Peter Young: “Stick” Paintings, 1970 - By Benjamin La Rocco - Viewing Room

“I believe the best paintings of landscape are made from memory. Of course you must study nature carefully for certain details but for the picture, paint it in-doors from memory. I never saw Millet out with an umbrella. When before nature, you are so much occupied with representing what you see that you can’t study combination and composition. You can’t make a picture!”

William Morris Hunt, On Painting and Draw ––

Hunt knew what he was talking about. In 1849 he had moved to Barbizon just to be close to Jean François Millet. Millet’s choice of accessible subject matter, particularly life among the peasantry, over the cosmopolitan airs of the urban artist deeply stirred the young Hunt. Millet is also known to have influenced Vincent van Gogh. I imagine that van Gogh, who spent much of his life making paintings out under the open skies, would have disagreed with Hunt’s statement.

But Hunt was an American exhibiting a peculiarly American literalism in his response to Millet–he even copied Millet’s style of dress while in Barbizon. This attitude resonates within our tradition of landscape painting, most particularly as it ties into our history of abstraction. Peter Young’s “Stick” paintings, presently on display at Craig Starr Gallery, draw this to mind.

To understand this, it feels necessary to contemplate the “Stick” paintings in terms of how they are made. Doing so puts one in touch with a very basic dimension of painting. I feel the playful pull of a painted line across the weave of the canvas and wonder at how pleasing the sensation can be. The thinness of the paint ground barely disturbs the movement of the brush over its surface. Young’s transparent, even casual, employ of tools is endearing. I am placed at ease, invited to participate.

Suddenly, an obstacle emerges! The edge of the canvas asserts itself, a strict limit on the enjoyable gesture. The physical end of the point of contact with the reality of the canvas has reared its ugly head, a reminder that there is no line that can be drawn on a monochrome painting that does not come into immediate conversation with the edge of the canvas, the border separating the illusion of what’s inside the rectangle from the greater illusion of what is outside of it.

A canvas’s edge exhibits the duality of being both illusory and absolute. From the point of view of what lies inside its boundaries, the edge of the canvas does not exist as real. This is the illusion of a picture. Everything up to the edge matters right down to the last little scratching of the palette knife. But once we’ve left the surface of the painting, its magnetism is broken and we are free to be on our way into other concerns, other worlds. From the inside, we may travel easily over that boundary, content in our material illusion. Even those of us accustomed to looking at paintings can miss this transition. Yet from the vantage point of our reality outside the painting, the painting’s edges are what separate it from us, an unconsciously accepted fact grounding our experience of whatever image we are offered.

One could look at surface in painting similarly. In fact, in the “Stick” paintings, the velvety smoothness of the surfaces helps move us toward the irregularity of their edges. How do you make a painting that gets at the problem of its own boundaries? And not in the innate sense in which every painting must account for itself compositionally, but in the explicit sense of drawing attention to the problem of its own thingness? And how do this without resorting to gimmicks or lapsing into theatricality? That’s a philosophical conundrum requiring redress in physical form.

Peter Young: “Stick” Paintings, 1970 - By Benjamin La Rocco - Viewing Room - Craig Starr Gallery Viewing Room

Left: Jo Baer, H. Arcuata, 1971. © Mamco, Geneva.

Right: Ron Gorchov, LA PIVA, 2012. © Cheim & Read, New York.

Others among Young’s contemporaries have attempted to scratch this itch. Jo Baer comes immediately to mind. Her “Radiator” paintings feel like objects and look like paintings. The sharpness of her canvas’s edge in relation to the depth of the stretcher bar is echoed in the contours of the paintings’ compositions. Their built physicality is consciously meant to enhance the quality of their painted surface. Ron Gorchov uncovered painting’s parabolic potentiality in the “saddle” shape of his inimitably crafted stretcher bars. The rounded shape of his canvases have no hard edges. They thereby soften the line between painting and not-painting, object and not-object. In both Baer and Gorchov, the experience of their paintings as pictures is inseparable from their presentation as objects.

Peter Young uses lengths of ponderosa pine, collected in the landscape of Utah, where the “Stick” paintings were made over a brief span of months in 1970, to accomplish the same end. These are the sticks by which the paintings are known. Young assembles them to form a rough rectangle over which he stretches his canvas, revealing the irregular shape of the branch beneath. He further accents the sticks by painting the canvas over each stick brown, so that the branches of pine are made to act as both stretcher bar and frame. This is done carefully and very deliberately. In #11-1970, the dueling yellows and blacks of the central image are framed in painted umber, helping underpin its electric, focal drama. A parallel effect occurs in #1-1970: the frame is painted in warm sienna to contrast with the dominant cobalt of the picture’s ground.

In each case, Young insistently draws attention to the factual physicality of the landscape elements that compose his paintings. Wandering en pleine air, collecting his branches and taking them with his observations back into himself, into his inner working space, Young continues a long tradition of landscape. This is confluent with the attitude of William Morris Hunt. The philosophy that Hunt advocated regarding the landscape, that one should take one’s experience of it back to the studio to be integrated in the picture, is taken a step further by Young. In Young’s work, there is less illusion, more embodiment; less transformation, more presentation. We can account for this in part by the differing eras in which they worked. However it is characteristic of both artists that integration of direct experience in the landscape be carried along as far as possible in paintings.

#5-1970, 1970

Acrylic on canvas stretched on ponderosa pine branches

with white nylon twine

28 x 24 inches

A good example is Young’s #5-1970, a 28x24 inch acrylic on canvas. In this painting, the dark lengths of canvas-covered ponderosa frame a swath of turquoise over which Young paints a series of vertical yellow lines vaguely suggestive of script. The same yellow line traces the boundaries of the canvas, traversing its width twice so that the image is divided into three unequal horizontal bands in which the script-like bending lines are anchored. The picture thus evokes a landscape, a classic simplification of the motif in which multiple horizon lines are bisected by waving verticals, which could be trees themselves. This bare-bones presentation of the essential elements of landscape, combined with the presence of the Costa Rican trees themselves in the frame, is a concretization of a schematic.

I have written elsewhere of the deep modernist strains in Young’s work, his extraordinarily fortunate positioning relative to some of the essential tributaries of the great river of 20th century culture. His father studied with Einstein and nearly worked with Oppenheimer on the Manhattan Project. His mother was a relative of Emily Dickinson. Charles and Ray Eames were family friends. As such, Young must have sensed, before he knew, the larger contours of our culture’s form. His early education continued as he found himself enmeshed in the surrealist culture of California as a very young man forming ties with prominent painters such as Lee Mullican, Wolfgang Paalen, and, most importantly, Luchita Hurtado. Their influences can be clearly felt in Young’s work and he still considers himself an “abstract surrealist.” Jonathan Williams, creator of Jargon, was a friend and teacher with ties to Black Mountain College. An anti-institutional institution if ever there was one, Black Mountain’s free wheeling, free-thinking poetry must have underscored the bohemianism inculcated in Young out west.

Yet our work is always possessed of greater influences than those specific to our lives. It partakes in vast collective conversations of which we may have but scant awareness. Nowhere is this more visible than in the art of painting, which always reveals itself, cannot tell a lie. The more open the creative life, the more available it becomes to this gamut of influence.

In On Painting and Drawing, William Morris Hunt further advised, “Make a picture, without a line in it. That’s the peculiar pill that you need to take. Try to see with how little you can make a picture.” In his visits to Barbizon to sit at the feet of Millet, Hunt was seeking the roots of a conversation about form that ran beneath the veneer he experienced in the world’s urban cultural centers. Of course Hunt says, “no lines,” where Young says, “just lines.” But in his time Hunt’s own landscape paintings were criticized as being too reductive in comparison to crowd-pleasing favorites like Frederic Church. So the long-standing argument continues outside of the boundaries of particular municipalities or nationalities, its terms varying with the decades. If this exchange remains unaltered at its core, its flux of terms may remain unrecognizable to us at any present moment. In the kind of temporal paradox familiar to philosophers, creative activity thus furnishes memory with the forms of future endeavors.

Ben La Rocco––

Benjamin La Rocco is an artist, writer, and teacher focused on drawing and ecology. He is the recipient of a Marie Walsh Sharpe Space Program Fellowship, the S J Wallace Truman Award for Painting from the National Academy Museum and, most recently, a 2024 Founder’s Grant from Tellis Art Fund. His writing has appeared in artcritical.com, Hyperallergic and The Brooklyn Rail, where he was managing arts editor from 2006 to 2011. He lives with his family in Brooklyn where he teaches at Pratt Institute.