Kimberly Lyons
Basil King Works on Paper: Singularity, Dyads, Families and Mass
“But all lines, unless there is resistance cross . . .,” writes painter and poet Basil King in the poem “Victorian Times and After,” from his book of poetic prose portraits and poems, History Now (91). In considering King’s works on paper—which, by 2017, number nearly four times the amount of his oeuvre of nine hundred paintings—it is useful to consider his idea of contact and resistance. While not ostensibly meant to refer to his own visual art, this statement offers a key to the gestural activity within King’s works on paper.
I will consider here a subset of King’s works on paper and put aside works that are drawings in a series with paintings. The Bird Series is adjacent in most respects to King’s several series of bird paintings. While I have recently examined a few aspects of the Bird Series in a previous essay (Lyons, 2017), both the paintings and drawings deserve a wholly separate consideration. Only a few of King’s many works on paper are discussed here, and in every series that I mention there are multiple other drawings that are not considered. The body of King’s works on paper is large.
King’s line—made variously with charcoal, chalk, crayon, ink, and pencil, in both black and color—crosses and converges, interrupts and coalesces, interweaves and reacts, splinters and frays, intersects, charges, ignites and proliferates, snarls and blends. If the series are compared, a set of situations and cumulative interactions constellate into genres that I name singularities, dyads, families and masses, respectively. An example of what I mean by singularity is a drawing in which a humped figuration projects a slow uphill movement of one (figure 1). A Yeti-like figure, or stumped tree set loose, it’s drawn with a wet blackened ink in a horizon of space, and seems striated with sleet.
Figure 1. Untitled, ball point pen on paper,
originally drawn for
Richard Caddel's book of poems, Against Numerology, 1987.
Adapted as the logo of The Friends of Basil King in 2012.
In Figure 2 (below) a snake-like intestinal shape slowly contorts its way across a dark spattered space as a majestically roiled, rolled plasm that writhes and spills, takes space, and sends sparks.
Figure 2. 25 Hours for Marosa #6 - ink wash on paper, 4.75" x 9.5", 2017
Its twin (figure 3) has become transparent as the murk surrounding the figure and panels of thin middle-of-the-night ink is the context of its being. This hillock becomes a serpent, crawls sinuously uphill with a rump that brings to mind Matisse’s Blue Nude as well as the hills of South Dakota if you have ever seen them at night.
Figure 3. 25 Hours for Marosa #5 - ink wash on paper, 4.75" x 9.5, " 2017
The singularity transforms into a dyad with the set of drawings, Looking for the Green Man. This series is comprised of numerous drawings created over a span of years. The Looking for the Green Man paintings evolved as a set of highly specific characters. The drawings and the related Single File Series come from an underground, chthonic situation, in which the figure does not represent a figure wholly human, individualized or gendered. The search for the Green Man takes the artist to a kind of primal uterine laboratory where a singularity becomes two, and two becomes more. These figures may prefigure the realized individuals of the Green Man paintings or they reveal auras or layers inside beings. In an example (figure 4), a pharaonic golden figuration enclosed within a multicolored, intertwined cartouche seems to have generated other entities. As King writes: “Because we never lose our fear of the dark we need color” (HN, 22). The faceted tints in these drawings seem to push back the dark.
Figure 4. Single File series, mixed media on gouged card stock, 11.5" x 4 7/8", 2011.
Resistance may be read as a condition of vibrant self-containment. In two drawings of the series (figures 5 and 6) a braided, thick, smudged lines forms two figures from one.
Figure 5. Single File series, mixed media on gouged card stock, 13" x 5.5", 2011.
Figure 6. Single File series, mixed media on gouged card stock, 13" x 5.5" 2011
In another drawing the dyadic figures (mentioned above) seem looser, more watery, and more conjoined. “I am an animal,” King writes (10). The gold orb of a tipped head in the upper third of the drawing is like the sun between pincers of a scarab. I can only speculate that the search for the Green Man of Celtic lore brought King into contact with a zone within the poles of male, female, human, and mammal.
Figure 7. Single File series, mixed media on gouged card stock, 13" x 5.5" 2011.
“…there are seven of us” (137), King writes, in reference to multiple selves or facets of himself. Within the works on paper King depicts, in a set of eight drawings, configurations that may be read as families. These are groupings that I read as of another order than the singular and dyadic figurations. In these families, entities shadow and emerge from the stem of a root figure and contain minute human features yet also evoke simply mammality, trees and organic forms.
For example, forms gathered as they are in one image (below, figure 8), demonstrate relatedness and specificity of mood. In the twilight, enigmatic blue-gray tonality a figure seems hugged or enclosed by an engulfing larger figure draped across the space of the painting. Thick blackened outlines, auras or hoods, ring the leaning adjacent family figures in circles of night, which suggests a resistance to an outside.
For example, forms gathered as they are in one image (below, figure 8), demonstrate relatedness and specificity of mood. In the twilight, enigmatic blue-gray tonality a figure seems hugged or enclosed by an engulfing larger figure draped across the space of the painting. Thick blackened outlines, auras or hoods, ring the leaning adjacent family figures in circles of night, which suggests a resistance to an outside.
Figure 8. Untitled, unnumbered, from Looking for the Green Man series, mixed media on paper, 8" x 15", 2009.
In another of these paintings (figure # 9) the family warms slightly. Tonalities lighten to a worked heather brown and crosshatched cream. A lit leaked coral of a rising sun is glimpsed around figures standing on ice. In this drawing, the creatures suggest the mythological seal of the Scottish or Norse selkie. The smoothly humped-curved tipped heads, wreathed in charcoal, hover together. This family is an odd clan in silent communion.
Figure 9. Untitled, unnumbered, from Looking for the Green Man series, mixed media on paper, 8" x 15", 2009.
All of the drawings in this set depict arrangements of both figure and small group. Tonalities vary and lines align. Resistance is the differentiation of the limiting outlines of being. The figures nearly converge, and this near melding imparts a tension created by proximate curves, close to contact and explored in multiple variations of figures in this set.
Your torso erects
The structure
(History Now 64)
King’s myriad abstractions on paper work with multiple meanderings or repetitively arranged abstract lines. This gesture departs from the singular, dyadic, and family groupings (discussed above), and result in drawings that embody mass and entanglement (to use an apt term from physics). However, King continues to work out on paper his preoccupations with figuration, groupings, the line and pictorial ground, and environment by utilizing the possibilities of various media and formats of application, in order to realize forms.
King’s 2008-2013 series Thumbs, and its aligned series Fingers, were made with edges of hand, thumb, and fingers dipped in Higgins ink and applied to archival paper. King stated to me, in a 2017-studio visit, that he was struck by Titian’s paintings made in his old age (which King viewed in the Venice Academia). In these Titian had used his fingers. “You can see the marks on the paintings,” King noted. In the multiple drawings of King’s Thumbs and Fingers series, repeated marks in horizontal bands, vertical streaks, and sets of rounded forms are combined to make a vocabulary of calligraphic “letters.” Resistance here lies in gravity as it pulls down the free riding streams of ink, so that in the fall there is a succession of echoes and drips that make for an x-ray transparency effect that is weirdly fascinating and poignant (figures 10 and 11). These are not preparatory drawings; but, instead, make up a wholly distinctive body of finished work that comes out of King’s preoccupation with groupings, relation, tension, resistance and movement, the possibility of the line, and forms that arise out of the pool of human historical mark making.
Your torso erects
The structure
(History Now 64)
King’s myriad abstractions on paper work with multiple meanderings or repetitively arranged abstract lines. This gesture departs from the singular, dyadic, and family groupings (discussed above), and result in drawings that embody mass and entanglement (to use an apt term from physics). However, King continues to work out on paper his preoccupations with figuration, groupings, the line and pictorial ground, and environment by utilizing the possibilities of various media and formats of application, in order to realize forms.
King’s 2008-2013 series Thumbs, and its aligned series Fingers, were made with edges of hand, thumb, and fingers dipped in Higgins ink and applied to archival paper. King stated to me, in a 2017-studio visit, that he was struck by Titian’s paintings made in his old age (which King viewed in the Venice Academia). In these Titian had used his fingers. “You can see the marks on the paintings,” King noted. In the multiple drawings of King’s Thumbs and Fingers series, repeated marks in horizontal bands, vertical streaks, and sets of rounded forms are combined to make a vocabulary of calligraphic “letters.” Resistance here lies in gravity as it pulls down the free riding streams of ink, so that in the fall there is a succession of echoes and drips that make for an x-ray transparency effect that is weirdly fascinating and poignant (figures 10 and 11). These are not preparatory drawings; but, instead, make up a wholly distinctive body of finished work that comes out of King’s preoccupation with groupings, relation, tension, resistance and movement, the possibility of the line, and forms that arise out of the pool of human historical mark making.
Figure 10. from Thumbs - ink on paper, 4”x 6 1/2”, 2006.
Figure 11. from Thumbs - ink on paper, 4 3/4” x 7”, 2006.
Red, Green
White Yellow Rose
There is no suffering
No hate
When Josef Albers frees
The room of claustrophobia
(History Now 51)
These lines alert the reader that King has an ambivalence in relation to Josef Albers’ clean, vivid geometric forms. King notices an insistent affect of positivity. King’s own corpus of abstractions realize myriad interactions of the line and figure, and both mark and stay in the room of claustrophobia. In contrast to bright and reliable forms, King offers a realm of thick, hectic activity, energized marks and concentrated darkness.
The 2012 Flame Series demonstrates this nocturnal, lit, underground. In three sets of small graphic works, each 61/2" high and 51/4" wide, King drew with mixed media on card stock and gouged at the built up materials with a grooved tool. The dimensional abstractions that result from this process suggest aggregates of standing verticals. In one triptych of drawings within the Flame Series (figure 12), vertical yellow-crayoned ribbons stand as if the Les Demoiselles D’Avignon were multiplied into shards or ribbon as seen through a keyhole with a middle insertion of flickering cinematic light.
White Yellow Rose
There is no suffering
No hate
When Josef Albers frees
The room of claustrophobia
(History Now 51)
These lines alert the reader that King has an ambivalence in relation to Josef Albers’ clean, vivid geometric forms. King notices an insistent affect of positivity. King’s own corpus of abstractions realize myriad interactions of the line and figure, and both mark and stay in the room of claustrophobia. In contrast to bright and reliable forms, King offers a realm of thick, hectic activity, energized marks and concentrated darkness.
The 2012 Flame Series demonstrates this nocturnal, lit, underground. In three sets of small graphic works, each 61/2" high and 51/4" wide, King drew with mixed media on card stock and gouged at the built up materials with a grooved tool. The dimensional abstractions that result from this process suggest aggregates of standing verticals. In one triptych of drawings within the Flame Series (figure 12), vertical yellow-crayoned ribbons stand as if the Les Demoiselles D’Avignon were multiplied into shards or ribbon as seen through a keyhole with a middle insertion of flickering cinematic light.
Figure 12 "Flame" --mixed media on card stock with scraping-- each 6.5" x 5 1/4"; to be shown as a
group with the black and white image in the middle, 2012.
Using French oil crayons and Higgins ink on heavy paper King creates an image (figure 13) of aggregate loops morphing into vertical thick gouges that evoke a figuration of a metallic, sharp angularity reminiscent of Giacometti as the group of bunched, pleated figurations emerges.
Figure 13. Untitled, mixed media on card stock with scraping-- 6.5" x 5.25", 2012.
King’s families, in the Flame Series, are linked, complicated, sculpted streaks of light in a cave. Flame-like licks of hot color flicker around the marks. I photographed one of these flames in a visit to King’s studio and saw how the drawing emits a stained-glass brilliance (figure 14).
Figure 14. from a sequence of six titled Toledo, mixed media on card stock with scraping, 6.5" x 5.25", 2012.
The psychic realm, the inspiration, for this set of drawings may be Paleolithic cave art of Dordogne. In conversation with King over the years, he has remarked on his fascination with those phenomena. “Will I never stop waking up at night thinking about war?” King writes. He has written of his experience of World War II in London as a young boy and his prose often returns to a fraying worry about war. Concentrated clusters of marks and the line, and positive spaces around the various drawings of mass, describe a thicket that may allude to the forces of mass or aggression.
The Tiny Gold Dress Series (named after a book of poetry by John Godfrey with a cover drawing by King), also drawn in 2012 with sharpie pen on French paper, 30” x 22”, multiplies and reverberates the scraped line of the Flame and Thumbs Series and King’s denser figurations. The singular and dyadic constellations have become a wiry mass. These electrically sparked bundles are completely other than the muted deep tonalities of the Looking for the Green Man Series (discussed above). The icy white of the paper field and red, black and blue colored strings project a clinical, snowy sense of an EKG reading, as though the bundles depict an etheric charge measured by a jittery machine (figure 15). Amidst this set of nudes descending a staircase one may read two metafigures outlined in red, as their progeny reverberate. There is something communicated here about mass and something intuited about connection and vibrations.
The Tiny Gold Dress Series (named after a book of poetry by John Godfrey with a cover drawing by King), also drawn in 2012 with sharpie pen on French paper, 30” x 22”, multiplies and reverberates the scraped line of the Flame and Thumbs Series and King’s denser figurations. The singular and dyadic constellations have become a wiry mass. These electrically sparked bundles are completely other than the muted deep tonalities of the Looking for the Green Man Series (discussed above). The icy white of the paper field and red, black and blue colored strings project a clinical, snowy sense of an EKG reading, as though the bundles depict an etheric charge measured by a jittery machine (figure 15). Amidst this set of nudes descending a staircase one may read two metafigures outlined in red, as their progeny reverberate. There is something communicated here about mass and something intuited about connection and vibrations.
Figure 15. from Tiny Gold Dress series, felt tipped marking pens on paper, 20" x 30", 2012.
The periwinkle-whitened light in a void of “First Love” (figure 16) thickens into whorls, and the electricity is in the tangled signals. This is a looped figuration that pronounces a combustible circuitry. The resistance is the negative space acted against by the accelerated, layering loops.
Figure 16. First Love 1 - oil crayon on paper, 3" x 6"- 2011.
The 2013 Windows Series of a set of nine drawings brings the exploration of vertical, abstract figures into a new dimension. This set of 40x26 inch works of crayon on Stonehenge paper reconfigures the vertical bodies of the Flame and Looking for the Green Man Series into glowing, smoky violet and reddish-lit horizontal and vertical bars. Windows, very likely suggested by King’s studio, become transformed objects of study and enigma. We are directed away from the studio and the outside that windows intervene against, and into the paper’s pictorial possibility, against which the object/window is laid. Overall, this work is a moody, vibrant response to the work of the esteemed pioneering head of the painting program at Black Mountain, Josef Albers.
Figure 17. from Windows series - mixed media on paper, 22" x 30", 2010.
The set of seventeen drawings from 2017 titled 17 Minutes (8x9) and drawn with Higgins ink on heavy, handmade paper delineates jagged, interlaced lines, and evokes figuration and mass in a process of becoming and of becoming undone (figures 18 and 19). The stained, dark wash of the background in each of the two examples from this series has an organic cast of moistened soil, or an earthen wall that grounds the asymmetrical procession of these charged fractures.
Figure 18. 17 Minutes #2 - ink wash on paper, 8" x 9", 2017.
Figure 19. 17 Minutes #1 ink on paper with scraping, 8" x 9", 2017.
King’s paintings work also with many of the dynamics of his works on paper but the relative slowness in his application of oil paint, and the density and viscous materiality of the medium, compels another process and works out different intentions. Likewise, King’s paintings elicit a different response and set of realizations on the part of the viewer.
In his paintings, King is concerned with the canvas as a field and void, which register the sustained duration of the painter’s process. The paintings engage through art historical reference and vocabulary. In contrast, the works on paper register increased speed, less mediated impulse, and a dialogic exchange of marks.
King has noted that these works are composed while at a desk, a context that constructs an intimate relay. The lines and marks respond reactively to the hand and to the thought around the surface of the mark-making process.
In King’s seventeen books of writing, poetic line, prose paragraphs, personal narrative, poems and art historical quotations are braided together to construct an open-ended series, akin to the works on paper in their shared themes. King’s set of poetic prose pieces, titled Learning to Draw, offers micro histories of artists and, in many of these prose portraits, narrate a critical moment and confrontation with resistance. An account of the one portrait or history folds within the others. King offers his own biography in the same manner. Narratives of the artist’s movement and blockage, place and time, relate key junctures not unlike those in the iconoclastic and nontraditional histories of King’s mentor in his youth, Charles Olson. (In a 2017 essay “History Now: A Mythology,” and in an essay that is part of the present collection of critical appreciations of King’s work, Joshua W. Gardner elaborates further the relation of King’s writing to Olson.) I would add that, in the music of King’s poetic prose phrasing, there is a shared articulation with the poetry of John Wieners, who was a close friend to King, beginning with their student days at Black Mountain and thereafter. One could say that they shared a fierce devotion to the hard-worked for psychic liberation against resistances that is achieved, in part, through the poem. King writes in History Now, “I am / A creature capable of cutting my own umbilical cord” (13).
Via a graphic, expressionistic physicality, related dynamics are demonstrated in King’s works on paper. An interactive situation activates the glyph; spurs it into response and transformation. One sees in King’s processes shared drawing proclivities with Franz Kline’s use of black bundling configurations. Perhaps, also, there is a resonance with Agnes Martin’s use of striations and layers to project immanence, and with Michel Basquiat’s epic, linked incidents.
A late fall 2017 visit to King’s studio was an occasion to see a new painting series, Mirage II, with its vibrant, electric colors and sinuous forms, and to further look at works on paper. We sat down and talked about King’s drawing process. He remarked:
My works on paper are not parallel to specific paintings but sometimes I do a drawing to work out something that I
might paint. A "study." Hundreds of my drawings were done simultaneously with painting series. I go back and forth.
For example, the Baseball, Cards, Pigeons, Trees, Looking for the Green Man series and others. As for the hundreds
of pieces, I did with my hand and finger. I got the idea from a museum in LA's large collection of Japanese art, screens,
and miniatures. I wondered how I could draw a miniature. My efforts were unsatisfactory until I dipped my hand into
the ink. I realized I could use my thumb, fingers, and the side of my hand as instruments. I love to work in series and
paper is immediately available as are charcoal, ink, marking pens, colored pencils, oil crayons, etc. I think a drawing
is always contemporary. The immediacy of execution. There is never a problem about paper, but for canvas, I have
to buy stretchers, canvas, and I do a lot of sizing -- sometimes 12 coats to prepare for painting. I keep on sizing until
I feel I have the canvas and it is not foreign to me. However, paper! I can do six pieces in a morning. "I began to draw
before I knew what a drawing was. I do not think this just pertains to me I think this is what happens to most artist.
There is yet another context in which to consider these works. In September, 2012, a one-day conference on King was convened in NYC, which included two screenings. One was of the film Basil King: Mirage (made by Nicole Peyrafitte and Miles Joris-Peyrafitte), the other the video art is not natural: a speaking portrait of Basil King made by the poet and artist George Quasha. Quasha made the point that King’s creative process shared something with William Blake. A facet of that comparison emerges for me in consideration of Michael Grenfell’s essay “Blake and Gnosis,” in which Grenfell discusses how “Blake’s work is the golden string he offers us, and the creative output … is the city of Jerusalem to which he leads us; the building of which represents a psychic union of opposites experienced at a deep psychological level.” (Grenfell, 1996).
King’s works on paper share that vital psychic “space,” realm or zone, in which intuitions connect to the materialization of the mark at a deep psychological level. Abstraction embodies and even enacts contradiction, resistance, union, reconciliation. Zones and presences intermix, and a spectrum of beings emerges and develops within pictorial space. What is of vital interest to King, however, is to depict not opposites but “the seven selves,” a phrase that King has used to explain a sense of multiple selves, and the beings and abstracted entities in the work, all in states of becoming. Marks gravitate to and become a charged flux, a still disequilibrium in which singularities, dyads, groups and masses vibrate.
Works Cited
Gardner, Joshua. Journal of Poetics Research, 2017 “Joshua A.W. Gardner reviews Basil King.” http://poeticsresearch.com/article/joshua-a-w-gardner-reviews-basil-king/
Grenfell, Michael. “Blake and Gnosis.” 1996 http://www.michaelgrenfell.co.uk/literature/blake-and-gnosis-2/
King, Basil. History Now. East Rockaway, NY: Marsh Hawk Press. 2017.
Lyons, Kimberly. Dispatches, July, 2017. “Here is Another Somewhere: The Visual Art of Basil King.” http://dispatchespoetrywars.com/commentary/2017/07/another-somewhere-visual-art-basil-king/
Peyrafitte, Nicole Miles Joris-Peyrafitte. Basil King: Mirage, a 22-minute film produced by the Friends of Basil King, 2012.
Quasha, George. art is not natural: a speaking portrait of Basil King (youtube.com).