Perspectives on Jack Whitten and the Birth of Abstraction with Jamele Wright, Sr.

What if paint is the vehicle and you are the medium? We dive deep into Jack Whitten’s Notes from the Woodshed with guest host Jamel Wright Sr., tracing how a life shaped by the Jim Crow South, pre-med rigor, and carpentry precision produced a studio practice built on invention. From the famed developer tool to a crow’s nest for high vantage points, Whitten redesigned the act of making—choosing systems over spontaneity and treating process like a living experiment.

Jamel brings a rich perspective as an Atlanta-based artist and professor whose work spans Georgia red clay, Dutch wax cloth, and large-scale textiles. Together we map the long road to abstraction—Turner’s atmospheres, Monet’s shadows, Cézanne’s form, and the New York School’s debates—while centering the Black artists too often written out of the frame. We talk Norman Lewis, Joe Overstreet, Sam Gilliam, and the way community quietly powers discovery, even as art remains a solitary grind. The result is a candid look at research, journaling, and “recipes” that transform failed trials into the first real painting, then the next ten that lock in the language.

Along the way, we wrestle with Whitten’s audacity—“May the history of Western painting die within me”—and why abstraction can be activism: engineering new tools, removing gesture, and insisting on thought as freedom. If you’ve ever wondered how to balance materials, memory, and ambition without losing your voice, this conversation offers a field guide. Press play, then tell us what rule you’re ready to break. If the episode resonates, follow the show, share it with a friend, and leave a quick review—your support helps more artists find their way.

Follow Jamele Wright, Sr. at https://www.instagram.com/artthenewreligion 

Make sure to follow us on Instagram here:
@justmakeartpodcast   @tynathanclark   @nathanterborg

Watch the Video Episode on Youtube or Spotify,

https://www.youtube.com/@JustMakeArtPodcast

Transcript

Setting The Stage And A Bold Book Rec

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Welcome to another episode of the Just Make Art Podcast. Today's episode is going to be all about Jack Witting. Now, this is not our first episode about Jack, and it's safe to say at this point it won't be our last. Both Tom and I are massive fans. We've been talking about this book, Notes from the Woodshed, for quite a while. If you have not yet read this book, just please do yourself a favor. If you only read one art book in 2026, make it this one. If you buy it and read it and don't love it, I will refund whatever you paid for it. Now, you do have to return it back to me so that I can regift it to somebody else, but that's my you'll love it guaranteed. Please go get this book. Now, for today's episode, we've got a special guest host, Jamel Wright Sr. And Jamel's somebody who I've got a tremendous amount of admiration and respect for, as both an artist and just a human being. He's become a great friend of mine over the last few years. Jerry Soltz in How to Be an Artist says, form a covenant. We talked about that in our Jerry episode. And I take that to mean that it is our responsibility as artists to surround ourselves with other artists who both challenge and inspire us. And Jamel definitely does both of those things for me. Over the last few years, we've had a lot of wide-ranging conversations about art, and I'm just grateful to call him a friend and a mentor. I know Jamel well at this point, but you may not, so let me give you a proper introduction. Jamel Wright Sr. is an Atlanta-based visual artist and professor whose work investigates the intersections of landscape, memory, and diasporic abstraction. Born and raised in Ohio, Wright moved to Atlanta at age 22, where he became an important organizer of art, jazz, and poetry events throughout the city. Seeing that many young artists lacked meaningful platforms, he founded the Neo-Renaissance Art House, a grassroots gallery that nurtured and elevated a new generation of emerging creatives. This experience led him toward his own artistic path. Wright earned a BA in art history from Georgia State University, focusing on African and American contemporary art, and later completed an MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York City. Wright's studio practice spans Georgia red clay, Dutch wax cloth, gesture drawing, and large-scale textile installations. His work explores presence, duration, and the in-between as active structures within black experience, often merging material experimentation with ecological and historical inquiry. He is exhibited widely, including solo exhibitions at the Gibbs Museum of Art in Charleston and the Albany Museum of Art, and his work is held in collections across the region. Wright has participated in residencies at Surf Point Foundation, the Vermont Studio Center, and Mass Mocha. And he received the Wingate Artist Fellowship at the Zuckerman Museum of Art. His public commissions include major works for the Montgomery Museum of Art and Hartsfield Jackson Atlanta International Airport. As a faculty member at Clark Atlanta University, Wright teaches studio practice, African American art history, writing, and professional development. He recently co-curated Inner Visions, an exhibition on black abstraction at the Clark Atlanta University Art Museum. He approaches notes from the woodshed with a deep connection to Jack Wynn's devotion to process, improvisation, and the studio as a site of becoming. And I'll just add, Jamel's work is tremendous, so please go check it out. He can be found on Instagram at ArtTheNew Religion. We've had a lot of conversations like this. Most of them aren't recorded. This one was. So I really hope you enjoyed it. Jamel, let's dive in. Hey, let's dive in. We've been talking about this for a while. Yes. And um I have been really looking forward to it. I'm super excited to have this conversation. I have to first off um just thank you for recommending this book to me. I had heard of it before, but in one of our conversations, um, you're like, you gotta read this book. And it has been a game changer for me. So I gotta thank you for that. I was trying to recall um how or and when we first met. I think it was Ty actually who connected us somehow. And I I believe it was when I was gonna be, I w I was about to be in Atlanta to do a project. And I asked Ty, hey, who do you who do we know? And when I say who do we know, I'm asking him who does he know in Atlanta, and that's kind of how we started chatting. But I guess let's jump in with this. Maybe just give a broad overview, just your experience with with Witten's work and specifically what do you love about this book, Notes from the Woodshed, that we're going to be talking about today.

Civil Rights, Tuskegee, And Becoming An Explorer

SPEAKER_04 4:39

Uh well, I'll start off by adding to what you were saying about me suggesting the book to you, was kind of based off of you know what I was seeing in your practice and how you work with materials. Um and thinking about Jack Witten and the way that he worked with materials, the way that he worked with paint, the way he experimented with paint, the way he was um creating devices or creating tools to work with paint. He was always rediscovering paint. So I thought that those two um with you and with that would be a really good connect. The book or Jacqueline's practice, we think about the 2,000 years of painting, right? Abstraction probably started around uh 1870 with like, I believe with J.W. and Turner. When you look at some of his seaside paintings, and the way if you look at the backgrounds of those paintings, then you'll see these kind of notes of abstraction. It almost feels like knowing what we know now, it almost seems like he was bubbled on something, but he didn't know how to quite do it because the camera hasn't really been invented yet or hasn't really been explored yet. So you can't really leave the leave the the history paintings or landscape paintings or pectoral figurative painting. Then you have Monet who does like these gesture paintings where um they're not calling a gesture yet. He's just trying to uh show us the light, the way the light looks upon an object. Not the object. He's not as invested in the object as much as the light and the way that it appears on that object, and how the light then reflects the color of the object that he is painting. So he's able to do something where most people had not done before was the that was coloring shadows, where typically shadows were always just black. But he was able to find like the blue in a shadow or these additional colors in shadows. So you have like these early kind of precursors of like um the impressionists that were kind of verging on like abstraction. And then you have Shizan who is kind of verging on removing the figure as he's continuing to paint this mountain. And as he paints the mountain and the landscape even more, you can see how the houses just become shapes, and the mountain just becomes a shape and then he's kind of breaking it apart. It's not so much about the mountain as much as it is about the act of painting, the practice of painting, and the practice of excavating this, you know, this landscape that he's he's doing consistently because he's almost painting this mountain consistently, and then we have like cubism. Cubism was kind of like blocking things out, and then you have cubism that begins to break down the form and flatten it. So when you have George Barack and Picasso breaking down the figure, when you see Matisse and Picasso start looking in the African mass, so there's this interesting catalyst that's happening at this time where these ideas of painting are now leaving the photograph and leaving the figure, and now we're just really thinking about painting, but we still aren't sure like what does it truly look like to leave the figure or an object or a landscape. And then something magical happens. Norman Lewis, Jacket Pollock, Jacket Pollock, when he looks at a painting that he completes with Lee Krasner and says, Is this even a painting? So we had to go through surrealism, we had to go through Dada, we had to go through these things that are allowing us now Kadinsky who is using anesthesia. So that's what Kadinsky had, where he's able to uh do that. Um so and then you have Helmhalf Clint who does, you know, begins with geometric abstraction, and then Genie Stro Strobel who kind of starts these splatters, and then Jackson Pollett sees those and begins to explore that. And now we're starting to see where the camera no longer has influence in the the painter's life, and then people are now because of Deschamps are no longer thinking about painting for anyone else. It becomes individualized. And now we're trying to express how we're feeling which is really interesting because this is happening after World War One, World War Two, the wars that will end all wars. And because of that, then you have these different kind of aspirations that's happening. So by the time we get to Chat Witten, we're talking about civil rights. We're talking about the fact that, you know, he was born in Bessemer, Alabama, in Birmingham, Alabama, which I find really interesting because here you are the Jim Crow South. Here you are dealing with not only racism, but uh you know, he called it apartheid. You know, he's seen Klansmen, he's seen lynching, he's seen then he goes to Tuskegee where he got an opportunity to be a pre-med. So that kind of gives you a hint that he believes in an experiment, he believes in exploring. He's you know, and in a time where America has been explored and conquered and colonized, he becomes a modern day explorer. But he changes the media, right? It's no longer land, but it is this kind of ephemeral, liquidy, plasticky substance called painting. And when it gets to him, at first he's trying to fully express himself through the paint, and then he finds that that's not enough. And that's what we see in his life, this kind of quest to create something that kind of I believe opens it up to what is a not a painting that is referential to to the past 2,000 years of painting, but that is truly, as he says in the book, a Jack Winton painting.

SPEAKER_00 11:30

He was acutely aware of where of his place in historical context.

SPEAKER_04 11:38

Right.

Tools, The Developer, And Studio Ingenuity

SPEAKER_00 11:38

And that that's really evident throughout throughout the book. It's interesting, you know, as when you were mentioning his passion, his drive to develop something that is was uniquely his and his use of tools to accomplish that. I just I was thinking I know I shared this with you because I I uh I called you shortly after visiting the show at at MoMA this past summer. And one of my favorite things about that show was seeing the developer, you know, they had and so you know, being uh being a nerd when it comes to processing tools, just looking at the way that he constructed that. And I don't know which iteration that was. I don't imagine it was his first attempt, you know, to make that particular version. But yeah, that was uh absolutely, absolutely fascinating.

SPEAKER_04 12:27

Yeah. You know, we talked about um painting as a art, making art as a solo sport. I often call it a solo sport because you spend so much time alone. Yeah. But I would also say that like making art is really built on community as well. He had a really strong community. Like uh, who um was making paintings with his comb is where Jack Whitden began to see another way of making a painting. And he began to make these comb paintings, these these pick paintings, right? Hair pit paintings. And then um the rumor is that him and I just had his name William De Cooning. People call him Bill, but William De Cooning became friends with I think that William De Cooning is actually kind of interesting too, because William De Cooning is actually friends with a lot of the African American contemporary um painters during that time that oftentimes. I gotta jump in.

SPEAKER_00 13:35

De Cooning was Dutch. Oh, Dutch. Okay, great. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Those are my people. I'm like three-quarters Dutch.

SPEAKER_03 13:42

Well, you live in Minnesota.

SPEAKER_00 13:47

Anytime you see a D or a van or I mean there's a lot of others that that's a that's a detailed sign. Almost always. It's uh great from the from the Netherlands.

SPEAKER_04 13:56

So um, but those guys, you know, when it came to painting, like they would show these paintings of the New York school of painters, and Norman Lewis was one of those painters. But oftentimes they would have Norman Lewis stand on the on the side, and then they would cut him out of the paintings so that it would look like this New York school of painters were all white. I say that because they all used to meet at the same bar, the Cedar Bar, along with the African American painters, and they all would talk together. You know, they all knew who each other were. But you know, the New York school versus these African-American artists are often excluded from these conversations.

SPEAKER_00 14:41

He was he was a member of the Irrascibles. Yeah. But was not on that iconic photo.

Art As Solo Sport And Community

SPEAKER_04 14:50

Right. So Norman Lewis is considered like one of the first abstract expressionist painters, uh, first black ones. But then you but then when you go down this this line and you look at who's alongside of the Cooney, there were people like Joe Overstreet, there was Ed Clark, there was Jack Witten, there was a whole school of painters alongside of Aggar Goings, who like I had already mentioned, but out loving. Um there were all these abstractionists that were around the same time who were contributing to each other, and I believe were contributing to this New York school of artists as well. Because then you have the younger generation, which is the the Roshenbirds and the Jasper Johns, uh the Sytwamblys, Joseph Alberts, who's kind of an outlier to all of that, but he's influenced the way we look at color. When we go back to New York school, we talk about Rothko. All these people knew each other, they were in conversation. So to say that like an artist is just discovering on his own, you know, there were many discoveries that were happening, there were many conversations that are happening. And um Jack Whitden mentions, you know, some of his conversations with De Cooning in the book. But I was saying all that to say that De Cooning, the story is that De Cooning helped Jack Witten create the developer. He told him he needed a tool. But other sources that were close to Jack Um Witten at that time, says Joe Overstreet helped him to develop this tool. So we have these um different sources, these different um witnesses to what's happening during this time to create these new languages, right? So, yeah, so I think that that helps to kind of give us some context when we're talking about the book is kind of having some of this background information.

SPEAKER_00 17:02

Absolutely. I want to come back to something that you mentioned earlier just because I'm curious. We'll get to the book at some point, probably. Great. But uh I um I'd love to hear you unpack that idea. I I think I know what you mean when you say that art is a solo sport that also involves community, but I'd love to hear you talk more about that.

SPEAKER_04 17:23

Well, I mean, art being a solo sport means that like you spend a lot of time in the studio by yourself. It's like for me, my practice is probably like 90% research and 10% actually making the thing. What people see is the 10% in a very large scale. But oftentimes people don't know how long it took me to get to that. I'm currently researching some stuff now, and I've been researching it for like maybe two or three months of just like reading and resourcing and selecting materials and trying some stuff and it not being that successful, and then you know, eventually I'll be trying some more stuff here soon. Um, and then that won't even be that great, and then I'll finally get to a point where I have the opportunity to really like do it the way I want to do it, and then it's gonna be rock'em sock'em, right? But the thing is like people don't see that part of it. And that part of it kind of takes community. That part kind of takes like me having conversations with you about materials, me calling up Ty and and asking him how he did this thing, me calling calling Golden and saying, Hey, I'm thinking about this this uh type of paint, or I'm thinking about the way to use this paint. Can I do this to it, or is there a medium that I can do that to it? Um it's hanging out with some friends and you know, maybe they'll come to a studio and we smoke a cigar and we'll be looking at a painting that I've done and they'll go, hey, have you thought about this? But all the prep work is solo, all the painting part is solo. I can't have people in the studio while I'm making. They just at this point they just get in the way.

SPEAKER_02 19:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 19:19

You know, people asking questions, why are you using that blue rather than the other blue? You know, like why don't you flip it over? Doesn't this painting look better on its side? I don't need that conversation with you. Right now, like I was telling a friend, look, I'm just trying to learn how to make the thing. Let me learn how to make it first, and then we can start critiquing it. And I think that a lot of times people like even when I say learning how to make it, um, most people would think like, Well, you already know how to paint. Yes, I know how to paint, but there's a certain thing that you're trying to get to in a painting and you want it to resonate in a certain way. Like uh there's a quote in here. There's a quote, it's on page 63. He says, I had I got some pretty good paintings, but it did not please my third eye. Meaning that I can do some really great paintings, but they haven't really hit the mark that I'm trying to get it to hit.

SPEAKER_02 20:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 20:21

Right. You know? So I can do 15 of those until I finally get to that one like, okay, this is it.

SPEAKER_00 20:32

That's it.

SPEAKER_04 20:32

What did I do? What did I do differently on this one that I hadn't done in the past? 15 paintings, right?

SPEAKER_03 20:43

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Research, Recipes, And Listening To Work

SPEAKER_04 20:44

And you start building these kind of recipes, right? These kind of recipes for painting. And then once you get that recipe down, then you're like, okay, it's clicking. And that 15th one really becomes your first one. And then you start making the other paintings. And then you start going, okay, I got it now. I got it. And that's when you've learned how to make the painting. And also when people come see it, they're not questioning it anymore. They can go, Wow, that's something. And then at that point, you've done maybe after you hit that 15th one, then you do your next 10 to solidify the fact that you know that you know what you're doing. And then 10 is when you can really start talking about what it is you did, what questions you're asking, where are you trying to place yourself, where do these paintings placed um in history, where are you placing the canon? What are you trying to achieve? And Jack Wooden's talking about that throughout. He's talking about like using a developer and how he did like three or four paintings that day, but they didn't quite hit it. Or he did like ten paintings, but he only liked two. And that's why, like, you know, I look at your book and you've read it completely, what, twice now? At least. And I've gotten through half of it because I'm really meditating on things that he's saying, and I'm really in the place where he was in my practice. Where when he's saying something, it just makes me go, okay, I'm not alone, I'm not crazy. But I need to kind of like really kind of feel this out in my day-to-day, yeah. And let me get back to the studio and make some things. So it almost like I feel like sometimes I'm in conversation with Jack Witten as opposed to just reading a book. Sometimes I feel like when I'm reading it, it's like he's talking to me. And I'm like, yeah, exactly. Makes perfect sense. Yeah. Okay. So what do we do next? You know?

SPEAKER_00 23:09

Well, it's the the book is it's so dense with the deepest of of gems and and nuggets. We talked about this uh the other day when we were um talking about about uh planning for the episode here, but you know, we could literally close our eyes and open up any page. Right. And I'm curious to ask you what your more you gave me like I wrote like seven things down that I want to ask follow-up questions on from what you just shared. But you know, when you talk about research, a big part of that for me is is journaling and writing, listening to the work. You know, one of the things that I've done with this book is taken things that I've highlighted and and you know, this book is all marked up and I've got you know things that I've written down. I just opened up to a page.

unknown 24:00

Right.

SPEAKER_00 24:00

Bunch of ideas, one of seven of which I've I've executed. That's actually a good idea. I should try that. Um but I I've used it as a um uh like a almost like a prompt, you know, for journaling. I'll write what Jack wrote and I'll just reflect on it and try to absorb it and receive you know the data that's in.

unknown 24:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 24:23

So sorry, yeah. Uh I had a I I was gonna put that in the form of question. So is uh talk more about your what what research means for you and for your practice. Is journaling a part of it? Like what else?

Landscape, Diaspora, And Material Inquiry

SPEAKER_04 24:34

In a way, my undergrad is art history. So research to me is real like in-depth research. I believe that my making is a continuation of my making. So like if I I did Dutchwex paintings dealing with petite, then I started thinking, okay, well, I want to make my own petes. So then I learned how to hand dye fabric and then do petiking. And then I said, okay, well, I did that. Now I want to do like really large-scale pieces, hand dye in different colors, and then add in some fatiging and some discoloration. And then I was like, well, what could I can I dye these in earth? Can I can I use red clay because red clay stains? Can I dye these in red clay? And I did that. Can I paint on top of that? What does that look like? Okay, so now I've done that. Let me learn how to do some other painting techniques. What if I stain the surface rather than just paint on it? What if I stained it first? Looking at Peter Bradley and Helen Frankenthaler, how does that look in comparison to just painting it? Right? What do I develop out of that? And I'm note-taking these things. I'm looking at these artists, if I'm looking at staining, I look at Peter Bradley. Um, if I'm looking at like Sam Gillian, I'm Al Loving, I look at William T. Williams, um, because of the way that he uses these directional forms. I look at uh JW and Turner a lot, Robert Duncanson uh landscape paintings. So I'm thinking about landscapes, thinking about how we're into the land. Over the past couple of years, I've been researching landscape painting versus abstraction. Thinking about historical paintings, thinking about Amazon Kiefer, again Robert Duncanson, Edward Bannister, J. David Turner, Wendzel Homer, like those guys right there are kind of like in the background of my thinking. And then, but the methodology that I'm thinking I'm using is abstraction. So then I start thinking about Joe Overstreet. Joe Overstreet was really interesting because of he did something called vernacular architecture. So he's reshaping the campus, having it hover in space. He currently has a show in Mississippi that I want to go to. It was in Houston, the Vanille Collection, and I missed it. There's that, and then Sem Gilliam and Our Loving, they kind of like teach me about color. But when I'm looking at form, I'm thinking about like Sai Twambly and gesture painting, Basquiat, the way that Basquiat was able to level the surface, like he could put the figure there and put the gesture there, the hand gesture there, and even them out. Like he's the first person that's been able to like balance the figure and the gesture that abstraction at the same time.

SPEAKER_02 27:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 27:46

I guess I'm really kind of giving you a lot of my secrets, but but not really. The thing is, is like I'm studying these painters, but side but the side part of that is I'm currently looking at the American South within the context of landscape painting. And then particularly Georgia, because I live in Georgia. So I'm thinking about like what is the land, how does the land offer, like the land of Georgia in contrast to the Hudson River School painters. So that's kind of like where I've been for the past two or three years. Um so when you look at a painting like uh Is it Siberian Salt by Jack Witten, when you're looking at those uh huge like swipe paintings, the developer paintings, thinking like even he says, I'm not trying to create a landscape. I'm trying to get away from the landscape, right? But I'm kind of interested in the landscape because I'm kind of like next door to where he used to live. My parents are actually from Birmingham, Alabama. So understanding that landscape and understanding artists like Thornton Dyle and Lonnie Holly, I really see myself as like how do I gather all these artists that I've mentioned, put them in a box, or do like we used to do in when I used to work in restaurants where you get a glaze, you have to boil everything down to it's just like a sauce, and then make that sauce. So I'm thinking about the research as opposed to how we deal with the land. What is the land? Why is the land? Why do we think about the land in this way? So very theoretic idea of what does land mean and our position in the land and who are we amongst the land in the land. I think about that. But then I'm also thinking about these painters and how they uh work their practice, and then how do I then meld those two things together? When people ask you a lot.

SPEAKER_00 29:56

That's a lot. I love it. We're in it. We're doing it. We're in it. Yeah, we're in it. When people ask you, while looking at your work, how long did this take you? How do you answer that?

SPEAKER_02 30:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 30:11

Um I actually, when people ask me what I do, I actually just tell them I'm a college professor. I stopped talking about being an artist to most people because of that, that like 15 minutes it took me to kind of explain to you like how I'm getting to a painting.

SPEAKER_00 30:30

Sure.

SPEAKER_04 30:30

Right?

SPEAKER_00 30:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 30:31

The average person is not really interested in all that material.

SPEAKER_00 30:35

Right.

SPEAKER_04 30:35

They're just kind of asking me, like, okay, so how long did it take for you to make that?

SPEAKER_00 30:40

Right.

SPEAKER_04 30:40

Yeah, but it's been taking me two or three years to even figure out what it is I wanted to make. It's been taking me experiment after experiment of learning how to die, buying all the material so I could die in my backyard. You know, I spent a whole summer outside nine o'clock in the morning till nine o'clock at night, hand dyeing fabric.

SPEAKER_02 31:03

Right.

Time, Labor, And Capitalist Timers

SPEAKER_04 31:04

You know, so like how long does it take for me to make that? Like, that's really it's really kind of like this American concept of trying to quantify time and trying to put my thought process in the context of capitalism.

SPEAKER_00 31:29

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 31:29

Because they want me to be able to qualify and quantify my time to justify them buying, or I call it investing, yeah, in an idea that will then lead to another idea.

SPEAKER_02 31:50

Right.

SPEAKER_04 31:51

As if every painting is a proposal, as opposed to every painting being an opportunity for the viewer to see something in life that they've never seen before.

SPEAKER_00 32:04

Yeah. That it that is a very industrial, you know, linear sort of thinking, right? A leads to B, leads to C. And it's it it is almost I I I ask that question obviously tongue in cheek because it's it's a question that we all get all the all the time. Right. And it's like I I I say 50 hours, somewhere between 50 hours and 46 years.

SPEAKER_04 32:30

You know, it's I say, you know, like when they ask me about the Dutch wax paintings that I do, I would often tell them, you know, if I'm really getting good on it, it takes me about four days, but a lot of it is waiting for paint to dry. Right. You know, I know how to make them well enough now that I can just I can get those done. The um the other abstract work that I do, it has to do with um now once you learn how to make it, I mean, it it gets faster. But still there's there's waiting on paint to dry. And you know, I like I don't like to really involve myself with the the forcing of a painting.

SPEAKER_02 33:13

Right.

SPEAKER_04 33:14

I like to kind of allow the painting to tell me what it wants to do, and then I adjust to that.

SPEAKER_00 33:23

Yeah, yeah. You said something before that that uh that caught my attention. You said, okay, I did that, now I want to do this.

unknown 33:35

Right.

SPEAKER_00 33:36

That's something that that reoccurs all throughout, you know, Jack's work, obviously, and his writing about his work. Okay, I did that, now on to this, you know, sort of what if, what's next? You know, that you talk about the time it took you to get it takes us to get to that first work of a series of a of a of a new vein that works, and then the time it takes to do the subsequent ten, you know, it's a very different, very different time domain.

SPEAKER_04 34:05

Yeah, and and the advantages is that we're standing on on Jack Witten's shoulders, right? So we know how he made that. Right. Right? We have an idea, we have a book where he goes through like his his ideology. So we have a cheat code to some degree. We know how Joe Overstreet made his work, we know how Al Lovey made his work, Ed Clark, DeCooning, Rothko. We have their recipes.

SPEAKER_00 34:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 34:31

So you could almost to some degree stop there if you really wanted to and say that there's no reason, you know, to paint anything else. I mean, that's the reason why Deschamp started like, you know, hanging shovels in the in the gallery space, you know, because he began realizing that there's everything beautiful has already been made. But I think that's where that's where we're just at the beginning.

SPEAKER_02 34:57

Yeah.

Standing On Shoulders Without Stopping There

SPEAKER_04 34:58

And I think that's the reason why I'm like rediscovering the Hudson River School. Like often my practice, I go, like, why am I so rather than trying to make something new, why am I going back to these older concepts? But I think that they're cyclic, you know, cyclic cyclical in the sense that we're discovering new things. We're in a new age. We're in a uh a new era of technology. Like I don't re I don't really believe that the world's gonna end and then the whole world's gonna be burnt up and then people are gonna be gathered up. I believe that people are being gathered up um every day. But I also believe that sometimes the world ending is a season, is a time of technology, right? Where like Rome ended, Greece ended, Egypt ended, and right now we're at a place where technology is changing the world. So the era of learning how to write cursive is over. The era of doing math by hand is over, and even to some degree, the era of thinking for yourself for a lot of people is over.

SPEAKER_02 36:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 36:10

We now have AI, we now have all these other things that are telling us what to social media, all these things that are telling us what to think, how to think, and why to think that way. And it's easier oftentimes to kind of submerge yourself and just go along with it and just submit.

SPEAKER_00 36:32

Hold on, are are you suggesting that uh using prompts is not thinking for yourself?

SPEAKER_04 36:38

No. I'm saying when when the prompt is yourself, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So what I'm saying is, so I kind of think of to this modern era that we're in is a new new uh Hudson River school. It is a time to look at the land as as a wonder, yeah. To explore something new, to explore new ideas. I don't plan on colonizing painting, but I do think about excavating painting. I don't think about dehumanizing other cultures. I my intent is to include other cultures and see where those things meet. Yeah. And they meet in me. And I think that that's where Jack Win, again, learning to make a Jack Wynn painting, something that's not African American, something that's not Eurocentric, something that's not American. You know, um, one of these things he says, May the history of Western painting die within me.

unknown 37:55

Yeah.

Activism Through Abstraction And Making

SPEAKER_04 37:55

Page 95. These kind of ideas that like let's start anew, which I think is kind of bold. I think that's what makes uh painters or artists kind of really different than most people. This ambition to make something so new that's never been seen before. Um but there's a lot of pain in that. There's a lot of pain in making something that no one's ever seen before because no one's ever seen it before, so they don't really know how to deal with it. You often are waiting for people to understand what you're making and seeing how consistent you are about making it. Right. The pain of of doing that. Even there's a section in here I didn't put it in the notes where he says that like I'm about to start a new series. I was gonna take these last couple of pieces from this last series to a gallery, but no one wants the last pieces to a series. Right? They don't want to see the end, you know, they only want the new. You know?

SPEAKER_00 39:06

You talk about the that that's such a sorry to cut you off, but that's such a you know, may the history of Western painting die within me. That that is incredibly bold. That is incredibly about as bold and ambitious as it gets. One of the things that's so fascinating about this book, so he wrote that in 1975. Right. We read that today, right, with all everything that he did after that in the rear view, right, for main text. And it makes sense. You're like, yeah, it makes sense that Jack would have been thinking that then. But and these these are his journal entries, you know. Right. This is not something that he was publishing at the time or sharing with more anyone, let alone a select few, right? So that's that's a really interesting thing, is that that's that's what's so great, and and we we've recommended this book so many times. Like if you only read one book in 2020. 26, just read, read this book. It's so so good. But just that insight into his thought process and some of the sort of just audacious, audacious big thinking, you know, that one needs to entertain to even have a chance at getting close.

SPEAKER_04 40:21

Yeah, and we can't skip also some of the racial undertones that are happening there, too, right? We can't miss we can't gloss over the fact that not only is he talking about Western painting, he's also talking about Western ideas, right? He's talking about the fact that his body is the bot the black body has been subjugated. He can't, you know, the the fact that until he goes to the north, does he have access to abstraction because of the figure being so prominent in the South, and the figure meaning the black body, meaning the labor of the South, the the way that we look at the South as far as um a place where slavery was. And we forget that slavery was actually in Washington, D.C. It was in Virginia, it was in, you know, it was in many parts of America, and he is kind of like escaped some of it to some degree, where he's goes to Cooper Union and gets a degree in art making and then becomes an artist in New York. He's not uh tending to the South, but he is remembering the South. You know, I was watching this thing where his wife was saying he didn't tell everything that happened to him in the in the South, but you can see it, right? Yeah, you know, like you can hear it, like some of those first paintings that he did where it's talking about Martha the King because he was marching along with Martha the King. Yeah, so he was even though his work does not appear to be civil rights driven by him making this kind of work becomes activism. Yeah. Because he's showing that black people can think too. Because that's what abstraction really is. I mean, abstraction is about thinking, it's about like Jason Pollack, we look at and we say, okay, he's he's going back to the id, right? He's going back to the super ego, he's dealing with the superego. Abstraction is about problem solving. As we sit up here and talk about his practice of, okay, I made my own paint. I made this developer. I I've had to construct, build my own studio. I've had to construct these platforms and make sure they're perfectly straight, so then when I use the developer, it goes up across the right way. Like there's all these things he's doing. He built a crowd.

unknown 43:02

Right.

SPEAKER_00 43:03

I mean, yeah. That's that's next level. A crow's nest so that he could sit. I think he said at the time he had 13-foot ceilings. So just so that he could get the perspective that he wanted on these the work that he was doing, that was obviously amazing.

Birmingham’s Crucible And Endurance

SPEAKER_04 43:19

Right. So the thing is, is like so he's doing all these things. So you can't say that he's not thinking. He's around major thinkers of abstraction. And abstraction is not just you know throwing paint on the surface, it is discovering the materiality of paint, but it's also the theory of painting that comes behind it. It is uh dissecting Velasquez and Titian and Goya, is dissecting uh the Dogon tribe, it's dissecting the metal workers of Benin, it's it's it's uh the temples in Egypt, it's all of those things compacted uh into a person and then them uh putting it in a blender, right, boiling it down into a glaze. So this idea of the civil rights, this idea of like, you know, he was going to Tuskegee. So when we look at Tuskegee Airmen, the purpose of the Tuskegee Airmen was first an experiment by the American government that said that black people were not intelligent enough to fly a plane, and definitely not in battle, and yet they become one of the most decorated uh units in World War II. So like he's kind of like doing away with these ideas by him painting alone, it becomes activism because he's showing that he can do it. Not only can he do it, he can do it well. Not only can he do it well, he can discover new things. Not only can he discover new things, we have other painters that had gleaned from his expertise, like Gerhardt Richter, who was making these paintings that were very similar to his, but Gerhard Richter is the one that we recognize.

SPEAKER_02 45:14

Right.

SPEAKER_04 45:14

Meanwhile, Jack Witten had already passed that era in his painting and is going on to something else.

SPEAKER_02 45:21

Right.

SPEAKER_04 45:23

So even when we look at abstract expression, we think about jazz and how jazz is influencing abstract expressionism, but no one's really talking about these jazz musicians. We're not talking about the Louis Armstrongs, we're not who like is one of the inventors of jazz, we're not talking about Charlie Parker, who is one of the inventors along with uh Dizzy Gillespie inventing Bebop. You know, and then we go to DJ Cool Herc, who then invents uh with Grand Wizard Theodore and Africa Bambada, um, who are then creating hip-hop. Like these inventions that are happening coincide with the inventions, you know, because like Jack Witten and Joe Overstreet used to hang out with some raw. So there's all these kind of theories and new things that are happening that by them showing up, simply showing up, without even mentioning they're fighting for their civil rights, as many of them were, by showing up, they're being activists.

SPEAKER_00 46:34

He was involved in the civil rights movement before he lived in New York. And and it's interesting. It goes back to he talks about his stepdad made his living as a sign painter, and Whitten made signs, you know. And it's it's interesting you think about you know, most of the signs that are that are used, you know, in public demonstrations and protests today are very sloppily handwritten, you know. But you think about the signs from from that that era, they were they were proper signs, you know. You know, there's something else about Birmingham. You know, he tells a story. Um, it was sometime in the 90s when the Birmingham Museum of Art called to acquire one of his paintings, and he recollected about and just just was reflecting on the fact that a museum that wanted to acquire one of his works uh was one that he was not able to visit as a child.

Dedication To Painting Versus Making

SPEAKER_04 47:37

Right. Right. Birmingham has a very interesting history, a very interesting history with its artists. Like I think Michi Miko, um, who lives here in Atlanta, who's from Alabama, I think he's probably one of the greatest painters alive right now. One of the greatest artists alive right now. And again, he's from Alabama, Jack Whiton, Birmingham, Thorn Dahl, Birmingham, Bessema, uh, Lonnie Holly, Birmingham. And I'm always interested, going back to the idea about the land, how do you how does the land birth something so amazing in the midst of Sunrise also from Alabama? How do you birth something so innovative, so amazing in the midst of just very overt apartheid type of racism? Like, how does this rose grow from this concrete? You know, it's just it's just amazing. Like I look at them and I go, like, how how were you able to sustain such tragedies? Because the main reason why Jack Whitney left the South was because one of his friends died during the protest. So he was like, I can't I can't deal with this anymore. I I need to go. So like amidst great tragedy, you have these artists create some of the most beautiful work that is still shifting the way we think about art. You know, something that seems so sidelin in a culture like today, right now, right? Yeah. Like why are we thinking about I mean this is 2025 and all these things are happening in America and we are talking about art? I I find it really find it really interesting. We're in interesting times.

SPEAKER_00 49:49

You mentioned the recipes earlier, and that that's such a that's such an interesting reference to Jack's background as a you know pre-med student, um a physicist, you know. They're really uh, you know, I would I would extend that to say they're they're really formulas, you know, that he invited for himself, you know. And you you can just tell that throughout his writing and the work obviously um you know supports that.

SPEAKER_04 50:19

Well, just you know, just I spent 25 years in restaurants, I spent 13 years in fine dining. So recipe is you know my language. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So him being a scientist formula will would be more of his his language. Let's get into the book.

SPEAKER_00 50:39

Okay. You've um you indulged me in sharing the quotes that you wanted to talk about today, okay. Uh, which I appreciate, which gave me some time to re revisit them. Okay. So we're just gonna go in in uh sort of chronological order here. From page 48. And by the way, I haven't referenced this specifically. Here's the book for those of you that are watching on YouTube Notes from the Woodship. Yes. So on page 48, art in its advanced stage is something more than therapy. The modern day realist gives us art as therapy. Rothko gives us art as dedication to painting.

SPEAKER_04 51:16

I think it goes back to the idea of art being a solo sport that is beyond therapy. I think you have to do the therapy before you get to the studio. Yeah. And sometimes you have to do therapy alongside your studio practice. For sure. Um I have seasons where I have to do therapy. Um it's very easy to get caught up in your own thoughts while you're in the studio, and sometimes leave distractions um while you're in the studio. So it's a it's advanced to therapy because you have to deal with those things because you are spending so much time alone. But also the level of expression and really being direct in what it is you want to say, sometimes you have to go through it over and over and over again in order to really kind of fine-tune it. And that's where doing 10 helps you do that. You know, we sometimes when we talk about pain and people go, Oh, it's like therapy. You're in the room by yourself and you're and you're moving your hand, and yeah. And sometimes it feels like therapy, and sometimes it feels like work.

SPEAKER_01 52:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 52:48

Like construction. It feels especially for you. I've done that kind of work before, and now I'm like, no, I'm I'm not into that. I'm more into this other thing. Still labor.

unknown 53:04

Yeah.

Paint Is The Vehicle, I Am The Medium

SPEAKER_04 53:04

But in that labor, you're working something out. You're not just working your body, you're working your mind. You're asking yourself questions. You are even when I was dyeing fabric, it was still, okay, if I leave it in here for 30 minutes, what color will it be? If I leave it here overnight, what will it be? If I leave it here for uh uh three hours, what would it be? Or rinse it out, I don't rinse it out, what would happen? Like there's all these things that are happening. So it's that rough coat dedication to painting. Yeah. But I don't, you know, like I don't know. You you tell me what do you think? Do you think that Winton was as dedicated to painting as he was to making the thing?

SPEAKER_00 53:48

Not at all. No. And he he talked he talked about that a lot, you know, when he made the transition between thinking about you know, changing the verb from painting to making. Jack was a maker. I mean, and and you think about so talking about your background in the restaurant industry, you know, the fact that that Jack was a very skilled carpenter, cabinetry maker. I mean, that's a big, big thing that he I mean in especially early on in um in the book, that I mean, that's what he had to do to support himself. I mean, we talked uh uh before off camera the other day about the the three years that he had to take off to rebuild his studio from from scratch, you know, and that he had to support the the financial you know burden of rebuilding the studio by doing a bunch of side jobs, you know. It is interesting though, you know, you think about all of the things that influence and affect an artist's you know practice and approach to making. Um but uh you know his his desire to to study both the scientist and the and the builder, you know. Um there's there's both there's both precision, you know. I mean when you're when you're building he he talks about you know when he was building his platform, you know, um he describes it, you know, two by four studs, 16-inch centers, you know, three-quarter construction grade, you know, I mean he gives the form, he gives the recipe, he gives the plates, right? Basically, it's been interesting, you know, I I I have somewhat of a background in in construction, um moderately skilled, you know, mostly I was just an unskilled laborer in high school and in college, but just being around it, um, you know, that that stuck with me. You know, being around my my grandfather who was a who's a woodworker and just watching and just absorbing you know those different things had a had a huge, huge impact. Um we're in the final stages of uh building a sauna in our backyard. Um and uh thankfully I've got a very skilled builder friend who's who's doing most of the thinking and planning.

SPEAKER_04 55:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 55:53

Because you know, it it it requires per se, I mean, you know, the the week to make as long as the frames are square and I've gotten away from frames as well. But you know, apart from that, it's yeah, it's it's you know, uh all it's open, it's free, it's you know, it's not any, but it just in observing Bob, my friend, who's who's who's uh who's helping me, you know, watching and observing how many times he, you know, the old you know, measure twice, you know, cut once. Yes, it's yes, it's and and how you know, especially when you're trying to make things are plum and square, you know, but just all of the ways that that that background clearly influenced Witten's work um and his ability, you know, to make.

SPEAKER_04 56:36

Right. Um what's funny to me is you live in Minnesota and you're getting a sauna where you could just come to Atlanta from July to August and just stand outside.

SPEAKER_03 56:55

That's that's partially true. Yeah. And you won't have Asana. We get we get triple.

SPEAKER_04 57:03

I love the fact that you're building Asana and from like June to October, I live in Asada.

SPEAKER_00 57:11

Well, I mean, listen, when this thing gets going, we're gonna have that thing ripping at uh you know 190 to 210 degrees, you know.

SPEAKER_03 57:18

So that's a that's that's a it's a step above. It's a step above. That's what the cold is. If you're down here in Atlanta, sometimes it feels like 190.

SPEAKER_04 57:29

I spent a lot of my time um when I was younger in Birmingham, Alabama, my um, because I told you my parents lived there, so uh grew up there. So uh my mother lived in Rig lives in Riggins, and my um father lived in Docina. I was really interested. They met in Columbus, Ohio. They're 13 years apart, and um so we would go there and we would they live 20 minutes apart from each other. Um so we would go back every summer, every spring. Um, and when my grandmother was uh going down to health, we would go through the wintertime as well. But I would sit spend a lot of time on that front porch at dad's old house, and that's where I learned abstraction at a very young age, and I didn't realize it until I was in grad school, kind of like going back over my life, you know, kind of building my thesis. But that front porch where I was able to look out and see the houses that were in front of the railroad track. Um, and then the and then there was woods behind that, so there was like these evergreen trees behind that, then there was the the train going, and then there was a house in front of it, and then there was a street lamp, and then like I was told to go count train cars as the sun's going down. So, you know, counting train cars is really an activity to get the kids at the house. Like, we want to toss some adult business and we're gonna give you an activity. So, you know, I'm running outside, I go, okay, and I'm 99, 100, 102. I just counted 106 cars. Oh, great, there's another train coming. Just wait on it. And then you count the next 150 cars, right? But seeing those trains go past those colorful houses, and in between the colorful houses, because you see it in between, then you see the trees behind that, and then you see the sun setting behind that, is where I begin to understand. My mother was a photographer. So at around five years old, she taught us how she would just hand you a camera and say, Okay, you go over there and take pictures over there. I'm gonna be taking pictures over there, like at a family reunion or a family launching or something. So you learn how to begin looking at things through a square. So that's part of the reason why. My paintings are never really square, is because I've been looking through a square my whole life. But looking through that square, and then knowing how to look through that square. If you imagine, you know, shotgun houses in front of a train going by, and that is the background is evergreen trees as the sun goes down, you can see then how color and light and form but relieving the shade as Shazan did, we're leaving that and just leaving the form, how you begin to conceive abstraction at an early age without knowing it. So I would get in trouble all the time because I would take pictures of the sunset, or I'd take pictures of a bird flying. And my mother would be like, Jamal, what is this? What is this? What are you taking pictures of? You know, there's pictures take money, it's film. I pay for this. You can't just be taking put somebody in the picture. Don't just be taking random pictures of things.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:13

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:01:14

But now right? My vision that I was seeing at 10 years old or 15 years old when I was taking this random picture of the sky, now that's the quantification, right? That's the qualification. That's the I've been seeing these things forever.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:01:35

You know? Well, it's not forever, but as long as I've been here. So these ideas about dedication to painting. Right? When we come back to this idea about dedication to painting, you talk about this idea of being a carpenter, but learning these different skills, learning how to cook, learning the one thing I learned from restaurants. Um, I used to work at this restaurant here in Atlanta called Blue Ridge Grill, and everything had to be fresh. You know, they actually picked food out of a garden or our vegetables out of a garden, and then it was farm the table before I understood what farm the table was. Right? So these ideas about freshness. So it's hard for me to give somebody paintings that I did last year. You know, because I want them to have something fresh. Yeah. And so all of those things, the same way that Jack Whitman was thinking about this dedication to painting, or this or this advanced therapy. Yeah. Like it's all part of practice.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:42

All right, page 52. The ultimate meaning of abstraction in painting is to be found in the true nature of the paint used. Paint is the vehicle. I am the medium. I do not believe in preconceived ideas in painting. The response to painting must be immediate. There must be no time to think.

SPEAKER_04 1:03:04

Do you think he's talking about the viewer's perspective or his perspective? I read that as his perspective. Okay. How do you read it? Um, I would read it as his perspective, but thinking about the viewer because I often think about the viewer only from the perspective of history that the the viewer doesn't see things as immediate as we do. Sure. But I do see the gesture as immediate, which I find fascinating, how direct some of his work is. When I think about the history, when I think about these ideas of like primitivism, like Henri Rousseau, um, or when you look at a painting created by self-taught painters where there's no linear perspective and everything's just very direct, right? And when I think about this level of immediacy that's happening in in his work, it's that gesture. Like when he leaves those little like pebbles inside of those um those uh paintings where he's using the developer. By him scraping that rock through that, you know who else does that is uh Mark Bradford. He leaves these little things then behind the painting where you can pull it up, right? That relief adding that uh right. Um also adding that subtraction, what it is, is subtraction, right? I think he's also talking about when we go back to that a third eye, like it's like immediate, like, oh yes, that's it. That that's it right there.

Breaking Gesture And Part Two Tease

SPEAKER_00 1:04:52

There's um there's uh uh an excellent podcast um that has a couple of interviews with Jack that um is it? I thought it was called Jessic Art. This is like a proper podcast where they have themselves. Um it's uh it's the Modern Notes Podcast, uh episode 699. I sent it to you. But I would I would highly recommend if um if anybody listening is um is a fan of of Witten's, or hopefully we can convert you if you if you weren't before. But it's um it's excerpts from two interviews you know with with Jack. But he talks about in in that interview, um, which I believe will recorded in 20 2013, 2014, but he talks about the process of construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction. Thinking about that in those in those three those three distinct phases. It's um I yeah, and just hearing him hearing him speak as well is is is fascinating. Yes, yeah. This this quote, so this was um he wrote this in 1973. So just to put things in context, this is this is during this is after he had made a very intentional choice to remove all gesture from his work. You know, he realized how how heavily influenced he was by DeCooning specifically, and now he wanted to, and he he speaks about this in this in this interview, but he said, I I realize, I'm paraphrasing here, but he said I realized that I was making the same sort of repetitive marks that were all within that ABEX, you know, school of thought, and he wanted to remove that. So, in this in the context of this particular excerpt, paint is the vehicle, I am the medium, not the brush. You know, I mean he pretty much set the brush aside completely going forward. All right, so this ended up being a much longer conversation than we had anticipated. We probably should have expected it, but they often have a way of doing that. So we decided to break this up into two parts. So join us next time on just make art for part two on deck wind with mail right.