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WELCOME TO THE EAST FINCHLEY OPEN ARTISTS NOVEMBER NEWSLETTER
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This Month - EFOA Winter Fair - Franz Kline - Lots of Members News - Joo Lee Kang - and more
If you are viewing on gmail remember to click 'display images' and 'view entire message' when you reach the bottom.
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COMING UP - OUR WINTER FAIR AT THE UNITED REFORM CHURCH IN MUSWELL HILL
Friday evening 11th November 6pm - 8pm and Saturday 12th November 11am - 5pm
ART AND CRAFTS MAKE GREAT CHRISTMAS GIFTS
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An American Abstract Expressionist
MIKE COLES writes:-
How long does it take to complete a great painting?
From 1503 Leonardo worked on the Mona Lisa for four years, took a pause because of his health but carried on fiddling with it until he died in France in 1519, leaving it unfinished – 14 years in all.
Maybe it took Franz Kline took around five minutes to paint ‘Chief’ in 1950
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But of course, that doesn’t tell the whole story.
Before we start, forgive me for a personal recollection. On my very first day at art college in 1963 we, (about 15 of us), were gathered in a large empty studio and each issued with a bucket of black paint and a roll of lining paper (the cheap whitish paper that decorators use to paste on walls as a base for the proper expensive wallpaper). Our instruction was to tear off sheets of paper and “Kill white – as quickly as possible”. So for the next couple of hours we, ever more energetically, splashed black paint over our white paper – it must have been like a toddlers painting session at a nursery – messy and total chaos. It was quite a traumatic experience that lives with me to this day.
The idea, of course, was to lose/liberate any inhibitions and preconceptions we had, and experience the mental and physical emotion of wielding, in this case, a 3 inch decorating brush. At the end of it all we had stacks of ‘Franz Kline-like’ paintings. Kline had only recently died, so was in the news. From then on, I was a Kline fan – not of all his stuff, but his black and white action paintings of the late forties and early fifties.
It’s those, almost violent paintings, black on white, painted with strident confidence that most comes to mind when his name is mentioned, but how did he get there?
Franz Kline's life story reads like a movie plot: young artist starts out with high hopes, spends years struggling without success, eventually finds a style, becomes an "overnight sensation” and dies too soon.
Franz Kline (May 23, 1910 – May 13, 1962) was an American painter. He is associated with the Abstract Expressionist movement of the 1940s and 1950s. Kline, along with other action painters like Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, and Lee Krasner, (and also local East Coast poets, dancers, and musicians), came to be known as an informal group, The New York School. Although he explored the same innovations in painting as the other artists in this group, Kline's work is distinct in itself.
Kline was born and grew up in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, a small coal-mining community that offered few opportunities for artistic development. His childhood was marred by a complicated relationship with his parents. His father, a saloon keeper, committed suicide in 1917, when Kline was only seven years old. His mother later remarried and sent her son to an institution for fatherless boys, which the artist later referred to as "the orphanage."
Determined to make his own way, Kline worked as a cartoonist for his high school newspaper and managed to escape his small town to attend Boston University's School of Art between 1931 and 1935. He then came to England where he enrolled at Heatherly's School of Art in Chelsea. It was there that he met his future English wife, Elizabeth Parsons, a former ballet dancer who was working as an artist's model at the school. He applied for British citizenship but never followed through on it. She returned with him to New York in 1938 but would later suffer a mental breakdown and spend time in mental institutions. He began his career as a commercial illustrator.
Kline was a many-sided personality. He liked beer and to hang out with other artists, and particularly musicians, at the Cedar Tavern, (In its heyday, known as a gathering place for Avant Garde writers and artists in Greenwich Village – it closed in 2006). In his studio he drank English tea. He was outgoing, He loved jazz and Wagner. He was a confirmed New Yorker but had roots that he never forgot in the gritty coal country of eastern Pennsylvania. He also bore an allegiance to England - His mother, a native of Cornwall, had come to the United States when she was seventeen and had encouraged him to become an illustrator. Willem de Kooning has recalled, “He was an Anglophile in a nice way. He could juggle life until it came up fun. But he believed all artists were lonely”.
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Left: Kline in the early 1940's selling art on the street in New York. Right: 'Hot Jazz', painted for the Bleeker Street Tavern around that time
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However, it seemed New York really didn't care much that Kline had talent back in England and was now ready to take on the world. He struggled for a number of years as a commercial illustrator and a figurative artist, doing portraits for two loyal patrons that won him a modest reputation. He also painted city scenes and landscapes- which he sold on the street, and occasionally resorted to painting barroom murals to pay the rent.
His individual style can be first seen in the mural series Hot Jazz, which he painted for the Bleecker Street Tavern in Greenwich Village in 1940.
At this point, his work was shaped by his love of Old Masters such as Rembrandt, but in 1943 he met Willem de Kooning and, in their frequent sessions at the Cedar Tavern, also Jackson Pollock and Philip Guston.
In 1947 Kline began his crucial shift toward abstraction. Little by little, representational imagery was given up, perhaps reluctantly, as if he was in a tug-of-war with his years of training and experience as a traditional draftsman and painter and a new radical liberation coloured by the artists around him.
Under the influence of de Kooning, he had already begun tentatively to experiment with a gestural, abstract technique with an austere black and white palette in a series of ink on paper sketches, but now he brought the technique to larger canvases and began to employ house-painting brushes to create broad strokes of black criss-crossing white canvases. In part he was inspired by de Kooning's black and white paintings, but at some point around this time he had visited de Kooning in his studio, and the latter showed him the possibility of enlarging his small pen and ink drawings by projecting them onto canvas.
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Taking one of Kline’s small sketches, de Kooning blew it up on the wall with a Bell Opticon projector (not unlike an overhead projector used in schools today). The small sketch of a little chair, magnified beyond recognition, became huge black calligraphic strokes. Kline was inspired by what he saw with the projector and the abstract results would become his iconic style.
This was how Kline described it:-
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“A four by five inch black drawing of a rocking chair…loomed in gigantic black strokes which eradicated any image, the strokes expanding as entities in themselves, unrelated to any entity but that of their own existence.”
These early exercises would inspire more large, black-and-white gestural paintings that became Kline’s legacy. He developed a painting practice that rejected many conventions of the medium: dramatically working at night under harsh lighting with loud jazz music. He worked quickly and energetically - the marks he created and textural inconsistencies left were a record of the artist’s movement. Though contemporary critics often credited the presumed influence of Japanese calligraphy (which he denied) the sweeping strokes that dominate Kline’s thickly painted canvases convey the same emotion embedded in the act of painting (or writing) itself.
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Bokujin-kai, was a Japanese avant-garde association of calligraphers. Kline and the group’s leader, Morita Shiryū, (right), exchanged letters regarding the relationship between abstraction and calligraphy. Despite those critics mentioned above, who claimed that Kline was directly influenced by traditional Japanese art, he continued to reject this claim, siding with American art critics who insisted that Abstract Expressionism was a distinctly American invention. Kline also stressed that unlike calligraphy paintings, in his work, white carries the same importance as black.
Kline specified two things his paintings were not - they were neither calligraphy or symbols. On the contrary, he regarded his work as “painting experiences” whose prerequisites were excitement and surprise—for him and the viewer.
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And now back to the five minute masterpiece.
Kline was said to be an action painter because of his seemingly spontaneous and intense style, not focusing on figures or imagery but on the expression of his brushstrokes and use of the canvas. However, his paintings are deceptively subtle. While generally they do have a spontaneous, and dramatic impact, he closely referenced his compositional drawings, rendering many of his most complex pictures from extensive studies, commonly created on old telephone directory pages. Unlike his fellow Abstract Expressionists, his works were only meant to look like they were done in a moment of inspiration - each composition was extensively explored endlessly before his housepainter's brush ever touched the canvas. I don’t actually know if ‘Chief’ was completed in five minutes, but an academic study has shown that each stroke can only have taken a couple of seconds.
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Kline experimented and refined his compositions on old telephone directories, pages of which are now sold as Kline paintings
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Kline was known for avoiding giving meaning to his paintings in titles, unlike his colleagues who would give mysterious or suggestive descriptions of their works. A critic wrote that "his art both suggests and denies significance and meaning." When asked to explain the meaning of his work, he refused, saying that he wanted the viewers “to feel the effects of the composition unhindered by suggestion”. Instead, he emphasized the non-symbolic character of the work, and what he called "painting experience."
Many of his works have been viewed by art historians as indications of a progression towards minimalist painting, the movement that replaced the Abstract Expressionist movement in the 1960’s.
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In 1958, after some experimenting, Kline was persuaded to return to colour. His gallery paid for oil paints instead of his usual hardware shop enamals. This brought forward 'King Oliver', an embodiment of all things that inspired him - from the free-improvisational and vivacious spirit of 1950s New York, the bars, poets, writers, artists and the urban jazz scene. “If I can’t do more with colour than I can with black and white I won’t use it” Kline said, but his ‘King Oliver’ painting with all it’s energy proved to be his last great work. Dore Ashton was an art critic for The New York Times who championed the New York School, she remembered, “I have always thought he had style in the way the term was used by a jazz trumpeter I once heard who, after a long improvisational digression, waved his instrument and shouted exultingly, ‘Man, I got style I ain’t even used yet!’”
(Joe 'King' Oliver, was an American jazz cornet player and bandleader, He became popular during the 1920s in Chicago and New Orleans. Taking great interest in the alteration of his horns sound, King Oliver pioneered the use of mutes, which he unceremoniously fashioned out of rubber plumber’s plunger, derby hats, bottles and cups in order to gain a wider range – Louis Armstrong was a protégé of his)
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Top: A landscape of Lehighton near where he grew up in Pennsylvania Centre and bottom left: Kline's best known style. Bottom right: Kline in his studio in New York
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Engaged in an art-making process that was both active and interactive, the Abstract Expressionists, Kline and Pollock, like their musical counterparts, composed as they painted or played. Engrossing themselves in a “dance” around their respective canvases, they became staunchly devoted to the improvisational process.
Ornette Coleman, an originator of free-form jazz, openly recognized the reciprocity between artist and musician. Keeping his radio tuned to WEVD, where he would pick up Symphony Sid after bar hours, Kline named four paintings—King Oliver, Lester, Bigard and Hampton—after four mainstream musicians.
"The final test of a painting, theirs, mine, any other, is: does the painter's emotion come across?"
Kline died in 1962 in New York City of a rheumatic heart disease, ten days before his 52nd birthday.
There are some paintings that make the viewer remark “What is so special about that? Anybody can do that!” At first glance, Franz Kline’s Abstract Expressionist paintings may invoke just that response. After all, what is this painting but a few black brush marks on white background? Easy enough for a child to do, you’d say…
Back at art college in 1963 I too thought I could do a Kline painting – I still have it. It doesn’t have a title but ‘absolute rubbish’ might fit.
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POSTSCRIPT
Because of his 'simple' style many 'Kline' pictures turn up as fakes. This picture was withdrawn from a major auction house at the very last minute when concerns about its authenticity were raised. It was expected to sell for $150,000 - $200,000.
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MEMBERS NEWS - GAIL ALTSCHULER
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Multi-talented EFOA member GAIL ALTSCHULER has just won a prize in the 2022 Welsh Contemporary
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Contemporary ceramicist and EFOA member NORIKO NAGAOKA is having a ceramics sale in her studio on Sunday 27th November. The entrance to her studio is through her back gate at the end of Woodberry Grove, N12 0DN (between No's 38 and 45)
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Top EFOA printmaker DAWN FINN has a lot on. This is Sheringham Reeds, a large 100x50cmx oil rolled monotype being exhibited at Mandells Gallery, Norwich.
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https://www.mandellsgallery.co.uk/
at the Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair, Woolwich, she has Blue Retreat - also an oil rolled monotype 80x60cms
https://www.woolwich.works/events/woolwich-contemporary-print-fair-edition-7
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At The Art Pavillion, Mile End, she has Ribbon Bay another oil rolled monotype 80x60cms
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PETER HALE & NORIKO NAGAOKA
If you fancy a trip South of the river, formidable EFOA ceramicists Peter Hale and Noriko Nagaoka are exhibiting at the London Potters Annual Members Exhibition in Brixton from 3rd to 6th November - opening times see below
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PENNY ELDER
Highly respected EFOA painter PENNY ELDER is taking part in the N22 Open Studios
Penny writes:
"At last, Open Studios again after 3 years! Do hope you can come to my PV on Thursday 10th November, 6-9pm, at Wood Green Works, 40 Cumberland Road N22 7BU.
I’m on the 4th floor. If you can’t manage this then come on Saturday 12/Sunday 13th, 12-6.0pm. Parking is free at Morrisons and we are only a few minutes from Wood Green tube station. It would be lovely to see you."
https://www.n22openstudio.com/2022 www.pennyelder.co.uk
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JUDITH DEVONS
Multi-talented EFOA artist JUDITH DEVONS is painting a giant mural at a new community garden on Leopold Road in East Finchley. Due to be finished shortly it has already attracted a lot of local interest
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From the Mailbag:-
A Mrs Hockney writes:-
Dear Editor,
I want to be a great artist like those nice people at East Finchley Open Artists but I don’t have much money for materials– I have only got a budget of £4.99 in fact. I do all my shopping at Tesco. My daughter is taking me down there on Saturday. Is there anything I can buy that will set me off on the path to greatness?
The Editor writes:
Yes, Mrs Hockney, there certainly is! I would like to draw your attention to Joo Lee Kang. She works with ordinary Bic 'crystal' ball point pens – Tesco have them for 37p each - but you might have to buy a packet of three. You can also buy a packet of 100 sheets of photocopy paper for only £4.50 - Good Luck!
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Joo Lee Kang is a Korean born artist who graduated from Tufts University in Boston 10 years ago. She worked exclusively with Bic black Crystal ball point pens but is now branching out into different colours.
"Kang’s work appears to be delicate, ornamental drawings presented in crisp white frames. If one looks more closely, however, the drawings reveal grotesque and mutated flora and fauna. Often presented as table arrangements one might see in the Victorian era or exquisite bonsai trees, they teem with two-mouthed fish, three-footed birds, and hairless mammals. The line separating animals from plants has all but disappeared, some forms having been completely camouflaged. There’s a sense of foreboding inherent in these somewhat dark drawings, done with a black Bic ballpoint pen. At once delicate and subtle they are also intensely overwrought and obsessive."
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ABOUT EAST FINCHLEY OPEN ARTISTS
Find out about us on our website www.eastfinchleyopen.org.uk
There you will find details of all our current members plus photo's of their work and contact details plus information on recent and upcoming exhibitions
MEMBERSHIP: If you are interested in joining East Finchley Open Artists please contact the Membership Secretary at membership@eastfinchleyopen.org.uk
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