The Gift of Narrative

Eric Fischl’s Discordant Melodies

What’s the mark of an interesting painting? What pulls you in?

Not that many people give a good goddam about painting, but for those of us who do, a good painting elicits some kind of endocrinological spark, I suppose. It is painting of course, so the dopamine/seratonin overload is sufficiently regulated, but the chemical bond exists nonetheless.

So what is the spark? What is the linking force that makes the bond stick?

For most of this year, my friend Daniel and I have been looking at west coast figurative painters of the 1950s, with appreciation and amazement. Appreciation for their unequivocal achievement, and amazement for the lack of due approbation they have been given by the art cognoscenti.

What brings me around to Eric Fischl is maybe the coincidence of his west coast education, but more his painting reminds me that David Park switched in the late forties from abstract work to figurative work because he felt that the decade of abstract work he had done, despite its ideals of, “vitality, energy, profundity, warmth,” didn’t quite get to what he wanted to express. It lacked, for him, the spark, or what he called, “the sting,” the capacity to spontaneously bond. Eric Fischl’s paintings have that, in buckets.

Eric Fischl is undeniably a great figurative painter for all the normal reasons: he is dextrous, facile, ambitious, etc., but for me what really looses the glands and fills the buckets is his instinctive and flawless innate narrative sense. And especially satisfying, is that this narrative skill is, as I see it, his contribution extending the link of figurative painting from the Bay Area Artists of the fifties to today. This is a rather extraordinary eventuality, in that anything narrative is and has been received harshly by the painting experts, and instantly relegated to the territory of second tier works of illustration (I won’t expound on this here, but say only that Eric’s acceptance by the art world for his narrative works was probably 100% conditioned by the notion that they were dark and disturbing). My favorite pictures of his tell a story, but what each particular story is is, I think, beside the point. It’s the discordant melody of the painting that arrests you.

Recently I read a book about how animals perceive the world. First, they don’t just exist in our world as participants, but have instead their own worlds, which to them, I suppose, we are the participants. This world of theirs, their umwelt, is illuminated, not surprisingly by their leading sense: for example, dogs live in a world of odors and the best description I read about this is that smells envelop them like smoke. Odors flow around them and through them. They define the boundaries of their experience in an evanescent fog. I think of music like that. Musical construction supports and entwines itself around a governing melodic voice. Eric Fischl’s narratives are similar: they are the melody that characterizes the picture. It flows through the stories supporting and being supported by the painting’s unfailingly disagreeable themes.

The picture at the top of this writing, from his Sag Harbor Series, is a nice example. It’s so fun to get seduced by Eric Fischl’s technique, his loose and liquid shorthand establishing context for his always entertainingly distorted figures. And these figures are definitely a group of strangely disfigured Americans, but it’s the narrative tune that works you. These folks, some leaning on crutches and canes others, like the boy with the drum, in costume, leading the parade; are they a family? Everyone is looking past everyone else, almost splitting apart, each seems to be moving away from the other. What about this girl in the back? She seems a little different than the others. She’s wearing blue and white - sort of an angelic little character. What happened to this family? The technique and the distortion fill in some of the blanks, but ultimately the primacy of the melody lights the spark.

Eric Fischl was born in 1948, about the same time David Park took his abstract paintings to the dump. Maybe its coincidence that Eric has extended David’s desire to make, “troublesome,” figurative paintings by fusing figuration with narrative. Maybe. Either way I can’t think of anyone who has done this effectively. Seems to me, Eric Fischl is singularly adept at building an acceptable narrative painting. My impression is that he builds the melody into his paintings in a way that fills them like smoke: the pitch perfect narratives exist in their own umwelt: Outside our space, utterly seductive, and sadly perfectly descriptive. Eric Fischl’s gift for narrative is the driving melody of his paintings and man-oh-man do they sting.