Around 1963, Peter Young began to think of himself as a painter. A Los Angeles native who spent two years at Pomona College, in Claremont, California, he moved to New York in 1960 and studied briefly with Theodoros Stamos and Stephen Greene at the Art Students League before enrolling in the art history program at New York University — not yet fully committed to being an artist. But by 1964, a year after graduating from NYU, he was making all-over plaid paintings as well as all-over paintings composed of identically sized, equidistantly placed dots. Although he did not seek gallery representation, he gained considerable attention with these latter works.
While Young used a reductive vocabulary made of dots and lines, he did not identify himself with Minimalist or formalist painting, which insisted on the grid, flatness, and a rejection of nature as a subject. In a video interview on the Gallery Wendi Norris website, he calls himself a “Maximalist.”
Young’s “Maximalism” had its roots in his upbringing. When he was 16, he met the couple Lee Mullican and Luchita Hurtado, both modernist painters. In contrast to their East Coast counterparts, they did not reject mysticism, otherworldliness, and nonwestern sources, or what could be called alternative systems. For them, nature was part of the cosmos, teeming with unseen energy. This is the foundation from which Young developed his preoccupations.
In the summer of 1969, just as his paintings were included in prestigious exhibitions such as the Corcoran Biennial, Nine Young Artists/Theodoron Award at the Guggenheim, and a two-person show with David Diao at Leo Castelli, Young removed himself from New York. When Castelli invited the artist to join his gallery and offered him a stipend, Young turned him down, and remained with his then dealer, Richard Bellamy.
At first, Young went to Costa Rica and lived with the Boruca tribe, where he made paintings by wrapping cloth around sticks tied together, the opposite of what was going on in New York. When he left Costa Rica, he gave all but one to friends he made in the Boruca tribe. The other one he gave to a friend who lived in England.
After he returned to the United States, he wandered around the West. He eventually settled in Bisbee, Arizona, where he continues to live, work, and contribute to the community, but he also spent time in Utah. While there, he made “stick” painting. These are the subject of Peter Young: “Stick” Paintings, 1970, at Craig Starr Gallery. Continuing the formal and material explorations that he began in Costa Rica, Young stretched canvas over ponderosa pine branches held together by nylon, jute, or cotton twine, and painted with acrylic.
The 11 paintings in the exhibition are all titled with a number and year. The planar “36-1970” is, according to Ellen Johnson in a 1971 ArtForum article, the last painting in the series. Together, Young’s 36 “stick” paintings establish a viable alternative to the rigid, large-scale abstract paintings that were then being hailed in New York at the time. Handcrafted, modest in scale, and irregular in shape, they have a brown border that echoes their handmade frames, protrusions and all. Over the monochromatic interior, Young painted a few similarly colored lines. He never revises the drawing, and the viscosity of the lines register when he stopped and reloaded his brush. What you see is not a tightly executed, machine-like painting, but a humbler and more vulnerable approach, the labor of the painter.
While the drawing is abstract, the works evoke Native American motifs. That proximity, along with the ponderosa frames, bring forth a lot of associations, including the Indigenous sources behind so-called American abstraction. Literally and metaphorically speaking, the canvas is attached to nature, rather than to a stretcher, which Young connected with the self-serving, aesthetic rigidity of the New York art world. His resistance to aesthetic agendas and group think was important then and urgently so now. Young is far more than a maverick artist, and the wider implications of his visually striking oeuvre have yet to be registered fully in the history of American art.
Peter Young: “Stick” Paintings, 1970 continues at Craig Starr Gallery (5 East 73rd Street, Lenox Hill, Manhattan) through February 8. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
