Ford Plant, River Rouge, Canal with Salvage Ship, 1927
gelatin silver print
Watching a documentary on American Modern Art aired on BBC4 a couple of weeks ago I became aware of Charles Sheeler for the first time and have subsequently become greatly enthused with his body of work. I was going to say bordering on obsessed but I’m not there yet…yet. My obsessions lie with Tame Valley at the moment and I hope that maybe I can bring the two together. What I like about Sheeler’s work is how it is most definitely landscape, with the focus often on the man-made intrusions without making them seem alien to the landscape. Often the subject of the painting is a warehouse, or a goods yard, or the rear end of a tenement block, not exactly picturesque scenes and certainly not the sort of place your average middle class art gallery patron would associate with. And yet these are some of the most fundamental elements of the city and without them the city would fail to function. This is something Alan Berger talks about in Drosscapes which I am beginning to realise as time goes by is one of the more influential books I’ve read since leaving university. In it he talks about the tourism industry and how postcards of cities generally show a civic centre, some grandiose piece of architecture, people enjoying themselves, maybe a skyline or a pleasant landscape within the city but rarely show any of the everyday elements that allow that city to exist. The drab workers houses, the sewage treatment plant, the warehouses of industry, the inside of an admin office etc. rarely feature.
New England Irrelevancies, 1953
oil on canvas
Classic Landscape, 1931
oil on canvas
Ballet Mechanique, 1931
Conté crayon on paper
In the paintings of Sheeler direct human presence is almost totally removed creating the sense of a monolithic romantic natural presence…or it does to me anyway but I’m no art critic. I also like the high realism without really being hyper-detailed, his paintings are crisp, clean and clear and that gives it “reality” without really looking “photographic.” Sheeler became a professional photographer but often used his commissioned photographs as the basis for his own paintings in many different media. His work became part of the early 20th-century abstract movement, Precisionism;
“a style noted for clean-cut, severe-seeming lines, simple forms, large areas of flat color, smooth finishes and the conveying of a general sense of good order and precision. Often the subjects were architectural or industrial and usually devoid of human reference.”
I like how he revisited the same scene over and over using different media each time capturing a different atmosphere within the piece. This is especially powerful in the paintings he did using stills from his film “Manhatta” that he worked on with Paul Strand in 1921. I like this version of Manhatta as the minimal techno soundtrack doesn’t sync at all with the footage yet is strangely befitting conceptually to the footage being shown…although it might just be that I have made that connection in my head after seeing his Detroit works.
New York, Park Row Building, 1920
gelatin silver print
Skyscrapers, 1922
oil on canvas
New York , 1920
graphite on cream Japanese vellum
I hope that I might be able to start a little series of work based on the Tame Valley utilising the same working methods as Sheeler. The lengthy visit to an area not normally frequented by people who don’t have to be there, the photographic documentation of powerful scenes followed by the experimental trial and error representation using clean no nonsense artistic styles, almost painting by numbers regurgitation but always seeking to capture a different atmosphere felt from my experiential memory of the site. Watch this Space…probably a lot of space and hot air before anything happens…but watch it.
Criss-Crossed Conveyors, River Rouge Plant, Ford Motor Company, 1927
Gelatin silver print
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