Fairfield Porter

Barry Smylie sent me this interesting and pithy response to my appreciation of his online suite of paintings (link in post below).

I thought I'd share it, especially for the link to another artist new to me (and perhaps you).

midstream...

In the same letter Porter quoted from memory a line of Wittgenstein that he felt central to his own view of aesthetics: "Every sentence is in order as it is." And he went on astonishingly to elaborate: "Order seems to come from searching for disorder, and awkwardness from searching for harmony or likeness, or the following of a system. The truest order is what you already find there, or that will be given if you don't try for it. When you arrange, you fail." I think it is in the light of statements like these that we must now look at Porter's painting, prepared to find the order that is already there, not the one that should be but the one that is.

Smylie continues...

"And Ukiyo-e, yeah! I did a lot of printmaking last century. Way way back, I was very much influenced by the art of Walter Phillips.

Walter Phillips

"I think he went to Japan to study woodblock printing. His stuff knocks me out.

"Also, Maxwell Bates sent word to Roy Kiyooka who was painting and teaching in Montreal to take me into his studio and get me into Sir George Williams University. I spent 4 years under Kiyooka’s mentorship. He didn’t so much teach me paint as he did Zen. So, I guess you got the connections."

It's interesting to me that Fairfield Porter was doing what had to have appeared as counter-intuitive to many of the avanty artists with whom he is associated, and with whom he was friends. I suppose he and Alex Katz weren't that far divorced, really, aesthetically. But with many of the other New York notables of the time...

And yet like everyone I judge a painter by the results, not the aesthetic principles or rationales (which may be ex post facto and wrong anyway).

I always associate Porter's paintings (naturally!) with James Schuyler's poetry.

Both may look like "realism" at first glance but aren't (merely that).

Neither is afraid of the honest details because the "honest details" are always otherwordly anyway if one looks closely enough--or long enough.

I guess I realize that's a strange assertion to make. I mean, what is "realism" in poetry? How can such a thing even exist? I suppose some of Reznikoff's Testimony would be an extreme case where I would say "That's realism." Because these are brute facts, brutally deployed. But even there we are dealing with language, so the best we can achieve is Barbara Guest's funnily on-point term, "fair realism."

But I hope it was clear I meant factual realism, which is a thing which does seem to have an objective (verifiable) existence. Yes, I realize if we go down the route of Wittgenstein mentioned above, the only factual realities we're going to be left with are the "cat on the mat" type assertions lol. But go with it.