THE NEW ORLEANS ART REVIEW | VOL. 32, NOS. 3-4 SPRING 2015
DAVID BATES
Coastal Paintings
Arthur Roger Gallery
New Orleans, LA
David Bates: Conch III, 2008-12. Oil on panel, 24” high. Courtesy Arthur Roger Gallery.
CHILLY IS THE word that comes to mind when describing David Bates’s vision of the Gulf Coast. The landscapes are painted with cool colors, and the portraits are full of sad faces. It’s as if Bates has nominated himself the Modigliani of the South, offering a variation on the bohemian Parisian group Les Maudits. Instead of the gypsy women that Modigliani stretched into gaunt figures, it’s fishermen that haunt Bates. Stylistically, the references are to early 20th century expressionistic variations on the standard genres of the portrait, landscape, and still life. The paint is heavy and slick, leaving a shiny impression. It’s the texture of Wayne Thiebaud, an impasto of frosting strength. Strong black lines reminiscent of Georges Rouault surround most of the forms and help flatten the image, as does a schematic approach to value in areas that should be modeled to create a three-dimensional illusion. The awkwardness of treating three-dimensional form recalls self-taught art, as if Bates has appropriated the look in order to tap into a kernel of authentic emotional expression.
Much of the imagery in the exhibition is stereotypical of the Gulf Coast: a shrimp boat, a tray of oysters, a blue crab, magnolia blossoms. It’s imagery that we know from advertising, but it’s the least appetizing tray of oysters that I’ve ever seen. Magnolia in a Bowl (2014) lacks the velvety texture or the still beauty of a real magnolia blossom. Here it feels like a porcelain sculpture, its petals and leaves turned into perfect segmented arcs. Instead of big white petals, olive and forest greens complement a clay red background. The blossom rests in a porcelain bowl decorated with pink and blue flowers, placed on a marble counter. A knife lying parallel to the edge of the counter must have been used to cut the half of a lemon on the left. The lemon may serve to reference the memento mori tradition in still life painting, in which case the tourist cliché of the magnolia is brought into the tradition of symbolizing the transience of life.
The front room displays landscapes and still life subjects, while the smaller back room begins with a gallery dedicated to portraits and culminates in a three-figure composition Port Sulphur (2014). The portraits use a standard bust-length format with vertically stretched faces and sad eyes that are often tilted off-axis. Most are named, but some just list an occupation, such as Offshore Fisherman (2014). Bates flattens the bridge of the nose with outline and white highlights, at times resembling diagrammatic horse nostrils. Often the background is the water of the Gulf, with the horizon line cutting across the canvas. Sometimes the water is pure blue, as in Gulf Coast Portrait (2006), but it is sometimes green, as in the stormy sea and dark grey sky of Kate, Shrimper and Offshore Fisherman.
In general, there’s a feeling of stillness, as if all life has been sucked out of these subjects. Kate, Shrimper (2014) could be a statue carved out of wood. She faces the canvas in the frontal format used for all of the portraits. Light is falling from the left, registered by the light tan colors of her skin. A sharp edge divides the lit area from the darker tans used on the right side of her throat, and the vertical line of this shift carries the viewer’s eye up to her face. The lips are pursed, painted a cool red. Laugh lines look like parentheses marks connecting the lips to the nose. Dark areas of shadow line the strong highlighted patch on the bridge of the nose, and then those lines swoop into the arcs of her eyebrows. The eyes underneath have brown pupils and the whites are colored pale green. The light splits on her forehead, dividing into highlighted areas on both sides. Her short black hair is tucked behind her ears, and she wears a simple tank top. The sea behind is mint green with white highlights; the sky is a midtone grey with patches of white paint representing clouds.
David Bates: St. Ann Church, 2014. Oil on panel, 40” high. Courtesy Arthur Roger Gallery.
Is Bates’s treatment sympathetic to his subjects? His interviews suggest that he intends them to be so, and that they are based on personal experience from living in Texas and memories of annual trips to Galveston. The Oysterman (2014), for instance, could have been observed on such a trip. In the mostly white painting, a man stands behind a table with an oyster knife in one hand and an oyster in the fist of the other. Two oysters lay open to his left, displaying the goal of this oyster shucker’s job. The clothes are ordinary – a plaid shirt over a thermal t-shirt, a baseball cap. His face sports stubble, his lips are pursed, and his pink eyes are looking down at his work rather than out at us. Is he offering a true to life depiction of our time of economic depression? Did the subject of Andre, Oil Worker (2014) experience the Deepwater Horizon disaster and the impact it had on the Gulf Coast? The oysterman’s dejected face may express the frustration of working in a ravaged industry where oysters are simply no longer as abundant as pre-oil spill times.
Jimmy I (2006) looks really dejected, posing against an ice machine with a cigarette dangling from his mouth. The character dates from Bates’s Hurricane Katrina series, where a similar composition was used for Katrina Portrait VI (Jimmy). This approach functioned clearly in the Katrina series to bring attention to unjustified inequities, but here the treatment does not feel motivated by a specific social circumstance. Jimmy is a type, just as “Kate” is identified as a shrimper, suggesting that their emotions may be shared by others of the type. It could all add up to a portrait of a town. Bates feels that even the still life paintings and landscapes are connected to portraits, explaining that “they all feel like portraits.” The Sealy House (2012) and The Moody Family House (2012-2014) could represent the town’s richer residents. Perhaps Miss B (2014), who peers out at us over her reader glasses, is the local librarian? And Jimmy is the guy everyone sees hanging out at the local convenience store by the ice machine? But portraits tend to be specific, whereas these houses and people could exist anywhere on the Gulf Coast or the Atlantic side. Bates’s approach seems more like early modernist painters who approached the portrait as an opportunity to explore form. Think of Picasso’s portraits, or Matisse’s portrait of his wife. Bates’s self-portrait shows rectangular patches of paint on his forehead that recall Matisse’s early style. If that’s the case, then the portraits are about painting and abstraction.
The landscapes recall the Impressionist practice of painting en plein air, translating light into patches of paint. Salt Marsh (2014) is Bates’s Impression: Sunrise, Monet’s defining Impressionist painting. Bates captures the momentary reflection of light on the surface of the water as clouds keep the light bouncing between the water and the clouds. In Storm (2014), wedges of white testify to use of a palette knife and recall Courbet’s seascapes. The lone figure in Shrimp Boat—Full Moon (2013) is just swipes of sienna and blue and olive yellow, with no facial features to individualize him. The touches translate the observed scene through a formalist filter of Impressionist sensation.
David Bates: Boat Dock, 2014. Oil on panel, 24” high. Courtesy Arthur Roger Gallery.
Some of the landscapes are monochrome, with Pointe a la Hache (2014) done in mauve pink tones and Crab Fisherman (2014) in orange. Crab Fisherman is a horizontal format landscape that depicts a fisherman’s boat coming down a body of water placed parallel to the picture plane. The lines of light in the water are matched by the horizontal lines of the dramatic orange sunset in the sky. Cypress trees—perhaps dead—are incised into the paint, their vertical lines counteracting the horizontal emphasis. This grid-like approach to the composition continues in other landscapes. In Levee Pump House, the stilts holding up the pump house of the title form strong vertical and diagonal lines, balanced by horizontal lines that indicate reflections of light in the water. In Boat Dock (2014), the horizontal areas of negative space of the water snake between clumps of marsh grasses drawn in black and dark mauve vertical lines. The dock juts out into this space in an interrupting diagonal, pulling our eye to the muddy yellow light reflecting a sunset in the background.
The grid activates St. Ann Church as well, a vertical format painting of the front of a simple wooden church. It recalls Walker Evans’s photographs of churches in the South during the WPA era of the 1930s. The horizontal lines of the clapboard siding are balanced by the verticals of the steeple and the cypress trees in the landscape behind it. Nesting triangles mark the steeple, the sides of the gable, and the pediment above the door. A semicircular form of a shrine contrasts with the linear shapes. Cool whites, greys, and blacks are balanced by warmer colors of tan, red, and mustard yellow. Behind a corner is nearly hidden my favorite piece in the show, Conch III (2008-2012). It’s a close-up still life of a conch shell, propped up on the points of one of its spiny knobs. The organic edge has been straightened into a perfect line and black outlines the shape. The dominant palette is black, white, and grey, with some pink and mauve inside the lip. The result has an architectural feel.
There’s a fine line between using abstraction to make an image timeless and instead rendering it lifeless. As the paint hardens these landscapes and figures into monuments, it does elevate the everyday working world of the Gulf to the status of a sacred relic. But that abstraction also creates a barrier between the viewer and subject in the portraits. They are people, looking right at us, and yet they seem frozen, unable to speak, ossified in paint. If Conch III and St. Ann Church work, it is because this freezing operation does not silence them, but preserves them like a specimen in amber.
David Bates: Jimmy I, 2006. Oil on canvas, 14” high.
