Writings
Neil Marshall was a dedicated painter as well as a terrific writer and critic. He maintained an online journal with his art and cultural criticism long before the popularity and prevalence of blogging. This entry was his review of my show at Long Fine Art in 2001. Neil died in May of 2007 and he is truly missed and I treasured his support and friendship.
JOURNAL ENTRY
Neil Marshall April 17, 2001
The James Walsh exhibition of recent paintings represents an important
advance not only for him but for painting on this side of the Atlantic. With
these paintings Walsh surpasses the achievement of Bram Bogart. More could
be accomplished in terms of size and color, but the expressive range and formal
invention of these paintings goes well beyond Bogart, and forms a profound
critique of that particular vision (which of course does not belong to Bogart
alone). This is not to imply however that Bogart was in any sense the original
influence on Walsh. That goes to Jules Olitski. Olitski’s handling of
paint has deeply influenced Walsh, who from the beginning of his career has
been recognized as particularly gifted with paint, and the passion that has
always been in evidence might well have taken him to these “extreme”
articulations of surface and material on his own. As I have pointed out before,
Olitski himself has never engaged in what art historians call “plasticity”
on this scale. He appeared to broach it in the later seventies but even then,
his technique of obliquely spraying paint against the textures of the painting
surface created an illusion of far more material, and much greater projection
of surface than in fact was actually there. Walsh’s handling of paint
and the shape-formation which is its teleology and so radically distinguished
him from Bogart, has always been far more literal. Literalness in fact defines
his sensibility. In this, not only Olitski and Bogart must be cited as influences,
but also the critic Clement Greenberg who became a close friend. Greenberg’s
thinking should be considered as important an influence as these painters
have been. All of it is here in this most recent work. His best exhibition
to date, and the best painting in this idiom done anywhere today.
The first article by Valentin Tatransky appears in the Table of Contents
of the April—June 1984 number of Art International as Five New Talents
but I believe Valentin’s intended title for it was as it appeared on
the lead-in page.
This article brings back Annie’s and my early days in NYC, when on any
given night Valentin might show up ringing our doorbell at midnight or later.
He would have in tow a group of people that he had pried from an art bar somewhere
in order to show them a particular painting of ours to prove a point that
he had made. It all seemed very natural then, but compared with the artworld
of today the recollection of those times seems as it happened in a foreign
land.
Events conspired to drive Valentin from NYC and he resided outside of Buffalo
until his death early in 2009.
THE NEW AVANT-GARDE: DELUCCIA, NATHANSON, ROTH, TINT, AND WALSH
ART INTERNATIONAL Volume XXVII/2 April-June 1984 by
Valentin Tatransky
(Excerpt) James Walsh’s art summarizes and echoes everything
I have been saying. As with DeLuccia, Nathanson, and Roth, the decisive break
in his art occurred within the last two years – perhaps less radically,
for he had already been painting very well before. There is in him that same
complete freedom of paint-handling I’ve already noticed in the others.
Although influence can be pointed to – Bannard’s – one is
struck, as with DeLuccia, Nathanson and Roth, by how less format-oriented
he is. Each picture is substantially different. And too, like DeLuccia, Nathanson
and Roth, Walsh exploits great variation in the thickness of the paint, going
from flat to thick, from smooth to rough; though now, since last summer, he
has been exploiting variation of surface with greater subtlety.
Compare Walsh’s earlier The Crest to the more recent Green
K – comparison is a connoisseur’s delight, marking off which
is excellent from that which is very good. The Crest is a harmony
of green and orange, which at one point builds to a great thickness. In a
way – and only the superior merit of Green K tells us this
– the surface of The Crest is too heavy, the high relief actually
canceling some of the range of values, creating too stark a contrast between
light and dark. Green K has a much broader resonance: the feathery
surface of Green K: the combination is at once tough and delicate,
all its silvery rows glistening in a sea of green.
Download
Entire Article with Photographs (PDF)
JAMES WALSH Joan Prats
ARTS MAGAZINE October 1985
This exhibition marks the debut of an important young painter. James
Walsh is about 30 years old, and already has created an impressive body of
work. As befits a young artist, he is not an even painter; not all his works
are perfect. He is still in the process of feeling his way about, which is
as it should be, but there is more to this than the mere fact of youth, and
that has to do with Walsh’s character: why he paints the way he paints.
Walsh is primarily an innovator, an experimenter. He paints in that way which
gives him the most freedom. He enjoys too much the sheer act of painting to
be a man haunted by images. He demonstrated here how much further the medium
of paint can be pushed as pigment in terms of pictorial possibilities. Most
of the pieces in this show were painted with only a few colors: pumpkin, black,
and white. It’s that earth harmony we associate with Cubism, Pollock,
Rembrandt, and the very earth itself. It allows for greater freedom, intensity,
as if the artist wanted to exhume the essential character of the art.
The best paintings Thrion and Tarfu, are ambitious not only
because of the traditions they carry on, but because of the synthesis they
represent of various currents in our strongest school. More specifically,
they represent a breaking away from Walsh’s earlier influence, notably
Bannard, to a more fundamental engagement with Pollock. The astonishing thing
about Thrion is its freedom. It differs from all the others having
the same colors in that it looks the least “composed.” Tarfu,
on the other hand, shows that Walsh can compose a picture with recognizable
pictorial features, such as foreground, background, and highlights, without
interrupting the ease of his paint handling. Olitski was the first to handle
paint in such a thick way, with Pollock’s freedom, and Walsh carries
it on admirably.
This exhibition proves that Walsh is not simply one of the finest young painters
around today, but one of the most ambitious, and one of the most serious.
(Joan Prats, February 2 -23)