Whitehot Magazine

Anthony Haden-Guest at Art On Paper

 ANTHONY HADEN-GUEST - So I see It's Time I disconnected the dots - Mixed Media - 2024
 

By ANTHONY HADEN-GUEST September 7, 2024

  The group of six artists that the Debbie Dickinson Gallery is showing at the Art On Paper fair are a variegated crew. No Ism will surface from this pool, count on that but the thing we share – yes, I am one of them– is a healthy working relationship with paper, an antique medium, now under the shadow AI. So this is clearly the right time to take a good look at some encouraging paper uses.

  Why are you working on paper, I asked David Richardson?

  “Number one, paper is portable and I can manage it outside of my studio,” Richardson said. “The other thing is that it has a completely different tactile feel to it. You can use materials like chalk, and colored pencils and crayons the way you can’t use them on canvas. That’s the main thing.

   “And in general works on paper are probably more intimate because they’re smaller. It makes for more intimacy and they can be matted and framed. That’s part of it. I like working on paper. It’s smaller format. I can make a lot of mistakes and recover quickly. So I can explore a lot more.”

   Richardson’s most recent works are the vividly assymetrical flower paintings he has made on both canvas and paper.

“There’s a much different feel with the work on paper,” He says. “With the black chalk, pastel chalk, crayons. I actually use children’s pencils that are called My First Ticonderoga.”

   How does he choose paper?

 “Actually I don’t. I take different types of paper. Watercolor paper, multimedia paper, chalk paper …just so that I can get a different effect. I like the challenge of working with a new brand of paper.”

COSMO MULLICAN - Feral Child - Watercolor on Green Label Arches Paper - 24 x 18 inches - 2024
 

  Cosmo Mullican reached back in time when I asked the "Why" question.

   “I’ve worked on paper since I was a young kid. My first love was making art since I was in pre-school,” he said. “But I have taken it to a whole other level really with being able to print onto paper, being able to map out photographs with my own personal printing process”.

   Does Mullican have a preferred paper for drawing and watercolors?

   “At the moment it’s mostly Arches. It works very well for me,” he said.

  Does he sometimes have a drawing that doesn’t work?

 “I’m a very methodical artmaker. When I paint nowadays I have everything mapped out perfectly,” Mullican said. “But I  have moments when I don’t hit an edge or design the right way. I accept it. I move right past it. And I’m usually a lot happier after the fact, after it happens. The process.”

BILL BUCHMAN - Black, Yellow, Red - Mixed Media on Archival Watercolor Paper - 22 x 30 in - 56 x 76 cm - 2020
 

  Why are you working on paper, I asked Bill Buchman, a longtime professional jazz musician, who is also a working painter.

  “Well, this is what I would say,” Buchman answered. “The basis of music is a vibrating note. And not a visual vibration. It’s an actual vibration. From an instrument, a real instrument, not a digital instrument. And the basis of painting is the brushstroke. And that’s something you do with your hand, like on a musical instrument. And that experience and the emotion that can be conveyed from the hand to the surface of the paper is not comparable to any digital kind of action. It has to do with the communication of human emotions.

  “Something is lost with digital music. I play digital instruments. I’ve worked a lot with digital photography and art as well. And it’s cold and lifeless compared with the analog activity of brush on paper. So it’s necessary sometimes to work with digital things. But for me there’s really no comparison. I am foremost an artist these days. I’m not a musician painting, I’m a painter who also plays music. But my painting draws deeply from a lifetime experience of performing music”.

  “You’re a young fellow,” I said to Evan Lagache. “Why are you working on paper? Why aren’t you working with AI? Or video or whatever?”

  “The reason I choose to create art without AI is that there is a deep meaning behind my work,” Lagache said  “It’s very human and it generally surrounds themes of nature, spirituality, and society, things that I don’t feel like AI could capture with the same authenticity and thought as the human mind.”

EVAN SEBASTIAN LAGACHE - The Beginning of the End - Ash and Collage, 24 x 18 - 2019

  So to the show. “I’m going to be showing a series of works called The World in Color. It’s a series of collages of aerial views of Earth,” Lagache said. “I’ll also be exhibiting two older collage works that I believe are critical pieces that speak to the state of our world today: the first is called The Beginning of The End, and it depicts the apocalyptic reality that the choices we make are often the cause of our own demise. The second piece, called A Flag Woven With Fire, features the destruction, rebirth, and constant evolution of America, whether that change be constructive or destructive to society. Another piece that I will be showing is called Remanence of Light. It’s a painting of a spirit in a cenote, which is a sacred cave in Mayan culture that I had the pleasure of visiting in my travels to Mexico. These are very special places filled with such powerful energies of what’s come before us, and standing inside of one really calls you to reflect on all the souls that have walked this earth long before we were here.”

  Zachary Kahn sees paper as its own reality, effectively a bridge. “Paper, with its texture and immediacy, offers a counterbalance to the virtual world” he says. “It allows for a direct connection between hand and medium, where each mark is intentional and permanent. This process is not just about creating art but about preserving the human element.”

ZACHARY B. KAHN - Blue Arrangements #5 - Oil Sttick , cut paper, Krink, Acrylic on Paper - 30 x 22 inches - 2023

   
    So to my cartoonery. Cartoons differ from fine art in that there’s usually some mystery in good art, sometimes elements the artist didn’t
knowingly put there, but there’s none of that in cartoons, because it would slow them down, interfere with their job, which is the delivery of a comic idea. That said, as the work of past practicioners has indicated, cartoons and caricatures can hold the page or the wall as well as art. I’d as soon be looking at Honore Daumier, Max Beerbohm or George Herriman of Krazy Kat as at many of their painterly contemporaries.

   These pieces are mostly pen and ink on paper and I like to work with paper with different surfaces from mirror-slick to those so thickly textured they can induce a tortured nib to produce an irritable splatter with fine effect. Also when I pick up the pen to work up an idea a kind of obsessive compulsive disorder will usually take over and I can get through well over a dozen pages of drawings before I think I’ve got it.

    What if I’d been doing that on a screen? It would have been a horror story of erasure/erasure/erasure, winding up with something usable, yes, but regretting the blotted out. On paper though I’m not forever crumpling or tearing-up the botches because I know that most will look fine the next day and may even birth a fresh idea. As when the new use to which I put a reject has made it one of my most durable faves. WM

 

Anthony Haden-Guest

 

Anthony Haden-Guest (born 2 February 1937) is a British writer, reporter, cartoonist, art critic, poet, and socialite who lives in New York City and London. He is a frequent contributor to major magazines and has had several books published including TRUE COLORS: The Real Life of the Art World and The Last Party, Studio 54, Disco and the Culture of the Night.

 

 

 

view all articles from this author