FEATURED CONTEMPORARY ARTIST: John Fincher

In the 1980s a magazine called John Fincher the “Quick-draw artist”. The pun was provoked by the Cowboy paraphernalia, postcard sunsets, and cactus plants that populated his colorful still-life paintings at the time. But the point was the dash and skill of his draftsmanship. Over the years, while there have been shifts in his subject matter, Fincher’s virtuoso drawing continues to dazzle and dominate.

In his most recent body of work Fincher has turned his draftsman’s hand to rendering the linear thrusts of wooden fence rails, barren tree limbs, and twisting vines. It is a subject matter that already provides a kind of three-dimensional drawing in space. The interlocking posts and rails of a fence, for example, when isolated against an open field, can look a lot like Japanese calligraphy, and Fincher has exploited this resemblance in a handsome series of monotypes on handmade paper. Using only greasy black pigment on a metal plate, Fincher strokes and swipes to produce works of breathtaking grace and economy.

But there is a sly irony at work here as well. Viewers familiar with the history of art will find many witty echoes throughout these works, as Fincher’s depicted sticks drolly usurp the look of Brice Marden’s Cold Mountain compositions or Franz Kline’s black on white abstractions. Sometimes they recall the gridded twigs of Charles Arnoldi, or the decorative branches painted by Egon Schiele, or the ones in Hiroshige’s woodblock prints that Van Gogh recopied. And as Fincher’s painted tree limbs also take on qualities of human limbs and fingers, they pay homage to the brooding skeletal trees of Caspar David Friedrich and the myriad popular illustrations that have descended from the German Romantic tradition, including those scary animate trees that reach and snatch in Walt Disney’s cartoon fairy tales.

That menacing element is not to be overlooked, however, nor the barrenness that reflects a soul in winter. Fincher’s fences and tangled thickets can be forbidding. Some are labeled Barrier. And sometimes the branches have grown as dense and impenetrable as the thicket that surrounded and closed off the castle where "Beauty" lies asleep—surely an artist’s nightmare. But in the end, much as they may raise issues about dividedness and closure in our lives, these paintings are also very much explorations of the artistic process itself. For Fincher, the twists and turns, the fits and starts in the growth process of a branch can also graph the movement of the creative imagination. Fence posts mark the blocking in of a composition, the dividing up of the space. A fretwork of interlocking twigs can parallel the fretting that an artist does to activate his work and knit it all together. "I, in my intricate image," writes Dylan Thomas, "stride on two levels."

Contemporary

Since its establishment in the late 1980's, the Contemporary Department has devoted itself to the discovery, exhibition, and sale of the finest in contemporary painting, sculpture and works on paper. We currently represent over 60 living artists from throughout the globe. Each year, we embark on an ambitious year-round program of group and solo exhibitions, which invite audiences to experience the artistic diversity of today's living masters.

Artists