In order to practice putting together an artist’s statement, I am going to try to write more posts about contemporary art. Please feel free to chime in with any thoughts or critiques about the style, subject, or conclusions of these little descriptions.
Since I have been writing about the meanings and ramifications of all things gothic, I have decided to start with Steven Assael, a very gifted realist portrait painter working today. A native New Yorker, Assael studied with the contemporary masters of portrait painting to learn the meticulous craft of the great realist painters of yesteryear. He employed hi hard-won skills painting outsider “punk” models with the refined & dignified realism one would usually employ for a university president or a bank executive. The contrast is intriguing and it lends a stolid dignity to the pierced goth figures and faces on the canvas (and a frisson of craziness and excitement to staid academic portrait technique).
Club Kids (Steven Assael, 2001, oil on canvas)
The otherworldiness of Assael’s portraits is an illusion we are meant to see through: the timelessness of the human emotions under the layers of props is part of his theme. If we scrubbed off his club kids’ makeup and hair dye and then gave them cravats, lace, and wigs, they would look just like an 18th century group portrait. Is the difference between a banker and a rebel girl just a bunch of props? Well, on canvas interpreted through the brush of a talented painter, maybe it is.
Assael is self-conscious about using extremely traditional techniques and poses to contemporary ends. When asked about his relationship with modern art he answered, “Modernism has taken a direction toward the North Pole—with nowhere to go, frozen. On the way back we are discovering new territory, using the past as a means of expressing the present. To go forward we must, at times, take a step back and evaluate our position. With progression there is always a [positive, studied] regression”
At Mother, detail (Steven Assael, 2001, Oil, wood panel, canvas and steel)
So is the future of art just the past wearing wild clothes? And is Assael’s underlying classicism at odds with the gothic/emo/punk rebelliousness of the personalities portrayed? There is a melancholic loneliness to Assael’s figures which suggests he understands the paradoxical desire to be outside of popular convention while at the same time being part of a group. His paintings almost seem to have the same paradox. He wishes to be outside of traditional painting while firmly a part of it.
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ferrebeekeeper 
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December 31, 2010 at 6:25 PM
Feathers
I like your assessment of these two lovely paintings and am rather intrigued by this artist and will have to look him up.
Some of the goth types, especially those of the ‘Romantic-Goth’ persuasion CAN be seen wandering around in lace, frock-coats, frills and elegant gowns – the festivals at Whitby and Leipzig are testiment to this. The classical, realist approach to the paintings is not really that at-odds with members of the gothic subculture, because while the subculture is decidedly modern with half its roots in the Punk movement, and half the aesthetic is deliberately contrary to all that is mainstream and conventional, the other half of the subculture is rooted in Romanticism and literary Gothic – in a mixture of Baudelaire, Stoker Poe and a Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic turned six shades blacker, a romanticisation of the medieval mixed with a taste for the elegant and the macabre. Most of the ‘spooky kids’ and ‘babybats’ – the teenagers who join the subculture seeking rebellion never get as deep as to find that core, and never even find out that the subculture they’ve joined is older than they are, and so don’t really display that aspect, but it exists, and is why goth musicians like Emilie Autumn, have songs about the Lady of Shalott and Ophelia alongside her songs about insanity and vengeance. Goth itself both rejects and embraces tradition simultaneously – things once seen as staid and restrictive such as long skirts and corsets, or top hats and dress shirts become symbols of rebellion.
A woman showing lots of flesh in a mini-skirt and short cut top is making one statement, a woman walking out in an ornate corset, victorian inspired skirt, lace gloves, choker, and makeup bordering on the theatrical – all the funereal elegance of Victorian mourning mixed with a dash of vampishness and piercings, is making a completely different statement.
Contemporary art has become all about obscure forms of creativity, about installations and art that is as new and non-traditional as possible, and being out-there, new and far away from the old art establishment has become the NEW art establishment, and working in a traditional way – if not necessarily a traditional style – can be a rebellion from that in the same way a bustle gown becomes rebellion in a world of mini-skirts. It is not the retrospective safety of mantle-piece paintings, it is the use of realism as a universal visual language by which one can convey to anyone who can see something about these subcultural models and their existence. I agree with Assael when he says that modern art has frozen – it’s got caught up in its own outlandishness and while provides a creative outlet for the artist, doesn’t always actually /express/ – actually convey anything in a way anyone else can understand, and can end up feeling very academic, very considered, and at times, pretentious.
The look in the eye of the woman who is painted up as half Day-of-the-Dead and half ancient pagan deity, with her crown of flowers and antlers, staring out of the painting with defiance and a little nervousness; the way the deathrocker with his blue mohawk is turned away, face in shadow, or how the woman with the red hair in the back of that painting is virtually obscured, it conveys a lot more than the typical portraits of subcultural types that focuses on the idea of freaky people in strange but beautiful clothes – that seems relatively shallow, or the stereotypical pictures – marketed, oddly enough, back to the goth demographic – of vampires and tragic heroines. These are real people with as much depth and dignity as the university president and the banking executive, and are equally deserving of being painted thus, actually, probably being painted a little better, because I’ve seen too many portraits of important people that are just a good likeness with a few props here and there to say what they did and very little soul, and these have soul.