It was also, as Finch insists, a pure impressionist effect of colored dots, like a tiny patch out of a Monet landscape.
Like the impressionists, with their half-absorbed ideas about color and vision, he's interested in the "struggle between science and subjectivity," between what we perceive and how we feel about it. It makes his work "poetic" in the full, rich meaning of that overused term: not overwrought and underthought, but rigorous and probing in its encounter with reality.
Spencer Finch's installation, left, and its reflection in the basement of the renovated building in New York City where the anchor tenant is Bloomberg LP, the financial media company. Finch's piece is titled "Sunrise (Over the Atlantic Ocean, September 6, 2004)".
(Blake Gopnik - The Washington Post)
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In his most recent show at Postmasters, where he's been on the roster for a decade, there was a suite of lovely watercolors. Large sheets of thick rag paper were left almost completely blank, except for a single brightly colored blotch in a top corner. And each of those blotches represented a valiant attempt at reproducing the effect of a gorgeous butterfly seen at the far edge of the artist's peripheral vision.
The attempt happened to be futile: The only thing that could truly reproduce the effect of a butterfly seen out of the corner of your eye is . . . another butterfly seen out of the corner of your eye. Looking straight at a fuzzy patch of painted color is another thing altogether. But that really doesn't matter. What matters is the effort to translate a real-life visual experience into artistic terms -- just as a poem takes the world and puts it into words that try to hint, at least, at the original, even as they know they'll mostly fail.
"The fallen blossom flies back to its branch; a butterfly" -- that tiny poem by 16th-century master Arakida Moritake, inventor of haiku, was Finch's inspiration for making his piece about perception and its limits.
Finch has made several extended visits to Japan, including a junior year abroad spent in Kyoto, on leave from Hamilton College in Upstate New York. Learning the rudiments of Japanese pottery was the first mature expression of his artistic inclinations, and he followed up on it when he returned.
With a BA in comparative literature from Hamilton under his belt, Finch signed up for graduate studies in ceramics at the venerable Rhode Island School of Design. But he says his radical, and radically leftist, ideas about what ceramic art could be got him kicked out of the program. He was re-admitted to the school's sculpture department, which had more patience for peculiarity. Finch's graduate exhibition consisted of renting out his allocated space to the Monet jewelry company, for a display of its "tacky costume jewelry" that spoke about beauty, and its commodification, and the art world as a counting house.
In the 15 years since then, Finch and his practice have softened a good bit. He's even happy to learn the kinds of traditional skills involved in painting watercolor butterflies ("that's become a pleasure again," he says). But there's always toughness lurking at the heart of what Finch makes.
One of his most impressive recent works, "Sunlight in an Empty Room (Passing Cloud for Emily Dickinson, Amherst, MA, August 28, 2004)," was inspired by a poem by Dickinson, the ultimate combiner of the soft and tough. Once again, Finch's art began with light and color readings, but this time taken in the back yard of Dickinson's home. He measured the light in both noonday sun and in the shadow cast by a passing cloud, and set out to reproduce those two effects -- just as Dickinson herself might have felt them -- for visitors to his New York gallery.
After much hair-pulling -- and much brainstorming with Forsythe, who's planning to build a dance around a similar Finch piece -- the artist came up with an elegant solution. In the middle of the room, he suspended a mass of blue theatrical gels, crumpled and assembled into a passable "cloud" about 15 feet across. And on the wall behind it, he hung a bank of 100 bare fluorescents tweaked to give a full-sun effect.
Stand in front of the lights, and you're the young Emily at her most cheery, reveling in "as much of noon as I could take /Between my finite eyes," as her poem says. Pass to the other side of Finch's "cloud," and the blues set in: You're in the shade alongside the cautious, introspective, older Emily, who let her soul alone look out "Where other creatures put their eyes, / Incautious of the sun."
Either way, Finch has complied with the request that launches a Dickinson poem he doesn't cite: "Make me a picture of the sun," she asks. "So I can hang it in my room -- And make believe I'm getting warm."
