9UNP1671HD_Christopher_Campbell

- It's my pleasure, and in many ways my honor, to introduce to you a painter whose work I find unexcelled and extraordinary. And I'll just describe Christopher Campbell just very briefly because he's going to do his own presentation of his art. He's a painter whose art takes up different media and formats. He also works at the cutting edge of color management, ever a concern of an artist who wishes others to see color in paintings across the world. 

He is also the chief color scientist at a German firm, basICColor. And with members of that firm, he's developing protocols that would make it possible to achieve accurate color across many digital visual media. Please join me in welcoming Christopher Campbell. 
(audience applauding)

 - Thank you very much, Terry, Quick correction. I collaborate with the chief color scientist at basICColor. I am the rogue artist that they have never worked with before, so.

 So, I am an artist, a painter, and a photographer, and in the fall of 1992, I suddenly had a color problem, because the easy color had gone away. Earlier that summer, I was living in Vétheuil, a little village in Normandy, about 75 kilometers from Paris, in order to study painting with a remarkable artist, Joan Mitchell. In this painting by Monet from 1879, you can see the tower of La Tour, that right there is La Tour. The estate that Joan Mitchell purchased, and where I had my bedroom.

 In the evening, this was the panoramic view of the Seine valley, looking down on the roof of Monet's house. Monet's house is this one right here from the 1870s. And at the end of that summer I married Nancy Locke, a fellow graduate student in art history that I had also met in Paris, and we moved to Ann Arbor so that Nancy could take her first teaching job.

 So from Vétheuil, after working in a place where obvious motifs were everywhere, I suddenly needed to learn how to draw form and color out of the configurations of a very different place. Here the camera barely registers the wonderful sprawl of red and orange vines snarling through the trees. I spent many of my days working outdoors, finding it invigorating in every sense. 

I was learning how to begin from the things that I was seeing; not reproducing them, but taking them as a starting point, particularly in their color. And here I am working with oil sticks on sheets of Arches paper. Returning to the same spot to work day after day, experiencing it in a variety of conditions as I drew, I began to think about capturing particularly salient moments, effectively sampling the landscape.

 I had taught myself Ansel Adams' zone system as a teenager in the 1970s, and had been fortunate to be able to study with Adams in 1981. My idea of photography then was to use large format cameras to shape and privilege tonal relationships in order to translate them into the strongest possible negatives. With their relentless, impossible accumulations of detail, and subtlety of value scale, the photograph instantly constituted a paradigm shift in the world of image-making in the 19th century. 

And I'm showing you William Henry Fox Talbot's The Haystack, from about 1844. But I was ready to give all of these qualities away, because I now wanted the photograph to yield expanded information about color in the world. Studies such as this simple composite, three small overlapping prints, proved to be a precious supplement to the long days spent drawing and painting "en plein air," rewarding extended, repeated contemplation. I already knew that I had a great deal to learn. 

Two years before, I had, quite miraculously, been invited by Joan Mitchell to take up residence at La Tour in order to paint. I had been living in Paris on a Fulbright, doing dissertation research in art history on Sorrow and Cezanne. Her withering daily studio critiques were counter-balanced by the galvanizing experience of watching work develop in the hands of one of the great colorists of the late 20th century.

 These are the huge batons, on the right over there, of dry Sennelier pastel that she used to make the large drawings that summer. You can see them behind her on the panels. Here is Joan in her studio with composer Gisèle Barreau, working on a series of pastels for an invited exhibition at the Whitney Museum.

 Color is elusive: too subtle to name easily, too infinitely graded to be definitively classified, so complex in its perception and neural processing that it's hard to even know to what degree we share the same experience of it. And then there's learning to use it. A case in point: a drawing I did down on the Seine, and which I tacked up on my studio wall. Joan saw it and judged that I was still looking too hard at nature, and not hard enough at the paintings. 

Over the course of several days, Joan noticed the drawing, but said nothing. And then one day, she said, "That's kinda nice, "but I know what's wrong with it." And then, a couple of times, she would say something like, "I could fix that drawing in a second," leaving the studio with a faint smile on her lips. 

And finally, I said, "If you know how to fix it, "then please do because I would if I could!" She picked out a couple of gray crayons and these were water-soluble wax crayons by Caran d'Ache, and said, "It's not in color." And I, of course, objected that the drawing was full of color. She said, "Exactly. It's so full of aniline color that none of the colors "are allowed to do anything. They don't work, they cancel each other out.”
 
"It's not in color!" And with that, she stroked the gray crayons with surprising gentleness across some of the brightest areas, knocking the saturation and intensity down a notch, or two, or three. And you see her little corrections, you know, there, and here over this bright kind of phthalo blue. She knocked out that piece of yellow. Did that all across the surface.

 As the brightest patches settled down, or the areas of highest contrast were integrated, the drawing grew quieter, and more whole. Joan insisted that if I really wanted to learn about color, I should go and look at Matisse. Lessons such as these were fresh in my mind that fall, and I made a whole series of drawings in the thickets near my home in Ann Arbor. 

Those drawings, in combination with the study photographs made in field, became the basis for a group of large paintings in one of my first exhibitions. This is one of the diptychs, "Thicket II of 1993.

 I was finally working at large scale and became aware of several related considerations: the genuine difficulty of attaining anything like real complexity, the stark limitations of my own imagination, and, happily, the concentrated richness of the materials I was creating on site, both photographic and handmade. We tend to see conceptually, eliding the visual richness of the world. 

But look at a couple of canes of red osier dogwood in warm light, buried in deep yellow grass, surrounded by a panoply of shadows, blue-green here, blue-violet there. Even more interesting, look at what happens when the recording medium is not the instantaneous eye, but silver-based film, where light must accumulate over time. Where forms cross and overlap, they unexpectedly perform a kind of luminous and chromatic algebra, in which the results can't be anticipated in advance. 

Look at the diagonal stroke up here of grass at the upper right, the most translucent because closest to the lens, and the way its color is modulated to a delicate violet by the shadow behind. It wasn't hard to identify such beautiful effects when they appeared, but it was impossible to predict when they might occur, and the feedback loop of exposing film, delivering it to the lab, only to get the prints back after a day was impossibly long, and fraught with disappointment. 

What I needed was a machine that would show me the effect I was producing instantly, in real time. And then in the late 1990s, it appeared: the digital camera. [audience chuckles] This was an unremarkable scene: an early morning on the Huron River, hot light splashing across a fallen tree, a few brand-new leaves here and there. And yet I'm quite sure that there's enough of the intricacy of the real world here, that I could happily paint for a year and never repeat myself.

 Here's what you see if you zoom in on the ostensibly blue surface of the Huron. Early digital cameras were noisy, but I found the indeterminacy of the forms seen close compelling, and the wash of violet and green chroma noise from the silicon sensor aesthetically exciting.

 As a student of 19th century French painting, this diaphanous weave of color looks a bit familiar, doesn't it? This is Monet, somewhere between 1914 and '26, that was the working interval, for a detail of the Nympheas, the water lilies, now at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. By this point in his career, Monet has let go of the solid forms of the landscape. 

He's concentrating not on the colors of things themselves, so much as the way that color is modified and transmitted by water and light, spreading across vast surfaces that fill the field of vision, and this is only a section of the whole composition. Oil paint on canvas can be a bit dry and dusty looking though, not the optimal equivalent for the kind of rich, pellucid color I was seeking.

 In 1996, I was approached by Peter Sparling, formerly of the Martha Graham dance company and then at the University of Michigan, to produce a backdrop for a modern dance that Peter was creating: New Bach. As the piece needed to be large but also portable, I painted it on panels of polyester sailcloth that could be rolled up and transported easily between cities. 

What I had not foreseen was that the piece would at times be lit both from the front and the back, which, of course, revealed all the things that were underneath that I never wanted anybody to see. I suddenly wondered why I was painting using essentially 16th century materials, and began to experiment with modern supports that would permit greater degrees of luminosity: sheets of mylar, panels of sailcloth and aluminum composites like Dibond.

 Imagine that you start by seeing a tree against a lake, and you end up with a photograph like this. How to grasp its contrasts and contradictions? How to use its haunting color as a jumping-off point, so as to give such contingency tangible form? What are those colors, and how would you mix them? Here is Newton's spectrum, the full panoply of wavelengths to which human eyes are sensitive, roughly 380 to 730 nanometers. 

You sense, correctly, that this is part of a larger continuum, and that we are granted just the barest glimpse of the whole. You see too the gentle slippage from hue to hue; where to say that blue ends, and violet begins? The nature of color, and our perception of it, dictates that it will never have an octave structure like music, how jealous I am, or such strict laws of counterpoint. Chromatic canon and fugue will, therefore, always be soft and improvised, never definitive.

 Even though I consider color the most difficult part of my studio praxis, because the most volatile, the most beguiling, and the least predictable, I'm afraid that I have never found anything like "color theory" to act as controlling figure. That said, subtractive pigments do have their own physics, and a circle in which complementary colors stand across from each other does help with color mixing. Think about the hue range for a particular color. 

If you look at the blues, for example, you can see that the upper-most blue is biased toward the green, while the lower one is biased toward the violet. Color bias is important in predicting the results of color mixing, and here are three sets of hues from my own palette: reds that bias toward violet on the left or the orange, yellows that move toward green or orange, and three blues, cerulean at left, cobalt in the center, ultramarine on the right.

 If we combine the yellow with the blue immediately below it, we get the green at the bottom. If you want the brightest, clearest green, we need to use the yellow on the left, which is already heading in the green direction, as well as a green-biased blue. As you can see by studying the greens made with these particular yellows and blues, it's impossible to know in advance what a paint mixture is gonna look like without a long accumulation of experience. And back to the photograph.

 A corner of the work in progress, where I'm drawing with a brush I made by binding together a thick bundle of dried marsh grasses. Here is that same area of the finished work, that's actually the whole top of the painting, and this is the finished painting, a modest one measuring just under 18 by 13 inches. My hope is that a strong painting briefly halts the flow of experience, points at something and sets it apart, even if what it points to is something that never quite existed.

 My family and I live out in the Pennsylvania forest, where the pattern of shadows are fascinating. This is a device I built to capture only what is intercepted on a translucent mylar screen, effectively a shadow catcher. I use it out in the landscape like a butterfly net, and in a world awash in a flow of imagery intended to cajole and convince, I love the mystery of these images. 

Is that a body? Actually, it's the first adumbration of spring, the first leaves unfurling from a broken apple tree at dusk. Here's the full composition, three rows, six columns, printed eight feet high and 10 feet wide, about the height of the broken apple tree itself. I am moving in an arc around the tree as I photograph, a big 180. The translucent screen filters out high-frequency information, but retains the color of air and space. Learning to see deep color in the world takes time. 

I made this photograph in the snow, up in the Rothrock wilderness, just as the sun was about to pass below the horizon. This is truly drawing with a camera: sometimes making hundreds of exposures of a single subject, with fine adjustments of iris, shutter speed, focal length, tuning the degree of kinesthetic tension in my outstretched arms, all directed towards trading away that most salient characteristic of the photograph, the precise registration of texture.

 In exchange, I get something quite wondrous, the recording of what we might call average unit color. Look at the modulation of the blues, shifting toward gray, green, or violet, and see how every square meter of space has its own unique color. Note the fine silvery filigree running on a diagonal through the center of the frame, this kind of dancing silver, that's the sparkle of the sunlight dancing on the surface of Roaring Run, the stream that passes through this place.

 Perhaps now something about late Cezanne makes a little more sense? The fantastic richness of the color in a work such as Château Noir, circa 1900 to 1906, might now look a little less strange; not that I want to make a case for its plausibility. Here, very approximately, is the motif, the Château still jutting out from the wild green mountainside in Aix-en-Provence. 

What is Cezanne doing with those greens? To concentrate on just one aspect of this painting, and it is typical of works from Cezanne's late period, look at the development of the hue range of the color. Ever since Chevreul's discoveries at the Gobelins tapestry works in 1839, the laws of simultaneous contrast were well known to artists in France, but these don't begin to cover what's happening here. 

If we look at any given area, we can see that Cezanne has pressed his color towards all three of our retinal primaries, effectively red, green, and blue. I'm not arguing for any kind of crossover from nascent theories of trichromatic vision to Cezanne's practice, but for the recognition of an extraordinary intuitive sense of what was required to bring color to its greatest plenitude, it's most symphonic.

 Note the degree to which many, even most of the colors are quite desaturated, admixtures where there is a strong degree of complementary neutralization going on. I hope you see what I mean by pressing toward the red, the green, and the blue. I mean, that in any given area, you know, you have obvious green and blue, but he's finding things that are violet or dark, alizarin crimson, I mean, and it occurs constantly. 

It's in the sky, it's in the edge of the building, I mean, where no sort of ostensive subject matter would necessarily call for those things. That this is something purely felt and required by the structure of the painting. Here you can see the precise mechanism by which Cezanne is able to build a continuous fabric out of individual patches of color. He's using a relatively small brush, and constructing the patches by laying down a series of parallel and overlapping strokes. 

You see what I mean, that any given mark is, you know, four, five, six, seven, and here it's quite obvious in the ochre. This creates an open, sawtooth perimeter that sutures the blocks of color together with a gentle interlock. Perhaps the best way to show something of the dialectic between history, theory, and the phenomenal in my own work is to look at a few stages of a work in progress. 

Last summer I was working at my parents' place, on a little lake in Victoria, Minnesota, just west of Minneapolis. And here is a completely banal photograph of the view off the studio deck the afternoon I started this painting. This is not what I am painting, but where I am painting.

 When I am working out of doors, I am conjuring form out of some combination of vision, memory, invention, desire and feeling, with the whole enterprise buoyed, and informed, by the sensory experience of being in that light and space. On this day, I was directing my attention to a small stand of red cedars, their color excited by the afternoon light, through which I could see the blue of Lake Zumbra. 

The central tree shows a wonderful fractal complexity in its branches, which partially explains why I have returned to it so often. One of my favored drawing instruments is a kind of grabbing claw, the sort of tool that a mechanic would use to retrieve a bolt, made rigid by being taped to a long dowel, clenching a fat piece of willow charcoal, the thickness of a finger. I'm dipping the charcoal into diluted paint before making each mark. 

And I'm executing most of this drawing looking only at the trees, so that I'm working blind for each individual mark, then looking back at the paper to reposition the charcoal; working toward an all-over field of marks. Attracted by the hot light fringing the cedars, I begin a secondary round of drawing with a brush in cadmium red. Now I begin to apply larger patches of color, establishing a basic color chord between the red, the orange, and the blues. 

You might ask: Why patches? This is Mont Sainte-Victoire at dusk, one of Cezanne's favored motifs. What would it look like to build a painting out of not just local relationships, but within an overall gestalt, effectively creating larger supersets of virtually inexhaustible relational complexity? This is another late, largely unfinished Cezanne, the Garden at Les Lauves circa 1906 in The Phillips Collection. 

For me, this is a clear example of the process of starting with the phenomenal, but building an equivalent, Cezanne's phrase was a "construction after nature," in such a way that each individual block of perceptual data is reconsidered, and transformed, as it is related to the composition as a whole. 

In speaking of this process so briefly, I give it short shrift, but suffice it to say that what I am seeing is that each time a reddish patch is laid down, and we could look at the patterned one here, and here, and here, and then finally things in the sky, it functions first, probably, as a response to something seen, then second, in relation to all the patches to which it is adjacent, So, I mean, we're seeing a mark here that is working in conjunction and in relation to its surround.

 And finally as it joins and augments the pattern created by all the other reddish patches across the canvas. Working in this way, Cezanne could plausibly find himself feeling the need for a certain color at a certain point on the canvas. Did that then mean that he directed his eyes back to that area of the motif, in order to search out a sponsoring subject for that color? That is certainly my experience when I am painting.

 It's important to remember that even though I'm standing out there in the landscape, referencing what I see at virtually every moment in some way, in the end I am painting. I am giving form to thought via an abstraction in such a way that an alternative vision, a world all its own, will ultimately materialize for an attentive viewer. These are just a couple of patches of paint, but it shows how complexity follows from procedure. 

When the charcoal was wet and loaded with paint, it dripped, the flow generating an insistent vertical beat. Sometimes the paint laid down with a broad blade is thin, and the grain of the paper shows through. Sometimes the mark is heavy, such that it creates a line of shadow, as in this thin rope of cerulean at the center. If you look at the blue patches themselves, you can see that they too are not internally consistent. This happens because I am careful to not mix colors completely. 

Here is my glass palette in Minnesota, and you can see the different painting media, each with its own viscosity, and the stainless steel blades that I use largely instead of brushes. Later in the painting's development, you can see the thin skeins of color beginning to float over one another, a layer of white knocking down the intensity of the blue at center, deep, deep cadmium yellow, almost an orange, sailing over the blue at right. 

Painting is so hard because it is so easily forced, tightened up to be too controlled and orderly, or slipping away into entropic disorder. I try to feel the necessity of every mark before I bring my hand to the painting, but to act is to give physical presence to an intuition, a process that requires my muscles to find a delicate balance between intention and accident. 

Here the value scale is reaching its full range with the addition of dark blues and greens, while a final layer of drawing with the brush is re-articulating some of the initial structure which has been lost. This is the final painting, a little more than four feet tall and six feet wide, brought into balance with some of the bright color tamped down and subdued at the end. As a final example, here is some of the thinking behind a work from this past winter entitled Hemlock IV.

 Out walking near my studio after a heavy snowfall, I made a whole series of photographs of some towering black hemlocks. As you can see, each act of drawing with the camera generates a completely different record, each full of unique chords of color, and structural configurations I may choose to develop.

 Here I've performed a kind of digital color analysis, similar to the sort of averaging performed by the shadow catcher, to get a better sense for some unfamiliar colors such as this gorgeous range of violet browns. I begin with a new aluminum panel, sanded and primed, about seven feet high and 5 feet wide. Beginning work in my outdoor studio, the back deck of the house, the surrounding forest makes a shadowy suggestion.

 I begin to draw, taking cues from a tiny study print just six inches high. I begin to think that the drawn lines are too dense-- this is a closeup-- and offer too much contrast to the surrounding white field, so I pass across them with a blade, caressing the line into a quasi-planar spread. When I am using the paint in its thinnest, least viscous state, I will often have to work with the support parallel to the ground. 

Here you can clearly see that these are not thick deposits of color as is traditional in oil painting, but microscopically thin dispersions of pigment, oil paint suspended. These patches of color constitute a second voice to the preliminary drawing.

 Here I'm about to mix what is ostensibly a brown, but actually squeeze out six different pigments, so that with each pass of the blade through the paint, it will pick up a slightly different balance and concentration, and no two strokes will ever be the same. There's violets and ochres, whole range of pigments there. You can see the richness, the internal richness that this lends to individual gestures here.

 Color over color, color against color, color that manages to sever the firm bonds of the drawing from the picture plane, and send it tumbling into space. The act of painting often seems like a Nantucket sleigh ride, a nearly uncontrollable hurtling forward, where one is just barely hanging on. The leaves from the oaks overhead are falling thick and fast. This area of the painting is finally attaining the kind of richness I had anticipated at the start.

 The color is finding its full voice, and a polyphonic structure is emerging: a triad of drawing, superimposed by colored planes, next to be augmented by powdered pigments. For a number of years, I've been fascinated by powdered pigments, largely graphite and charcoal. The particles are so finely ground that they have a unique physics of dispersion and adhesion; and have proved wonderfully reactive to things like falling rain, sleet, or snow. 

Several years ago I bought raw pigments that largely duplicate my basic palette. There was a fabulous store in New York down on 28th Street, Kremer Pigments, and they have hundreds of these. They get used by violinists to color the varnish on the violin as well as by painters. It's really worth a visit. And have barely scratched the surface in terms of exploring combinations of dry and bound color.

 In Hemlock IV, I used powdered pigments to establish a delicate intermediate voice between subtle and insistent passages. And here you see a row of graphite swimmers heading off into the white. Alternatively, graphite can form clouds of de-saturating grayness. When I'm completely in the flow of working, I lose consciousness of myself and feel as though the painting is directing its own making, proceeding as a delicate series of intuitive suggestions. 

At this point, I had the sense that the contrast between the figure and the white ground was still too stark. Reviewing my vast catalog of study photographs, some 133,000, I came across this image, trees photographed at dusk, in an icy fog in the nearby Scotia range. The improbable coming and going, the here and not here quality, of the network of branches felt apt, and I decided to transpose some of that character to the painting using a brush, as a fourth and final voice.

 Here you see some of the soft brushwork being developed, at times tightening a contour, in other places smoothing a transition. These things never proceed in clear stages, but require a continuous back-and-forth. Here I am incorporating powdered pigments in the blues, ultramarine blue, and earth tones. Toward the end of a painting's development, the process becomes enormously improvisatory. 

At its best, a coherent universe emerges, where the rawness of the spray of graphite seems to have sponsored, utterly naturally, the raggedness of the brushstroke, and the brushstroke seems but a late extension of the stuttering movement of the blade, even though that took place a week before. Looking back at a finished painting, this degree of coherence sometimes strikes me as nearly miraculous, lying completely outside my conscious ability to control.

 A finished passage along the right-hand edge, dense with incident, chromatically rich, spatially indeterminate, unknown and unknowable, the parts related but distinct, in short, everything I could have wished for. The base of the painting, once the trunk of a hemlock, and now pure metaphor. The finished painting, with a fine brush taped to a long handle, and the two tiny sponsoring studies pinned up with the right. Color seen, sampled, suspended. Thank you. 
(audience applauding)