With the acquisition of John Register’s painting The Conversation (1991), the Seavest Collection has begun to look toward the inclusion of West Coast artists, acknowledging the significance of this critical regional component of later-twentieth-century American realism. Though Register lived on both coasts for extended periods of time, he identified himself as a Los Angeles artist. (Barnaby Conrad III, John Register [San Francisco: Chronicle, 1989], 5.) His work bears this out.

Register responded early on to his inherent artistic impulses, but avoided formal training during his college years at Berkeley, rejecting outright the espousal of abstract expressionism by the university fine arts faculty in those years. Instead, he majored in English. During his Berkeley sojourn, he nurtured his artistic appetite by spending a summer in Paris at the Academie Julien and by enrolling in classes at the California School of Fine Arts, San Francisco. There, as teachers he encountered Elmer Bishoff and Nathan Oliviera, early proponents of expressionistic, painterly figural art. However, like a number of his contemporaries represented in this catalogue, his next formal training and career choice were directed toward the arena of the commercial arts. He became a successful Madison Avenue art director, producing television commercials.

In 1970 he did a stint as a professional photographer, an early sign of his disillusionment with his then-current occupation. But the familiar tool of the best painters of this newest realist movement was in his hands in a new way. It was not long before Register, in 1972, resigned his lucrative job to devote himself to painting. It is interesting to note that, like a number of his contemporaries, his first major painting, Cadillac Grill with Flags (1973) featured the grill and bumper of a classic Cadillac. And while cars, it begins to be apparent, were an easy way into art for a number of these realists, a comparison of their car paintings would quickly reveal the sort of stylistic individualism we seek to underscore in the cataloguing of the artists represented in this exhibition. Even at this stage, we see in Register little concern for the reflections and light effects that became the fodder for such fruitful exploration by his peers. And, in fact, he always remained quite separate from the group of so-named Photorealists.

As one peruses the body of his work, Register’s versatility is immediately evident, as is the personal stamp, or style, that characterizes it. Whatever the subject might be, Register was able to strike a perfect balance between pictorial illusionism and formal properties, a structuralism of sorts (adapted, not necessarily firsthand, from constructivism/neoplasticism), underpinned by color more dedicated to form than to illusionism.

Register might be considered an eclectic in the sense that in his canvases one recognizes delightfully intelligent and ofttimes obvious references to leading artists of his generation, and of that preceeding, especially Richard Diebenkorn, Malcolm Morley, Fairfield Porter, Wayne Thiebaud, Robert Bechtle, and Richard Estes. But these citations are filtered through a forceful personal vision that transforms and modifies his models into pictures that are undeniably his own. For example, Four Phone Booths (1974) is a retake on one of Estes’s early masterpieces, Telephone Booths (1968) – which itself references an important earlier work by George Tooker. But it is informed by a measured dose of Pop art’s series or serial sequences and spiced with a dash of Thiebaud’s colorful, candied painterly subversions of actual objects. Yet Register has transformed his hybrid of appropriated images into geometries of enmeshed colored planes where sophisticated neoperspectives and compositional rhythms, set up by plays of solid form and shadow, and by sycopations of vibrant and muted color, dominate.

Mood as well plays a role in Register’s work, which is informed in good part by his literary background, especially twentieth-century literature and its preoccupations with backcountry mores and alienation. A number of his paintings concentrate on commonplace interior spaces – waiting rooms, diners, offices – but they are peopleless. Often dominated by empty chairs, tables, or soda-fountain booths, they are an echo of past or potential human interaction. It is clear that these spaces are not the foil for painterly pyrotechnics that capture the shine, sparkle, and reflection of polished glass, formica, and chrome. Rather, they evoke a sense of solitude and absence. Comparisons are often drawn between Register’s work and that of Edward Hopper, especially to the latter’s moody environments built of simplified blocky elements seen often in flat, brilliant light, which are the stage for downtrodden and lonely denizens. Of these comparisons Register says, “I love Hopper’s work. We see things similarly, but we’re different. I think he sets up disenfranchised people on a kind of pictorial stage that projects a sense of isolation. With Hopper you witness someone else’s isolation; in my pictures the viewer becomes the isolated one.” (Barnaby Conrad III, John Register [San Francisco: Chronicle, 1989], 6.)

Yet these spaces are not the disturbingly uneasy psychic antechambers of Surrealism. Rather, they have a metaphysical quality about them. They are about detachment and solitude. They might be characterized as the fascinating remainder once the human element has been magically extracted, as it were, from the equation. They are provocatively self-sustaining images; ripe with narrative potential. While Register was preoccupied with alienation as a phenomenon of twentieth-century urban life, these spaces are as much informed by his own very personal battle with a debilitating disease that began in his early maturity and that claimed his life, only very recently, at the age of fifty-seven. They are as much the result of the sort of aloneness one feels when facing death, even when surrounded by family and friends. It is a personal journey, and in Register’s case not a negative one.

The Conversation is a prime example of this aspect of Register’s work. Two tables accompanied by single chairs are set at a splayed angle to each other, following adjacent walls as they project from a corner of a room. Both tables and chairs, though generic in type, are different from each other. The difference sets up a dialogue of contrasts, which is the subject of the painting. The corner divides the pictorial space into two-thirds and one-third. The larger area parallel to the picture plane is flooded with light described as a dramatic, broad diagonal band of white, spotlighting the table and chair, which cast a geometric “subset” shadow. The predominant tonality is taken from the warm orange/ yellow end of the spectrum. The corner signals an abrupt shift of palette to cool blues and grey violets (the other end of the spectrum), accompanied by the compressed and eccentric geometries of the more rigorously foreshortened window wall and its table and chair. Rhythms of color and form convey mood and lessons about the phenomenology of solids and so-called voids in a fascinating analogy/parallel to concepts of presence and absence.

©by Virginia Anne Bonito, revised "Get Real" John Register essay, April 24, 2000.

For a more detailed printed view of the collection order the book:
	Get Real: Contemporary American Realism from the Seavest Collection Virginia Anne Bonito. Foreword by Michael Philip Mezzatesta, pp. 138, 68 colorplates, 2 b/w photographs Exhibition at DUMA April 4-July 6, 1997. Hard cover $40.00 Soft cover $25.00 To order contact: Duke University Museum of Art Click on Publications