• "Painting Conveys So Much Spirit": George Lawson's San Cai Paintings, 2004
• The Gamut of Possibilities: George Lawson’s Drawings, 1992
• Allegories of Surface and Substance, 1987
• Beauty is Upfront in Lawson’s Paintings, 1986
• Catalog Introduction for SFMOMA Exhibition, 1981
• Selected Articles, Reviews & Catalog Essays, 1974-present

"Painting Conveys So Much Spirit": George Lawson's San Cai Paintings

Written on the occasion of George Lawson's exhibition at Elins Eagle-Smith Gallery in San Francisco, September 9 - October 16, 2004.

I first saw a painting by George Lawson in a group show in 1980 at the Shirley Cerf Gallery in San Francisco, which put him in the company of Joe Marioni, Phil Sims, Marcia Hafif, and Max Gimblett. I have seen many of Lawson's solo and two-person shows in galleries and museums since 1980, following work that, while exploring variations in size, drawing, and medium, always retains a determined commitment to the conception and finish of abstract paintings realized in sensitive yet rigorous approaches to support, drawing, paint, color, and surface. The few years in the late '90's during which Lawson stopped painting -- though never stopped drawing -- did nothing to diminish his grasp of painting's challenges, and instead allowed for observation and reflection leading to an even greater clarity, appreciation, and passion needed to sustain the making of a kind of painting that, to use his own words, "conveys so much spirit."

I refer to Lawson's painting as "abstract" with some reservation because the word implies a bias towards understanding painting as a reduction or simplification, a genre meeting a lower standard of success. This is hardly the case, however: Abstract painting is a difficult thing to do, and an extremely difficult thing to do well. It is a complex undertaking requiring enormous effort and care to navigate an iterative continuum of decisions positioning painting between object and picture, ideas and assumptions, and between sensual experience and decoration towards a holistic, fully realized culmination. When done well, abstract painting is immensely rewarding on many levels. With the San Cai series, Lawson has successfully negotiated the arduous task of using basic materials -- cloth, wood, pigment, oil -- to create abstract paintings that are rich and complex art works that reward long and repeated viewing.

Facts & Observations

Sancai in Chinese means "three color," or "three glazes," a low fired glaze-based style of decorating earthenware primarily reaching its height during the T'ang Dynasty (618-906 CE). The San Cai paintings follow the Jizo series of 2002. The Jizo paintings, the most recent series of paintings made with a brush, are multi-colored, using a paint more finely ground with more oil which is applied in short, horizontal, slightly-arcing strokes that build into six opposing wedge shapes, each a single color, the peak of which is positioned at the support's edges and then points towards and thins out in the middle of the canvas. The 2003 series titled T'ang introduces the use of thicker red, green, and white paint scraped and shaped with a spatula on linen; the central motifs are large blocky forms, each placed in a single quadrant of the painting. The following series of smaller studies and medium-sized paintings in the Lokapala series (2003) introduce the kind of drawing expanded in the San Cai series: improvised shapes that are pre-figural and not quite calligraphic, that somewhat interlock -- though not systematically -- and are distributed across the surface evenly and out to the edges, leaving raw linen exposed between the forms.

The San Cai painting stretchers are all vertical rectangles- the largest is nearly six feet high, and several reach fifty two inches. These are actually painted on double supports; a cotton duck is first stretched and gessoed, and then greenish brown linen is stretched over this first support and sized in clear acrylic. The paste-like paint is hand ground pigment and oil, mostly matte. The pigments used can roughly be described as olives, brick reds, and white or cream, all earthy hues varying slightly from painting to painting depending on the pigment, how they are ground, and how they are applied. The paint is applied directly with a spatula; it is spread and scraped -- almost shaped and molded -- into larger and more complex red, green, or white shapes similar to those in the Lokapala paintings. The paint, because stiff, has body, almost like low-relief. After the first attack additional painting may take place, though this is not typical. The three colors are distributed among the forms in a way so that no form of one color abuts another of the same color, although this isn't done systematically, and there are instances where this kind organization almost seems on the verge of breaking down. The exposed linen between the shapes creates another set of shapes in negative. (Left: San Cai 1, 2003, 70" x 60" oil on linen)

Lawson has stated many times that his intention is to make paintings that are, as he calls them, "open images." In a recent statement he wrote, "I've tried to keep these paintings as uncooked as possible, which means I've tried to keep them open to the unpredictable associative content individual viewers will inevitably bring to bear. I think of my paintings as open images." Certainly, this does not mean that an abstract painting is to be so unstructured or full of holes that viewers can take it or leave it; the artist is obligated to provide enough hooks via color, surface, motif, surface, line, and space to create a holistic image that allows a viewer to enter the process of engagement, discovery, connection, and re-engagement. Nor is an open image merely a Rorschach ink blot, a piece of a standard set that is intended to provoke a range of measurable responses in the viewer, and does not necessarily result in the construction of meaning. Instead, the purpose is to allow the viewer to personally construct meaning through a visual experience. As Jasper Johns said in a recent interview with Nina Siegal, "Meaning is something people find or construct or enact more than it is something that is offered to people." For this to happen, however, the painter must offer a hint of meaning, a way into the painting that entices, motivates, or gives the viewer a means to engage in a visual, emotional, and intellectual experience. The challenge is to create an image, through a careful consideration and use of all the components of painting, that does not shut down the painting and make it a vessel of received meaning, but instead leaves the painting open to a variety of experiences, singly and simultaneously.

Seeing & Reading the San Cai Paintings

In "Painting as an Art," Richard Wollheim identifies the experience of seeing-in as prior to representation, which involves the perception of, say, marks on a surface that can also be perceived as things apart from each other. This aspect of seeing-in is called twofoldedness; everyone knows this, for example, from the simple pleasure of looking at clouds and seeing people, animals, cars, etc. Wollheim insists that the experience of twofoldedness is not either/or, a switching back and forth from one image to another. Instead the viewer sees, experiences, and holds these images simultaneously. I wonder, however, if it's possible to experience trifoldedness, octafoldedness, or a multifoldedness wherein an image can provoke a number of simultaneous associations that the viewer holds, cycles through, balances and interrelates. An open image, then, would be most successful not only when it allowed viewers to see-in and experience a range of associations, but when the range of associations are simultaneously full and complex visual, sensual, emotional, and intellectual responses.

A multifolded seeing-in occurs when viewing the San Cai paintings; these paintings prompt many responses and possible readings. In the act of looking, one's interaction with the paintings leads to the recognition and interpretation of possible meanings, and then on to the validation and solidification of these meanings. In the San Cai paintings, where the presentation lays bare everything for the viewer to see, it is possible to retrace a backward and forward continuum from the painting as evidence of action to decision to intention. The San Cai painting successfully work as open images because this tracing back and forth openly supports multiple readings.

As the forms comprising the San Cai motif individuate and interrelate it becomes clear that the associations they provoke are the result of a risky, rigorous process. This process requires many decisions and actions coherently worked through so that many of the painting's components fall into place: size and scale, color and surface, gesture and form, and drawing that defines two relationships: one between each painting's forms, and another between the forms and the canvases edge.

Again, the forms are each one of three colors -- red, green, or white -- more or less evenly distributed, with no two forms of the same color next to each other. That they are muted colors creates a relationship between the red and green of a kind of shared signaling, that attracts and releases the eye from one to the other. The matte paint pulls the eye in. Instead of competition, the red and green are two thirds of a chord. The white, tending more towards cream, seems as if it includes a touch of the other two colors mixed into it. These three colors make a lively, dynamic trio that is also historically based in the Sancai glazes. Immediately, one obvious but delightful association presents itself: the painting represents a ceramic form, and, more complexly, is also itself an object standing in as a ceramic form: the stretcher defines the vessel, the linen support is dark clay, and the red, green, and white are classic Sancai glazes, perhaps prior to firing. This neat connection turns de Kooning's often quoted line, "Flesh is the reason oil paint was invented," radically on its ear.

Each San Cai painting is first an object, a shallow box that is wrapped in cloth, marked or decorated with paint, and hung on the wall. They are handsome and formal, present and commanding. Looking at these objects on the wall we want to see not only what is on this object, but how this object shows us other things. At the same time that the painting is an object we want to look at it as a picture full of forms that represent something else. We can see the painting as a picture, a window, a mirror, or a body. We look at the painting at the same time that we look into the painting, and we scan the surface, meet and pull back from the canvas edges, and physically respond to what we take in. What we see and respond to might begin to prompt a number of questions. Are the separate forms fully independent? Are these forms pieces of something larger that has cracked and is pulling apart; are the forms aggregating into a larger whole; or, instead, are these forms suspended in a space that keeps them apart? Will they ever meet? Are they fixed in the shape we see, or are these bodies forever positioned in this way? If these forms are representations of a positioned body, can I imagine the forms taking a different shape? Are the forms of the same color a family apart from the others, or are all the shapes, no matter what color, part of the same family? Are the shapes meant to interlock as pieces of a puzzle might, or are these positions arbitrary? What is the significance of the exposed linen: is it the background, or is it just unpainted cloth? What if instead of focusing my attention on the painted forms I concentrated on the forms created by the unpainted areas; do these spaces define forms that represent something, too, and are the red, green, and white are instead the background? Why don?t any of the forms run off the edge to continue outside the paintings, but instead are contained with the four sides of the canvas, strongly suggesting that the painting as a complete and whole object? There really are no simple or verifiable answers to these questions. In formulating and pondering these questions, however, the viewer senses how a painting begins to breathe and engage, thereby opening a range of observations and responses essential to "Art." (Left: San Cai 3, 2003, 52" x 46", oil on linen)

There is incredible movement and energy in the San Cai paintings. The shapes stretch, turn, leap, gesture, hang, and flip, while some rest, sit, fold in, and recline. In these forms there is a kind of life energy, an animal energy, wild but not threatening, ordinary yet graceful, and though the forms seem familiar it is impossible to pin down and name them. I see these forms as having a consciousness and spirit, a freedom to move and be themselves, while at the same time demonstrating social awareness and good behavior by not intruding on each other. These paintings are fields of strong and equal individual beings that belong to a collective society, fitting around each, considerate and accommodating, diverse yet unified. Some forms loosely share attributes that encourage grouping and categorization, cross referencing and analysis. One looks at all of these forms and feels a sympathetic movement in the body: the shoulder turns and head tips; the back arches and arms reach out; the pelvis shifts and the heel lifts. This dual experience of seeing movement and responding in kind strikes a deep emotional core that is primal, yet far form simplistic. It is based in the knowledge of the body, and connected to the process of seeing and being in the moment, which is immensely satisfying and regenerative, even necessary.

The San Cai paintings are truly successful open images, and immensely successful paintings. They hold up to the viewer's deep looking. The viewer reacts to the paintings emotionally and physically, makes observations and asks questions, verifies responses, and returns for more. The paintings prompt a multifolded seeing-in that leads the viewer through a complex encounter. It is a significant achievement that the San Cai paintings consistently sustain such important and meaningful experiences.

Meaning

That the San Cai paintings engage the viewer in a multifolded seeing-in without closing down into simply a representation of this experience is evidence of the painting's success as open images and works of art. Out of this personally intense and complex viewing experience comes one of the primary meanings of these paintings: seeing as a sensual and intellectual process of exploration, discovery, understanding, and renewal.

Wollheim identifies several types of primary and secondary meanings in paintings. There is the primary meaning I have already described in the viewer's understanding of the painting as a unified body of images meant to visually stimulate both sympathetic and personal responses that the viewer acts on. There is also historical meaning in how the San Cai paintings borrow the idea of three colors from Sancai glazes. Expressive meaning is found, in particular, in the energy of the painting's forms: a kind of joy and exuberance, freedom and recognition of interdependence. Textual meaning is read in each painting's content as a text; for example, Lawson applies the ethic of diversity, equality, and continuity -- openness -- in the making of the paintings and in an attitude towards the viewer's experience.

Secondary meanings in the paintings arise from discerning the painting's meaning to Lawson, which he discovers through the act of creation and is left in the painting as evidence. The viewer observes the finished painting, notes how it is made, and works backwards to interpret the artist's intentions and wishes. The San Cai paintings are fully exposed; nothing is hidden. This willingness to expose the pieces of the painting, and the way it is made, creates a generous and welcoming opening for the viewer. The artist's intention, I think, is to sincerely involve the viewer. Referring back to Johns's quote, rather than offering a meaning to the viewer, Lawson method is to make paintings that engage people in finding, constructing, or enacting meaning. The San Cai paintings engage me in cycle of moving through: a preverbal visual experience, where words are inadequate; a middle experience of intellectualdiscovery and synthesis; a post-verbal experience, where words are exhausted but meaning remains; and then back again to the painted object. I return to make meaning over and over. (Right: San Cai 6, 2003, 52" x 46" oil on linen)

Value

Paintings are real things. We regard them in the world, and, if we're paying attention, they regard us. I can't agree more with Lawson's statement, "We are exposed to a lot of digital imagery now that tends to break down upon close examination, while painting has such a high degree of resolution, it seems to just keep on giving the closer you get. Painting's unfolding continues beyond any scrutiny." This statement easily applies to Lawson's paintings.

The San Cai paintings are the result of clear vision, conception, intuition, and concentrated, focused action. Painting is such a flexible, strong medium, and Lawson employs it so well. These are powerfully crafted objects, real and humbly made using, basically, earth and plant byproducts: minerals, oil, wood, woven fibers. It is astounding to realize how these paintings, hanging on a wall for unmediated viewing, hold up under close inspection, catalyze such complex experiences, and stimulate so much meaning. The value of the work is in the experience of discovering, identifying, and knowing meaning, and in how the paintings set a high standard for what a painting is and does. These works buoy an opposition to a cynical surrender to things apart from us, such as the digital image and the mass produced multiple. They work to connect us to ourselves and each other, rewarding prolonged and repeated viewing. George Lawson's San Cai series are exceptionally beautiful,meaningful, and important paintings.

Chris Ashley
September 2004
Oakland, CA

The Gamut of Possibilities: George Lawson’s Drawings

Essay for Catalog of the Diver Paintings
Published by Room For Painting Press, San Francisco 1992
(Revised translation from the German, 2003)

It is just in the last year that drawing has come to be such an integral element in George Lawson’s work, attaining increasing meaning, whereas earlier the painting stood completely in the foreground of his artistic output. Here, within that realm of Color painting which of late has clearly become more significant internationally, Lawson has sought unconventional ways to further sharpen the question of the paint-as-color image and its status in contemporary art.

Lawson’s recent drawings are organized in amply laid out rows of circles, whereby for instance either four rows of four circles or five rows of five circles are arranged one over the other, such that altogether they circumscribe an approximately square field. The grid of circles and rows gives the appearance so, not of an arbitrarily extended pattern, but rather a rapport contained within the field, so for all the differences in the constituent forms, the image holds up as a whole. The surface of the paper incidentally is never completely covered, but rather between the paper’s format and the drawn grid, a marginal border is left untouched, emphasizing and defining the drawn area. Although conceived according to the same guidelines, each sheet drafts a pattern at once conforming and individually unique, though never coalescing into a figure. What presents itself is a rational shuffling through the picture plane, freely realized through a series of details

Splattered with ink as they are onto the surface of the paper, these circles are not in the literal sense of the word, drawn, but rather, with the help of a variety of round objects, stamped upon the page. They touch one another; they sometimes even overlap one another. Smaller circles are drawn within larger circles. Each, according to the whims of the employed material, leaves a thin imprint or sometimes a very massive blot, or at times traces from burst bubbles of ink, and sometimes the ink floats into the middle of the circle or spills over its contour to bind its edge together with the circle to its side.

In this manner, each individual circular form affects a completely different ink pattern, and displays an array of inner-outer relationships. The characteristic style of the drawing, the inner and outer zones, the overflowing of the circle and the grid, are all comparatively unwilled, meaning that the results are not premeditated. Lawson does not take this dynamic deviation from the geometric norm simply for granted; much more he draws from it the imagistic potential, the sense of presence, revealed through the working process. It is not rule--so and so many circles of a certain diameter organized so on a grid—that is decided, but rather the open and many faceted process by which an image is gradually revealed.

For this process, overlays and drawn traces are decisive; just as unpredictable as they are unavoidable, they just “happen” and overspill the measured regularity of the grid of circles, yet still manage nonetheless to remain openly defining. So, as the gaze scans from one coherent cluster to another, the gaps between the elements resolve into an integral aspect of the image. The complex overlap creates visual ambiguities, an unresolved play of positives and negatives, a set of images at once clearly present and obscured.

In some ways, these drawings of Lawson’s would appear reminiscent of the type of work with the grid that was so prominent in the art of the ‘60s. At that time an art developed which, refusing all forms of representation, was drawn to the neutrality and presence, the flatness and regularity of such grids, suppressing as they did the individual characteristics of form and demarking a clear distinction between art and reality. In contrast, Lawson’s grid revitalizes an expressive undertone; therefore in these drawings, any reminiscence of serial systems is in the end clearly overcome. The manner of drawing inside and outside the circles—that is, the violation of the grid--—is more to the point than the grid itself.

In the course of his painting, Lawson has utilized grid systems in a number of ways: from the early works of the ‘70s organized around bar forms to the free-standing squares of color arranged in a grid to form large scale images, dating from the mid ‘80s. While the pictorial structure in these works derived from the various set frameworks, measured, exact and determinedly fixed, the color has always been a matter of openness, a wealth of subtle differentiation and unpredictability. The sensibility that distinguishes so finely between colors builds itself upon a system of form.

With the paintings from the late ‘80s this changed; for the first time, circle and ring interfere with each other on the painting plane. Eventually Lawson abandoned the square format and the homogeneous color-texture altogether and began to experiment, presenting parallel slices of completely controversial characters, circular planes and ring forms, these amorphous planes all thrown together in multi-faceted ways, in a depth without transparence, shadings depicted without any spatially fixed planar hierarchy.

Lawson’s drawings belong in this context also. Just as the underlying system of the painting is encroached upon by color, so now is the systemic aspect of the drawing by its characteristic gesture. The fruit of the drawing lies in the individualistic modification of what is essentially an anonymous grid. As much in the drawing as in the painting of the last few years, the original emphasis on a system for viewing has returned. This progression owes itself to Lawson’s conviction that one must question the authoritative idea, firmly fixed in Color Painting, of the hierarchal superiority of the absolute or pure image as opposed to the complex one.

In this frame of mind, dating from the mid ‘80s, Lawson has developed a certain set of axioms pertaining to the new Color Painting, a pictorial concept he refers to as the “Open Image”. The search for visual equivalents to the overlays of memory and association, as they inevitably influence the perception of the viewer, led him to the multi-layered, integrated motif of the painted circles and stamped rings.

Lawson’s works on paper, whether gouaches or drawings, possess a directness and immediacy, compared to the painting. They are more seismographic in their tracking of sensitivities than the painting. In comparison, the attitude of the drawing is much freer, more spontaneous and immediate, covering the large gap between the realms of the provisional and the conclusive. Through a successively growing dynamic range of new pictorial forms, drawn from the breaks and overlaps of the circle-grid, constrained as it is by the very essence of the drawing to incompleteness, by the dissolving circle, the sketchiness or obscurity of the ink blotch, to wholeness, the drawing affords an altogether different visual activity than the painting.

In their tension between framework and overlap, even measure and overspill, Lawson’s drawings offer particularly intense possibilities for the eye and spirit of the viewer willing to plumb the intimated space and depth of content of these sheets. Directly through their own “incompleteness,” each viewer can profoundly influence the unfolding of these open images. The possibility of participating in these inner processes is not finally determined by the stimulus of the drawings here, nor after all by the artist, himself: “In the material possibilities, however, I find unending fascination.”

Dr. Bernd Growe
German Writer and Art Historian (1951-1992)
Cologne, Germany, June 1992

Review excerpt, ARTWEEK, May 23, 1987

Allegories of Surface and Substance

…despite the title’s allusion to Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s fresco, it is evident that Lawson has painted Good and Bad Government with an informed appreciation of modern painting’s notion of essential phenomena existing as metaphors for the transcendent. In this work, one can see the visual echoes of such artists as Robert Ryman, Brice Marden, Robert Irwin, Ellsworth Kelly (from the late 1950s), Yves Klein, Kasimir Malevich and, especially, Piet Mondrian. Regardless of Lawson’s studious absorption of the tradition of high modernism, however, a question remains: Why paint on squares of terra cotta? I would conjecture that the decision has something to do with creating an ironic tension between the archaic preindustrialness of clay and the now-conventionalized look of “radical newness” that is supported by Good and Bad Government’s identity as a modernist painting.

…the thrust of Lawson’s project can be understood in allegorical terms as well as transcendent ones: the oil paint appears to be resisting being absorbed into the porous terra cotta, and it seems uncertain which of the two materials will most define what the viewer reads as “surface.” If one reads the oil painting as symbolizing a modernist consciousness of present-tense virtuality and the terra cotta s symbolizing the unconscious omni-presence of traditional assumptions, one can see the eternal dilemma between progressive and conservative dramatized in an eloquent and subtle way.

Good and Bad Government flirts with an apparent taboo that abstract high-modernist painting seems to be laboring under during this time of post-modern hunger for image and the mythologies that images imply. This flirtation is part of what makes the work so provocative, but most of the work’s success stems from the fact that its entire content can be surmised from what the paint is doing on the surface and from the care and devotion that Lawson has lavished on the materials that reveal this fact.

Mark Van Proyen, Artist and Writer
San Francisco, May 1987

Review excerpt, San Francisco Chronicle, April 4, 1986

Beauty is Upfront in Lawson’s Paintings

Amid the current wave of razzle-dazzle imagery in contemporary painting, George Lawson’s abstractions are liable to look staid and inexpressive. But I find them a welcome respite from the stylistic vehemence of so much that appears in galleries these days. …this description makes the paintings sound more uniform than they really are. In fact they differ dramatically in color, mood, intensity and surface quality.

Schoene Lau, for example, named for a mythic German river maiden, is done entirely in tinted whites. Bathed in daylight from an adjacent window, it brings to mind DeKooning’s famous quip, “flesh is the reason oil paint was invented.” On one reading, Lawson’s picture seems to essay oil paint’s seductiveness abstractly through a play of flesh tones. But the affinity between Schoene Lau and the other works present keeps us from taking this reading too seriously.

For what Lawson has done in each work is choose a limited range of colors and a specific painterly attack and allowed them to heighten and detail certain properties of painting. It is as though he has tried to evoke as many of the possibilities of painting as he can simply by displaying the medium’s inherent properties.

The series as a whole reads like an argument against representation as painting’s primary mode of address to reality. I think that is why, like Robert Ryman, Lawson avoids placing anything on his surfaces that would read as a figure. He tends to work his brush or palette knife so as to sustain an even flow of energy over each panel’s surface, letting the medium resist according to variations in his “recipe.”

These are paintings without insides, though they constantly intimate the possibility of opening up illusionistic space. You sense the potential for it in the slow shimmer that develops across the panels in Captain, Schoene Lau and Biography. In each of these paintings, the hues of various panels are similar enough that you cannot be sure just how many colors you are seeing. As explicit as the panels are materially, they interact optically in ways that seem so outrun language.

Lawson has reduced painting to its most flat-footed terms as the blanketing of surfaces. Yet by managing color, facture and the rhythms of labor well, he has produced one of the most beautiful painting shows to appear in these parts this season.

Kenneth Baker, Art Critic
San Francisco, April 1986

Catalog Introduction for SFMOMA Exhibition

August 6 – September 20, 1981George Lawson’s oeuvre fits within the tradition of color-abstraction painting inherited from an early breakthrough generation of artists such as Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, and Ad Reinhardt.

As an artist, he concerns himself with formal issues of the act of painting, working within a self-imposed limitation of non-objective color painting as an actualized object.

Utilizing a serial format, Lawson’s towering monochromatic canvases with their closely valued hues and segmented panels, deny a normal compositional response, asserting a confrontation with the primacy of color. Because of the scale and holistic quality of these paintings, a primal and direct visual experience of color as image-substance is evoked.

The application of richly surfaced opaque paint on panels not only records the physical process, but serves as an extension of the personal touch of the artist’s hand and his emotions. These paintings’ surfaces are not merely covered with color but occupied by it, creating a meditative atmosphere of color-image resonance.

George Lawson’s paintings serve as evidence of the means of paint and reiterate the concept of painting as material object.

George W. Neubert, Associate Director of Art
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
San Francisco, August 1981

Selected Articles, Reviews & Catalog Essays