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| Criswell's flair for the dramatic emerged
in this new style, and he began allowing himself to address subjects
far afield from the suburban and rural backyard. His love of
music took strong hold of his imagery. His newfound lush, luminous
realism was in fact technically and stylistically derived from
the kind of painting that predominated at the moment of classical
music's European apotheosis one hundred-plus years ago. Indeed,
Criswell's conjurations of dark, brooding, intricate events clearly
wrung from the imagination point not only at the operatic tradition
of Wagner and Strauss but at the 'abstract-narrative' tradition
of the tone poem, the narrative conveyed in music alone, from
Beethoven through Berlioz to Liszt and the Russian Five (Rimsky-Korsakov,
Borodin, etc.). Criswell's musical analogies are literalizations
of extra-musical content - an old-fashioned approach given an
edge of psychological and compositional destabilization that
bespeaks a contemporary point of view. As such, Criswell's musically based pictures are not simply illustrations from libretti, nor even proposals for stage sets. They are enactments, key moments in sonic storytelling brought to a visual level. Of course these paintings, drawings and prints obviate what remains nebulous in sound; and in their attention to detail and their momentousness they clarify what is distinctive about their wholly visual media. Certainly, they recapitulate the conventions of expository fiction, epic poetry, and, as mentioned, grand opera, in media now considered inappropriate and even inadequate to the task. But the hand-rendered picture, Criswell insists, is quite adequate and appropriate. As compared to the novel, theater or film, the narrativity of painting and its attendant disciplines, no matter how retardataire, is elaborated entirely in pictorial space, not in time. Not only does painting tell a story a different way than does stage or filmwork; that way of telling provides a singular comprehension of the story, a nuanced but momentous comprehension in which the whole tenor of the account is packed into a coherent image, at once summative and exemplary. This is an old argument, but, like the "old" approach(es) it accompanies, Criswell honors and updates it in the context of - essentially as - Anxious Realism, an entirely painterly tendency (albeit one made possible by, first among other media, film). Criswell demonstrates the appropriateness of painting to storytelling even more emphatically in his non-musically based work - which, it should be noted, comprises the majority of his output over the last two decades. For all his forays into the minds and sounds of late-Romantic middle-European composers and librettists, Criswell has found his most anxious reality at home, down the local highway, in the local bar, in his own bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen. In these altogether too-familiar places, the tinge of anxiety works its most delicate and sustained magic, even in the tone given a darkened room by moonlight, lamplight, or the glow of a television set. Darkness does not quite envelop, but in the soft halation things seem more or less - or more and less - substantive than they really are. A hard object on a night table becomes almost fuzzy; a woman's torso becomes as crisp as alabaster. |
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 Bedroom Painting, 2002, oil on linen, 36 x 48 inches |
 Blue Moon, 2002, oil on linen, 48 x 36 inches |
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Criswell's most naturalistic series of work to date
is his least visually, but the most spiritually, anxious. Indeed,
in the skewed dramas of its human interaction(s), it has at once
informed and complemented the deft histrionics of the musically
themed pictures. In fact, his many domestic interiors, nearly
always featuring his wife Janet, and well as his paintings, drawings
and prints of strippers, deliberately avoid the dramatic. Criswell
suppresses all but the most glancing of incidents in his depiction
of these profoundly "incidental" worlds. He has jokingly
referred to himself as "the Degas of the strip joint,"
but unlike Degas, and after a good century of Freudian conditioning
- and at least a quarter-century of feminist consciousness-raising
- throughout western civilization, Criswell admits to his voyeuristic
impulses. (But then, voyeurism as an artistic fundament is not
the presumption it was in Degas' day.) What motivates Criswell
on the quotidian level is the ambience of strip clubs, their
slack, ordinary sordidness, and the contrast in attitude (as
well as form) between the patrons and the performers. The behavior
of the women ranges from vague enticement to matter-of-fact ennui
- serving if anything to point away from their sexualized presence
- while the men, responding even more to the pseudo-intimate
atmosphere, perform the rigors and supplications of their status
as sex-customers with sad discomfort or embarrassed intensity.
Donald Kuspit has noted Criswell's "self-obsession" in this constant reiteration. The artist himself once noted in a lecture that "[t]he atomizing process I described for Western culture begins with self-questioning, and I think that same process is mirrored in the individual." Writing to this author, Criswell observed that "I wouldn't write it like that now - in 1995 I was deep into postmodern theory - but the self-questioning, I think, still goes on in my work, even when only one of me, or none of me, is visible. At that time I didn't think those people were me. I said I just used myself as a model because I couldn't afford real models. Later I realized that they were me after all…. Whenever I'm ambushed by a scene in a opera, novel |
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 Old Guy Running, 2002, watercolor, 30 x 22 inches. Collection of S. Gene Cauley |
or whatever, I always end up playing
all the principal parts myself. . . . Yes, the fact that the
different parts are played by the same person, as in Salome,
Golem and Arald, adds another level of meaning to the picture,
but that this person is the artist adds still another layer--the
one I didn't admit to in the '95 lecture. It doesn't subvert
the source but twists it, perverts it into a usually comic enlargement
of my own private, personal anxieties." It is where these personal anxieties meet the "atomizing process of Western culture" that an Anxious Realism emerges; and in Warren Criswell's conjuration of realisms past, the present sees its anxiousness, if anything, magnified. Los Angeles March 2003
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 Arald, 2003, oil on linen, 48 x 36 inches. Collection of Rickey Medlock |
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The exhibition catalog, Warren Criswell Shadows, in which this essay appears is Copyright 2003 by the Arkansas Arts Center
All images and text on this Web site Copyright © 1997 - 2010 by Warren Criswell
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