John Altoon, Three Men on a Boat

Untitled 1963-65

The boxy close crop of Altoon’s painting gives it solidity – something of the heraldic or crest-like. This is reinforced by the loose brown frame inset into its blue – an interior that appears, with some negotiation, to be boat and sail.  A little vessel on an ocean blue. What is so strange about this particular abstract painting is its strong resemblance to…to what?  It is not far into the adventure of looking, perhaps no time at all, that we are struck with other obscure clarities – a purple clubheaded figure, its Easter-pink companion to its right, and both aboard a little brown boat.  The sail, seafoam and at full mast, belongs perhaps more to the second instant of looking, but it is not easily unseen once the rest locks into place. None of it is. There is perhaps a third being that may be just a burst of cloud or cloth set further back, it has outline and is a shade beiger than the inky sail that surrounds it.  The picture is so representational that the boat ripples the surrounding water and casts a shadow by the slightly rear, overhead position of the sun. And yet, and yet…

The picture is still abstract. It is so clearly none of these things I have suggested that it is.  But you’d have to be a zealot or blind to cast aside these clear identifiers in favor of some “it is just plain paint” bottom line.  Altoon thrives in this margin, and the closer his pressure is put on a near miss to a known thing, the more startlingly we register how absurd our knowing is. It is the opposite of uncanny in that we register the thing for what we think it is only to find it altogether other. And were it really two (lets say three) men on a boat, would the painting be merely cast off as a pithy nautical scene, perhaps even amateurish?  I can imagine that scenario. In its wake, and from the familiarity with the unknown that it puts upon me, I am left resolving it forever, as a crest or herald, for what is as of yet, and forever: unknown.