They Were Carrying Guns, But I Had My Camera: The work of Guy Palmer Merrill

Words, Not Pictures: Instead of more images from the studio I wanted to share a recent essay I wrote for my friend Guy Merrill, to accompany his most recent body of work and exhibition Interior Hunter, on view at Threshold Gallery @ Mithun. The show runs through May 26th.
https://www.guypalmermerrill.com/interior-hunter

They Were Carrying Guns, But I Had My Camera: The work of Guy Palmer Merrill

        I’ve had the pleasure of knowing Guy Palmer Merrill and his work for over a decade. As I’ve watched his work evolve over this period one thing is always constant: he’s always looking with uninhibited curiosity. It’s a trait that gets lost with age as we grudgingly shift away from the innocence of adolescence into the complexity of adulthood with the burdens of modern life shrouding the clarity of sight. That state of inhibition is one found in children, where everything in the world is new: The joy of seeing a bubble burst for the first time or that first bite of birthday cake, elicit a profound response because they are FRESH. And that’s Guy: taking that first bite of cake as the eternal kid (in the best possible way, of course).
In our latest studio visit and conversation about the new body of work one thing he said struck me as quintessential Guy and summed the work up perfectly: “We were out on this hunting trip partying and having a good time and everyone else had guns but I had my camera.” The statement struck me as funny, weird, a little bit unsettling and reminded me that regardless of where he is or what he is doing, he’s always thinking (scheming?) about making things and putting together divergent elements of the world. For Guy, vision is an accumulation of meaning and sight and he is always LOOKING.

A Mountain is Never a Mountain
      I think about all of the interesting questions that Guy’s new show, Interior Hunter, poses to us as a critical embrace of the everyday that at the same time looks to transcend it. And what isn’t cooler than transcendence? The title piece Interior Hunter provides a good example: an uninspiring office interior in disarray meets a hunter walking through scrub brush in a bright-orange safety vest. These disparate images sit worlds apart in reality, but share the same comfortable space here, weaving a strange narrative of time, place and ecosystems. Taken individually, each image would have little to say, but in their commingling and juxtaposition a new narrative flourishes that does more than each could obtain on its own. This image- and all in the show- begs the question: What is happening here and what is my complicity in it?

      Taking in this body of photographs (and the sole painting in the show- Perpetual Twilight) it’s not surprising that Guy is a painter by training. The work has many of the sensibilities I associate with the “slowness” of painting and looking at the world, while combined with the immediacy of the photograph. It’s easy to miss the importance of process in the work, but each piece is composed of multiple images (photographs and actual physical sculptures), many layers and then painstakingly built up over time. So being able to step back and see “the big picture” by allowing images and ideas to gestate is a huge part of the process for Guy. I like to refer to this as the “Unfocused-Focusedness”: If you’re in too tight you won’t get it all, but if you step back it will all come into focus. Take the recent work Off Campus Rubble: The photographs that make up this composite image were taken years apart and in different parts of the country, but memory is part of vision and the subconscious is a powerful thing. The initial photographs are what Guy describes as “field recordings” and had little value in themselves but each held some kernel of truth that functioned well with the others to create meaning. Having the awareness of how things work together and mingle on the page is the central problem Guy is trying to solve. They are photographs that dangle a bit of truth down to us, then quickly snatch it back. It is so fake it’s almost believable, or does that just make it more real?

Undertones: Fragile Ecosystems and Delightful Terror
        And so I get dragged into these photographic landscapes but they aren’t really scenes. Even with all of his formal knowledge of art and composition Guy is not trying to recreate a scene. He’s really just luring us in to accepting the image enough so he can tell us what he really thinks, and he seems to be thinking a lot. These photographs present us with a lot to dig into: Good artists always make references to the past in direct or indirect ways and Guy’s work is not lacking in this regard. Immediately artists like Albert Bierstadt, JMW Turner, Caspar David Friedrich, William Blake, Frederick Church and a host of others come to mind as I respond to the sublimity of the images. But this feels like a dead end because it’s not just that. Each image always has a bump in the road that jolts us out of our classical reverie and brings us back down to the here and now. When I look at Lost Scaffold I have to ask myself: What is that scaffolding doing in that dense forest? It’s a bastardization of a bucolic, perfect green world and it really has no place. In fact, none of the carefully integrated objects or buildings or humans have any place in the backdrops of the natural world, which are so faithfully depicted. On closer inspection I find them more like abominations of the sublime 19th century landscapes in front of us. Religious visions start to filter down to me as the modernistic office building and mall become our twenty-first century gods. Who holds power in any of these situations- Corporations? Monoliths? Mountains? The mall? The landscape pales in comparison to these declarations of power.

         Edmund Burke, the 18th century philosopher-statesman, used to describe that sublime state as a “delightful horror”. It is to confront the opposing reality that what gives us pain may also give us pleasure. And isn’t that the world we live in today? We are perpetually dwelling in a state of uncertainty and Guy’s work pits man against nature in a very literal way, balancing on a precipice.

        When I first saw some of these photographs leaning against Guy’s studio wall out of the corner of my eye (like Dandelions, 2019) I thought the images and objects that occupied them might be actual things. And maybe they are real? I think they are- maybe not literally, but I see the ideas he presents everyday as I move through Seattle, framed by the window of a bus or a classroom- Mount Rainier looming large in the background with a new construction hurrying along twenty feet away from me; or the majestic, whitecapped Olympic Mountains softly asserting themselves amidst a bank of cranes humming along with impeccable efficiency. As I look around I can’t help but think: We truly are such incredible creators and these are acts of pure genius- look at all the incredible things we have filled the world with! And at the same instant I simultaneously feel a shudder of despair, and have to ask: but is it good? and a knot forms at the base of my stomach. In the end, I don’t draw any final conclusions from Guy’s work but I come away with a heightened state of awareness of the world, cautious, a little bit on edge, and questioning everything that I see. So Guy’s work brings me back to reality- my reality- where I continue to examine the world for all the good, the bad and the in between, and sometimes I just hang on for dear life. Only Guy Merrill would take a camera to go on a hunting trip…. happy hunting.

-Michael Lorefice
  Seattle, Washington, April 2023

Jetty, 2019-2023, Archival inkjet print, 28.5 x 30 inches

Off Campus Rubble, 2023, Archival inkjet print, 30 x 20.25 inches

Dandelions, 2019, Archival inkjet print, 26 x 36 inches

Notes From the Studio

Just a quick blog post:

I wrapped up another painting in this series (Hic Sunt Leones) and I’m expanding in the scale of these works, along with starting some works on paper. I hope it will speed up the process a bit, make things less precious and provide a spring board for working out some new ideas (and perhaps keep costs down a little- damn the cost of wood!).

In this unnamed work on canvas I’m exploring some of the same themes in this series (basic elements of earth, water, mountains, sky, etc.); the sublime of natural world; and the sheer awe of observational wonder. I still consider this body to be observational, even though I’ve deviated far from the knowable “rational” world. And luminosity and light are very key. It makes me think of the (supposed) dying words uttered from James Mallord William Turner’s lips: “The sun is god!”.

In the second image you can also see some sketches on the wall of my son and wife. There are drawers full of these in the studio….

More Notes From the Studio: Hic Sunt Leones

Another long overdue update with some images. Works from the Hic Sunt Leones series continue, and currently are starting to increase in scale. I’ve been going back and forth between heavily built up surfaces and scumbling over the top of texture with thin layers. Although I took these photos only a few days ago, the paintings are already drastically altered from what you see.
It has been a constant process of paint/edit, as the paintings slowly take form and unify.

The pain of learning what is lost/ is transformed into light

Posts from the studio have been infrequent, but the work continues. The paintings in these images are part of the body of work Hic Sunt Leones. The imagery continues to be derived from basic elements: land masses, bodies of water, trees, sky, stars and the forms/marks push and pull through two- and three-dimension forms. Most of the titles from this body of work (like the title of this post) come from the work of poet W.S. Merwin, whose words have had a large influence on my thinking. I find many of the themes of his prose to be relevant - an undercurrent of loss, the rugged beauty of the nature world, the folly of man- but always with a tinge of hope (or at least I think so).
Most of the work is a VERY modest scale- around 26 inches. I hope to start some larger works on canvas and paper soon - stay tuned.

More Scratchy Drawing

I’ve been mostly drawing over the past two months or so; the studio days have been less frequent than before and the drawings have been flowing out more freely than anything else. The drawings below are a continuation of the body of work from my recent book that deal with more personal, political and social issues. They are FAR more representational than my other work. With everything going on in the world there is a LOT of thoughts going through my head and these drawings are so succinct and immediate (at least I think so).

I am the cosmos, 2020

Untitled (Amerikkka)

Hic Sunt Leones- "Here There Be Lions"

Here are a few studio shots of work from the series “Hit Sunt Leones”. This is a phrase early cartographers would write on a map where it lay beyond human knowledge and roughly translates to “Here There Be Lions”. I’m drawing from a range of artists here, including early 20th/mid-20th century American & European painters, post-war abstraction, and some literary sources like William Blake & W.S. Merwin. These are slooooow paintings…..

Romantic Drawings

I've been making some break throughs with painting recently (perhaps I'll post an image of a sketch soon) but I started another series of crayon drawings, a medium I haven't worked in since last summer. This is one of them. They are becoming more romantic, saturated, psychedelic, heavenly, as I think about some great artists like Charles Burchfield, Arthur Dove, Gregory Amenoff, and, of course, David Hockney. You can see the black and white sketches above it, which are twice removed from observational drawings.

December Studio Blog: A Painting?

I've been making paintings again after an absence and for the past four months I've painted and then come back in the next day only to paint over it or scrape it off and start over. This is an image of the first painting that I've kept for longer than a couple days, with the study for it (on cardboard) next to it. I'm still not sure how I feel about it. There are a few other studies that relate to the Photography and Text paintings I've been making over the past few years. We'll see what happens in January...