The Prophets

In conversation with Nashville songwriter, Mary Gauthier, she described two types of songwriters to me: those who crank out two or three songs a day on their kitchen table and those who chisel their words for days or weeks or even months. Mary’s songs are the chiseled type. She says she learned it from touring with Guy Clark. She agonizes over every word. Every note. 

The Prophets are the same: chiseled, hammered, sanded, painted, stripped, striped, beaten, sanded some more, and re-painted for weeks, even months, and almost thrown out the window, until one day it all comes together in a symphonic mess of scrapes, scratches, and colors. These are slow paintings. Slow to make and slow to look at, each filled with enough layers of paint and crud to cover a wooden window sill on an old house.

The Prophets / Number 1 (2023)
acrylic, ink, graphite
64 x 66 inches
© iv whitman 2023

Painting each one of The Prophets is an exercise in frustration. They aren’t easy and they sure aren’t fun to paint. They are more about excavation than painting, even sculptural on some level. And like a lot of art, these are metaphors and symbols for something beyond their material. Colors and surfaces instead of prophecies.

I don’t imagine prophets enjoyed their job listening to God and delivering the worst kind of news. Repent or burn in hell doesn’t make for an ice breaker in a king’s court. And when God makes good on the promise, the prophet ends up being sawn in half or grilled over a fire or passing onto the next life in some other unsavory way. One might say that job satisfaction for the prophet was low to none.

To live and to die for one’s belief is a lost art. Life has become far too comfortable and prophet work is often outsourced to those with little money, but lots of passion. In fact, believing in anything where I’m from is a dangerous sport. Except for money. We might almost be willing to die for that. Or die trying to make it. Instead, the prophet lives as though our lives, not his or hers, depends on it. And it is always about the future: the future of the planet, the future of a nation, looming wars and diseases, the future of life after life.

All in all, The Prophets is the feeling I have when considering the prophets themselves, not their messages. No prophecy is easy to deliver, just as no real work of art is easy to make. Yet, we do it anyway. Reputation be scorched and ego be damned.

Night Skies

Appreciating stripe paintings took me somewhere around twenty years. The first one I really looked at was a long Gene Davis painting a friend had hanging in his loft. The other pieces in his space drew me in more naturally: a Warhol portrait, an enormous Chihuly float, a ponderous Howard Ben Tré, some Voulkos pieces, and a large painting by David Bates. I thought the Davis painting, though, was boring as hell: flat and pointless. No brushwork. No gesture. No life.

I bumped into the name Daniel Buren a few years later and fell in love with the sort of absurd stoicism of his work: alternating vertical stripes against a ground of white, each methodically the same width, somewhere between being too fat and too thin. Buren’s stripes had confidence, even arrogance in their simplicity. He didn’t seem to try to make them interesting, yet their ordinary predictability got to me. I found something profoundly appealing about Buren’s extreme back-to-basics approach. I still do. Even the widths of his stripes. They never seem to deviate.

Nigh Skies / Number 1 (2023)
graphite on paper
64 x 66 inches
© iv whitman 2023

As more time went by, the stripe work of Noland, Martin, Riley, and Bleckner’s from the 80s, even Richter became some of my favorite people to spend time with. Especially Martin and Blecker. I loved the monk-like marks of Agnes Martin and the glowing quality of Ross Bleckner’s brushwork, which one rarely sees in more minimal paintings. Both Martin and Bleckner gave life to their stripes.

At the same time, I was drawn to the gestural paintings of Motherwell’s Elegy to the Spanish Republic series. More specifically, it was the splashy fringes of the dominant shapes that drew me in. These were small details, but wide open and free. Lots of the Abstract Expressionists approached the paint like this: Pollack, Kline, Frankenthaler, and so on. But it was Motherwell who appealed to me. I liked his sloppiness. 

My gestural stripe work is a bit of an homage to these artists. For me, though, the stripe represents an effort to control the wild contortions of nature. Locked inside each of their edges is a world of chaos, each with its own swirling and splattered ecosystem alternating one stripe to the next, and sliced with a blade or taped off with an edge.

The Night Skies series is a combination of all the simple elements I love: a gesture of black graphite on top of a white ground with the cleanliness of a stripe. As much as I attempt to control my life, whether it’s managing my time or attempting to steer a conversation, my attempt at doing so is just that: an attempt. And a failed one at that. That’s the stripe. And inside of each stripe lives that chaos I arm wrestle into submission. Again, a failure. The Night Skies are metaphors of failure, but beautiful failures at the same time. Another metaphor. We can find beauty in our push to shape our reality, as well as beauty in how reality shapes us.