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Michael K. Paxton
"Practical Beings"
New Drawings & Paintings

September 8 - October 11, 2000
Tues - Sat: 11 AM-6 PM

Byron Roche Gallery
750 North Franklin Streets, Suite 105
Chicago, Illinois 60610
Telephone: 312/ 654-0144
http://www.byronroche.com

Chicago artist Michael K. Paxton was born in West Virginia, and "Practical Beings" is his tribute to the people of Appalachia. This exhibition of new paintings and drawings will be at Byron Roche Gallery, Chicago, from September 8 through October 11, 2000. It is well worth a visit. Anyone who has ever come to know Pride of Place -- an attachment to a locality and to people whose lives are rooted there -- will feel a sense of recognition... as John Denver once sang: a "coming home to a place he's never been before."

Oh, the green rolling hills of West Virginia
Are the nearest thing to Heaven that I know
Tho' the times are sad and drear
And I cannot linger here
They'll keep me and never let me go.

"Utah" Phillips

At the reception for this show, the artist, congenial and forthright, spoke with affection and in detail of the family and kin portrayed in these paintings: their lives and the land to which they first came before 1800. As one who has traveled there, I have to agree with Michael Paxton (and "Utah" Phillips): The land is very beautiful, and poor. "Practical Beings" is an exhibition of the artist's memories and roots. But it resonates well beyond that. I have not known these people, but I have seen them before. There is a character and a way of life here in Paxton's art, a history, which is true of the Ozarks, the Polish Carpathians, the Tyrol, the Scots' highlands -- a persevering, tenacious strength in the face of hard lives, and a deep love of a land that exacts much and yields miserly.

"Practical Beings." Paxton noted that the ancient Greeks sung of great deeds and ideals. As an artist, Michael Paxton turned to the modest and personal. Epic deeds are of extreme moments, but all men must find a living, each and every day: life depends upon "Practical Beings." Theirs is a nobility of persistence and resourcefulness. And it is a universal. Paxton's work 'travels well' -- beyond language, country, geography. The people of these paintings have an excellent spokesman: the artist noted, "I do drawing a lot better than I tell stories." Words wouldn't really capture what the paintings directly give each visitor.

Paxton's current paintings focus primarily on single individuals; an associated, emblematic tool or weapon is often excluded or merely implied. In a sense, this art performs a function for its subjects which the Greek sculptural tropes realized for the Ideal and the grand Heroic. Although Paxton's subjects are seen at labor, active, the artist has selectively chosen the pose as an archetypic moment: there is a sense that each could be translated into a three-dimensional sculpture. They imply a cinematographic freeze-shot as accent or coda to an unwitnessed sequence, ongoing prior to the painting, and continuing once the viewer is gone. In that, one feels a certain 'Classical' aesthetic has been reasserted here, and given a new vigor of expression; and yet , in Paxton's art, it comes quite naturally to a very un-Classical, new subject matter. On closer examination, one realizes that the artist has evolved not so much a personal expression, as a distinct typology, and that it owes little to Greek adulation of form, Renaissance Mannerist exposition of gesture, or the indulgent and patronizing sentimentality of subsequent periods. A comparison of Paxton's images with, say, Francois Millet's The Sower (c. 1850), or even Gustave Courbet's The Stone Breakers (1849), somewhat closer in its naturalistic sensibility, confirms that Michael Paxton's "Practical Beings" offers figurative art with a very broad and yet distinctly modern sensibility. Paxton's approach is admirable. Critic George Steiner once asserted: "Art develops via reflection of and on preceeding art, where 'reflection' signifies both a 'mirroring', however drastic the perceptual dislocation, and a 're-thinking'. It is through this internalized 're-production' of and amendment to previous representations that an artist will articulate what might appear to have been even the most spontaneous, the most realistic of his sighting." The paintings of "Practical Beings" display a free and spontaneous figurative expression, but their pose and composition embody a new, only somewhat Classical decorum and dignity of subject. They reveal a personal voice within figurative tradition, which confirms Steiner's own conclusion about vital art, namely: "The best readings of art are art."

Paxton brings a sense of decorum to his work which is distinctly of our time, but it reveals a dignity found, not forced. Rev. Jesse is based on the artist's grandfather, who led a Baptist circuit ministry: the familiar 'traveling Preacher.' The actual portrayal -- the Reverend's face in shadow, eyes turned from the viewer, a subtle torsion to the body -- might well suit a philosopher, or any such quiet intensity of commitment; yet it employs a stance and attitude of pose clearly derived from actuality. The painter Degas responded to the selection of image in art photography by using its specific perspectives, framing and candidness as a spur to new compositional strategies. Each artist, however, creates an image selection from an awareness of many such still frames. One senses that Paxton's aesthetic sense here is equally a further contribution as well. As in many of the paintings in this exhibition, predominant hues are limited to a few, and Rev. Jesse is rendered with direct, minimal masses and contours which are clarified by clean lines. Throughout this exhibition, Paxton's individuals are set against sparse background, and, although there is a spontaneity in the blending of pastel and wet-run pigments, these recent paintings display less expressionistic, or free-hand treatment in brushwork than Paxton's previous showings (some of which are accessible on the Byron Roche Gallery's website, http://www.byronroche.com). "Practical Beings" stands as a contemplation of people rather than a documentation or play of self-conscious idiom from the artist.

In looking at Paxton's work, one does notice that his general palette is light: warm hues -- yellows, ochres, Indian reds, siennas -- predominate. The favored colors lend a sense of distance in time, remembrance, and they echo as well the surrounding hues of the region's clayey soils and mountainous woodland. Full Lonnie portrays the Reverend Jesse's father: the artist's great-grandfather. Michael Paxton noted at the opening that six generations of Paxtons have called those green rolling hills their home. Full Lonnie characterizes the personality which raised what crops would grow, hunted at large for meat, sustained themselves with whatever work they could devise. Full Lonnie demonstrates one of the strengths of this series of paintings: content is presented for contemplation in itself. The artist disciplines his considerable skill in technique, and the human subject is foremost for the viewer. In works such as Tobacco Hands (Mixed media: 22"x15"), or Screwdriver Boy (Mixed media: 21"x15"), the artist offers the human form, and only implies tool, tobacco, or similar emblemata of occupation. Screwdriver Boy is particularly striking: the upper torso hangs suspended in upper image, while the negative space of the lower image strikes concentration on the boy's activity.

The Byron Roche Gallery notes that in recent years Paxton has sought to "open discussion about the role and purpose of the figure in contemporary painting." The intent is timely and evident in his work. The Greek aesthetics of human form developed in tandem with the abstraction, idealization, and later, Platonic and theosophic world-views which gave us philosophy, chemistry, science: a mindset which threatens to overwhelm our worldly, immediate and shared humanity. Michael Paxton returns for inspiration to lives where what a man does measures his worth, and deeds speak louder than words; where strong attachments to people and land are what make a human life. The poses, style and media of his paintings build upon a sensibility simply and eloquently voiced by John Steinbeck:

Carbon is not a man, nor salt nor water nor calcium. He is all these, but he is much more, much more; and the land is so much more than its analysis. The man who is more than his chemistry, walking on the earth, turning his plow point for a stone, dropping his handles to slide over an outcropping, kneeling in the earth to eat his lunch; that man who is more than his elements knows the land that is more than its analysis. But the machine man, driving his tractor on land he does not know and love, understands only chemistry; and he is contemptuous of the land and of himself. When the corrugated iron doors are shut, he goes home, and his home is not the land.

John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

Paintings such as Full Lonnie or the triple-image works in this showing embody that experience, an experience which may not be evident at first to the urban viewer. It is not necessarily true that a man who hunts his meat feels no awe or admiration for the creature, a kindred miracle, which he stalks. It may even be one reason why he hunts: a righting of balance in his own nature. It is the alienated, the purely urban, a crippled soul, who sees only a use and a purpose to things. Equally, sentimentalism admires an abstract and false ideal, with little appreciation for necessity or natural order. It took six generations of Paxton's to forge the sensibility revealed in these paintings. Michael Paxton has devoted seven years to examine and impart it to others. "Practical Beings" at Byron Roche Gallery, and Paxton's concurrent show, "From Enoch to Strange Creek," at the Chicago Cultural Center are an important body of work. Beyond their Appalachian context, they explore the human need to form bonds, attachments; for a self to have a 'center,' and for that center to have a place in the world. Paxton's "Practical Beings" heal what Steinbeck saw as man "contemptuous of the land and of himself." This is art which envisions the long struggle toward an evolution and a salvation announced by poet, Robert Frost:

The land was ours before we were the land's.
...
Something we were withholding made us weak
Until we found out that it was ourselves
We were withholding from our land of living,
And forthwith found salvation in surrender.

Robert Frost, "The Gift Outright"

The work at Byron Roche Gallery is fine painting: without sentimentality... honest, even austere; which also prevents it from falling into the flaws of any 'Socialist Realism' (a genre obsessed with workers and the rural poor). Strong, confident technique, informed by an equally evident personality of the artist, lifts Paxton's art above any conventional Realism or Naturalism. Each work is clearly stamped with the artist's hand and commitments in life.

"Practical Beings" includes three paintings, each of which is a composition of three adjacent images in series. Paxton did note at the opening that he had been experimenting with such multiple image works, but, with admirable directness, confessed that he settled with the triple "because it just seemed to work best." Mule, Miner, Big Sister (Mixed Media: 15"x42") exemplifies the type, and although Paxton is said to select his elements "at random 'out of a hat'," there is a visual harmony in the ensemble, and, perhaps even an underlying sense of affinities. It all of Paxton's art, the artist's concern with his subject, rather than with what the viewer's, or even the artist's conscious conceptions may be, are what saves the work from any overtones of the anecdotal or polemical.

In viewing the paintings of "Practical Beings," closely and with attention, even an outsider comes to feel empathy with their human content. It is an exhibition in which the guest is taken in and made a member...of the family, "of the land and of himself." These paintings are only a part of Michael Paxton's seven-year effort to grasp and to come to terms with his West Virginia roots. Byron Roche Gallery has had two earlier showings of this artist, and Paxton's installation of large paintings, "From Enoch to Strange Creek," is currently on exhibit at the Chicago Cultural Center. More than the artist, we as viewers increasingly need to be reminded of this aspect of our humanity; and need to discover that one of fine art's potential is to nurture more than just what Steinbeck called 'the machine man.'

Practical Being Laying Stone (Mixed media: 21"x15") might well serve as a symbol for Paxton's ongoing project. Byron Roche Gallery stated that over the last 18 months, the artist rendered 175 individual images based on "his family, the mountains, and the culture of Appalachia." Gallery visitors in Chicago are fortunate that Paxton currently has several shows here. One only wishes that at some point his paintings and drawings of Appalachia could be gathered together in a single volume.

Michael Paxton's art draws a viewer into the lives of other men and women and in this, it is an enriching experience. The paintings of "Practical Beings" are an homage to Appalachia -- a Pride of Place and a continuity of generations living in remembrance. The artist has evolved a typology: a decorum, and immediate, readable imagery which epitomizes the Appalachian experience, and in doing so, gives voice to a vision of labor and life which is timeless and without borders.

But some day I'll go back to West Virginia,
To the green rolling hills I love so well.
Yes, someday I'll go home,
And I know I'll right the wrong;
These troubled times will follow me no more.

The gallery statement calls "Practical Beings" part of a "seven-year commitment by Paxton to present direct and honest images that confront stereotypes of a maligned and discounted region and people...." Artist Michael Paxton in his art has found his way to return and 'right the wrong.'

Michael K. Paxton received his MFA in painting from the University of Georgia and a BA in art from Marshall University. He has been a Chicagoan for 17 years. "Practical Beings: New Drawings & Paintings" will be at Byron Roche Gallery, 750 North Franklin Street, Suite 105, from September 8 through October 11, 2000. A concurrent exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Center, "Michael Paxton: From Enoch to Strange Creek" runs from September 16 through November 12, and it is an installation of mural-sized canvases which are also part of his theme of rural Appalachia. In addition, Paxton was juror for "Union Images 2000" (review currently posted, click here), also at the Chicago Cultural Center until October 15, 2000. (For information, call the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs: 312/744-6630.)

--G. Jurek Polanski

Jurek Polanski has previously written and art edited for Strong Coffee in Chicago. He's also well known and respected among the Chicago museums and galleries. Jurek is currently a Visual Arts Correspondent for ArtScope.net.

Editorial Note: Many of the books mentioned in www.artscope.net reviews are in print and may be purchased through this site's Barnes & Noble link. Bruce "Utah" Phillips's "Green Rolling Hills" is in the Emmmylou Harris Songbook (Cherry Lane Music Co: 1981). George Steiner is quoted from his book Real Presences (University of Chicago: 1989). Both John Steinbeck's novel of the dustbowl, The Grapes of Wrath (Penguin: 1984), and Complete Poems of Robert Frost (Holt, Rinehart & Winston: 1949) are available.