January 25th to April 21st, 2018
23 South Front Street, Milton, PA 17847
Thursday, Friday, Saturday, 12-6PM

The Crash of 1929 has had at least one excellent consequence for art in the twenty-first century. In Milton, Pennsylvania the new bank that had just opened its doors was barely able to gasp on for a few years before going belly up. After a second life as a library, the bank building has been remade as an art exhibition space: The Milton Art Bank. Founded by artist and writer Brice Brown last year, their current exhibition, Trevor Winkfield: Early and Later, is a compact retrospective of thirty paintings and collages.

The exhibition spans the years 1968 through 2010. A number of these works have never been shown before nor reproduced. These previously aloof works offer their own perspective on how the ever-evolving Winkfield has changed over the past four decades.

Winfkield has been painting, first in his native England and the past few decades in New York City, since the early 1960s. A long hiatus in the early 1970s, during which he concentrated on writing had, in the end, greater implications for his art than for the world of literature. The writing star Winkfield followed during this period was the French eccentric Raymond Roussel who employed a number of verbal techniques—including puns, vowel shifts, taking a pen-nib cleaver to multisyllabic words, et al—to find bursts of inspiration to generate his writing. Winkfield mastered this approach in a number of quirky, humorous fictions, and kept it in mind when he returned to painting. For a number of years he constructed his works from Roussel-inspired chains of personal word and image associations. So seamlessly have these strands been braided together that we can almost never see evidence of the process. One instance where he has deliberately left it on the surface is The Painter and His Muse (1996), where an easel and an eagle confront one another, separated by a single consonant. More recently (Winkfield is smilingly evasive about the timeline) the construction has become more instinctive, while, as this exhibit illustrates, even more complex.

Circling the bright white rectangle of the room viewers can clearly see some changes over time, one example being how Winfkield’s color sense—saturated shades, ungraduated, with crisply defined edges—has remained individual (nothing straight from the tube, ever) even as it has gradually taken on more of a dynamo hum, brightened toward the neon. Other changes can be sensed, but evade dry analysis. Images and elements repeat, appear in more than one work, but never seem repetitive, the felt contexts of their new surrounds keeping them fresh.

Although the show is not hung chronologically, the first painting the visitor comes to is Cave (1976), which in turn was the first painting Winkfield did upon his return to painting. This small painting depicts the view from inside a cave, its exit blocked by a rickety grid of wood slats and looped rope. Is this an allegory, a p. o. v. self-portrait of an artist reemerging? Quite possibly, but with its striking contrasts of coal black and slate blue cave walls with the bright sky beyond, the painting is also a recognition of the lure of the painted image.. While Cave uses only five colors, this show as a whole reminds us that Winkfield has employed an almost uncountable range of colors over the years. (This is further highlighted by the Bank space, whose very tall walls are so white they almost glow.) Near Cave hangs one of the most chromatically rich paintings in the exhibition, First Prize: Three Apples (2001). This features two figures comprised, as are the best of Winkfield’s figures, of stacks and lively mobiles of curious objects, all precisely detailed, only a few identifiable. The colors range from a pale yellow ground to a deep black background sky.

Meticulously smooth surfaces, with each image laid in like a decal, are so consistently a feature of Winkfield’s paintings that the pieces here that have a more obvious material presence—a collage study for a magazine cover; a triangular clownish face in crisp papers; a study collage of stele proportions (17 inches wide, eight feet tall)—catch the viewer’s eye. The striking and eerie Eye, Tree, Prospect Park (2008) is an acrylic-on-paper collage study for a painting. Even the shallow degree of depth that the overlapping, stiff papers exhibit, like bright thin shale, conveys a not-quite-settled feeling in contrast to the characteristic Winfkield surface.

At times the tinkered-together arrays Winkfield assembles are painted with awkward couplings to convey a deliberate disjointedness  But only in one painting, Father and Son (1982), do the pieces fail to cohere with a common energy, seem randomly laid into the space; a snapshot of a worktable rather than a finished composition.

Father and Son is one of three works that hang in the Art Bank’s vault, a mini-exhibition space the size of a large elevator in which the viewer can feel immersed in Winkfield’s imaginary worlds, with works on three close-quartered sides. Also in the vault is Republic of Small Children I (1980), in the middle of which are two small children exclaiming something in a muddy town square, a scene simultaneously bright (though the pallet of this early work has a slight, deliberate, washed-out cast left behind in the more recent works) and somehow sinister. The third vault work is Home from Home (1984), a wholly successful, multi-planed painting with a terrifying witch-like figure front and center, her complexion resembling that of the moon in Le Voyage dans la lune, a 1902 film Winkfield admires.

What had been upper level offices in banking days has been walled off and three large canvases—the largest being Voyage 1 (1995), four by six feet of brightly colored Muybridge- like rhythmic progress— hang there, floating above viewers’ heads. Also included here, resting on a window ledge, is the most successful of Winkfield’s occasional series of 12 by 12 inch works I’ve seen, Upwardly Dripping (2009). Where most of these small works strike the viewer as tweezed-out selections-from or samplers—that is, suggest they are lifted from more complete works—Upwardly Dripping, divided as it is along the horizontal, generates enough tension between its top and bottom halves, which seem to be fleeing one another, that is is very much able to stand as a complete work on its own. So much so that the window to the wider world just behind it merits not even a passing glance in comparison.

Winkfield enthusiasts should also note that a show of his recent paintings has recently opened at Tibor de Nagy in New York City. Anyone able to attend both exhibitions will be afforded a rare opportunity to observe Winkfield’s evolution over a span of more than forty years.

The post A Credit-Worthy Show of Trevor Winkfield, at Milton Art Bank, Milton, PA appeared first on artcritical.

How I Became a Painter: Trevor Winkfield in Conversation with Miles Champion, newly out from Brooklyn’s Pressed Wafer, is a book comprised of an interview between the England-born and NYC-based Winkfield, a painter, and Champion, a poet. The conversation took place over several meetings during 2009 and 2010 in a West Village park, and was suggested to Champion by his friend, the poet Kyle Schlesinger, for an issue of Schlesinger’s magazine, Mimeo Mimeo. As Champion later related, the book begins with a “[focus] on Trevor’s activities as an editor and publisher, so that, when we were done, it seemed natural to do a second interview in which Trevor talked about his art. And then it occurred to us that we had a book.” And so, after several meetings and Champion’s careful editing, the accompanying images were selected and How I Became a Painter was well under way.

This is, above all else, a dialogue between two friends; it is one essentially of humor, affinity, adventure, and down-to-earth talks whose subjects and interests engender further exploration, which of course will only produce more probing by whomever is playing the foil. A particularly satisfying object in itself, the book is a small paperback volume with a handsome, colorful acrylic painting by Winkfield, entitled The Third Page, as its cover. Its design and layout are remarkable, and in keeping with the artist’s work: clean, deftly arranged, and supremely pleasant to look at. The content of the conversation, also like Winkfield’s work, leaves a strong after-image in one’s mind. The cover stock is matte, with the “soft furry” feel similar to what Winkfield fawns over in describing John Latham’s books (p. 29), and its interior page is finely suited to the images of his own works, which are composed with house paint for a more flattened look and a newsprint-like texture to temper his brighter hues.

The conversation commences without fanfare or introduction; it has no need for insightful preface or literary epigraph. A black-and-white 1968 photograph of young Winkfield smiling in Leeds greets us as the frontispiece, followed by two facing-page images of a watercolor from Winkfield’s germinal years, and a Francis Bacon figure study from 1945-46. And that’s how the book graciously proceeds: full color images of works mentioned throughout the conversation, which is chock-full of references, figures, and epithets that demand further looking.

Winkfield has no hesitation or secrets, and freely admits to copy-cutting, misunderstanding texts, not understanding, and being “stupid as a painter.” This type of candor is an endearing Winkfield attribute, one that can’t be missed when reading his impressions — the freedom with which the painter shares his inspirations, good works, and insights is a major part of the interview’s irresistibility. And there are gleeful, ingenious insights to be gained through glimpses, not just of ideas, but chiefly of Winkfield’s procedures in painting and drawing, with which Champion relates and is attuned to through his own use of diversely juxtaposed images in the writing of his poems.

With Winkfield’s drawing at the end of the book, That Various Field for James Schuyler, there’s an unmistakable view into the compositional practice of simple elements in complex relationships. Here he uses solid black ink lines that render the dissimilar but excitingly paired side of Dionysus, a diminutive rectangle of tartan, and branch-cuts of acorns being poured into a bowl held by a woman’s long-nailed hand. “Sharing a quality with poetry,” as Champion points out, we get a more complete picture of Winkfield-as-painter (in Champion’s telling) in his use of color, which he employs as a “unifying agent” (p. 103). They draw a keen comparison to Ted Berrigan’s word-brick Sonnets and works by Clark Coolidge and Larry Eigner, all of whom created a kind of “poetry that seemed more built than written, the words as building blocks, each flatly displayed in natural light, with no shadows or recesses in which the author as ego could grow monstrous” (p. 102).

Citing the discovery of the endlessly fascinating Raymond Roussel (Winkfield has edited a volume of Roussel’s work into English, called How I Wrote Certain of My Books, 2005) as one of the two greatest art events of his life, it’s apparent that the material of the interview, too, is an analogy of the procedure of moving pieces to form a picture (or story), and here one finds a paradigm of the imaginative process. The interview’s composition could almost have been constructed on the theme of the jigsaw Winkfield mentions: “how to look at pictures closely, and how abstract — almost incomprehensible — large areas would often remain until the final two or three pieces were found and also slotted into position,” (p. 12), harkening one to Georges Perec’s preamble to his incredible novel Life, A User’s Manual. In one of Winkfield’s Rousselan responses to Champion, he says “I think you’re right about influences … one could unwrap them endlessly” (p. 12), to prize open a box of delightful images, anecdotes, curiosities, and give the Q&A an absolutely perfect metaphor for the function and charm of the painter’s oeuvre.

The poet-painter relationship and intersection are key here. How did Winkfield become a painter? By way of knowing and admiring poets and their works, after having done the heavy lifting (of seeking and long-looking at masterpieces), starting way back in his teenage years in the 1950s. And after an intervening time wherein Winkfield had stepped away from the canvas, it was incidentally the poet Kenward Elmslie who, in the 1970s, sparked Winkfield’s realization that it was again “time to attack the picture plane” (p. 63). Champion also masterfully cajoles his subject in the matter of beginnings, recounting the painter’s return and long-wrought crystallization of his later and current manner, with imagination and craft.

The two men seem to cover everything in a couple of outdoor park sittings, but in a somewhat sequential, if forensic manner. From the exploration and explication of place, to the complex matter of creative abandon in lieu of conventional life and the elite, from which Winkfield has somehow managed to abscond without turning his back, having discerning taste without snobbery. In fact, he has gone to some lengths to make known his appreciation for the unacknowledged precursor, the Larry-Fagin-dubbed Neglecterinos, the “second-tier artists… waiting to be visited, if you jettison that academic straightjacket called ‘hierarchies,’ the idiocy that keeps everything in its preordained place” (p. 41). The desertion of hierarchy is key to Winkfield’s approach of discovery and invention, major and minor artists being interchangeable. This statement from his friend Harry Matthews, “language by its nature makes us focus on its conclusions, not its presence,” (The Case of the Persevering Maltese) makes perhaps more immediate sense when considering the creative process and the fantasy of popular success and prizes, which Winkfield and certain of his contemporaries shrewdly take note of.

The conversation is so robust, so matter-of-fact, one feels the two should not be conducting an interview, but catching up after an extended time apart. Both Champion and Winkfield seem to view what others call “art,” and discovering art, as acts of interest and pleasure, and for the reader, this proves to be a suitable historical record of some of the best of these acts. It’s true the two gentlemen situated themselves in a New York park that day and perhaps wandered bodily a bit, but the voyage they took their reader on may as well have been from a balloon — gliding over the whole world as the best literature gives license to do.

Trevor Winkfield and Miles Champion, How I Became a Painter: Trevor Winkfield in Conversation with Miles Champion (New York: Pressed Wafer, 2014). 112 pages, ISBN 978-1-940396-02-6. $20.

The post Origin Stories: A Poet and Painter in Conversation appeared first on artcritical.

Collage is inextricably linked in historic consciousness with poetry in no small part because of the intimacy of its artistic inventors with poets. Pablo Picasso and George Braque, the inventors of the medium, were championed and inspired by poets like Blaise Cendrars, Pierre Reverdy, and Guillaume Apollinaire, the last of whose verbal experiments invariably entailed play with typography—arrangement of words on the page could be as much a visual as a verbal gambit. Among the Dadaists and Surrealists, there were no union demarcation lines between painter and poet preventing wordsmiths from picking up their scissors: The poets of those supremely literary movements made collages and “found” objects, just as many of the visual artists wrote — in the 1930s, during his close association with Surrealism, Picasso devoted much energy to verse.

Is there something intrinsic to the appeal of collage to writers — to moving bits of paper around in startling, revelatory juxtapositions? The coincidence of two shows of collages by writers of markedly different ilk – a sometime poet laureate and a member of the third estate – begs the question. John Ashbery is the subject of a display of collages made from his undergraduate days at Harvard in the late 1940s to a series from 2008 that use chutes and ladders boards as their support. Mario Naves, who is perhaps better known as art critic for the New York Observer, has his fourth solo exhibition at Elizabeth Harris Gallery since 2001.

The coincidence, and the connection with writing, intensifies around the identification of both men with the postcard. Mr. Ashbery is a consummate collector of postcards, and receiver and sender of them, too. Many of the collages in this show use a postcard as the support; they are framed to allow sight of the recto text, appropriately for objects as likely to be collected for their literary as artistic interest — and with Mr. Ashbery, as we are dealing with images and impulses, the distinction between the two is refreshingly fuzzy. Friendship plays a profound role in his collage activities: the 2008 chutes and ladders collages use source materials gifted to him by the late Joe Brainard and are unquestionably an homage to that poetry world artist.

Mr. Naves, who in this show returns to a welcome intimacy of scale, calls his collages “Postcards from Florida,” as they date from his brief tenure as Professor of Drawing at the Ringling College of Art and Design in Sarasota.

The types of collage Messrs. Ashbery and Naves favor occupy different ends of the spectrum in relation to the key issue with this medium: the legibility and relevance of the source material. In Mr. Ashbery’s images, the sources are virtually pristine. There are figures and objects cut from historic engravings or old magazine advertisements and then placed in equally intact though incongruous, dreamlike scenes and settings. In “Diffusion of Knowledge” (1972), for instance, a pair of comic strip action heros flex their muscles on a postcard of the Smithsonian Institution. There is a strange misregistering of the buildings in the background, as the familiar tower seems shadowed by a stenciled doppelganger in bright orange. But there is no confusion about the sources, only the encounter.

In Mr. Naves, by contrast, the imagery is entirely abstract, and the source material, which consists of painted tears of crumpled papers, is fabricated for collage purposes by the artist himself. Where Mr. Ashbery comes from the collage tradition of Max Ernst and Braque, Mr. Naves looks more to Henri Matisse’s late great cutouts and Jean Arp. The emphasis is on shapes created rather than figures isolated; it is more an aesthetic of unity than incongruity, and is less subversive.

Paradoxically, it could be argued, each writer tends to the opposite extreme in their visual and verbal work. Complicating this idea is the fact that besides his poetry, Mr. Ashbery writes clear, precise, accessible prose commentary on art and literature, but the work for which he is best known and admired is deeply, notoriously difficult. His collages, on the other hand, are formally bright and transparent, tending towards immediately accessible story lines and inherently attractive source materials.

Mr. Naves, by contrast, a journalist whose opinions are as bright and punchy as any editor could wish for, makes jolie-laid abstract art that is rough at the edges, scruffy, almost nonchalant in its casual disregard for any sense of a central organizing principle. The historic collagist he most closely resembles is the German Dadaist Kurt Schwitters (whose example also enthused the Harvard undergrad according to Mr. Ashbery) in drawing upon detritus whose desuetude survives the alchemy of its artistic transmogrification.

True, Mr. Naves’s “crap” consists of studio stuff, as opposed to bus tickets and candy wrappings from metropolitan streets, and it was originated by the artist for intended transformation. But the result constantly stresses distress and arbitrariness — papers are crumpled as if underfoot; there is never “pure” color but instead the contingency of splodges and brushstrokes are always manifest. The initial impression of the scarred, battered surfaces of Mr. Naves’s collages is of a segment of billboard where layers of old posters have been stripped and scraped away — a form already made into art by the Italian pop artist Mimmo Rotella.

So, two highly accomplished visual artists who just happen also to be writers? That seems too easy a conclusion. Mr. Naves – in contrast to public perception of him – is an artist who also writes, whereas with Mr. Ashbery, self and public perception coincide around the fact that he is a poet who makes collages, in the Clausewitzian sense as poetry pursued by other means. Mr. Ashbery’s collages, in contrast to his verse, is eminently likeable and legible. Even his coy hints at pederasty are sweetly whimsical. Mr. Naves, by contrast, makes tough, itchy, irksome collages which are strictly for aficionados of abstraction.

It could be said that these are “difficult” writers in very different senses. Mr. Naves is a maverick dissenter as reviled by the art world establishment as Mr. Ashbery is beloved of the poetry world’s. The one is difficult in the sense of being a nuisance, the other in the sense of being brilliantly obscure and impenetrable. Collage presents a means of intensifying his efforts to the one, and of providing gentle relief from them for the other.

Tevor Winkfield, whose solo exhibition in the main space at Tibor de Nagy complements the project room display of Mr. Ashbery’s collages, makes paintings that betray a collage mentality while totally eschewing its touch. His paintings are seamless, sealed-in, and automobile-like in their glossy finesse. But his vocabulary is intimately informed by the aesthetic of collage, bringing together both commonplace and esoteric objects in startling and suggestive juxtapositions. He could be called a conceptual collagist, cutting and pasting within the mind’s eye.

Mr. Winkfield is a natural double act with Mr. Ashbery as, since 1988, works by this expatriate Yorkshireman have habitually graced the covers of the poet’s new publications and reissues. His style is unmistakable: high contrast, high chroma arrangement of forms that are radically contrastive in scale and source executed with the clean precision of a graphic designer. He has associated closely with the poetry world, and twice instigated small but influential journals for poetry: Juilliard, in the late 1960s, and Sienese Shredder, since 2007.

Mr. Winkfield’s aesthetic is essentially heraldic: objects are flattened to the extent that they are not allowed to threaten the two-dimensional picture surface, even as they busily overlay one another. “At the Gates,” (2004) is a triptych that sees areas of pink, yellow, rust, and grays and blue occupy distinct but interconnected zones, with objects as diverse as a metronome, a fan surmounting fluted columns, and a shattered vase holding court in each.

While flatness of overall design is strictly policed, the shadows of individual forms are almost scientifically rendered. Also undermining heraldry is the non-hierarchical nature of his compositions, the all-overness of his spreads recalling abstract, color field painting as much as any historic source.

His artistic origins are actually firmly rooted in a European pop sensibility, and are thus at once formal and literary. He trained at London’s Royal College of Art where students a few years ahead of him included Peter Phillips and Patrick Caulfield, whose precisionist advertising style set the scene for British pop art. Eduardo Paolozzi, Valerio Adami, and the American Richard Lindner are also points of reference.

In a way, Mr. Winkfield suffers from the fact that his work reproduces too well. He draws on graphic design, and provides graphic design solutions for book covers. But the experience of his paintings in the flesh underlines the richness of his saturated color and the vitality of his paint application, neat for sure but by no means mechanical.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, September 4, 2008 under the headings “Gallery Going:  Bits and Pieces Brought Together” and “Art in Brief: Trevor Winkfield”

The post John Ashbery: Collages at Tibor de Nagy Gallery, Mario Naves: Postcards from Florida at Elizabeth Harris Gallery and Trevor Winkfield at Tibor de Nagy Gallery appeared first on artcritical.

through February 7, 2004

With his fourth exhibition at Tibor de Nagy, Trevor Winkfield brings a new twist to his jazzy, collage-like paintings. Not that the new theme-Gardens and Bouquets-appreciably changes their impression of playful but careful chaos; the mechanistic, semi-abstracted chotchkas, swirling among brightly hued planes of color, still suggest something like the daydreams of an android poet. Now, however, one detects just a hint of high-tech yearning-unrequitable, perhaps-for nature’s organic plenitude.

There’s definitely a method to the arch-madness of these eleven paintings: rudimentary articulations (sometimes hinting at actual light sources, sometimes merely schematic) regularly model the objects’ volumes; proppings and pilings of forms attest to a kind of gravity, despite the abiding flatness; and foils of pure colors bracket and contain every composition. Do the goblets, gems, feathers, flames, sliced fruit, and unidentifiable gadgets-and, yes, blossoms-hold private meanings for the artist? Their honed surfaces and almost hallucinogenic color suggest that, as for Pop art, the style is the real subject-and indeed one finds here more than a little of Warhol’s process-color palette and Lichtenstein’s designer-shorthand.

But there’s something else happening here, too. Somewhat fitfully, these paintings reach for other purposes for color and design. Bits of colors bounce around in intriguing ways, such as in a sequence near the bottom edge of “Concert,” (2003) where a lick of simmering scarlet drives with sudden plastic force past jostling patches of limpid blue-green, dense green and a very retiring cobalt blue. In “The Corridor, ” (2002); the hues of four cubes navigating the mid-regions of the canvas-the same cobalt and blue-green, and a slightly cooler, stolid red-give palpable weight to the light passing over their facets. Such sparks of pure visual energy begin to gather into larger rhythms in “The Guardians,” (2003) before eventually dissipating in the general hubbub of forms, while in the “Garden VII,” (2003) a certain sameness of color pressures precludes any ignition at all. But in “Bouquet III,” (2002) sequences of color weights animate the entire surface. In this striking image, taut cords of red and white whip centrifugally from a single crimson bloom, reaching into the corners of a large neutral black. Demanding even more than its two-thirds share of the canvas, the black presses irresistibly against the surrounding heated red. Stiffening the retreating perimeter of red are smaller, dense articulations of cerulean stripes and a strange yellow ziggurat-like form. The eye follows as Winkfield uncovers small moments of plastic vitality, and elaborates and extends their energy into larger rhythms, locating all within a cohering scheme of visual events. It’s painting’s way of showing what’s big and minute, urgent and lax; it’s powerful stuff, if you’re into this kind of thing. It also happens to be the kind of thing that Léger and Gris did uniquely well.

Not every artist that came after Léger or Gris-in fact, surprisingly few-made such complicated demands on color. Though some Pop artists returned to the Cubist idiom of planar construction, their color tended towards a climactic inertia-hues plucked from various points of the color wheel, but varying little in their density. In such work there’s little of Léger’s give-and-take among hues, of the intuitive hierarchy of color weights that conditions, say, the experience of a table leg stretching to connect cup and floor. (No matter how abstracted their images, the color relationships of the great Cubists reveal a surprising faithfulness to the contradictions and rhythms of actual observed light.) Revisiting Cubist stomping grounds, Winkfield does considerably better than some of the stars of Pop art, especially when his playfulness extends to a subjective characterizing with color.

At points in Gardens and Bouquets one feels that the artist would like to have it both ways, to have his Pop and eat it, too: he’d like to convey Warhol’s pleasure in the play of symbols and surrogates and the strange ways our culture digests itself; but he also hopes, like Léger, to reward the innocent, engaged eye. For much contemporary art, the designer-colors of Pop run rampant; it’s evident in the current vogue for unmodulated, sense-saturating cartoonishness. This is the kind of work designed for ultimate max-out effect: an instant, visceral impact that loses little in reproduction, and that doesn’t necessarily deepen upon experiencing more of it. Winkfield isn’t content with such eye candy, but he doesn’t mind being caught window-shopping.

Can the ethos of Pop art and the Cubism be reconciled? One might have thought the two irreconcilable, and that Pop with its instant and transportable impact had proved more durable, at least in the short run. Trevor Winkfield’s intriguing paintings, however, suggest other, tantalizing possibilities.

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