BEACH: Paintings of southern California

Essay by Jeffrey Carr

I grew up in Southern California, where I now reside. The California landscape’s colors, smells, and textures made me an artist. I was always conscious of the sea. Even if you can’t see the ocean, you know it is there. Where I grew up, in the yellow-colored hills inland, the sky and clouds reflected the distant sea. I attended high school in La Jolla, where the ocean was always present. I would walk down after class to Windansea Beach or the Cove in La Jolla to watch the waves. Body surfers ruled the beach, and dogs with colored handkerchiefs played frisbee with dark-tanned beach kids. My first girlfriend and I made out on the beach to the sounds of surf.

In California, you drive to the beach as you must drive everywhere. At first, roads and freeways dominate your visual experience. You see the dashboard and windshield, the horizontal greys of asphalt and concrete, the shapes of cars, the light on buildings and roadways, and road signs. Then, the glimpse of the distant sea, an aquamarine smudge on the horizon. The sky dominates everything and is rarely pure blue. It is grey, dusty violet, or pink with clouds. The sky contrasts with the blue-gray asphalt and the distant emerald hint of the ocean.

The beach is hidden behind houses, grey-green trees, shops, off-white concrete, signage, and other cars. In Southern California, the sight of the ocean is a valuable commodity and is guarded by houses, hedges, walkways, and palm trees. When you can make your way through all the visual distractions, the sight of the ocean bursts upon you like a breaking wave. When the beach appears, you see a vast expanse of sand with a slowly expanding ribbon of waves and water. People. Swimsuits. Dogs. Hats. Tents.

The beach is a state of mind. It is supremely sensual. It is changeable and mercurial. It is a boundary, a door, a transitional space between the earth of convention, clothes, and hu- manity and another world of space, boundlessness, and water. We view the sky, ocean, sand, rocks, and waves. We smell salt and brine, hear seabirds, see waves, and feel the wind. The beach is yellow sand, striped towels, red, white, and brown bodies, bright colored hats, swimsuits, blacks, greens, tans, whites, and blues. You see picnics, sandals, dogs, tanned humanity, and surfboards.

The beach is about gazing. It is a space of beauty. From the beach, you stare off into the world of the sea. The sea is a watery space bounded by a horizon and sky. It is endless shades of blue and blue-green and the changeable pinks, greys, and whites of clouds, sky, and surf.

You walk along the beach while gazing at the shapes, colors, and textures of people, ocean, sand, sky, and horizon. You experience the sensations of heat, smells, bird noises, sunlight, red shoulders, hot and cold, soft voices, wind, and sand. You are aware of the feel of your body.

You walk along the cliffs, looking down at the sand and ocean. Then you go down the walkways past grass, families having picnics, volleyball courts, and palm trees. You take off your sandals and walk through the hot sand to the hardpack near the waves. People sprawled everywhere. Kids are digging holes. People in bathing suits. Moms and children. Old folks. Teenagers lying in groups. Folding tables and tents. Dark, angular bodies and beach umbrellas. Puffy clouds. Thin rolls of surf. Bellies. Sunburn. Flat blue sky. Seagulls. The eyes are constantly shifting and moving. You look at the pebbles to the seafoam to a sandpiper, the lifeguard station to a distant red bikini, a child digging to middle-aged strollers to sunglasses to towels to brown legs to hats to suntanned girls to cliffs and back out to the sea again, always thin and ribbon-like soft gray blue and green, dominated by moving shapes of waves and surf.

Artists have depicted the sea as moods: calm, majestic, mysterious, exotic, changeable, stormy, or dangerous. Because we have so much of it, the ocean shore has always fascinated American artists. Winslow Homer painted the violent seas of Maine, portraits of vast sprays of water erupting from dark brown rocks. Edward Hopper painted silent white yachts against blue oceans and distant lighthouses. Edwin Dickinson painted the infinitely subtle grays of Provincetown. Richard Diebenkorn, the great painter of the California seaside, painted elegant abstracted landscapes of Ocean Park, rectangles of pale lilac and ultramarine blue against dusty orange triangles and beige stripes of shopping mall whites and ochre hills.

My love for this beach world permeates my paintings. After a long career teaching and paint- ing on the East Coast and Midwest, I returned to this landscape late in life. It is what the art critic Robert Hughes called “The Landscape of Pleasure.” It is the joy of spectatorship. I was never a surfer or a beach bum. I was always looking and taking it in. Now, I look at it as a painter but also a lover. The beach contains no irony. It is not about reflection or soul searching. It is about pleasure, pure and simple. It is an ideal world of sensations. That is the world I celebrate in my paintings.

Sybaritica: A Golden Age in Blue

Essay by Frank Galuszka 

Philosophy underlies these paintings and holds them together.   In his work, there is so much that is manifest, so available to be seen, that what is underneath may not be apprehended, though it is not out of reach. Jeffrey Carr makes paintings that fulfill and delight both him and us.  His philosophy is not explicit because he doesn’t mean to sell it to us through his paintings.  A spirit finds form in his work. In his view, everything is imbued with spirit, vitality, playfulness, and joy.  Seeing no contest between pleasure and order, desire, and ease, his work descends most directly from Matisse’s groundbreaking 1904 work Luxe, Calme et Volupté, which in turn is inspired by Baudelaire’s Symbolist poem L’invitation au voyage and its lines: 

There, all is order and beauty, 

Luxury, peace, and pleasure.

While Matisse forges an alliance between Postimpressionism and Symbolism, with the reverence for light of one and the sovereignty of imagination of the other, it is through synthetic form, a built defensible style, that he holds these together in the artistic pre-psychoanalytic explorations of mind that hadn’t yet funneled narrowly into surrealism, and, with Matisse, would diverge from the powerful influence of Munch to aim at visually structuring happiness, rather than anxiety and pain.

An artist can admire and be influenced by another artist without imitating them.  Carr reflects on the findings of Matisse’s Luxe, Calme et Volupté, without imitating the master, except that he chose the same site, the seaside, as the theater for his paintings.

Carr observes and invents seamlessly, as it is hard to determine where one ends and the other begins. The phenomena of the natural world exist in his work intermingled with invention, and the invention is provisional – it is play.  That he can unite the characters and behaviors of people-as-figures with often lavish abstract conceits of arrangement so effortlessly is more than I can understand or explain, but he does this.

Who are these people who populate his paintings?  There is no sense of artificial drama.  There are no villains or particular saints among them.  Their behaviors are depicted, and yet all of them are also seen through their actions to the underlying quality that they share, that all people share.  They even share a part of this, or some of this, with the sky, the surf, and the beach.  A young woman is angry with her boyfriend, but that, and the argument between them, is contextualized as a superficial incident in the eternal life of both of them.  And we know this is so as we look at the painting.

Realms of Day

 Essay by Frank Galuszka

God appears and God is Light

To those poor souls who dwell in Night, 

But does a Human Form Display

To those who dwell in Realms of day.

William Blake

In Jeffrey Carr’s paintings, the idyllic becomes indistinguishable from the commonplace.  You could say the idyllic becomes mistaken for the commonplace. The  Arcadian idylls of Puvis de Chavannes and Poussin come down to American earth in Carr’s paintings.  Matisse and Bonnard created idylls, and Picasso also created them in his own way.  For America, David Park and Bob Thompson, too.  The Bay Area painters celebrated the California sun.  Of them, Diebenkorn was the most significant. But as to the sybaritic, he held back.  He painted the Golden State with reservations. Stopping short of exaltation, checking hedonism with a resistant toughness of mind, a refusal of seduction, a refusal to forgo the expressionistic anxiety that was the spirit of his time, creating a tension between the times and the place.

Even today, the challenge for the contemporary painter is how to move past superficiality and the trivial when faced with abundance, beauty, and pleasure. Is resistance to this a kind of cowardice?  A lapse into intellectual pride? The question is, how to see into the pleasure of living without yielding to feel-good clichés on one hand or soulless analysis on the other. 

Jeffrey Carr’s story of the beach is a human story.  It is the story of people having left their ordinary and often workaday lives in a search not only for relief but happiness.  And on Carr’s beaches, people find that happiness.  A sense of well-being permeates throughout. 

When approaching the figure, some painters are stymied from the start by political self-consciousness, from the difficulty of the task of representation, from the concern of revealing too much, and a retreat from psychological disclosure. Jeffrey Carr suffers from none of these problems.

Some figure painters approach the body as a problem.   When it comes to the figure it is a struggle to get things right.  As a complex three-dimensional object in space, the technical issues crowd out expression.

As a technical problem, the body is a complex object that requires adequate description.  Artists may seek refuge in expertise, expertise in anatomy especially. What too often results is an admired but ultimately lifeless realism, in which the body is more or less a widget among widgets in the universe.

Carr is mindful of something beyond the body and beyond the personality.  He is asking, without drawing too much attention to it, what does it mean to be a human being?   He is not painting an answer or even clarifying the question.  He is looking deeply into it without the expectation of finding an end, a stopping point.  He opens a human space in his paintings.  Further, he sees into the human being, into the human space within a world that has much in common with it.  What permeates the ocean and the sky permeates us.  Floating on the top of our being are appearances and behaviors.  Humans exist in a spiritual ecosystem that includes all elements of reality.  By painting in such a way, Carr makes this ecosystem feel apprehended but not analyzed, not turned by analysis into an object like any other.  Everything in his paintings is alive in a shared reality.  This reality is beneficent and repudiates the toxins in our world of theory, certainty, ambition, and power. Paradise is here, as Jacob Boehme declared.  Jeffrey Carr says the same: Paradise is here.  It surrounds us. It is right in front of your eyes.

FRANK GALUSZKA; Painter & Professor of Art; University of California, Santa Cruz