ARTICLES
Madison Fred Mitchell
Daniel Putnam Brinley
Louis H. Porter |
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Louis H. Porter 1904-1984
Article printed in 1972 in Arts Review magazine by Denis Bowen critiquing Porter's exhibition that year at Drian Gallery, London:
...Infinity --as I see it' the passwords of Louis Porter have a deeper meaning for him than the metaphysical interpretation, and although the shapes and forms he uses are abstractions his idea is to assert through the medium of paint and symbols that 'God is infinite' in both time and space. The forms he paints are sphere like and interpenetrating, giving the viewer the feeling of drifting off into infinity. These forms have been used by Kandinsky, Robert Delauney, and Paul Nash and, as the circle is a symbol for the psyche ( Plato described the psyche as a sphere), it seem that Louis Porter has arrived at the same conclusion and created a real measure for his concept of the oneness of the universe.
Dr. Jung has pointed out that a true symbol appears only when there is a real need to express what thought cannot think or what is only divined or felt. The square, he points out, compliments the circle, and is the symbol of earth bound matter, of the body and reality and that the separation of the two significant symbols is an expression of the psychic state of the twentieth century man and his fear of disassociation. Louis Porter writes 'that of necessity man to be related to God must be shown as having: Man the vastness of his form and space and movement and God the vastness of the eternity of the circle, both related within the abstraction of the rectangle'. In this way his concept of interpenetrating spheres related within the rectangular frame of the canvas brings these two symbols together and expresses the urge to heal the split in our apocalyptic age.
A further symbolic implication is in his bringing together the two extremes of the spectrum into chromatic relationship. Passages of reds and yellows are interspaced with violets, blues, and greens and their concentric changes visually impel the eye to travel forwards and backwards beyond the picture plane....
...Louis Porter's technique is a combination of the brush and the palette knife which he uses to obtain both hard & soft edges and the harder changes of color and texture, giving a feeling of unfolding edges to the concentric circular forms. These edges are not painted in the directions along the perimeter but are purposely pointed towards the centres of the circles giving the eye a series of infolding tracks which lead into the full depth of the painting. The shapes created by the reddish spherical forms penetrating each other take on the opposing greens and blues of the spectrum and become the container balance of the more powerful basic circular motifs. Louis Porter is convincing in his directness of approach and makes his statements with the utmost clarity and purity of vision, and one's inner sense of reaction in reading his pictures does not fall short of the main premise of his thesis.
- Denis Bowen
London, 1972
Louis Porter biography:
Louis Porter studied at The Arts Students League in New York with the modernist Russian painter Kimon Nicolades in 1929-1930 who taught him to study not what he saw but rather what he felt. This was in Porter's own words his greatest art lesson and Nicolades his most influential instructor. Under pressure and with contacts from his father he attended Yale University Law School. But Porter struggled for years with the responsibilities of his father's law practice, a new family, and making a living. For many years he stopped painting altogether. Porter moved to Paris for a year in 1932. There he studied with futurist/modernist painter Jean Marchand, a protégé of Bloomsbury scholar Roger Fry. Back in New York he again studied at The Arts Students League in 1939-1940, this time concentrating on drawing and sketching with with Vaclav Vytlacil and Kenneth Hayes Miller. Then feeling like he failed at law and now as an artist he bought a small farm in Connecticut. There he farmed, but eventually left behind farming to again concentrate exclusively on painting. He lived & painted for his last 20 years in New Canaan, CT using money from a small family trust left to him.
Louis Porter's art was highly evolved, spiritual, and prolific. His mature abstractions of the 1960's & 1970's show the influence Vytlachyll's extreme color palette and yet give a nod to the organic forms of modernist's such as Arthur Dove.
Between 1939 to 1948 Porter had exhibitions at The Denver Art Museum, The Silvermine Guild, in Connecticut, and Norlyst Gallery in New York. In 1969 and 1972 he had solo exhibitions at Drian Gallery in London. His work is in the collection of The Denver Art Museum, The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC; and The National Museum, Gdansk.
Porter wrote two books: "Extending our Vision: God is The Infinite", Carlton Press, New York; and "Road to Damascus" his autobiography, and had critically favorable reviews forthcoming for several of his exhibitions. Below is one London review.
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