This essay is published in a book that accompanies the artist’s exhibition, “because I have no interest in those questions: photographs, paintings and painted photographs” at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, 208 Forsyth Street New York City, 917-861-7312.  November 19 to December 21, 2014

What more is there to a photo than a curious and prurient glance? And yet it is also a fascinating secret. – François Laruelle, The Concept of Non-Photography, 2012.

Stuart Shils is a painter.  His very being has come to be filtered through the act, substance, and legacies of paint.  The place of photography in his life is a case in point.  That he photographs with acumen and passion, relishing what are for him new expressive possibilities, is borne out by this publication and its related show, but his photography is, as Clausewitz might have put it, the continuation of painting by other means.

A latecomer to the feast, Shils is indifferent to the order of courses.  He has a hunger, but the kind of hunger induced by nibbling, not the kind that brought him to the table in the first place. In any event, he seems impatient with gadgetry, preferring the low-tech of the iPhone even to the user-friendly pocket Leica D-5 given to him in 2007 by his friend, the late Roy Davis, the gift that launched this adventure.

The classically trained painter could have gone in different directions, applying equivalent rigors to those that are now second nature in the painting studio, or “chilling out” with the instantaneity offered by his new toy.  In any event, there is an indifference towards post-shutter finesse—the developing, editing or printing aspects of photo craft.  But that is changing, inevitably, as he prints up his images for exhibition and is forced to address issues of size and scale and texture. It is changing also in a departure in which he actually paints on photographic supports (pace Richard Hamilton or Gerhard Richter) suggesting equally painting asserting its primacy over the newfound interest or an increasingly openness to medium fluidity.  But technological ease is still essential to Shils’ belated embrace of photography.

He is a bit like those resolutely abstract painters whose photography is less the scouting for source material than it is the registering of equivalents of their form-vocabulary in the observed environment. I’m thinking of artists like Ellsworth Kelly, Sean Scully and Joe Fyfe.  Except Shils is not quite (perhaps indeed is hardly at all) an abstract painter.  His painting is always rooted in observation and experience of actual places, however generalized the sensation of looking may feel in his pared down evocations.

Another way in which the camera is subordinate to the easel in the ontology of image-formation is that his photographs are continuations of the act of painting rather than merely its resulting images. His discovery is of correlatives of painting in the layering that exists—or rather that is revealed to exist through slow looking—within the humanly built environment.  His photographic motifs often entail viewings through meshes and apertures and coming back at the viewer/photographer in mirrors or reflective panes—instances of observation that structurally mimic camera work.  In much the same way, the palimpsest of screens and frames that characterize his photographic motifs are equivalents of a painting process that is somehow at once alla prima and layered, marked equally by impressionistic responses and minutely deliberative editing, a kind of temporal push-pull that exploits dichotomies of composure and snap.

The iPhone suits the interventions of his eye upon the urban scene, as tool of communication and instantly handy jotter. A latter-day flaneur, Shils bikes around his native Philadelphia finding in its understated poetry a twin city to the Naples of Thomas Jones.  He is a wonderful guide to the underbelly of this city, as I have discovered on car rides with him, marveling at the architectural grandeur of its industrial age, offering almost archaeological insights into its social transformations.  I have dubbed him a connoisseur of slums, although his tours and evident astonishment at all he witnesses is the opposite of ruin porn.  His vision cuts through layers of renewal and decay, alerting him tosignifiers of alienation and aspiration. He is, in equal measure, aesthete and citizen.

It is odd that an artist who was a student in the 1970s managed without photography in his artistic life for so long.  Perhaps shunning the medium was a statement (to himself or the world), an affirmation of the totality of vision contained by painting and drawing.  And yet, as a teacher and voracious gallery goer, Shils is nothing if not ecumenical: give and take characterizes his attitude towards artists of all mediums.

Could it be that he had no need of the apparatus because he himself was the camera, in the Sally Bowles sense?  But that seems too cute, especially as Shils’ realism, even in his cooler, crisper earlywork, never aspired to mechanically impartial empiricism.  More likely photography seemed a distraction from the delicate ecology of looking and feeling constantly evolving in his painting practice – an unwelcome third wheel.  What has changed is not just his own security and balance but also perhaps the radically fluid, informal nature of photography itself in its post-celluloid and iPhone incarnation: with Shils and photography, medium and messenger are meeting half way.

Shils’ photography echoes the adventures of millions who use this technology almost unselfconsciously, and stands apart from the quasi-cinematic efforts of much fine art photography that exploits scale, precision and theatrical composition almost as means of distancing itself from popular use.  And yet, ironically, precisely by bringing painterly verve to iPhone quickies, Shils’ low-tech photographic imagery actually recalls the immaculately composed, attempting-to-be-painterly photography of the medium’s first half century.  His photographs, like his paintings, entail a strange chemistry of contrastive speeds.  Despite the layering and the relish in the discovery of layering, his images are a kind of suspended clarification, a sudden gestalt.  “Content is a glimpse” as de Kooning put it.

Just as his painting entails a back and forth between the painterly and the perceptual, between making and seeing, between plastic metaphor and actual moments of observation, so his photographic touch oscillates between clarity and blur, accident and set-up, purposiveness and nonchalance.  His iPhone is a weapon in the front line of seeing, in the fog of perception.

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Stuart Shils: Works on Paper
Davis & Langdale Company, Inc.
231 East 60th Street
New York City
212-838-0333

No other medium has watercolor’s blend of luminosity and directness, and none requires so sure and responsive a touch. With larger watercolors, it becomes even more difficult to maintain a spontaneous effect. Big dimensions, however, obviously present no problem for Susan Shatter, whose immense landscapes and seascapes at DFN Gallery show both a formidable technique and a remarkable freshness. These works are confined to two motifs: Southwestern desert canyons and rocky Maine shores, and they contain virtually no trace of human, animal, or plant life. Because of their downward point of view, only small strips of sky occasionally appear at their upper edges. This concentration on the elemental, though, allows a vital, organic exploration of whole environments.

Ms. Shatter works from preparatory studies, but even her largest watercolors have the fluidity and breadth of first-hand responses. Forms are confident and hues clear—even in shadows with multiple layers of color—so that the great masses in the six-foot-wide “High Desert I” (2005) sort lucidly into buttes and valleys spreading below one’s gaze. Orange and burnt sienna washes become a dramatic projection of rock in the foreground; its sides drop hundreds of feet to a rocky plain captured in darker washes of ultramarine, cerulean and crimson. Scarlet ranges of hills and green and pink valleys draw the eye, point by point, to the horizon of this inhospitable world awash with color.

The depiction of vast, exotic spaces in this watercolor and in its only slightly smaller companion “High Desert II” (2005) is dazzling, and yet I prefer the dramas of her seascapes. In four large works in the gallery’s main space, sea and rocks occupy approximately equal amounts of paper, so that their compositions resound with the penetrating entanglement of the two. In works like the nearly ten-foot-wide “Crash” (2006), Ms. Shatter maximizes the contrast of fluid and faceted worlds: the translucent depth of the sea, rolling with blues and greens and crested with white ribbons of foam; the prismatic array of warm, compact lights and darks. The visual collision invokes the sensation-saturating rhythms of the real thing—so startlingly that one struggles remember it’s only diluted pigments on paper.

Don’t overlook several small seascape studies in the gallery’s viewing room. These have every quality of the larger ones except the physical dimensions. If they’re less impressive technically, they show a wonderfully intimate, one-to-one correspondence between nature’s gestures and the artist’s responses, with that immediacy available only in watercolor.

If Ms. Shatter pursues wild expanses, Stuart Shils mines the nuanced and diminutive.

His recent monotypes at Davis & Langdale depict scenes from his hometown of Philadelphia as well as from trips to Ireland, Israel, Vermont and Indiana, but like his oil paintings they explore a relatively narrow niche: small, simplified compositions rendered in evocative, atmospheric strokes of color. All these prints measure about six inches square and date from 2006.

Mr. Shils’ painterly textures would seem ideally suited for timeless subjects, but in “From Guy’s Balcony, Ahad Ha’am Street #1,” he vigorously tackles the crisp, modern geometry of a modern, multi-story Tel Aviv building. Here, hues energize a straightforward composition. A vibrant deep blue sounds the shadowy cleft between two buildings, one of them partially covered by a lighter gray that has just the right pressure of a shadow cast by the other building. Above them, Mr. Shils’ masterful textures—brisk, but sensitively tuned—lends the sky a humming depth.

As is sometimes the case with his paintings, Mr. Shils’ monotypes can be over-reliant upon such textures. For instance, the approximated shapes and location of colors in “From Emek Ha Matzieva” leads to a certain slightness of effect, as if the artist were content with just invocations of atmosphere.

Hanging next to it, however, “Along 33rd Street, Strawberry Mansion, North Philly,” has a brightness of rhythm to match its hues. Here, colors not only shift restively about—moving in this case from the vibrant orange-reds of sunlit brick facades to the sky’s spacious cobalt blue—but also build with intense, concise sequences. After the march of orange-red brick, a shadowy violet cuts back abruptly across the buildings above the punctuating note of a tree. A deep blue diamond of roof, weighted by its location and color, provides the essential separation of buildings and sky.

On another wall, “Rooftops, Night Descending” is a true gem. With Turner-esque élan, Mr. Shils places a building in the mid-distance, so that its front, illuminated by late-afternoon sun, glows against the contrasting darks on its every side. A particularly dark blue plunges in space to one side; in it, a slender tower rises, the print’s lightest note, addressing us from afar. Small ragged notes of white—bits of the paper showing between strokes—attest to the energy of ink application, matched in this case by a dynamic conception of the subject.

This article first appeared in the New York Sun on October 26, 2006 under the title “Watercolors Wild and Tidy”

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December 2, 2004 – January 8, 2005

Stuart Shils is an artist both of great refinement and dramatic emotion. His recent paintings at Tibor de Nagy were done in Ballycastle, on the wild northern coast of County Mayo, under the auspices of The Ballinglen Arts Foundation. He has painted there every summer for the last ten years, each time returning with a hauntingly beautiful body of work.

His landscapes dwell on the uncertain border between representation and abstraction; increasingly, they cross into pure suggestion. Landscape is inseparable from scenery; yet scenes all but dissolve, Turner-like, in these modestly scaled oils. In their place is something more elusive, harder to evoke: the mood of a locale and the temper of its weather. With each successive show, Mr. Shils reveals himself as a poet of atmosphere.

Paintings are small, never more than 12 by 14 inches. In part, the size accommodates the demands of travel. At the same time, it is absolutely right for the intimacy of Mr. Shils’ response to fugitive conditions of light and mist. As he admits: “In a moment it’s all over anyway because the clouds are moving like stage sets in front of the sun and now it’s gone flat.”

Drenched in fogs surging in from the North Atlantic, Mayo is kissed by a cool Artic light so distinctive that it has its own name: the Blue Charm. Mr. Shils pays homage to that light, refracted through moisture and seized with plein air veracity. His titles have the ring of notes to himself jotted down on site. A literary touch, they confirm the sense of sheer immediacy passionately conveyed by each work.

“Gentle Morning, Drifting Sun, Toward the Stella Maris” (2004), a radiant panorama of Bunatrahir Bay from the high coastal road, comes closest to description. Yet even here, no definitive contours slow the movement of the painting. The Stella Maris, once a fortress, is a blurred rectangle of subdued white cresting an expanse of modulated greens and cobalts that evaporate into cloud. Truth to nature is in his color; delineation is needless.

The simplicity of his painting belies the mastery that permits Mr. Shils the freedom of his responses and insures the luminous delicacy of his results.

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