The late-days of the high-summer of my career find me in a 2000 square foot studio in Santa Fe, NM. From the skylight, 20 feet above my head, I am bathed in a perfect well of light. I stand at my work table mixing paint. Before me on a large rolling easel sits a 4′ x 6′ painting. Described within the plane of this picture are vast tectonic plates moving and shifting as they contend with one another; a subtle and endless movement before the eyes intended to hold the viewers attention… forever. The painting, divided nearly in half by aggressively incised lines made with a large metal straight edge and the nub of a blunt plastic pen, has reached the stage where all egg tempera paintings eventually must go. I work in silence, carefully mixing the paint to exacting hues and, with a small brush and infinite patience, carefully modulate these final moments in search of a perfect balance. An admirable journey of thousands of images done over the years has brought me to this one painting. It is not the best painting I have done. It is only another painting - a link in a chain of paintings - but it is the last painting of this series of wildly popular images which has been 15 years in the making. I am not aware, at this moment, that this painting is the last. I am 50 years old. I do not realize summer is coming to an end.
The brushes have been cleaned and neatly returned to my work table. The painting has sat, all night, in the darkness, waiting passively as I have slept. Over my first cup of coffee I take one more hard look and decide it is finished. It is moved to a corner of the room and out of my field of vision. I pull out another white gessoed panel and place it on a second paint spattered easel. During the course of the day I have lunch with friends, take my dog for a walk, and mix the mud of five different pigments which has become my black and my starting point. Towards evening I take the largest brush from my can of brushes and begin to slap large quantities of this mixed-black upon the surface of the board. I then take my aluminum straight-edge and make my first cut… and stop. I have seen this mark before. I make another mark, this one dissecting the first at an odd angel, and stop. It is so familiar! All evening I search and find no new point of entry. During the next few weeks I try several different mediums. I return to the print studio, which had always before jarred me awake. Much to my chagrin, the door remains closed to me.
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The medium in which I first discovered my voice is watercolor. This fluid paint, rich in the mythos of unintended consequence, taught me to believe in the accident as a tool to enlightenment and forward progress. I have explored all mediums and methods and, stretching my arms wide, I have embraced all ‘isms’ while championing none. This was the first time an approach I had chosen un-chose me! What is an artist to do? It seemed I had come to know myself too well. When the tools of image building (brushes, pigments, etc.) and the elements of image building (composition, texture, etc.) are put in the service of ‘product creation’ it becomes possible for a person to know a thing so well that he looses the awareness of the broad world of unknown possibilities which surround him. In the surety of my own hard won competence I had lost sight of The Mysteries; all those things we do not know, the discovery of which is the true source of creativity. Perhaps, while I had slept that night, I’d had a dream which awoke in me some restless spirit. Perhaps I had simply run out of steam. For whatever reason, my way had been firmly blocked. And so began my long search for a new aesthetic vocabulary.
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The subject upon which I chose to hang these new explorations was the human figure. I chose the figure for its quality of opposites to the minimal architecture of my recent past work. ”Perhaps,” I thought, “a new point of entry is on the the opposite side of this thing called image building.” The medium I began with was the monotype for, as I have said before, it tends to jar me awake. I first cut stencils based on the contours and silhouettes of the naked body and these were then inked, flipped, turned and printed using multiple passes through the press. I kept the process as spontaneous and unpredictable as possible. This work led to a series of 250 prints and an oddly familiar result. As the images resolved they became, again, just as in my earlier series, volumes of space contending with one another within the picture plane. What, in the geometries, were tectonic subsurface volumes of strata became, in the figurative context, volumes of sky and cloud. A new door had opened but I had walked into the same room!
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This change of subject had the result of presenting a much different face to the world, but my language had not expanded. Buried within this imagery lay the seed of further disappointment. I twiddled with this new imagery for several years, thinking to somehow commandeer these images in the quest for a new and more satisfying approach. Eventually I had to face the fact that I had not turned over new soil. I was contending with a kind of self-limiting view (the sense of horizons placed too near me) created by the use of similar tools put in service to similar ends. This room I was at first attempting to get back into had, by then, become one from which I was trying to break free.
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In 2006 my grip upon the known world began to loosen. I began attending 5 life drawing groups a week. Out of this intensely focused practice of seeing-for-the-sake-of-seeing, came a kind of selfless abandon. In 2007 I painted a show consisting of oil pastel studies over grid works of pen and ink drawings. These explosive color-works consisted of contour figure drawings executed, one over the other, with the expressed intent of achieving a kind of moment to moment forgetfulness. They became, for me, a spiritual exercise in letting go of expectation and fear. I wrote during this time, “After another day of drawing and painting, I stood looking into an oil pastel of lush oranges, pinks, and whites as aggressive and juicy as any De Kooning. It is as if I had somehow gotten the fingers of my hands wedged between two parts of the painting process that, up till that moment, had fit together seamlessly and, like two flaps of skin, pulled them apart to expose the gut.”
Which brings us to 2009 and this new body of work. In this show I have returned to those figurative monotypes of 7 years past. Using them as a foundation over which the image is built, I continue to work with the live model, letting the contours, shadows, forms, and feelings found there to excite the page. For a year I have refused to speak of them, even to myself in my journal. They have accumulated in a stack at one end of my work table, each placed there when finished and not looked at again. They have been, to my mind, only artifacts; what is left over from the act of staying in the moment. I have not asked anything of them. I have not studied them, fearing that to reason them out would be to murder them.
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As I have been signing and preparing these paintings to hang, I have been struck by their lucidity and the pure joy with which they embrace those long studied elements of color, hue, texture and light. These improvisations - for that is surely what they are - are about abandon; not the practiced abandon of the well trained craftsman reproducing a known energetic stroke in pursuit of a desired result, but rather, a true and complete abandon which can only come to those who have nothing to loose. With no thought of preserving the mark just made nor any expectation of the mark to come; with my mind preoccupied in ’seeing’ the figure before me and thus distracted from the normally contemplative judgments of image making, I have danced for that hour or three on the edge of failure, as close to the spirit of pure improvisation as I have ever come.
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In the doing of this body of work I have rediscovered the joy and excitement of true risk taking, and I have realized something quite surprising. All substantive art has, at its source, a kind of improvisation. Those architectural images of my past, which in many cases were so laborious to complete, began as acts of improvisational play. The excitement and appeal they still convey to the viewer is the result of the joy I felt while drawing out of those muddied black surfaces an image new to the world. For years I had played with that series till one morning I awoke to find the ability to play had left me. I’m sure someone had told me sometime in my past, “Stan, have fun, take risks, be joyful.”, but I had either not heard or, more likely, I had simply forgotten.
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I’m often shocked by how long it can take to learn a lesson. It can be even more difficult relearning a thing which has been forgotten. This creative life - this life of learning through discovery - is not an easy one. Some revelations are years in the making. Some knowledge is gained by circuitous routes. The world is full of rabbit holes. In life, as in art, surprises abound.
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There are Indian Summers, and places on this earth where summers never end. And there is the summer carried within our hearts; an ecstatic summer which only demands we keep the child within us safe, and play with him from time to time. I’ll not soon forget the lessons of joyful play which lie at the heart of these paintings.
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Stan Berning - September 2009
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I’m so excited about this issue that I created a series of works called “Practical Manual to the Intangible”. I love painting. I love the process and the studio environment, the smell of paint. I love painting in early morning; that universe of white canvas waiting for my appearance. And I believe these feelings can be transported to any media. If you believe so, its there. The value is also there and present for everyone who creates, who feels it, who sees it. There is a part in Aldus Huxley’s book, Brave New World. He mentions something called Sensitive Cinema; a place where you watch a movie and feel exactly what the characters feel. 
