Exchange (with Rhys Ziemba)
This exchange began when, over the course of preparations for the exhibition, Rhys replaced the word “Heaps” from several titles of paintings that feature piles of objects, with new titles. It felt like a move worth digging into further, as titles are a very important element to his work, and signal what ideas he is engaging with in his painting.
New Mountain Upstate, 2023. Oil on panel, 20 x 24 inches.
Natalie Zayne (NZ): I wanted to ask you a few questions that have come up, with the thinking that Kenneth and I will understand your work even more roundly, and be of interest as a supplement to the exhibition.
First, we are intrigued by the (re)thinking you have been doing surrounding the work titles using “heap.” For example, Upstate Heap became New Mountain Upstate (image above). One thing that “heaps” did for me was provide a mental image and thus a certain container for thought. Looking at your work causes the mind to wander (and glide, and leap) all over and “heaps” was a kind of hook. The other thing it did was illustrate so well your knack for holding a certain casualness and absolute deliberation in tension. So I’m wondering what changed for you vis-avis “heaps”?
Rhys Ziemba (RZ): I quite like the word heap. A number of words might serve to describe the concept in some sense: pile, midden, tell, mound, etc. but heap has a lot to recommend it. I like its sweet domestic feeling. The reason I “decided” to use New Mountain… is that I thought it an economical way to evoke my ideas about the flimsy barrier between what is made by humans and what is not, what landscapes actually mean, and in particular the way that phrase distorts scale in terms of both time and space.
The thing that I am least comfortable with about this whole issue is feeling kind of penned in by a naming convention. As in, well this piece is called so-and-so and therefore all of the work in that “series” has to use the same language. I dislike that and I’m trying to give myself permission to kind of wander around in that space and trust that people will get it (or not) based on other factors.
New Mountain at Night, 2023. Oil on panel, 20 x 24 inches.
NZ: I love that, despite the quiet of the paintings, of that feeling of suspension, language persists - and the way you describe your choices vis-avis work titles really illustrates that. What you said about the way the title “New Mountain” distorts scale in terms of both time and space got me really excited.
I don’t remember if I mentioned this the last time we spoke, but around the same time I started reading a collection of Philip Guston’s texts and interviews (I Paint What I Want to See, Penguin 2022). Guston, as you might already know, absolutely loves Piero della Francesca, and speaks about him frequently. I have to say, when I read it I couldn’t stop thinking about your paintings. There are so many connections. I will rattle off a few here and see what you think about it. (I will spare you a full art-historical account of Piero’s paintings; it’s really what Guston says about them that is important right now.)
There are a couple registers of illusionmaking that are involved in making a painting, particularly, as in this case, a landscape painting. The first is obviously a creation of a world within a rectangle: it is a picture of something else, manifested with paint. A landscape requires an illusion of deep space, as you do with your landscapes - the horizon in the far distance, and the objects, piles of things, trees, and the like that are arrayed within it. The picture plane, Guston reminds us, “does not exist factually...It’s not a physical thing. It’s not a material surface. It’s totally an imaginary place, plane, which has to be created by illusions.” The rules of perspectival illusion are man-made, in other words. When you spoke about how you like the term “heaps” because it was an “economical way to evoke my ideas about the flimsy barrier between what is made by humans and what is not,” I felt that you are also maybe involved in the same types of questions about one’s relation to painting in general, that have been explored by certain painters since at least the Renaissance (including Brueghel and Hieronymus Bosch, whom you have mentioned as painters you like very much).
The big questions about Painting seem to relate to the artist’s position, often literally, within the painting: as in, where are you? And this is also where I find that Guston’s fascination with Piero della Francesca, and mine with your painting, is the way that a resolved illusion of space is continually disturbed by various means: in your paintings, sometimes it is the point of view: as you have said, it is too high to be a “normal” place to stand: you are floating above. The trees, in The Law That There is No Law, are too close to the water. The parking lot on the right side is dimensionally skewed, as is the zigzagging boardwalk that issues from it, retreating into the background. The real business of the painting, the little camping spot with the skeletons snuggling under the beach umbrella, the vegetable garden behind them, the (non-lifesaving) floaties in front, push to the front of this “plane,” threatening to break the precarious balance of the “law” of perspective. In other paintings, pairs of intensely glaring eyes stare down at an otherwise innocuous beachscape.
The Law That There Is No Law, 2023. Oil on panel, 36 x 60 inches.
Guston speaks about Piero’s The Flagellation like this: “his thought is diffuse. Everything is fully exposed. The play has been set in motion... The flagellation of Christ, the only ‘disturbance’ in the painting, [is] placed in the rear, as if in memory...At times, there seems to be no structure at all. No direction. We can move spatially everywhere, as in life.”(24) And then, “Possibly it is not a ‘picture’ we see, but the presence of a necessary and generous law.”(24) Not to sound too grandiose on your behalf, but it seems that you are working at something similar. Within the confines of a rectangle there is a great freedom being exercised, or at least practiced. And your paintings, while being “quiet,” as I mentioned at the outset, seem to avoid immobility: never fully resolved and suggesting a kind of potential of change, just-before, just-after, or something around there.
RZ: I do not remember specifically talking about Guston with you but I would be surprised if we hadn’t because I revere his work tremendously. Maybe even too much. I haven’t read that one but I did read Night Studio a few years ago which was a dazzling and somehow at the same time demystifying experience. It affected me a great deal. Poor Musa! I knew a bit about his affinity for Piero della Francesca and Musa touches on his trips to Italy but I would say in general that what you say here is: revelatory; apt to my work; and exceedingly flattering to myself.
The manufacture and disruption of illusion that Guston’s talking about is an idea that is very important to my paintings. I love how you/he put it here. It so happens that for me these issues are in fact very much about time. I don’t believe in a world outside of time so to me it’s a delicious paradox to deal with that disbelief in the form of the illusion of a painting which sort of (but I think only superficially) refutes it.
The full quote is, “There is no law except for the law that there is no law” which was said by the great (and perhaps even more quotable than the extremely quotable Guston) American physicist John Archibald Wheeler. I came across it in the book Time Reborn by Lee Smolin. Smolin quotes it in the context of a discussion about his idea of Universal natural selection which in short is the idea that universes are subject to evolution no less than species - that even physical laws that we (with good reason!) think of as immutable are never really final. It’s really a staggering and almost unimaginable concept and I just love how it fits into my weird sort of Libertarian fantasy/condescending joke. It’s maybe a bit of a digression and certainly too grand for the lowly context of my humble art but I love to think about these ideas. Are mathematical concepts real? Are they discovered or invented? Have they always been and will always remain the same? For that matter (although perhaps it begs the previous question) how long is always?
Visitor, 2023. Oil on panel, 16 x 20 inches.