For out of olde feldes, as men seyth,
Cometh al this newe corn fro yer to yere,
And out of old bokes, in good feyth,
Cometh al this newe science that men lere.
[For out of old fields, as men say,
Comes all this new corn from year to year,
And out of old books, in good faith,
Comes all this new science that men learn.]
-- Geoffrey Chaucer, Parliament
of Fowls, 1373
Left: John Spinks, Aimer, 1999, acrylic and collage on canvas, 24 x 24 inches. © John Spinks 2000. All rights reserved.
CONTENTS
Critical Commentary:
Beautiful Maneuvers
Mimi Thompson, New York, February 2000
John Spinks Interview
Mimi Thompson, New York, January 20, 2000
What's New in the
Northeast?
Vivien Raynor, The
New York Times, New York, Sunday, June 9, 1991
Beautiful Maneuvers
Mimi Thompson, New York, February 2000
Chance meetings and long reflective gazes -- this kind of random communication usually goes unrecorded. Holidays and birthdays are the predictable and documented hallmarks in our life. But the meetings and glances, the large painful silences and giddy laughter, and the breathless anticipation of all of the above punctuate our lives in a way organized events never can. The interior memories we grasp are the real journal of record . They spell out a history of our own personal life that, if not completely accurate, is true.
John Spinks takes rectangles and squares for his yarn and spins a jagged paean to life as it is and could be. His story is one of exploration -- he creates his own topsy-turvy world where the Soviet Union sits northwest of Spain, and text swirls about in the sea in between. The text is sometimes as personal as his father's diaries, or as random and poignant as a list of foreclosed properties with the word "home" placed dead center. With a Jesuit passion for detail, Spinks utilizes and reveres the used and the overlooked. A small leaf sits in the center of the painting NONFICTION. Tender and delicate, the leaf holds the center of the painting like a rock. The power of the leaf's shape outmaneuvers its decaying skin.
The maps place and displace the viewer geographically. Countries are torn apart and scattered, floating off like three card monte customers when the police whistle blows. Spinks has created his own version of global warming, and his land masses change position with scientific and mystical purpose. Sometimes map pieces fulfill their geometric duty, balancing the composition, or they give the viewers roads or bays or some means of egress. In Captiva the map is so present, and the water so big, you are able to smell the salt and feel the heat. Spinks has a visceral connection to the land of his Anglo-Irish childhood, as well as the terrain of the dissected countries in his paintings whose sediment is represented by graphic calculation.
Spinks takes both a romantic and knowing look at the modernist canon. His appreciation of form for form's sake is the underpinning of many of his paintings. But that exercise is shaken and stirred by his use of word play and ironic text choices. In Portal, a painted portal is filled with pages from his father's 1943 wartime diary. Charts, statistics, and a revolver serial number sit in what looks like a delicate cave, their reality and hardness dispelling the softness around them.
These paintings exist like visually luscious scrapbook pages. They reveal non-specific histories with specific details, creating a skewed but compassionate world for the viewer to contemplate. We are a part of the world that Spinks describes, and it is a fantastic world -- full of emotion, great natural beauty, war, unspoken feelings and the occasional right look at the right time which causes a connection. Spinks takes us through the looking glass in order to tell us a story. He asks us to look, and to think. Perhaps he wants us to see, to paraphrase the 1914 Endeavor expedition's photographer, how a mass of ice flowers in Antarctica illuminated by the sun can look like a field of pink carnations.
John Spinks Interview
Mimi
Thompson, New York, January 20, 2000
MT I wanted to start out asking you about where you grew up, Newcastle upon Tyne. What kind of environment was it?
JS One of the fantastic things about it, it was heavy industry, ship building and coal mining but in half an hour you could be in the most wonderful open, wild countryside. I had both sides of that coin. I was also going to Ireland for 6 weeks every summer.
MT Did you look at a lot of art -- were there museums?
JS My earliest aesthetic memory was lying snug in bed with me mother, and we were looking at the sky and she asked me what I could see in the clouds. I would tell her what I could see, and she would tell me what she could see. Today I regard it as a kind of epiphany. It had that kind of Rorschach blot aspect to it even though the blots were the clouds. It was an act of interpretation. Also my Irish relatives say the reason I became involved with art was from my mother, she used to do embroidery. Me father encouraged me to look very closely at nature. Birds, plants, weather.
MT You trained your eye by looking around you.
JS I think so. My earliest major museum experience was a Pop Art Show at the Hayward Gallery in 1969. After that everything looked different. I saw that perhaps it wasn't all nature.
MT A lot of your paintings seem very diaristic to me, almost like pages from your life. Do you think that's the case?
JS Definitely. Joyce is a big influence on me and Joyce is a big one for cataloging things . He was big on detail. He would call his aunt in Dublin when he was living in Trieste, and he would ask her to measure the wall outside a certain house to make sure a man could actually climb over it. There's a spontaneous side to Joyce but also a detailed side, it's to do with placing things in time. Lately I've been thinking about the phrase "Once upon a time...". That seems to apply to my work because they're often dated -- never mind when it was made. I might have a date like 1921 in it, there might be a hint of narrative. It is "once upon a time".
MT It reflects what you're thinking about in your own time, but you also use history. Are these two competing endeavors?
JS What I'm trying to do is akin to poetry. I'm hoping these things are visually seductive. And I'm encouraging people to read. You can read drawn lines but you can also read words. If you isolate a word it often has more resonance than a whole paragraph.
MT That's very true. And that is something you have in common with some artists whose work is very dissimilar to yours like Barbara Kruger.
JS Someone I feel akin to and whose work I admire is Richard Artschwager -- he plays with the idea of visual pun.
MT Yes, or Bruce Nauman.
JS In terms of sensibility I aspire to be somebody like Morandi because that kind of contemplative mood is something I really revere in painting.
MT You said the stillness and passivity of a painting interests you, but I never think of a painting as passive.
JS What I mean by that is they are mute, they don't actually speak. They can have movement in them. In contrast to a flickering image where we get most of our information today -- they don't move.
MT Maps are such a big part of your work. What began this interest in maps and topography?
JS Me father was fascinated with maps. It does purport to be something that it's not. In that sense it's akin to a painting. It's a picture of terrain.
MT You mean it's a two dimensional picture of a three dimensional landscape?
JS To me it's connected to the tradition of painting and what painting pursues. I'm interested in the idea, like in the painting Skin Deep, that the map represents the skin of the earth.
MT Your use of found materials reminds me a bit of Rauschenberg, again with quite a different result. But your respect for detritus seems to match his.
JS The quality I admire in Rauschenberg is his ability to swing. He goes very far out with his imagery but there is harmony, again I have to say swing. I like the way he dignifies humble objects.
MT Do you have any intellectual or emotional connection to work that went on in the 1970s -- process art like Richard Serra flinging lead? You talk about pouring the paint and chance. Was any of this work inspirational to you?
JS My work is some kind of synthesis of what I've seen. I worked with Helen Frankenthaler and I've worked with Jim Rosenquist and they are polar opposites. However, from both of them I've learned a lot. From Helen I learned good studio habits. I learned to come to the studio prepared and I learned a certain discipline from her. I also picked up a knowledge of the range of the rectangle. From Jim I learned not to be afraid -- because you can always try again. I'm very conscious of Duchamp and Jasper Johns -- again because of their use of puns and found objects. I feel there's meat on the bone there.
MT The way Johns constructs his painting reminds me a bit of the way you construct yours, they are hierarchical.
JS And there's formality?
MT Yes.
JS I was raised a Catholic and that gives you a taste for theater and ritual and a certain formality. I'm very fond of the proscenium arch for example. I know there's different ways of staging things. I like the window, the whole contre-jour idea, I like the door. I like the vignette. These are things that appeal to me. It's instinctive. Although the jury's still out on this I do sense there is something spiritual at work in the best art. When I think of Vermeer for example I see this timelessness and this willingness to confront the everyday and make it into something profound. That seems to me to be close to something spiritual.
MT I agree. I think the time and passion and thought the artist puts into whatever they are making comes back out to the viewer if the viewer is receptive.
JS I also like the work to look old. I'm influenced by Tantric paintings, Indian paintings where there isn't any personality that you know of but there is this immense view. I like the idea you can give something a monumental scale without it being huge.
MT You haven't been burying any of your work to age it have you?
JS No, the closest I've come is exposing things to light, I have burned things on occasions and rubbed and burnished things.
MT You've used some of your father's letters in your work. Do you ever think of using any more contemporary personal correspondence?
JS You mentioned the diaristic aspect -- I'm extremely cautious about this collaboration with my father because he's not here and he hasn't given me permission to do this so as a result it has to have a certain dignity. I can't just ride roughshod over his thoughts so in The Crux of the Matter, the center has two erased pages from my father's diary in which he poured out his soul when he found that his mother had died. He erased those pages. That I can use because his privacy is not violated and the emotional content is there. And it's also connected to the erased De Kooning. It's tight, you see. In the painting Portal I used me father's diary but there is no personal information in it. It's information about chemical warfare, sunrise and sunset, telephone numbers, a revolver number. It implies a background of war -- it was 1943. There's no personal information in that but there is still that "once upon a time" quality to it.
What's New in the Northeast?
Vivien Raynor, The New York Times, New York, Sunday, June 9, 1991
... Henry Moore is the official "Great Briton" at Bachelier-Cardonsky. But his works -- two tiny bronzes and a few drawings and etchings -- are rather less interesting than those of John Howard and John Spinks, both of whom have shown in New York City as well as in their native country.
Mr. Spinks does small melancholy collages with pages of old books that make patterns with their yellowed edges as well as with their print. His tondo shapes are particularly good. More affecting, though, is the use he makes of letters from his father -- the kind that ramble on as if there were a few English miles between the correspondents instead of the Atlantic Ocean. Taking four pages of the blue handwriting, Mr. Spinks laminates them to a board, superimposes two pages from Daniel Defoe and titles the result "Crusoeletter." ...
Source: Excerpt from review of Three Great Britons exhibition at Bachelier-Gardonsky Gallery in Kent, Connecticut.
Bibliography
Vivien Raynor, More Fuel for the Debate on Abstraction, The New York Times, New York, February 18, 1996
Vivien Raynor, 12 Times 12, The New York Times, New York, August 23, 1992
Vivien Raynor, What's New in the Northeast?, The New York Times, New York, June 9, 1991
Souren Melikian, An Alternative Market, International Herald Tribune, New York, June 1, 1991
Biographical Note
John Spinks was born in 1946 in Ennis, County Clare, Ireland and received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Durham University, England.
Group Exhibitions
Landscape
Stephen Rosenberg and Fran Kaufman, curators
Rosenberg & Kaufman Fine
Art, New York, 2002
Maritime Works
Exhibition
and conversation with the artist
South Street Seaport Museum Whitman Gallery,
New York, 2001
Time and Place
Stephen Rosenberg and Fran Kaufman, curators
Rosenberg & Kaufman Fine Art, New York, 2001
Inaugural Exhibition
Andrew Edlin, curator
Andrew
Edlin Fine Arts, New York, 1999
New York Undiscovered
Jim Murray, curator
Markham-Murray
Gallery, New York, 1999
Art as Spectacle
Thelma Golden, curator
Katonah
Museum of Art, Katonah, New York, 1998
Champions of Modernism
Steven Lowy and Dominic Lombardi,
curators
Brevard Museum of Art & Science,
Melbourne, Florida, 1997
Sunrise Museum, Charleston,
West Virginia, 1997
Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston,
South Carolina, 1996
Mary Washington College
Galleries, Fredericksburg, Virginia, 1996
Castle
Gallery, College of New Rochelle, New Rochelle, New York, 1996
Drawing in Tongues
Elena Alexander, curator
Stark
Gallery, New York, 1996
Reader
Katherine Gass, curator
Curt
Marcus Gallery, New York, 1996
The Book As Art
David Audet, curator
Tampa Museum
of Art, Tampa, Florida, 1996
Eckerd College, St.
Petersburg, Florida, 1995
St. Petersburg Center
for the Arts, St. Petersburg, Florida, 1995
Small Works
Violaine Bachelier and Darby Cardonsky, curators
Galerie Gianna Sistu, Paris, 1992
Small Works
Arne Glimcher, curator
Washington
Square East Gallery, New York, 1992
Small Works
Brooke Alexander, curator
Washington
Square East Gallery, New York, 1991
Three Great Britons
Violaine Bachelier and Darby Cardonsky, curators
Bachelier-Cardonsky Gallery, Kent, Connecticut
1991
Corporate Collections
Sony Music
Miami, Florida
Coca-Cola Company
Atlanta, Georgia
Marsh & McClennan
Greenwich, Connecticut
Contact Artist
John Spinks, 158 Saint James Place, Brooklyn, New York 11238. E-mail: andreajohn@earthlink.net
