Mark Bush's Portraits

Mark Bush, Daniel. 
Acrylic on canvas, 36" x 18"
Selection for BP Portrait Award 2011 Exhibition,
National Portrait Gallery, London

Courtesy, Hammond Harkins Galleries

Mark Bush: London 2011 occupies for the moment a corner of the Hammond Harkins Gallery space in Bexley, Ohio. The black and white portraits on display have nothing whatsoever to do with London, England, nor with London, Ohio, for that matter. One cannot blame owner Marlana Hammond Keynes for the implied whoop in her title, however, for Bush was among the fifty-five painters chosen from across the world to show in the British National Portrait Gallery's BP Portrait Award 2011 exhibition. If you visit the "Exhibitors" link on that site, you can survey the excellent company the young graduate of Columbus College of Art and Design is keeping. The BP Portrait Show is among the most elite art competitions.

Bush works in the realm of "photographic realism," a style I find more and more intriguing for its many artifices. His black and white portraits are rendered with minute attention to the range and nuances not only of grays, blacks and whites. Those remaining hairs on Daniel's receding scalp? They are enumerated, elaborated and each given its proper color and position. This degree of vigilance to detail goes beyond any normal idea of the photographic, however. Could a camera have caught each hair just so and have simultaneously captured every other near-microscopic detail—every single articulated stitch in the gloves, every fold of flesh at each knuckle, the precisely trimmed edge of his cropped head? Perhaps, but the issue is focus. Our human eyes cannot focus on every detail of a scene this large all at the same time, yet Bush gives us the impression that this is indeed what we would catch in the blink of an eye; it's the look Daniel would give to an unwanted click of the camera lens, or an interruption that makes him drop a stitch. The "camera eye" is the gift of this huge collection of focal points, impossible to attain in reality. That we call this impossible hyper-focus "realism" is the most outrageous thing about such painting.

The amazing thing to me is that every detail of this canvas forces us viewers to notice the painter's determined acuity and strong will. This canvas shudders with purpose. It puts the shutter to shame. Whatever Burns has captured of Daniel, he reveals with equally intensity about himself.

Hammond Harkins does not have the BP portrait on the wall, but it has a selection of Burns' portraits that demonstrate, within his self-imposed discipline of black-and-white acrylic-on-canvas, a fascinating range of effort. All of his portraits are penetrating, realistic images of people in poses of the moment, yet Burns nevertheless seems to be studying several different artistic approaches to his subjects. He seems to be dedicated to exploration at this early point in his career.

Mark Bush, Mr. Norman
Acrylic on canvas, 42 x 32"

Courtesy, Hammond Harkins Galleries

Georges de La Tour, 1640,detail
Magdalen with Smoking Flame
LA County Museum of Art

A portrait of one of his teachers at CCAD, Mr. Norman is set in darkness, as if lit only by a candle or flashlight—twenty-first century Georges de La Tour. It is painted not in blended brush strokes, but almost entirely in daubed and smudged paint. The painting suggests Chuck Close, with the face-to-face composition and the lack of line in creation of the image. The facial surface is rendered in a way that gives Mr. Norman's skin the look of roughly modeled clay, or the tough hide befitting a man whose eyes, brow, and mouth suggest, in momentary surprise, a deep combination of searching and knowing.

The weave of the subject's woolen or flannel shirt, too, is rendered in a grid of daubed paint. Close likes to compose his subjects on a centered grid. While Bush attains a similar intensity of gaze and horizontal position of this subject, he has still pushed Norman to the side of the canvas, so he hasn't emulated Close's centering technique. But I can't help but wonder if the simple checked plaid doesn't refer to Close's grid, a sort of homage from the closet, as it were.

Mark Bush, True Grit
Acrylic on canvas, 40 x 30"
Courtesy, Hammond Harkins Galleries

True Grit, a portrait of the artist's father, might be said to have many characteristics of a Close portrait—the centered face, the size of the face within the borders, the straight-ahead gaze—but the tough intimacy is Bush's own. The face is half-disguised by the cigarette-holding hand. In truth, it may be better said that the hand constitutes the bottom half of the face; it is as important an identifying element as the deeply furrowed brow and the eyes with such far-away, dim reflections of light in them. Smoke and mirrors? Those mirrors take some searching for, but the hand holding the stubby cigarette is big and awfully interesting and hardly disguises the story of the man.

Here, as in the portrait of Mr. Norman, Bush's rendering of his subject's aging flesh becomes a study in abstraction the more closely he pursues the realistic. The details of the man's furrowed knuckles appear as soft swirls of cloud or distant fogs; his eyes and forehead are painted with such surface detail that they are like a geographer's aerial photograph of the earth, a small patch of one human's skin transformed into uncharted lands, rather as Edward Weston used his camera in 1930 to turn a green pepper into an object of mysterious sensuality.

Bush's realism invites other comparisons too, but again his work is his own. In portraits of a little boy and a pretty, blonde young woman, he enters Norman Rockwell territory. The subjects may be his familiars, but their appearances would have put them right into a casting book for Rockwell: the all-American good looks, the innocent, pretty, and expressive child; the fresh, wholesome femininity of the blonde.

Mark Bush, Hear Me Roar
Acrylic on canvas, 26" x 18"
Courtesy, Hammond Harkins Galleries

Hear Me Roar is indeed difficult to distinguish from a photograph. The realism with which Bush has rendered the face and hair are uncanny; it is only the evidence of the canvas' surface supporting the paint that verifies for the viewer that this is, truly, painted: Bush has eliminated the traces even of brush strokes. If anything betrays his hand, it's that the letters on the child's shirt are so clear that they appear to be from a competing reality. But the child's hand right hand is in motion, another trick the painter has used to heighten the illusion of veracity.

What grabbed me about this is that the child, while being a model, adorable little boy—the tousled hair, the Cupid lips, his posed participation in the eternal motif of boys growing into their roaring powers—departs from it too in his expression. At first, I was indeed ready to credit him with the Rockwellian mischieviousness, that position of innocence at the moment when it is disabused, or is caught in naughtiness learning its lesson. Examples abound, like this, gleaned from the famous No Swimming cover (below) that I saw in the Dayton Art Museum's show of Rockwell covers for the Saturday Evening Post in January 2012.

But Bush's little boy is markedly different, for where I thought I saw at first a glint of mischief in the cant of his eyebrows, there is nothing of the exaggeration that is Rockwell's hallmark. Bush, if anything, works against the type. He sets up the composition to have us respond stereotypically to the subject, as we do of every little boy. We are prepared to take, from the outset, the fundamentally patronizing position of an adult.

But this child is a human being first. He is thinking something over; he is considering. Although his right hand and arm are moving, his mind is elsewhere, sizing up something or someone who doesn't realize that she or he is being watched. What do children do, anyway? They keep tabs, they look around and they figure things out on their own. Bush's child is realistic in that sense too: He is doing what real children do most of the time.

The pretty young woman of Just Peek is a similar case of thwarted generic expectation. In this 20 x 16" novelty portrait, one expects the subject to be the girl's flirtation coyness. As in Hear Me Roar, the painting is almost entirely lacking any evidence of brushwork. But do her eyes really relay a come-hither or laughing message? Although her eyes are wide open, the corners aren't wrinkled, the forehead isn't creased by the lifted brows, and there is no evidence of drawn muscles as there would be in an exaggerated or "cute" expression. In fact, there is a real intensity and an unnerving directness. Perhaps the scarf is not the veil of coyness, but is held protectively before her, as a screen. Like the Rockwell boy immediately above who has just learned the unfortunate truth about Santa in The Discovery, this woman appears to confront something shocking: The viewer, perhaps, into whose eyes she stares.

I am eager to follow Bush's development. I'm excited to see that someone of such skill is able to apply it in different ways, and has such control not only over his materials, but over the many possible ways to travel. The self-awareness and independence his work shows are refreshing; they are the marks of a young artist who knows what he's got and is good enough to see how far he has to go—how many discoveries await him on that long career ramble.

Aminah Robinson's Oral History for the Hard of Hearing

Hammond Harkins Galleries in Bexley, Ohio are currently showing the first part of Aminah Robinson's new series, The Chronicle From the Village—Songs for the New Millenium. Part two of the series will appear at the Columbus Museum of Art later this year, second in a series of what Robinson imagines with an ironic roll of the eyes to be of indeterminate length.

Afrikans Entering the Ohio Valley in 1200 AD. Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson.

Mixed media on paper, 21 x 55.5."

Courtesy, Hammond Harkins Galleries

Most of these mixed media works are horizontal. They are painted, drawn, and collaged on dark brown paper that has the look and heft of hand-made. The pieces require two sheets, which are joined by Robinson's signature row of hand-sewn two- and four-hole buttons chosen for their dark, earthy, and neutral colors and materials. The palette she's chosen favors loamy brown, and blue mixed with white in a way that suggests foam on the water or wispy clouds dancing in a bright sky. These new works are lyrical, rhythmical compositions that emphasize long lines and sinuous curves. Robinson can make us feel like she has executed the central flowing line of women's head and well-occupied hands in one, long, elegant gesture made by her own hand, as if that hand were as big as the ones her women and elders always possess. Guinea Village in Belmont County, Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson Mixed Media on paper, 21 x 55.5" Courtesty, Hammond Harkins Gallery Detail, left, above Author photo, through glass Detail, right, above Author photo, through glass But of course she has not done that. This enchanting work draws its life from vivid exaggerations (the sizes of hands and arms) and by great compressions (the distances between figures, the foreshortened space from foreground to background). The feel of spontaneity is distilled from many such individual moments in a carefully executed composition. The liveliness comes through Robinson's acute observation and experience of materials. Perhaps it is more difficult to create the picture of contented serenity than one of dramatic conflict.

Throughout her career, Robinson has celebrated her heroes. Some are African-Americans of public achievement, like Sojourner Truth, or fellow artist Faith Ringgold. But her special love and commitment are for the childhood heroes in her family on the Near Eastside of Columbus, and to the history of her neighborhood.  The central preoccupations of her work arise from her early experiences in this world as a member of a household that included a great grandmother who still recounted her experience of the Middle Passage—of her own abduction from freedom in West Africa to slavery in Georgia—and of Uncle Alvin, the family griot, the storyteller/historian.

ODetailOne Day in 1307 AD: King Abubakari II, 1985-92
Button Beaded RagGonNon Music Box Pop-Up Book: cloth, thread, buttons, beads, paper, paint, graphite and music boxes,
55 x 155", Detail Columbus Museum of Art, gift of the artist

Robinson has been working with the present material for years. The detail above is from a work she began in 1985, showing a teacher pointing to a model of Abubakari's fleet. 


The topic arises from Uncle Alvin's stories about ancient Africans who crossed the Atlantic and reached Ohio via the Great Lakes or the Ohio River during the 13th century A.D. The current series interprets their passage and their village life in the forests.

Songs for the New Millenium, Aminah Robinson
Courtesy, Hammond Harkins Galleries

Many who love Robinson's art (see my August, 2011 article in this blog) for aesthetic (or investment) reasons, seem to overlook this content as the harmless fulminations of an adorable eccentric. ("They think I'm crazy," Robinson tells me, spinning her finger in circles by her head, in the sign of the loose screw of unsound gear.) For years she has been making us of the Columbus are research libraries and geological surveys to dig into the basis of Uncle Alvin's story.


In Songs for the New Millenium Robinson records what she's concluded in a manner that suggests not only a pedagogical program but a sacred one. Three hand-lettered documents on vellum—prepared calf- or sheepskins—constitute the Teaching Tools. There are one mission statement and two maps. One map shows Ohio by county, highlighting the sites where there is evidence suggesting the possibility of ancient African settlement. The map of her childhood Columbus neighborhood records its development and documents its alterations as one would expect the thorough-going historian to do. She is such a historian.

Songs for the New Millenium, detail. Robinsons' historical map of the near eastside of Columbus, noting the changes
 of street names, homes of notable residents, sites of community importance, structures once venerated and now gone.

On these precious teaching tools, a motley figure more likely to be seen in a childrens' book than on the Magna Carta points out the critical information. This wise serpent (in some West African traditions, the serpent is the incarnation of deceased relatives) is followed by the words, rendered in large, colorful lettering, "Uncle Alvin says..." Uncle Alvin's memory is the host and guardian presence for the spirit of this pedagogical enterprise; the audience is children or the childlike, who are wise enough to listen to the authority of elders. Children need to learn their history and understand their spiritual legacy.

Uncle Alvin appears on the vellum works in this show, even one that is dominated more by image than by words, Sacred Life of the Neareast Side. Massed male forms stand inside their pirogue that is decorated with scales of precious metal colors—gold, solver, copper, bronze—to fold a sail as they ease into a cove created by a tree with green roots. 

The work is formed with two skins that are hand-stitched together without buttons, leaving the image uninterrupted. The brown skin of the figures, the brown tree trunk, and the contrasting shine of the vessel, all against the warm, neutral color of the vellum add to the compositional dignity and solemnity of the document. As in a cupped hand, the image unites sustaining Nature, the power of Art, and the strength of massed human will and effort. These are values that appear again and again throughout Robinson's work. 

Sacred Life of the Neareast Side, Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson
48 x 20.75," vellum and calfskin, 2012
Courtesy, Hammond Harkins Galleries

Detail, Erie Village Founded by Afrikans, Aminah Robinson
Mixed media on paper, 28.25 x 62.25."
Author photo, through glass

For Robinson, racial history and family history are part and parcel of the central theme: being as fully-realized a human being as possible. Because this theme seems universal —inclusive, if you will—and because Robinson gives it dignified and beautiful expression in her work, Robinson is often discounted as being an African-American artist, at least locally. "There's no protest, no rage, no line to divide any groups," seems to be part of her appeal.


It's ironic that both white and African American audiences can enjoy Robinson's humane art yet for years turn blind eyes to central preoccupations that now she is making explicit to the point of stating in words. This series, for instance, really is about the history of African settlement in American, a topic neither Robinson nor Uncle Alvin was making up. Without much effort, anyone can find the published theory that Emperor Abubakari II of the Malian Empire (today's Mali, Gambia, and much of western Africa) explored the Atlantic with a large fleet and established North American settlements. A BBC News article from 2000 explains that though the theory is not without champions, archaeologists tend not to be among them because there is little physical evidence. Those who study it most carefully are students of the griot tradition. While Western scholars may be skeptical about the authority of oral tradition as an accurate vehicle for history, that point-of-view is far from universally accepted.

The Storyteller, Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson
Mixed media on paper, 2010
Courtesy, Hammond Harkins Galleries

Uncle Alvin was a griot. Robinson is herself a griot for generations that don't believe in them, don't listen to oral history or care to. 


Robinson's conclusions about the nature of the diaspora—the result of slavery, or of exploration?—are only one aspect of the career-spanning work she is trying to unite in her new series. For her, the deepest history of Africans in America is intimately related to the current issues in her beloved neighborhood. In particular, she finds heinous the city's current plan to abandon and raze Poindexter Village, the first public housing in Ohio. Opened in 1940 by President Roosevelt, Poindexter housed not only Robinson's family, but generations of highly respected African American families. For years it has kept many families off the streets; these people have been the subjects for many Button Manuscript pages similar to "The Storyteller," in which she portrays the dignity and humanity of neighbors most reduced in circumstances.


It is because Robinson pictures the dispossessed as they deserve to be seen that her bedrock positions on illegitimate power and inhumanity are overlooked and her art is appreciated as pretty and fundamentally toothless. She shows the Africans ancestors as explorers, not slaves. She links the power to overcome neighborhood problems to the strength of ancient forbears, faithfully transmitted through millennia by oral history. That storytelling tradition legitimates as more than poetics her vision of the homeless whose rags become raiment.

Chronicles from the Village, the first of the Teaching Tools, then, is of the utmost importance in her entire body of work. It is unique for being an immense written document. In it she states what she has been suggesting visually throughout her career, but now states unmistakably in words. She tells us that she is repelled by inhumane treatment of the vulnerable, and that African Americans have suffered the cruelest of this from the beginning of their experience in the Western Hemisphere; that she makes her work in the hope to illuminating this, and making a difference. 


Robinson is getting old. She has worked all day, every day, in private concentration, for her whole, long career. Chronicles of the Village is dated, "1958-2012" in an indication of the force of decades behind her thoughts. 


Because few will get the opportunity to see this document, hand-written on vellum in many colors like sacred texts of the Renaissance, I've copied its text below so that Robinson's statement is recorded. (Spellings are Robinson's.)


UNCLE ALVIN SAYS...


One day, when the Morning come...


The body of work coming out of Chronicles from the Village: Songs for the New Millenium, is a reminder of what came before when morning come, and to address issues facing all of us today in the new Millenium. I encourage each person who was raised on the Neareastside of Columbus, Ohio to testify in putting their recollections on paper, canvas, in song, film, or however one chooses to create and tell their own stories.


Generations of poverty, lost jobs, 2nd class schools; again and again history continues to repeat itself! An indigenous people, whose families lived on the sacred land of the neareastside of Columbus, Ohio since the 1200's.


The New Millenium: the uprooting of an indigenous people, their traditions, culture, and history, and the scattering of this way of life to the winds. Many of the families will fall through the "cracks" and end up homeless; living under bridges, in cardboard tent communities and in shelters. The failures and misdeeds toward any group of people or human beings is again, a History that is being repeated.


When morning come...since the days Afrikan people were kidnapped from the HOME for thousands of years, forced into slave houses in chains on the Transatlantic Crossing, and shipped to slave markets to be auctioned for a live of slavery of plantations throughout the Caribbean and South and North Amerika. She slaves were brutalized, humiliated, dehumanized & subjected to the indignity of being stripped of their names, their traditions, their languages and their cultures. Afrikans in Amerika continue in the New Millenium to suffer from the consequences of slavery and Jim Crow Laws that fostered discrimination and segregation; wrongs committed against a people and their descendents who suffered under enslavement. Jim Crowish, segretation and discrimination, wrongs that continue today by uprooting an indigenous people out of Poindexter Village and the Neareastside of Columbus, Ohio. I personally see/and view the situation as a crime against humanity.


When Morning come...it is my hope, that issues of sacred land of Poindexter Village will bring about a Resolution to rectifying generational lingering consequences of injustice of any human being or group of people.


Chronicles from the Village: Songs for the New Millenium is based on the Oral Tradition from the elders of my family and community & I have also provided an historical account of events arranged in order of times but without analysis or interpretation with loosely connected episodes also arranged in the Oral Tradition.


The Village are Chronicles from Columbus and throughout Ohio, Afrika, Puerto Rico and throughout Amerika and the Globle World.


When Morning Come...in the timelessness of all life, water still flows, roots still bear witness to a new day and deep in the wellspring of this ancient life the reminder of what came before—when Morning Come, and that the integrity of its inner life be preserve through its culture, traditions and history is reaffirming its base future re-development on its traditional worldview.




March 23, 2012/ Manuscript Page/ the Teaching Tools:vellum: calfskin & sheepskin/ 1958-2012/Inventory1774

Detail, Sacred Life of the Neareastside, Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson, 2012
Courtesy of Hammond Harkins Gallery.