For both the artist speaking and the audience listening, studio art lectures can quickly become harrowing. The latter must suffer many unfocused and some permanently blurred slides. More importantly, the artist is unjustly asked to explain in words what she or he has already translated into visual form, a painful transition never easily made.
George Rose tried to give the audience in Loew Auditorium last night an insight into his painting, but gave, at best, a mere and partial overview. The listener came away impressed with Rose's talent, without really gaining any understanding of the artist's convictions and motivations.
Maybe there really is nothing else to say about those still-lifes Rose painted while teaching at Boston University than what he briefly invoked in his speech: a careful attention to composition, a particular care in the choice of colors. And maybe looking deeper into his pieces inspired by Titian, Cezanne and Rembrandt would not reveal anything new or profound.
Yet one suspects that Rose's sometimes trivial anecdotes do not adequately explain his complex "skull" series or his rapid oil and charcoal sketches fail to tell the whole story.
What began as a rather academic still-life exercise of plaster skulls on a table, became, as Rose experimented with color and lighting, variations on the themes of life vs. death, of time passing. Each new "skull" work departed further and further from the humble initial project, and reached, with the final painting in the series, a strident and powerful abstract pitch.
Just as expressive are Rose's subtle, small scale impressions. Whether depicting a religious scene or the artist looking at himself in a mirror, he manages to capture fleeting moments of energy: the traces of paint remain visible on the canvas and the sudden bursts of charcoal violently scratch the paper.
Among the slides Rose presented last night, such moments of controlled chaos seldom appeared. In his "beach" paintings, and also in his "subway" series, varying influences (Rouault, Cezanne again) come together nicely, the compositions are pleasing, but absent is that energy that characterized the improvised sketches and the "skull" group.
Rose might be well aware of how dissatisfying his explanations are for those wanting to probe his work. Perhaps in an attempt to clarify his own intentions, he chose to read several lofty quotes, like the one from Delacroix who speaks of art in terms of universal destruction. Unfortunately, these high-minded words just added another barrier between the audience and Rose's painting.
Yet however incompletely we may understand his art, Rose seems very much aware of his strengths and weaknesses. For his two latest projects, he has finally dropped overtly explicit references to past masters, and is reevaluating the classic artistic dilemma between the frame and the inner space of the canvas.
So on the one hand Rose is painting unusual diptychs, ironically called "binocular" paintings because of the two large circular frames within the rectangular rim of the canvas. When the spectators peer inside the circles, they see simplified scenes from reality and memory: mechanics working on a car, people reading on a subway.
And on the other hand Rose is exploring new directions in landscape painting. To find new ways to interpret nature entails a confrontation with an extremely old tradition, and thus demands some amount of courageous cockiness which Rose undoubtedly possesses. The outcome of this bold conflict seems on the verge of total anarchy and disruption, while at the same time his landscapes retain a distinct resemblance to actual calm, rural places.
In retrospect, Rose might have given the ideal studio art lecture. He gave us enough information to approach his work, but just not enough to understand it. A visit to the Lower Jewett Gallery in the Hopkins Center, where a group of his landscapes are now on view, might provide us with that missing information.
