In her paintings, Louise Fishman feels compelled to make choices about coming out as a woman, a lesbian, and a Jew, whether or not these choices help her career. true Cora Cohen p(q). %Cora Cohen% When you became public about the impact of your trip to the concentration camps of Eastern Europe (to the extent of letting us know that some of the paintings contain ashes from the Pond of Ashes from Birkenau) your relationship to the world was changed. p(qq). Have you ever thought of where your social responsibilities might lead you in relation to your work? p(a). %Louise Fishman% I don't plan these things in advance. My painting follows my life. It has seemed important to me to make choices about coming out as a woman, as a lesbian, and as a Jew—in my work—at times when these choices were politically powerful and important to those groups. It hasn't helped my career. p(aa). As long as I'm living in a society where people are ill and dying all around me, along with most artists, my work will reflect that reality. I just hope that my paintings aren't going to be about illness and death much longer.   !!38997!! p(q). %CC% In your earlier work—paintings on paper or board, irregular, cut, seemingly forged together, I see and feel an involvement with substance as it's encroached on by the environment, you being part of the environment. A call and response between the materials and the interposition of your will presents itself. p(qq). Would you describe the sources of your influences and the associations invoked in your work; do you see them predominantly as referring to culture or to the natural world? p(a). %LF% The richest experiences I've had with art recently were with the Black Paintings of Goya, the Ecce Homo painting of Titian, and with early Brancusi sculpture. I would guess that the strongest source for my work is the natural world: rocks, air, space, water, trees, time, the physicality I experience with my own body, and the idea of mortality. But where would I be without the dialogue I have with Cézanne, Brancusi, and all the others? p(q). %CC% Your new paintings utilize light that's not within them; they absorb and refract light. To fully apprehend the painting the viewer must alter her position, and the painting seems yet again different. Thus the element of change rather than stasis prevails. p(a). %LF% The light is deeper inside the paintings. It is equally true that the surface throws light around—at times confounding the viewer—in many cases the viewer feels a demand to move around to see the "other painting." I did more moving around while making the paintings than anyone will have to do to "see them" because while they were still wet there was 10 times the reflectiveness off each molecule of paint. It made me angry at times—the trouble seeing my own paintings, especially with the late afternoon light—when I had to stop painting altogether. So, in effect, the viewer may have a modified experience of the one I had making the paintings. I feel no remorse at bullying people in this way—I know what these paintings are capable of giving.   10 2007-07-07T21:37:47-04:00 Admin 0 0 1470 38967 false Cohen, Cora Fishman, Louise   !!39555!! Ralph Humphrey asked me about 10 times what I thought of his last show. I said something different each time he asked. My characterization of the paintings as Protestant Philip Gustons amused him the most. I think I was referring, in a short-hand fashion, to a combination of the blunt and poetic in the same painting which Guston and Humphrey's work share. The Protestant relates to the plain American, almost Hopperesque _mise-en-scène_ situation. But rather than the sense of something which has already happened, as in the Guston KKK paintings, or the sense that something may occur, as in Hopper, Humphrey's paintings themselves are virtual. I met Ralph Humphrey when I was 19, and I knew him until his death in 1990. From the beginning, Ralph's work was individualistic. It did not adhere to the reigning dogmas but reflected his particular way of seeing. It withstood separately at a time (the late '60s, early '70s—Minimalism, Greenbergian formalism) when the pressure to forge a consensus exerted enormous power in the art world. His paintings, often outward-projecting and object-like, operated in a complex way—the more they shared (invaded) the viewer's space, the greater was the role of their illusionism. Ralph's art never eliminated the tentative, emotive or idiosyncratic. He followed his own natural poieses: he felt his way through. The paintings in his show in March 1990 were his last completed works. The shapes in the paintings, painted, cut and pasted on have personas, are individual, have constrained poignancy. Often in the isolation of each shape a restive bleakness is apparent. These shapes are not figural to me yet I identify with them. Apprehending them and their fugitive movements enables me to sense my connection to a living organism which is not I, to that part of the world and perhaps even the universe which is isolated yet related to the rest, as I am. All the paintings but one from this show take their titles from SRO (Single Room Occupancy) hotels on the upper west side where Ralph had lived in the 1960s and are also, except for that one, the same titles he used for a group of his paintings in the '60s. ??Great Jones??, after Bill Jones, is the exception. Those hotels had long been demolished by the time Ralph titled his paintings for his 1990 show. Bill Jones was dead. What is left of one's past when it's physically gone? Had all those people who had lived on the edge (of society) disappeared? Is shelter impossible? Was the significance of these transient shelters dual in that they performed a temporary task and then disappeared? I think the paintings are about the transience of the physical world, even when it is their own substance: their object-like quality diminishes as one looks at them. More than most paintings they change as one looks at them. What had appeared as visually static and absorbent begins to oscillate; a pulsating flicker caused by a slight chromatic transposition occurs where the shapes meet the ground. As the dynamic aspect of the painting affects one's perception, the shapes seem to dissolve. In a constant alternating interplay, seeming certainty is relinquished by the most concrete elements as the rest becomes activated, the paintings take on depth. Through color—glowing color, saturated yet crepuscular color—these paintings assert their vitality. Through color the paintings operate simultaneously as illusionistic and inverse illusion, moving towards the viewer and returning to their own boundaries. As followed by our gaze, color acts as the amplification of our motor being. During the long gaze the material nature of these acutely scaled paintings fades almost completely as the penumbral color activates a response to depth and its limits. Not to that of the space around one but to the limits of depth within oneself through one's body. From the painting to the eye we know it must be but it feels like it touches the inside of the body first. When Ralph died I became conscious of everything I might have asked him and hadn't. I had taken for granted that the ideas behind the work of the people I knew would reveal themselves over time, without my directly inquiring; there is no substitute for an understanding gained during the course of seeing work and the subsequent spontaneous attenuated exchanges which have no purpose outside of themselves. But after Ralph's death it began to seem possible that the thoughts of the artists I knew, what those artists regarded as their motivating forces, might remain unknown to me if I didn't ask about them specifically even though direct examination risks changing the thing examined. I am now more inclined toward the notion that an artist's verbal communication may bring the outsider closer to the meaning of that artist's work. Connected to this is my belief (which forms the basis for some of my questioning) that how people live—their politics, how they have accepted or rejected their own backgrounds—has an effect on the art they make. My natural inclination is toward apprehending work sensually; toward art which is optically complex; toward art which is generous, inclusive, not worked over toward a signature style, towards artists who have more ideas than they know what to do with; towards vision, not the adjustments thereof; and an art which goes all over the place, sometimes literally. I have resisted the Modernist authoritarian canon, which is essentially a stylistic approach requiring a compositional a priori, and its tacit insistence on oneness. I am interested in heterogeneity rather than formal unity; in allowing a painting distinctive and particular parts, permitting the varying operations of those differing parts to retain individual character and qualities. There isn't a hierarchy within the painting. The mode of apprehension which follows is one in which the viewer puts the painting together herself. There is no agreed on "ideal" interpretation. Hierarchies in other areas have seemed equally misguided to me. The artists I've questioned here are at different levels of development and exposure. During the past year and a half I have learned and borrowed from all of them. Although they communicate with varying degrees of fluidity, acuity, and success, all have a steadfast resistance to being cast into systems of speaking about their work, to jargon. All speak about their work in ways which are reflective of their work, using words as ways of communicating about what they believe they've made. The realm of ideas isn't utilized as conspicuous display, nor are concepts advanced for the sake of invidious comparison. Though these people were familiar to me, the underlying ideas behind their work and their motivating forces for making work were frequently surprising. _"(external)*Click here*":/issues/37/articles/1469 to read Cora Cohen's interview with Leonard Bullock from this issue._ _"(external)*Click here*":/issues/37/articles/1464 to read Cora Cohen's interview with Craig Fisher from this issue._ _"(external)*Click here*":/issues/37/articles/1465 to read Cora Cohen's interview with Dona Nelson from this issue._ _"(external)*Click here*":/issues/37/articles/1463 to read Cora Cohen's interview with Carl Ostendarp from this issue._ _"(external)*Click here*":/issues/37/articles/1480 to read Cora Cohen's interview with Saul Ostrow from this issue._ _"(external)*Click here*":/issues/37/articles/1468 to read Cora Cohen's interview with John Zinsser from this issue._   37 0 2009-10-30T15:00:13-04:00 Editor