Asked if he had any hobbies as a child, painter Max Ernst replied, “looking.”

What is painting? Today, altered by the various change agents brought on with modernism, then postmodernism, and other -isms down to the present, painting as a practice has become much more flexible. A painting doesn’t need to be only made from paint. A finished painting isn’t necessarily flat. (In the middle of the twentieth century, Formalist critics, led by Clement Greenberg, championed flatness as painting’s defining quality—the quality that distinguished painting as an art from other arts—from music, sculpture, dance, and architecture.) And a painting doesn’t necessarily feature imagery—such as a nude, a landscape, a battle scene, or a bowl of fruit— recognizable in the world.

What is painting? Painting has changed dramatically in recent decades, and yet, in a fundamental sense, painting remains the same. Painting now is what painting has always been: the art of vision.

The earliest paintings we know—thirty-thousand-year-old prehistoric paintings on the interiors of caves in southern Europe—are formed from vision. Vision is painting’s sine qua non. Here, by “vision,” we refer to a trio of nested meanings. First, vision means vision—the sense of sight the painter relies on as the primary conduit of perception, both to see the world and to see her/his way through the process of creating an artwork. Vision is seeing and looking—a painter does both, again and again and again. The prehistoric painters’ images are, strikingly so, the product in part from careful looking. The ancient bison, horses, and saber-toothed tigers in their paintings resemble—they are representations of—visual attributes of how the actual creatures that lived outside the caves looked. There is a breathtaking correspondence afoot in these paintings of our human ancestors. They knew animals’ physiques like the back of their own hands.

Second, vision means envisioning. Imagining. The painted vision is never a complete, utterly accurate simulacrum of all, or any portion, of the real world. The painting is always, to some degree, made up. And stylized. Representation is a conceptual feat as much as a perceptual feat. The made-up-ness may be subtle (e.g., a painted picture of a bowl of apples, even a trompe l’oeil masterpiece, is two-dimensional, unlike a real bowl of fruit) or it may be mind-blowing (a visionary vision). Down through the millennia and across the globe—including ancient Egyptian, Greek, and Roman art, Asian, and Australian aboriginal art—the art of painting has captivated viewers with arrangements of colored shapes, made by human hands and minds, all done with an aim to explore what can be seen, in reality and in imagination, and how things look transformed through the process of painting.

Third, vision means what we do in the process of engaging with the painting. We, the viewers of paintings, look. We use our eyes, our organs of sight that are hard-wired and soft-wired to our nerves leading to our brains. We crane our necks and see. We stare at the painting and glimpse our own interpretive thoughts; we vision the painting. If we don’t, the art isn’t art, at least not for us.

All three of these usages of the term “vision” combine to define the actuality and the potentiality of painting. From the past, to the present, and, we anticipate, into the distant future, painting is the art of vision. We could extend our claim, make it more carefully shaded by nuance, perhaps separating it from photography, as in: painting is the art of human-made vision. But, just as Greenberg settled on flatness (with no urge to append rectangular), we’ll focus on vision as the heart of the art of painting. Which leads us to ask: if painting has always been the art of vision, from the caves to the canyons of midtown Manhattan, what, if anything, makes contemporary painting distinctive?

To give some explicit ground to stand on in answering this question, we will focus on the work of two painters active at this moment. The two we examine aren’t, in any way, offered as polar opposites. But this pair of examples offers some sense of the breadth of what painting can be, and is, in the second decade of the twenty-first century. While not polar extremes from each other, the two painters whose work we describe are indeed extreme painters, extreme in their intensity of exploring painting as an art of vision. And, the pair we’ve selected demonstrates that the range of extremes contains room for painting that continues significant traditions—paintings can be flat painted artworks; paintings can also be not flat and not made of paint.


 
October, 2013. Our destination was the Venice Biennale, the great granddaddy of contemporary art extravaganzas. In Italy’s breathtaking floating city, every two years, artists and artworks from all the well-known (and many of the less well-known) nations come together in an assemblage of exhibitions and events that offers a broad sampling of cutting-edge art. Strolling national pavilions, the mammoth gallery space of the Arsanale, and the many separate art staging sites around the canal-lined city (in palaces, alleys, and island piazzas), viewers (including veteran art watchers) stand a good chance of being mesmerized or befuddled, sometimes both at once, by artworks in a vast variety of media, scales, styles, aesthetic persuasions, and emotional registers. But, we (or you, if you were there with us) would also notice: there are virtually no rectangular, representational, flat paintings on display in the entirety of the Venice Biennale. Of course, we enjoyed a wealth of fabulous paintings in the city’s many churches and museums. Titian, Tintoretto, and other Italian painters of the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries. But within the Biennale itself, flat, portable paintings were scarce.

Most of the art on exhibition at the 2013 Venice Biennale—and the same could be said for other contemporary art extravaganzas and huge museum shows we’ve attended in Berlin, Kasel, London, Paris, Shanghai, Santa Fe, Havana, Prague, Bonn, Bern, Cologne, Madrid, Chicago, and New York City—carries a big stick and speaks loudly. (The same, it must be said, is not necessarily the case in commercial art galleries, where medium-size, flat, rectangular paintings can still be found for sale in abundance.) In Venice, some favorites for us included Alfredo Jaar’s stunning replica of the entire Biennale—with a miniature Venice and doll-house size pavilions rising from then disappearing into a black lagoon (the artwork’s “rinse” cycle envisioned the Venice Biennale in a more globally warmed future); and, at the edge of an island near the mouth of the Grand Canal, we took a few selfies, charmed by Marc Quinn’s twenty-foot-tall blow-up pink balloon sculpture of paraplegic, pregnant Alison Lapper on display by day, deflated at dusk! But, among the thousands of artworks, many vividly colored and gargantuan in scale, created by many of the world’s most famous contemporary artists, one artwork stood out for the contrast of its perfect silence that resonated outward, like tree rings circling wider and wider—a very small painting entitled Tree by American Ellen Altfest.

The core of Tree’s effect? We can say it in a word: eyeballing. Altfest’s painting, like any painting, remains an art of vision, but, in this case, vision is super enriched. And, mirroring our earlier use of three definitions for “vision”, now we employ “eyeballing” to pinpoint three parallel levels of extreme visual engagement: by the painter in the act of creating the painting; by the painter in seeing the world and her subject matter in the world; and by us, staring at the painting on the wall of a gallery, a quiet little oasis amid the cacophony of the art world extravaganza.

Eyeballing. That’s what Altfest does when she goes about her business of looking for subject matter, at subject matter, and at the painting while she paints it. As a painter who paints from life, the first step for Altfest is commonly to spend time looking closely at the subject. Ultimately, to produce such an intensified image, she eyeballs a tightly cropped view over months (months!) of almost super-human patience. She controls her own concentrated attention and painstaking application of paint strokes to accumulate—on canvas—a faithful representation of the subject. Her subjects have ranged from close-ups of a man’s back, still-life objects arranged on a table, the stretched skin of a man’s penis against the upholstery of a stool, and, in the painting that hung on the wall before us in Venice: a close-up of a tree. But why do highly controlled representational paintings—such as Altfest’s—mesmerize us, the viewers of the painting? Altfest claims that there is such a density of visual information in her subject that the overload of visuality is breathtaking. Fair enough! But imagine a small section of a fallen tree trunk—the actual motif that Altfest spent thirteen months in a Connecticut forest staring at and painting, often spending many hours a day seven days a week at the work, including during the frozen months of deep winter. The resulting painting, Tree (2012–13) was the one we witnessed in the main exhibition of the Venice Biennale in 2013.

But what if we park ourselves in front of the same exact section of bark that Altfest selected for her art? Would the small section of a tree trunk captivate any of us in the same way the painting does? There is more visual information in the actual section of the tree—the phenomenal object in the real world—than in the painting. Altfest would be the first to admit that she didn’t exhaust her subject even after eyeballing and painting for thirteen months. So why isn’t the actual tree as fascinating as the painted version? Well, let’s rephrase the question and ask why the real tree isn’t so fascinating to the ordinary human? Clearly, the real tree transfixed Altfest.

One reason is that the painting is a painting, a human-created image, and this fact—that it is manmade (well, in this case, womanmade)—fascinates us, adding a keen level of mystery. We know the painting was constructed slowly, brushstroke by brushstroke, and yet Altfest’s painting of the tree outstrips a photo in its convincing sense of texture and volume. We examine the painted surface, looking for traces of the artist’s hand. How did she do it? How did she make it look so real? How long do you think that took to paint? And why did she do it: what is it about this person Altfest that she would spend so much time staring at a log? All these questions circle back to the essentials of eyeballing. What captivates the artist, and what captivates the viewer, enough to get us to eyeball that which we see? We are captivated; we take a close look, and then, step forward, for a closer look.

Another reason is that the painting selects from the full scene the exact rectangular view that the artist presents for our visual delectation. She frames a section of the subject (just this section of tree, or just the penis and upper legs of the male model, et cetera), and, as a result, the painting in its frame confronts viewers with a contrived view that, in a manner of speaking, condenses what the artist saw and felt into a dense visual icon. What did the artist intend by riveting the gaze on just this one up-close frame from a larger universe? What are we thinking as we gaze upon the detail?

Tree is hypnotically still and stable with respect to which forms are in front and which forms are behind. In real life, what is in the foreground and what is in the background can change as we shift our own position. If we stop to examine in close detail one particular tree, our eyesight ratchets down, dropping from the large scale of the forest, to a clump of trees, to one particular tree, to the section of bark we touch, to the small branch extending out its arm, holding one tiny fresh green leaf, upon which rests a miniscule green insect (What do you think? Maybe an aphid? Hmmmm. Or a baby grasshopper? . . .) What we are engaged in throughout the journey— into Altfest’s painting within our trip to the Venice Biennale, as clearly as into an actual wooded setting, is intense eyeballing.


 
August, 2016. Our destination is a short car ride from our house in Indianapolis. We’ve been invited to attend an art event on a Friday evening. The location is a nearby public park. The event, entitled 38th & Shine, is being organized by Stephan Eicher, and a few collaborators connected with Indianapolis’s Harrison Arts Center. Eicher, a citizen of India, is here as a graduate student at Herron School of Art and Design, majoring in painting. Eicher’s thin, of medium height. He emits an uncanny, sincere warmth. In his presence, one feels uplifted, joyous to be alive in this reality, in this moment. So, trusting Eicher’s effervescence, we drove over at the designated 6:30-ish evening time, parked in a somewhat desolate lot, and walked through a thick fog of summer humidity a few blocks, past construction trailers and orange construction zone witch-hat cones. We sat on a curb and waited, raising a hand, now and then, to shield our faces from the glare of the setting, but still powerful, arc lamp of the sun.

Is this a painting? Once the sun had started to drop below the horizon, and the scene dimmed, various representatives of local organizations, standing on a makeshift platform, addressed the crowd, now several hundreds of people. We were directed to gather into a roughly half-acre area cordoned off inside the larger green space. We heard explanations, the rationale for why we were all here—the event commemorates a joining of a particular community subset, bringing together a sampling of the full mix of ethnicities, ages, and genders that live near this particular park. The park itself has suffered a history of neglect, urban blight, even homicides and other crime; now, starting tonight, various community organizations and government agencies, church groups, and concerned citizens are assembling to chart a new, more luminous future for the park—as a green space, a playground for children and families, a safe zone where the best in each of us can flourish.

In honor of the event, and to embody the energizing of the community, we are invited, right now, to participate in a singular art event. Eicher takes the microphone, and, in his lilting, wry way of talking, he gently invites us to take our places, in small groups of four people, centered on stations that have been painted (dusted would be more accurate) onto the grass. Each foursome is handed a small metal can containing sparklers. Eicher explains, “the world record, in Guiness, for sparklers lit simultaneously . . . that’s what we’re going to see if we can set.” We smile, captivated by his voice and his ideas. “What is the record?” Eicher continues speaking, “The worldwide record now stands at one thousand, four hundred and fourteen. . . . set a few months ago in Japan.” Looking around, we shake our heads, knowing our assembly isn’t that large. “But, the national record is only nine hundred and . . .” We remain doubtful. Ever the optimist, Eicher continues, “And if not that, then . . . we’ll set the Indiana record for sparklers all sparkling at once! (pause) “Which is currently (another pause) ZERO!” We beam, feeling a rush of confidence.

Our leader, Eicher, then directs us in the details of lighting the sparklers; he encourages us to synchronize the process with maximum efficiency, because “Sparklers only remain lit for forty-five seconds.” But not to worry: we will do the whole process twice. Eicher explains how the official tally is recorded: “we’ll do the lighting process, and then our minions (Eicher’s official term for the volunteers) will walk along the lines and collect our responses to, “How many sparklers did your group succeed in lighting at once.” Our honesty is assumed with delightful cheer. Those pieces of paper, collected at the ends of the lines, will be picked up by a very (very) tall young man in semi-camouflage pants, who then runs up to the platform, and a pair of official counters add up the sums to get the grand total.

Our first attempt at setting the record goes smoothly. Craig recorded the scene on his iPhone, just as many others in the gathering. In one favorite, Jean is in the lower right, capturing a close-up of the sparkler lit in her hand. The picture looks just like a painting. Craig showed the pictures he’d snapped; everyone in our little group eyeballed everyone’s pictures. All of us were glowing, physically and mentally, amazed at the scene in real life, and the way various cameras and smart phones had captured the fleeting in still images. Images that endowed a timeless monumentality to a moment that, after the sparklers snuffed out, went back to seeming rather ordinary. While we went about our business on the park’s grass, a silver drone flew and hovered overhead, filming from above. We wondered what those pictures look like?

The grand total was four hundred and seventy-eight. A new “Indiana record”! Eicher asked us to “try again.” Let’s see if we “can set a new, NEW record!” Some minutes later, the sky even darker as the sun vanished over the horizon, we lit another round of sparklers.

Stephan Eicher is a painter. In the paradigm of the contemporary art world: an artwork is what an artist does. (This is the functional definition, the working definition of what art is in the diverse landscape of the early twenty-first century.) And, therefore, a painting is what (whatever) a painter does. The art event, 38th & Shine, became its own special type of painting. We can situate it within contemporary practice by making theoretical reference to relational aesthetics—in which art is the process of human relationships forming within an aesthetic situation. For us, and for all of the hundreds of people assembled that evening in a park in Indianapolis, the true power of that event was it got us to really look at ourselves, to see who we were (whites and blacks, some Asian and Hispanic people, old people, youths, relatively well-to-do and some who looked economically challenged). To see what we looked like as a group, in a specific locale, under specific conditions of sky and weather and setting sun: we made a huge painting. With sparklers, hundreds of them waving aloft. And to capture everything on hundreds of smart phones and cameras. And to look at those images. Paintings within a painting; paintings made of digital photos of a painting made of a social event.

And why should we, or you, care what painting is now? Because this new spin on painting—as the art of vision, now become the art of eyeballing at its most extreme—is empowering. Empowering because to eyeball the world is a way to live fully in the world, your corner of the universe; and to push the extreme boundaries of painting one doesn’t necessarily need to be a famous artist exhibiting at one of the premier art venues, like the Venice Biennale. One can be an artist—as humble as Stephan Eicher—who redefines painting in his own terms. And involve hundreds in the process. All of us, eyeballing the lives we live. Making a painting.