41786 artMattersV2 - School of the Museum of Fine Arts

FACULTY PERSPECTIVES ON THE ART SCENE
artNow:Painting
If there is a succinct way to
characterize the painting
community these days, Patte
Loper (Faculty) would be
comfortable with a twocamp
scenario: East Coast
and West Coast.
The West Coast model “is really impure,” Loper says
of the camp to which she belongs. “It brings in lots of
references, conceptualism, text, the abject, and pulls in
other media like video and photography.” Consider the
works of Kota Ezawa (highly stylized animation based
on film) and Marcel Dzama (cartoonish animal/people
hybrids).
The East Coast style, on the other hand, is all about the
painting. “These are generally larger-scale works that
focus on paint, brushstroke, and color,” Loper says.
“Even if imagery is involved, it is very unmediated.”
Contemporary modernists Jane Fine (Attended ’82–’83)
(geometric, fluid), Bill Flynn (Diploma ’64, Fifth Year
Certificate ’66, Faculty) (gauzy, introspective), and Amy
Sillman (colorful, rhythmic), for example, anchor the
look and feel of this group. Boston painters tend to
blend West Coast influences with their Eastern roots.
Gerry Bergstein’s (Bachelor of Fine Arts ’69, Master of
Fine Art ’71, Faculty) paintings contrast the awesome
and the trivial; he enhances humorous yet dark conceptual
dynamics with painterly textures.
Loper is definitely West Coast, though she says she
wishes she had more of an East Coast style. “When
you’re a painter, you want to aspire to a particular
relationship with the paint,” she says. “There’s something
very romantic about the artist alone in the studio
with a brush, pushing the paint around. But in my work,
the ideas are fore-fronted to the paint.”
Loper grew up drawing and painting and always assumed
she would be an artist. After graduating from college,
though, she began a career as a graphic designer and
illustrator. “That got boring really fast, mostly because
I wasn’t very good at it,” she says. She went to San
Francisco, got her masters in fine arts, and started
exhibiting on the West Coast. Her art is often based
on photographs of conceptual or modernist works.
She’s currently creating a series of paintings and animations
that juxtapose found images of Antarctica with
Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest. “The film is
really luscious,” Loper says. “It’s all about alienation in
the face of luxury and uses that as a tool to look at
Cold War paranoia. I’m fascinated by the fact that at
the same time the film was being made, the major
counties of the Western world (including the former
USSR and the United States) all signed an international
treaty making Antarctica a nonpolitical zone only to
be used for scientific purposes.”
And then there are Loper’s deer. You’ll find them licking
a pink tree trunk in one of her paintings based on an
early Jan Dibbets work, wandering around the Van
Damm house from the North by Northwest movie set,
or lying motionless on a neighbor’s yard. “I work with
images that are recognizable and from our own metanarratives,”
she says. “The deer are a way of interrupting
the narrative and taking it in a different direction. Also,
the deer’s presence indicates that there are no people.
The deer depopulate the work in a way that nobody or
nothing else could.”
Loper tried other animals but the deer images stuck,
possibly, she says, because they are very blank and
invite introspection. “If I used a tiger or a monkey or a
more exotic animal,” she says, “the painting would read
in a different way.”
If Loper’s West Coast style and the Eastern school are
somewhat disparate, so are the myriad influences on
contemporary painters. There are, however, familiar
themes that stand out regardless of style —throwbacks,
almost, to more socially tumultuous times. “There’s an
activist spirit afoot,” Loper says. “Feminism and political
forms of art from the ’70s are being looked at again,
a reaction, I’m sure, to what is happening politically in
the world right now.”
Loper says she also hears talk about a need to move
away from the commercialism that’s rife in the art world
today to more artist-run events and artist-based venues.
“I love this idea,” says Loper, mentioning an article
by art critic Peter Schjeldahl along the same lines,
“although, like a lot of artists, I’ve benefited from the
art fairs.” It’s hard, she admits, for artists to make
the break from “a capitalist machine that co-opts any
rebellion or resistance.”
Predicting the future for painters and the consumption
of their art is near impossible, she says, though she
images that a market correction of sorts will happen.
The question is when. “I’m sure that even if I were
able to formulate an answer,” Loper says, “I would be
wrong. Artists clearly need to support themselves and
art needs to be made, but you just have to wonder, what
is the function of art. Is it to decorate people’s homes
or is there a more significant way it can contribute to
society?” ❖
above: patte loper, Architecture Review 1978
(After the Shoot), 2006. Oil on paper. 52 x 60 inches.
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