This was written by me for AVT374
Alex Katz’s 1968 landscape painting, Swamp Maple (4:30) is not only a masterful piece in the artist’s extensive catalogue of work, but also one of his personal favorites. It is a wonderful showcase of both Katz’s professional skill and his deep philosophies for artmaking. A brief viewing of Swamp Maple (4:30) might temp the viewer to assume that it is a simplistic piece due to its flat depictions of objects, uniform colors, and plainly visible brushwork. However, upon a longer inspection, the viewer will see evidence of deep artistic intellect and passion not only in the methods and modes of the work’s creation, but in what it and all of Katz’s works represent when viewed in the larger context of art history. The viewer will realize that Katz intends to not only slow down the viewer’s looking, but to also slow down a single moment into an eternity in order to experience what Katz calls “the immediate present”.
Swamp Maple (4:30) is a massive 144in tall by 93in wide (12ft x 7.75ft) oil painting on linen that depicts a nature scene of a swamp maple tree growing in front of a small body of water (a pond or maybe a lake) with grey hilly shores on the far side. The tree itself is slender and tall and aligned vertically in the middle of frame. It is cut off by the top and bottom edges of the canvas, implying that it extends beyond the painting’s surface. Along the tree’s arcing branches, Katz has painted individual leaves that shift in color from green to grey the higher they are in the picture frame. Also, upon close inspection, there are visible paint drying cracks that Katz has left along the tree trunk that give the bark a crackling naturalistic surface. The ground that the tree is growing on is a yellow-green field taking up the lower third of the image and is painted with vertical strokes that suggest a grassy surface. Beyond this, the body of water is painted in a light aquamarine color with a white reflection on the water’s surface that mirrors the right-side shore above it. Katz employs atmospheric perspective on the hilly shores behind the water by shifting their color from grey to light blue- mimicking the way the atmosphere causes landscapes to shift to a lighter blue-grey tone as they approach the horizon. Finally, the sky above this scene is an all-yellow cloudless sky that causes the grey leaves near the peak of the tree to stand out well against the lighter tone behind it. The whole image is painted in large swaths of near-uniform colors that visually flatten the image in a way reminiscent of Japanese woodblock prints, which Katz has stated he had an affinity for.
For added context, Katz is an American painter born in New York on July 24, 1927, and is still alive and working at 98 years old. He attended The Cooper Union Art School in Manhattan from 1946 to 1949 and studied modernist painting and was awarded a scholarship to The Skowhegan School for Sculpture and Painting in Maine which he attended for the summers of 1949 and 1950. It was there at Skowhegan that Katz’s artistic journey fundamentally changed once he was taught En Plein Air painting. Katz states that the En Plein Air technique- painting scenes outdoors in the open air- gave him “a reason to devote [his] life to painting.” He developed a unique figurative style unaligned to any particular art movement and painted with disregard for how they would be received in an abstract dominated market. That being said, he still remained aware of the art world around him and took inspiration where he could; his flat plains of color are reminiscent of those seen in pop art and his immersive-ly huge canvases mirror those seen in abstract expressionism. While Katz is primarily recognized for his portrait paintings, he is also prominently known for his landscape work, and Swamp Maple (4:30) is a brilliant example of what makes his nature paintings so significant.
During his time at Skowhegan, it seems Katz fell in love with Maine and purchased a summer home there where he would vacation annually for decades and paint the beautiful Maine landscapes.4 Relatively early into his professional career (during or before 1968), while on one of these vacations to Maine, Katz painted a small 12x16in Plein Air panel of a swamp maple in the environment and returned to either his New York or Maine studio and used it as a guide to create the 12ft tall Swamp Maple (4:30).
In its basic form, Swamp Maple (4:30) is a display of the beauty and tranquility of nature. However, on a deeper level, it is a memory of a brief moment allowed to exist eternally. In order to capture the light in the scene while Katz painted En Plein Air, he needed to paint quickly, only spending about 15 minutes to sketch it out with his paint. It is in this short time that Katz is completely focused on the moment and the scene in front of him. This is what he means when he says he tries to paint the “immediate present”. In an interview with Prudence Peiffer, Katz said, “The immediate present is my idea of eternity. It’s total consciousness. I don’t believe in regular eternity. It’s totally a state of consciousness.” He likens the mindset to that of a jazz musician; devoted fully to the current moment. Through this lens of the immediate present, we begin to see Swamp Maple (4:30) as a layered recording of Katz’s own experience while making it. Because it was copied from a Painted sketch, the finished painting is a kind of memory of a memory. Speaking on this iterative process in that same interview with Peiffer, Katz states it best: “To get involved in painting a sunset, you have 15 minutes to make a sketch. And then what you do is make a sketch from what you remember of this moment. Then you go out and make another sketch, and then you paint a memory, what you think it looked like… You keep doing it to get what a real sunset is.”6 Perhaps this is the origin of the strange color choices in Swamp Maple (4:30), such as the frankly exaggerated atmospheric perspective, and the sky that is distilled into a single yellow expanse. Additionally, and this is only speculation, the leaves changing color may be a result of Katz remembering seeing the leaves in a dark silhouette against the bright sky while also noticing that the lower leaves caught the light and revealed their true color. If this is true, then Swamp Maple (4:30) serves as an interesting record of the intricacies of seeing and remembering.
On a personal level, this work really resonated with me. I am also a figurative 2-dimensional artist (pen and ink) trying to remain unbound from particular art movements like Katz does, but I differ in my methods and mindset. I wish I could say I have experienced that focused flow-state of painting/drawing the immediate present like Katz, but I don’t think I have. I am studying jazz guitar on my own time, so I understand the concept; however, the visual works I make are slow, not drawn directly from life, and in many ways over planned. I work for hours sketching the image to make sure everything is just “right” and sometimes spend days or weeks inking the piece carefully- almost too carefully. Unlike Katz, I’m afraid of the spontaneity of making art quickly. Now I concede that there are different ways of making art. Both the spontaneous works and the careful works have their place in the world, but much like how Katz borrowed from pop art and abstract expression, I think I would like to open up my practice to new methods. I’ve already practiced making art quicker by using thicker brush pens and allowing my materials to do some of the heavy lifting. I won’t abandon my current style just like Katz didn’t abandon his, but I will use the lessons I learned from Katz in swamp maple as more “tools” in the “toolchest” of artmaking. Particularly, I intend to allow my viewers to experience the world through my own recorded observations in an attempt to let them slow down their viewing and see short moments in my life stretch on into eternity. It’s a heavy and deep pursuit, but like Katz says: “What I’m trying to do is impossible.”
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