By Michael Gormley
"Jenny," oil on linen, 45" x 35" (oval), 2011
All artists struggle with creating work that resonates with a viewer. It gets tricky when the work announces allegorical and narrative intent. Having a strong point of view is at the core of great art--the challenge is having a compelling message that appeals to a broad audience and is delivered with just the right expressive technique--or all meaning is lost. However, get the formula right and chances are the work will attract an audience. Get it really right, that is, offer a sensual experience that is both urgent and timeless, and your work will be remembered forever. Tall order; why Rembrandts are as alive today as they were the day they left the studio.
Not many of today’s practicing artists will achieve the fame of Rembrandt, but that’s not the point to making art anyway. I don’t imagine Rembrandt spent a lot of time thinking about how to become famous; he was too busy working out a genuine expression that was true to his time and to his nature. By all aesthetic accounts he did arrive at a uniquely compelling art form and he died broke--the adoring public will always be fickle and fame is as fleeting as good taste.
So best to focus on the making--like artist Palden Hamilton. As did Rembrandt, and all the artists before and after him, Hamilton is struggling to find a style that is uniquely his own. He is committed to working realistically, but has committed to little else. His work to date attests that he’s all over the stylistic map; Hamilton is the first to admit that he is often pulled between competing influences and motives.
That’s absolutely fine; artists are supposed to explore and take risks--or at least they once did. Experimentation is how artists arrive at compelling imagery; but first they muddle through a lot of disheartening dead ends and near misses. This exploration is essential not only for the artist’s own development; the well-being of the greater visual culture is dependent upon individual innovation as a basis for renewal.
The choice for young realist artists like Hamilton is significant; do they work for the market and paint beautiful canvases that will likely sell or do they seek to invent a unique expression that can change the way we view ourselves and the world. Hamilton can certainly achieve the former; like his realist colleagues, he is the product of a boon in atelier education that has led to an enormous growth in well trained artists that are accomplished in a range of genres. Most can produce surprisingly good canvases for the trade--many with an outstanding display of realist technique.
Not since the glory days of French Academicism have we seen as many well trained and genuinely gifted realists impacting on contemporary art practice. Luckily, we are experiencing an art world that is much more supportive of figurative work than was even conceivable ten or twenty years ago. Yet, I would argue that Hamilton has a greater challenge in achieving recognition than the generation of realists that directly preceded him. That cohort entered a world that had very limited exposure to contemporary realist practice. Its appearance alone announced genius--independent of content and imagery. In hindsight, really accomplished work was still rare (art forms don’t mature overnight after lying dormant for a generation) but the beginnings of an important shift were in evidence.
Now that our collective critical eye has grown accustomed to deft displays of realist technique, representational artists seeking an audience have two choices open to them: continue to refine technique and ramp up the realism to achieve photographic effects or invent images that have a conceptual underpinning–with realist technique in service to that intent. Hamilton’s work has staked a claim in the latter.
The portrait of Jenny seen above evinces a bold mix of influences and styles and the resulting image is inventive and delightful. Hamilton notes, “The work might be considered allegorical or narrative. It's important to me that my paintings are broad enough in context to be relatable to others, and thus the universal themes I have in mind are sexuality, alienation, growth, death, nature, etc... The timeless language of painting seems to be an appropriate medium for these themes, and I want my dialect to acknowledge the breadth of painting's history, which for me includes aspects of 19th century technical proficiency, some of the static-ness and naivety of early American or medieval European paintings, a modernist's acknowledgement of a painting's two-dimensionality (my influential Aunt, Elaine Hamilton-O'Neal, was an abstract-expressionist), elements of children's story books, etc...”
Hamilton is wary of basing his judgments of a painting solely on technique--regardless of style. He considers photo-like realism and bravura, open brush work flip sides of the same coin---both announce technical skill and offer little else in which to qualify and quantify artistic intent or motive. He adds, “My relationship with the contemporary realism movement has been exhilarating and confusing. I spent four years at the Art Institute of Chicago, where I was informed by, but felt alienated from, the strictly conceptual culture. When I "discovered" the contemporary realist culture, I responded to it like an adopted child having discovered his birth parents: initial excitement, then the confusion of coming to terms with artistic motives that are provincial or vapid. It spawned an examination of what commonality of language (which is mostly what "realism" is) actually entails. My subsequent disillusion was as much about the delusion of my expectation than anything external. It's one possible interpretation of my painting "Disillusion." In general, I'm attempting to return to center, between incommunicable musing (my art school experience) and the dogged pursuit of technique.”
I am reminded of the perfectly executed salon painting that line the walls of the Louvre for miles on end. They leave one cold—as all perfect things eventually do. With that feeling (or rather lack of feeling) still fresh, one understands why modernism happened—it had to. I would venture that the contemporary Realist Movement has arrived at a similar historical moment that defined the last days of academic painting—questioning what is good, real and true. However this go around the collective response from realist artists is not smug complacency. Like Hamilton’s work, it is inventive and full of life.
NEWS FLASH:
Stay tuned for more information about our upcoming event at the Salmagundi Club in New York City: The trending exploration of contemporary portraiture will underpin a group exhibition and symposium being presented by Portraits, Inc., with the curatorial assistance of Michael Gormley. A strong cohort representing the genre's emerging talents and leading masters will be showing works that both reinforce and dispel our collective notions of what a portrait should and can be.
Michael Gormley is a painter, writer, curator and regular contributor to the Portraits, Inc. blog. Gormley is the former editor of American Artist magazine and most recently created the fine art catalog for Craftsy--an online education platform.
Portraits, Inc. was founded in 1942 in New York on Park Avenue. Over its 70-year history, Portraits, Inc. has carefully assembled a select group of the world’s foremost portrait artists offering a range of styles and prices. Recognized as the industry leader, Portraits, Inc. provides expert guidance for discerning clients interested in commissioning fine art portraits.