Don Resnick: The Poetry of His Painting

Early Evening 48x72

In Early Spring trees, tall and leafless, rise out of green undergrowth. The pale brown of the trunks, the vivid green of the undergrowth, are like the colors you would see if you went there. Sloping Fields has wedges of bright color, green, orange, and blue, and a wedge of darkness folded among them. If you went to New Hampshire you might see colors and shapes like these. "It is always something I've seen," Resnick says. "I have to experience it."

Wordsworth said that poetry takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity. The phrase "takes its origin" is essential. Experience is the starting point -- then creation begins. It is the same with the painter. He begins with memory, and this is tranquil - he isn't having the original experience, he is thinking about it. But the word "tranquillity" is misleading: all sorts of ideas are coming to the painter as he works, and these are what he paints. This makes art different from memory. The thing is happening now as he paints, in the present.

Mallarmé said that he was not describing the object but the impression it made. A painting by Don Resnick is the painting of an impression. I have seen him in the field, drawing rapidly in a notebook... a few lines and some shading, enough to remind him of the moment when shapes and colors came together and said, "Now!" It is this living, present moment he will try to recapture in the studio. Then he will place these things in the order that the painting needs.

He saw the rocks and dark blue sea of the painting titled Rocks, Old Tree, Sea and Sky, and it is very likely that he saw an old tree --you and I might have seen it. But would we have seen the tree he has painted, pulling the elements together and seeming to speak? It rises in its raggedness out of the landscape like a figure out of mythology.

The old tree is a marvel, a prophet out of an ancient tale, a Cassandra. The tree in the painting is not the tree the artist looked at -- it was created in the course of his painting.

But though he creates he does not destroy the world of visible, tangible things, does not abstract from the solid surface so that it collapses like a pack of cards into fragments of his own imagining. He recreates and makes new. The thing seen is more itself when he is through painting it -- "changed by eternity" as Mallarmé said.

The scenes in Resnick's painting are halfway between the things we perceive with our senses, which we misleadingly call "real," and the forms and relations we envision. This in-between world is the real one. At least it seems so, for this is how we live, between world and idea.

He infuses what he has seen with his delight and absorption in the act of painting. He humanizes the scene. A house or barn in a painting by Resnick seems to be thinking like a person. We look at the house, and it looks back at us. The house stands at a distance from other houses... visiting distance, unless these houses have quarreled and are not on speaking terms. Lives are taking place in this land - and seascape, within sight of rocks, sea, a jutting point of land. I wonder what it is like to live here. I have seen paintings of crowds that do not seem as filled with human life as a painting by Resnick of a field. The life in the painter fills the scene.

In Living at the Edge a green shoreline, massive, with red cliffs, stands up to all the strength of the sea. Opposites are meeting here, beneath a golden sky. In the upper left corner a white house peers out from trees. It is watching you make your way along the cliffs. The house knows the shore and sea. The house is associated with nature in a common life, the same sounds, the same skies. Something different from your life exists here - if you could go further into the painting you might know what it is.

In a painting by Resnick the seen and the imagined interact. Human life stands between such opposites. This is why his paintings demand to be looked at for a long time, giving rise to reflections and ideas. We are looking at ourselves.

Whatever thoughts and self-communings the paintings generate, they would not make such an immediate and delightful impression were it not for their vital colors. There is a language of colors. Rimbaud said that his vowels were "A black, E white, I red, u green, O blue." The colors of Don Resnick's paintings speak and invite you to walk by the shore, by the wood, up this road.

Louis Simpson, 1995