Gregory Amenoff is to be right up front my hero. He is the person that “discovered Me” along with Randall Morris.
He is another exception man, funny, brilliant, and human. I spent allot of time with him in the early 1990’s/ Eating out, listening and learning. He has had a profound impact on my life and my art. The kind of genius that is always seeking out others, encouraging, nurturing. honoring. A wonderful man, brilliant art.
The Sky Below
by Gregory Amenoff
Images:
The Starry Floor I; oil on canvas, 1994 (27K)
The Starry Pole II; oil on canvas, 1994 (28K)
The Starry Floor III; oil on canvas, 1995 (26K)
Untitled; mixed media on paper, 1996 (53K)
18 paintings based on the introduction to The Songs of Experience by William Blake; with an introduction and interview by William Corbett and a critical essay by Donald Kuspit.
Amenoff's latest work takes its overall title from the poet William Blake. These are large pictures in both size and scope. Always rooted to the landscape, Amenoff has here brought the sky down to earth and ground starlight into pigment. These visionary paintings echo the work of Charles Burchfield and Martin Johnson Heade, but their lavish use of paint and their exuberance ("Exuberance is Beauty," wrote Blake) are all Amenoff. In their essays Kuspit and Corbett, the former writing from a critical distance and the latter from a long association with the paintings and painter, explore Amenoff's achievement. Accompanying their texts are excerpts from an interview with the painter.
"Hear the voice of the Bard!
Who Present , Past & Future sees,
Whose ears have heard
The Holy Word
That walk'd among the ancient trees,
Calling the lapsed Soul,
And weeping in the evening dew,
That might controll
The starry pole,
And fallen, fallen light renew!
'O Earth, O Earth return!
Arise from out the dewy grass;
Night is worn,
And the morn
Rises from her slumbrous mass.
Turn away no more.
Why wilt thou turn away?
The starry floor,
The wat'ry shore
Is giv'n thee till break of day."
--Introduction from
The Songs Of Experience by William Blake
From Donald Kuspit's 1993 review in Artforum of the Amenoff show at the Hirschl & Adler Modern Gallery, New York City:
Even though Gregory Amenoff apparently still believes in content, he is one of the best painters around. The content: weirdly involuted, abstract forms that resemble micro-organisms becomes a vehicle for the sultry, turbulent density of Amenoff's painterliness. Like all good painterliness, his is emblematic of an emotional state, in his case one fraught with a tension that seems about to burst its bounds. Indeed, without the containment and control provided by organic shape, Amenoff's painterliness would be blindly impulsive, a kind of vertiginous swirl of violent energy. His painting seems propelled by an ecstatic urgency As in the best instinctive painting, there is a sense of ecstatic response to the mystery of naturea kind of onomatopoeic recapitulation, in painterly terms, of its generative power.
The wish for transcendence through ecstasy is an archaic one, and also the primary motivating factor of so-called expressionism. The point is to work oneself up into a frenzy of painterliness, each gesture synergistically interacting with every other, to create a kind of orgasmic resonance. It is not simply a matter of simulating the sensation of orgasm in paint, or of a general release of libido and aggression, but rather of using them as a kind of fuel to escape the particularity and limits of selfhood. Paradoxically, the paint must be sufficiently driven to suggest release from controlling drives. Nonetheless, release is incomplete in Amenoff's work: the core of the self affords a sense of autonomy which is what I think his micro-organismic forms symbolize and remains intact. His micro-organisms are vitalized by drive, but they also resist it, that is, maintain an integrity of their form. I am suggesting that Amenoff's painting is an allegorical psychodrama, "describing" the inner conflict between integrity and instinct that threatens to tear every self apart. Ecstasy and excruciating tension blend imperceptibly in energy struggling to shape itself even as it erupts...
The point is made clear by the Blakean allusion of Panther Burn (1992). A pyrotechnic loop with rays emanating from it and an intricate constellation of "stars" within it ( the whole implying the fusion of macro and microcosm) suggest the visionary brightness of Blake's mysterious panther, a symbol if instinct at its most intense. (It is worth noting that a panther replaces Franz Kafka's "hunger artist" after his death; the crowd prefers the vital animal to the life-denying ascetic.) Blake's creature is instinct at its purest, that is spontaneously creative instinct. In a sense, Amenoff's paintings are about the ecstasy of creativity, articulated as the emergence of elementary natural form from elemental formlessness. It is refreshing to see the ahistorical view of creativity as a natural, instinctive process in action, especially when much of today's art seems to be the result of pre-programmed strategies rooted in a simplistic reading of art and social history intended to legislate them.
Gregory Amenoff was born in Illinois in 1948. He attended Beloit College and earned a BA in history. He lives and works in New York City. He began painting in Boston in the 1970's. He has held numerous teaching positions since the mid-1980's at institutions including The Pennsylvania Academy Of Fine Arts, The School Of Visual Arts in New York City (whee he is currently on the Graduate School faculty) Yale School Of Art, and Columbia University (where he is a Professor). His work has been shown in dozens of solo shows since the 1970's, nationally and internationally, and his work is in many major private and museum colections.
Awards and Honors:
1994 Honorary Doctor Of Fine Arts, Massachusetts College Of Art, Boston, MA
1989 The National Endowment For The Arts
1981 CAPS; The National Endowment For The Arts
1980 The Louis B. Comfort Tiffany Foundation; The National Endowment For The Arts.
1979 The Artist Foundation Of Massachusetts
1976 Massachusetts Bicentennial Painting Award
Oversized (8.5" x 11") Hardcover 48 pp. 18 color plates $39.95
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