Trading spaces
Artist Bruce Marsh's adaptations of classic portraiture pull differences in time, style and cultural expectations into artistic tensions that yield surprising insights.
By LENNIE BENNETT
Published April 3, 2005
TAMPA - This is a good time to be Bruce Marsh. The veteran painter and professor retired from the University of South Florida about two years ago after more than 30 years there, having survived the conceptual art wars and onslaught of new media, living to see his medium enjoying a popular (and commercial) renaissance in the larger art world.
But Marsh, 67, has always found an admiring audience for his easy-on-the-eyes landscapes and portrait homages to 19th century neoclassical artists. An exhibition of recent and new work at Clayton Galleries demonstrates he still has the goods.
Marsh could be described as a painter's painter, an artist who has mastered his craft, found his themes and continues to refine both without getting stuck in a rut.
His enduring admiration for Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres is the source of some of his finest work. Choosing one of the greatest portraitists of all time not just to emulate but copy could be considered both brave and foolhardy. But that's the yardstick Marsh has set for himself over the years, returning to Ingres' iconic paintings of wealthy Parisians, trying, as he says, "to get them right," believing he never will. That's true enough; leave reproductions to sell-by-the-yard painters who do them to match the upholstery.
Marsh uses those grand images to set up a conversation between himself and his subject - a component of all portraits - and between himself and the artist who originally painted them. Who are you, he asks of Ingres and Madame de Moitessier, whom Ingres painted in 1851 and 1856. By extension he asks himself, who am I?
Many will remember Ingres in Largo, which appropriates the 1851 Madame de Moitessier, from a USF faculty show four years ago. The haughty young woman, dressed in expensive black lace and fashionably coiffed with roses in her hair is a coarser and rougher version in Marsh's hands, in part because his technique is so different from that of the 19th century master. Both use slow-drying oils, but Marsh paints wet-on-wet and relatively quickly, unlike Ingres, who built up many layers of glazes to achieve the smooth sheen that abjures evidence of brushstrokes and the painter's hand. Marsh's treatment of Moitessier is respectful, but he injects a big shot of wit in juxtaposing her, as he does all such subjects, with a contemporary scene, in this case an old cement plant in Largo.
He does the same thing to Ingres' Louis-Francois Bertin, a curmudgeonly looking man whose impatience Ingres captured in the odd twist of his hand in his lap. Marsh plants Bertin on a corner of Hillsborough Avenue in Tampa, which the artist paints in the monochromatic grays of grisaille inspired by a print Marsh made with a pinhole camera. The oddness of it comes not just from the sense of Bertin's being a time-traveler: It's also in the shifting perspective Marsh uses for the two images.
Marsh appropriates another portrait of Madame de Moitessier, from 1856, for one of his most recent works, Ingres in Ruskin. It's a painting in a lighter mood. Her frock is less severe, a confection of fringed floral silk, and Marsh places her in his studio. Unlike a gritty industrial site or the decrepit lean-to of another work, Madame Le Blanc at Fruit Stand, de Moitessier poses in Marsh's studio. We get to see some of the artist's process through an accompanying study, an oil on panel that's looser and less finished. She sits in the foreground, welcoming us as if to a salon, but the studio itself almost trumps her presence. Ingres surrounded his subjects with the accoutrements of wealthy lives so all who viewed them were sure of their prominence.
Madame de Moitessier is less out of place in the cool serenity of Marsh's light-filled room with its bare wood floors and pale walls than in the exterior locales of other paintings. This one, an artist's studio, seems timeless. More than the others, Marsh injects himself into this scenario. She may be a creature of Ingres but Marsh claims ownership of her too, and makes the point that appropriation may be more obvious with some artists but everyone owes a debt to the long creative continuum.
Marsh's landscapes, too, mine familiar territory. We know his water, made of many paint dabs that merge into a teeming, abstract richness, sometimes returned to realism with finely delineated leaves floating on the surface or its convergence with land. And we know his technique of scenes overpainted with strips of landscape that appear collaged, giving us shifting views and alternating perspectives.
In a new home and studio in Ruskin, Marsh has painted straightforward vistas with a subtler exploration of the pull between then and now, recording the natural beauty of his surroundings being changed by development. Marsh uses small formats, some long and narrow, all horizontal, to exaggerate their dimensions. We see bulldozed beaches and piles of earth from a distance, monumentally conceived, as if we're standing on a plateau looking at the Grand Canyon. They are artificial and manmade like his portraits, like all art.
Marsh's work is not especially difficult or provocative and will probably never make it into the door-stop anthologies of art history.
Does that matter? I hope not, at least to him.
Being truly good at what you do has never been a guarantee of anything except the thing itself.
-- Lennie Bennett can be reached at 727 893-8293 or lennie@sptimes.com
REVIEW: "New Work," paintings by Bruce Marsh, is at Clayton Galleries, 4105 S MacDill Ave., Tampa, through April 24. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Friday and 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday. (813) 831-3753.