The Music That We Care To See: ‘Dan Welden and the Symphony No. 103’

“Elected Silence, sing to me

And beat upon my whorlèd ear,

Pipe me to pastures still and be

The music that I care to hear.”

— “The Habit of Perfection,” Gerard Manley Hopkins

The opening measure of Joseph Haydn’s Symphony No. 103 nicknamed “The Drumroll,” is devoted to a murmuring trill on the tympani. So, let’s begin with a verbal paradiddle to herald another milestone in a venerable career that, like Haydn’s own, has benevolently influenced the creative lives of so many of us, students and art lovers as far-flung as China and eastern Europe and as local as the length of Long Island where his wry smile seems to grace virtually every art event on the calendar.

“Dan Welden, Symphony No. 103” is a compact but robust exhibition at Alex Ferrone Gallery in Cutchogue and quintessential Dan Welden (and another marvelous example of Alex Ferrone’s deft curatorial hand at combining media). It rests securely on three movements, opening andante in a room dedicated to mixed media paintings, a second movement crescendo maestoso dedicated to large and gorgeous paintings, and a final coda piano descending to pianissimo, featuring the artist’s signature Solarplate etchings based on photographs of a spruce grove laden with snow.

The musical analogy guides the synesthete through the experience. Tympani players must love this Haydn symphony, because that drum roll recurs like a thunderstorm moving along the shore of the Long Island Sound in the first movement and then erupts in the finale in a bravura passage that can be related to those large-scale paintings around the corner.

The opening movement of mixed media works in the front gallery offer a marvelous lesson in process and how revision can unleash a perpetuum mobile, as Haydn himself well knew once he started spinning variations on a catchy theme. Like Haydn, Welden just can’t leave well enough alone, as you can see with “Banana Republic,” what was once an etching, its velvety blacks still shadowing the corners, before he plunged in on it with gesso and acrylic and, with a Uniball pen, began to festoon the surface with calligraphy that Brice Marden or the Chinese Tang master Mi Fu would have enjoyed. Now the work is crazed with this linear fantasy, which carries over into the paintings with fine graphite often drawn on with a Stabilo 8046 pencil whose fine graphite bleeds into acrylic medium in a smoky effect. One of my favorite examples is “Patrons Veins,” pulsing with golds and blues (oh, I see Diebenkorn as well in these here) in a counterpoint of complementarities as balanced as a soundly constructed Haydn sonata. In the lower left center of which I dreamed I saw a Giacometti portrait, those skittering black lines that tunnel into the persona of the subject. The calligraphic fissure that juts into the upper left corner of “Worlds Apart” can be read so intently that it balances the weight of the chromatic density of the lower right, reminding us that the exhibition is tantalizingly slugged as a “consonance of four parts: etchings, paintings, mark-making, color.”

Music and painting, as Gerard ter Borch, Johannes Vermeer, and Miles Davis and so many others at the easel have understood, make marvelous bedfellows. With “The Great Symphony,” the billowing gold passages conjure Turner, although the work’s title refers to Schubert. Intrepidly and gamely going along with a daunting challenge to perform, the painting “Axel’s Axle” is all we have left of what must have been a memorable day when Welden took on the painter’s role with a poet and a pianist (Axel Quincke’s program included Chopin, Liszt, Rachmaninoff and Piazzola). On the downbeat, he began with melodic chords of whites and peach and gold (you can see the aura) and worked up the layers in an improvisation that never relinquishes its formal strengths. I found that the margins, where bold patches of reds or blues often triangulate with one another across the energetic centers, like the well-balanced key modulations of a Haydn symphony.

When I offered Welden an essay to commemorate his 103rd exhibition, a number that should make us all gasp, I was tied up in a research project on complexity in art, music and literature featuring an amazing episode in the history of printmaking involving Albrecht Dürer and Leonardo da Vinci.

Dürer made a series of woodblock prints based on drawings of knots by Da Vinci that weave patterns of dizzying intricacy in one stroke, without ever taking the pen from the paper. For Dürer and for Welden, who has been a marvelous guide to the technical challenges of printmaking for me as for so many other students, the printmaker is a virtuoso, tying the linear language in networks that are dense here, more open there, and always integrated in accord with their profound grasp of the way in which a work of art, however abstract, abides by the invisible of the world — a principle that Leonardo and Dürer believed in deeply.

I felt as much as saw this in action the moment I stepped in the door of the gallery and as I walked through the works right to the sylvan final scene. Welden’s three densely reworked etchings leave scarcely an inch of the original print untouched by layers of gesso, acrylic and the pen that is the muse for much of this show, a Uniball that dances through the works. One of these mixed-media pieces, originally created here and brought to a New Zealand residency, became the basis for a small but rewarding painting, “Woodpecker Serenade.” I gravitated toward it because it has a medial seam like the gutter of a book, and seems to be written across with the delicate marks that Welden has mentioned in another context as he makes work that begin with simple forms that “become more refined and delicate and knits itself together through line.”

My core of belief is one of the main reasons I volunteered to write this. In our benighted era, when collegiality and ethics may seem low at times, Welden shines brightly. He shows up. I have seen him at openings, artist’s talks, panels, fairs and all manner of events in support of his students, who are legion, and of art in all its power to do good, to improve lives and communities. I believe in guys like Dan Welden because he believes in art and the good it can do. That faith is manifest in the endless enquiry we can follow in these works and in the warmth of his encouragement to those who follow in his solar path. He is a throwback to a golden age of artists who help one another, a better time when the art, ideas and generosity mattered.

As he prepped me on the current show, we reminisced about the time we both spent with Robert Rauschenberg, one of his many distinguished collaborators on major print projects. No matter how out of the way or obscure our exhibitions on the Lower East Side were, including a hallway in a very sketchy building on Avenue C, Rauschenberg would turn up at our openings and talk quite seriously about the art for hours. In much the same way, Welden is a star (he has worked all over the world and understands that art talks in a global language) who becomes a generous and unfailingly positive force at any gathering. We need more like him. He moves in a world of multiples with the full understanding that each is unique.

As Welden says: “Our labeling of art — flowers, birds, music, people — takes us from our true nature of love and appreciation. Our sense of wishing to identify what we see and create is usually ego-based and diminishes the true essence of beauty. Allow the senses to appreciate the art, rather than pigeon-hole the artist and the technique.”

Keep this advice in mind as you move into the third gallery of the show. It may be September, but the exhibition turns the calendar pages to deep winter for its coda, a suite of Solarplate etchings that return us to Welden’s home key, his C major. One of these bits of sorcery is entitled “Silence,” and we know the quietude when the wind dies and the snow still lies piled on the branch-work. But as a hunter, Welden also knows that the silence only accentuates that dull thud of a clump of snow from the crown of the spruce, like the fall of ashes late at night in the fireplace.

Poetry is summoned. The final quatrain of one of Robert Frost’s most frequently recited poems, “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening,” unfolds the many emotions that a winter scene of this tranquility, enough to stop us in our tracks. It also accords with the type of resolve that has led an artist with this kind of stamina to give us more than one hundred exhibitions, with so many more to come:

“The woods are lovely, dark and deep,

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.”

Charles A. Riley II, Ph.D. is a professor, curator and former director of the Nassau County Museum of Art. He is editor-in-chief of Hamptons Art Collector magazine and served as editor of Art & Auction magazine as well as a reporter at Time Inc. He lives in Cutchogue.