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A moment in place: February 18, 2012
by Anne Pyburn Craig
Sense of place is a curious thing. Reading an article in a reference source, you may get a list of great restaurants and a raft of statistics but be left with no feeling at all of what it would actually be like to be standing on a street corner there on a random afternoon. Short of actually visiting a place yourself, true understanding can only be reached with an artist as interpreter and guide.
Glen River's Portraits of Place series is just such a mediating force, revealing the essences of his subjects- River summarizes it as “the myth of the moment”- with accuracy and affection but no affectation. Starting with a photo and then working up a piece with a variety of media, he immortalizes scenes from memorable towns such as Manhattan and Woodstock, New York that are colorful, vivid and entrancing in their conveyance of everyday life.
“I take as many photos as I can,” he explains, “when I've got a view I like. When I look through them and choose, often I find that the shot I thought was the best isn't as good as one I caught by accident. A good beginning for a painting is often not the same as a great photograph; I look for something, maybe a gesture, that captures the feeling of place. I know I am going to mess with it a lot.”
What River summarizes as “messing with” is actually the application of decades of study and practice. “I started as a kid, around 1959. I had an uncle who was an artist and he lived on the Lower East Side and I used to tag along with him with a sketchbook, then work up a painting that night. I got into the habit of grabbing images.”
After a sojourn in Cleveland, where he found himself drawn to music and civil rights action, and some time wandering the U.S. on a motorcycle, River decided “school was the gig for me. So I got into the School of Visual Arts, and then went to Silvermine.”
“I've been blessed to know some amazing people,” he says. “Bob Grey, the man who ran Silvermine, he was an intellectual dynamo, always experimenting with pushing people out of their comfort zone and he did it very well. Nobody was comfortable at that place! But it was great.” Journeys to Greece, the south of France, and England would follow.
In the early 1980s, with the advent of computer technology, River expanded his comfort zone into the realm of digital imaging. “It was akin to what happened in music when multi-track recording came in- all of a sudden there were new ways to manipulate images, and I started experimenting and playing with those, layering painting and printmaking and photography and assimilating what the computer could do into my lexicon of image-making. Gradually I became more fluid with it- the methods meld into your consciousness and you stop having to struggle so much.”
The subjects in River's found images are candid and immediate. In his “Manhattan” series, people struggle with heavy packages, fumble with clothing, talk on cellphones. Heavy equipment blocks traffic. And somehow, it is all beautiful. Other series evoke essential qualities of Woodstock, Rosendale and New Paltz- three towns in New York's Ulster County where River has lived and worked- and Connecticut, where he now resides.
River is currently running a Kickstarter drive to fund production of a limited edition book of his Manhattan works, which are being exhibited through February at the Stone River Grill in Sandy Hook, Connecticut.
End Story
Hanging in the Balance -
A conversation with artist Glen River by Sean Ryan 2011
Lately, Glen has been expanding his “Portraits of Place” series, in which he depicts landscapes of urban and pastoral environments. These paintings couple accessibility with highly robust and nuanced textures that produce a great deal of emotional depth. I wanted to get a sense for what keeps Glen going and experimenting, and find out what it is that Glen considers the reason for creating art in the first place.
“I’m driven by the concept of grabbing a hold of meaning,” he said, “of extracting the instantaneous feelings and emotions we have all the time and contextualizing them, relating them to the universal, timeless human experience.”
He remembered a comment a student of his made that he felt aptly characterized the experience of creating art.
“This student said to me, ‘This project started off as an experiment, but then I became committed to it.’ I think that’s how it generally happens for most artists. A spontaneous thought or feeling will prompt you to go along with something, then you’ll have this sense of things falling into place, and that’s what allows you to follow through. Art allows us to organize things – it exists in a tension between organization and chaos.”
The concept of tension, in various forms, is a pervasive force in Glen’s artistic process and conception of art itself. The theme of tension arose at several points in our discussion. For many artists, tension arises on a personal level due to the disparity between their vision and the expectations and judgment of their community and peers. Glen has felt this tension throughout his career, and he says this has led him to become an inwardly focused individual.
“Creating art is a precarious situation because you see something in your mind’s eye and you think it’s important, but it may or may not conform to the desires and tastes of the larger community. That’s why so many artists wall themselves off inside their own minds, and create a boundary between themselves and the things in the outside world that might cloud their vision. The temptation to create something for other people sometimes forces us to compromise our ambitions.”
Glen pointed out how this tension exists on a very obvious level in the art business. Artists’ experimentation and creativity is often at odds with the tastes of their commissioners and the public in general. This conflict has always existed, and this gives Glen a feeling of solidarity with artists from all eras.
“Van Gough had the same problem,” he said, “so did Gauguin. It’s something every professional artist has to deal with.”
He feels as though his Portraits of Place series, for which he is currently working on several cityscapes of Manhattan, strikes a balance in this respect. Creating these portraits satisfies him deeply, and yet they are among his most popular and best selling work.
“The Portraits of Place sort of provide the best of both worlds,” he says. “People have always been attracted to landscapes for a number of reasons, so the Portraits become popular, but I’m also very happy to paint them.”
New York City has long been a subject of artistic fascination for Glen.
“Primarily because it’s so many things at the same time and yet one thing,” he says. “Every block is so different – the neighborhoods are like worlds unto themselves – but still they exist as part of the same great organism. The cityscapes give people a sense of a world community.”
Ever a student of art history, Glen relishes the idea that his work is part of a historical progression. Art doesn’t exist in a vacuum – rather, it is dependent on all of the environmental and cultural influences that comprise an artist’s sensibilities and psyche. He sees himself and his work as contributions to an ongoing dialogue, and he feels that each piece of art becomes part of a collective record of humanity.
“All art is drawing on history,” Glen says. “Every artist is indebted to the other people who came before, and often that debt manifests itself more than we give it credit for.”
As someone who creates art in various media, Glen also spoke to the similarities between visual art, music, and the written word, and the potential pitfalls that being a multimedia artist presents.
“When you’re playing music live for an audience you’re engaging in a real time act, so every choice happens in an instant and it takes its meaning from the other choices before and after it in time,” Glen says. “The process of painting also unfolds over time, of course, because the artist makes instantaneous choices that lead up to a final piece, but the audience experiences it as a whole.”
Glen is driven by the real time aspect of music, and for this reason he says playing music live fulfills an artistic need that painting, by its nature, cannot. Yet the satisfaction he gets on stage presents a conundrum that seems like an odd one for an artist to have.
“It’s too gratifying,” he says. “Playing guitar live is sometimes so instantly stimulating and enjoyable that it’s easy to get sidetracked from my other work like painting or recording music, which has a delayed payoff.”
Herein lies another source of tension for Glen – the negative impact that too much satisfaction in your work can have on your willingness to continue experimenting.
“It’s another thing that hangs in the balance,” he says. “You need to stay inspired, and too much satisfaction can dull your inspiration. Yet without feeling satisfaction, it’s hard to keep conjuring inspiration. You have to find the right balance between these things.”
You can find out more about Glen and his art at http://glenriver.com. Glen’s work is regularly featured at art shows throughout Connecticut, and he is also available for commissioned works.
End Story
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© 2011 Glen River Publications
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