When
I was in my twenties, I wanted to be a man. Not literally but I had a lot to
prove and made sure that my paintings were as macho as they could be - big,
thick, dark, imposing and heavy. This is not to say that they were not sincere
and deeply felt. They were largely about fear and the manifestation of my
neuroses and my obsessive and perfectionistic nature.
I
did well in graduate school; after all, people are usually impressed by
monumentality. One day, one of my
professors, Franklin Williams, suggested I look at the work of Jay DeFeo, a Bay
Area artist who had had moderate success on the west coast but was relatively
unknown outside California. Franklin saw a connection between my work and Jay’s
that excited him. Coincidentally, Jay’s work, The Rose, was crated up in one of
the seminar rooms at The San Francisco Art Institute where I was studying. Due
its thickness, the painting was falling apart and SFAI was keeping it safe
until the money could be raised to restore the legendary painting. Jay DeFeo’s
spirit hovered around me.
Franklin
told me the story of The Rose: in the late-fifties to mid- sixties, DeFeo spent
almost all of her time secluded in her San Francisco apartment doing pretty
much nothing but drinking gin, smoking cigarettes and painting The Rose,
obsessing over it and building it up thicker and thicker until the painting
became so heavy that the person who lived below her had to prop up the ceiling
with pillars to keep it from caving in. In the end, the painting, which
measured twelve feet tall by ten feet wide and a whopping thirteen inches
thick, tipped the scales at about 3000 pounds. When SFMOMA took the painting
for an exhibition, they had to remove a window from Jay’s apartment and use a
forklift to get it out. The story mesmerized me in all its romantic, beatnik
glory. Here was someone I understood and who I assumed would understand me. At
the time, I didn’t see how sad a story the making of The Rose actually was; to
me, it was tragic but cool. At that
point in my life, I was not equipped to understand how truly sorrowful Jay’s
life must have been. Franklin gave me a reproduction of the The Rose. I remember it well: a large yellowed foldout
card with the image of the Rose on the front and text on the interior. I was
fascinated with the image - the massive sculpted painting appeared to stand on
its own, it was so thick, yet, despite the obvious materiality, the painting
appeared positively transcendent.
Jay DeFeo
The
Rose
1958-66
oil with wood and mica on
canvas
327 x 234
cm
As
it turned out, Franklin and Jay were friends and he wanted me to meet her. She
was having a birthday party at her home in West Oakland and Franklin invited me
to attend. It was an important birthday, not only because Jay was turning 60
but also because she had been diagnosed with lung cancer the previous year. I
agonized over what to buy her and walked through some of the worst streets of
Oakland to get to her loft. When I finally arrived, a young man who seemed
quite surprised to see me greeted me at the door. Franklin had given me the
wrong date. I had missed the party by one day and therefore missed meeting
Jay.
The
next time I saw Franklin, he still seemed intent on my meeting Jay and told me
that he would drive me out to her place one day – that he would arrange
everything. In the meantime, Jay’s cancer worsened. She passed away on November
11, 1989 before we had a chance to meet.
In
1995, The Whitney Museum held an exhibition called “Beat Culture and the New
America: 1950-1965”. It was the first time The Rose had been exhibited on the
east coast and the first time it had been shown since it was crated up and
stored at SFAI. At the time of the exhibition, I was quite ill and just a few
months away from my own diagnosis of cancer; another parallel development in
our lives. It was the first time I had
ever seen the Rose in person. It was magical.
Since
then, I have seen the painting at least four times and have seen several
exhibitions of her work at SFMOMA and The Whitney which purchased The Rose
after the beatnik exhibition. Interestingly, as my own work has evolved and
grown exponentially, I have seen that the connection between my work and Jay’s
goes far beyond the monumentality of my early work. We share a great love for
edges. De Feo’s collages and late paintings have a quiet sparseness and utilize
crisp contours as a way of creating figure/ground reversals and pushing and
pulling space. She also had a love of technology. There is a peculiarity to her
work, something that made her work uniquely hers and not a part of any particular
artistic movement. Her work is disturbing yet it is also beautiful.
Jay DeFeo
Loop
System: Where the Swan Flies
1975
acrylic mixed media
122 x 244
cm
There
was a time when I had a hard time looking at The Rose. It seemed to me Jay had
bared her soul for the whole world to see her psychological flaws. The painting
seemed mostly an expression of a tortured woman’s perfectionistic nature and obsessive/compulsive
tendencies. It seemed naïve and too exposing. As time has gone on, however, my
feelings about Jay’s work have continued to evolve. I still think The Rose is
an amazing work of art, in my mind singular in its scale, its presence and it’s
spiritual impact. As opposed to when I was younger, however, what is remarkable
to me now about the painting is not how big, thick and imposing it is. What I
find incredible and unique about The Rose is that while the painting takes the
physical form of an utterly exposing manifestation of pure pathological
neuroses it manages to transcend that level of expression to arrive at
something expansive, infinite and joyously liberating. I like to think that
creating The Rose played that same role for Jay in her own life.
Suzanne Laura Kammin, 2015
Suzanne Laura Kammin (US)
Return
Of The Master
2015
oil on linen over panel
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