Margaret Koval: Painting Pixels Arts News Now

Pictured Above: Artist Margaret Koval in studio. Photo Credit: Contributed.

Painting Pixels: The Distinctive Eye of a Journalist Turned Artist

By Artist Contributor, Margaret Koval

Margaret Koval reflects on her journey from documenting history with a video camera to exploring its ambiguities through the authenticity of paint.

Images have coursed through my life so strongly that I can hardly imagine modern history – or indeed my own personal history – without them. One of my earliest memories is the assassination of John F. Kennedy. My parents’ Time-Life photo album of that event, which I poured over for years afterwards, undoubtedly propelled me towards an early career in television news.

That and my love of art. I remember distinctly scanning my career options and weighing which would best allow me to pay the bills while feeding my visual hunger. I chose broadcasting then (and painting later), thinking it offered a rich image source to work with. Boy did it.

I began producing for ABC News Nightline in the late 1980s, later moving to 20/20. Those job sent me around the country and overseas, watching the churn of history through the lens of a video camera. Palestinian boys throwing rocks at tanks; a Chinese student playing chicken with one: even now these images are completely iconic for me, as they are for many.

When I moved on to make history documentaries for PBS about a decade later, I became less concerned with capturing such emblematic images and more concerned with making them. I worked on staging and lighting my shots so they were freighted with as much subliminal information as possible. From there, it was a perfectly logical progression for me to dispense with all the camera paraphernalia and cumbersome production crews and simply focus on making images for their own sake. So, in my forties, after decades of painting in the garage, I made an opportunity to go to art school in London, and I grabbed it.

It’s been a circuitous route (with a few other twists and turns not mentioned) and I’m grateful for that. Without doubt, I’ve swum upstream against the cliché that serious art demands single-minded compulsion… or a life steeped only in the monoculture of the art world. But equally surely, my parallel lives are a source of artistic distinction. The most obvious consequence has been a commitment to narrative images – to painted ‘scenes’ that are loosely representational and imply a backstory.

This has not always been fashionable. But years working as a television news producer embedded in me an appreciation for the power of strong pictorial storytelling to convey understanding by grabbing the emotions. The words that accompany television news stories are important, of course, but I became convinced that emotional persuasion ran deeper than intellectual persuasion and the former was best reached through the senses — through the ears, yes, but essentially through the eyes.

Of course, I also learned that pictures, like words, can lie. Or can tell competing stories. The dictum that “seeing is believing” in photojournalism begs the question of whether that belief is right or wrong. In art, however, the difference is less consequential than it is in news – and, in fact, I think the potential for slippage is exactly where the power of artworks can be found. You read a painting one way based on your visual memory and experiences; I read it differently based on mine. The truth is amorphous… and defining that truth rightfully resides with the viewer. I want my paintings to invite such varied readings and to be explicit that other readings are equally possible.

To be a little glib, I could say that my job as a journalist was to find truth hidden in complexity. But as an artist, I’m trying to point out the ambiguity hidden in clarity.

Digital media have amped up this agenda. And again, my perspective has been fundamentally shaped by my personal history. When digitization swept the broadcast industry, I was making social history documentaries which relied heavily on archival source material – family photos, early newsreels, old films. I found myself scouring hundreds of hours of material in search of images showing the everyday experiences of ordinary people. Footage of public figures was available in relative abundance. But shots of working- and middle-class men and women going about their daily lives were scarcer.

And it hit me that this was a dying problem. Documentary makers of the future would be drowning in shots of everyday life thanks to the growing adoption and widespread deployment of the new(ish) technology of surveillance cameras. These cameras were being installed every half block by the police in London, where I lived then. And private surveillance feeds were (and are still) viewable live on the internet. In a few years, I reasoned, this would create a veritable bottomless archive of social history. Smart phone cameras would accelerate this process exponentially, as nearly everyone began collecting and sharing their own massive archive with frictionless effort.

Pictured Above: Artist Margaret Koval up close and in studio. Photo Credit: Contributed.

Nonetheless, the issue of ambiguous meaning was only getting stronger. Most digital images quickly dissolved into a sea of meaningless dots when enlarged for scrutiny. And the magnitude of the digital archive itself soon became a tsunami of meaninglessness. I began to pity the documentary makers of the future rather than envy them. Their sightlines (literal and figurative) would be completely clogged with staged selfies, iPhone videos, marketing clips, influencer channels, bot-generated content and now deep fakes. The blizzard of images was creating whiteout conditions where the abundance of the visual record meant nothing would be visible.

These sorts of thoughts have created a long-running conundrum among many artists about whether to lean into the digital revolution — by making art with and about digital or reproductive technologies — or whether to resist by eschewing technology and sticking with the artistic approaches of previous eras. Contemporary painters have too often been lumped together in this discussion as purveyors of the past.

I’m hardly alone in thinking this is a false dichotomy. I’ve certainly been enriched by a lot of digital art. But, curiously, more than a century after painting was declared dead as an artform – allegedly killed by the invention of photography – I think painting may now have the upper hand when it comes to resuscitating a sense of the real. In my mind, paintings can feel more authentic than photography or other digital media in the sense that each painting is a singular creation, thought up by a unique person, produced by an individual hand. Each painting holds the aura of its particular creator in one way or another – be it the brush strokes, color palette or other idiosyncrasies. And I believe it’s that visible corporeality that allow paintings to draw us emotionally closer to the creative process… to what I consider the essence of humanity.

At the same time, painting isn’t merely a rear-guard action in these matters. It goes without saying that contemporary painters can and do also address the essence of contemporary life – sometimes by embracing or even coopting its more emblematic features.

Take my preoccupation with surveillance images, for example. Initially the product of police departments, security firms and maybe espionage departments, surveillance images carry distinctive signs of their origins. They are typically grainy images, shot from high angles, looking down on their subject, or through some duck blind of trees or shrubbery.

The next generation of self-surveillance images became defined by the particular aspect-ratio of a smartphone and the focal length of a selfie. Collectively, I call these cues ‘the surveillance gaze’ and I often embed them in the compositions of my paintings. Like the French Impressionists of the 19^th century or the early German Expressionists of the 20^th – both groups whose members frequently painted street life as a distillation of their view on modernity – I’m trying to capture the digital highways we promenade through now. In other words, my subject is the technological reproduction of our contemporary landscape as much as the landscape itself.

Viewers don’t have to appreciate these nuances to recognize there’s more at play in my paintings than first expected. They’ll see that right on the surface. Digital pictures, as everyone knows, are comprised of pixels of light. In reference to that, my paintings are comprised of small bubbles or long strands of oil paint. I apply the paint from the back side of a loose-weave canvas and push it through the holes. When it extrudes out the front, the paint coalesces into images that behave much like a digital photograph. That is, the image is legible from a distance, but becomes a different universe of fiber, dots and loops when viewed close up.

Stepping back again, the object that is the painting itself can look like something else, altogether. People often see the warp and the weft of the fabric and assume the paint strands are yarn. They imagine they’re looking at a tapestry or needlepoint. When I push the paint through in more abundance, the emerging strands take on the appearance of a shag rug or old carpet. I’m told it’s uncanny. I love that. Because by activating a sense of the uncanny around the painting as object, I hope my viewers pause to reflect on the uncanny nature of the world those paintings depict.

An exhibition of Margaret Koval’s paintings, The Uncanny Valley of Everyday Life, will be on display at ArtWRKD Gallery in Newtown, PA February 7-23. There will be a ticketed ‘First Friday’ Preview on February 7 from 6:00-9:00 pm; an open to the public and free ‘Second Saturday’ Artist Celebration on February 15 from 6:00 – 9:00 and an Artist Dialogue on 23 February at 1:00 pm. Learn more about Margaret on her website by visiting: margaretkoval.com.