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[icefloecontemporaryartjournal]

Rod Penner and Photorealism In the New Digital Era

By Lawrence Nassau

In the early 1990’s, Rod Penner arrived in New York City from out of nowhere.

From outside of Houston, specifically.

By car, transporting a painting he’d done.

The work, measuring about 24 x 36 inches, depicted a suburban home with a verdant front lawn.

The painting astonished gallerist Ivan Karp and his staff at O.K. Harris Works Of Art.

When asked about his background, Penner said…

- He was originally from Vancouver, Canada.

- He had studied art at Oral Roberts University.

- And, from the beginning, he had aimed to be a photorealist painter.

Penner didn’t emerge from an academic, beaux arts tradition or merely a precisionist milieu.  

He looked at photorealist books and learned from them as points of departure.

At one point, Penner was asked why the blades of grass in this particular painting were expressively articulated.  "Because, in real life, they are thick and coarse,“ he replied.  

It was the last work of art that Penner had ever done that was a hybrid representation of both nature and photography.  

Since then, Penner has been purely a painter of photographs.

Primarily of the exteriors of small town and suburban homes, storefronts, and commercial buildings of no particular note.

Except for how they are visually represented - factually and evocatively -  by the artist

Also of roads and intersections.

Upon which the only discernible activity is that they catch sunlight and cast shadows during the middle of the day and reflect artificial light during the middle of the night.

Occasionally, the rising or the setting of the sun suggests the possibility of the passage of time in his paintings.

So subtly so that, by remarking upon the occasion, one would have to also note that the event is equal in weight to everything else in the composition.

Noticeably - and fortunately so for his audience - Penner has refined and updated his approach during each and every phase of his career.

This is what he has in common with the earliest painters of photorealism, who were acknowledged 45 to 49 years ago for perceiving realism in new ways and, along with the earliest minimalist painters, for producing the most extraordinary works without revealing the touch of the artist’s hand.

One can comment on Penner’s technique in achieving this effect.  It’s been noted that he uses "brushes as small as #000, [as] he renders each worn brick, pavement crack, and fallen leaf in precise detail.”

However, it all starts in the mind.

The mind that motivates the artist to identify views.

Which prompt him to pause.

With his camera.

And record them.

And to which he has no emotional attachment.

Penner has stated “that ’…having grown up in Canada, I’m thankful I don’t have any childhood memories of these small Texas towns that might interfere with my observations.’”

Penner, of course, edits each source image in order to achieve the effects that he is after in creating each composition.  

Minimizing.  Amplifying.  Cropping.  And pulling back in order to establish broader views and/or to allow for a store sign, a length of a parking lot curb, or a pair of inflatable snowmen to appear - but for a moment - as a feature of interest in a painting.

Most notably, it is Penner’s choosing to paint small-scale works that is of significant interest now.

During a solo exhibition of Penner’s paintings at Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe, New York, from April 27 to May 26, 2017, viewers could encounter an extraordinary body of works, each of which measured either 5 x 7-½ inches or 6 x 6 inches.

In regarding each work up-close, one could immediately detect a sense of expansiveness in the small, Texas town settings that Penner has chosen to depict.

It’s all very harmonious.

“Commie’s Tacos,” for example, is really about the space surrounding the eatery, which is partially - and not entirely - depicted towards the right of the composition.  The street in front of the establishment sets the building back for the viewer.  The street at its side vertically bisects the image, and, the utility pole (and the wires emanating from it) functions as a visual tent pole for the work.  The wires are connected to several buildings further to the rear and off to the side and to a more distant pole, and they call attention to and amplify the physical presence of the sky, itself a mixture of cloudiness and blueness.

“G & R Grocery” depicts the eponymous store, which is set back in a parking lot of what may be a shopping strip.  The long, deep cracks in the asphalt run towards the shop.  The parking area directly in front of the store is paved with red brickwork; its horizontal orientation - as well as that of the concrete sidewalk immediately before the store - very subtly brings the viewer closer into the scene but also act as a sort of boundary between where a driver presumably enters the lot and the store itself.

In “Yard Inflatables,” a pair of tall decorative inflatables - a somewhat sagging, bearded toy soldier with a drum and a snowman - flank the sides of the front yard of a suburban home.  Bare trees buttress the jolly inflatable figures.  The grass is green, albeit with barely noticeable brown patches, and its horizontality draws attention to the the black asphalt road before it and the white house behind it.  The white paint is conspicuously peeling, but the front porch is tastefully, yet simply, adorned with white Christmas lights and a wreath.  The sky, which is visible behind the tallest and slenderest of the trees’ branches, is a blend of blue skies and white clouds.  On the roof, one can say that the antenna resembles a cross.  Although “Yard Inflatables” looks optimistic, it is not sentimental.  It is, however, one of a number of works by Penner that is characterized by romantic tendencies.

Penner’s small-scale works - in the age of Instagram and a world with hand-held smartphones and tablet computing devices - seem to be in synch with how, in the current decade, pictures are viewed and also how reality is perceived.  Landscapes in these sizes have existed for centuries, and Penner has produced many medium and large paintings throughout his career.  Nevertheless, his most recent works are most timely and relevant.

New York, October 2017

Bibliography

Hillings, Valerie L.  “Picturing America : Photorealism In the 1970’s.”  New York : Guggenheim Museum Publications; Berlin : Deutsche Guggenheim, 2009.  

“Rod Penner,” Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe, New York, April 27 to May 26, 2017.

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