It's funny, there’s something about Brett Scheifflee’s paintings. They kind of evade words. They’re very quiet. Quiet pictures. Quiet moods. Softened colors. But, still they speak to you. And, they’re damn poetic. 
Then I came across Brett’s painting, Burkowski’s Bluebird. A small, simple painting of a bluebird on a branch. Influenced by Charles Burkowski’s poem, Bluebird. It gave me an entry point. Bluebird is a fragile little poem about the vulnerable, and often silent, capacity in each of us to delicately hold the simple things we find beautiful. And, in some ways, that helps say it about Brett’s paintings. 
He paints the things you don't usually need to say aloud. Precious pauses for the admission of beauty. You see something, and somehow want to write a poem. You want to see the sunset with someone. If you tried to say it aloud you couldn't. Your words would tangle up, and you’d lose the point. 
How do you adequately depict that thing? That sunset. A lone tractor, harvesting in the evening. Summer haze. Winter fog. Rolling waves sand dark, salty, and eternal. What about the perfectly round moon reflected in a grassy back bay marsh? 
Brett has a wonderful sense for these views. He goes right to it. Paint the moon. Paint the grass. Paint the sky going blue purple pink. Put the moon mid canvas, because that's what the picture is about. He is one of those artists who make depicting the landscape look perfectly plain, natural, and also very heartfelt. Get to those picturesque moments. It takes a keen eye for the job of depicting nature, and a keen feel for the emotional core of a landscape.
You want to see these kinds of paintings on the wall. Color on the surface. Easel sized. A good picture, wrangled well. And, in a very real sense, that's what you understand paintings to be. The language, and tools of observation used to put together a lovely vision. 
Brett Scheifflee was born in Buffalo, NY, and somehow I think of Hudson River School artists. Well honed depiction. Skill imbued with the romance of wonder. The lovely vision.
And so, from Burkowski to someone like Frederic Edwin Church. There’s a lot of Church in Scheifflee’s paintings. 
Church’s Rainy Season in the Tropics, and Sheifflee’s May Rainbows. Double rainbow paintings. Church shows two rainbows in rainy mist over tropical mountains. The picture is grounded by foliage, and figures in the lower right. It's the kind of picture that could easily go candy colored, but this landscape is tonal. Gray and rocky. Color in the painting is carefully reserved for a few spots where the rainbows weave out of the mist.
Sheifflee’s double rainbows function the same way. A strip of green marsh for weight. Tonal composition, but the rainbows give color to nature's magic. By reflecting the rainbows in still water, Scheifflee cleverly turns the arcs on their side, and the whole image hovers in the ether.
Church’s Mount Kathadin from Millinocket Camp, and Scheifflee’s Small Mouth Morning, both have boats, and background mountains. The horizons are high, in the top half of the compositions. But, tone and color carry the action to the bottom of the pictures. By reflecting skies in water the artists put the weight in the foreground. In Church’s painting it is a woodsy shoreline. In Scheifflee’s, it’s a jon boat tied up at a dock.
Another trait comparable to Church is Sheifflee’s sense of travel. An oeuvre like an artist's visual travelogue. The portfolio on Scheifflee’s website is categorized by location. Eastern paintings, and western paintings. The American landscape. A man goes places, and paints them. An artist who can't help but find romance in the landscape wherever he is. East to west, and mountain to marsh.
One of my favorite books is Wolf Kahn’s America: An Artist’s Travels. I look at it often. It has a magnificent collection of imagery that follows Kahn’s work around the US and pairs it with musings by the artist about making art from place to place. 
Now Brett Scheifflee, and Wolf Kahn work in different types of painting. Different handling and mark making, different hierarchy in picture. Something, overly simplified, like modernist v realist. But their sense of the journey is the same. Both landscape painters. Both travelers with ties to NY. But, the closeness in their vision is most striking. Their acute eye for gauses of color that make the landscape feel enterable. Then they develop the vision with a careful balance of shape, harmony, and vibe.
And, well, with something akin to those Hudson River painters, and a vision approaching the eyes of Wolf Kahn, can you ask for any more from a landscape painter?
And isn't that cool. I often think it's remarkable to paint today. The joyful, if crushingly daunting, task of drawing influence from, and creating within, art reference available from everywhere and everytime. 
Keep that in mind for a second, and I'd like to mention Charles Burkowski again.
I first came across Bukowski's poems on Youtube. There are lots of these little videos. His poems are narrated. Sometimes with the text running on the screen. Sometimes with slow-mo clips, or color-faded inspirational scenes. The poems lend themselves well to phone videos as a medium. Maybe it's that they’re not too difficult, maybe un-stuffy, or some kind of sweet and sour middlebrow. I'm sure I'm not the only guy who gets inspired by these things. They're nice little everyday passages of the thoughtful and dear. 
I first saw Brett Scheifflee’s paintings on Instagram. Then I saw them in person at Robert Lange Studios, in Charleston. I see them within something of a new era in realism, and in the hard business of painting. There are artists out there making it work, and doing so within their own power of sight.
People may find art they like just by surfing their interests. An artist with grind may find an audience for their work without hustling traditional art world gatekeepers. 
Now, every new way will come with pitfalls. Social media algorithms are maddening. Is the potentially great artist's creativity sidelined by attention grabbism, and content creation? And, for what it is, trading curators for tech billionaires sounds pretty scary. But, I love galleries like RLS, and work like Brett Scheifflee’s. They're unencumbered by the leaden, and frequently suffocating, maxims too often found in high art spaces.
Look all around. Find art wherever you can. You artists, get down to the work of making good paintings. Use paint to make a poem about a landscape. Make things of beauty, and make doing that your life. 
I can't wait to get down to Charleston this week and meet Brett. We have a duet show, opening Friday, at RLS. So, I’ve had his paintings on my mind.
It's been an artistic challenge. You're going to put your paintings on the wall beside talent and skill, you have to show up well. Guess I can't just  phone this one in can I? 
That's what I said to my wife when we got the invite to the show.
Brett’s painting Comes in Threes popped in my head. I showed it to her. He's an ace painter. Look at this one. It's more than a beautiful painting. 
Waves crashing, rolling, since time began. These waves, like every single wave before them, rise for a moment from the sandy bottom Atlantic. The moment is bot by tiny and epically unending. And in there, you find a childhood memory. Standing, ankles in cool foam, watching waves coming to you, imagining and studying, giving them personalities, giving them names, counting them. Those heavy waves can push you around. Push you at your legs, and at your middle. Hours of fun on summer days. Hours of love walking the shoreline hand in hand. Hours of anxiety as the hurricane surge inches closer. Stong, emotional, dreamy, poetic. 
But, in the end, what can I say? It does exactly what all really good paintings do. I can't really sum it up in words. And, I kind of think, that's one of the best things you can say about a painting. I don't know. It's on the wall. Just be quiet, and look at it. That's what it's there for.

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I've been working out a painting with a New England sky. In the process I've been looking at a lot of Hopper paintings. His lighthouses are certainly quieter of image than Plisson’s. And, by virtue of their form, they’re less talkative than Woolf’s stories. Hopper's paintings, like lighthouses themselves, are taciturn monuments. Their affection is artistically contained. Hopper pictures are a specific kind of quiet. It’s the quiet of  a book on a shelf. The book itself. Once you've read the novel, you close it, and put it away. It sits there still. But you know what’s in those pages. The whole world of that lighthouse. In To the Lighthouse there is the Ramsey family’s whole world. The harsh coastal weather, summer guests and meals, their thoughts, dreams, and disappointments. All on those pages sitting quiet for the moment. Hopper's lighthouses are something like that. 

With his paintings, you don't have to try hard to get into the mindset. They are easier to enter than Plisson’s picture. But they’re not at all simplistic. They just don’t need all the bluster. You know, somehow, it’s all in there. Great paintings easily grab your gut. And, if you sit with them, like great novels, they get better and better.

For young me, Hopper paintings were comfort food. The kind of paintings I grew up on, they were plain enough, and they just felt right. As I get older, I appreciate them more and more. Like books you’ve read. When you know what’s in there, the book on the shelf helps you know you're not alone

I like to think about that poster, hanging in that rental house. The rip-roaring image hangs there quietly on the wall. Little kids, eager to get out and down to the beach, run by holding plastic sand toys. Their parents are sunblocking, gathering flip flops, and packing beach bag lunches. Season after season, one rental week, one vacationing family after another.

In the evening, sun tired, bronzed, rinsed with bits of sand still clinging to toes, ears, knees, and scalp,  kids can ask their parents about the picture. About the big waves, and the little light house. About the kinds of storms you can stand up against. And this is my thought today, on happy Fourth of July, 2023.



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Some thoughts out of the blue, and the sky

I love skies in March and early April. The air still has a crisp clear of winter. But big boozy clouds of summer start to muscle around up there. Rolling. Growing. Blowing. There’s action in these skies. They change, often strikingly, and fast. 

Recently I was getting over a sinus infection. I was tired and achy in the studio. So I took a few to zen back, stare at half finished paintings, and doze off. But cars kept going by. You know how it can be, they just kept bugging me. I tried to relax. I put on music. Tried some meditation. Maybe it just wasn't going to happen. But then, one car somehow sounded like an ocean wave. And then the next sounded like a wave. And so on. Soon I was listening to rolling waves, and I could rest. 

I got to wondering where sounds go after we hear them. Where does music go inside you? Where do the car/waves go? And where did they come from? They’re in there somewhere. I'm not talking neurologically, or of narrative memory. Where poetically are they? They must become part of you. If you are what you eat, are you not also what you hear? There’s calories to food, sure, you’re physically built of it. But there’s also the intimacy of eating. The taste, the sacrament, the expression of the food. That also becomes you. And, isn't that something like art? 

We can consume art like food. When you really get looking at a piece of art, digging it and vibing with it, you get a feeling like ingesting it. You know and remember a great piece as an affection within yourself. Absorb great artworks, and they are you. 

I find it noticeable with places. If you have some Hopper paintings in you, it's somewhat impossible to head out Cape Cod without feeling his Truro scenes. Scott Noel paintings breathe Philadelphia in summertime. Tom Birkner’s breathe New Jersey. If you travel to the Brandywine Valley, PA, you intuitively know when you're in Wyeth magic.

In things. Spend time with John Chamberlain or David Smith sculptures, and it's pretty hard to walk by a scrap metal pile without seeing the magic they felt.  A bakery case is a Wayne Thiebaud picture. See spiraled orange or lemon peels, and you’re in a 17th century Dutch still life. My kids scribble on the little toy blackboard, and I see the magic of Raymond Saunders.

To me, Cape Ann, MA, is Winslow Homer and Milton Avery. But it's also John Updike. All variety of arts can get in you and then stew up. It's great. Richard Estes paintings meet the Beastie Boys for New York City summer. Read Hemingway passages about food, and see table still lifes by Picasso or Cezanne. In the opening chapters of Heart of Darkness you get the Thames of Whistler, Grimshaw, and Turner. Eastertime can be Michelangelo's Pieta, also Jesus Christ Superstar, and Godspell, and throw in some Mary Cassatt and some Virginia Woolf. 

Taking art this way is not like recognizing realistic representations of scenes out in the world. It's how artists tap notions you have deep within. That which you aren’t immediately or oftenly aware. Cars can sound like waves. Artists find intangible things to help share vision. If they’re really good, they may even do it preemptively. I say, great artists tell the future. During the past few months with the hubbub about Chinese spy balloons, everything looked like the wonderful and eerie balloon paintings by Michael Andrews.

I’m sure there are volumes to write on art viewpoints in our individual and/or collective psyches. I can handle it if I think a little smaller. When my wife was pregnant with our daughter, our birthing coach gave me great advice. She said we are responsible for ourselves (our physical bodies and thoughts, emotions, etc.), and we are also responsible for the aura in several feet of space around us. It transfers to others. The mood, the attitude, your condition: it rubs off. She was teaching me how to calm my wife through the birthing process. But I’ve found it's life advice, and useful when looking at art. The artist and viewer share the aura around each piece. 

If you're a chef, you want to make food nourishing not just for nutrition, but for the spirit. And, you’re responsible for what you feed to people. The same can be true of an artist. The art you make gets in people. Care for it, care for them. 

And, well, like there’s lots of crappy food out there, there’s crappy art out there too (Boring knock offs. Zombie formalism. Pictures for pictures sake, often pretty cheesy. And, ‘conceptual art’ with no real concept). Any which way, you end up with a stomach ache. 

Akin, some art tries to be too nutritious. Teach you too much. Teach you how you ‘should’ behave. Try to prove something, or maybe just prove the artist is clever, sophisticated, or discerning somehow. Maybe useful sometimes? But you don’t really eat medicine. You don't chew your pills for the taste.

Good food is beneficial, because it sticks to your bones and makes you feel well. Good art sticks with you, forms you, and firms you. Visiting art is healthy, but you don't do it for your health. The benefits come in communion. Great works touch you, they may make you happy, and they surely make your life richer. They help to hint how you are in the world. 

People visit us here in South Jersey. Sometimes, they’ll say how, on getting near, everything starts feeling like Ted Walsh paintings. My wife, Kay, was one of these people. She talks about fist coming around and seeing my paintings in the land around her. Says she recognized it right away. I love this stuff. I can even be bashful with pride when I hear it. It's delightful when people see something in your work.

I don't know, I stare at my paintings so long and so often, they can just start to look like nothing to me. But maybe, there’s something in this. A lot of my landscapes are just made up from my head. What am I really depicting? I like to think, if I do my job, I’ll get to things people truly clasp. It’s fun to think so, anyway. Maybe visually. Maybe in subject. Maybe just a vibe. To me, a great painting is one you can look at and purely know. Before you have to explain why, you know it as you’d know anything deep in there.

Not long ago Kay and I were driving where Salem and Cumberland Counties meet. A beautiful part of NJ. It’s where the inner coastal plain, (along the Delaware River), meets the outer coastal plain (a lot of pineland). The land changes there. The hills flatten out. The soil gets sandy. The weather gets maritime influence from the Jersey Shore. Often big bright inland skies become a little grayer and a little wetter. We watched the weather change, and we watched the spring skies get dramatic.

Around us, the landscape looked like our paintings. Kay points it out. Ted pictures. Big action filled skies, over simple farmhouses, and barns. Windows and birds. And the sun shining between/through clouds, cutting shapes of shadow and light on walls.

Most of the time, when you see something of beauty, you can’t drop everything and paint the picture right there. But, I guess, maybe you can anticipate the picture. There’s a glimpse. A, kind of, flash of meditation. I think it’s related to how the things you see become a part of you. There’s that magic…well, it's not so easy to construe. It’s similar to the sense you get when looking at a great art work. It’s something like, you know there’s a whole macrocosm within that microcosm, and you know you now have it all within you. 

You are what you eat, and you are what you hear, and you are what you see, and that's pretty cool.

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I often look at artworks, and can pretty quickly tell how they're made. It's one of the great joys of being a painter. It's illuminating and fulfilling to walk through museums and know what great artists years ago, or in far flung places were up to. But, I find, some of my favorite artworks are ones I can't quite figure out. 

This is why I love Alex Griffin's paintings. They're somewhat elusive. You can look closely, or again and again, and still be a little stumped about how he puts them together. They're deep. They're affectionate. They're puzzling. And they're lovely. 

Alex has a solo show at Nancy Margolis Gallery, up until February 17th. Here’s the blurb from their website:
“In his second solo exhibition with Nancy Margolis Gallery, Philadelphia artist Alex Griffin conjures impressions of distant memories and dreamstates. Quiet figures hover weightlessly within gauzy landscapes that oscillate between solid and transparent areas of paint. The times of day are intentionally ambiguous, but recall in-between states, similar to twilight or the dim glow of midwinter. Heightening the aura of mystery, Griffin evokes timelessness by concealing the narratives’ physical locations and precise moments in history.”

You can see the paintings in a first-rate viewing room on the gallery site. There are images, info, and some nice detail shots of the paintings’ surfaces. These surfaces, the small and subtle details and textures are some of the most charming bits of Griffin’s painting.

He lays his paint with variation. In areas the pigment is thin and scrubbed. Other areas have thick luscious dollops of paint. There are candid scratches and scribbles throughout. Small features, figures, shrubs, moons, birds etc. doodled into the paint before it dried. All laid in with ruthless intimacy.

Each scene feels like something you remember, but are also seeing for the first time. Griffin abstracts scenes in ways that make you feel like you’re seeing multiple things at once. They’re kind of like storybook pictures. Deep spaces are foreshortened, and feel no deeper than the picture plane. He presents perspective with guilelessness. In a good way, the pictures feel childlike. Honest and natural they seem composed by intuition. Objects and figures float. Birds may fly around at the bottom of a picture. Things like windows, ladders, fences or chairs may wander into the picture wherever your eye happens to meander.

Hazy with patches of blue and brown Midwinter is both joyful and quiet. It feels like short winter days when dusk comes just at the end of afternoon and buildings quickly change from structures to silhouettes. Daubs of white paint polka dot the sky. The orbs of white light flutter in the tree branches over a little winter village. Memories of winter, maybe Christmas, from childhood or a dream. Scenes that float around in the back of your vision, very familiar but ungrounded from a comprehensive report.

Agatha’s Dream is a play set. It's among a few scenes in this show portraying theaters or stages. Agatha’s Dream has a figure in a pink dress and a house, some trees, and stars in the sky. The dream emerges through sleep’s gauzy veil like a scene from behind a theater curtain. It starts somewhat devoid of context, but you're drawn precisely because there are more questions than answers. 

If Agatha’s Dream is a simple mystery, maybe Agatha Christie, than A Gathering is David Lynch. A Gathering is also set in a theater-like structure. A square of black, specked with stars,  borders three sides of the composition and frames the scene. A Gathering is not as homey as Midwinter or Agatha's Dream. A pointy animal faced figure looms above another vague animal shape, maybe a wolf. A man and women hold hands beneath a gothic looking window. It’s all fenced in behind a small row of shrubs, and under a clouded night sky.  

Afterglow is a landscape that vibrates with purple and pink. There are twos in this picture. Two tall green trees. Two flying white birds. A stately building stands mid picture with a glowing white circle, a clock tower. It's countered by a round moon in the sky to the upper right. A ghostly plume of smoke rises from a chimney, while a ghostly blear that seems ground into the painting’s surface emanates from the building’s roof. 

There are also some paintings on cigar boxes in this show. These are a treat. The best expressionistic paintings are undergirded by a kind of urgency of passion. I feel it in these. They’re not necessarily fast paintings. Rather they’re paintings of outpouring. Heartfelt outpouring. They’re blind to pretense. The expression is foremost, and the highbrow comes later. It’s an accomplishment to be appreciated. Sometimes found object pieces and colloquial motifs can feel a bit ingenuine. Not the case with these cigar box paintings. They feel wholeheartedly unfeigned, and they’re materially lovely.

Interestingly the earnest childlike charm of Alex’s paintings turns grandfatherly on the cigar boxes. Like, maybe, a great grandfather who  tools away putting together tenderhearted little objects: these seem like pictures humans have been painting forever. Wonderfully humble. He quietly glimpses his love. She’s briefly silhouetted by winter's light, and he is struck by her beauty. He scratches it down with whatever things are at hand. Or he sees some foxes on a snowy ridge, and does the same. There's a sense these kinds of things, heartfelt artfully made objects, are simply timeless. Someone will always be there, seeing things and putting notions down in paint. Making art out of sentiment and intuition. Unassuming. And for this we can be thankful. 
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                                                                                                   Ted Walsh, Uncle's Farm, 2013

​His farm was one of my favorite places. No frills, and economical. Flat roofs, simple materials. Concrete, tar, sand. Efficient and orderly, but in no way fussed. His garage had a wall of huge north facing windows. He said it was the most efficient light to work by, and he got the windows for a good price.

He loved to paint things. Not pictures. He painted and repainted everything regularly to look clean and fresh. His palette was simple. Red, blue, yellow, black, and white. Real colors, primary colors, Mondrian colors. 

His house was red brick. All the farm buildings, painted fresh white. His new tractors were Ford and New Holland blue. The old tractors got rebuilt, and got fresh coats of whichever color was handy. He bought old army jeeps and rebuilt them as field vehicles. He painted the jeeps yellow top to bottom. Wheels, dash, seats, and all. His bicycle was yellow too. His canoe was red. He painted tools bright colors so he could find them if dropped in the field. And the whole farm was trimmed off in black. The farm bell outside his back door was shiney Rust-Oleum black. The roofs and driveway were black tar. 

He had an aesthetic. I don’t know if he’d have said much about it if you told him so, but it was palpable. You felt it. At his farm you were inside his mindset (I’ve had similar type feelings in Frank Lloyd Wright buildings).  

So, what to say about Mondrian paintings? I think maybe we don’t leave enough art alone. We couch it in pretext, and rationale. Useful sometimes certainly, but sometimes it's fun to clear your head and see if the work stands on its own. Let a Mondrian stand alone. Has he done the job? Is there something there?

I like it, but a lot of people would answer no. It’s just a bunch of squares and rectangles. And, well, they're kind of right. I can’t deny them. Tell them $51 million. You’ll hear you're outta your mind. But, Mondrian work is also iconic right? He’s a great. And, we really seem to like his stuff. There’s Mondrian swag. Underwear, home goods, toys. And, someone just paid $51 million for one. 

In Mondrian’s work, I think there may be something much more elemental. Like my uncle’s farm.  A guileless expression of belief. So, maybe I can’t bring myself to totally justify Mondrian’s work, but I’m also unwilling to dismiss it. 

As for $51 million. There's no doubt some artwork is absolutely priceless. Truly priceless. But Composition No. III, with red, blue, yellow, and black? Well, $51 million is a whole lot less than priceless. It could all be a sad moot point anyway. There’s a likelihood the painting sits in a private collection, and none of us will ever see it again.
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