2019 JOHN NEWSOM
Divine Wind is an inverted cone of fuchsia-colored flowers sweeping across a periwinkle sky. Are the flowers painting the windy white brushstrokes in the background or being painted by them? In either event, a hierophany is happening. Magic is afoot. And to heighten the supernatural feeling, John Newsom reduces the flowers themselves to a woodblock-style duotone pattern of fuchsia highlights and blueish-purple shadows. The two colors (of equal saturation and value) shiver against each other, coming alive before our eyes—a classic optical effect that Josef Albers’ Interaction of Color identifies as “vibrating boundaries.” Newsom uses such effects sparingly in his Meadow Paintings (2018-2019), and their impact is all the more powerful for his measured restraint.
John Newsom’s Meadow Paintings consist of twenty-four paintings of sunflowers, grapes, roses, and wildflowers set against Easter Egg-hued monochrome backgrounds. They are a departure from the artist’s usual grand scale. Rather than painting the meadow as a single monumental landscape, Newsom zooms in on each individual fruit or flower, employing an intimate 30 x 24-inch portrait format that allows us to encounter each element of the meadow on its own terms, directing our attention to the gravity of a dewdrop or the stately grandeur of a leaf. His titles, such as Tender Certainty, Within a Moment, and Origin of Light, signal that there are metaphysical subtleties at play in these paintings beyond whatever run-of-the-mill notions of “beauty” or “nature” a more conventional series of “fruit-and-flowers” paintings might elicit.
Between the solid pastel backgrounds and the crisply delineated foregrounds of each painting, Newsom first lays down an intermediate layer of white gestural brushstrokes in a fast Action Painting style. The white brushstrokes may be read literally as representations of wind—sometimes forceful and gusty, sometimes soft and lyrical—or more abstractly as the structural armatures or compositional guides onto which the floral imagery is fitted. In either case, the monochrome backgrounds function as generative voids, out of which representation emerges, and the windy brushwork is the go-between, what Newsom calls “the instrument of possibility” that mediates between absence and presence. The dual nature of Newsom’s white brushstrokes as both “wind” and “paint” recalls the waterfall paintings of Pat Steir, whose drips and splashes occupy a similarly ambiguous superposition (“paint as waterfall” and “paint as paint”), directing us simultaneously toward the materiality of the picture plane and away from it.
Another painting in the series, titled In a Lifetime, presents us with a single sunflower whose petals extend just beyond the four edges of the picture plane. The head of the sunflower, with its thousands of seeds, suggests a mesmerizing, kaleidoscopic mandala or a spinning galaxy. It is not quite as psychedelic, perhaps, as the endlessly unfolding mandalas of James Whitney’s abstract films from the 1960s, but the suggestion of infinite space is still here, augmented by the swirl of white brushstrokes circling the robin’s-egg blue of the background. Like the café scene in Jean-Luc Godard’s One or Two Things I Know about Her, when the spiraling froth in a cup of coffee briefly interrupts day-to-day life with a vision of cosmic space, the sunflower of Newsom’s In a Lifetime takes us unexpectedly “to infinity and beyond.” Such is the enchantment of Newsom’s art: one moment we are gazing at a mere flower and the next we are swept unawares into vibrating planes and cosmic gyres.
Newsom is also a master of formalist composition with a penchant for turning the visual language of Abstract Expressionism against itself in ways that would probably make Clement Greenberg writhe in his grave. Sweet Serenity, for instance, has the structural clarity of a Franz Kline, but its puffy blue hydrangeas and soft baby-pink background undercuts any hint of Ab-Ex machismo. In Eternal Present, Newsom gives us a composition that’s as elemental and direct as one of Adolph Gottlieb’s Blast paintings, although it’s also a naturalistic image of grapes. And just as Gottlieb’s exploding forms remain forever caught in a timeless freeze-frame, Newsom’s grapes hang suspended by a thread in the “eternal present” of the long pause before their inevitable abscission. Journey of a Lifetime, meanwhile, is one of the few Meadow Paintings to feature fauna in addition to flora: namely, a cluster of monarch butterflies that has attached itself to the top edge of the painting. The mass they create has as much compositional heaviness as the black shapes in Robert Motherwell’s Elegy paintings, despite being composed of the lightest and most delicate of meadowland creatures. In each of these examples, Newsom’s choice of pastel colors and bucolic motifs brings a lightness and tenderness rarely seen in their Ab-Ex forebears while still maintaining the strong visual impact that formalist strategies can achieve. “I’m attempting to make strong paintings that remain humble,” Newsom says. And he does so by channeling the power and aesthetic audacity of High Modernism into modest, portrait-sized paintings of flora. If Paul Cézanne astonished Paris with an apple, John Newsom astonishes us with grapes and hydrangeas.
The Meadow Paintings use every trick in the formalist playbook to elicit feelings of wonder and reverence, and if we give ourselves over to those feelings, we may even see, as William Blake did, “Heaven in a wild flower… and eternity in an hour.” Each eye-to-petal tête-à-tête connects us, by way of a deceptively commonplace image, to an efflorescent meadow of the mind. They offer us two dozen opportunities to slip beneath the world of mundane appearances, and while they’re strong enough to carry us beyond ourselves, they’re still humble enough — and generous enough — to give us space to breathe.