TONY SCHERMAN LECTURE AND EXHIBITION
SMITH COLLEGE DEPARTMENT OF ART
Title: Tony Scherman Artist Lecture:
Location: Graham Hall, Department of Art, Smith College
Details: Canadian encaustic painter Tony Scherman will lecture on his work,
including the recent series Difficult Women. The lecture is in conjunction
with a solo exhibition by Scherman at Oresman Gallery, Department of Art.
Location: Oresman Gallery, Department of Art, Smith College
Dates: December 04 2015–January 30 2016
This solo exhibition features three encaustic paintings from Scherman’s recent
series Difficult Women. The following text by Sky Goodden explores the
implications of this series.
Troubling Our Trouble with Difficult Women
In terms of timing, Tony Scherman’s Difficult Women presents an auspicious
inquiry, one that could be witnessed as a searing—even insensitive—challenge
to its contemporary audience. What makes a woman difficult? he asks. Who do
we associate with the term, and how do they get portrayed? The contemporary
moment’s regard for the subject of women—and their difficulty—is rife with
unseen hazards. Without naming names (because they’d quickly become dated,
but also, they don’t really matter; recent celebrity citations regarding the
perceived subject only serve as footnotes to a greater body of commonly-shared
experience, as we’re quickly learning), the world is actively reflecting on what
makes a woman difficult, and what her punishment or reward has been—and
ought to be. It’s a heady time to frame this ever-shifting subject.
On reflection, however, history doesn’t suggest a moment when this set of
questions—and their presentation by a male artist, no less—would not feel
timely, challenging, and both obtuse and overdue. Indeed, this series presents a
provocation of contradictions and constancy that is ripe, and deep, and deserving
of our fierce and prolonged consideration. At its base, Scherman asks us what a
difficult woman is, and what it means to frame one. How does this subject go
embodied, and portrayed? What’s the difference between these? In our looking,
we should know an answer.
Continuing his decades-long articulation of the figure in encaustic painting,
Scherman produces built-up impastos that take on new meaning, and drive down
into new metaphysical layers. He develops on past series that similarly named
their subjects (The Rape of Callisto, Black October), but here, their description in
a medium that both shrouds and appears to reveal (like a wax-veiled altarpiece in
the middle stages of its cleaning) resonates in profound and enduring ways. This
can be explained by the sensitivity of its subject, but also the nature of its
author’s chronicling. Here is a man, describing women, and calling them difficult.
And he’s painting them as unresolved.
The works’ troubled description, then, feels significant. Some are built up (The
Bread Thief), others laid bare (Cixi). Each one, though, has been marked by its
making, and these gestures to process—and as such, thinking—feel important to
this series. An outbreak of irresolute strokes darting out from a woman’s neck; a
network of drips and dabs maligning a woman’s nose and mouth; a clouding of
some features, and a clear illustration of others (Scherman describes his as
“notational” painting), carries an emphasized significance when he’s lending a
brush to subjects whose portrayal (and canonical position) is anything but clear.
This long-established technique of his (continuing a process established by the
Egyptians and continued through artists like Georges Rouault, Diego Rivera, and
Jasper Johns, and in so doing, infusing a sense of historicity in his contemporary
portraiture) quickly shifts from gesture to comment in Difficult Women. His
subjects go remarked upon rather than treated; their status becomes justly
complicated. And rightly so: a resolved portrait of these subjects just wouldn’t feel
true. Scherman troubles the surface so that his material might trouble us, too, the
Canadian artist Tony Scherman, born in Toronto in 1950, received an M.A. from
the Royal College of Art in London, England, in 1974. Since then he has had his
work in various corporate and public collections and has exhibited in solo and
group exhibitions in both North America, Europe and China. He has also
participated as a visiting critic and lecturer at universities, art colleges and art
galleries in North America and Europe.
Scherman’s encaustic method of painting combines pigment and wax to create
works with multiple layers. The dripping and heavily built up wax surface gives
the work a visceral edge and a remarkable sense of depth. Tony, along with
Jasper Johns are considered the leading exponents of the encaustic medium.
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