princeton advanced

painting

Spring 2013

Josephine Halvorson, Instructor

Buse Aktas Firdevs Ulus Megan Karande Kemy Lin Laura Preston Maura O’Brien

This semester, Princeton’s Advanced Painting course left the studio in search of new spaces and environments. We worked at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Guyot Hall, and alongside Lake Carnegie, among other locations. Through making paintings on site, we questioned the shifting relationships between artist and environment, subject and object, and painting’s abilities to communicate. Students devised and implemented individual final projects, using painting as a way to map time and space. These are notes from the field, snapshots, and reflections.

BUSE AKTAS

When painting is a performative act, as it was with all our experiences – near the river, in the Plasma Physics Lab and in Guyot – the act and process of painting becomes much more important, since you are more conscious of each decision you make, more than the end result. You are aware of all the external influences and how they change your approach to your subject, and the painting then becomes a recording of what has happened during that time in your head, around you, while you keep looking at this one thing. That one thing you keep looking at becomes your medium of communication. The dirt you see on the object, the little irregularities you decide to depict, the

things you decide to ignore – all of these turn that thing into a word on a canvas, an entry into your visual diary.

I’m not a big fan of words, because words are a medium of communication that forces you to frame your experience according to those words. You don’t actually feel like you experience certain things unless you have the words to express them, which shows how pathetically you’re connected to the history before you. But if you use something else as the medium of communication, if you are freer in the ‘words’ you choose – if you are the creator of the words, it’s a more personal and pure way of communication. And even though people will still process your painting with their existing vocabulary – it creates a new, if not better, platform of communication.

The process of ‘making things’, the sharing

of a tactile process, should make a better mode of communication, right? This class, a collection of experiences framed and set up by our professor Josephine, should sort of make us get an idea of the understanding this practice has given Josephine. Even though this is, in my opinion, a much better way of communication, it still is inefficient; it still is prone to the extensive framing of each student in the class through their own lens of vocabulary.

This is something I have been struggling with, during the last couple of months, not specifically about this class but about making art in general. And I really think that making these paintings and communicating with passersby helped me at least get a better understanding, although I still can’t find concrete answers to the questions I’m struggling with – I don’t think I ever will. Why does art matter?

Why and how does something you make matter more than other things you could have done with your time? Why should you spend hours and hours on a painting, on mixing a color, if all you’re getting in the end is a bunch of colors on a canvas? Especially, as it was in my case, it ends up as an image that you’re not even that happy with. This is usually the case with all my work – it’s my pathetic struggle to try to find a means of communication and constantly feeling like I’m failing. But then there are moments, very few but quite precious moments, where that thing you made opens up a conversation – a conversation that you want to have – without you initiating it with words. That is when I feel like it all matters, and it does something that other things can’t do, somehow.

FIRDEVS ULUS

I am by the canal. I usually come here to walk, and I walk for the sake of walking by the canal. I mean, not to exercise, not to lose weight, etc. I usually walk slowly, and watch the environment; I listen to the air, the birds, the wind. I breathe.

For the first time, I am here to paint, looking at the reflections of the trees on the water. How exciting! All the time I come here, I watch it, feel it, perceive it. Now, it is the time to give a life to it on my own canvas. How exciting, and how scary at the same time. I always think and say that one of the

most difficult things to paint is my loved ones. Now, I somehow feel the same for the canal. It is so beautiful and perfect as it is. How can I make art from it?

This is not the only difficulty. It is also the first time that I am trying to paint something that changes dramatically in every moment. It is totally different from painting still life. Now, I need to ‘see’ the moment, if it is possible at all! Actually, I am not really sure if this is important at all. Do I really need to capture that particular moment, each time I look at the water? Is this the way I should paint? Is it even possible to make it a ‘whole’ painting in that way? Well, I don’t know. Still, I am attempting to paint it in the way I know how. Look, I am able to fix the composition by observation. I even start to find the color of the reflection of the air on the water, and I have placed the reflections of the large trunks as well. The time

passes and the big picture is somewhat ‘unchanged’.

Or not? Where is this wind coming from all of a sudden? Now all the reflections are so blurry that I cannot even see the trunks separately. And, the sunlight: It is now late afternoon, and the brightness of the sun as it was at noon, is now gone!

Now, it is the time for all those feelings. I understand that this, my first painting in nature, is not going to be ‘realistic’ - whatever that means. It is time to reflect my own reality, and my own perception. It is a whole new way to go!

… It is time to leave. I look at the canal, and look at my painting in front of me. How different they are! Still, I like them both. When I look at the both I know that I have learned a lot from the last five hours.

MEGAN KARANDE

What to Leave Out / The Ultimate Arbiter

There are some objects or scenes that I look at and think, “I could paint that.” I pick up my brush and I know exactly where to place it on the canvas. I know how to get the sufficient resemblance. Women’s profiles, the eves of buildings, most animals. Easy. It feels relaxing, maybe even a little rote.

But much more common are the objects or scenes that instantly make me say to myself, “How could I ever paint that?” Either there is just too much information, too much recognizably, or too many places to slip up

and lose the image. I’ve got faces down pat, but knees? Knees fill me with waves of anxiety when I’m trying to pin them down. Plenty of things give me that anxious feeling, reflections, signage, carpeting…the list goes on. And it’s not that I can’t actually paint these things. I can. And I’ve done it before to some success. It’s just that somehow I get bogged down, fretful and doubtful of my own abilities. Every stroke feels tenuous. Even when the painting is going well, I feel like I’m just waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Trees and water fall squarely into the anxious category. But I had sort of forgotten about this when I set up my canvas by the river. It wasn’t until I sat down and stared at the blank canvas that I remembered my own anxieties. How could I get all the angles of the trees? How could I capture all the sunlight on the water?

How could I...? But what was there to do? I knew this was the scene I wanted to paint. I wasn’t about to give up. I had walked all this way, I only had a few hours left to make something. There just wasn’t time to move my easel.

And so, I started to paint.

To my surprise, I was okay. I had forgotten that I was the ultimate arbiter of the image. I didn’t have to get every branch angle or ray of light. I could decide what to leave out. I could decide what to put in. I’m not a historian. It’s not my responsibility to faithfully record those trees and that lake for everyone to recognize. My painting just has to be enough for me. A record of my experience, a personal history.

Because who is going to look over and say, “It wasn’t quite like that”?

LAURA PRESTON

I’ve been spending a lot of time at the C-Site MG, and the landscape of that strange, buzzing cavern under the ground is starting to imprint on me. The place is womb-like, primitive, and sub-verbal, and its bizarre emotional language has begun to creep into my subconscious mind. I’ve had dreams where I somehow end up pacing the length of the infinite grate that runs from front to back, staring at the nuts

and bolts and dream-objects buried in the red silt below, reading the hieroglyphic scratches across its metallic surface, and watching the violet pools of water and mineral deposits that sparkle through the slats. Then I’ll be at the C-Site in the day while I’m awake, and I’ll see some arcane diagram scratched onto the wall with a dull nub of chalk, or I’ll see a the loops of handwriting of a person who might not even exist anymore, and for a moment I feel like I’m dreaming again. Sometimes when I leave the C-Site MG and walk into the sunlight I feel like my skin is tattooed by the yellow-green light that floods the basement. That yellow-green light is so electric it shoots up your retinas and massages the insides of your brain.

I’ve spent several days working alongside Josephine, who has been painting tall, narrow transcriptions of the flesh-pink

columns in the basement. Now whenever I walk past those columns I don’t see columns anymore, I see rows of paintings by Josephine. Once we went down into the basement and found that overnight, mysterious pairs of letters and numbers, each encircled by a thick black ring, had appeared on the surface of each column. We didn’t know where they came from, although we did find a cylindrical cup the same diameter as the circle with ink markings around the edge as if it had been traced. The C-Site MG is like that: everything seems to exist in a simple, basic universe of Sherlockian logic.

I found a phone booth in the basement that I couldn’t stop staring at. It had a huge hole ripped into the back panel, and I imagined a workman talking on the phone and getting so angry that he ripped away a chunk of particle board because he

couldn’t find the words to express himself. There was a foot safety poster lying at the bottom of the booth. It had a cartoon of a man getting his foot crushed by a falling pipe coupled with the words “AVOID TOETAL LOSS.” I’ve sat at the base of this booth so many times that it’s starting to feel like an altar to me. I’m also painting the metal grate. The only way I can paint it is if I kneel on the cement floor.

At one point I borrowed the foot safety poster to take back to my studio because I wanted to draw a picture of it. When I removed it from the booth and took it out into the sunlight, the dust-coated paper seemed cartoonish and unreal. I experience a strange sensation similar to both guilt and amazement, and when I carried the poster past the gates of the PPPL I felt as though I had committed a crime.

KEMY LIN

What does it mean to work in the PPPL space?

Painting at the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab (PPPL) this semester, many of us have focused on the stains, peeling, and crude markings found on the aging and damaged concrete walls of the MG-3 site at the PPPL. These stains are, in a sense, “unidentifiable” forms without preconceived identities, especially when placed on the canvas without outside/environmental context. We have been forced to move away from objects that are familiar and “known,” e.g. the fire extinguishers, dead bird, etc. which has, in one way, reduced the pressure to match expectations for how an object is supposed to appear.

At the PPPL, the artists in our class are actively exploring and mapping out this abandoned, dilapidated territory – this seems to parallel the way in which physicists and engineers originally delineated the space of the MG-3 with symbols and other types of notation. What types of notation can we use to indicate our passage through, experience of, and understanding of the MG-3 space? Does this have to be a literal notation, e.g. a superimposing a diagram upon a painting –- or does the painting, in itself, function as a diagram of the space?

For us, painting has served as a means of understanding the PPPL space. We’ve

uncovered artifacts, some of which have remained unchanged from visit to visit -- like Laura’s phonebooth. These artifacts recall a time when the PPPL was a bustling, industrial space. Humming and churning. On the other hand, other minute changes from visit to visit hint at the space’s engagement with the “shared world.” The first time we visited PPPL, I discovered a dead bird and chose to paint it. The next time, he had been wrapped in a white towel with loving care. Eventually, however, the towel then the bird were removed from the space.

MAURA O’BRIEN

A Wall

I had tried to paint something that had been an interesting photograph to me: the shadows that the stairs had cast on a large sheet, as seen through one of the square frames of the pits at the PPPL. I spent less than 2 hours on the thing as a whole before class ended for the day. It wasn’t a bad beginning; most of the colors were there, and the geometric shapes were well drawn before I put down color. But the next time I returned to the PPPL, I tried to pick up the painting again. Almost as soon as I resumed painting, I became bored and frustrated. The angles weren’t working, the geometric shapes and angles were becoming more important than the colors. I painted over it.

I wandered around for at least an hour (even now I could still spend more time wandering around the pits). At first I looked at the rest of the In & Outs, and then I saw the rust, the scribbled writing, and the layers that had built up on the walls. How funny that someplace I associate with science is so unkempt. I think of labs as pristine and sanitized spaces, where Serious Thinking gets done and Progress gets made. More and more though, this space–these large and abandoned pits–seemed to be making fun of itself. There’s humor in the scrawled “Vic + Luke,” and in the “Yooooo,” and in the footprints on the walls. There’s humor in the walls themselves, which age and neglect have reclaimed from imposed precision and usefulness.

The part of the wall I chose had no identifying feature other than its spectacular

colors and a small crack in the wall. What must have happened was that a pipe burst, or there was a leak in the ceiling, or a ventilator, or something, but that leak had created streaks of color on the wall. Nothing had been intentional, but there were beautiful greens, blues, reds, and oranges. And it was very intricate; each drip had left its own path and shade on the wall. I covered the canvas quickly with approximate colors. Left of the small crack in the wall it was mostly yellows and greens, with a few purples thrown in. To the right of the crack it was almost entirely blue and white.

I would call the process of painting the wall nothing less than obsessive. I tried to work with larger colors first, but everything seemed so small to me. By the end, I had completely destroyed both of my smallest brushes. Salty white deposits wove over

the blue and purple and yellow such that every time I did another pass over an area I’d painted, I had to change the colors almost completely because I saw something completely different than I’d seen even a few minutes earlier.

The painting remains unfinished, in that I didn’t get the detail I might’ve if I’d spent several more hours on it. I never got to the right of the small crack. Looking at it now, back in the studio, it’s almost a testament to how staring at a wall can change it. I’m glad I didn’t finish the painting. The sketchy nature of the right-hand site of the painting remains my first impression of the colors, whereas the left-hand side shows the complexity (or at least, parts of it) that come only from my obsessive curiosity towards the wall.

AN UNUSUAL PARTNERSHIP TAKES FRUIT: ARTISTS EXHIBIT WORKS FROM PPPL AT OPEN HOUSE

BY JEANNE JACKSON DEVOE

Artist Josephine Halvorson and her Princeton University art class were a startling sight in the cavernous warehouse of a basement in the old motor generator (MG) site at PPPL where they spent several weeks and countless hours painting stunningly beautiful works based on not-so-beautiful objects – metal beams and grates and even an old telephone booth.

Some of the art works that resulted from Halvorson’s unusual partnership with PPPL will be displayed in a gallery at PPPL’s Open House on June 1 from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. and over the summer at the Laboratory.

Halvorson has made a career of realistic paintings of everyday and industrial objects and has had solo exhibitions in New York and Paris. The New York Times in its review of a 2011 show by Halvorson called her paintings of diverse objects such as a steam valve, a generator and an empty set of metal sign holders “rugged, deeply gratifying realism.” “One might see Ms. Halvorson as a gifted salvager, rummaging through the odds and ends of American experience and finding plenty that’s suitable – even desirable – for painting,” the review concluded.

She and her students are happy to continue the connection they made with PPPL by exhibiting their artwork at the Laboratory, Halvorson said. “I feel that it’s especially meaningful that we can display the work here,” she said. “Painting is a discipline where the object and the context are not often aligned. As the artist, it’s rare to

witness the act of communication. What’s really nice about showing work at the PPPL is it kind of reconciles these issues because this is an environment we all share.”

Halvorson spent many hours of her own time at the MG site painting pink colored I-beams and concrete blocks, which once served as bases for heavy machinery. She will exhibit one of her paintings in the upcoming exhibit.

The unusual partnership between the art class and PPPL began when Paul LaMarche, the vice provost for space programming and planning at Princeton University and a former plasma physicist at PPPL approached Deputy Director for Operations Adam Cohen about the idea of having Halvorson bring her advanced art class to PPPL. “I thought absolutely, 100 percent, yes, let’s go for it,” Cohen said. “If you want to have a strong, vibrant lab,

this is just another one of those things that makes the Lab and the university that much stronger.”

Cohen invited Halvorson to PPPL for a tour and she came back with her six students and the portable easels they constructed themselves to start painting.

They not only painted every Tuesday from 1 p.m. to 6 p.m., they also took safety training and got badges so that they could come to the Laboratory at all hours of the day – often past midnight –to complete their paintings. The students also spent a few weeks painting dinosaur bones, gems and other artifacts at Princeton University’s Guyot Hall and painted outside at Carnegie Lake in Princeton during one class.

“I think people at first raised eyebrows and looked a little askance,” Cohen said.

“But they recognized in the end, these were mature students, they were taking instruction and they were actually interested in what we’re doing. I think that all turned out really well and it’s something different, it keeps our name in front of people.”

Al Von Halle gave the students a tour of PPPL and Halvorson pointed out differences in lighting between various rooms as they went along.

The class spent one day painting at the NCSX site, where the vacuum vessels of the stellarator are stored and work on the center stack for the NSTX upgrade is taking place. The students painted silently at their easels for four hours and while few painted the shiny, twisting metal of the stellarator, they were taken with the beauty of the machine. “We were saying it was one of the best sculptures we’ve seen in a while,” Halvorson recalled.

One of the students, Buse Aktas, a mechanical engineering major, was particularly struck by the bright, shiny metal vacuum vessels and painted a vacuum vessel being stored in the basement of the MG site. “This thing is awesome,” she said. “It’s a different kind of really cool.”

For the engineers and technicians who watched the students painting, it was odd seeing their workplace through the artists’ eyes. “I find it interesting to see what they see because my mind sees all the clutter but they pick up certain shapes and stuff,” said engineer Steve Raftopoulos. “It’s really neat.”

The artists said they preferred the MG site basement despite or perhaps because of its dark, gloomy industrial look, which Von Halle compared to a World War II bunker. “I personally prefer the other room,” said Kemy Lin, a sophomore. “There’s something

almost tragic about it that I like.”

The students painted a fire extinguisher and the valves of red pipes, the grates on the floor and the cement walls, where long-ago workers scrawled directions and where one wall has mysterious footprints going up the wall. Halvorson said the hand-written scrawls on the wall reminded her of cave paintings.

The MG site once housed three massive sets of motor generators and one smaller set that powered the Laboratory’s early experiments and were removed in 2011 when the metal components were sold for scrap metal and recycled.

Laura Preston, a graduating senior at Princeton, said she was drawn to the MG site. “I’m just loving the space here – it’s so beautiful,” she said. “I turn everywhere and there’s something I want to paint.”

Preston spent dozens of hours at the MG site working on paintings for her senior project, an exhibit of paintings that featured paintings from PPPL that ran for a week at the Lewis Center for the Arts’ Lucas Gallery. Preston parked her easel in front of a dilapidated phone booth at the site day after day and often late into the night as she brought the telephone booth to life in an oil painting, right down to the crumpled safety brochure on a shelf of the phone booth, which had a picture of a big toe and the slogan, “Avoid Toetal Loss.” Preston adopted that slogan as the title of her show and both the painting and a wooden recreation of the phone booth were displayed in her exhibit.

The show also featured a handwritten essay about her time at PPPL in which she described the effect of painting in the basement where the electric lights make a constant buzzing sound. “The strange,

buzzing cavern under the ground is starting to imprint on me,” she said. She recounted how she dreamed about the MG site and her discovery of the phone booth. “I’ve sat at the base of the booth so many times that it’s starting to feel like an altar to me,” she wrote.

Preston said painting was a new way of seeing the world for her. “One thing I really love about painting is it really trains your eye,” she said. “After you’ve been painting for a while, you enter the world with a new attention to detail. It sort of sharpens your eyesight.”

Halvorson said the class also got to see how the individual students view the same site. “It’s been really fun,” Halvorson said. “You bring people down here and everyone sees something different.”

Halvorson said there are similarities between painting and the work by physicists and engineers at PPPL aimed at developing fusion energy as a viable energy source. “When you look at a painting and when you look at a machine or experiment you can draw a lot of parallels,” she said. “Both are very creative fields and you have to think through the need but also innovate it and expand it at the same time.”

Thank you

The Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory: Adam Cohen, Jeanne Jackson Devoe, Elle Starkman, Dolores Stevenson, Al Von Halle

The Lewis Center for the Arts: Marjorie Carhart, Joe Scanlan, Kristy Seymour

And to our indefatigable and knowledgable assistant Hans Tursack!