Between Gerhard and Louisa

There is a kind of tug-of-war in my work that pulls back and forth between photo-based imagery and practically cartoonish imagery. It would be easy enough to say that it's a push-pull between my love of the works of Chuck Close and Philip Guston (especially the latter), and there's no denying that both of them are always on my mind, but the outcome, I think, is more like the contrast between Gerhard Richter (see Candles, above), and Louisa Chase, whose work, titled Red Sea, is at right.



While Richter has been the subject of major museum exhibitions worldwide, especially over the past decade, Chase's time in the limelight was more limited; she is often characterized as a Neo-Expressionist, but before that term was coined she was a "New Imagist" painter of the 1980s--a brave soul who helped us return to figuration and narrative after more than a decade wandering in a Minimalist desert. I saw a work by Chase at on of the IMA's old Painting and Sculpture Today exhibitions--titled Cave, I think. The intensity of the color attracted me immediately--it was not unlike Red Sea. There is a great deal of animation--of aliveness--in the works of both Richter and Chase. Close, by contrast, strikes me as a formalist, while Guston's work is more self-referential and formalist critique. I'm only describing shades of feeling--not valuing one approach over another. But if I were to pick a side of the scale for my own work to fall on, my heart resides with Richter and Chase.