Smith College Department of Art

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MANIFESTO: Studio Art Senior Exhibition

December 4, 2015

4:30-6:00 PM

TONY SCHERMAN LECTURE AND EXHIBITION

SMITH COLLEGE DEPARTMENT OF ART

LECTURE

Title: Tony Scherman Artist Lecture:

Date: December 7th, 2015

Location: Graham Hall, Department of Art, Smith College

Details: Canadian encaustic painter Tony Scherman will lecture on his work,

including the recent series Difficult Women. The lecture is in conjunction

with a solo exhibition by Scherman at Oresman Gallery, Department of Art.

EXHIBITION

Artist: Tony Scherman

Title: Difficult Women

Location: Oresman Gallery, Department of Art, Smith College

Dates: December 04 2015–January 30 2016

This solo exhibition features three encaustic paintings from Scherman’s recent

series Difficult Women. The following text by Sky Goodden explores the

implications of this series.

Troubling Our Trouble with Difficult Women

By Sky Goodden

In terms of timing, Tony Scherman’s Difficult Women presents an auspicious

inquiry, one that could be witnessed as a searing—even insensitive—challenge

to its contemporary audience. What makes a woman difficult? he asks. Who do

we associate with the term, and how do they get portrayed? The contemporary

moment’s regard for the subject of women—and their difficulty—is rife with

unseen hazards. Without naming names (because they’d quickly become dated,

but also, they don’t really matter; recent celebrity citations regarding the

perceived subject only serve as footnotes to a greater body of commonly-shared

experience, as we’re quickly learning), the world is actively reflecting on what

makes a woman difficult, and what her punishment or reward has been—and

ought to be. It’s a heady time to frame this ever-shifting subject.

On reflection, however, history doesn’t suggest a moment when this set of

questions—and their presentation by a male artist, no less—would not feel

timely, challenging, and both obtuse and overdue. Indeed, this series presents a

provocation of contradictions and constancy that is ripe, and deep, and deserving

of our fierce and prolonged consideration. At its base, Scherman asks us what a

difficult woman is, and what it means to frame one. How does this subject go

embodied, and portrayed? What’s the difference between these? In our looking,

we should know an answer.

Continuing his decades-long articulation of the figure in encaustic painting,

Scherman produces built-up impastos that take on new meaning, and drive down

into new metaphysical layers. He develops on past series that similarly named

their subjects (The Rape of Callisto, Black October), but here, their description in

a medium that both shrouds and appears to reveal (like a wax-veiled altarpiece in

the middle stages of its cleaning) resonates in profound and enduring ways. This

can be explained by the sensitivity of its subject, but also the nature of its

author’s chronicling. Here is a man, describing women, and calling them difficult.

And he’s painting them as unresolved.

The works’ troubled description, then, feels significant. Some are built up (The

Bread Thief), others laid bare (Cixi). Each one, though, has been marked by its

making, and these gestures to process—and as such, thinking—feel important to

this series. An outbreak of irresolute strokes darting out from a woman’s neck; a

network of drips and dabs maligning a woman’s nose and mouth; a clouding of

some features, and a clear illustration of others (Scherman describes his as

“notational” painting), carries an emphasized significance when he’s lending a

brush to subjects whose portrayal (and canonical position) is anything but clear.

This long-established technique of his (continuing a process established by the

Egyptians and continued through artists like Georges Rouault, Diego Rivera, and

Jasper Johns, and in so doing, infusing a sense of historicity in his contemporary

portraiture) quickly shifts from gesture to comment in Difficult Women. His

subjects go remarked upon rather than treated; their status becomes justly

complicated. And rightly so: a resolved portrait of these subjects just wouldn’t feel

true. Scherman troubles the surface so that his material might trouble us, too, the

way that it should.

BIOGRAPHY

Canadian artist Tony Scherman, born in Toronto in 1950, received an M.A. from

the Royal College of Art in London, England, in 1974. Since then he has had his

work in various corporate and public collections and has exhibited in solo and

group exhibitions in both North America, Europe and China. He has also

participated as a visiting critic and lecturer at universities, art colleges and art

galleries in North America and Europe.

Scherman’s encaustic method of painting combines pigment and wax to create

works with multiple layers. The dripping and heavily built up wax surface gives

the work a visceral edge and a remarkable sense of depth. Tony, along with