Carol Caputo, a New York abstract artist, is a slight, jittery woman with a touch of a Brooklyn accent.
City Sketchbook
By Annie Poon
Carol Caputo, a New York abstract artist, is a slight, jittery woman with a touch of a Brooklyn accent. Her studio is at the Northwest corner of Union Square, just steps away from the bustle of the farmers’ market and on view is her latest body of work entitled ‘The Rhythm in Me’. On the wall is a seven-foot painting on un-stretched canvas. Broad slashes of color intersect mottled fields of spots and stripes, while soft areas of pastel soothe the dizzying whirls. The childlike colors lack subtlety and instead jump at the viewer like tropical fish in a violent altercation. Her gleeful compositions recall the unfettered outpourings of Joan Mitchell. Swirling bursts of musical forms proclaim reverence for Kandinsky. The painting vibrates with texture. Overall it’s an unapologetic binge into abstraction.
Yet there’s a thinness to the images that borders on stinginess. She seems hesitant to load the brush or build up a surface. Assertive jabs end in dried scumbles. The mere perfunctory handling of paint contrasts with her lavish attention to texture and pattern. She crams the interstices with dots, grids, zigzags, and waffles. The patterns appear too specific to spring from mere imagination. I’m drawn into the textures and interrogate her to discover their source.
"It’s all rubbing," she explains, as what appear to be abstract patterns are in fact crayon rubbings taken from the street. She’s spent years walking around New York with crayons the size of soap bars, laying her sketchbook out and using them to capture urban impressions. "I’m collecting these wonderful pieces of what I see. It’s not like you’re taking a manhole cover and making a picture of that. . . I’m just taking a section, borrowing it, so to speak." She combines the rubbings to create startling new compositions. They’re magnificent. I recognize a thin string of circles and ask if it’s a bike chain. "No, it couldn’t be a bike chain," she responds, "cause those are hard to get into."
Carol doesn’t only rub flat surfaces. She wraps her book around poles and corners or lays it across junk she collects on Canal Street. She shows me a rubbing made just outside of her apartment. It’s taken from a tiny embossed metal map of Manhattan. Having crossed Union Square hundreds of times I’ve never seen the little map. But Carol’s eager eyes consume the details of the street.
"Look how beautiful this is," she says, opening her sketchbook to a cluster of arcs and rectangles reminiscent of Malevich. "That’s Madison Ave. and 34th St." The entry at the bottom of the page lists the address.
After picking a location, she scampers back and forth across the street to combine the textures onto a single piece of paper. "My husband goes nuts because every time I go traveling I say, "I have to come back here, let me make a note- 35th and 7th Ave. I just did two off a church," she says, rifling through stacked paper rolls. They’re marked on the outside with notes like ‘no good for rubbing, waxy on the inside,’ etc.
Prior to this studio visit, the only rubbings I’ve ever seen have been those made from gravestones. In the front hall of my house a rubbing of a knight shimmers on black paper. The medieval tomb guardian appears as lifeless as the crypt itself. I ask Carol if tomb rubbings inspire her, but regret the question as she shoots me a bored look.
One of the most strange and beautiful pieces nestled in her notebook is an untitled work that resembles an odd, cyborg botanical illustration. Judicious rubbing has captured the essence of a circular form, which might have been repeated monotonously on a manhole cover. Coupled with horizontal stripes, it takes on the image of a blossoming flower. "This one’s from a storage bin in my apartment house," she gushes, "and these are from the laundry room. See these? They’re telephone poles . . .Here’s the northwest corner of 15th street."
Caputo’s work has always attended to textures: "I’ve just always loved the facades of things. My father was a bricklayer," she explains, "and my mother was the most resourceful human being in the world. She worked in a factory. At the end of a lot, whatever they were sewing, if it was blouses or something, there would be one left sleeve, and one right sleeve, and she would sew them all together and make clothes for us. My sister and I just looked incredible all the time. She just knew how to tie it together- [collage] is just a matter of doing that".
Caputo’s first rubbing was on a piece of fabric. She recalls a graphic design project that led to the discovery. "The assignment was to design some street style graphics for a sweatshirt group. It was one of the first real ‘street wear’ companies, Bugle Boy, I think . . . I went out and got some things from the street. Metal things, not garbage so much, but you know what I mean, like graffiti feeling. And I rubbed those elements and created a band, which went all along the side of the pant in black and white. And that was really how I came to this whole thing. [Later] in art school, we did a lot of things with stencils and printing of potatoes and crazy stuff like that."
The transition of this work onto the canvas was part of a natural flow. "I used to take the canvas wherever I was going and just jump out of my car. I would have one of my daughters or some friend stay in the car while I rubbed something." Now Carol prefers to use a durable onionskin paper. Its light weight encourages spontaneity. The rubbings do not suffer from any retrospective fiddling or editing. After all, it’s the spontaneity that draws her to the street. "The unexpected happens when you’re out on the street," she says. "There’s no unexpected here in the studio."
Looking at Carol’s paintings, I am reminded of Jackson Pollock’s early work, before he narrowed his technique to his trademark splash. His early paintings were full of unease. Disparate elements rivaled for attention. But as Pollock drew nearer to pure ‘action painting’, the little drips and unplanned outbursts crowded out premeditated forms. Carol still struggles to find new ways of incorporating city impressions into traditional painting. Her most beautiful artistic moments occur when she’s on the street with her crayon. "I used to think, "Oh this stuff is corny because it doesn’t have an intellectual content. But then I said, ‘you know something, that’s not who I am. This is the place I love, the place I want to capture in my work.’ I’m celebrating the place that I love."
