There’s a preferred edict amongst writers: the perfect writing is rewriting. Whereas there might not be an identical saying for painters, the work of the late Terence Netter, on view on the Pollock-Krasner Home and Research Heart in Springs by means of July 31, is a testomony to the position of revision in visible artwork.
In 1997, Netter’s work was exhibited on the Stony Brook College Artwork Gallery in a present known as “Visions and Revisions: Work from the Nineties.” Impressed by that present, “Visions and Revisions Revisited” takes one other have a look at eight works that Netter got here again to and altered.
That it’s on view on the Pollock-Krasner home is apropos for quite a few causes. First, Krasner, a detailed good friend of Netter’s for a few years — they met when his MFA class visited Springs and she or he was taken with Netter when he requested her about how one among her darkish, grief-inspired Umber collection work made her really feel — joked that she couldn’t be trusted round her completed work. A continuing revisionist, her fixed re- and over-painting is one cause that her physique of labor is definitely fairly small.
Secondly, Netter was instrumental within the creation of the Pollock-Krasner Home and Research Heart because it at the moment exists. Netter was the founding director of Stony Brook’s Staller Heart, and labored with the Stony Brook Basis to execute what Lee Krasner had envisioned for the property. Her will instructed her executors to deed the property to a charitable establishment and create a public museum and library for the research and exhibition of her work, Pollock’s, and different artists of the time. The Stony Brook Basis grew to become that charitable group, and her needs have been carried out.
Netter, a lifelong artist, was additionally a person of God. A New York Occasions function article within the Sixties dubbed him “The Priest Who Paints.” Netter, a Jesuit, studied below the influential theologian Karl Rahner in Austria and was closely impacted by The Religious Workouts of Ignatius of Loyola, which the founding father of the Jesuit order developed on a retreat whereas recovering from a leg wound. They have been, and are, a information for deepening one’s connection to and love of God.
Within the late Sixties, a debate was raging about letting clergymen get married. Netter, who had fallen in love with Therese Franzese, hoped that the church would change. Sadly, they didn’t, and Netter obtained papal permission to depart the Jesuit order so he might marry Franzese. That they had met as a result of her brother was his scholar and Franzese, who labored for the Metropolitan Opera on the time, would attend Father Netter’s providers. In a 1968 Life journal, their story was written up as “A Priest Who Selected to Marry” and extra lately their relationship was the topic of a New York Occasions documentary in regards to the Netters known as “The Religious Workouts,” launched in 2020.
Professionally, Netter was an educator alongside his portray profession. He taught at Georgetown, Fordham, Choate, Santa Clara College and Stony Brook, amongst others, principally the topics of aesthetics, theology, and philosophy.
His creative apply was lifelong and assorted throughout the a long time. One in every of his main strategies was frottage. Netter would add turpentine to grease paint and use newspapers, laying down the newsprint and peeling it off to create works with depth and transparency which recommend that extra lies behind. The works are extremely charged, colourful, and dense with that means. Usually their titles have been Biblical — “Creation,” “Eden,” “Pentecost,” to call a number of. Summary, they have been extra involved with capturing an internal picture or a nonliteral subjectivity. And their three-dimensional, or transcendent, high quality means they appear to gesture past this realm. Though the church “decreased” him to a member of the laity, Netter’s religion remained sturdy and animating. Later in life, he grew to become a devotee and practitioner of Zen meditation, making a collection of Zenscape work impressed by contemplation. His work appears to talk to this connection to spirituality.
The works in “Visions and Revisions Revisited” are into their second, or perhaps third, existences. Whereas not all the unique works are documented, every was as soon as a completed portray that Netter took down from a wall and went again to work on.
“Night Star: Moon Rising” — previously “Harvest Moon” — went by means of a collection of revisions. First, it was an all-over composition of his frottage method. Then, Netter painted over it, including leaves that the underlying work peeked out by means of, and a moon. Not glad, Netter rotated the canvas, enlarged the moon, and added a small, shining star. In “Untitled,” a piece initially known as “La Baroque,” Netter took an underlying indigo and purple composition and painted gold over, 30 years later. The ultimate work creates three globe shapes and sweeping traces that render the charged abstraction barely extra figurative. Some revised works grew to become three-dimensional; in “Shattered Dream,” Netter added on a chunk of a pc’s motherboard in addition to an oil paint border and jagged lightning shapes.
Krasner and Netter shared a penchant for overhauling their previously-finished work. And though Krasner was not historically non secular, she preferred Terence and Therese for his or her rebellious streak and the 2 linked over aesthetics, artwork and philosophy. For each Krasner and Netter, artwork meant a devotion to the inventive life, an animating energy that was each exterior and deeply inside. A non secular train, if you’ll.
“Terence Netter: Visions and Revisions Revisited” is on view on the Pollock-Krasner Home and Research Heart, 830 Springs-Hearth Street in East Hampton, by means of July 31. Advance reservations are required. For extra info, go to stonybrook.edu/commcms/pkhouse. Pollock-Krasner Home, a member of the Nationwide Belief for Historic Preservation’s Historic Artists’ Properties and Studios program, might be open to the general public as a part of an Open Home on Saturday, June 25, from 11 a.m. to three p.m., together with Madoo Conservancy in Sagaponack, Moran Home in East Hampton Village and the D’Amico Studio & Archive in Amagansett.
