Striving for Perfection : In Conversation with Laurie Fendrich
By Julie Karabenick
Laurie Fendrich has been an abstract painter for over 30 years. She received her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1978, and is currently Professor of Fine Arts at Hofstra University. A prolific writer on art, her essay, "Sleeping Beauty," is forthcoming in The Common Review. Fendrich’s work was most recently exhibited in the New York Academy’s 2004 Biennial.
Julie Karabenick: You’ve written that you’ve inadvertently painted your way back to the 1930s.
Laurie Fendrich: I honestly painted myself back to synthetic cubist structures without thinking about it. It just happened. When I saw the Stuart Davis retrospective at the Met in the early 1990s, I couldn’t believe it. I was so at home! I do not know the meaning of my paintings, but I have observed that when I look at them after a long time lapse, I see that I was trying to make crazy things all calm down and behave well together. In the end, I know that I intuitively balance things that by nature don’t automatically go together, and that’s where I succeed or fail.
JK: What are the primary elements you try to balance?
LF: It’s easy to balance something if the colors go together, like in a blouse, and if you just use symmetry, or all-overness, or keep all the elements in a painting the same. But I try to throw things off a bit by throwing big rounded, almost-cartoony form up against straight edges and small, tiny squares and grids. To me, these are opposites, and they don’t go together at all.
JK: So you want order, but nothing too serene or docile…
LF: I think the ordering impulse lurks beneath all works of art. But you can kill art with too much order, just as you kill anything you try to control too much. When art gets too perfect it’s stultifying.
JK: Stuart Davis incorporated motifs from popular culture into his work. Do you share his intent to "paint the American scene"?
LF: I don’t deliberately set out to paint the American scene, but I do think my colors and my sometimes cartoony shapes are American–kind of obnoxious and brassy, no matter what I do. I don’t use motifs on purpose, but I think noses and funny profiles are sometimes suggested in my images. If things look too figurative, I get disturbed, and alter them. But I do think there’s a lovely small beauty that comes from elevating something essentially humorous–like a crazy pink, bulgy form–by painting it with classical purity and control.
JK: So more balancing–in this case, Modernist and pop sensibilities?
LF: I think I try to balance my basically Modernist impulses with some fun jabs at it. In this sense, I acknowledge that there’s some light irony in my art. I’ve got some comedy in my painting. My model is Jane Austen, who demonstrated ways to dwell on the beautiful and the best, while at the same time acknowledging–and even enjoying–the imperfections all around her.
JK: You’ve written that you struggle to reconcile a longing for perfection with the imperfections of the real world. Do your share the faith of the early Modernists in the power of abstract art to make the world a better place?
LF: Although I don’t question the sincerity of the early Modernists, or the beauty of their art, I have come to the conclusion that their ideas were not, in the end, powerful enough to combat the materialism that is the real character of the 20th century. To me, a serious abstract painter has to take account of Darwin and Freud. In other words, high-fallutin’ words about spirituality won’t cut it. But this doesn’t mean we abstract painters can’t try to make something that moves people, even if it’s on a smaller scale than the universal, all-encompassing spirituality of Kandinsky or Mondrian. As to perfection, it’s simple. I love to try to make a perfect curve or a vertical straight line without any tools other than my hand and my brush. It’s so very satisfying to me! It’s a way to be more human, rather than machine-like. I was very disappointed when I read that Mondrian would have used a tool to make his paintings more perfect if he’d had one at his disposal. Everything I like in Mondrian comes from his human effort to achieve perfection in the face of the impossibility of achieving it. I guess it’s that gap between striving and achieving that I am in love with.
JK: Your husband, painter and art critic Peter Plagens, has said that composition is the most important aspect of painting to you.
LF: Composition is everything in flat art, in my opinion, because it’s where things end up balanced or not. And balance is where visual pleasure comes from. I think the Minimalist movement in the 1960s killed artistic awareness and pleasure in composition, because there was no composition. To the Pop artists I must give credit–there’s no greater artist of composition than Roy Lichtenstein.
JK: What is it about Lichtenstein’s compositions that you find so remarkable?
LF: Lichtenstein knew how to crop his images. Each of the four edges of his paintings–each side–is divided differently, to create stunning visual interest at the edges of the paintings. I try for that–I try to make my paintings extremely active at their edges, which is why I have forms bump up right against the edges. I have learned a lot from him about how to use the edge of a painting as if it were part and parcel of the internal image.
JK: To what extent do you work out your compositions before you paint?
LF: The odd thing is that for all the certainty of the look of my paintings, I paint improvisationally. Yes, I do start out with a drawing, which I transfer to the canvas. But from there, things change so much that if you were to see the final painting next to the original drawing you might not recognize the connection. My technique allows for shapes to merge or to be broken up. What’s hard is to change dark into light, since I use so many glazes. For this reason, I work from light to dark–deepening colors as I go along and commit myself to the final shape. The color depth is important to me–a visual effect of layering thin glazes so that orange is achieved by successive layers of red over yellow rather than just mixing the orange ahead of time. Photography can’t achieve color depth. Only painting–in fact, only oil painting–can do this. I find color depth the most sensuous part of oil paint, and I love it.
JK: And your color sensibilities?
LF: I like bright, artificial color, which I think is part of my contemporary spirit. I like to achieve my colors accidentally, improvisationally, and because there is such an infinity to color–its attributes of hue, tone, and intensity are so nuanced–it shouldn’t be that hard for painters to develop very idiosyncratic color. It puzzles me that there isn’t more of that.
JK: You’ve said that you aspire to make paintings which are "openly good-looking." Do you find that beauty is making a comeback among contemporary painters?
LF: I think beauty is in deep trouble today, both in art and in the culture at large. And no, I don’t think it’s making a comeback. Precisely the opposite. People just don’t believe in its value any more–for reasons that have to do with the slow takeover of the materialist view of life. The bottom line is that a lot of serious artists think beauty is trivial and superficial. This puts serious artists who do care about it–and I’m hardly alone in this–in an isolated position.
JK: But you believe that beauty is one of abstract painting’s strongest virtues?
LF: The strongest virtue of abstract painting is its capacity to be beautiful. And it’s true that it isn’t so time-bound as figurative art, where the funny collars and weird hairdos in paintings from a long time ago can be jolting to our sensibilities. But this capacity to be beautiful is also its downfall. Abstract painters often wallow in the wonders of color, shape and brush mark, and become terribly self-indulgent. On the other hand, abstract painting that illustrates extremely abstract ideas is also very dangerous. Lots of painters end up with images that don’t support their grand intentions. The days of Kandinsky and Mondrian are over.
JK: I’m surprised that you put beauty at the top of the list.
LF: I’m reasserting the profundity of beauty. I think that we now think of beauty as ordinary, and not profound at all. It’s the stuff of magazines, and it’s been appropriated by the shallowest part of the popular culture. Abstract painting has a funny way of giving us that bit of room to re-see beauty, to see it again, and to see it as something profound rather than trivial. I think abstract painting does other things well, too. If it’s good, it’s a little jolting. You notice a good abstract painting right away, even in a room full of furniture or a hotel lobby, and it stands out as an independent entity.
JK: So you’d encourage budding abstract artists to aim for beauty in their work?
LF: I don’t think it does an artist one bit of good to make beauty be the direct intention of the art. Good painters hit upon beauty almost accidentally, as a byproduct of trying for something very particular and focused. If an artist has some talent, the solving of a very narrow and direct problem–balancing shapes, bringing up the full chroma of a color, trying to make an icky green fit into a painting, making one edge meet another with some delicacy–ends up as something that is beautiful. This is the nature of all art forms–that the form itself isn’t necessarily beautiful, but the striving for excellence in the art form allows a moment of beauty to occur.
JK: You’ve suggested that abstract painting offers an elegant pathway out of our current cultural crisis.
LF: Our cultural crisis is that movies and celebrity life have taken over–like that strange plant in the South called kudzu. Painting–especially abstract painting–can’t compete with that.
But for those who eventually can’t take any more–who love images but can’t take one more movie or one more story about one more movie star–painting is there.
JK: So what must an artist do to help keep abstract painting vital?
LF: I think abstract painters should become really difficult people–refuse to show their pictures with photographers or figurative painters and absolutely refuse to exhibit their work in group shows that include installation art or any kind of sound whatsoever. We have no apologies to make for taking this stance. All we’re doing is carving out a small area for our kind of painting to have a fair shake in the middle of all the other stuff. Anyway, we ought to be proud. At least we’re not making obvious art that preaches to the converted, or pretends to have a political impact—when it doesn’t—or has some convoluted, esoteric "meaning" that is an obscure, high-tech, expensively hip version of navel-gazing.
JK: Do you find yourself out of sync with the art world around you?
LF: Oh gosh. I’m totally out of sync with the current art world. But I must admit that I like that. It doesn’t take much to be out of sync with it–if you cultivate your own garden, as I do, you find much more interesting things are growing there than in the art world. I’ve got lots of artist friends in the same position as I am in. We’re not unhappy.
JK: How would you suggest a viewer approach your art?
LF: I think the best viewer of any art is someone who will give time to looking, has a little visual sensibility–some people don’t–and isn’t ready to attack before looking. Looking at my paintings while knowing something about the history of Modernism probably gives a little additional pleasure, because it kicks up the intellectual participation of the viewer. But just looking and enjoying my pictures is a fine thing as far as I’m concerned.
JK: As someone who has taught art for some twenty-five years, what changes stand out for you?
LF: When I went to art school in the late 1970s, the best thing about it was that it was a place to hang your hat in a somewhat protected environment–supporting teachers, other people like you who wanted to become artists. You had time to develop your art. The longing to make it big really early hadn’t yet invaded the art schools. Now that’s all changed, and every 18-year-old art student wants to be at the right openings of the right artists at the right galleries. What can I say? I hate this kind of crap, but it was inevitable once fashion and art merged, back in the 1990s.
JK: Are art schools complicit in this?
LF: Yes, definitely, I think art schools and studio programs are after their own fame and fortune–they want to be known as the number one art school and all that because that attracts applicants.
JK: Do you find that there’s too much emphasis on thinking and talking about art and not enough on making art?
LF: I’m not against reading and thinking and talking as part of an art education. In fact, I’m completely for it. It’s part of what helps form the intellectual side of an artist’s work, and if you’re not an out-and-out primitive artist–which is awfully hard to find now–it’s important for an artist to have an intellectual engagement with his or her work. So the question in simply the content of the curriculum.
JK: And you prefer your students to read…
LF: I think a steady diet of the likes of Judith Butler or Julia Kristeva or Michel Foucault is boring. A better education comes from reading Kandinsky’s essays and notes, and Delacroix’s diaries. But I like to throw in fascinating essays from long ago about the nature of art–such as Lessing’s Laoco�n, for example, or Leonardo’s paragone on painting, or Tocqueville’s passages on what happens to art in a democracy. I’ve found Rousseau’s brilliant attack on the value of the arts stimulates passionate thinking in my studio students far more than any post-modern theories about simulacra.
JK: And what advice would you offer your students who are intent on pursuing a career in painting?
LF: Don’t. I’d tell them how bad it is out there, hoping to prevent misery for the best and knowing that real artists always go ahead and become artists no matter what a teacher says.
JK: You’ve written that you’re an ideal seeker. What responsibilities do you feel as an artist?
LF: I struggle a lot with what’s called the "Platonic Fallacy" —the idea that through knowledge I can achieve virtue. I believe that being good is about the hardest thing possible, and I’m not all that good a person in the end. Making art is probably a kind of atonement for my failings as a human being. I’ll say this: If someone outside the art world likes one of my paintings—say, a totally ignorant-of-art super in my building sees one of them that I happen to be carrying, and says, "Hey, I like that" —I am about as happy as I can ever be.
