Christopher Campbell, Artist's Statement, 1995.10.20
Exhibition: “A Gap in Nature”
My paintings are abstract, but they have at their origins an apparently trite condition—nature. If, according to one account, painting itself is hardly possible at this point in the history of art, then surely “landscape” is beyond the pale. However, looking at certain groupings of post-war American painting—Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Cy Twombly and Joan Mitchell, for example—I find it impossible not to recall the long history of Modernist landscape that includes Corot, Daubigny, Pissarro, Monet, and Cézanne, artists that I spent years studying closely as a graduate student. One cannot evaluate the work of any of these artists, French or American, in the 19th or the 20th century, without considering the quality and kind of interaction they had with nature. Moreover, two of the artists whose current work most interests me, Brice Marden and Gerhard Richter, are engaged in reinvigorating their painting through a dialogue with nature: Marden in his Cold Mountain series, and Richter in the play between his figurative paintings and his abstract ones such as Wald (Forest).
During the past few years, my practice has bifurcated into two modes: one a kind of absorption and harvesting of original sensation in nature, the other the development and intensification of some aspect of that sensation in the studio. Typically, the fieldwork has been limited in scale to relatively portable supports, from one to four sheets of paper each measuring up to 30 x 40 inches, while the studio work attempts to establish more environmental scales of viewing using large linen supports up to 76 x 104 inches. At the heart of both my field and studio modes has been my developing awareness of what it means to paint: to permit an unfolding of the strangest kind, a refusal of ostensive subject, a deliberate relaxation of the immediate pressures of historical contingency. To achieve that state of openness which is the opposite of forcible creation, that state of transcendence that enables one to go somewhere one has never been and see something one has never seen until it comes into being, I find it helpful to work in a place of nearly absolute solitude while responding to an external subject/stimulus that is as obscure, banal, and visually complex as possible. In my recent experience, the initial stimuli that have been most fertile in this regard have been found in nature: fields of wild grasses, thickets and forests.
Once I have identified something that seems to have the requisite mode of visual interest—a place, a photograph of an aspect of a place, a memory, or some combination of all of these—I try to bring about a selective disintegration of individual sensations from the whole, deliberately isolating highly specific and fragmentary features of the motif/source and seeking to be hypersensitive to particular configurations of color, volume or orientation: “only an eye.” There are specific practices that seem to belong to this process: marking while looking only at the object of interest, not at the support (a deliberate blindness); following the felt direction of a shape in a purely kinaesthetic sense (a refusal of analysis), and pursuing various technical extremes in order to encourage chance or unplanned effects (extremely slow/fast gestures, extremely loaded/thinned applications of pigment, etc.). Working in this way, the gradual accretion of marks becomes not a mimetic image of nature, but something like a parallel structure, in which the discontinuously seen, felt and marked are reintegrated almost as if they had been grown according to some principle internal to themselves. Even though it is obvious that I cannot escape my accumulated painting culture (that personal combination of experience, taste and inherent inclination), the deliberate pursuit of a nearly unconscious means of production seems to produce an image which suppresses its vanishingly small source in visible reality, and foregrounds a kind of structural intermittency in which the conventionally deliberate—relationality, ordering, composition—is both present and permanently destabilized. Under the right circumstances, a poetics of connection seems to be at play in which form coalesces, structure emerges, and feeling accumulates, virtually unbidden.