Two years ago Don Kimes, who had been painting high key intensely colored collage works, began using metal rather than canvas as the support for paintings. Gone too were the bright colors and fragile collage surface. Instead of applied color put on by conventional techniques, the dark burnished and rusted color of metal treated with acid washes became his new palette. Kimes’ decision to forsake traditional materials and techniques opened up new possibilities for creating pictorial form and structure. But these new materials and techniques were neither arbitrary nor unrelated to his earlier concerns; their use indicates a growing awareness of the problems of painting that pushes at the boundaries of the already known.
An uncommonly intelligent painter, Kimes was determined to bring his own particular vision and content into line with the most progressive developments in painting that acknowledged the literal character of both the surface and support while dispensing with figure ground relationships that are the mainstay of academic composition. A generation younger than Johns, Rauschenberg and Stella, Kimes followed their lead in finding fresh inspiration for painting in printmaking techniques. In Kimes’ case, however, this meant using automatic procedures to “provoke” form as opposed to imposing static compositions related to static imagery. The result is a tension between chance and control, accident and discipline that give his new works, whether large or small, an inherent drama.
Kimes’ determination to remain faithful to the ambitious notions of content to which Abstract Expressionism (which was really never abstract or expressionistic) aspired is both rare and courageous for an artist of his generation. No matter how radical or experimental his materials and techniques, his paintings remain paintings that emphasize the pictorial concerns of painterly surface and coherent structure as much as they demand to be experienced as poetic and emotional statements related to human experience.
Confronting the dilemma of the painting as literal object is among the essential elements of painting as it seeks to redefine itself. Within this framework Kimes struggles to define how a pictorial statement is different from an object in its ability to imply light and space without defining their explicitness so narrowly that what we are left with is furniture rather than a metamorphic transformation of the material into the spiritual realm of the immaterial.
The transformation of the materials into the immaterial has always been the goal of ambitious painting. Perhaps it is even more so today because we live in a purely materialistic and one-dimensional culture that would deny meaning and content to art other than the basest and most obvious forms of propaganda or decoration. In the context of the goal that painting sets for itself today, an artist like Don Kimes exhibits an exemplary tenacity and courage in confronting the limitations as well as the potential of the pictorial.
Things change. That's precisely what makes things interesting. But change is also uncomfortable. Being in a place that is familiar is comfortable. You know it, and you know what to expect. There is one very recognizable time when you can know if what you're doing in the studio is hollow. That's when it feels comfortable. When you're making discoveries, finding something that at least holds a possibility for being original, it is by definition uncomfortable.
I've lived in Brooklyn, Wyoming, Washington, D.C., Chautauqua County, New York, Pittsburgh, Mexico, Kauai, and Oil City, Pennsylvania. I spent last year living and working in Umbria in a tiny, thoroughly agrarian hill town fifteen kilometers from Todi. It was a big change for me, although the town itself has changed only minimally over the course of the past five hundred years, give or take a century or two. It's not far from Perugia, Orvieto, Spoleto, Siena, Florence, Assisi. There were several artists living in the area. Perhaps because of the place, we had interesting conversations about notions of time, immortality, change, crisis, the information age, cyberspace, pictorial space and what all of that means to us as artists.
In my own work I don't think about these things directly, although I am interested in what time does to nature and to civilization. I think that time takes everything back. There isn't any immortality, but we all want it anyway, and Italy is a great place to think about space, immortality and the passage of time. You cannot pick up a stone that hasn't already been touched by a dozen human hands, or walk through a forest that hasn't been harvested a hundred times before. I wrote something (on a manual typewriter) about these conversations while I was living there:
"If I take a stick of charcoal and make a deep black mark on a blank white wall, that mark takes on great significance in the context of what happens on that wall. If I take the same piece of charcoal and make a second mark, the impact of the first mark is lessened in the context of the wall. The first mark doesn't change. It remains the same size, has the same weight, character, tone and all of those other formal qualities. But the second mark also demands our attention, and it changes the first mark because of that. If I make ten thousand marks on that wall, the first mark is diminished to the point of having virtually no meaning at all. These marks are like bits of information. So what is the meaning of that most singular of acts - making what we call art, painting on a rectangle (a shape which doesn't exist in nature) - in the world of the information age, with it's billions of bits of information? What is the information superhighway, and where does pictorial space fit in the environs of cyberspace?
Between my studio and my home there are two answering machines, two fax machines, three computers, three televisions, countless radios and six telephones. I am in Italy now. I have not been in my home or studio in nearly a year. Nor have I watched television, listened to a radio broadcast, touched a word processor, heard an answering machine message or sent a fax during that same period of time. I do, every three or four days, buy a copy of the International Herald Tribune, and two or three times a week talk to someone (a human being, not a machine) on the telephone. But overall, the experience of the past year offers me some semblance of being a detached observer. And I must concede that spending a day last December with a dozen local people slaughtering a pig that they had raised for the winter's meat, combined with a few paragraphs on the latest sensationalized trial of the century in a four day old newspaper, makes me at least as 'informed' as I was when hundreds of times as much information was coming at me every day a year ago. Only then I didn't know anything about the pig. Perhaps it is just a question of how much information a human being is actually capable of processing in a meaningful way."
More than was the case before I spent a year in Camerata di Todi, I think about the nature of how we experience space and time in the world as it exists today. We sit on airplanes traveling at speeds in excess of six hundred miles per hour, listening to Beethoven on the headphones while we are reading a newspaper article about last night's political crisis on the other side of the Planet - all at the same time. Certainly, the quality of the experience is diminished, but the truth is that we all experience Beethoven in this, or some other detached fashion far more often than we do sitting in a concert hall. Time and space now exist in a way that would have been impossible for Matisse and Picasso to have imagined only a short few decades ago. Time and space aren't sequential. They are simultaneous.
In the age of information making art requires a greater act of faith than it did for Piero and Giotto. At least they had the Church. We have AOL, the Internet, the World Wide Web, instant and anonymous e-mail, CD ROM, video, C-Span, CNN - a safely sterilized, convenient and instantaneous world on the inside of a television cube. Whether we realize it or not, on a daily basis we all walk around in a suspended state of virtual reality. From Giotto and Piero through Matisse and Pollock, painting was first hand, capable of being touched, original. It does seem out of place in the information age world of cyberspace. However, I am not convinced that this state of affairs is so terrible for painting.
Earlier this year I visited the Villa of the Mysteries in Pompeii. The walls, the frescoes, the remnants are magnificent. And while standing in the courtyard of this marvelous two thousand year old house I was reminded that painting is painting. It is incapable of being threatened by the incredible access to technology available to some of us. Whatever has happened since the walls were painted doesn't do anything to diminish the walls. They still talk to us more than two thousand years later. Before the Romans there were the Etruscans. They painted frescoes on the walls of tombs. The Romans came and the Etruscans disappeared. Painting continued. The Romans built the Pompeii that we know, and they painted the frescoes on the walls in the Villa of the Mysteries. Vesuvius erupted and buried Pompeii. The Roman Empire rose and fell. Painting continued. It survived the Dark Ages and industrial revolution, world wars and how many other empires? How far has pictorial space "progressed" since the frescoes on the walls at the Villa of the Mysteries were painted? As I see it, the notion that cyberspace might somehow diminish the meaning of pictorial space represents a kind of simplistic arrogance. It is an arrogance based on either the inability to transcend, or the inability to accept one's own time. Art exists outside of time. Cyberspace is only about time - or the compression of it.
In Camerata I read a book by Milan Kundera. It's called Immortality. Kundera opens the third chapter with a quote from Rimbaud saying "For eight days I had been scraping my shoes on the stones of roads". Then Kundera continues by defining a road as "a strip of ground over which one walks. A highway differs from a road not only because it is solely intended for vehicles, but also because it is merely a line that connects one point to another. It has no meaning in itself, but its meaning derives entirely from the two points that it connects. A road is a tribute to space. Every stretch of road has meaning in itself, and it invites us to stop. A highway is the triumphant devaluation of space, which thanks to it has been reduced to a mere obstacle to human movement and a waste of time."
It's not called the information highway for nothing. Painting belongs to the world of roads. Are roads disappearing from the landscape to be replaced by highways? Of course they are. This happens especially in the post-industrial world where your neighbors don't raise and slaughter their own pigs. But like the mark of charcoal on the wall, the importance of each road is greater in proportion to the fewer roads that there are. It's not that the cyberspace and the information age diminish the relevance of painting or of art. In fact, they may do the opposite. For every new bit of information out there on the highway, there is an increased importance to that most singular of acts.
Physically, Don Kimes’ paintings are an amalgam of diverse materials: torn paper, acrylic, and oil paint, which is sometimes dissolved in turpentine and selectively wiped away with rags. Here and there, waxy limning in oil stick punctuates luminous washes of color. The variegated ensemble is layered together on sheets of mahogany and birch. Kimes’ multiplicity of means is often spread across multi-paneled formats, including diptychs, triptychs, and shaped canvases. In paintings such as Isosceles, the frame itself seems to Buckle and bow under the internal stress, as if the extremes of nature’s energy defy containment within the comfortable stability of a rectangle.
Kimes intermingles bright glazes, drawing marks, and translucent tissues to produce subtle differences in matte and gloss that change in response to the viewer’s motion. As they say in the lapidary world, the gemstone surface is “romanced,” i.e. sensitively faceted and sheered in order to capture and reflect light. For diamond cutters and action painters alike, the stroke must be swift and sure, totally focused but entirely fuss-free. The execution is direct and deft; in Kimes’ work, the result is a surface that shimmers as we move.
Don’t be misled by his images’ fresh looking color and gestural verve. The effect is one of guileless immediacy, but careful scrutiny reveals the artist’s time-consuming method. Glazes have been built up in luminous overlays that demand days of drying time. Reworked pentimenti and strips of collage offer other clues about how many thoughtful moments went into the painting’s genesis.
The appearance is of one frozen instant suspended for out contemplation. The truth-the protracted development of individual works, and the evolution of the artist’s lifework-involves much more. Recollect Whistler’s Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket, and remember the artist’s quip that the act of painting took one or two days, plus “the knowledge of a lifetime.” In Kimes’ case, the labor includes a lifetime’s engagement with nature, especially the raw North Eastern landscape. His spiritual guides in this enterprise have been Paul Cezanne, Marsden Hartley, and Hans Hofmann.
Kimes’ art involves a distillation of landscape space. This is also to say that his work provides insight into the essential problem of painting the landscape - a task that has nothing to do with souvenir snapshots, and everything to do with the fixity of concentration required to grab and hold the slippery natural world and its ever-changing light.
Through the early 1980’s Kimes sought to capture the site-specific character of various locales, favoring unmanicured nature and subjects such as water cascading over boulders. His early landscapes were portraits of real places. However, unique occasions may evoke universal truths; and so Kimes’ renderings of rocks and rapids also represent obdurate objects opposing irresistible forces.
The concept of likeness, which can signify “physical resemblance,” may also involve the question of simile, i.e. “What is the model like?” These two realms need not be mutually exclusive. Throughout his twenty year career, Kimes has concerned himself with the common ground between his model’s appearance and its essence. The emphasis has always been a matter of degree and, over time, the artist’s focus has shifted gradually away from the particular and toward the universal.
Two centuries ago, in the heyday of Romanticism, art that dealt with nature was proclaimed as “Sublime” and the Sublime came in various guises. For instance, Keats praised Wordsworths’s verse as an example of “The Egotistical Sublime”. A rubric that Edmund Burke posited in 1760, the “terrific Sublime,” might have been coined by Madison Avenue today. Don Kimes ambitious new work depicts the precarious point where the recognizable world meets abstraction. In this instant of dematerialization, the details of the locale are lost, but the residue of the landscape – its singular spirit – lingers there before us. Thus Kimes’ art suggests a contemporary category: the Subliminal Sublime.
Don Kimes' recent paintings represent more than a return to the Hudson River School. Even though most of these large, ambitious landscapes were made along the Hudson near Bear Mountain, their vision embraces the stylistic principles of twentieth century modernist art, combining a native American romance of nature with the dynamism and cosmic overtones of cubo-futurist composition. Perhaps "transcendentalism" would be an appropriate term. For Kimes, nature embodies forces greater than man, and the landscape is interpreted geologically rather than humanistically. The absence of human figures or of any reference to man merely underlines the abstract, universalizing thrust of his work.
There is a naturalistic component in Kimes' work, especially apparent in his watercolors. Here his handling is softer than in the oils, he achieves a richer play of color in a subtle range of blues, greens and reds, a feeling more impressionistic and less abstract. Elements of this gentler light persist in the smaller oils, but in the larger works Kimes sacrifices it to a more elevated style, more strongly drawn, in which dynamic relations of planes take precedence over the naturalism of the light. What painters such as Church attempted to achieve by portraying the sheer vastness of the American landscape – an impression of the sublime – Kimes attempts to accomplish through the syntax of abstraction, avoiding romantic rhetoric by focusing on nature's essential, underlying structures.
Here are no panoramic vistas. Horizons, when present – are high, and the space is confined rather than wide-open, somewhat in the manner of Cezanne's quarry paintings. In "Hell-Hole-Popolopen Creek" for example, the space is closed by the wall of a ravine, and boulders in the foreground are abruptly cropped by the frame. Pools of water establish a sequence of horizontal steps around which bare rocks create a rhythmic pattern of planes, sometimes broken and dramatic in their irregularity, sometimes suggesting the ordered progression of geological change. The planer emphasis and the baroque, overall rhythm recall Cezanne, yet here the sharp contrasts of light and shade enhance a physicality which has more in common with abstract art. Cezanne's boulders are organic, suggesting strong bonds of empathy between the artist and his subject, whereas Kimes' are sharper, less compromising.
Kimes' dynamism recalls the planar structures of Cubism and Futurism, yet these European styles were motivated by a progressive orientation, a romance of technology. The elimination of organic forms took place in a spirit of future-oriented enthusiasm. Kimes, however, partakes of an American innocence that values nature as a primal image. It finds in nature immediate access to a transcendent, timeless world with restorative powers for the spirit. Rather than an aggressive transformation of the world by technology, Kimes seeks renewal in the discover y of a nature innocent of man, in contact with forces which, if not supernatural, are at least superhuman.
This experience of the American landscape was given individual form by the vision of painters such as Hartley, Dove, Avery and Burchfield. Kimes paintings have only limited affinities with the work of such artists, who celebrate the isolated vision of romantic individualism. Only when he deals with landscapes barren and wintry does Kimes evoke a mood of romantic desolation, but this, one suspects, has more to do with the subject than with the painter's treatment. If Kimes relates to any painter of the individualist tradition, it is to John Marin, who found the play of cubist forms even in the Maine seacoast.
For Kimes, like Church and other Hudson River artists, grounds his vision not on individual idiosyncrasy, but on a style and technique with claims to universality. For Church this meant the Neo-classical heritage of the academy, whereas for Kimes it means the structural logic of Cubism, as interpreted by Hans Hofmann and other painters of the New York School.
Kimes art is thus based on a revelation of the higher order of things which the artist experiences in contact with nature and makes available to others through his work. His paintings can therefore embody formalist principles without losing contact with the concrete or becoming "art for art's sake". This effort to justify art by an aesthetic appeal to nature seems characteristic of much American art, reflecting the American spirit of pragmatism and mistrust of decadence. It applies equally well to the Abstract Expressionists, though to them nature was identified with the subconscious. As Pollocke put it, "I am nature".
While Kimes is closely involved with his subjects, and their beauty is undeniable, he seeks an art of balance, grounding subjectivity in the objectively given, visually apprehended world of natural landscape. While there is security in this objectivity, there is also a radical and adventuresome spirit in the pursuit of a natural ideal – in the faith that nature will abundantly confirm the highest intuitions of art. Don Kimes' paintings are charged with this speculative energy.