Page 57 - Studio International - June 1967

NEW YORK point. She studied painting at the San Francisco colleagues and those particularly interested in
Deborah Remington, born in 1930, is a case in
West Coast painting.
commentary by Dore Ashton Art Institute from 1949 to 1952, the very years in Among the imperatives, of which so many were
which the renown of Clyfford Still and Mark moral rather than stylistic, was that of organic
Rothko among others attracted gifted students to development. After having been formed by artists
the school. Sam Francis, Frank Lobdell, Richard who believed that painting grew from deep, slowly
Diebenkorn and Ed Corbett are among the 'next evolving sources, and that there was enduring
generation' artists who absorbed the exalted mystery and ambiguity in the work of art, it was
premises Still put forth, and who in turn stimulated inevitable that Remington's generation moved
younger artists. slowly into their personal idioms.
The school itself, then known as the California The use of the loose brush stroke, or the 'action'
Deborah Remington at Bykert; Kienholz School of Fine Arts, was defiantly unorthodox, line, was not the decisive factor. Remington,
at Dwan; Ray Johnson at Willard; Segal advocating 'a new measure of life' and harbour- along with the others, painted in impastos, worked
at Janis. ing such charismatic teachers as the cosmopolitan with non-figurative imagery, and the shallow but
Varda, who would remind his students that extensive spaces adumbrated by Still and others
`painting is a philosophical instrument of life'. years before. Thickness of paint and softness of
And then there was Kenneth Rexroth at hand, contour, however, are only the superficial—
The furious rate of change in American painting and, within travelling distance, Big Sur and big literally superficial—hallmarks of the abstract
since the late 1950s has tended to obscure the solid Henry Miller, encouraging the artists who flocked expressionist style. At its core, both East and West,
achievements of a whole generation. All those to his rustic door to 'fight free' of American pro- was an attitude, rather than a way of wielding a
young painters who were nourished by the rich vincialism and American cramping affluence. brush.
enthusiasms of the abstract expressionist years; Certainly the young artists schooled in this This becomes especially clear in Remington's
who were trained by artists professing the new atmosphere had to follow the categorical impera- first one-man exhibition in New York at the
philosophy, and whose own earliest post-student tives of their generation. It is possible that Deborah BYKERT GALLERY. Her paintings with their hard
paintings were couched in expressionist rhetoric, Remington was inspired to go adventuring in the surfaces, incisively drawn lines and sharp details
have found numerous obstacles in their exhibiting Far East, where she spent a few post-graduate might easily be mistaken for the 'hard-edge' pro-
paths. It has been much easier for the very young— years, by the Millerish ferment of her student duce of the 'sixties if technique alone were the
those born in the mid-1930s and later—than for the years. Nevertheless, she and about a dozen others decisive criterion. But Remington's paintings
artists who are now reaching the assurance of their of her generation stayed close to San Francisco as reflect the first principles of her early training: they
late thirties. artists until the 1960s, and were known chiefly by are distinguished chiefly because she has not
abandoned the conviction that a painting develops
organically, and that it is not merely a self-
contained object.
The ambiguities, expressed often by the abstract
expressionists in terms of the matter itself, are
here expressed in terms of the imagery itself. It is
not easy to characterize these images. They seem,
at times, to be diagrams of machines. But then
again, they might be schematic renderings of
figures. They suggest landscapes, or they suggest
animal skulls (much in the way the steer's skull
constantly appears in the work of Georgia
O'Keeffe, with whom Remington has something
in common). They also refer to shiny objects such
as automobile hoods and bumpers, and to dim
things such as twilight landscapes. Finally, they
carry within them eternal antinomies, not the
least of which are sexual (the ovoid shapes that
appear regularly, and the symmetry of shape).
Almost all of Remington's paintings move out
from a central, or nearly central axis, and map
their course bilaterally. The planes are flattened
in leaf-thin sequences, emphasized by the sharp
lines that can be read either as delineators, or as
crevasses. Generally, the centres are rendered in
the highest light—the light that slides over smooth
surfaces and grades itself softly off.
Here, Remington shows her mature control
of pictorial event. She offers complicated plays of
concave and convex in the smoky diminution of
light without sullying the essentially two-dimen-
sional scheme. If mirror images and extensive
vistas suggest themselves, as they often do, it is the
product of controlled, willed illusion. This con-

Deborah Remington Saxon 1966-7
oil on canvas, 72 x 70 in.