Art, Features, LA Iconoclasts

Sheldon Figoten, Painter

It is certainly pleasant to step into Sheldon Figoten’s 1920’s upstairs studio in Mid-Wilshire and be bathed in light flooding in through windows on two sides, but it’s more than exciting to view paintings which emit a powerful light of their own—paintings using pure color and forms created by oil paint poured on stretched canvas rolled with acrylic emulsion. Figoten has honed his own painterly vision to an elegant minimalism. As a dedicated abstract painter for 39 years, Sheldon Figoten’s knowledge of the LA art scene is encyclopedic. He studied art at UCLA and The Art Institute in San Francisco. And when he met Ed Moses of the Ferus Group, he was persuaded to move to Los Angeles where he has created a huge body of work. Intrigued by his work and history, I wanted to talk further with Sheldon and we met at his home in Venice to find out about his journey as an artist: including key influences and how his painting challenges the viewer.

FABRIK: What inspired you to become an artist and when?

Sheldon Figoten (SF): My parents were working class, Jewish immigrants from Latvia and Russia, so we had no library and they weren’t interested in art. But I had a friend in high school who was taking a correspondence course in commercial and fine art. He invited me to his house one day, where his parents had allowed him to convert a porch into his studio. I stepped into that studio and was hooked—loving the smell, the atmosphere. My friend gave me a few tubes of paint and away I went.

As an undergraduate student at UCLA, I took art history courses, marking the beginning of a lifelong study. I was awestruck attending a retrospective of Henri Matisse—stunned by the crudeness, the directness, the expressiveness. It didn’t look like anything I thought painting should be—it was sophisticated and primitive at the same time. “The Dance,” from MOMA knocked me out! Another of his paintings, the more abstract “Open Window, Collioure” was a framed black rectangle and had very few references in the painting. I think that particular painting even scared Matisse, but it left a deep impression on me.

Kurt Von Meir, an art critic for a New York art magazine, came to the West Coast to teach a modern art class at UCLA. Excited about the LA art scene, he insisted we go out and see it. We used Art Forum Magazine for one of our class texts. I visited the Nicholas Wilder Gallery and The Irving Blum Gallery. At these two galleries you could see the best of New York and Los Angeles art. Those two venues, especially, provided an immense education.

FABRIK: What did you learn about the difference between East and West Coast artists?

SF: In New York, the abstract painters were traditional and formalistic—paint on canvas. In LA, there were two schools of modern art: the classicists, who were the older, erudite easel painters who did hard-edged planar abstractions. They were the gentlemen. The Ferus group were the Venice guys—hip, experimental and into new processes and materials. I became intrigued by those possibilities, some of which were seen in John McCracken planks, Larry Bell boxes, and Ron Davis fiberglass paintings.

FABRIK: What did you do after studying art in college?

SF: I wound up going to dental school in San Francisco 1966 to1970, taking classes at the Art Institute and painting every spare minute. But when I graduated I knew painting was what I wanted to do. Practicing dentistry would allow me the time, means and freedom to continue to paint. I left town and set up a studio in Weaverville, Northern California and started to paint abstract painting full time.

European painters traditionally go to The Louvre and copy the masters but I thought I’d copy a Frank Stella painting. Of course, it didn’t wind up like his and I was off on my first group of paintings using commercial Rustoleum black and metallic paints—a lot slicker than Frank Stella’s work!

I was drawn to people using new materials and processes, inventing new forms and structures—all part of the legacy of the Ferus group. Then I saw this show in SF, called “California, The Modern Era” and for the first time I saw a group of paintings by John McLaughlin and was ready to understand and connect with them.

I wanted to learn more about McLaughlin and that led me to The Archives of American Art housed in The De Young Museum (now housed in The Huntington). They had received his papers from his estate and I was lucky enough to go over them before interviewing his wife, Florence, in his house and studio. So in 1980, I wrote and published an article about him which led to more writing and reviewing. As a consequence of my interest in McLaughlin, I was introduced to Ed Moses by art dealer Daniel Weinberg, who had helped open doors for me in my research on McLaughlin. Ed came up to San Francisco preparing for a show. I happened to bring in a couple of paintings to show Dan.

Dan said, ‘I’ve been telling you about this young guy inspired by McLaughlin, come take a look at his stuff.’

Ed looked at my poured and irregular, not hard-edged vocabulary and said ‘I like that pecker track right there!’ (Laughs) (Meaning a visceral mark, organic, not refined!) That was the start of our friendship.

Interviewing Ed for The American Archives and getting to know him opened my window to the Ferus artists. He told me stories about each one. Ed and I have followed each other’s work for 28 years. He has influenced me most importantly in his attitude towards change, openness and freedom. Not many painters are as fluid as Ed—he’s one of the great ones. He’s been enormously generous in his attention and I’ve been lucky enough to travel with him.

In 1990, he had a show in Japan and took me along. Ed knew how much Japanese pottery meant to me and we both were able to see wonderful local pottery villages and museums. My work has been strongly influenced by Japanese pottery. The old stuff is the best—natural, unforced, unselfconscious, it moves me tremendously. There were scholar potters, but I loved the tradition of the farmer potters who learned century after century how to make the shapes and had to make their water storage jars and bowls during the winter. The attitudes inherent in those pieces have seeped into my paintings and freed me.

FABRIK: In what way?

SF: There’s a direct action when you pour paint—you don’t mess with it, whatever happens, there’s the acceptance of what the paint does and wants to do, how it runs and where it runs. I make abstract paintings in as clear and direct and truthful a fashion as I can.

FABRIK: What effect do you want your paintings to have?

SF: I hope to engage the viewer through this immediate sensory experience, not to please or entertain or to make something simply beautiful, but to create an imbalance, to challenge the viewer’s perceptual sense, throwing people off a little to put them into a state of active contemplation. I hope the paintings provide a stimulus that is about questions, not answers. The freedom in abstract painting is that the viewer can provide his or her own meaning, own sense of order, if need be. McLaughlin said, “I don’t want to tell the viewer who I am but want to let the viewer find out who the viewer is.” I agree.

FABRIK: And what do you hope for in the future?

SF: Most importantly, I look forward to continuing to work, to show and sell my work more than I have in the past—giving me greater personal freedom.