Gus Blaisdell Collected

On In: Outside: Guy Williams, Selected Works 1976–1982

∙ 154 ∙ on in: outside Guy Williams, Selected Works 1976–1982 ■ Color will clarify what seems obscure. A number of remarks made by Guy Williams in the interview accompanying his 1976 show at LAICA lead me to condense their various senses into that single sentence and to use it as a kind of guide throughout the course of this writing. Since practice reveals conviction in painting as surely as justification and argument ground and elucidate belief, I regard the guiding thought of color clarifying obscurity as an article of faith typical of a colorist. Each painter creates a tradition against and within which he works. It comprises the history of his work to date, but it is usually retrospective, looking back over its shoulder in the hopes that a clarified past will provide a limpid present. What criticism desires is here parallel with what the artist wants: to make the present clear in terms of the past, to make the past useful to the present, and not to reduce the present experience to the past. With the variety and depth of Williams’ work over the years there is little danger of reduction in any direction. What is almost daunting is the variety and richness, as though a painter could work in terms of Leibniz’s ideal for a scientific system: the simplest set of principles expressing the richest variety of phenomena. However obscurely expressed, I believe that the sentence guiding my essaying here is one such axiom. What is it about color alone that makes it a subject for works of art? Thinking about Guy Williams’ work has given me a new appreciation of this question and has provided me with whatever understanding is beginning to dawn in me. We habitually think of color in terms of its traditional achievements, in particular those of modeling in painting by value contrast. This construes on in: outside ∙ 155 color as a means and the colorist as one who, as the dictionary defines the term, is skilled in achieving special effects with color. The colorist can produce any desired effect, these being, no matter how slightly, still basically ulterior to color itself.When confronted with a genuine response to abstract art, however, one we feel we would like to express, we find ourselves confounded and silenced by the fact that the cause/effect terms traditionally at our disposal are hopelessly crude.They debar rather than enable expression. Yet the contrary of color as a means seems equally hopeless and confusing . For what could it mean to regard color as an end? Color is, after all, so ephemeral. It is an accident, not an essence, and some sin nearly mortal must certainly result from conflating the two.Yet in painting, color, accidental or not in the scholastic realm of metaphysics, is of the essence. Are we then to try to think non-causally and essentially about something accidental? That is certainly desperate, and absolutely the wrong way into painting. Two remarks of Wittgenstein’s are worth juxtaposing to each other and to these thoughts. The first, from his personal notebooks, says that “the insidious thing about the causal point of view is that it leads us to say: ‘Of course, it had to happen like that.’ Whereas we ought to think: it may have happened like that—and also in many other ways”(Culture and Value, 35). Guy Williams, Yanonali Street, 1981, painted paper cutout, 30 in. × 42 in. 156 ∙ on painting The second remark comes from Remarks on Colour: “When psychology speaks about appearance, it connects it with reality. But we can speak of appearance alone, or we connect appearance with appearance” (#232). In another place in that same book, he says that psychology relates experience to the physical, refers it there, while what we do is relate experience to experience, referring it to itself in order to make it more fruitful. The last I take as an exemplum for criticism, the second for a way to thinking about illusionism in painting, and the first as a principle warning us not to preclude imagination by subscribing to a doctrine that subjects the imagination to utter constriction. What Guy Williams’ work demonstrates is that painting today is no longer a question of the technical, of special tools and workshop secrets, but of the painter’s continual rediscovery of what will count as painting, whatever the means and vehicles and media chosen—that it...