Jeremy Blake’s work made an indelible impression on me and it will probably always remain an esotaric touchstone I’ll keep coming back to and thinking about. But I can hardly talk about that without first remembering the influence of Graham Peacock and the Lush album “Spooky.”
In 2001 and 2002, Mr. Peacock, a “New-New” painter and one of my painting teachers, was forcing me to evaluate formalism and abstract art, particularly color field painters, with his own sensitivity and energy for the history and value of such projects. He knew how to cut to the chase when analyzing anything by the likes of Jules Olitsky and Morris Lewis, both with and without the Clem Greenberg vocabulary. The psychology of this culture of abstract painting was rich and addled with conflicting ideas of friction and bliss. But I was trying to compliment this education with experimenting in digital work at the same time, and it was difficult for me. I remember showing Graham some of my color field digital paintings done outside the studio and he slightly encouraged it, even if he didn’t like the apparent small scale. Although I didn’t feel successful at abstract painting, eventually it started to be fun. I began to find some confidence in making bright and super-saturated colors work for the first time. I also used motion graphics to experiment with animating my color field paintings from scans and photographs. I took my digital paintings and clips, with ethereal transitions inspired by British shoegaze music, and even converted them to 35mm slides for my portfolio. Admittedly, the Jim Friedman photography for early Lush singles and, in particular, 1992’s Spooky have held my fascination for so many years, that I gravitate to similar blurry, microscopic motifs frequently.
Artwork for Lush singles by Vaughan Oliver and Jim Friedman.
It was when I saw the opening to Punch-Drunk Love that I recognized that what I had been playing at was something other artists had already invested in with better currency. And that’s how I first learned about Jeremy Blake. Searching out information on him after seeing his spectacular animations in that movie, I was floored. He had been doing brilliant, formalist work on a larger, more advanced and articulate scale, with much greater style and visual élan. Better yet, he introduced photography into his work with terrific dynamic taste for iconography and brooding metaphors. His growing body of work was something that made me feel like small potatoes, but it still inspired me to keep trying. Works like The Winchester Trilogy plundered pop culture subjects and fused them into a visual reverie, flowing delicately, undulating in and out of shapes and colors, in a manner that seemed less like animation and more like an effort to use time as temporal collage to extend the canvas or screen. For the extension, our eyes stay focused ahead to watch images unfold into much larger entities, with the frictions and contrasts accentuated by motion and editing. All throughout his oeuvre, I appreciated his energized motifs of childhood innocence, formalist beauty, fractured egos, and self-awareness. It was only in the later works, like The Winchester Trilogy, that it seemed to become much more political and musically collaborative.
From Winchester Trilogy, (c) Jeremy Blake, Feigen Contemporary.
I hoped one day that I would cross paths with Jeremy and finally meet him, get to ask some questions, and to talk. I’m pretty saddened that both his wife, video game designer Theresa Duncan, and he have apparently died from suicides this month. They were both articulate and curious about so many interesting subjects that it’s a real pain that they won’t be around to contribute anymore. The semi-obituary at the NY Times for Jeremy and Theresa barely covers the mystery of how this happened, but I hope if anything their work will get more notoriety so that more people will appreciate what they accomplished with their forward thinking motion narratives and their impact on the art world.
Links: The apparent double suicide of Jeremy Blake and Theresa Duncan, Jeremy Blake at Kinz/Tillou+Feigen Gallery, Jeremy Blake and The Winchester Trilogy, Jeremy Blake: Winchester Book, Quicktime clips of Jeremy Blake’s Punch-Drunk Love contributions, Jeremy Blake, Artnet, 2001, Theresa Duncan’s “The Wit of the Staircase” Blog, “NYTimes: Two Artists, One Suicide, the Other Missing”
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