“Whenever you break through a doorway, the first discoveries are always the easiest. Then it gets to be more and more difficult.” –David Palmer
A little over ten years ago David Palmer hit a wall with his painting. Dissatisfied with the work he saw around him, he says, “One day with brush to canvas I made a disturbing realization—I was part of the problem. I was only succeeding in communicating in maybe two out of ten paintings.”
While he’s known now for his marvelous single stroke paintings that have been exhibited from New York to Paris; Brussels and back home to The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, for about fourteen months between 1999 and 2000, he stopped painting entirely. That moment of realization, paintbrush in hand, led to a total break from painting.
During his hiatus, Palmer searched for a next step. Or, as he explains, he tried to find a way of “Painting without messaging or branding.”
“In the landscape of our daily lives rarely is there a moment when there is not branding taking place. A visual space absent of that is so rare.” He sought to create that space, to “Give the viewer a moment to experience visual space absent of branding and messaging—a moment to feel our humanity.”
But, as he says, “It’s easy to figure out what you don’t want to do.”
During his break, he started “Looking for visual hints. Little things that excited me. I remember three stripes that popped on a placemat at a friend’s house.” Another graphic drawing his eyes were the bubble lettered graffiti patterns he saw around Fort Point and in various cities he traveled to. How the letters “Lean into each other—hug one another,” fascinated Palmer. Which led to thinking about different fonts.
He was “Enamored with the fact that there are only thirty-six main characters in the English language. Yet fontographers have come up with tens of thousands of variations. Font is so strict and there seems to be limitations—a D is a D. But we humans have that ingenuity.” Consciously looking outside of traditional art for guidance, he found inspiration. “It would be a label of a can at Super 88, or something like a piece of graphic design in a Martha Stewart magazine.”
“I wanted gesture—the human hand in its largest form—and started to push around paint.” Up until then, Palmer had been an oil painter for over ten years. But he turned to acrylics as a new medium. “Oil paint was too noble for the work I was trying to do.”
“The middle of the stroke was rather unexplored territory.”
One night back in 2000, David Palmer couldn’t sleep with all these ideas swirling in his mind. Getting up from bed about 4 a.m. and walking through his studio—lit by the city light outside—he stepped through a maze of the canvas scraps strewn around the floor where he had been experimenting with pushing paint around.”
He “Started cropping with my feet and suddenly there between my left and right foot—this little piece—was the answer I had been looking for.”
Part of this early exploration was getting—literally—to the middle of what is important in rendering a line, a gesture. “The middle of the stroke is what is important. The beginning and the end needed to be eliminated. The middle is where the action is. Other painters have explored the end. That territory has been explored—Lichtenstein with his illustration of a brushstroke. But not much happens in the middle.”
So while he had initially removed the process from the arc of traditional Art History, Lichtenstein and others began to have influence—if only to push against. “I mentioned Pollock in my first artist’s statement regarding this work. I felt the path he took was not yet completed. Not that I felt I, or anyone else, could complete it. Just that it hadn’t been completed.”
“Especially in Lavender Mist. Is it surface or deep space? The two of them together. Looking at his [Pollock’s] work, this is still not fully explored. There is more to be found—might be more relevant to contemporary society. Goes back to creating work that is neither branding or messaging.”
“Pull opposing ideas together with simplicity.”
In the past ten years David has completed approximately 90-100 paintings in the series spawned by that hiatus—or about ten a year. The great majority are 62” or 64” square. And while the works bear the marks of intense technical craftsmanship, there is a startling amount of emotional content as well. “They are done on the floor. I can only reach out so far. They are bound by my own physical geometry,” Palmer says.
And perhaps the works themselves are so effective because of the existence of a variety of tense contradictions. They resist traditional art, yet engage with art history; draw from graphic design, but hold all the earmarks of elevated fine art; engage completely with the line, yet are incredibly painterly; push against the question of nobility, and hold a domineering presence and grace—all simultaneously.
Finally, these paintings are completely David Palmer’s, recognizable in their intensity. So, “As much as I try to avoid it (a personal brand) that’s where I end up. I still have yet to discover how I feel about it. And whether I wish to avoid or embrace it.”
Remaining true to his goals at the outset, Palmer has unified disparate elements while creating personalized variations on some graphic design/pop art fusion with painterly techniques and expressionism. Lucky for fans of the series, Palmer is still enthusiastic about the work.
The artist, who has lived in Fort Point for over 20 years, says, “I’m still having fun. Every time I walk into the studio to paint a painting, I think—this is the one that is going to whoop my butt. As long as that is going on, I think I am going to keep going with these.”
- Kurt Cole Eidszvig
About the Author: Kurt Cole Eidsvig is an artist and poet who lives and works in Fort Point. To learn more about Eidsvig visit http://www.kurtcoleeidsvig.com/
Other photo credits:
Image 1: David Palmer, Janine, 2009. 64” x 64” and Grace, 2009. 72” x 72”
Image 4: Roy Lichtenstein, Brustroke, 1965. Courtesy of Tate.org
Image 6: David Palmer, Niki, 2009 76” x 76” and Camryn, 2009 76” x 76”
