Heres an essay written on me a while back. Roberts a good man. But, as with most art criticisms these days, youll need a dictionary to read it. Steve Huston – (b. 1959) American, is a native of Alaska who received his degree from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. He first established himself as a successful illustrator, commissioned by such high profile clients as Paramount Pictures, MGM and Warner Brothers. After holding a faculty position at the Art Center, in addition to teaching courses in life drawing, anatomy and composition for the artists and animators of Disney and Dreamworks SKG studios, Huston earnestly began his career as a fine artist, winning top prizes at the California Art Club Gold Medal Show two years in a row. A string of gallery shows followed, first in Los Angeles and then in New York and elsewhere. Huston continues exhibiting his work widely. His works are poetic, poignant and masterfully powerful and his figures are iconic archetypes of masculine and feminine line and form. Mr. Hustons work is much sought after by prestigious private collectors, distinguished fellow artists and other cognoscenti of the contemporary art world. He has been an extraordinarily effective mentor whose instruction and guidance has produced an impressive number of accomplished acolytes. STEVE HUSTON Steeped in the profoundest painterly traditions, Steve Huston is a postmodern master who has assimilated a host of diverse influences and recapitulated them in an entirely fresh idiom energized by contemporary color theory and experiment. New Traditionalism A proponent of the New Traditionalism, Huston fuses attitudes and approaches borrowed from such sources as Renaissance giants, early American Tonalists, the homespun character of the WPA art projects, and the heroic and graphic power of the American Comic Book form. His art embodies a lyrical realism with deep antecedents in American art tracing back to the 1820s to 1840s. The dominant traditions of American art lie in romantic realism. Representing an extension of several strains of this prevailing native tendency, Huston recapitulates and surpasses them. Over the past three hundred years American painting has followed a course as unpredictable as the changing temper of the times – now savoring the new, now re-examining the old, testing native invention against imports from abroad, or abandoning past experience for the adventure of fresh experiment. Yet American painters have always returned to the tradition that is the mainstream of American art. At mid-twentieth-century the abstract expressionists dominated the scene – by weight of numbers and the vigor of their advocates. But many of the best American painters to emerge in the first half of the twentieth century and again, many flourishing during the 1980s and 1990s, remained faithful to the perceptive realism that has occupied the great American masters from Copley to Eakins to the present day. Huston maintains that “an artist is a philosopher”. His renowned teaching method emphasizes the importance of the central idea, the essence of which it is the business of the artist to refine and give expression. Huston reduces figurative art into key elements: parts and relationships, and structure and gesture. Structure is equated with the capacity for dynamic movement. “If gesture is movement between forms,” Huston observes, “then structure is movement over forms.” As a technician, Huston also stresses tones and values and what he calls the “Laws of Light”. With a nod to the wizard of luminescence, Rembrandt van Rijn, Huston cites the methods of the Brown School painters, whose limited, “indoor” palette deferred to draftsmanship and deftly modulated tone to coax forms and create impact by applying a simple equation: cool shadows, warm light. Rembrandt elicits shadows, Huston notes, by means of a blend of cool grays and browns; the elegant spectrum the maestro employs includes ivory black, titanium white, Indian yellow, lemon yellow, cadmium red, alizarin crimson and ultramarine blue. Despite this elaborate complexity of technique, Huston contends, it is still the artist’s underlying idea that counts. Influences and Antecedents For all his polish and finesse, Huston has not sprung from a vacuum. His pedigree finds clear historical context: besides Rembrandt and other Dutch Masters, Huston owes a debt to the Renaissance giants Titian and Caravaggio and to such equally venerable but more recent forebears as Jean Francois Millet and George Bellows. From the former he has learned secrets of technical expertise; from the latter he has absorbed a sublime sense of subject matter and formal composition. Intimations of geometric arrangement, symmetry, balance and structure derived from these models have invested Huston with powers to match his vision. Implied Narrative Tellingly, when lecturing, Steve Huston routinely delves at great length into the topics of story structure and organization. His pictures, which might be characterized as stop-action snapshots containing allegorical messages, are wrought with great care for staging and dramatic structure and are fraught with heavy, if elusive and ambiguous, narratives. Hidden from view behind smokescreens of raw energy and vivid intensity, lurk hidden metaphors and unsuspected depths. Huston’s cameos of kinetic physicality, for all their dynamism and elan, are charged with symbolic undertones and, sometimes, overt parable. The artist’s drily scientific dissections of physiomechanics and studies of locomotion in color-filtered chiaroscuro mask a consideration of the body or the physical envelope as the essential integer of the human condition. Whether depicted in the everyday execution of occupational pursuits or in states of desperation or extremity, Huston’s laborers, boxers, spectators and supernumeraries are suspended in a harmonious balance of rawness and refinement. Their shared denominators are struggle, strife, conflict, and contest: the travail of the common man to earn his daily bread. Like Millet’s gleaners, winnowers, sowers and harvesters, Huston’s brawny performers speak of the nobility of toil. The exertions of these heavily burdened souls, laden with wheel barrows, buckets, and other elementary tools, seem directed at building their own frames for an existential pageant enacted under the direction of a cruel and indifferent demiurge. Each is a tour de force illuminating a hidden language of posture and gesture. Pop Naturalism In the twenty-first century, art has sprouted a visual metalanguage whose vocabulary derives from centuries of movements, styles, genres and schools whose methods, approaches, attitudes and iconography have undergone innumerable cyclings, recyclings, repetitions and reactions involving a countless succession of home truths and passing fashions. In order to give rein to his personal insights and perspectives, Steve Huston has adopted what might be termed a kind of pop naturalism incorporating a revisiting of historical Naturalism onto which has been laminated a luminous chromatic tonalism sustained by the introduction in recent years of a whole new palette of commercial colors and tints and filtered through the unlikely influence of such stylistic developments as the Finish Fetish and Light and Space movements. Huston superimposes this retinue of ideological and technological innovation on the armature of good old fashioned naturalism to arrive at a sort of glowing realism with a contemporary slant. At the same time, the customary facets of traditional naturalism seep from every pore of Huston’s painting. With a whiff of the wistful melancholy of the world-wearied Winslow Homer, Huston conveys in his canvases a simple directness and gritty frankness commensurate with a sense of futility in the face of overmastering external forces. Following in the wake of an exhausted avant-garde, Huston has returned to a portrayal of the Common Man and the unornamented spectacle of common life. Delineating simple, everyday social interactions with honesty, integrity, and truth, Huston deploys an entourage of Ragtime-era-inflected dramatis personae in boldly audacious configurations rendered with ironically soft, impressionistic coloring. The Fleshly Tradition Huston’s is a tripartite, confectionary naturalism, simultaneously veristic, idealized, dreamlike. The meat-essence crucial to his view of the human experience is conjured by means of surfaces treated with the creamy tones associated with Rubens, Renoir, and Bacon. Mellow gradations in the faience and texture of musculature reinforce this effect. Nuance and Ambience Nuance and inflection are all-pervasive in Huston’s oeuvre. Subtlety and detail inform every centimeter of a Huston canvas. Combining the fidelity of photography with a slightly otherworldly feel of the oneiric, the artist’s distinctive dramas ooze atmosphere fostered by ghostly, plasmic blobs of light and spongy surrounds of murk-filled, infinitely micro-tissued backdrops. Other Facets of Technique Paintings within paintings, worlds within worlds; Huston’s pictures incorporate what amount to micropaintings resident within the larger area of each picture as a whole. Incredible relationships obtain in his paintings – spatial relationships are coordinated with exacting precision and picture planes are organized with marvelous ingenuity. Structures within structures are supported by a skein of correspondences, echoes and resonances; like music suffused with a wealth of counterpoint, the more you look, the more you see. Layers within layers, tiers within tiers; the components of these compositions are compartmentalized into a tapestry of interwoven zones limned with velvety lushness and coated with an ice cream sheen. Shadow work is similarly complex, while treatment of enfolding atmosphere is equally rich and attention to all incidentals comparably thorough. Deconstructing any segment of the human anatomy – head, neck, face, joints, limbs, back, thorax, abdomen – results, in Huston’s handling, in a system of interrelationships comprised by articulated and interlocking particles. Individual constituent structures are painstakingly parsed and dissected according to a secret ratio of proportions: a golden mean disguised by fluid line and a rhythmic progression of recurring shapes. A typical Huston boxing composition, for example, concentrates on a pivotal moment of crisis, which is accentuated and reiterated by muscle motion. Electric Exxes and razor-sharp zigzags indicate vibrant action. Shimmering stripes in a fighter’s shorts and squiggly lines emanating from shoulders, elbows, backs of legs and knees continue the suggestion of joints and muscles in play. Pugilists Like esteemed American painters Thomas Eakins and George Bellows before him, Steve Huston is drawn to the “sweet science” of prizefighting as a subject for his art. With its colorful legacy of such larger-than-life figures as Gentleman Jim Corbett, John L. Sullivan, Jack Dempsey and Joe Louis, the pageant of American boxing is steeped in lasting legend. Noted artists pre-dating Huston have left celebrated fight scenes with titles such as Bare Knuckles; Between Rounds; Stag at Sharkey’s; and Down for the Count. Huston’s own titles in this vein – Straight Shot; Men of the Ring - reflect the poetry of the sport. With flair and verve, Huston articulates the dynamic tension of skin, muscle, bone at high impact points of contact. With cinematic acuity, fighters are captured in frozen action given urgency by slashing brush marks and strong tonal contrasts serving to highlight the heroism of primal conflict. These violent contests, which range from scrimmages and skirmishes to knock down, drag out brawls, are ritualized in solemn tableaux of formal dramaturgy. For Huston, such bloody exertions, phrased as they are with grace, even delicacy, represent a harsh Darwinian struggle for ascendancy and dominance among human beings at odds with existence. Confronting an inescapable “moment of truth”, these vintage-tinged figures seem fated to obey some eternal law of sacrifice. Against static framing devices such as gymnasium windows and the rigid ropes that encircle the boxing ring, a skein of horizontal and vertical planes, of intersections and perpendiculars, contrives to propel each of these kinetic compositions with a sense of gyration and sheer electricity. Even the shadows, the transitional figures, and other secondary elements informing the background thread together in perfect harmony. Nothing exists beyond the moment, and everything is subordinated to the central idea, interlinked in a composition from which every other part is inseparable. All the variables coalesce and fall into an alignment designed to apostrophize the battling contenders in an apotheosis of frailty, courage, and transcendent aspiration. Silhouetted by a halo of triumphant light or a gloomy mantle of shadow connoting uncertainty, the scarred combatants blunder on, bolstered only by the dogged determination to try one’s utmost against a rigged game and an indeterminate outcome… Paradox Emerson held that “every correspondence we observe in mind and matter suggests a substance older and deeper than either of these old nobilities.” In his own way, Huston serves that same cause, making a clear and convincing translation of reality to canvas. He creates not just the appearance of things as they are, but a larger truth that combines the world of visible objects with the invisible world of man’s ideas. Informing the purely physical with human thoughts and feelings, he enhances both worlds. A critic said of John Singer Sargent that “he ought to know nothing of the object before him…but should concentrate all his powers on a representation of its appearance. The picture was to be a consistent vision, a reproduction of the area filled by the eye. Hence, in a very curious way, the aspect of a substance became much more real to him than the substance itself.” In short, Sargent was a painter of appearances. But Huston might agree with Whistler, who ventured to say about portraiture that, “One wants the spirit, the aroma, don’t you know? If you paint a young girl, youth should scent the room; if a thinker, thoughts should be in the air; an aroma of the personality…and, with all that, it should be a picture, a pattern, an arrangement, a harmony, such as only a painter could conceive.” Joining the fray, Robert Henri, leader of the Ashcan School, said: “What we need is more sense of the wonder of life, and less of the business of picturemaking.” Huston straddles and unifies this tension between appearance and reality, and between picturemaking and the wonder of life. Like Albert Pinkham Ryder, yet another immortal predecessor, Huston might ask: “Have you ever seen an inchworm crawl up a leaf or a twig, and then, clinging to the very end, revolve in the air, feeling for something to reach something? That’s like me. I am trying to find something out there beyond the place on which I have a footing.” A perpetuator of the highest humanist traditions, Huston glorifies the figure of man as a creature half angel, half beast; a blob of protoplasm with its gaze fixed upon the veils of the infinite… - B. R. Gilbert Steve Huston
Posted on: Tue, 04 Nov 2014 14:23:43 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015