Mike Glier (b. 1953)

WORKING FROM LIFE

MG: We have three cloudscapes to consider here; the Burchfields were made from observation, and mine was imagined. I’ve enjoyed years of painting outside, making studies, not unlike Burchfield’s, Flaming Orange Northern Sky at Sunset, and there is no better way to learn about color, form, and movement than working from life out of doors. You really don’t know how much color there is in a shadow under a bush until you try to paint it! 

NW: These brilliantly colored cloud studies probably document the aftereffects of a volcanic eruption that occurred on May 22, 1915, at Lassen Peak in California. We learned this in 2011, when Stephen J. Vermette, Ph.D., a climatologist and professor of geography in the Geosciences Department at SUNY Buffalo State, provided a scientific perspective. Burchfield created both cloud studies in Salem, Ohio on July 16, 1915, about two months after the “Great Eruption of 1915.” A vintage postcard shows its enormous pyroclastic cloud, filled with hot gas, ash, and rock debris. The particulates traveled westward on dense currents causing more vivid sunsets because the “scattering of the short [sunlight] wavelengths are depleted before reaching the viewer (the blue light simply cannot make it).” 

MG: Since Burchfield began his career on the heels of the Impressionists, and in the good company of other plein air American painters like O’Keeffe, Hartley and Marin, his habit of working outdoors was familiar and even fashionable in the early- to mid-twentieth century. But the practice fell out of favor and was considered passé, even reactionary. Now, the contemporary art world is more accepting of varied methods for making art, and I wonder if it’s a good time to reassess the contemporary relevance of plein air painting, particularly plein air painting that engages abstraction.  

NW: Artists, like you and Burchfield, acknowledge predecessors while creating new unique work. How did your vision and practice evolve?

MG: I lived in New York City in the early 1970’s and 80’s and loved it, but for one thing; I could live with the garbage smells and crime, but I left New York because of art theory! I was a reader of Artforum and October magazine, and a student of the brilliant Rosalind Krauss who was its editor. Within these pages arguments were made that we modern humans do not have a core, unique self, but are vessels that are filled up and shaped by mass media and the capitalist entities that construct our identities (apologies to the Octoberists for this oversimplification!). These theories animated the work of some exceptional artists like Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince, who wisely kept some distance from theoretical assertions. While the theory was compelling, it was presented as a totalizing frame that ignored the input of biology. Each of us is a library of genetic information whose original entry is the first day of life. Such a vast resource is never idle but is always in conversation with the world around us, shaping our perceptions, often in unique ways. Sure, the way I see is shaped by photographs and paintings I have studied, but it is also shaped by the evolution of the eye itself. Culture and biology are always mixing it up. Since the possibilities are endless, it stands to reason that each of us grow into creatures whose perceptions are, at least in part, unique. 

I was deeply distressed by the theoretical assertions that I had no unique self, so I set out to disprove it by eschewing photography and other forms of advanced mediation, moving to the country and working entirely from direct observation with the simplest of mediating tools: charcoal, pencil and paint. Although it might have seemed like a reactionary move, I thought I was investigating a future that is inoculated from alienation by rediscovering intimacy with myself and other living things. I started painting out of doors in 2005. Working in the fresh air brought a new level of complexity and serendipity to painting. The light was always in flux, constantly changing the colors of things and their shadows. Shapes could no longer be isolated. Instead, they were elements in the terrain and the transition from one thing to the next was as interesting as the things themselves. Birds flew by, bugs stuck to the pictures and the wind tried its best to upend everything. Insecurity became a part of the process requiring me to respond quickly. Deliberation gave way to improvisation. Observation was replaced by estimation. And the intellectual satisfaction of realizing a goal dissolved into the physical joy of making something unexpected.

When drawing and painting out of doors, there isn’t a break between thinking and doing. In the best moments there is no lag between the movement of the sun and the wind and the response of the brush and the palette knife. Stimulus and response become a single thing and the experience is one of feeling very connected with the subject. It’s a reciprocal relationship in which the natural world gives a prompt, like a breeze, a vivid red, or bird call, and the artist gives a response in the form of a gesture, a color choice, or a shape. The experience is particularly intense when working abstractly, since the subject of the picture is not the landscape anymore, but the imaginative dialog between the artist and the landscape. And here is Burchfield, the landscape painter, whose finest work favors improvisation over representation to express his ecstatic relationship with the living world. He pioneered a creative method in which his subject, the living world, became an active partner in a reciprocal relationship. This is exemplary and for me a guide. He models a way of being that is fit for the ecological challenges of the future.  

NW: In many respects, Charles Burchfield was clearly ahead of his time. I’ve gained insight into your work seeing which of Burchfield’s works attracted you. There are so many! Burchfield’s cloud studies pair aesthetically with many of your drawings.

MG: My drawing July 24, 2011; Eagle Lake, Blue Mountain, NY, installed on the exhibition’s title wall is a plein-air study for Storms Splitting Light. The study helped me understand the forms and their scale relationships. I enjoy storms’ various forms and colors, but this painting was also a response to anthropomorphizing weather by giving storms proper names. When I hear my local weatherman say, “After causing historic floods in central Europe, Storm Boris continues to bring devastating weather,” I think of Boris as a personality, who drives around the landscape in a dark cape, tossing thunderbolts. The three storms in my painting are sweeter than Boris and are having a fine time dividing white light into prisms.