In landscape painting, Marvin Saltzman is trying to get the maximum amount of energy using composition, color, and mark making as ingredients … Editing and notating, he filters the experience of landscape through his coloring, his intellect, and his record keeping.
Many of Saltzman’s series since 1987 have used site-specific drawings as an abstract way of recording the experience of looking. He also uses a Hofmannesque nonobjective system of marking squares, circles, arrows, X’s – done in yellow ochre on the canvas. These markings are developed from the drawings to move the eye of the viewer away from the constant linear and rectangular divisions of the space of the canvas that the viewer’s eye would normally anticipate. Unanticipated placements are selected to give the canvas the maximum amount of energy …
The next stage of the process is to make sure that the painting is completely covered with color. The eye and the mind plot the placing of the color all over the canvas. This adhesion of color and composition is what Saltzman refers to as “the total painting system.”. The next stage is literally to “scribble it up.” The scribbles placed over the painting establish its basic color sensibility. At this particular stage, this is what might normally be anticipated as the background, but as Saltzman says: “It’s not background. It’s the surface…part of the surface of the painting”.
The process that ensues from this point is very like that of reduction in printmaking. Saltzman was trained as a painter and as a printmaker:
A reduction print simply means you put a complete color on and you block out and you put another color on, and you block out and you put another color on and you block out more. So at all times, you are both adding and subtracting. You’re making the content more complete, but you do it through an erasure process…. “I just keep going – then all of a sudden I’ll be looking at a painting and there will be nothing left to change. There’ll be nothing left to do to it. And the painting is saying to me: “I’m finished”.
Other features involved in the adding and subtracting of color include the emergence of Saltzman’s color “glyphs” from within the layers of paint on the canvas. These glyphs are reinforced, refined, changed in color, or sometimes eliminated just as in a reduction silk-screen process. There are also the wonderful drifts of color, very subtle in the play of greens and blues in one series but more dramatic and mutable in another.
Saltzman’s palette has remained fixed since 1954 when he eliminated blacks and browns and began using viridian green or ultramarine blue and alizarin crimson for his darks. Although Saltzman says his palette is very basic, it is also uniquely his own. Saltzman can move from a very hot black to a very cold black so that it visually kicks back color rather than absorbing it. He also gets extraordinary resonance out of his palette. Saltzman espouses an almost pointillist concept, not in the sense of a palette knife divisionism but rather in allowing fragments of color to work together to make a third or fourth color. This is the hidden reward of adding and subtracting from the color layers and their glyphs.
Color is inherent in everything. It is underneath; it is inside. It’s just like a garment that’s blue. The dye is not necessarily on the surface of the garment. It is in the fiber, so what you are really seeing is the top of the fiber and the side of the fiber.
… other sources for Saltzman’s landscape art beyond those of the site and his technique. Most likely the answers lie in the realm of personal biography, regionalism and the proximity of Asian influence on Saltzman’s art. Saltzman is not a North Carolina artist; he is a Californian, raised three houses away from the Pacific Ocean and within sight of Catalina Island off the coast at Long Beach. He is to some extent a regionalist manqué, a situation from which many American artists might be said to suffer but which only a few are able to surmount. There are other intangibles; Leonard Bernstein visiting his parents’ house or Merce Cunningham giving him a dance lesson. There is the issue of what it means to be raised in a family of artists and of what it means to grow up in southern California, in a world of color and light in excess of that experienced by people from the East Coast. There is also his firsthand experience of Japanese folk art in Tokyo; his tour of duty during the war in Korea; and studying upon his return at the Art Institute of Chicago with Russian émigré painter Boris Anisfeld and the Japanese printmakers, the brothers Yoshida. Always there was Saltzman’s older sister, Florence, painter and printmaker, who in a 1934 letter to her cousin wrote:
We were talking about having to learn technique, but while learning it, one must not lose sight of the first desire, the motive behind it all, or we would lose the justification of spending a lifetime, such a precious thing, on an ordinary article like technique. If in the process of learning we wold keep this little phrase in view it would help to keep from losing the true desire: Art is the creation, not the imitation of life.
For Saltzman today, process and technique are indeed intuitive.
Michele Patterson,
Adjunct Professor Department of Art, North Carolina Central University.
