Wall Drawing #146. All two-part combinations of blue arcs from corners and sides and blue straight, not straight and broken lines. September 1972

We are going to define a different type of culture than the last 3 days of blogs: a little more refined culture so to speak (just kidding). As you would surmise, these blogs are about getting to know me, your surgeon, a little bit better and for me to reach out to you, the reader, with my aesthetic sense of what I consider beautiful. Of course, if you do not like modern art, this blog will be devastatingly boring or foolish. My buddy, Mark Wettreich, who owns an incredible European Art Gallery that focuses on “real art”, would look askance at this blog. I doubt Mark reads my blogs. However, if you are, please stop reading here.

Perhaps the best way that I conceive of my art is of its high graphic design quality. In essence, I really appreciate good design. It appeals to me fundamentally at every level. I love beautifully designed clothing, furniture, cars, anything really (and you know by now my obsession with Apple.) I would have loved to have been an industrial designer. Johny Ive move over (he is the Apple brainchild who has revolutionized the world more times than I can remember.)

Okay, now to the core of this blog. I absolutely love Sol LeWitt. He just died last year. He was an amazing American artist whose structure, clean, and graphic sense of the world I absolutely loved. I am going to insert here my paper that I wrote for the Archives of Facial Plastic Surgery in 2003, which never saw the light of day since the editorial board believed (perhaps rightly so) that my monograph on art did not highlight the beauty of the face. Well, besides the editorial board, you will be the first to read this article that never got published:

“Wall-to-Wall Beauty”

Samuel M. Lam, M.D.

Although Sol LeWitt has produced a prodigious amount of art over the past half century – from sumptuous two-dimensional geometric prints to elaborate three-dimensional cubed lattices, his most significant contribution to the art world remains the wall drawing. When asked if the sobriquet “originator of wall drawings” properly applied to him, he replied, “I think the cave men came first.” His cheeky reply aptly evokes his self-dismissive attitude that permeates his entire life and career. He has constantly upheld the primacy of ars gratia artis and subserved his ego to his artistic ambition. He often declines to attend media events in his honor, arriving late or not at all, and has refused to pose for a portrait by his celebrated artist friend, Chuck Close, because he wanted the public to pay attention only to the art rather than the artist. Even the large-scale retrospective of his work that opened at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2000 required years of coaxing before he could be convinced that he should participate, given his concentration on the future direction of his art rather than the past.

Part of an entrenched anti-commercialism is expressed in the very idea of a wall drawing. Unlike canvassed works that can be bought and sold as a commodity, a wall drawing lacks this vital attribute of market viability. Although LeWitt never explicitly foreswore a commercial intent, he stated, “I never think about selling a work while doing it.” LeWitt had even naively proposed that any artist that desired to replicate his wall drawings could do so to widen the public consumption of his work but has since retreated from this untenable position given the inferior reproductions that were spawned without his oversight. LeWitt’s massive wall projects are often executed by hired hands under his supervision, as he subscribes to the Conceptualism school that embraces the artistic idea more than the mechanical process, so long as the construction effort remains true to the original design. In fact, the colossal wall installations that are delicately fabricated for a specific site are often completely destroyed at the conclusion of the prescribed event.

LeWitt embarked on his first wall creation in 1968 for a group show at the Paula Cooper Gallery in New York. He wanted a medium that could offer him the most two-dimensional representation of his two-dimensional art, in a word, flatness. He wanted his created work to convey its true two-dimensional essence, which could not be accomplished on a canvas that by its very nature was a suspended three-dimensional object. Beyond this consideration, the artist was motivated by early twentieth-century Russian art that celebrated visual art within the context of a defined setting. His architectural sensibility may have also been partly informed from LeWitt’s time spent in I.M. Pei’s studio a decade earlier. His later sculptural monuments would also resonate with architectural vibrancy. This pairing of art and architecture achieved its fullest expression in the German Bauhaus and the Dutch De Stijl movements of the early twentieth century that prefigured LeWitt’s efforts fifty years later.

LeWitt’s contemporaries of the 1960s were also explicitly and subtly exploring the immediate environment in which their art was displayed. Dan Flavin’s fluorescent light sculptures illuminated the entire room in which they were exhibited and cast a luminescent glow and shadow on neighboring walls, floors, and ceilings. In fact, Flavin is credited with introducing to LeWitt the expressive and intellectual nature of serial, permutated forms that would become an integral element in LeWitt’s idiom. Donald Judd’s wall-mounted sculptural pieces were also intimately tied to the wall from which they were suspended. Similarly, Andy Warhol canvassed the Castelli Gallery with Cow Wallpaper, a work that must have resonated with LeWitt; and Eva Hesse’s Accretion that consisted of numerous fiberglass tubes propped along the expanse of a blank wall echoed LeWitt’s aesthetic ethos. Despite all of these varied concurrent artistic endeavors, LeWitt would most fully exploit the architectural interior and transform it with his site-specific wall installations.

Over the past thirty years LeWitt has continued to evolve his style of wall drawings from the intimate to the dramatic. Initially conceived in the 1960s, his drawings represented little more than transference of his paper drawings to the wall without a premeditated link to the environment in which it would be presented. In the early 1970s, he began to develop an artistic idea more specifically for the physical space that it would occupy. In Wall Drawing #51 in Turin, he hired three draftsmen to connect every architectural point on the wall (light fixtures, door knobs, wall corners, etc.) to each other in every conceivable combination using blue chalk. In 1975, his art underwent a transformation yet again: he began to alter the background wall color to suit his artistic needs rather than be satisfied with the typical, preexisting white facade. He relinquished part of his artistic control to his draftsman, ordering only that “White lines from the center of a [black or yellow] wall [be connected] to specified random points” as would be determined by his skilled draftsmen. By the 1980s, LeWitt’s work achieved a strong visual vitality through use of bold geometric shapes and vibrant color schemes. LeWitt himself has commented that the newfound boldness of his work reflected the size and grandeur befitting the architectural space. His wall drawings continued to expand in scale to occupy neighboring walls, adjacent rooms, and even moving out to the outdoor environment. By the 1990s, LeWitt began to use acrylic as his favored medium rather than pencil, crayon, and India ink, which he had relied on in the past. Although LeWitt still refers to his collective works as “wall drawings”, use of acrylic transformed his drawings into paintings. The austerity of his early works gave way to the playful exuberance of his acrylic pieces that exuded bright, saturated, glossy colors with a simplified geometric vocabulary. Despite all of the intellectual rigor that LeWitt has applied to his art through his writings and advocacy of the Conceptual movement, his oversized wall drawings provide an immediate, seductive appeal that remains truly unique in twentieth-century art.

I had a patient sitting pensively looking at one of my paintings one day, and when I passed by she asked me, “I really like this painting and am trying to figure out what it means.” I started to explain how I designed the pattern and why I chose the colors, then stopped and realized that was not at all what she was driving at. She was asking for a deeper intellectual meaning behind my work. Here is the short of it: there is nothing deeper than what you see.

Perhaps classical art has a narrative behind what you see. Even some modern art has a “meaning”: the Dada movement that poked fun at art and that carried political overtones comes to mind. However, no matter what art is trying to say, ultimately art is intended to appeal more fundamentally to an aesthetic level that does not carry with it any other higher motivations.

When I create my art, I am purely focused on color, shape, pattern, material, and composition. If any meaning comes to it, perhaps when I give it a name I come up with some contrivance that really has no serious meaning but is meant to be more playful. For example, I have this spray painting of drippy white lines on a blue-green background entitled “Nimbus”, and a patient’s husband asked, “Why do you call this Nimbus? It does not look like a cloud but a flat-lined EKG.” Well, that is a nice, positive interpretation compared to my celestially inspired appellation. Nevertheless, I really didn’t care if what I painted resembled a cloud or not. It just sounded cool, and it had some vague resemblance to a cloud in my perception.

I oftentimes hear, “I just don’t get modern art.” What the heck is there to “get”? I don’t like a lot of modern art myself, especially the splashy stuff that looks uncontrolled. I like things a bit more restrained in terms of the color palette and the geometry in most cases. For me, whatever art from whatever epoch, I must relate to it aesthetically. Intellectually is practically irrelevant to me.

I remember I took a summer class on art history in high school and I had to go to the Dallas Museum of Art to stare at this Monet painting of a large green bush sitting in the middle of this lake (no, it was not a waterlilly or a haystack) and I had to write an essay on that painting. Boy, I got pretty creative on that one. Although coming up with interesting intellectual ideas about a painting can be fun, it should be irrelevant to one’s appreciation of the artwork. Historical context (for a history major like me) is a nice adjunct but should not be a prerequisite to enjoying art.

I remember in 9th-grade high school, my English teacher, Dr. Pruitt, talked about how basically everything was art down to the clothes you wear, etc. I almost laughed. Clothes being art? Now, I truly get it. I see art in everything small to big. Perhaps my art is more “graphic art” than traditional painterly efforts. Maybe you can see that in my extensive catalog of logo work. Whatever category you want to append to my art, it is not cerebral but visceral. My favorite artists are Agnes Martin, Sol Lewitt, Ellsworth Kelly, Morris Louis, and Henri Matisse. I will do a small homage to some of my artistic mentors in coming blogs.