Flock, Oil On Panel
Elizabeth Johnson: Michael, you mention in our email exchange that "the current work is based on a very small piece from my last show, Flock (2022), and a larger piece Michelle Birds (2022) from last year, from which a whole body of work has been produced." What ideas in those two pieces generated this show? The thing I notice first about Flock is what could be called negative white space, which both pushes forward and retreats.
Michael Gallagher: Flock stood out because it was by far the most reductive piece in the last show. It retained subject matter (birds), but the simplification of form would not allow for an easy read of image regarding what it was "representing." The painting itself was very small, and subsequent paintings based upon it are much larger and much more ‘full’ of forms. The second source, Michelle Birds, is a large-scale painting that I labored on for over a year. It went through many iterations. Once completed and documented, I took elements and areas of it and cut and spliced them together to find new possibilities with the imagery. The results lend themselves to an "all-over" strategy; they're Pollock-like, where hierarchies are reduced if not eradicated completely. Pattern and repetition are in play, and the space is flattened.
I believe the negative white space in the original Flock that you refer to moves forward and retreats due to shifts in scale. Also, the white shapes in the earlier painting are meant to be able to be seen as (potentially) both positive and negative, depending on the context in which they are viewed. This interest arose in my previous exhibit Infinition, and I’m continuing to explore the theme in the current show.
Flock 8 (Four of a Kind), Acrylic On Canvas Panel, 48" x 42.5"
EJ: Have you titled the show?
MG: I'm pretty sure it’s going to be Flock. Previous shows had longer titles; the last show, Infinition, was short and sweet, so, I think we’ll go with Flock.
EJ: Do you source your bird and boat images? Are they purely imagined? The last time we chatted, I saw "eyes and smiles" in your works. For you, do dots function beyond solidifying surface, acting as handles or portholes and establishing rhythm?
MG: Previously, I did source the images; but now, for the most part, the works are sourcing themselves. You could say that I am appropriating my earlier work.
Eyes are obviously still in play, even more so than before, but smiles have left the building. These days––what is there to smile about? (Though I’m not quite as cynical as that sounds.) The forms, circles included, definitely function to establish rhythm and movement.
EJ: In our previous interview you stated, "In my lexicon, subject matter is not the same as content, I use the term ‘subject matter’ to describe what can be seen and named in a work of art. 'Content' refers to what the work is 'about’.” How would you describe the content and trajectory of recent work? Are they almost the same thing?
Michael Gallagher's Studio
Flock 4 (Pink and Green), Oil On Panel, 51" x 62"
MG: I think what interests me most about the current work is just how far I can push the imagery away from a clear read regarding subject matter; in this case, reading birds, through reduction of form, and in some cases color combinations. Can the reference be found or arrived at with very little information available? I also hope the images have a full-on visual appeal. I’d like people to want to look at them and find pleasure in looking at them and kind of “space out" for a while.
A couple of shows back I used the title Hallucination Engine that I borrowed from an album by a group of musicians called Material (a great record, by the way). One can think of paintings as hallucination engines, correct? Why not? It's self-explanatory. Content and trajectory are intertwined; the content is the trajectory or, at least, a major element in the work.
EJ: For instance, does Flock 4, which has more recognizable bird heads, manifest different kind of content than Flock 7 because of slight difference in subject matter?
Flock 7 (Whirlygig), Acrylic On Panel, 48" x 42"
MG: If some of the subject matter is more recognizable than other forms, it is probably because the later version of Flock 7 (Whirlygig) is more stripped-down, less dense. It seems that the denser the images become, the more ‘abstract’ or less distinct the subject matter becomes.
EJ: Also, in our previous interview you talk about the term “slippage”:
“It’s not informed by any postmodern thinking, which I find mostly befuddling and obtuse on purpose. How I use the term relates not only to subject matter but also issues regarding space; the idea that a shape/form can occupy multiple spatial conditions and potential readings keeps me engaged in both making and looking."
Is it your job to explore the multitude of ways things can slip? For instance, Large Flock Study's shapes slide and slip between implied rectangular units creating and negating seams, suggesting a kind of musical score. Dodo seems to spin and center on a red pentagram. In this show are you are chasing "in/as and both/and," or "potential readings," all previously mentioned, by both asserting and erasing repeated linear boundaries?
In other words, is current work showing linear slippage units happening within a slipping and sliding whole?
MG: “Slippage” is still a useful term to locate an on-going interest of mine. I’m still "on the job," as it were; and yes, if I can stumble into multiple ways that slippage can occur, all the better. Stumble is a good way to describe what I think I do in the studio. Creative Stumbling? Creative Stumblebum? Yeah, that’s it. It makes me think of some of those figures in a Guston painting, the images that were most likely self-portraits. "Implied rectangular units" is spot-on since I traffic in implication, tethering me to "slippage." Creating and negating is another form of slippage, and I do often think of patterns as musical scores.
If you compare the Study of Large Flock to the resolved Large Flock, there's a progression from ruckus and dirty to more well-behaved. I'm not sure I particularly prefer the latter, but that’s how it played out. Making studies is a relatively new thing for me, and are usually more interesting than the finished works; but it could be said that they are “easier” than the finished works. The finished works have more at stake and, therefore, resolve themselves in a different manner.
Large Flock, Oil on canvas (Two Panels), 4'7" x 11'8"
Flock 6 (Three of a Kind), Acrylic On Canvas On Panel, 24" x 24"
EJ: I am drawn to Flock 6 (Three of a Kind) because of the suggestion of deep space behind tectonic shapes. Comparing it with Black Swan at the Edge of the World, I wonder: Is experimenting with composition always your driver of content? For you, is indicating deep space as in Flock 6 (Three of a Kind) equal in weight to mapping it with an arc in Black Swan at the Edge of the World?
MG: Composition is always the driving force in any image, as an image must have a range of similar and different elements to keep me interested in making it and looking at it. Hopefully, the viewer will also be engaged enough to stick around. The issue of space is a slippery ordeal; there are so many ways to conceptualize spatial interests. I use flat/perspectival, recessive/psychological, Baroque/Asian dialectics to define space. David Hockney is one of my go-to guys for engaging dialogues on the various ways to think about and employ "space." His book Secret Knowledge still ruffles feathers.
Experimenting with composition is at the heart of what I am interested in. As a self-declared Formalist––and proud of it!––I spend quite a bit of time and energy on pictorial structure; it is a bit of an obsession. Black Swan at the Edge of the World is a bit of an outlier for this show. It’s not derived from the two source paintings discussed above and it deals with space potentialities very differently...
Black Swan at the Edge of the World, Acrylic On Panel, 9.75" x 10"
MG: ...Most of the other works have very flat or shallow space: Black Swan has the potential for a deep space reading while simultaneously being a very flat picture, à la Richard Shiff's essay on Georges Braque, “Infinition.” (Shiff's essay was published in an out-of-print Acquavella Galleries catalog, Georges Braque: Pioneer of Modernism for their late fall 2011 Braque exhibit.)
EJ: I notice several opened picture books with Post-it notes in your studio shots. Which artists and/or books you are studying now? Does research influence your subject, content, and process? Does research primarily suggest a jumping-off place?
MG: I’m very much an art about art kind of fellow. I go through obsessive phases. Last year I had a deep Braque phase. Cezanne is always a constant, if not always readily apparent. Picasso, Gris, Bonnard, Sillman, Bill Scott, Ben Nicholson, Léger, Charley Harper, de Kooning, and, recently, Pollack and Brice Marden again. There's a boatload of Self-Taught/Visionary folks that are a constant source of inspiration. (Everyone should frequent the Fleisher-Ollman Gallery in Philadelphia!) And far too many others to name. It truly is an addiction. Not sure that I need rehab for this one.
Flock 1, Oil On Canvas, 48" x 48"
EJ: We talked before about Amy Sillman, an artist we both love. Her recent show Alternate Side (Permutation #1-32) is worth a look. I know this happened independently, but it is interesting to me that she too is using seams and multiple panels. Would you say that, for you, this might be the natural result of painting organic shapes for years and wanting to expand outside the painting surface through a kind of musical score format?
MG: Sillman's exhibition seems to privilege more of an installation read. The framed works become consumed or integrated into the organized chaos of the walls. I've seen her employ this strategy before; the seams seem to come from the installation strategy. My seams or sections arrive out of my recent ham-fisted technological use––photographing older works and then copying, cutting rotating, enlarging, reducing and pasting––closer to Mary Shelley than Disney CGI.
If anything, the recent work employs fewer organic forms and more geometric ones. Also, the sense of movement is less sharpened than heightened and accelerated, and it flirts with stasis. We're back in Shiff's "Infinition" territory: two potentially opposite events/forms/spaces are happening or are available at the same time...
Flock 3, Acrylic On Panel, 10" x 11.25"
MG: ...Finally, the overall effect is perhaps more closely aligned to Marden than Pollock, although I'm confident that Marden's interest and usage of it comes from Pollock. Where Pollock may eschew a hierarchy in the extreme overall pictures, I'm often less inclined to go all the way: I retain some type of hierarchal order. The musical reference is a good one.I have considered this motif in the past and have thought of forms in a picture and their placement as notes on a page of sheet music.
I was in Galway yesterday and picked up Edwin Frank’s Stranger than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth Century Novel that attempts to summarize some of the greatest novels of the 20th century––an art about art thing. The introduction has a spot-on quote that reinforces, for me, the necessity of the art from art belief:
"This is how any work of art demands that we look at it: form is always another form of content."
––Elizabeth Johnson
(elizabethjohnsonart.com)
edited by Matthew Crain
(@sarcastapics)
Flock 5 (Ariel), Oil On Linen On Panel, 40" x 62"
Michael Gallagher is a painter whose work moves freely between abstraction and representation.
His works are in a number of public and corporate collections including Aronson and Partners, Philadelphia, PA, Delotte and Touche, New York, NY, PepsiCo, New York, NY, MasterCard, New York, NY, the Wilmington Trust, Time Warner, Legg Mason, The Franklin Mint, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and the Woodmere Museum of Art.
He studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts where he is currently a Professor and a six-time recipient of the Excellence in Teaching Award.