Paul J. Karlstrom and Susan Ehrlich Turning the Tide: Early Los Angeles Modernists 1920-1956, Barry M. Heisler Introduction Santa Barbara Museum of Art 1990, Forward
"What the younger generation of California artists-among them Tony DeLap, Ron Davis, Ed Moses, Fletcher Benton-came to admire about McLaughlin, [early 1950s] who worked by choice in semi-isolation on the coast south of Los Angeles, were his extraordinary independence and total commitment to an art developed on its own terms. Like David Hockney, Richard Diebenkorn, and a score of others who chose to work in California in part because they would be left alone . . ." p. 33
"And yet McLaughlin preserved a letter from Stanton Macdonald-Wright, "You are most kind to send me the S.F. paper clipping of [critic Alfred] Frankenstein-I hadn't seen it but he has been nice to me for some time-I'm looking forward to meeting him sometime in San Francisco-Let me add that Mrs Wright & I are sorry you two don't live nearer this center of contagion (or is it "infection.") I'm sure we have much in common."
". . . as Susan Larsen points out, McLaughlin's painting is "profoundly anti-classical. He creates disequilibrium and virtually subliminal visual and psychological motion out of stasis and symmetry." In this respect McLaughlin appears to move closer to a general Southern California aesthetic that acknowledges change and impermanence as conditions of existence." p. 34
". . . Oskar Fischinger . . . arrived from Germany in 1936 with a reputation for abstract film animation . . .
". . . An underlying attitude of exploration, seeking new and different means to express ideas about sound, color, shapes, and movement, is seen in a variety of artists of the 1940s-ranging from Stanton Macdonald-Wright to Fischinger and the Whitney brothers, James and John." p. 35
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"James and John Whitney . . . wandered even further from tradition in creating their audio-visual music. Feeling that music was too dominant in Fischinger's non-objective films, they invented a "pendulum system" to transcribe sounds directly. This optical printing and pendulum composition was the basis for their revolutionary Five Abstract Film Exercises. When first screened in Los Angeles and New York, the films, seen as shockingly radical, were described as electronic music and neon images, "from the sciene fiction future." p. 36 William Moritz You Can't Get Then From Now, The Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art Journal, 29 Summer, 1981: 27-35
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". . . [Howard] Warshaw ['s] view of reality as an ongoing process . . . While Warshaw's absorption with process seems to relate to Action Painting, it springs from different intentions. For Warshaw, process entailed a description of the external world rather than an athletic display or a cathartic release of emotion. Intellectual in his approach, he sought complete formal control and therefore rejected spontaneous handling and its courting of chance. Thus, while flux was central to his conceptions, it expressed itself not through free-wheeling gestures but by overlays and dissolves that held points in common with motion pictures . . . "
"A filmic quality come to the fore . . . overlays of substance and shadow maintain cinematic analogies, as does its sequenced imagery, or what the artist termed "transactional figuration." "If one is thinking of observing the world in time, then those intervals [of space] change; they're not consistent . . . cubism . . . says, "I'm examining this by turning it over and looking at both sides of it, and the space goes with it". . . If the vision of the observer is shifting, then everything shifts, not just some object in an otherwise static world."
". . . Warshaw portrays on canvas the shadowed projections of . . . the flux of the world and his aesthetic constraints upon it. Concerned with signification . . . "There's a relationship between the fact of the painting and the references the painting makes to the experience out of which it grew that's not unlike memory . . . The memory is an overtone, a referential something that isn't here but which one must think about. And one thinks about it relative to the present moment . . . It is the present moment of the past."
"In the tethering of the past to the present, Warshaw refused to conform to the modernist mandate of novelty . . . T.S. Eliot doesn't obviate John Donne because he's more modern, any more than Picasso makes El Greco obsolete. Quite the contrary; he confirms El Greco's presence by finding him germinal, alive again in his own work. So this history is, as I say, not chronological: it's a set of graphic ideas that can constantly be interchanged, moved in their relative positions. It's a lacework, a network."