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"Less wilderness and more order I object to."
-- Frederick Law Olmsted
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I was born in Philadelphia in l955, went to Andover and then left Yale. This was the first but most dramatic of many acts of hermetic resistance. Motivated by a combination of 60's generated idealism and the completeness of the Andover experience, it produced much chaos at first, but ultimately resulted in someone who probably couldn't have been made any other way.
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While I did study large format photography at Yale, I'm a self-taught painter. I love the traditional craft of oil painting, the more basic work with the materials. The fact that something important had been lost dawned years ago when I began to notice that modern paintings always looked better in reproduction than in person, whereas the opposite was true for older paintings. I began to question what I had been taught, began to look at painting with different eyes. It was odd: I had grown up with Modern Art, but the more I looked, the more it seemed intellectually inbred and physically awkward in relation to work generated by classical ideal of artists and craftspeople in service to society. As soon as I discovered Morandi's work in 1989 I began to work with a very simplified realism. I don't know if this style can be called symbolic in the usual sense, but I love the Earth and believe there is wisdom and compassion on offer of a much higher order than most of us humans are willing to acknowledge or comprehend. I'm fascinated by the code or ur-language of Nature hidden so well in plain sight: to me this means everything. By combining meaning with the craft I hope to take realism beyond itself, so the paintings are in the world but not of it.
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Although I work with technique in an old-fashioned way -- refining oil, making mediums, varnishes, and paint -- the craft is hopefully exercised in the service of the art. The most important thing to me about a painting is what it means. It can't be called finished until I believe in it, and this often takes a long time. It's been good to balance this process with alla prima work, painting designed to be finished in one sitting.
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Genuine culture expresses a numinous still point between unity and diversity: it is neither rigid nor chaotic. I try to make paintings which are as much as possible an antidote to the ongoing process of cultural devolution in America, which is sad on the one hand but necessary on the other. While it doesn't seem wise to try to eliminate the negative, I do believe in accentuating the positive, hoping to transform the inevitable lead of experience into the gold of understanding. At the same time, the truth seems to often be more complex than either; an alloy of inscrutable mien. It seems that Newton's Third Law of Motion holds true in the metaphysical realm as well. At the same time, life is clearly capable of infinite magic: the self-perpetuating confines of empiricism can be transcended. A leap of faith is necessary, and whether this leap is wise or foolish cannot be foretold with any certainty within life's cramped and personal context.
Or can it?
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Lots of paintings are within, both current and from the past, many different permutations of painterly realism. You might enjoy an overview of the work.
Slide shows of the technique used to make various different paintings are here.
And much too much information about older oil painting technique ishere.
Have fun, feel free to contact me with any questions.
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Tad Spurgeon.
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| The Climate of Delight |
"Delight is a secret. And the secret is this: to grow quiet and listen; to stop thinking, stop moving, almost to stop breathing; to create an inner stillness in which, like mice in a deserted house, capacities and awarenesses too wayward and too fugitive for everyday use may delicately emerge. Oh, welcome them home! For these are the long-lost children of the human mind. Give them close and loving attention, for they are weakened by centuries of neglect. In return they will open your eyes to a new world within the known world, they will take your hand, as children do, and bring you to where life is always nascent, day is always dawning. Suddenly and miraculously, as you walk home in the dark, you are aware of the insubstantial shimmering essence that lies within appearances; the air is filled with expectancy, alive with meaning; the stranger, gliding by in the lamp-lit street, carries silently past you in the night the whole mystery of his life...
Delight springs from this awareness of the translucent quality in all things, whereby beauty as well as ugliness, joy as well as pain, men as well as women, life as well as death -- the grinding clash of opposites between whose iron teeth all systems of philosophy are crushed at last to pulp -- are seen as symbols; in the true meaning of a symbol, whose Janus-like face contains at once that which exists in time and space, and that which transcends it."
--Alan McGlashan, The Savage and Beautiful Country, Houghton Mifflin, 1967
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Modulating the modernist maelstrom.