MILTON TEICHMAN
I've experienced a double passion in my life: I spent forty-seven years teaching literature and writing on the college level, and during that period I also actively pursued my interest in painting and sculpture.
During my adolescence and in the years that followed, I was drawn to the paintings of Picasso, Matisse, and Braque. I loved their visual simplifications, their deliberate and creative distortions of factual reality. In my early years, I was intrigued also by the work of Kandinsky and Mondrian. Their work struck me as a form of visual music, stirring the feelings through the eye as music stirs the feelings through the ear. In Mondrian, I also saw the beauty of two-dimensionality and the exciting dialogue between form and space.
In the 1960's, partly under the influence of the abstract expressionists (Gottlieb, Motherwell, Kline, and others) I turned to non-objective painting and collage, treating the canvas not as a window though which one views a scene but as the glass itself, on which the pure elements of design--form, space, color, texture, and line-- are brought into harmony. My constructions in wood, styrofoam, plastic, and found materials, were likewise nonobjective compositions.
Living in the Hudson Valley of New York for many years, I exhibited my painting and sculpture in juried shows at the Woodstock Art Association and the Poughkeepsie Art Association (Barrett House). I appeared in juried shows also at the Art Students' League in Woodstock and at the Albany Museum of Art. I had one-person exhibitions of my painting at Bennett College, Millbrook, N.Y. (1975) and at Marist College, Poughkeepsie, N.Y. (1970, 1985, 1996). As a longtime member of an artists' cooperative, Summergroup, I exhibited in group shows throughout the Hudson Valley of New York. My works in painting and sculpture are in many private collections.
Over the years, I have published on literary subjects, including the poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge, the teaching of writing, and the literature of the Holocaust. My college courses frequently explored the interrelation of literature and visual art; and I experimented with workshop courses in which students created both poetry and painting, often incorporating their own writing into collage paintings. More recently, I have written and published short fiction.
I became a resident of Cape Cod in 1999 and began to experiment with paintings that reflected the influence on me of the Cape landscape. In these paintings I abstracted and simplified the ever-changing appearances of ocean and bay, marshes and sand dunes. The colors I employed were poetic rather than naturalistic. Today, I paint such quasi-representational landscapes as well as nonobjective paintings and collages which show my continued interest in the interplay of form and space on a two-dimensional surface. In my three-dimensional work, I now focus on small sculptures in wood, sheet brass, fired clay, and bronze. The bronze pieces reflect the influence of the primitive art of Mexico, where I have spent several winters.
Since settling on the Cape, I have exhibited my work at the Provincetown Artists Association and have appeared in its juried shows since 1999. In the fall of 2004, I was Artist in Residence at Cape Cod Community College and showed a selection of thirty-five years of work in painting and sculpture in the Higgins Gallery.
My bronze sculpture has been exhibited in San Miguel, Mexico, at the Galeria Diana (2006), Galeria 19 (2007-8), and Galeria Mero (2008).
"Questions
People Ask Me."
1. How do you begin a painting or sculpture?
Sometimes I start without knowing what I want to create. I go where my
feeling or
intuition leads me. In this way, I discover my painting or sculpture.
Conscious
ordering will then enter the process. Usually, however, I start with an ink
or pencil
sketch, with a doodle, or with a small collage of torn or cut colored
paper. The
completed work is seldom identical to the original sketch or doodle.
2. How do you know when a work is finished?
I know a painting or sculpture is finished when I see an order or
harmony--sometimes
a precarious harmony--that surprises me, not only as I am working but the
next day and
the day after that. The work has what I call "life". I know a painting or
sculpture
is on the way to being completed when I have simplified it and I have
nothing more to
eliminate.
3. What do your abstract works mean?
My works are not experiences for the head. They are experiences for the
eye, and
through the eye for the feelings. We do not ask what a Beethoven quartet
means. It
is an experience for the ear, and through the ear for the feelings. We do
not ask
what a field of flowers means. It is a visual/emotional experience. For
abstract
art, a better question than "What does it mean?" is the question "Do these
images
which I see convey some emotional truth for me, ambiguous as that truth may
be?."
EDUCATION
Ph.D. in English, the University of Chicago (1966)
M.A. in English, Duke University (1953)
B.A. in English, Brooklyn College (1952)
I have studied with the following artists: Max Schnitzler of New York City; Evelyn Fisher of Poughkeepsie, NY; William Pachner of Woodstock, NY; Ati Johansen of Millbrook, NY. On the Cape, I have studied with Bob Bailey, Joan Pereira, Paul Bowen, and Jim Peters.