about technique and its semiotic implications, however: there is genuine exploration of color sensations—not just chroma but hue. It is a major work that demands return visits to penetrate its depths, and to revel in its surfaces.

***

Alfred Leslie’s abstraction is the stuff of legend, for it is often told how he turned his back on an accomplished early style to embrace the new perceptual realism of the 1960s, the style for which he is better known. It turns out, as the cache Allan Stone has gathered together at his Upper Eastside Gallery, that he was a highly accomplished if somewhat derivative Abstract Expressionst in the 1950s. The experience of this show is rather like finding a vintage cadillac in a long locked garage: they are as fresh as the day they were painted and roaring to go.

There are undoubtedly strong influences from better known painters like de Kooning and Kline in the way emphatic brushstrokes define structure, chance effects are given full play, and the paint embodies the sensation of flesh, and there is probably some influence from such figures as Al Held and Milton Resnick. But the palette has a panache of its own that belies the existential heaviness of his peers, and the energy is prodigious.

I spoke with him as his show opened about the distance he must feel from his early artistic self. On the contrary, he sees absolute continuity between his charged, loose, gutsy bravura painting and collage of the 1950s and the hermetically tight realism, with its bid to create a contemporary history painting, of the subsequent decades, such as his Caravaggesque series devoted to the death of Frank O’Hara, or the monumental series of full-frontal male and female nudes. He stresses frontality, confrontation and all-overness as the underlying formal continuum.

There is a clue about his impatience with abstraction in the experimental movies he directed, two of which are being screened by Mr. Stone in a special projection room (including “Pull my Daisy” with a script by Jack Kerouac, who narrates). Ms. Leslie’s allegiance was to the avantgarde in its broad manifestation, not towards a specific style or technique.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, December 16, 2004

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August 6-22, 2003

End of season group shows are a little like summer movies. They have the advantage of setting out simply to please. In a category-loving art climate, the last exhibition usually relaxes the categories. Works tend to be smaller, allowing us to look at art scaled for actual rooms, not museum spaces. Galleries are more willing to chance work they are not committed to. The publicity machine gears down. After months of generating operatic press releases, galleries puts their feet up and let items on the wall summon their own audience.

Fine and surprising things surface in these closing medleys. While this exhibition spares us the artificial labors of a “theme show,” its focus on a single medium-watercolor- provides continuity among the disparate sensibilities and ranges of ambition that are part of its appeal.

Most of the work on show is by members of Zeuxis, a loose affiliation of artists devoted to still life painting. Many of them exhibit regularly in artist-owned and/or university galleries. The better known names-Garth Evans, Andrew Forge, Lois Dodd, Robert DeNiro, Sr.-are on loan from other galleries. Three come from Kouros’ own stable of artists.

Things begin with two paintings by George Constant, an early modernist best known in his lifetime as an etcher and engraver. Here is a rare look at his gifts as an abstract painter and a return to one fecund moment in the history of modern art. Petunias, a 1952 watercolor, offers a bouquet of forms that recall his contemporary, Baziotes. There is something of Sheila Delauney in these shapes as well. Field of Flowers, c. 1960, is a fluid, calligraphic dance of all-over color, dispersed with an energetic and graceful hand. Constant’s approach has its antecedent in Pollock’s Lavender Mist , which itself points back to Monet’s waterlilies. Contrast between figure and ground disappear. We look straight into the surface of a multi-colored field, its elements woven together with delicate strands of black ink.

Immediately opposite, counterposed to Constant, is the vertical Study for Venice with Bridge by watercolorist Jorge Eduardo. The rigor of the study gives a useful clue to the hyper-realism for which Eduardo is celebrated in his native Brazil. He brings the intensity of an archivist’s scrutiny to even the smallest detail. Eduardo has built a career recording Brazil’s loveliest locales and the architecture of its colonial past. Here, he turns his concentration on a typical view of Venice. For all his command of the medium, his affinity for local color and light, and his ease with architectural detail, the painting seems more a scene prepared for tourists than a personal response. Technique can sometimes become a bludgeon that intimidates the audience into confusing a sense of place with mere items in sight.

By contrast, Joseph Byrne’s four diminutive tree studies are lively and personal. They make no claim to be other than what they are: liquid caresses of a tree trunk. One especially delicious rendering recalls John Marin’s warning against reading things into paintings: “There’s the daisy-you don’t rave over or read messages into it. You just look at that bully little flower. That’s enough.” One bully little tree trunk is plenty.

John Goodrich’s high spirited contributions are a surprise. Gone is the broody quality I’ve come to associate with his oil painting. Both still lifes here, attentive to the effects of light and air, have summer written all over them. Other unexpected pleasures are the lush, ebullient landscapes by Carolyn Harris; the startling subtlety of Louise Matthiasdottir’s subdued consideration of the Hudson River, less showy than her usual chromatism but with greater depth; and David Dewey’s darkling portrayal of a Belfast street on the shadow side of sunlight. Ruth Miller is always a happy find.

Phyllis Floyd, founder of Zeuxis, offers lean, reduced figure compositions done on site in Madison and Bryant parks. Victor Pesce’s works, each focusing on a singe object afloat on a field of color, emphasize how much the appeal of his painting resides in his eye for placement, independent of the characteristic weight and texture of his oils. Robert DeNiro, Sr., who died in 1993, is represented by a pleasant, neo-Matissean trifle Teapot and Vase/Flowers. But name recognition lends heft to what is almost a studio throw-away, slight in structure and technique. (Its $16,000 thumb-in-your-eye sticker is an instructive moment in art world pricing.) Nell Blaine’s Darkening Sky, Gloucester, just as pricey, provides more to look at.

I have always enjoyed Andrew Forge’s writing more than his painting. Elegant and spare, his work has struck me as having an air of the podium about it-a distillation of style-conscious theories with little blood in them. Even so, I was drawn to the untitled watercolor submitted here. Discreet, luminous marks, arranged in repetitive, seemingly stenciled rows, drift across the paper. Shifting gossamer planes overlay and penetrate each other, massed in the upper left and sliding, in delicate glissando, toward invisibility at the lower right. It sends me away to rethink my responses to this most refined technician.

One of the true satisfactions here is the opportunity to see Garth Evans. Known most widely as a sculptor, his watercolors are small astonishments. Two of them hang near a window in the upstairs gallery, a turn of the head away from Forge. It is an inspired placement. The works of both men share a similar sense of sequence, of structure arising from spaced intervals-like notes of a musical scale (Forge) or interstices between overlapping geological structures (Evans). Both make the most of transparency while letting color drive their compositions.

Similarities end there but how does one describe the difference? Or the quiet pleasure of Evans’ inventiveness, his lyricism, contained in a geometry of his own devising? This is painting that has to be viewed up close. At a distance, color and outline assert themselves easily. But the magical subtleties of surface and errantry of lines dissolving into worked paper reveal themselves only on close embrace. It is hard not to lean just a little closer to one particularly enigmatic, darksome piece just to kiss it.

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