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Notes on Abstraction / Detroit / Rick Vian

The soul is created in a place between Time and Eternity: with its highest powers it touches Eternity, with its lower Time.

Meister Eckhart

[As] we enter a new century, abstract painting is respectable again. [Abstract art has] re-emerged as a subject of serious critical discussion.

Roald Nasgaard, Pleasure of Sight and States of Being: Radical Abstract Paintingsince 1990.1

1. From the moment I arrived in Detroit some ten years ago to teach Critical Theory and

Critical Studies at the College for Creative Studies, I have been driven around – I

have never learned to drive – and all manner of things have been pointed out to me by

long-time Detroiters, and many people have shown me things in weeks and months of

which it might otherwise have taken one years to uncover, or at least, grasp the

significance. There is, though, a little unassuming and “contemporary” building, a

building utterly without architectural distinction, which sits, snug like a little shop

front in the camouflage of suburban shop fronts, at 27745 Woodward Avenue on the

west side of Woodward in Royal Oak: the Theosophical Society in Detroit. (As with

so many things, such as the French School of Detroit which is in Birmingham, no one

outside Michigan will have heard of Royal Oak, so Detroit becomes the marker, or

better, the container of recognition.) Its website has the following statement from the

great medieval (German) Christian mystic Meister Eckhart (1260 – 1328) – admired

by the great Romantics and later Heidegger - “The soul is created in a place between

Time and Eternity: with its highest powers it touches Eternity, with its lower Time.” I

have yet to meet anyone who attends this Church of Theosophy or who has even

noticed its existence on Woodward Avenue. From time to time I mention it in my

1 Roald Nasgaard, Pleasures of Sight and States of Being: Radical Abstract Painting Since 1990 (Tallahassee: Florida State University Museum of Fine Arts, 2001), 7.

Notes on Abstraction / Detroit / Rick Vian

The soul is created in a place between Time and Eternity: with its highest powers it touches Eternity, with its lower Time.

Meister Eckhart

[As] we enter a new century, abstract painting is respectable again. [Abstract art has] re-emerged as a subject of serious critical discussion.

Roald Nasgaard, Pleasure of Sight and States of Being: Radical Abstract Paintingsince 1990.1

1. From the moment I arrived in Detroit some ten years ago to teach Critical Theory and

Critical Studies at the College for Creative Studies, I have been driven around – I

have never learned to drive – and all manner of things have been pointed out to me by

long-time Detroiters, and many people have shown me things in weeks and months of

which it might otherwise have taken one years to uncover, or at least, grasp the

significance. There is, though, a little unassuming and “contemporary” building, a

building utterly without architectural distinction, which sits, snug like a little shop

front in the camouflage of suburban shop fronts, at 27745 Woodward Avenue on the

west side of Woodward in Royal Oak: the Theosophical Society in Detroit. (As with

so many things, such as the French School of Detroit which is in Birmingham, no one

outside Michigan will have heard of Royal Oak, so Detroit becomes the marker, or

better, the container of recognition.) Its website has the following statement from the

great medieval (German) Christian mystic Meister Eckhart (1260 – 1328) – admired

by the great Romantics and later Heidegger - “The soul is created in a place between

Time and Eternity: with its highest powers it touches Eternity, with its lower Time.” I

have yet to meet anyone who attends this Church of Theosophy or who has even

noticed its existence on Woodward Avenue. From time to time I mention it in my

1 Roald Nasgaard, Pleasures of Sight and States of Being: Radical Abstract Painting Since 1990 (Tallahassee: Florida State University Museum of Fine Arts, 2001), 7.

classes at CCS to blank stares – and no, I would not expect a single student to have

ever heard of Madame Blavatsky or the theosophical movement so popular at the end

of the nineteenth century and which for a while looked as though it might become the

spirituality of a certain educated middle-class both here in the USA – or at least in

major cities like Chicago, Boston, and New York - and in London and Paris and

elsewhere in Europe.2

Paul Sérusier, The Talisman, 1888, oil on wood. Paris: Musée d’Orsay

Rick Vian, Reflection VII, 2014, oil on canvas.

2. For each of the great painters at the origin of a systematic working out of an account

of abstract painting - Kandinsky, Kupka, Mondrian, Malevitch - there is a direct and

easily demonstrable lineage coming from the great Symbolist painters, especially

Gauguin and his followers in the Nabis (Vuillard, Bonnard, Sérusier, Ranson, with

Émile Bernard occupying a special position apart); there is also, like the Nabis

(Prophets), a demonstrable fact about these abstract painters that sometimes has been

held to be central to the very existence and emergence of abstraction properly so-

called – which is to say, an explicitly theoretical account of a new mode of painting in

the Western frame – but which is often (and now increasingly) occluded, namely, that

all the major artists at the source of abstraction were deeply and affectively engaged

with some aspect of theosophy as a spiritual activity and a motivation for their pursuit

of abstraction. In more technically philosophical – but still accessible – terms, it

might be said that theosophy was part of the description under which they acted and

so in some sense causally related to their practice. (Of course, it is the adverbial in

some sense that makes life anything but straightforward since nothing is more

troubling than to invoke causation in what, correctly, is fundamentally a hermeneutic

question.)

2 Madame Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled: A Master-Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology(1877) was the chef d’œuvre of theosophy. In France the great promoter of theosophy – the person most read by artists – was Edouard Schuré, especially his Les Grand initiés (1889).

























question.)


























question.)


3. The Theosophical Society was founded in New York in 1875 by Helena Petrovna

Blavatsky in collaboration with Henry Steel Olcott. The term theosophy – wisdom of

the gods – is an old term for the study of wisdom through esoteric sources and

practices. Its Christian forms extended from Jakob Böhme (1575 – 1624) to

Emmanuel Swedenborg (1688 – 1772) and in between one could find many

permutations of alchemy, astrology, kabbala, hermeticism, again, in a range from the

Renaissance figure of a Marsilio Ficino all the way to Baudelaire (whose aesthetic of

correspondences is theosophically derived) and the Surrealists and quite a few

Dadaists, too.3 The poetics of W.B. Yeats and many a Symbolist would make little

sense without certain theosophical concepts then commonly available. Without

getting into complications, though, the basic idea behind theosophy in its nineteenth-

and early twentieth-century incarnation was (i) to assert the fundamental unity of the

great world religions and thereby to extract a spirituality common to all, and (ii) to

show the compatibility of this spiritual tradition with modern science. To this end,

theosophists and theosophically inclined artists became attached to scientific

developments (especially in modern physics) that demonstrated the existence of

invisible forces – invisible, that is, to the human senses – such as x-rays, electricity,

and even sounds in a range beyond human hearing. This new invisible world of forces

was taken as vindication of a certain Neo-Platonism, and abstract painting – which at

certain moments could be seen as illustration of the theosophist Annie Besant’s

thought-forms4 – came to be the visible embodiment, the making-visible of such

higher or extra-sensorial forces in no way irrational.

4. That Kandinsky, whose relationship to Rudolf Steiner’s version of theosophy,

namely, Anthroposophy, is well established, thought in these terms when he wrote On

the Spiritual in Art (1912) cannot be doubted, and likewise Mondrian when he wrote

3 See, for example, the exhibition catalogue, Entrée des mediums: Spritisme et Art de Hugo à Breton, Maison de Victor Hugo (Paris: Maison de Victor Hugo, Paris-Musées, 2012).

4 See Annie Besant, Thought-Forms (1901) of which many examples on the www here: https://www.google.com/search?q=annie+besant+thought+forms&client=ubuntu&channel=fs&biw=1366&bih=657&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&sqi=2&ved=0ahUKEwjMxuaEz_jPAhWB8CYKHRxBBHQQsAQIKw

























question.)





















































question.)





























1920)5 and Neo-Plasticism, dedicated to Aux hommes futurs [to men of the future].6 It

is also safe to say, however, that the spiritual practices, the spiritual technology of

theosophy, however authentically important to the painters at the source of

abstraction, would soon lose any purchase upon its developing audience - one need

only follow the fate, the solitude of Krishnamurti to grasp the gradual and irreversible

dimunition of the practice of theosophy - and would cease over time to have any

purchase upon the emerging audience for abstraction as painterly art, indeed, as

emblematically modern art (even as forms and re-activable traces of this disposition

are still available in the work of a Robert Smithson, a Gordon Matta-Clark, and a

Brice Marden). The great book by the Finnish scholar Sixten Ringbom, The Sounding

Cosmos: A Study in the Spiritualism of Kandinsky and the Genesis of Abstract

Painting (1970) was both a summation in scholarship of this disposition and in many

ways a closing of a way of thinking within the advanced accounts of modernist

painting. The most important attempts to update this tradition and to make its reserves

once more available to scholarship and contemporary sensibility was the great

exhibition (in part inspired by the chance discovery of Ringbom’s book) curated by

Maurice Tuchman at LACMA in 1987, namely, The Spiritual in Art: Abstract

Painting 1890 – 1985. This exhibition, drawing upon an anti-formalist counter-

tradition of modern art and abstraction, did more than any other form of

contemporary scholarship to bring back into view certain ways of thinking about form

and non-standard, heterodox spirituality as necessary conditions for the emergence of

a determinate language of abstraction, and though it has had a long afterlife and

received critical acclaim, it remains that that this exhibition and its catalogue emerged

at precisely the moment when new materialist strategies in the form of, first, the New

Art Histories, then the Social History of Art, and later Visual Culture along with the

5 Piet Mondrian, Natural Reality and Abstract Reality: A Trialogue (While Strolling from the Country to the City), in The New Art – The New Life: The Collected Writings of Piet Mondrian, ed. Harry Holtzman and Martin S. James (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987), 82-123. An important but implicit aspect of Mondrian’s writings of this period is the movement and relation between country (Holland) and city (Paris), or, metonymically, landscape and studio., and thereby a movement from an art of embodiment (affect) to construction (language, or signification in Yve-Alain Bois’ account of abstraction).

6 Piet Mondrian, Neo-Plasticism: The General Principle of Plastic Equivalence (1920), in The New Art – The New Life: The Collected Writings of Piet Mondrian, ed. Harry Holtzman and Martin S. James (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987), 132-147.












Painting (1970) was both a summation in scholarship of this disposition and in many
















The New Plastic in Painting (1917),5 and Natural Reality and Abstract Reality (1919-












Painting (1970), was both a summation in scholarship of this disposition and in many











5 Piet Mondrian, The New Plastic in Painting, in The New Art – The New Life: The Collected Writings of Piet Mondrian, ed. Harry Holtzman and Martin S. James (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987), 27-74. Consider the title of Mondrian’s “Conclusion: Nature and Spirit as Female and Male Elements.”









































































































































neo-Structuralism of the October journal in New York, had captured the academic

study of art’s histories and so left no room for the kind of thinking of form rooted in

the essentially post-Symbolist modes of symbolization common to poets (Eliot,

Pound, Breton), composers (Debussy, and Schönberg’s school), novelists (Dujardin

to Joyce, but also Blanchot), playwrights (Maeterlinck to Beckett, Jarry to Ionesco),

painters (Nabis to Kandinsky, Cézanne as interpreted by Bernard and Maurice Denis,

with Denis and the Nabis simultaneously able to acknowledge Redon and Cézanne8),

and philosophical thought – say, Kristeva’s semiotic interpretation of the feminine

dimension of avant-garde production and experience developed in her La Révolution

du langage poétique: L’avant-Garde à la fin du XiXe siècle: Lautréamont et

Mallarmé (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1974).9 An important moment in the afterlife of

Tuchman’s great exhibition came in 2008 with Alfred Pacquement’s extraordinary

exhibition Traces du sacré at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The exhibition and

catalogue are explicit in acknowledgement of Tuchman’s 1987 exhibition on The

Spiritual in Art, publishing a moving page by Tuchman on the struggles he

encountered in getting his exhibition accepted.10

5. The late art historian and abstract painter John Golding, in his Mellon Lecture on the

nature and language of abstract painting Paths to the Absolute, perhaps put it with

most tact when acknowledging the importance of the theosophic / hermetic sources of

8 Here, see the painting by Maurice Denis, Hommage à Cezanne, 1900. Oil on canvas. Paris: Musée d’Orsay. Here is not the place to go into the cultural and psycho-social significance of this painting. Cézanne is present in the painting through the copy of one of his still lives (owned by Gauguin but on loan to Denis), Still Life with Fruit Dish, 1879-80 (New York: MoMA), whilst Redon is depicted in person (surrounded by Nabis painters) receiving hommage from Paul Sérusier.

9 Though aspects of Kristeva’s work have passed into English-language cultural studies and critical theory – for example, abjection – the implications of her work for art historical methodology and the re-conceiving of fundamentally post-Symbolist aesthetics have never been picked up.

10 Cf. Maurice Tuchman “The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting, 1890-1985,” in Traces du sacré (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2008), 36.



















































Mondrian’s art nevertheless observed that “[Mondrian] came to reject totally the use

of symbols; and yet his abstraction is informed by the idealistic philosophy with

which he became imbued, [and] he reached his initial conclusions through the

hermetic systems of thought saturated with symbolic content.”11

6. This brief historiography matters: first, because the question of Why abstraction – of

which the most powerful accounts are to be found in the work of Yve-Alain Bois,

Richard Shiff, Hubert Damisch, and Richard Wollheim – is tacitly now the question:

Why painting? What is it that painting as an art continues to makes available?

7. The question of Why painting? is also linked to the conception of painting and the

transmission of certain conceptions and practices. It is essential, for example, that it

be understood that had Picasso and Braque’s Cubism never existed the abstraction of

Kandinsky would still have existed. Kandinsky’s work c. 1905 – 1910 leading to

abstraction emerges from a purely Symbolist tradition and owes nothing to Cubism.

Wassily Kandinsky, Murnau Garden, 1910, oil on canvas. Munich: Städtische Galerie inLenbachhaus

Rick Vian, Il Ramo, 2010, oil on panel. Detroit: Addie and Michael Stone-Richards

Mondrian, too, emerges from a strictly Symbolist tradition, but there can equally be

no doubt that his pictorial language is marked and transformed by a definitive

encounter with Cubism – even as Picasso and Braque’s Cubism consistently refused

the language of abstraction. Mondrian’s engagement with Cubism becomes the

foundation of an international language of abstraction marked by the work with the

plane and the reduction of the plane from phenomenological form and symbol to

constituent elements, from image to sign, let’s say. As a short-hand – a crude short-

hand, to be sure, but that is the nature of short-hands – let’s call this the School of

Paris lineage.

11 John Golding, “Mondrian and the Architecture of the Future,” Paths to the Absolute: Mondrian, Malevich, Kandinsky, Pollock, Newman, Rothko, and Still (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 9.
























Paris lineage.

























Paris lineage.

























Paris lineage.


8. It is with Kandinsky and Mondrian that the principal terms for talking about the

possibility of a language of abstract art are set up. E.H. Gombrich’s account of art as

developed in Art and Illusion (1960), that neurological structures ultimately shaped

our perceptual capacities and so the understanding of art, was in part motivated by the

wish to explain the development of perspective and naturalism in Renaissance art, but

such an approach could in no way begin to explain abstraction, and there never has

been a plausible account of abstraction along Gombrich’s line of argument. Anti-

naturalism is the hallmark of modernist art: for Bois this requires recourse to the

language of the sign, but it can equally be argued – following Roman Jakobsen and

Emile Benveniste – that the notion of the sign is an abstraction from the more

fundamental notion of reference, that is, relation to the world. Signification or

embodiment. In either case, the issue becomes the way in which something like a

language is activated by new structures – one which is capable, in the terms of

Mondrian, of grasping abstract reality (intellection) in a manner distinct from but

comparable to natural reality (perception), and hence a language marked by the play

of reference or sign as a break with the naturalism of pointing (ostensive definition).12

Abstraction is the inability to pick out by mere pointing.

9. The attempts of Robert Rosenblum, Ringbom and Tuchman and many others to

create a Northern / Romantic lineage for abstraction was an attempt, often under-

conceptualized, to register an alternative to the (“formalist”) language of the picture

plane as shaped by Cubism and the encounter of Mondrian (and others) with the

language of Cubism. Again, to be direct, to speak in short-hand, consider the CoBRA

movement of which Asger Jorn became the leading figure, and for whom Paris was

also culturally and personally important. For the style of painting created by Jorn and

his peers not the plane but the surface in movement – energy, is the word that Rick

Vian likes to use – and layers (underneathness in Damisch’s language) is the issue,

above all the surface constructed as a screen to evoke and capture affect. (Indeed,

there is a remarkable statement by Jorn that no matter what the avant-garde attempt to

12 See Stephen Bann, “Abstract Art – A Language?” in Towards a New Art: Essays on the Background to Abstract Art 1910-20, The Tate Gallery (London: The Tate Gallery, 1980).



























































negate the projective qualities of a support – for anything cab become art - the viewer,

and by implication the first viewer, namely, the artist, always manages to find a way

to activate projective qualities and so make the support no longer accidental or

irrelevant.) The avant-garde school in Detroit’s recent history, the Cass Corridor, was

not School of Paris; and whilst I do not wish to say that everything curated in Vian’s

show is Cass Corridor or post-Cass Corridor, it seems nevertheless clear to me that

the language of surface characteristic of Detroit-school abstraction, shares with

CoBRA a refusal of plane in favor of surface, wetness in paint, impasto, paint as

gesture, accumulation on the surface (in sculpture / construction as well as painting as

we find in Lois Teicher, and John Rowland) and, further, that this particular kind of

work of the surface is linked to and held to be expressive of histories of affect and

place (which I find to be especially strong in the work of Robert Sestok and its use of

textures to suggest the archaic / timeless) – indeed, it is all too clear that Detroit

abstraction holds to a fundamentally expressive conception of art, above all where

abstraction functions as an analogue of metaphorical processes (here, for example, I

think of the work of Erin Parrish and Anita Bates) or the insistence, à la Reverdy, on

the new, that is, that a work of art is a new thing in the world of existing things, and

as such is something against nature (as might be seen in the work of Ray Katz and

John Piett III). When Picasso or Matisse looked at, collected, African sculpture, for

example, they did not affect any relationship to the work outside of a powerful

aesthetic experience – which was enough. When, however, we come to CoBRA, it is

no longer a simple matter of looking at exotic – that is, etymologically, foreign – art.

CoBRA begins to look at the primitive – that is, etymologically, earliest – “art” in

their native traditions, as part of their cultural location, as part of a cultural

morphology whose forms and energies continue to find expression in their

contemporary practice. One finds pictures and articles – and essays written by

anthropologists13 – throughout their eponymous journal dealing with primitive Nordic

art (just as Breton in the 1950’s will begin to look at native Gallic, that is, French,

art); likewise, I am struck by Vian’s deep and long-established engagement with the

13 See P.V. Glob, “Les ‘Guldgubber’ scandinaves,” Cobra: Bulletin pour la coordination des investigations artistiques, no. 1 (1948): 12-13.




























































































language, culture, and landscape of the Ojibway Native-Americans14 (First Nation

people in Canada): in his use of Ojibway for the titles of many of his works, for the

landscape – both abstract and figurative – where he situates himself to paint, above all

when trees are the objects (but not the subject) of his painting. This is especially so in

his Gitch Gumee series (Lake Superior via Hiawatha and the Ojibway). This art of

place – the location of culture – is very Olsonian, that is, deep American and in every

way comparable to CoBRA practices, the practices, in other words, of the non-

metropolitan artist of an aesthetic of the open.

Rick Vian, Nin Nodjim (Ojibway) I am cured, 2012. Oil on canvas.

Rick Vian, Nind Apagadjiwebaog (Ojibway) The Waves beat against my Canoe and

Carry me Away, 2012. Oil on canvas.

10. It is here that I can begin to make sense of the admiration and attraction I have for

what is most powerful in Vian’s painting, both in its formal and cultural

engagements: as with the origins of abstraction – Sérusier’s Talisman, Kandisnksy’s

painting from 1905-1910 – his work is fundamentally situated as landscape where the

formal features of the landscape are simultaneously grasped as expressively cultural,

hence the (pictorial) exclusion of the city. The work depicts embeddedness and is

itself an act of being embedded. There is, too, a sense of speed, indeed, something

that at first might be characterized as a calligraphic sense of speed, something that is

linked to the quality of wetness in the paint – which also contributes to the quality of

embeddedness – which on further reflection makes clear why one might have certain

artistiques, no. 1 (1948): 12-13.

14 Amongst the younger generation of Detroit artists, Scott Hocking is the artist more than any other who has taken this preoccupation with the Native-American as cultural condition further and in a conceptual direction – see his series Garden of the Gods, 2009-20011, but even more so the very important project called The Mound Project,2007 – present. On this aspect of Hocking, see Michael Stone-Richards, “Retreating / Retracing Space: Scott Hocking and the Politics of Visibility,” Detroit Research, vol. 1 (2015) https://www.detroitresearch.org/retreating-retracing-space-scott-hocking-and-the-politics-of-visibility/































language, culture, and landscape of the Ojibway Native-Americans (First Nation





















kinesthetic sensations when absorbed in the work, for throughout Vian’s painting is a

dance as in Il Ramo, 2010: a dance across the surface, a dance in the landscape,

meeting in the mental inscape. The calligraphic is also choreographic. His colors –

yellow ochre, alizarin crimson, cadmium red light, what Gauguinesque colors, what

Symbolist auras! – are like markers of sensation in this movement, this energy of

surface and densities. As with one of the key sources of abstraction – again, The

Talisman as an iconic example, but also Mondrian’s Pier and Ocean works of 1917

































language, culture, and landscape of the Ojibway Native-Americans14 (First Nation





















artistiques, no. 1 (1948): 12-13.

14 Amongst the younger generation of Detroit artists, Scott Hocking is the artist more than any other who has taken this preoccupation with the Native-American as cultural condition further and in a conceptual direction – see his series Garden of the Gods, 2009-20011, but even more so the very important project called The Mound Project,2007 – present. On this aspect of Hocking, see Michael Stone-Richards, “Retreating / Retracing Space: Scott Hocking and the Politics of Visibility,” Detroit Research, vol. 1 (2015) https://www.detroitresearch.org/retreating-retracing-space-scott-hocking-and-the-politics-of-visibility/








where one can readily track the dissolution of water and plane into an emergent

language of the sign – there is consistently present in the work the use of mirror-

images: water pre-eminently (see the Sky in the Water series of 2015 where the work

approaches the sublime in its approach to Lake Superior15), but also in mandalas, but

most distinctively in the painting inspired by hallucinations. In a conversation I had

with Vian, he told me of his researches into hallucinations and how surprised he was

at first to discover that there was a limited number of patterns in hallucinations and

that, furthermore, these patterns were always symmetrical. This is something well-

established – it is a feature that was much discussed in the early collecting of the “art

of the insane” (Prinzhorn) where the preponderance of symmetry in the art work of

psychotic patients could not be escaped. What I take Vian to be doing, however, is

recovering for his own purposes, that is, investigating, the role of mirror-images in

mental (hallucinations) and physical (trees) landscapes as a generative matrix of

abstract form; in other words, the symmetrical images of hallucinations fulfill the

same structural function as the mirror-image of water in the emergence of abstraction

in painting. Indeed, it is a feature of our part of the universe that is rarely discussed,

namely, that it is everywhere and without exception characterized by symmetry. How

telling, though, that this most urban of art forms, abstraction, should have begun in

landscape and, via Detroit, find itself still nourished by recourse to the play of water,

sky, and the open, archaic landscape. This play of reference is Rick Vian’s sensibility.

Rick Vian, White Pine Morning, 2014. Oil on canvas.

15 More work needs to be done on both the dance in Vian’s painting and the role of the sublime in his work as embodied above all in his work on the manifestation of Lake Superior as presence. I hope to curate an exhibition to this end.

language, culture, and landscape of the Ojibway Native-Americans (First Nation






































approaches the sublime in its approach to Lake Superior15), but also in mandalas, but


















15 More work needs to be done on both the dance in Vian’s painting and the role of the sublime in his work as embodied above all in his work on the manifestation of Lake Superior as presence. I hope to curate an exhibition to this end.

in hallucinations and that, furthermore, these patterns were always symmetrical. This

is something well-established – it is a feature that was much discussed in the early

collecting of the “art of the insane” (Prinzhorn) where the preponderance of

symmetry in the art work of psychotic patients could not be escaped. What I take

Vian to be doing, however, is recovering for his own purposes, that is, investigating,

the role of mirror-images in mental (hallucinations) and physical (trees) landscapes as

a generative matrix of abstract form; in other words, the symmetrical images of

hallucinations fulfill the same structural function as the mirror image of water.

Indeed, it is a feature of our part of the universe that is rarely discussed, namely, that

it is everywhere and without exception characterized by symmetry. How telling,

though, that this most urban of art forms, abstraction, should have begun in landscape

and, via Detroit, find itself still nourished by recourse to the play of water, sky, and

the open, archaic landscape. This play of reference is Rick Vian’s sensibility.


Rick Vian, Hex Walk, 1974. Oil on canvas.

Michael Stone-Richards

Chair, Committee on Critical Studies

College for Creative Studies

Editor, Detroit Research




approaches the sublime in its approach to Lake Superior), but also in mandalas, but


















Rick Vian, Hex Walk, 1974. Oil on canvas.

Michael Stone-Richards

Chair, Committee on Critical Studies

College for Creative Studies

Editor, Detroit Research

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