by John Elderfield
John's (and my) generation inherited from the preceding one in Britain the transformative, liberating experience of Abstract Expressionism and subsequent American painting. John found particular affinity with the so-called “color field” painting that emerged in America and then Canada in the 1960s, and his work does present itself as a uniquely personal development of this tradition-personal in its color and configuration, and perhaps more importantly, but elusively, in its spatiality. Unlocatable forms like enlarged brushstrokes appear to float and then settle, and then float again, in a sort of shimmering ether.
It is reasonable that we compare and contrast new art with what immediately preceded it, and this aids appreciation of John's work. However since artists do not only look just over their shoulders, this can disguise deeper affinities.Thinking now of john's work, I find myself recalling what Renoir said of Cezanne: "He could not put two spots of color on a canvas without it already being good.” Cezanne's influence is commonly described as encouraging the geometric simplification of forms that produced Cubism. Far more important was that his was the first major style in Western painting whose process was fundamentally improvisational; as such, the source of multiple subsequent working methods. He described it simply as, “one stroke after the other, one after the other.” That was also John's method.
John, too, made each painting from a series of distinct decisions. And each decision depended upon the convincing rightness of the position, placement, hue, value, shape, area, and thickness of every compositional unit - even while proceeding without a plan, or with only a hint of one. The new American painting that John admired was improvisational with an implicit plan - the achievement of pictorial unity by creating an all-over field without strongly distinguishable areas of interest. To achieve such unity without doing that was a riskier endeavor; and proceeding without a plan while doing so was even riskier. But John, in his quiet way, was a risk-taker; and his paintings, in their own quiet way, show it. Not merely felicitous juxtapositions but dynamic encounters came from putting spots of color on a canvas, making it very much more than good.
September, 2019
