As an artist, Jay DeFeo worked with an impressive array of media—including oil, acrylic, tempera, pastel, gouache, ink, charcoal, wax pencil, graphite, and enamel —which she applied variously to paper, canvas, linen, and Masonite. She also made collages, photocollages, and photographs. Although she did not begin to work intensely with photographs until the 1970s, there was an ongoing dialogue between what she photographed and what she painted and drew dating back at least to the mid-fifties. Many artists have used photographs as the basis for their paintings, but DeFeo was one of the few to keep the dialogue going by photographing what she had drawn, and then using the second generation of photographs as the basis for other drawings. She referred to this as transplanting an image. Sometimes multiple paintings and drawings were inspired by the way her original drawing(s) materialized in her black-and-white photographs.¹

Between 1969 and 1976, DeFeo acquired an expensive light meter and various cameras (including a Hasselblad and a Nikon), set up a darkroom, and concentrated much of her energy on photography. Funds from a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in 1973 helped her with some of these purchases. She made contact sheets that she organized chronologically into notebooks that she studied. Her prints were consistently small, most less than 8 x 10 inches and many smaller than 3 x 4 inches. While she made multiple prints from the same negative, most were different. Her love of experimentation was too great to replicate her printing decisions. Nor did her subjects fit readily into traditional genre categories. For instance, one could categorize her photographs of her dental bridge as still lifes, but it is not a comfortable assignment. One wonders if she really wanted us to care whether or not the subject was teeth. Nor does her series of images of a ceramic pot with small mirrors embedded in its sides lead one to believe that she cared about ceramic pots the way Ansel Adams cared about the peaks and valleys at Yosemite National Park or Dorothea Lange cared about migrant laborers. Although DeFeo used her camera as a visual journal and often carried it with her, she was not documenting her subjects in traditional ways, but as part of her highly personal and rich lexicon of images.

Photographs of plants make up about a quarter of DeFeo's photographs. In the botanical photographs in this show, the "thingness" of the plant is secondary to her decisions based on formal and tonal interplay. We know this because she later made drawings and paintings inspired by some of the photographs, and shapes in the photographs recur frequently in all media of her work. For example, the forms in three pictures in this exhibition relate to her most legendary work, The Rose, built with multiple layers of white, black, and gray oil paint, which in places reaches a thickness of 11 inches.² The image is of lines and undulating forms that radiate from a center with a surface that is somewhat smooth near the focal point and very craggy at the periphery. The fungus on the base of a log in one photograph (P0307) repeats the undulations of the outer edges of The Rose, as do the edges of cabbage leaves in two other photographs (P1198, P1200). Another analogy between the fungus photograph and her art in other media is that the fungus has "worked" the surface of the log as she often worked the surface of paper in her drawings. And like her drawings, the log is smooth and white where there is no intervention, then layered and heavy with echoing forms at the base where fungus grows.

DeFeo often worked with the same simple objects for years. She repeatedly photographed, drew, and collaged images of a tripod between 1975 and 1977.³ Earlier, from 1970 to 1975, she developed an important series titled The Loop System based on the broken handle of a white ceramic coffee cup. Roses are another recurring theme in her work, as is clear from three other photographs in this exhibition as well as The Rose. DeFeo photographed a rose in full bloom in her own garden and double-exposed it with a fur pelt (P0534). In another photograph, a head of cauliflower arranged on a silver serving piece sits on a scarred table, its shape and placement clearly referring to a rose (P1038). (She also plays in this image with repeated circles—the top and the base of the server, the vegetable itself, and a watermark on the table—against the strong diagonal edge of the table.) Finally, there is a lady's mantle leaf (P1201) that became the inspiration for a painting titled Cabbage Rose (1975). A series of prints exist of this photographic image, some of which are printed to reveal the leaf's veins radiating out from the center and creating pie-shaped wedges with scalloped tips. But the print that served as the source for the painting Cabbage Rose is printed so dark that the center goes black, obscuring the symmetry of the radiating veins as well as the fact that this is one leaf.

DeFeo photographed plants at the Conservatory of Flowers in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park (P0190, P0191, P0192, P0201), on walks, in private gardens, during her travels, and in her studio. Usually she made multiple prints from a negative, each slightly different in tonalities, contrast, and what I refer to as her scissor-cropping (although she also used a paper cutter). These modifications by cropping often radically change our perception of the subject. The long, thin photograph of a monstera stem and leaves (P0191) was trimmed to its thin, rectangular shape in numerous variations moving horizontally up and down the photographic image. With each variation, our impressions shift regarding the image that enters in the upper right and stretches across the picture. It is sinuous here, lyrical in another, and bold in a third. Sometimes the stem that bisects the leaf is a more dominant element.

Other times DeFeo creates variations by walking around a subject, as she did in a cabbage patch. She photographed cabbage leaves from different perspectives, at different times of day, and possibly on different days. In two photographs in the exhibition, the undersides of leaves are shown so that the delicate branching of the central veins appears as though they were drawn (P1198, P0190). The diagonal was a favored line in DeFeo's work, whether it materializes as a trail of overlapping leaves or a table edge. Jumbles of lines also recurred in all media. In two photographs, the trunks and stems of a philodendron (P0201) and the interweaving branches of a Japanese magnolia (P0185) echo the thrusting in and out of strokes in drawings and paintings.

In letters, diaries, and conversations, DeFeo noted the importance throughout art history of the myriad impressions that are possible by putting white shapes on black surfaces and black forms upon white surfaces, a premise that is a cornerstone of much of her work in all media. Some of her botanical photographs are filled with intricate forms and layers created by light and shadow, resembling complicated aerial views of the earth. They are rich with the push/pull of light and dark discussed so eloquently in Wassily Kandinsky's On the Spiritual in Art, a major early treatise on abstraction. We don't know if DeFeo read that particular text, but she was an avid reader who frequently mentioned art historical texts, including ones by Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini, Roger van der Weyden, and Pablo Picasso, among others, in her writings as well as in the titles of her works.

As a picture-maker, DeFeo was as good as it gets. She said that she was more interested in visual ideas than in literary ones. Although she named some of her works for poems and books, she revered classical form. She knew that if she looked hard she could build—with her eye and her hand—unlimited variations on those classical stand-bys: the circle, the square, and the triangle, creating evocative and memorable images.



¹ See Elisabeth Sussman, "Behold! The Tripod," in Jay DeFeo: Her Tripod and Its Dress, exh. cat. (New York: Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, 2003).

² The Rose was conserved and acquired by the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1995. It was first exhibited there in Beat Culture and the New America, 1950­1965 that same year, and in 2003 with other works by DeFeo in the exhibition Beside "The Rose": Selected Works by Jay DeFeo.

³ See Jay DeFeo: Her Tripod and Its Dress.

© 2006 Anne Wilkes Tucker

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