Art New Engand

Lucien Day Point of View

by Hearne Pardee Aug/Sept 2000

Some artists approach the world by rooting themselves in a place. One thinks of Georgia O'Keeffe in New Mexico or John Maring in Maine, places that provided them self-definition and stability. In the same way, Lucien Day has centered himself in Vermont. Although he has lived in New York and started a gallery there, he did so on his own terms, grounded in the perspective of his rural community and its New England values.

Point of view, in the strong sense of being rooted somewhere, is also of central concern to Day's art and essential to its particular sort of objectivity. Objects before they are paintings, his watercolors mounted on curved surfaces combine the verticality and delicate calligraphy of Chinese hangings scrolls with a Western concern for visual truth. Day likes to compare him self to a scientist in his preoccupation with sight, but perhaps it's more appropriate to place him in the tradition of New England philosophers like Emerson and Thoreau, who sought a common foundation for science and art through direct contact with nature.

Day was raised in Hartford, Connecticut, where independents like Wallace Stevens and Charles Ives supported their artistic careers, and his New England upbringing included prep school at Choate and a BA from Yale. At Choate, he recalls a visit form Gertrude Stein, "who talked most of one afternoon to the whole school, all boys. She wore bedroom slippers, we were mesmerized." But school included no specific training in art, and Day considers time spent tinkering with model boats and airplanes his apprenticeship for painting.

Day also remembers his father, an art enthusiast, taking him to a show of John Marin's work at Alfred Stieglitz's American Place Gallery. There, he was introduced both to Marin's paintings of mountains and to Stieglitz himself: "The old man grew a lot of hair out of his ears, and he treated me elegantly. " This larger-than-life encounter implanted in Day a lifelong involvement with Marin's work, inspiring an interest in watercolor and in lofty mountains and buildings. Stieglitz, too, no doubt inspired Day in his ambition to establish a gallery.

After an effort at law school, some study of painting at Cranbrook Academy, and a stint in the army, Day settled in 1946 in ...Vermont. In the 1950's he began to make prolonged visits to New York, through which he established a dialogue in painting between the mountainous landscape of Vermont and the cityscape of Manhattan. He recalls these early years as "lonely and terrifying." He did, however, show his watercolors at the Passedoit Gallery on 57th Street, and, perhaps more importantly, establish a close relationship with painter and critic Fairfield Porter. Porter, in turn introduced him to Rudy Burkhardt, Edwin Denby, and Alex Katz, other artists whose interest in realism ran against the prevailing abstract expressionist tide.

It was Day's pursuit of this community of artists that eventually led to the founding of the Green Mountain Gallery in 1968: At its original West Village location, Day exhibited a group of artists that resembled Stieglitz's in its diversity, including painters like realist Lois Dodd and abstractionist Ed Dugmore. Their works favored local subjects, treated with inventive, vernacular styles, responsive both to intimacy of place and to vastness of scale. Day approached New York much as he did Craftsbury (Vermont), not as part of the international art market, but as a potential community for those with common interests. On these terms the gallery succeeded, although it never made money, and it became a co-op, the Blue Mountain Gallery, in 1980.

In its matter-of-factness, Day's work follows very much its own course. It reflects most strongly the generous influence of Porter, who encouraged free thinking and making connections between science and art. It steers clear of both tightly rendered realism and expressionist brushwork, even that of some of the Stieglitz group to whom Day seems close. For example, Day's large painting of 1961, Looking Down From Jay Peak, with its accumulation of small touches of color, resembles Marsden Hartley's treatment is more physical. John Marin's brushstrokes, too, are broader and more exuberant. Day's painterly calligraphy is more akin to handwriting. Closely attentive, it doesn't point to itself, but provides and informal connective tissue for his images; it's where his lofty spaces meet the earth. Day's work, it's of the clear, objective kind, more in line with Martin Johnson Heade than with Thomas Cole. His delight in painting comes through the play of light over surfaces, like the glass and steel of the World Trade Center.

Day once remarked that the tromp3-l'oeil effects of Harnett were disturbing to him because they made him mistrust reality. When he began to work from slides, therefore, it was not with any interest in photo-realism but because slides enabled him to make ambivalence, concerned over losing direct contact with the richness of his subject. After discussions with Fairfield Porter, however, he concluded that no sacrifice was of his own pleasure in drawing from direct observation. His willingness to accept this loss of objectifying his vision, he accepts the fact that he himself should move out of the way.

The camera helps distance him, to keep him at one remove form sensual contact with nature. His stance is aloof. Day attributes to Marin's influence his discovery that mountains could be heads, hips, or breasts-that sensuousness could be safely projected into those vast, distant forms. Hartley, a lonely figure, also writes of a union of intimacy with remoteness in a poem about finding mother-love in the granite of his native state. The harshness of his paintings reflects this struggle imposed by puritanical inhibitions. But Day doesn't attempt to merge with his subjects. His own mother died when, and he records an early memory of struggling with the elderly aunt who raised him, who was trying to force him to eat. His aloofness in painting seems consistent with this effort to establish control by abstaining, by finding sustenance in in the abstractions of science. Some loosening of this stance is evident in Day's recent works in oil, where an expressionist spirit seems to have surfaced with a more relaxed enjoyment of paint itself.

In the 1970's, though, Day progressively focused on the process of vision, to the exclusion of self-expression. He wanted his paintings to become something like cameras in themselves, mechanisms for displaying the world to the viewer. To this end he developed his first paintings on curves, composed of two views of the same vertical motif, set one above the other to create and extended visual field-"to give a new space for the subject," as he puts it. To record the full height of a group of trees, for example, he took two slides, one at ground level, the second with he camber tilted upwards. He observed that the distortion of the tilted view could be resolved if it was angled forward in relation to the lower one, and that the illusion of straightness was enhanced if the surface were curved. The boxes on which his watercolors are mounted thus create a continuos transition from ground level into the upper "stories" of trees or skyscrapers. Day creates not a window onto nature but a special sort of viewing, apparatus for these extremely vertical subjects.

Day's earliest boxes were six-feet tall and stood on the floor; only gradually did he come to compress their format and create boxes mounted on the wall. In these days of digital technology, animation, and virtual reality, his efforts to improve the spatial illusions of painting seem quaint; their commonsense practicality recalls the simplicity of his New England lifestyle, rooted in nineteenth-century positivism. Ironically, though, his pursuit of an enlarged space leads not to our magical absorption into his paintings, into landscape as a spectacle, but to our awareness of them as strange, ungainly objects.

By calling attention to their own three-dimensional form these handmade contraptions parallel the efforts of Day's more well-known contemporaries in the 1960's, such as as Donald Judd, to establish paintings as objects. Like Judd's "specific objects," Day's boxes are resolutely grounded in the condition of things. In a wonder photograph, one Day's large boxes with a New York watercolor has been set in a wintry Vermont landscape. Its scale and stance suggest a human presence-one can't help but see in it an image of Day himself. Like a stubborn individual, it relates to the Vermont environment but remains resistant, irreducible to it. The buildings echo the verticals of the trees, like columns of a cathedral, as though to make a place for the city in this natural context. It points hopefully to some human resolution of the perennial conflict of nature with technology.