Fairfield Porter: Capturing Reality

Calm Morning

As a colorist he attained some triumphs that transcend subject matter.  The painting itself—where,say, the distant islands of Calm Morning float as mere oblong brushstrokes on a field of lilac gray—becomes emotion, and our response becomes one not merely of recognition but of discovery.”

John Updike  “Violence at the Windows” in  Just Looking

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Columbus Day

…the Columbus Day painting…is as good as painting gets.

Neil Weilliver in  Realists at Work , editor   John Arthur  Watson-Guptill Publishers, NY  1983

Aline by the Screen Door

Porter’s striking portraits of friends and relations first present themselves as embodiments of light and shadow (Aline by the Screen Door, 1971).  After such an encounter, we are free, visually, to test the accuracy of the characterization.  But, accuracy and realism for Porter do not mean literal transcription; his acute perception leads him away from banal literalism.

Alvin Smith “New York Letter” Art International  Vol. 16 (Sum. 1972): 81-82

Iced Coffee

There is a sharp, pragmatic snap to Porter’s technique.  While high-noon light plays with the geometry of the wicker chair and the folded edge of a discarded newspaper in Iced Coffee, his uncanny jabs and counterpunches with interior and exterior space shake any semblance of tranquility from the picture.  Isolated elements…raise questions about the one-sided pigeonholing of Porter as a “card-carrying realist.”    Judd Tully  “The Illuminated Palette”  Horizon 25: 14-21  D. ’82

Island Farmhouse

…the white weatherboard asserts itself in a blast of light like a Doric temple; the lines of shadow are a burning visionary yellow; everything from the angular dog to the ragged trees, is seen in sharp patches and yet one’s eye feels bathed in atmosphere, all the way out to the blue island on the remote horizon…the structure is locked together by affinities of shape, natural rhymes of form and color.  You can’t paint like this without deep cultivation as well as talent.   Robert Hughes Time July 12, 1993

Interior with a Dress Pattern

Interior with a Dress Pattern is his latest study of a room now known to thousands…each time he paints it, he finds something new to say…the dictionary in itself warrants a bow from any painter involved with painting objects in an easy, fluent way…

Lawrence Campbell  ARTnews  “Reviews and Previews”  April 1970

July Interior

…the dazzling ‘July Interior’ of 1964 is a veritable anthology of chromatic invention.  Just the passage in which the pink curtain encloses a window of pale green light is something that many a Color Field abstractionist could have lived on for a       decade or more.

‘A Virtuoso Colorist”  Hilton Kramer                The New York Times  November 25, 1979

The Mirror

An homage to Velazquez that transcends pastiche, “The Mirror” poses Porter’s young daughter Elizabeth before a mirror that reflects himself with brush in hand and, outside the studio window, a white house and an autumnal tree.  Polarized tones and dominant blacks, reds, and yellows…give heraldic punch to a gentle vignette.  The girl’s eyes are a miracle.

Peter Schjeldahl  “Stern Beauty”  The New Yorker  April 17, 2000

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