Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

The vastness and nuance and intelligent, rough beauty of John Dubrow’s paintings, the rhythmic turmoil which roils their cakes of paint, tempts one to conceive of them as natural wonders. How are such things made? These works sometimes put me in mind of the forces of nature that combine to create hurricanes and mountain ranges. In the deep geography of Dubrow’s works there seems to be no mediation, no polish, no editorial mercy to bridge, for the viewer’s sake, between what Dubrow was moved to make and what Dubrow meant by it. The painter’s long toil — these works require years to complete — is rewarded with an extraordinary immediacy. He does not translate for our sake. We meet him entirely on his ground. I thought all this before I had ever stood before a proper Dubrow painting. I had seen small oil sketches, the free power of which foreshadowed the force of the full-scale versions. Dubrow’s paintings are enormous, not only in height and width but also in the sculptural thickness of their surfaces and in the demands that they make. A topography of calcified oil rises and falls from one edge of each surface to the other. Seen from the side, uneven protrusions testify to the force of the painter’s impact. The surfaces are like the beaten ground of a paddock in which a wild horse has been penned. The man who made these paintings must have exerted prodigious energy to whip and slice and scratch all this paint so that it seethes the way it does. The edges of Dubrow’s surfaces are never straight because the paint rises and cakes over them, the corners are rounded, there are no clean angles. Like any inch of the natural world, Dubrow’s paintings are not neat. And yet they contain a beautiful order.  John Dubrow’s studio is sheltered in a converted tobacco warehouse twenty minutes outside Manhattan along with some several dozen other artists of various kinds. The complex in which it sits, called Mana Contemporary, strikes the visitor as misleadingly unsuitable for the attainment of transcendent experience: it is made up of several slabs of brick in a gritty, graffitied stretch of Jersey City only a few yards away from the train tracks whose thunder protects against gentrification. The eponymous Mana, Moishe Mana of Moishe’s Moving Business, is perhaps unaware of the condign allusion of his surname. Dubrow’s work is itself like manna, by which I mean it is inexplicable, it seems to have fallen from heaven, and it contains enough to satisfy a variety of appetites. Above all, it must be experienced physically; the effect of its physicality is difficult to describe. The charismatic textures of these dense canvases are a challenge to descriptive language. So is the atmosphere of his studio, with its mixture of solidity and vertigo, of gravity and excitation. Describing it in words is like trying to paint the sensation of tumbling down a flight of stairs. This incongruity is frustrating, and that frustration is precisely what makes the painter’s blood race and his paint hum and bellow. He is trying to describe in paint sensations that can only be felt in life. Something primary, something both sophisticated and atavistic, lives inside that studio. I will try to tell you what this means. The path from the front doors of Mana Contemporary to the elevator winds past a number of John Chamberlain’s gripping and enigmatic sculptural constructions made from welded scraps of colorful cars. John’s studio is on the fourth floor. The elevator doors open in the middle of a hallway, on the left side of which a glass sheet covers the wall of a large dance studio in which a choreographer was presiding over a practice session. I turned right, walked down a few thin, high corridors lined with enormous iron sliding doors until I reached 411. On the other side of the massive iron door, another world. Paint, paint, paint. Speckles of it and streaks of it and mounds of it. Paint piled high on a table that had once served as a palette but has over the years calcified into a many-colored undulating mass. Paint encrusted on empty paint pails and paint brushes and paint tubes. Stains of paint on the ground, on the tables and the chairs. The smell of paint is thick even in the immense space of the studio. The room is huge. The white walls, way above human height, lose their paint stains as they stretch all the way to the industrial ceiling. Enormous windows, the kinds of windows artists pray for, gape on two stretches of the studio, suffusing the immense space in a big, gentle light. On the day that I visit it is pouring rain outside — the light is soft and strong, like the artist.  Where did he come from and how did he get this way? John Dubrow was born in Salem, Massachusetts in 1958, studied at Syracuse University, Camberwell College of Arts in London, and then the San Francisco Art Institute. Formative years spent in California, Israel, and New York — where he has lived for the past several decades — mark him as a man with many influences and admirations, a man from no place and every significant place. He has painted the landscapes and rooftops of Jerusalem and New York City, in equal parts a creature of the Bible and of Babel. Leaning up against the walls of his studio are portraits —in an especially lyrical picture, the poet Mark Strand peers from behind his folded arms — and landscapes of euphorically vital greens and blues. On some walls crowded cityscapes buzz across from near-abstract combinations of flesh tones. Everything is oil paint. Paint is John Dubrow’s air and water and food. His commitment to the substance is absolute, almost monastic. He has spent his whole life studying its capabilities and its effects. While I was working on this essay I dreamed that I had to wash pills