Reference
Raeburn:
Portrait of a Lady:Miss Eleanor Urquhart, c. 1793, National Gallery, Washington.
We have become accustomed to seeing pictures framed by the page margin, both in the context of the book format and in the many environments in which reproductions, or reproduction images, live their transposed lives: advertisements, calendars, postcards, postage stamps, greeting cards, etc. In paintings such as
Reproduction Deem paints the enframing and isolating blank space to which our vision has become habituated. He also paints the context or environment created by reproduction, which promiscuously juxtaposes disparate images and marries different media (painting, photography, typography, etc.). Again, these are visual devices to catapult his painted images into the realm of the visible. They are a means of rendering painting accessible to our vision, and of broadening our sensibility, especially the appreciation of the paint surface.
The uniformly painted frame surround further acts to restore the painted image -- the picture -- to our vision by tying it to the two-dimensional picture plane. Deem creates only enough depth to hold the image of the canvas of the reproduced Raeburn in
Reproduction. It is a thin space that states unequivocally that a painting, even one that creates the illusion of deep space, is a picture, a representation, an abstraction. (Ronald Vance, "Painting Lists,"
Art and Artists, London, February 1968).
In
Frans Hals Green(1965) I quote the painting by Frans Hals titled
The Jester (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam), the quotation isolated on a field of green.
Goya with Detail,
georgedeem.org/works/view/Goya-with-Detail-1963-01-01 although I painted it two years earlier, is a related picture. The image I quote this time is Goya's painting of a woman with a water jug, with below the Goya quotation a detail of the same picture, both ...images isolated on a neutral ground. Actually, in each picture my reference is
not to the original painting by Frans Hals and Goya but to
reproductions of the Frans Hals and the Goya. Hence, the "detail" of the Goya, as in a magazine or art history book illustration.
My (1967) picture of an English lady by Raeburn, (titled
Reproduction) and
Frans Hals Green and
Goya with Detail are three related pictures. They are three first-rate painting explorations of the area between perception of reproduction image and perception of painting image. As always in my work, it is painting that makes the pictorial statement. (George Deem, letter to Pat Sneed, Jan. 3, 1979).
