Lori Ellison
Elisabeth Condon
Strong Men II
2012
oil on canvas.
15" x 18"
When I was 8 years old I had a dream I was in a garden. I climbed this wall and realized that if I jumped over I would no longer have the protection of the garden and would be in the wilds. I jumped. It seems a life's choice. With painting it is an act of faith just to pick up the brush. Art is the wish, the prayer and the offering all in one.
Farrell Brickhouse (excerpt from an artist statement)
Healer
2010
oil on canvas.
11" x 14"
Altar 1
2010
o/c
18" x 24"
Hi Farrell, I just did an interview with Lori Ellison and am planning to do a number of others. Because I'm just beginning these, I still have a number of things to learn and so I am reaching out to artists I respect---who are also unusually patient and kind---and your name falls onto this short list. Would you be willing to do [one] an interview with me that I would then post on the designated Facebook Conversations with Artists blog? The way it will work is I will begin asking you questions and offering observations (all this through your "messages" channel here) and you, in a few minutes each day can offer responses. I want the process to be as simple and easy as possible and want you to feel free to take whatever time you need between sittings.
I'm certainly flattered to be considered and like the tone- time to think and write, regard and then respond sounds good to me.
Jeff Hogue
I don't know why, but there's an artist whose work is in a book of paintings narrated by Sister Wendy that I keep referring to in my mind. I actually did a bit of research on her hoping to dial in on the specific reference...to no avail as of yet. There are a number of feelings I get from your work. One initial observation I may have made to you is that the work seems paradoxically innocent and grave....I find this a potent combination. I also find myself thinking of some of the contemporary German painters in terms of your freewheeling and rich use of paint and color. Perhaps this is a beginning...I will look forward to your response along these lines...cheers my friend. Hope you're having a wonderful day up there. Which days do you teach in the city?
January 24
I am about to go into class today, thankfully I start at noon, and then again on Thursday from 3PM to 9PM, they are 6 hr. studio classes. So I have a long weekend and will get back to you then....off I go....best, FB
February 6
Jeff Hogue
I've had some time to think about you and your work (and all this) and want to make an effort to get some lift on this conversation. May I begin the conversation by asking about your developing years and your early influences? I often think of comments by a visiting NY artist when I was in school in KC and her mention, "The difference between ambiguity and vagary is specificity." Somehow, in spite of the (at a glance) randomness of your drawing, composition, paint and color usage there is a sense of tuned and specific intention. I function so much more from my heart and antennae than cerebrum and I have always had a strong affinity for your paintings. As I became acquainted with you here on Facebook, I began to see so many parallels between my reading of your work and you.
February 6
Jeff Hogue
Can you speak of your early years as an artist?
Stapleton Rainbow
2010
oil & media on canvas.
20" x 16"
One of the SVA Waste Paint Series.
February 19
I've finally come to sit and think about your questions. Here is one way I have kept track of this evanescent life....if you haven't already seen it.
Journal entries over the years. Up to book Journal # 40, each one takes about a year. Most of us keep one.
(must be friends with Farrell on Facebook to access this) Or go to his site: http://www.farrellbrickhouse.net/
February 19
Hi Jeff,
I’m not sure if there is a word count limit on this so I’ve just allowed myself to ramble a bit here as I answer your questions.
Farrell Brickhouse
I grew up in NYC in a rough and tumble working class neighborhood. Making something with your hands and head was part of life to me since my Dad was a carpenter and my Mom both a homemaker and artist. I somehow made my way to Queens College, a City University and there made a commitment to making art despite the turbulent times of the late 60’s and early 70’s. Artists as diverse as Charles Cajori, Gabriel Laderman, Ilya Bolotowsky, Richard Serra and Judy Pfaff were teaching there. At that time the lines between abstraction and figuration were still sharply defined and defended. There was a push to be in one camp or the other, which I never really followed and caught some flak for. I also was always running up and down the flights of stairs from the painting studios to the basement sculpture rooms.
Teaching young artists today makes me realize what a wonderful moment my youth was. There was cheap space in Manhattan still and that geography allowed a concentration of fellow artists who built a community that was very exciting and supportive. You could walk upstairs or next door and get a crit and a beer at any time of the day or night, dance in lofts the size of city blocks and come home with your pockets full of food the more fortunate of us laid out for all to share. There was a belief if you worked hard there would be space in that larger art world for you.
You asked about influences and it was the times that were the real influence. Of course I looked at art history and what the noted artists of the day were doing. There was a wonderful dealer named Julian Preto who would somehow acquire some of the more spectacular spaces downtown and many ‘famous’ artists would show their outsized works while their uptown shows were running. Julian provided a meeting place for very young and more mature artists to have breakfast on a Sunday morning and to hang their work side by side. Robert Ryman, Al Held and Mike Goldberg were some of the regulars at Julian’s. I made many friends then and my best friend was met at Skowhegan School. His name was Ralph Hilton and together we explored what living the life of an artist was all about. Ralph was an amazingly talented, smart, handsome, confident well educated and connected young man. I was at the time rather mute when it came to discussing art matters but managed to hold my own as far as living life went. One of his friends was the theater director Robert Wilson, who became my friend too. Ralph and I worked on many of Robert’s early pieces. I came to be a specialist making performance artists’ visions come to life in a place called The Kitchen. I also spent a few years out of Manhattan fishing professionally in a little town called Montauk. It was an “intervention” on my part from the rather wild and dangerous life we were living. I choose to come back to the arts after a while and have been at It even since.
In a quote you asked about "The difference between ambiguity and vagary is specificity.” I’ll answer you with two quotes that speak quite well to what brings some specificity to my production, which as you wrote, could at first glance seem a bit ambiguous. “One of arts chief functions is to resist the denaturing forces that are always present: those things that would take away our transcendent possibilities and turn us into stereotyped beings.”- Max Beckman
For me art is not the production of meaning but the providing of a genuine experience of what it is to be alive and in the world. Peter Scheljdahl wrote that we need an art that shows “how to live right now in ways that bless life as it happens to be”. And finally I’ll quote myself. “When I was 8 years old I had a dream I was in a garden. I climbed this wall and realized that if I jumped over I would no longer have the protection of the garden and would be in the wilds. I jumped. It seems a life's choice. With painting it is an act of faith just to pick up the brush. Art is the wish, the prayer and the offering all in one.
Painting is a way to share the totality of what I've seen, touched and what has touched me. For me it is a process of loading it up and then emptying it out, gaining control and loosing it until I feel I’ve conversed with the painting. I paint “to see what I know not what I know.”
February 19
Jeff Hogue
Dear Farrell, what a generous and ample set of ideas and explanations of your background influences, life experiences and early choices. I think I've been trapped at times in too much ado about "meaning"...and it's all but strangled me for periods of my life. I've been fortunate to have a number of extended mystical periods but have been all but dumbfounded as to how to fully sink into these spaces in a sustained and fully integrated professional life. Your explanations found in Beckman's thoughts, "those things that would take away our transcendent possibilities and turn us into stereotypes..." and "...Art is not the production of meaning but the providing of a genuine experience of what it is to be alive and in the world." For me, these are very Zen notions...making painting as a singular expression of the Now and of full Human Being...devoid of too many definitions... I will have to spend some time with all this...I knew that you'd bring the goods...and as might be consistent with your work, you drove a truck in---not a little 2 door...More soon. Thank you, Farrell. Thank you.
February 19
So glad you are pleased Jeff. Yeah!
February 22
Jeff Hogue
So Farrell, the phrase, "art is not the production of meaning but the providing of a genuine experience of what it is to be alive and in the world" is still full of intrigue. I guess I'm still struggling. I have often thought of the notion of "deconstruction" and "reconstruction" and these two arguably distinct philosophical lineages...I've often traced the former to Freud, Saussure and the linguists as well as the French philosophers such as Lacan and Derrida.
I tend to trace the reconstructivists back to Jung. I've always identified myself with the recon group and was deeply interested in Suzie Gablik's writing calling many of the tenets of the art "industry" into question. I was convinced in the early 90's that painting was passé and that performance and film and collaboration were where it's at...
Now, of course, I'm much less sure...I have rediscovered painting in many ways. I can see that in many ways it's just as valid as it was in the 15th or 16th centuries---or for that matter, in the 50's.
Now, I'm less sure...What of the exploration and construction of meaning? Can painting be both a delving into the heart and vitality while also a contemplative exploration of fundamental human questions?
What's your stance on such matters as a teacher?
February 22
Here’s a part of the puzzle.
Your thoughts please...
By: Living the Law of Attraction / The Secret
February 26
Jeff Hogue
Farrell, I've been thinking about our conversation and some of your comments and am really looking forward to learning more. I find that so many key understandings of painting can only be implied indirectly through poetry and koan. I'm fascinated that I can see immediately when a painting "feels" right...I'm so interested in viscerality---in that which is transcendent and cloudlike while moist and dank and soiled...I think that there's something magical happening for me when I embrace your paintings...they give me some sort of impetus to leap into the abyss...only to find it joyous. Thank you my friend. What resonates through your Facebook style is your vigor and generosity...and these are surely earmarks of true originality...of profound experience. I want to hear more about what you recognize as your inner dialog (when you're there to notice...which presumably is only from time to time.)
February 27
This conversation is now taking on Parts I and II. Here's most of what I can answer at the moment.
FEBRUARY 27, 2012
JH/ FB- PART II
JH- What of the exploration and construction of meaning? Can painting be both delving into the heart and vitality while also a contemplative exploration of fundamental human questions?
What's your stance on such matters as a teacher?
I want to hear more about what you recognize as your inner dialog?
______________________________________________
FB- Hi Jeff,
I pulled the above out of your thoughtful response to my previous answering of your initial thoughts and questions. There were a number of important experiences and ideas you shared in your response but these are the actual sentences that had a ‘?’ at the end of the sentence so I will at least start there.
First the “construction of meaning”. I think of that as I would a painting that had a political message, take for instance the work of Leon Golub or Goya’s Third of May, 1808 in particular. For their work with its firm political stand to not be a poster it must be appealing to something else, its ambition and intention to something more than the artful statement of one’s deeply held opinion. I wrote in the mid- 90’s an artist statement when I was to give a lecture on my work at a University. I was warned that my “retinal” experiential painting would probably come under attack since it was not a practice that was involved with the production of meaning as it was being defined then. Some of this I have already shared with you but it bears repeating in the context of the above question. Here’s the first paragraph:
For me art is a personal odyssey. A vehicle to carry me forward and find some deeper unity in what is happening in and around me. I’ve never expected my art to overtly carry my political concerns. Art is a slow burn, working its gift on individuals. It is based on memories arrested in liquid space. I want my paintings to be a haunted living presence that reveals to the viewer passion, intellect, mystery and that changes with each day’s new light. My work is experiential, non-formulaic. Painting is a belief system that asks as Borges stated, “a momentary act of faith that reality is inferred from events not reasonings. That theories are nothing but stimuli: that the finished work frequently ignores and even contradicts them.” We all do that which is a thrill to us. The artistry is in portraying the depths of one’s soul. Where has one’s art led them to? What’s to be shared? One of arts chief functions is to resist the denaturing forces that are always present; those things that would take away our transcendent possibilities and turn us into stereotyped beings as Max Beckman cautioned. Art is not the production of meaning but the providing of a genuine experience of what it is to be alive and in the world. Octavio Paz said that art turns the viewer into an artist. Great art is a freedom giver, offering one a sense of the breadth of one’s own possibilities, what may yet be accomplished.
To follow up further with your initial question, of course painting can be “both delving into the heart and vitality while also a contemplative exploration of fundamental human questions?” Yet in addressing those fundamental questions it still must attain the above. John Yau who just curated a painting show wrote about his selections- They speak across generations. They don’t recognize the borders separating abstraction from observation. They are free spirits. Speculation and play have replaced claims to being factual.
You ask too about my stance on such matters as a teacher. Yikes, with students, and I teach both Freshman and Advanced Students at SVA in the Undergraduate program, you must address art- making on so many Fronts! Just the physical aspect of work, how to set up one’s space, the nature of paints and solvents, how to open a can of OMS let alone the spiritual aspect of making an object that contains one’s soul. We offer students themselves via this extraordinary history of art making. We give them a way forward while claiming their own history for themselves. We are examples that it can be done, to make a life in the arts, to live a life of the mind and spirit.
I champion making work that asks questions, that revels in its own making, I ask them to evolve a methodology that allows them to think in the medium, that is reductive as well as additive, that is not just problem solving or about getting it right, that is not afraid and that builds a vocabulary that allows them to speak. Philip Guston said, yet again the nail on the head, that the real problem begins when we see what it is the soul will not permit the hand to make. I want to help turn them into students worthy of the name since I believe artists are forever students. I have a one- page statement on my teaching mission I can share with you if you are interested.
About my inner dialogue I will save till later.
March 1
Jeff Hogue
Farrell, I would love to read your one-page statement on your teaching mission. I will have to reread your lavish response a few times to hope to glean the many insights you've offered. Lovely writing...it's clear to me why you've been brought into the halls of SVA...how fortunate your students are. More very soon. Thank you!
March 1
Thanks Jeff. Last look here before shaving so I don't scare the children....
March 1
Jeff Hogue
haha! yes, protect them, by all means...
March 1
Hah, had that teaching statement in one version here all along...when you have time....feels funny asking someone to read all this stuff of mine. I know you asked so here it is...
Journal #32, SVA Syllabus Statement for meeting.
Journal entries over the years. Up to book Journal # 40, each one takes about a year. Most of us keep one.
March 2
Jeff Hogue
I enjoyed reading Journal #32 again this morning. As per your response on the 27th, the Guston quote, "the real problem begins when we see what it is the soul will not permit the hand to make" is a fascinating take on the artist's charge. I think there can be a crushing effect for some who come to this realization too quickly or without a truly supportive mentor and community. I also feel that it should be said that no instructor can transmit what they do not have...and this "having" is perhaps an open-ended process of discovery. Again, a sort of Zen notion of "effortless effort" comes to mind and I can see how so many art school instructors might easily veer from this path of holding to that which one perhaps sees, feels and knows--even in its impenetrability---while keeping to the rigor of one’s processes and craft. Watching you and listening to you and witnessing your posts and comments here on Facebook have given me a sense of your abilities here.
March 2
Jeff Hogue
I have always experienced your vigor and your often playful and self-effacing charisma.
Having made a number of attempts to plow into the level of surrender I witness when I look at your paintings, I'm aware of the part of me that retracts from all the seeming chaos and ungainly forms that seem to scream against factuality and appropriateness. I easily recall the anguish. I know that without that edge, your paintings would be drab and amorphous...not charged with joy and discovery.
March 2
I 'm about outta here for 5 days sans computer. We do need to operate on all Fronts teaching and I guess in life too don't we? I'm printing out the above to see if I can perhaps focus while hanging with Mom in FL to write a bit or else respond once I return next week. It's a bit strange to read such complimentary words about oneself. More soon....
March 2
Jeff HogueSo I still hope for more "hearing" of the things that pass through your consciousness as you sit down before a blank substrate with brushes and tubes nearby. What is the armature of your painting construction? Do you find that you have a certain internal conversation that diminishes or disappears as you plunge? Is there a certain struggle at times here? What shows up for you as you recognize your human limitations here? Rollo May used to talk about depth of encounter or absorption as a sort of measure of a work of art's authenticity or originality. I think most of us who've spent years peering over images--both our own and those of others have some sense of real depth...commitment and unselfconsciousness. I'm always curious about what the artist's experience of this sort of "death space" is...It seems that most find a level of grief here.
March 2
I will share a piece I wrote about the experience on fb with you. It was supposed to be the introduction to a book being done by a fb'er but it seems they haven't yet managed to make the next step. I'll share it with you in confidence since it may yet happen and was written at their request. Silly though to think anything would stay 'hidden' in this day and age. As I mentioned I'm a bit "outta here" esp. after the day I had yesterday, some 3 hours hiking around Chelsea and then a 7 hour workshop, and leaving to see Mom in a few hours, sooooo, it is not the best time to coherently respond to your thoughtful, wise and kind writing above. Suffice to say- you are doing great, I wouldn't be doing this if it didn't feel exactly right. At this point in my life I have found I really avoid the stress of any conflict if I can. I've fought the good fight and now have taken somewhat of a leave of absence, except for my community battles here on Staten Island. I'm looking for honesty and sincerity in my workings with people, we all have our 'issues' but don't have to lead with them. Enough for now, thanks Jeff for the depth of your interest. I've always loved this quote about how to write, and I see another post of yours has arrived as I've been writing here. It said that all's you had to do when you sat down to write and faced the blank paper was to open a vein.
Well, not exactly, one's heart too and find the process for all that....ahhh, now I'm onto the deepest questions you are asking...and that will have to wait for now...
HIG Lesson On Skrillex
2012
oil, glitter, pigment on canvas.
14" x 11"
I copied the gist of your comments and then wrote below.
JH- I think it takes great generosity and sobriety to modulate between one's internal creative dictates and the subtle transmissions of various (often unconscious) needs of young and often overwhelmed student artists."
I'm aware of the part of me that retracts from all the seeming chaos and ungainly forms that seem to scream against factuality and appropriateness. I easily recall the anguish. I know that without that edge, your paintings would be drab and amorphous...not charged with joy and discovery.
I hope I am perceived as sincere.
This context, Facebook, as a place for sincere exchange between myself and
artists I am drawn to seems to call for a different sort of dialogue than I might
readily read in Artforum or such...I don't know.
So I still hope for more "hearing" of the things that pass through your consciousness as you sit down before a blank substrate with brushes and tubes nearby. What is the armature of your painting construction? Do you find that you have a certain internal conversation that diminishes or disappears as you plunge? Is there a certain struggle at times here? What shows up for you as you recognize your human limitations here? Rollo May used to talk about depth of encounter or absorption as a sort of measure of a work of art's authenticity or originality. I think most of us who've spent years peering over images--both our own and those of others have some sense of real depth...commitment and unselfconsciousness. I'm always curious about what the artist's experience of this sort of "death space" is...It seems that most find a level of grief here.
FB- Hi Jeff,
I’ve once again distilled our ongoing correspondence down to the above. My copying and pasting all this seems to carry the imbedded various formats of Facebook Messages and personal emails so I’ve done the best I can here.
First, I agree it takes great “generosity and sobriety” to teach young people what they need to know. Perhaps that, along with 6 hour classes, is why I am left exhausted when I return home from a day at SVA.
Secondly, about my “seeming chaos and ungainly forms”. I wrote that I had hoped that the horror and difficulty of my imagery and narrative was balanced by the joy of their rendering. Of course not all the work is about the “uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor” as Yeats put it, but still those ungainly and what some have called “child- like” aspects of my work are lived thru and arrived at in a way that contains an adult’s experience.
Thirdly, I agree that Facebook “seems to call for a different sort of dialog that might readily be read in Artforum or such…” as you wrote. It’s an abbreviated studio visit really for a dispersed arts community. Again, I wrote about the artists here on Facebook and the community we are creating- “They are not simply trying to advance their careers or make contacts that will be of use to them but rather revel in the sharing of their work and the chance to see what other fellow artists are doing. There is a consensual passion here in the making of things, their documentation, presentation and follow up discussion, not unlike what we have all attempted to greater or lesser success in the “real” world. What ever negatives we perceive that are visited upon us by a seemingly ever changing Facebook or that are inherent in a digital world, it is an amazing moment in history that allows us to have this living bulletin board where anyone, anywhere there is access, may post what interests them and share a life’s work.”
And lastly, your question about that inner dialogue while taking the “plunge”. There is the desire to cut and paste all that I’ve written over the years, Artist’s Statements and the like. I will attempt something else here knowing I will later feel I left something out. In my Journals which I’ve kept for some 40 plus years I refer to this state of working as “studio- time”, giving up the long awkward sentences I would construct trying to describe what was going on while painting. Most mornings when I know I will have a chance at being in the studio later that day I will lay there before fully waking and “dream’ of what I will do. There is also a period in the early afternoon before getting in the studio, when chores are done, when I will lie down and let myself wander. My intentions range from seeing exactly where to start or continue to having no intention what so ever besides that a pile of orange pigment has so excited me that I can finally do something, anything. I understand for myself there is a process to working, of starting somewhere and then building on that, like a counter- puncher, put up something and then move it from there, trusting that I know what I want or don’t as I see it before me. There are times where I long for the idea that will get me out of my seat, there are times I’ve walked into the studio and on the way to the intended canvas I pick up something lying in a pile and make a leap onto that unexpected surface. Good painters have talked about loosing control to gain control, understanding one’s intentions, not being afraid to make mistakes, looking for what one doesn’t know, all those things that apply to any creative process. With my terrible spelling I had to look up fugue and found fuge- combining form, expelling or dispelling either a specified thing or in a specified way…. I feel once I am fully immersed in “studio- time” I approach a fugue- like state where things seem destined, like I am discovering not making, where I have complete access to what I know yet am beyond my own knowledge, using everything I know to say something I don’t and at the deepest level do know as true as it is happening. Things become animated, real, all those elusive words but one knows when a mark is right, that an image has something to offer and one’s soul is satisfied that what is being done is worthy. Getting there requires that fuge idea; stating then dispelling the known, engaging and then editing, where marks and images struggle to earn their way, to deserve to exist. At some point, that whole process of working may bring one to the other deeper creative state. Sometimes it comes easily and other times it is quite scary, where one feels the whole thing is collapsing, all one’s assets are now liabilities, the process and images are a caricature of themselves but then there is nothing to loose, one is free to do anything if one can. There is a Native American prayer- allow me to make things happen. I want to surprise myself, step back and be a viewer, as if seeing it for the first time as the work unfolds offering itself beyond what I had intended. And hopefully that experience continues over the course of repeated viewings, where the novelty of the thing has worn off and what one believed was there is surprisingly evident.
Doubt of Columbus- Ashore II
2011
oil on linen
14" x 11"
Jeff Hogue
I love this writing. Your 40 years in the wilderness with a cart full of journals serves you well here. I was struck at some point reading this that I am sort of in awe...sort of humbled to be a steward of all this important and intimate information.
I very much like re-reading the conversation with Lori you posted. It’s great to be in such company and very gratifying to have such generous and thoughtful stewardship. Thanks for this opportunity Jeff. Certainly don't be sort of in awe, we seem to be all just making our way as best we can, but thanks. I like Lori's re-quote- not to be humbled because we're not that great, but we deserve to be allowed that sentiment when it’s an honest response to finding ourselves kind of blessed. I really appreciate the chance to share my story in this setting. Best, FB
Last summer R.C. Morgan in The BrooklynRail wrote a great review of my show at J. Davis. I think you should read it, some said it was some of his best writing inspired by my work. Here's the link- http://brooklynrail.org/2010/10/artseen/un-renard-dans-lart-the-paintings-of-farrell-brickhouse
Jeff Hogue
Beautiful and glowing observations and writing and you deserve them. It occurs that I haven't gotten to see your paintings in the flesh as Robert C. Morgan has...which puts me at a great disadvantage.
You told me at some point that Leon Golub has been an influence. While I can see some of the same drama in your figuration, there’s for me, actually greater psychological dimension in your work. Golub’s work has always felt somewhat irredeemably dark…whereas, in your case, the work has a visceral and edgy underbelly as ballast to a lighter and softer and more subtle feel. I am always turned on by polemics…by direct confrontation between elements. Campbell (one of my favorite quotes that’s actually at this point a paraphrase) once said that if one comes into contact with the Archetypal Presence we commonly refer to as “God,” one will find him or herself to be so utterly devastated by the experience that “you will not know whether you are in the presence of good or evil.”
I think that this intersection between opposites that seems at once contradictory and paradoxical is a fascinating space. As I had stated before, I sort of identify with the Reconstructionists (as I understand their basic tenets) in terms of this sort of dialogue between hopeful idealism and transgressive confrontation. For me, your work is reconstructive in that it hovers between these without cynicism. Some artists seem to dabble in the appearance of innocence, wherein you seem to truly experientially understand it. Again, it’s this dialectic tension that brings so much to your paintings…that the looseness is not contrived…it’s felt…and it’s an expression of your fundamental trust in yourself and the Universe around you.
Again, this is why, at the beginning of the conversation, I mentioned the now forgotten artist who Sister Wendy referred to as a painter of the sacred. I remember his work felt similar to yours, and that she spoke of the work as religiously and philosophically hopeful and potent, that there is a place for reverence and transformation, that deconstruction as a central tenet is only part of the story.
Many thanks to my erudite friend and editor, Dylan Brodie.
Dance of the Bombed, Last Dance, LA Riots
2010
oil & media on canvas.
20" x 26"
FB & Aunt Libby's Family Album
2011 Photo
My Aunt Libby's blue plate collection and the resulting painting.
Farrell Brickhouse