William Hubschmitt:A Retrospective Exhibition

Main Gallery and eGallery

Tarble Arts Center

Eastern Illinois University

August 21 – September 25, 2010

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For many students and professors of art, the boundary between historical inquiry and creative exploration is broad and impermeable. Art from the past all too often recedes in significance as the art world seems only concerned with what is new and original. In this climate, an art student studies art history solely to avoid making something that looks like work that was done before. To our great benefit at Eastern Illinois University, Bill Hubschmitt has continually challenged this notion with his teaching and digital painting, and has produced an extensive body of work that demonstrates the creative dialogue that is possible when the boundary between art and art history becomes more fluid and dynamic. The premise of this work is not to simply make art about art, but, rather, it is to understand what it means to be an artist in the company of other artists and belong inside the vast history of art making.

Hubschmitt’s early digital art in the 1980s represented a significant advance over what was deemed possible with computers and printers that were not designed to accommodate the needs of an artist. He began in 1984 by using the early Apple 512k with special expanded memory so it could handle the enormous digital files necessary to make large format works. Initially he was limited

to working only in black and white on printers designed to produce large font type. Even with no gray scale to work with, Hubschmitt developed a technique of distorting a photograph through repeated enlargements and reductions that allowed the image to retain its essential identity, but begin to take on painterly qualities as the black and white solids broke down and allowed for a more delicate matrix of interconnected forms. The selective introduction of chaos and decay into images is one of the enduring qualities of Hubschmitt’s work. At one level this strategy speaks to the entropy of memory—a result of the distance between then and now. It also allows forms to intermingle and suggest something new as they coalesce.

Hubschmitt’s work in digital art has always gone hand-in-hand with his interest in developing new creative tools for studio artists and research tools for art historians. Between 1988 and 1995 and through the help of grants from New York State CCI Programs, he was able to get $500,000 to help his SUNY Oneonta students get the tools they needed to explore new possibilities in computer-generated art. At the same time, Hubschmitt began using

“As Henri Rousseau taught me, beauty is usually found in the imagination.” Bill Hubschmitt

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computers to examine the compositional structure of paintings by editing out the figures to focus on the architectural elements that establish the style and meaning of the work. The challenge was not just to take the figure out, but also to extend the continuity of the architecture by introducing elements that filled the gaps left by the deleted figures. In 1995, while working on editing out the repeated number fives in Demuth’s painting, The Figure 5 in Gold (1928), Hubschmitt felt the need to introduce his own “corrections” to alter the balance of the composition. At this moment, he recognized his project was a more interpretive process rather than simply objective observation. While this realization ended his work with this method of art history research, it opened up a new interest in digitally deconstructing known works and entering into a more creative exploration of the artist’s methods and styles.

In an effort to help explain different artistic styles to his students, Hubschmitt has made many of his breakthroughs in his own art as he developed the means to translate oil painting techniques into digital media methods. The purpose of this exercise was not merely to demonstrate the way the oil painting techniques worked, but also to show how these older methods could be applied to what the students were doing with digital art. One of these experiments was based on techniques that Mark Rothko developed for his monumental and luminous abstract paintings. Hubschmitt had had an opportunity as a student to meet Rothko and watch him work, and he vividly recalled Rothko’s process of working up the painted surface to

focus on the interaction of the colors and textures. Hubschmitt has continued to use this technique on many of his digital paintings, but, whereas, Rothko moved away from representing the natural world, Hubschmitt has reinvested his landscapes with organic forms more closely linked to nature.

The landscapes rarely represent real locations and are more often assembled piecemeal from small samples of famous paintings or close-up photographs of such diverse textures as carpet, plaster wall surfaces, wood grain, popcorn or wicker baskets. These sampled textures are built up and layered with new colors and, after weeks of experimentation, the complexity, patina and, what Hubschmitt calls a “chordal harmony” in the composition, emerges. The full range of artists that he draws inspiration from is widely varied and may include brush strokes from Windslow Homer or Vincent Van Gogh, or elements from such sources as the art of Odillon Redon, Donatello, Rembrandt, classical Roman and Greek statuary, medieval icons, Degas, Caravaggio, Michelangelo and the photographer Eadweard Muybridge. A solemn and majestic quality pervades many of these pieces as Hubschmitt approaches the work of these artists with a deep and abiding respect for what they have wrought. These works are not, however, simply homages to great masters of art; Hubschmitt takes only enough of any one work to start his dialog with that artist, and from that kernel he begins to dramatically manipulate the forms, introducing one artist’s work to another, and continually working in his own ideas and emotions to make sure he holds up his side of the conversation.

Hubschmitt’s images owe most of their inspiration from Renaissance, Baroque and modern painting styles, but there remains a great affinity in his work for some of the underlying qualities of Chinese literati painting. Hubschmitt participated in a NEH Summer Study on the art of Imperial China in 1993, and in the past four years, while on break from his teaching at EIU, he has lived sporadically in Shandong Province in China with his family. Chinese culture and art holds a great fascination for him, and it informs some of the iconography, and the frequent use of atmospheric perspective, but more significantly it is revealed in his artistic sensibilities where he demonstrates a sympathy for the Chinese literati notion wen, nature’s underlying patterns. The organic qualities that emerge in Hubschmitt’s digital paintings do not describe actual places, but just as literati painters would study a single rock to paint a mountain, Hubschmitt’s landscapes convey aspects of several places drawn from memory. This allows the digital landscape paintings to embody a subjective space that simultaneously represents a personal response to the cornfields of Charleston, the sea

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Figure Study “Qing” Baroque, 2007

coast of New England, and the Nile River. Just as with Chinese literati landscape painting, these spaces are more akin to self-portraits, revealing more about painters’ understanding of themselves inside a world than a record of an actual place and time outside.

In Hubschmitt’s portraits, the figures are suffused with colors, patterns and textures to merge with the background; just as his landscapes evolve toward becoming portraits, the portraits evolve toward becoming landscapes. By unleashing the expressive force of color and texture, Hubschmitt’s figures gain drama in a similar manner to Degas or Toulouse-Lautrec—after the designs of the Japanese ukiyo-e prints—where the bodies present the seemingly arbitrary gestures of everyday activity, yet are framed within a vibrant and complementary world. There is a recurring ambiguity in the portraits between what seems to be, at one level, a casual snapshot, while on the other hand, the density of the rendering bends the image toward becoming an icon suffused with textures and colors that flatten out into a timeless tableau. Hubschmitt regularly engages the women in his family as subjects for portraiture and there is a tacit understanding of that relationship in the photograph. “In many cases, the model knows she is being watched,” Hubschmitt explains, “but she chooses not to directly acknowledge it, perhaps revealing something of her own self-image.”

Revealing the ravages of history frames the themes of many of Hubschmitt’s digital paintings. The heightened beauty and vitality that he has given to decaying artifacts and fossils is a way he affirms and reanimates the past. Most of the paintings posses a distinctive aged patina that

obscures and dissolves the forms into one other. The patina speaks to the accumulated history and establishes the objects as belonging in time. This is especially evident in the intense confusion of shapes and colors Hubschmitt brings to the classical Greek sculpture of the Laocoön and his sons. He made this piece in 2004 while caring for his father who suffered for many years from the debilitating condition of Alzheimer’s disease. At the time, myth about the fate of Laocoön and his sons seemed an apt metaphor for contending with his father’s condition and the cruel, unfair and tragic aspects of life. Echoes of the powerful vitality of the sculpture can be seen in Hubschmitt’s digital painting straining against the decay of time, but it is the beauty of the decay rather than the heroic glory of the figures that is immortalized here.

The ordinary laborers that occupy Muybridge’s photographic experiments in human locomotion were employed to document the quotidian ways humans moved about. Their names were unrecorded, but their actions, parsed out in measured increments, were no less significant for their day than unraveling the genetic code is today. In both we find a new definition for what it means to be human, which forces us to take into account our assumptions and prejudices, and realign our understanding of what constitutes the common stock of our shared humanity. Muybridges’ work was originally presented in an unflattering academic manner to focus on the quantifiable aspects of motion, but in Hubschmitt’s digital metamorphosis, the latent beauty of these figures emerges and enters into a dialog with our shared artistic traditions.

Robert Petersen

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Muybridge Series: Shadow Boxer, 2002

About the Artist

William Hubschmitt has a B.A. in art history and studio art from Eisenhower College of Rochester Institute of Technology, Seneca Falls, N.Y., and a M.A. and Ph.D. in art history from SUNY Binghamton, N.Y. He is currently an associate professor of art history and digital art at Eastern Illinois University. Prior to joining EIU’s faculty in 1996, he was on the faculty at the State University of New York-Oneonta from 1982 to 1996. Hubschmitt has taught art history and digital art and served as art department chair at both SUNY Oneonta and EIU. His art has been exhibited at various venues including: Derryberry Gallery, Tennessee Tech University (Cookeville, TN); Lawton Gallery, University of Wisconsin-Green Bay; and The Halpert Biennial National Juried Visual Art Competition and Exhibition, Turchin Center for the Visual Arts, Appalachian State University (Boone, NC).

http://www.ux1.eiu.edu/~wehubschmitt/

Roman Torso Capitoline Museum, Rome, 2000

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William Hubschmitt: A Retrospective Exhibition August 21 – September 25, 2010Main Galleries and eGalleryTarble Arts Center, Eastern Illinois University

Exhibition Reception and Curator’s Remarks:7 to 9 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 28, Atrium

The Tarble Arts Center is located at 2010 Ninth Street on the campus of Eastern Illinois University in Charleston, Illinois. Open Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday and 1 to 4 p.m. Sunday; closed Mondays and holidays. Free admission. For information: tarble@eiu.edu, 217-581-ARTS (-2787), www.eiu.edu/~tarble.

Cover image: Landscape with Golden Waves, 2003Graphic Design: Ryan Boske-Cox, EIU University Marketing and Communications

© 2010 Eastern Illinois University Board of Trustees for the Tarble Arts Center; images used with the permission of the artist.

About the CuratorRobert Petersen holds a Ph.D. from the University of Hawaii at Manoa, his M.A. from Brown University, and a B.A. from the University of California at Santa Cruz. Petersen was a Fulbright Scholar to Indonesia in 1988, and he joined the EIU faculty in 1998. Current areas of research include graphic novels and comic book art, and he has a book on the history of graphic narratives art due out from Greenwood Press in the spring of 2011.

This exhibition is presented in cooperation with the EIU Art Department. Tarble Arts Center programs are funded by Tarble Arts Center membership contributions and by the Tarble Arts Center Endowment of the EIU Foundation.

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