Artsplaining, With John Springer, Pt. 1
An interview series with John Springer, an artist living in France
Editor’s Note:
John Springer is an artist who lives and works in the south of France.
If that was all I knew about him, I’d have to assume he was a cool and collected guy. As it goes, I’ve known John for many years, and therefore know that “John Springer is an artist who lives and works in the south of France” is a little misleading.
He doesn’t seem particularly French, for instance, in large part because he’s from Charlotte, North Carolina. Nor, to be honest, does he look or act like an artist in the conventional sense. He wears Carhartt’s unironically and references The Office a lot. He recently founded an art collective called Society of Irregulars, which I assumed was some sort of self-aware joke, but whose named actually comes from Renoir, who proposed that members of said group “would have to know that a circle should never be round.”
John is also an outdoorsman, an educator, and a graduate of the MFA program at the American College of the Mediterranean in Aix-en-Provence. Over the past few months, we’ve traded emails on his new work, how he came about it, what it means to be an artist in 2024, and the roughly 50,000-year history of painting.
Do you enjoy painting? That sounds asinine, but I’m serious.
That question is not asinine. I enjoy being a painter, but the painting process is a combination of exhilaration and torture. In the way I paint — trying to render something in the moment while trying not to think critically, but just paint — that results in a lot of failures. When I finish one painting I’m rarely capable of telling whether it’s a success or not. I might think I did a good one and then realize later either by feedback or stepping away and looking a week after that it actually is not good at all. The paintings that end up being successful are often the ones I hated right after doing. It is exhilarating while painting, kind of like going on a run, but I am often swearing at my canvas.
What do you do with the paintings that are failures? Toss them? Or keep your mouth shut and sell them anyway?
Ideally I try to correct them in my studio but often they aren’t save-able without it becoming an entirely other painting. I am beginning to cut out certain parts of paintings where there is something nice happening to try and sell that. I used to just sell everything that I made, but that’s no good.
So obviously your technique has changed, if that’s the right way of putting it. Anyway, Sewanee Fall is substantially different from how you might’ve done that scene three or four years ago. What are you doing with this painting, and maybe by extension all your work, that’s new?
I would say that how I am going about painting in general is different. I haven’t painted from a photograph in years. So it is painting from life, but I started doing that really back in 2018. What I am doing now is much different than those early attempts. In the past I was trying to paint something specific in the hope that I could create something fascinating to the viewer through my unique colors and brushstrokes. I used to mix my palette at home and then go out and paint with the colors I had made. I already knew what I wanted my painting to generally look like before I began. I don’t think about it like that anymore. I start by looking at what I am going to paint on a given day and mix my palette based off the color harmonies I search for within the motif. The way my brushstrokes turn out are a result of drawing more than colorful embellishment. The color has to do with the depth. It’s not just yellow for the sake of yellow. Everything in the painting has to agree and adhere to itself. When I have reached a point in the painting where it has a wholeness that cannot be improved, I stop.
The trick is knowing when to stop or when to keep going, which is pretty difficult. There is a point in a painting at which the light turns on, and once you start to smother it you have gone too far. There is a general expectation in painting that you have to cover the entire surface of the canvas for a painting to be finished. There is a difference, though, in something being finished and something being complete. I have no problem leaving some canvas exposed, but where it is exposed should serve a purpose to the rendering of light and volume.
The difference in painting from a photo and painting from life has to do with how a camera works. The way a camera captures an image is not the same way which we take in what we see. Painting from life assists in rendering a relationship between the motif and the artist which is much more difficult to do from a photo.
Two things. The color has to do with the depth — what do you mean? And then, It’s not just yellow for the sake of yellow — to be clear, that’s an artistic decision you’ve made. Some artists, including some accomplished ones, would prioritize color over the approach you’ve described: color for color’s sake is part of the point. I tend to agree with your approach, but why is the alternative wrong? Or if not wrong, not exactly right?
I wouldn’t say the alternative is wrong. It is just something different than what I am pursuing. To be clear, color is quintessential to my process. I am looking to create a color harmony because that’s what exists in nature. Every color in nature (what we see) is tertiary, some particular combination of the primaries red, yellow, and blue. So for colors to be true to nature and our experience of it there has to be some form of a balance between it all. The harmony can be found in a particular form like Turner or Van Gogh, who balances his harmony with colors further out on the spectrum than say, Corot, who balances his color in less obvious nuances. It can be done in the imagination, but generally that artist has a lot of experience looking into nature, too. So if a painting is just purple and blue, then that is something else going on and not really in the same compartment of what I am exploring.
I am talking about literal depth, optically. Different hues of warm and cool colors can give the sensation of things being closer or further away. Like bluish green tends to read as more distant than a red orange. The drawing component is the values, light and dark, which create volume. And drawing with color makes the potentials for depth and movement endless. But there’s no formula, which is where the idea of a technique falls short. Once you try to tie it all together into one composition, that’s where the science goes out the window and imagination grounded in vision takes over.
A part of what I am doing is painting “the phenomenon of visual perception,” as my friend O’Neill says. That is an initial intention.
You’ve mentioned a few artists in particular. I know you’ve said Cézanne and Van Gogh are personal touchstones. Who else?
Yes, so I’d say:
19th century: Monet, Morisot, Pissarro, Corot, Constable, Turner, Goya, Delacroix
Pre-19th century: Rubens, Poussin, Rembrandt, Greco, Titian, Tintoretto, Michelangelo
20th century: Kokoschka, Giacometti
Also Romanesque, Japanese prints, and cave/rock painting.
Any common themes among these? Obviously Impressionism is a major influence and turning point for you.
They are all colorists (color-superior-to-line camp). The Japanese prints of Hokusai and Hiroshige and the connection to Monet and Van Gogh — which is a pretty studied thing — is something I have put a lot of energy into. Movement created through color and light. Fleetingness. I wrote my thesis on it. There is a lot to unpack there. One connection between Japanese prints and the Romanesque art of the Middle Ages is the neglecting of academic vanishing point perspective and instead rendering depth and structure with color and more of a brought-to-the-surface distance effect.
Ah, ok. So I’m guessing the line camp would be considered more classically inspired and, as you mention, academically trained? Ingres was known for his line.
There’s a major underlying communism trend happening as well. Not true.
[Editor’s note: not untrue.]
Yes, Ingres being Delacroix’s arch nemesis. To clarify, I think the Renaissance was great, or at least the best of the Renaissance was as good as any other time in art history. And before that with antiquity there is so much line, but used in a way so not the whole work of art depends on it. Lines that still let a painting or sculpture breathe and not make a painting or sculpture be an accumulation of separate definable entities. So something got lost after the early Renaissance once the use of mathematical perspective became almost mandatory in a painting.
Of course that is not across the board. The real trouble started with the neoclassical artists in the 1700s when they pulled an “all art sucks now, let’s go back and redo Raphael,” which of course they couldn’t. It mattered mainly coming into the 19th century when Ingres literally canceled any artist that was not in line with him. Not that Ingres isn’t a master in his own right, but he was establishing a trend of dedication to line over color that began to lose that wholeness that he found in the artists he worshiped from the Renaissance.
And lots of these trends, almost all, were governed by the patrons which was the church or the state, as you know. Lots of outside influence that was hard to fight. But there were those still dedicated to color that had maintained the tradition reaching back eons all the way through to Impressionism. Delacroix being the link between Rembrandt and Impressionism. The landscape element was coming around, too. Then there’s the introduction of Japanese art during early Impressionism, which affected about everyone. Something totally separate from the West.
Auden has a poem called “A Walk After Dark” that begins:
A cloudless night like this
Can set the spirit soaring:
After a tiring day
The clockwork spectacle is
Impressive in a slightly boring
Eighteenth-century way.
I like that. I am going to share it. Yeah, 18th century is weird and blurry. I honestly need to learn more about what was going on.
To return to Ingres and Delacroix, is it fair to say the latter won? Impressionism paves the way for the twentieth century, while Ingres remains trapped in a sort of prison of clean lines and precise geometry...
I would say that Delacroix having the principles he preached of color over line in the effort to make cohesive work did prevail in the end, and finally this was embraced and given a voice by artists of the future. But even through all Impressionism and Post-Impressionism and into the twentieth century the academic train continued in the mainstream. It’s the clinging to line and sacrificing individual artistic form for the doctrine of exactitude of answering all visual questions with concrete answers. A deletion of mystery.
Eventually the academics (Ingres’ students and their offspring) found ways to mimic what the Impressionists were doing, adopting more expressive colors and similar subject matter such as modern day, thus deceiving the public and screwing the Impressionists even more, because certain artists were mistaken and championed as Impressionists when what they were doing really had nothing to do with rendering light and depth — and thus life with color — at all. There are certain artists from that time period (I don’t want to say who) who are worshipped today, especially in America, who I would say took away from all the progress being made towards preserving colorist traditions, although having a similar stylistic look.
So in a way I think Ingres, who is really just a temporary player in the long line of suppression of authentic artistic form across all of art history, has continued to dominate and is just as bad now as was even then, or worse. Now we live in this paradoxical art world where there are no rules, even though the same forces that have always been applied still exist. It’s like “everyone just do yourself, but do it right.” Be free and show your inner spirit. Some artists are doing this, but I think the vast majority of the art world today exists in a neo-academia of the same line of Ingres, and I’m not just talking about the attachment to line, but a loss of tradition entirely. I’m talking about figurative art exclusively. At the turn of the century all sorts of things came out — as you know, Cubism and Fauvism which are really intriguing in their own light — but I’m not including this in my criticism of art today, although its massive popularity may have distorted the continuation of Delacroix (the heir of Rembrandt) via Monet, Cézanne, Degas, and Renoir, two of whom painted well into the twentieth century (Renoir and Monet). People associate Monet’s water lilies with Impressionism, but Monet’s panels at l’Orangerie were unveiled in 1927, over thirty years after Impressionism’s heyday. There were very few artists who continued Delacroix’s tradition (who for the record was not the premier colorist; cave painters were colorists, Giotto was a colorist) in the twentieth century. Giacometti and Oskar Kokoschka, and Leo Marchutz, Bonnard, Vuillard.
With Art Nouveau, Expressionism, and Dada, traditions got lost in the crowd. So now any reemerging “Impressionist” is probably just trying to paint like Impressionist paintings look instead of going about it in an approach of looking into nature and then creating as they did.
It’s not the new “Impressionist” or new “Post-Impressionist” painter’s fault. It’s just that the link in the learning has been buried like a fiber optic cable under the ocean of 20th century art movements. So the new artist is going about it blind and probably falling into the traps of aestheticism. I was one of these artists.
This interview has been edited for clarity. Stay tuned for part two.
In the meantime, you can find more of John’s work here.
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