On Callum Innes-  Exposed Paintings, Process and the Nature of Abstraction

Angela Dittmar

Excerpts in italics were taken from the essay "Once Removed" by Michael Auping

Unless otherwise noted, images of Callum Innes's work are from his personal website.

 

 

Exposed Painting Asphalt, 2000, Oil on linen, 94.5 x 91.5 cm (approx. 3 ft  1 in  x  3 ft)

 

 

Michael Auping has introduced the nature of Innes's abstraction by commenting on Zen Buddhism as a major influence on artists of the Abstract Expressionists. With an anecdote on John Cage viewing a work in the studio of Philip Guston, Auping alludes that the paradox of abstraction is that there can be nothing and everything at the same time. After crediting Vasily Kandinsky and Kazimir Malevich as the pioneers of abstraction, he writes:

 

The pictorial stage had been purged, leaving behind elemental fields of colour and gesture. What began as a small window into then on-objective world had become a doorway into what some described as 'nothingness' and others 'the absolute', terms that today sound almost clichéd, but at the time were loaded with meaning in the painter's ongoing search for the most fundamental condition of the image.

For painters, as well as philosophers and poets of the time, Zen brought a more worldly and less pessimistic approach to the dilemma of nothingness than did the post-war existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre. Referring to Sartre's Being and Nothingness , [musician Morton] Feldman remarked, 'Sartre left us with literally nothing. Zen gave a little more hope … what is eliminated makes room for something else. It's hard to describe what that something else is — maybe just the mystery that exists between the beginning and the end — between something and nothing.'

 

Exposed Painting Payne's Grey, Red Oxide on White, 1998, Oil on linen, 162.5 x 154.5 cm (approx.  5 ft 5 in x  5 ft)

 

In the excerpt below, Auping describes Innes' process similar to other abstractionists such as Agnes Martin, Frank Stella, and Mark Rothko as a visual koan. Koans have been described as philosophical principles, but also as parables, paradoxical riddles, or anecdotes. They are used in Zen Buddhism to demonstrate the inadequacies of logical reasoning and to provoke enlightenment. Some Koans are in the form of questions to which there is no right answer.  

 

Callum Innes has physically rehearsed this koan over and over, claiming his own piece of this landscape. He calls many of these works Exposed Paintings. His process involves painting a geometric, monochromatic form made of dense layers of oil paint. Using a turpentine-soaked brush he then carefully attempts to remove a large section of the form, leaving a soft veil of ghostly brushstrokes behind. Juxtaposed, then, is the carefully applied and the equally carefully removed. In this case irony does not indicate nihilism, and the eliminated section does not amount to a negation as much as a challenge. As more than one Minimalist has expressed it, when you start taking a lot away you had better make what is left better than it was. Otherwise, you will have to start again and then begin to eliminate more carefully. In other words, reduction is a difficult thing to achieve accurately and predicting its accuracy is no more assured than applying materials to a surface.

 

Exposed Painting Cadmium Orange, 1996, Oil on canvas, 170 x 162.5 cm ( approx. 5 ft, 6 in x 5 ft 5 in)

 

 

Auping continues to expand on the experience of Innes's exposed paintings, specifically Exposed Painting, Mars Black, seen below, by sharing Agnes Martin's philosophy on humanizing geometry. "Martin often talked about ineffable moments of 'balance', and of humanising geometry, if not eliminating it altogether: 'I keep telling people that my paintings are not about geometry. They are about trying to find perfection in the balance between a form and its human nature.'"

 

Agnes Martin, Mountain, 1960, Ink and pencil on paper, 9 3/8 x 11 7/8 in (Image taken from MOMA)

 

Exposed Painting, Mars Black, 2002, Oil on canvas, 97 ½ x 93 ½ inches, Image via TheModern

 

More from Auping:

 

Innes's paintings also represent a delicate balancing act in which presence and absence play a subtle shell game. The abstract geometric form — an iconic symbol of weight and emotional clarity — is connected like a fraternal twin to its own partial removal. Here, weight and clarity are given over to an ethereal existence — a series of liquid gestures, like a hand passing through water. Their commonality is that a single hand made and unmade the image. The resistance of the canvas, and of the paint as it is being added or removed with a turpentine-soaked brush, is specific to the artist's energy in a given moment. The trick for Innes is to apply the same energy to both operations. The same hand, seemingly with the same attention, is constructing at the same time it is dissolving — a moment of balance between giving and taking.

 

Lastly, Auping suggests that Innes's exposed paintings are perceptual experiences with an infinite nature, rather than merely exist, similar to that which is expressed in the Japanese tradition of a sumi-e ink painting, an example by a 16^th century artist is seen below.

There are moments when Exposed Painting, Mars Black suggests a postmodern sumi-e, an ink painting in the guise of an abstraction. There are related words like naru  (becoming) and ma (translated as space, it can also mean time). An ink painter strives to create an image that is not 'finished' in the Western sense, but is perpetually in the process of 'becoming'. Areas where the ink fades to grey at the end of a stroke, or the off-white rice paper where there is no ink, are equally not unfinished but are equal partners in suggesting a 'live' image between a beginning and an ending. It is an image that is more a moment of perception than a thing.

Hasegawa Tohaku, (1539 – 1610), Picture of Pine Forest, late 16^th century, 155 x 115 cm (approx. 5 ft x 3 ¾ ft)

 

I would like to leave you with a comment Auping includes earlier in his essay.

 

Part of the personality of Exposed Painting, Mars Black  is geometric. Its immediate visibility, particularly from a distance, is about the strength and orderliness of geometry. There is no black rectangle in nature, only in the illusory world of abstraction, which proposes it as a symbol of the possibility of a perfect invented form, but a form that is nonetheless made in the mind, not by the hand. In a sense, it is a material

illusion.

 

The other side of Innes's image — the removed side — suggests the real or human side of this

platonic architecture.