Getting the Drift of Discordance : Marc Pally Launches a Newport Harbor Lecture Series With Discussion of His 1987 Work

“I have an inability to see things in a coherent, monolithic, reductive way--an unwillingness to sort of get settled.”

Marc Pally, a painter from Los Angeles, was addressing an intent group of visitors to Newport Harbor Art Museum on Tuesday. His wide-ranging discussion of his 1987 work “Drift”was the first in a weekly series of gallery talks by artists represented in the museum’s collection.

As Pally suggested, the “note of discordance” in his work is obvious. The separate elements in “Drift,” which look vaguely organic, do not seem to have anything to do with each other. They seem to be exploding, colliding, floating, expanding, vanishing or spinning intricate webs in a strangely discontinuous space.

The painting also exhibits a hodgepodge of various techniques (such as dripping, erasing, drawing, scratching and varnishing) and contains layers of diverse materials (including chalk, ink, acrylic, oil, graphite, modeling paste and water).

What interests Pally, he said, is the relation between an object and the space it occupies, or, more grandly, “the unity of molecular matter” in life. He brushed some of the painted forms with varnish while they were drying, to pull them “into the atmosphere.” Recalling that he turned the canvas around while working on it--some of the drips trickle up instead of down--he remarked airily that “gravity is just a convention, after all.”

In the midst of revealing what he called the “tricks” of his technique, Pally asked: “What is a political painting? Can this painting talk about unity and diversity? Serbia and Croatia? Is politics how we perceive the world or how we vote?”

He reminded his listeners that even Impressionism was political because of “the life it is celebrating”--bourgeois and working-class leisure-time activities--as well as its revolt against the entrenched painting methods of the French Academy.

“I consider myself very political, and I go in the studio and make these things,” Pally continued, gesturing at his canvas. “(So) why don’t I write ‘Abolish Apartheid’ (on them)?”

“Well, you’re refusing to accept things as they are,” suggested a woman in the audience.

“Are you thinking political thoughts when you paint?” a man asked.

“No, I pretty much zone out,” Pally replied candidly.

“But everything in you protests things as they are!” the woman insisted.

Pally said he is interested in such questions as: What is the difference between a human body and a piece of architecture? Can you have anthropomorphic buildings? What about an architectural body? He is interested in botanical and cybernetic imagery, genetic coding research and “the warp between past and future.”

But such ideas, he said, float into his works without his direct bidding. Referring to a sculpture-like object in the lower portion of the painting, he remembered “thinking of basketry. But what I (wound up making) was a Space Age-Darth Vader-Watusi kind of thing.”

“The whole thing was finished before you realized it?” asked an incredulous-sounding listener. Pally nodded. Yes.

Though, he admitted, some of his imagery is just about moving his arm in space while listening to music on his stereo, his goal is to unite this “kinesthetic activity” with analytic thinking.

He said he enjoys “the very private activity” of being “sequestered in his studio,” where he works on “a formal level, trying to achieve a balance in which the intuitive and the analytical are in sync. It’s not that I stand back and become analytic and then I move forward and become impetuous.

“(I put) something soft here and something hard there. Then I get stuck. . . . I almost hate admitting that one of the joys of painting is when I end up in a corner. . . . (But) the death of one image provides an opportunity for some other image to live.”

Although Pally finds “a certain kind of risk-taking important for my self-esteem,” he said there are some risks he would not take in his work: “I would never want to put a refrigerator door on this. There is a level of elegance I’m not willing to sacrifice. I’m not interested in having my paintings be life.”

“How do you know when they’re finished?” asked Ellen Breitman, the museum’s director of education.

“When they’re in balance, compositionally, conceptionally, tonally,” Pally said, adding that “Drift” took about four months to complete.

“Do you ever start from an idea or image?” someone wanted to know.

“Never,” Pally said firmly. “The only kind of idea I have is like, I’m gonna drip.”

“Do you wish to be ambiguous?” someone else asked.

“It’s not a matter of wishing,” Pally replied. “I am.”

The next talk in the Tuesday series--organized in conjunction with the exhibit “Different Stories: Five Views of the Collection”--takes place July 23 in the galleries. Painter Karen Carson will discuss her untitled work from 1981. The museum is at 850 San Clemente Drive in Newport Beach. Admission is free on Tuesdays; the lectures also are free. “Different Stories” continues through Sept. 15. (714) 759-1122.