David Owen Art Notes

Meeting Vincent (Again): His Chosen Suffering

2012-01-29T10:16:00.000-08:00

Over the years, I have had occasion to say, “Religion can behelpful, if you don’t take it too seriously.” That usually occurred afterviewing persons who, it seemed to me, had gone over the top in applying theirreligious beliefs. Some thought mycomment cynical, but it was simply an extension of my more basic convictionthat “it is possible to go too far in anydirection.” You can perhapsprovide your own examples. I offerone of a woman in a mental hospital who pecked her eye out in response to thesaying of Jesus, “If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw itaway” (Matthew 5:29). One must becareful which scripture passage you read to a tortured soul.

Vincent van Gogh was a tortured soul who, perhaps because ofreligious teaching, felt that it was his responsibility to personally suffer asdid rural peasants or other poor. I will go further. It seemslikely to me that Vincent, who felt like an outcast throughout his life,believed that he would find love and acceptance by living like thepoor—although not like the poor, butpoorer than the poor. Van Gogh: The Life reports him assaying, “I consider myself below thepeasants.” By adopting theways of peasants in the extreme, authors Naifeh and Smith conclude that Vincentwas trying to find a “home” among the peasants that he did not experience amonghis bourgeois family and friends.

In addition, “peasants” had a new and important place in theart of Vincent’s time. Not longbefore, peasants had been seen as unsuitable subjects for “fine art,” butJean-Paul Millet, Jules Breton, Anton Mauve and others popularized paintings ofa romanticized peasantry and, by so doing, enjoyed commercial success. It was a subject matter to which Vincentwas quickly drawn, in part because he taught himself to draw by copying some ofthe charcoal sketches of peasants done by Millet. Also, peasants peopled the countryside around him.

Vincent’s decision to “live below the peasants” was deepenedwhen he idolized the image of Jean-Paul Millet in a biography written by AlfredSensier. According to Sensier:

Millet lived a life ofsolidarity with the impoverished subjects of his art. He always had in his heart compassion and pity for themiserable poor of his country. Hewas a peasant himself. In hisdress and ways he shared their life of self-abnegation and poverty. Millet was misunderstood by the public, spurned by criticsand hounded by creditors. Milletsaid, “I don’t want to stop feeling pain. Pain is what makes the artist expresshimself most distinctly.”

When Vincent read this biography of Millet, he declared it“a great work” and immediately sought to imitate Sensier’s Millet in his ownlife.

Vincent found inMillet’s call to a simple life the same summons to self-mortification that inhad found in Kempis’s or in Christ’s. He dressed in rags that even the peasants pitied; he denied himselfcover from the rain, and shade from the sun. When he stayed in his studio, he insisted on sleeping in theattic with the dust and the spiders, rather than in his more comfortable roomdownstairs. To have slept anywhereelse would have been to pamper himself. To deny himself the “luxury” of the studio itself, he never cleaned ortidied it. Great piles of ashessurrounded the stove, cane chairseats were left frayed and broken. Clothes and clogs, caps and hats forhis models, tools and farm implements, specimens of plants and moss from hisendless forays into the heath, all lay scattered about, gathering dust wherethey fell, disappearing under sheaf after sheaf of drawings as numberless andneglected as leaves. He ate onlythe “black bread” sanctified by Millet, supplemented occasionally by morsels ofcheese and always by coffee. Whenoffered cakes and meats by friends, he would request a crust of dry breadinstead. Anything else would havebeen pampering himself too much. He wanted to starve, to enjoy an empty belly, his stomach twisted bycramps that staggered him.

Two ironies accompanied Vincent’s attempt to find acceptanceand a home by “living below the poor.” First, the peasants did not welcome him. They saw his visits as a nuisance or a menace. Many said he was mad. When he was painting in thecountryside, some said, “That nut is at it again.” From all sides came scoffs and giggles. Those from whom he bought paintreferred to him as “that crazy little man from Nuenen.”

For me, the greater irony is that the Millet, whom Vincentsuffered to imitate, was a figment of his biographer’s imagination. We have here a vivid example of 19^thCentury spin. Sensier had createda marketing image meant to attract buyers to Millet’s work.

The real Millet, areckless spender, knew only indebtedness, not poverty. When he “escaped” to the fashionablyhamlet of Barbizon in the Fountainebleau woods near Paris, the real Milletentertained a wide circle of Parisian friends, not peasants, piling up debt and girth asamply as honorifics. Like otherlanded gentry he often wore simple clothes, but he always insisted on beingphotographed in the splendid attire of a gentleman, and spent lavishly ontailors.

I have been struggling to find the moral embedded in thispart of Vincent’s life. Perhaps itis a simple as, “Be careful which biography you hand to a tortured soul.” Or again, seeing how Vincent’s attemptsto find acceptance and a home among the poor by suffering like them failed,perhaps the moral is to be found in this short poem by D.H. Lawrence:

Those who gosearching for love

Only make manifesttheir own lovelessness,

But only the lovingfind love,

And they never haveto seek for it.

And yet, it is not at all that Vincent was loveless. It is that, in his time, he was unableto give his love in a way that others were able to receive and appreciate.

Postscript:

All italicized material above comes from Van Gogh: The Life by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith which has been the major resource for this series. The next and final installment will consider the illness against which Vincent struggled all of his life.

Meeting Vincent (Again): What Drove Him?

2012-01-02T09:44:00.000-08:00

Let’s begin with a trivia question, that is not reallytrivial:

What did Vincent van Gogh, the painter, have in common with his father,Theodorus?

Actually, there were several things. Theodorus was a pastor in the DutchReformed Church in rural Holland and for a few years Vincent struggled to becomethe same. Both Vincent and hisfather loved nature and, individually, took frequent walks through thecountryside, although Vincent often disappeared for many hours, even in severeweather and amidst storms, and sometimes walked punishing distances.

Theodorus was well-informed about the history of Holland andoften told his family nostalgic stories of their country’s past, especially ofher 17^th Century “Golden Years.” Vincent shared this fascination. In Van Gogh: The Life,Naifeh and Smith report that as an adult Vincent “devoured histories and novelsset in previous eras—eras he always imagined as better, purer than hisown—lamenting the lost virtues of earlier times.” Both Vincent and Theodorus believed in the solidarity of thefamily. Theodorus demanded it andVincent longed for it.

Vincent and Theodorus were of similar temperament:

As a lonely,needful child, Vincent couldn’thelp but emulate the remote figure that ascended into the pulpit everySunday. He adopted the samecircuitous way of talking and metaphorical way of seeing. He developed the same emotionaldiffidence in public, and dissected his feelings with the same misguidedrationalism in private. Heapproached the outside world with the same defensive suspiciousness. He treated those who challenged himwith the same self-righteous inflexibility and reacted to perceived slightswith the same paranoid anger. The son’s introversion mirrored the father’sreclusiveness; the son’s brooding, his father’s melancholy. Like his father,Vincent fasted to expiate his failings. In his collecting and later in his painting, Vincent mimicked Dorus’slong hours of solitary activity in his attic study. The sight of his father helping the needy and consoling thegrief-stricken—being welcomed and loved for the comfort he brought—became thecentral image of Vincent’s adulthood, the image that drove all his subsequentambitions in life and art.

I have a slightly different notion than Naifeh and Smith expessedabove as to the central image that drove Vincent’s adulthood and art. That is the biblical image of theSower, about which his father frequently preached.

As one who has listened to many sermons over my lifetime andhave myself preached for more than forty years, I have come to the conclusionthat many preachers tend to have a limited number of favorite themes, which invarious guises, they preach over and over again. These are insights, convictions, observations and beliefs thatstrike an especially deep chord within them. Often they are a source of the preacher’s animation andenergy.

Biblically speaking, the Sower is a laborer in thefields. Most importantly, he reapswhat he sows. If he does not sow,he does not reap. Without his effort there is no harvest. Theodorus, preached the story of the Sower because he believed that he had lived it. His own ascent into the pastorate was laborious and long.

When Jesus speaks of the Sower in theNew Testament, he acknowledges that the resulting harvest is not a consequenceof the Sower’s effort alone. Muchwill depend upon the sun and the rain and, in one of his most familiar parables(Matthew 13:1-23), the degree of the harvest will also depend on the quality ofthe soil. Many hands and manyconditions bring forth a harvest.

This was an insight that Theodorus seems to havemissed. The message Vincent received from his father was that, if ever hefailed, it was because he had not made sufficient effort. If he were to succeed, that wouldrequire more effort. Moreover,according to Theodorus, any heavenlyreward would be dependent on earthy success. For Vincent, at the emotional level, worldly failure meant eternalcondemnation.

If success is something the world awards, then, throughouthis entire life, Vincent knew little success. There was almost no affirmation or recognition and that ateaway at him. So, year after year,Vincent did his best to be a Sower. He worked with obsessive intensity, once he set his hand to art.

Recently, I came across a journal entry by Henri Matissethat spoke of his attraction to art and gave me new insight into Vincent.

Before, I had nointerest in anything. I felt agreat indifference to everything they tried to make me do. From the moment I held the box ofcolors in my hand, I knew this was my life. Like an animal that plunges headlong towards what it loves,I dived in, to the understandable despair of my father, who made me study quitedifferent subjects. It was atremendous attraction, a sort of Paradise Found in which I was completely free,alone, at peace…

Before he decided to become an artist, Vincent knew onefailure after another in the world of work. His attempts to sell others’ art, to become a pastor, and toteach all came to a sad end. Whenhe turned to art—even though the skills were not initially there—he knew he waswhere he belonged and, like Matisse, plunged headlong toward what heloved. When drawing and painting,Vincent became the Sower. He gavethe development of his art a supreme effort.

I mentioned in my previous post that when reading Vincent’sletters to his brother, Theo, I have been uncomfortable with his virtuallyconstant requests for money. Therewere times when Theo sent half of his income to Vincent and still Vincentwanted more. And when he receivedit, he did not treat it as a sacred gift but often spent it quickly andrecklessly on art supplies and models. Thus, Naifeh and Smith accused Vincent of seeing himself as a privilegedperson who felt that he deserved to be supported.

I don’t believe that was it. Vincent did not think he was privileged, but feltdesperate. For him it wasabsolutely essential that he succeed in his art. He worked with amazing intensity from the time he began todraw. Many call him a genius now,but he was no genius in the beginning. His early efforts were crude, so he repeated them over and overagain. As he progressed, he neededmore models and more supplies and so he begged for them and rapidly usedthem. His entire destiny dependedon finding success in his art. Vincentwas not a privileged dilettante or wastrel, but a laborer in the field, sowingseed day after day in marginal soil.

Meeting Vincent (Again) for the First Time

2011-12-12T07:47:00.001-08:00

"His brothers and sisters were strangers to him.

He was a stranger to himself."

--Lies Van Gogh, sisterof Vincent

I just finished reading the recently published Van Gogh: The Life by Steven Naifeh andGregory White Smith—an amazingly well-researched volume of 893 pages thathelped me to see Vincent Van Gogh more clearly than I ever have before. All critics do not applaud thisbook. A New York Times book review by Deborah Solomon called the bookcynical, dismissive and negatively skewed. I don’t agree. I found the book thorough, honest andfair, in part because the research appears impeccable.

I had read much about Van Gogh previously—at least fourother biographies, a volume about Van Gogh and Gauguin at Arles, and many, ifnot all, of his letters to his brother Theo. I had to ask myself why this newbook changed my image of him so thoroughly.

Thinking back many years, I realized that I had been viewingVincent through the eyes of Don McLean in his homage to Vincent, “Starry,Starry Night,” that was part of his 1971 AmericanPie album. If you don’t knowthe song or, even if you do, I urge you to hear it now at www.youtube.com/watch?v=dipFMJckZOM. I have listened and watched thatvideo several times and the song speaks to me as hauntingly today as it did 40years ago. If you had only oneview of Vincent, I would prefer it to be this one.

However, McLean’s view is entirely romantic, portraying theproblem in Vincent’s life being the fact that he was so beautiful that ordinarypeople could not love and receive him. That’s how I have been seeing him, too, even though from time to time Ihad to lay his letters aside because his constant begging for more money fromTheo disturbed me. I knew thatthere was another side to Vincent but I could not quite face it.

Again, wondering why my view of Vincent had been soone-sided, I realized that most of what I had read previously, including the lettersto Theo, depicted the life of Van Gogh asseen by Vincent. What sets Van Gogh: The Life apart from otherbiographies is that it spends much time and space telling how Vincent’s lifewas experienced by others.

The book is divided into three parts: The Early Years, TheDutch Years, and the French Years. There were only four “French Years” in Vincent’s life (1886-1890), butthose are the years that most biographers emphasize because that is whereVincent’s colorful and powerful outburst of productivity occurred. This new book does not ignore theFrench Years but devotes half of its pages to The Early and the Dutch Years,often in remarkable detail. Andthere one sees how troubled Vincent was from the very beginning. He was not an easy person to know, loveand live with, even as a child, and the longer he lived the more difficult hebecame.

The difficulties were no doubt accentuated because Vincentwas born into a parsonage as the eldest son of a minister of the Dutch ReformedChurch. Much conventionality wasexpected of him there, but those were not standards to which he desired or wasable to conform. It is likely thathis parents and siblings could have been more understanding, but Vincent wasnot the only one who “suffered for his sanity” as McClean says. His familysuffered for his sanity, too.

I see no reason to list examples of how difficult a childand young adult Vincent was. WhatI learned from this book is that if I had been his parent, or his brother, orhis employer, or his co-worker, or his friend, I would have had difficultieswith him, too. The more I lovedhim, the more I would have worried about him and the more my heart would havehurt as I watched him careening through life, pursuing one delusion afteranother. This is not to say thatVincent was not beautiful, but that much of his beauty was hard to see untilafter the end. And one of the manytragedies here is that Vincent himself neversaw his beauty, although he was always seeking it. To me, it is a miracle that so much beauty ultimately pouredforth from such a tortured life.

In the weeks ahead, I plan three or four postings aboutaspects of Vincent’s life that I had not previously known or had not been ableto see.

A Potpourri of Indecision?

2011-11-02T08:55:00.000-07:00

Lunch or Breakfast by Pierre Bonnard

^{That’s not painting, what he does. He never looks beyond his own sensibility. He doesn’t know how to choose. When Bonnard paints a sky, perhaps he first paints it blue, more or less the way it looks. Then he looks a little longer and sees some mauve in it, so he adds a touch or two of mauve, just to hedge. Then he decides that maybe it’s a little pink, too, so there’s no reason not to add some pink. The result is a potpourri of indecision. If he looks long enough, he winds up adding a little yellow, instead of making up his mind what color the sky really ought to be. Painting can’t be done that way. Painting isn’t a question of sensibility; it’s a matter of seizing power, taking over from nature, not expecting her to supply you with information and good advice.}

- Pablo Picasso

One of my few certainties about art is that there are many ways to paint. In the quote above, Picasso seemed not to have learned this. He might have said, “Bonnard paints differently than I do and I prefer my way to his,” but he says instead, “Because Bonnard does not paint my way, he is not painting at all.” Picasso was wrong.

Painters differ not only in the art they produce but also in the processes by which they create it. Recently, I’ve enjoyed learning more about some of the processes that made the work of Pierre Bonnard different.

Bonnard painting on four canvasses

One oddity is that Bonnard did not paint on an easel but tacked pieces of loose canvas to his studio wall. That may have been because of the narrowness of his modest studio or it may simply have been his preference. That decision had several effects. First, it allowed him to work on several paintings at the same time with the canvasses hanging side by side. Often he would work a few moments on one and then another. More interestingly, this method allowed him to decide the size of his painting as it unfolded. He said, “I never know in advance what dimensions I will choose.” Was that a strategy or indecision? A fellow artist said of Bonnard, “He lets the painting grow, then decides where the end is.” Then, since these canvasses were not on stretcher bars, Bonnard could roll them up and store them in his studio easily. This allowed him to take the paintings out, tack them back up on the wall, and rework them—making fine adjustments—sometimes for years. Only when no new adjustments came to mind did he put the paintings on stretcher bars and frame them. Was that thoroughness or indecision?

A second way in which Bonnard differed from most painters is that he found it distracting and difficult to paint from direct observation. I have never heard another painter say this, but looking directly at a model, still life, landscape, or interior confused him and caused him to lose sight of his initial idea. He wrote:

I tried to paint a bouquet of roses directly, scrupulously, I was absorbed by the details. Then I realized that I was floundering. I had lost my original thought and couldn’t get back to it again; I couldn’t find what it was that has captivated me, my starting point. Through captivation or inspiration, a painter achieves universality. It’s captivation that tells him the subject to choose and precisely how a picture should be. Take away that captivation or initial concept, and all that’s left is a particular subject that overwhelms the painter. From that moment on he is no longer painting his own picture.

Bonnard did look directly at his subject in the early stages. He made drawings and kept sketches in his small daybook. At times he painted a small watercolor or oil. But for him that was not “painting.” He stated his bias this way: “Untruth is cutting out a piece of nature and copying it.” It wasn’t what he saw that Bonnard wanted to paint. It was what he saw, and felt, and imagined and remembered. What Bonnard wanted to do was to paint his own picture. How did he move beyond an object or a scene? He said,

I go and look. I take notes. Then I go home.

And before I start painting, I reflect, I dream.

What was that dreaming all about? It was an attempt to bring to the surface the responses that his subject was stimulating within him. An artist who seeks to paint emotions, Bonnard said, must spend a great deal of time looking, both around him and within him. From this distance, it sounds as though, when Bonnard sat before a subject, he went into a meditative state, seeking to become aware of the feelings, memories, and associations his subject released within him. When he painted, he was seeking to express not only what was outside him but what was within. Was that sophistication or indecision?

Some of what was within him was fuzzy and vague, so Bonnard allowed his paintings to be vague—dreamlike, with colors flowing into one another, a soft focus with no hard edges, and half-seen, mysterious images on the periphery. If his paintings arose from a meditative state, it may require of us a similar state when we seek to view them. Being faithful to his method, suggests that we also seek to detect the responses that his paintings call forth within us. For Bonnard, painting required sensitivity to both one’s inner and out worlds. This is a step I have not yet taken and may never achieve, but I will try to take it.

Picasso’s statement with which we began, that totally dismissed Bonnard’s work, has reminded me of an anecdote from Zen Buddhism. It goes like this. Two hikers were climbing a mountain, but were trying to reach the summit by different paths. At one point along the way, the first hiker went to where the second was hiking and told him that he was on the wrong path and would never reach the summit. "You must come over to my path, if you are ever to reach the top," the first hiker said. The story concludes by saying that the one thing we know about the first hiker was that, at that moment, he was not climbing. The moral of the story? We would do well to honor all artists who are exploring their own path. And dare to walk our own.

Self-Portrait by Pierre Bonnard

Steps in the Right Direction

2011-10-07T08:32:00.000-07:00

Smokies Overview

The first step is to be in touch with yourself.

-- Thich Nhat Hahn

Several months after I began to paint, I showed some of my paintings to a group of friends who had asked to see them. At that time I thought my work was better than it was. After all, when you’re just beginning and you paint something that almost looks like a mountain or a tree, you feel that you’ve achieved something. Several of the friends made complimentary remarks, but one’s response was more subdued. He looked at the paintings carefully and said, “These show potential.” “Potential?” I said to myself. “Only potential?”

Looking back from seven years distance, I now marvel at my first critic’s generosity and am grateful that he saw some potential. He was, I think, trying to tell me that the road ahead to the kind of art I wanted to create would be longer and more challenging than I was then able to see. Moreover, his lack of enthusiasm about my work brought me back to reality and caused me to see it more honestly.

+ + +

Nobody tells this to people who are beginners. I wish someone had told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple of years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good. It has potential, but it’s not good. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get beyond this phase; they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing we want it to have. And if you are just starting out or are still in this phase, you gotta know that it’s normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. It’s only by going through a volume of work that you will close the gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions.

- Ira Glass

As Night Falls

And what is that special thing we want our work to have? These words by Steve Jobs spoken to the graduating class of Stanford University in 2005, shortly after he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, make it crystal clear to me what, in my art, I am trying to achieve.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

I have not been diagnosed with a deadly cancer, but at age seventy-five I am well aware that my time is limited. And the last thing I want to do with my life is to mimic someone else’s art or to allow other people’s opinions to drown out my own inner being. Most of all I want to follow my own heart and intuition.

That, for me, has not been as easy as it may sound. By not starting to paint until I was sixty-eight, it felt from the beginning as though I were in a game of catch-up—trying to advance quickly to what others were already doing. I have tried to listen to my inner self, but I know that I have often been overly responsive to other voices.

Happily, that seems to be changing. It may not be a change that you would be able to see, but it is one that I am feeling. Following my own heart—listening to my own inner voice—expressing my own spirit in the work I do---is not only, as Steve Jobs says, “the most important thing,” but is now the only thing—the only reason for me to keep painting.

Newfound Gap

Tonight my work will be part of a three-person show of pastel paintings that is opening at the Ivy Tech-John Waldron Art Center here in Bloomington, Indiana. It’s a modest show in a small gallery. I will have nine pieces—most of them small because the gallery is small—and six of the nine were done in the last few weeks. What I noticed while working on these pastels is that I was very much enjoying painting them. And, just as importantly, I wasn’t worried about them—that is, I wasn't worried about what other people would think of them. Are these paintings great art? No, they are modest in all respects, but they are my art. I am happy with each one of them. Do they represent the end of the road for me? Surely not, but they feel like a few more steps in the right direction.

I don’t know how it happened, but I am much less worried about how my art looks to others and am much more concerned about how it feels to me. I don’t know where this approach will take me, but my central question from now on will be, “Does this art feel like me?”

Mountain View

P.S. The show opening tonight has been called “The Softer Side of Painting” and includes pastel paintings by fellow Indiana artists Pat Bardes and Anabel Hopkins. The show will continue at the Ivy Tech-John Waldron Art Center in Bloomington through October 27. The paintings shown above are among those that I painted in preparation for this show.

The Art of Connie Hayes

2011-09-03T09:02:00.000-07:00

Butter in Water by Connie Hayes

I see the world in layers of paint.

-- Connie Hayes

In the late summer of 2004, a few weeks after I had retired from 43 years as a United Methodist minister, my wife Dot and I were visiting friends at their summer home on the bay in South Bristol, Maine. The weather was exquisite and I found Maine to be excruciatingly beautiful. I was sixty-eight years old at the time and, without realizing how challenging it would be, had a vague notion that I would “like to learn to paint.”

During our stay we spent one day driving up the coast and in Rockland visited several galleries as well as the Farnsworth Art Museum, an artistic gem, both for its building and for its collection. I remember some strikingly bold and colorful watercolors by Andrew Wyeth that were very different from his later work, a painting or two by Robert Henri, an exhibit of very early work by Alex Katz, and a gallery filled with large hyper-realistic paintings by a famous artist whose name I should know but have nonetheless forgotten.

The exhibit to which I was most powerfully drawn, however, was called “Painting Maine: The Borrowed Views of Connie Hayes.” I’m guessing now that there were forty of Connie Hayes’s paintings there—all small, often 10 by 10 inches, and in a square format. I’m always at something at a loss to know why some paintings excite me more than others. The subject matter was Maine—buildings, landscapes, and seascapes featuring islands. The “Borrowed Views” theme referred to the fact that Connie Hayes had asked friends and acquaintances to allow her to use their home for a few days or weeks, so that she could paint what was seen from their decks or from out their windows. Sometimes, she painted interior views from those homes, as well. Hayes thanked her hosts by leaving behind one of the paintings she created while there. This would be no small gift today when even one of her 8x8 inch pastel sells for $3600.

It was not the Maine scenes alone that captured me, but the compositions and the bright colors. Suddenly, my vague notion that I wanted to learn to paint intensified and caught fire. I didn’t just want to learn to paint. I wanted to paint like that. I bought the book that was the catalogue for the exhibit, Painting Maine: The Borrowed Views of Connie Hayes and back home in my garage unsuccessfully tried to copy a few of them. I’ve learned since that you don’t know how good a painter is until you try to duplicate her or him. Connie Hayes’ paintings look simple, but are, in fact, sophisticated and well thought out. Soon with “proper instruction” I moved in other directions.

Recently, I came across Connie Hayes, again. She is very highly regarded in her own region, but I have not seen mentions of her nationally. If you Google “Connie Hayes,” as I hope you will, there are surprisingly few entries. I will note three of the most important links below. What I found on-line was a one hour and fifteen minute lecture about her work that she gave in 2010. It can be found at http://vimeo.com/15635944. There she talks about her evolution over the past several years. Where once her work was almost always done en plein air, now after taking notes and making careful sketches—in pastel or in oil—she returns to her studio “to pursue invention” in the design and construction of her paintings. In the past she worked fast--sometimes completing six paintings in a single day. Now by "filtering, distillation, and planning" she prefers to develop her paintings over time. She cites Monet, Manet, Bonnard and Degas as her forerunners in this. Above all she is seeking to find “an edge between representational work and abstraction.” She sides with Fairfield Porter who said, “The best abstract work is representational and the best representational work is abstract.”

The lecture cited above would be of significant interest to artists, but was delivered to a general audience of gallery-goers who were preparing to see her show. Even if you don’t paint, I encourage you to try it. But, first, explore the links below.

Two websites give close-ups of her work. The Walsh-Dowling Gallery displays all the paintings from her 2010 show at http://www.dowlingwalsh.com/wp-content/uploads/Connie-Hayes-web-catalog.pdf. Since I first saw her work in 2004, Connie Hayes has done extensive pastel work, again working small. An exquisite collection of 30 small pastels can be found at www.georgemarshallstoregallery.com/files.me.com_mpharding_k99m2f/Photos_Hayes.html. If, when at that site, you click on “Subscribe,” all 30 pastels will be downloaded to your computer where you can enlarge and enjoy or study them.

It was the art of Connie Hayes, more than that of any other artist, that fired my imagination to paint. I, too, would like to paint closer to the edge between abstraction and realism than I have so far done. Hopefully, these websites will help me to find that edge.

The Salon: Part Two

2011-08-18T13:03:00.000-07:00

Portrait of Theodore Duret by Eduoard Manet

On May 29th 1913 at the Théatre des Champs-Elysées in Paris, at the opening-night performance of The Rite of Spring with music by the young composer Igor Stravinsky, the Parisian crowd responded by whistling, booing, hissing, shouting, fist-fighting and hitting one another with canes. Of that premier, Thomas Kelly writes:

By intermission, the police were called in to restore order amongst an audience divided as to whether they were witnessing genius or heresy. The furor worsened in the second half, culminating in full-scale riot as the jerky, profane, "sacrificial dance" finale unfolded. The pandemonium was such that the orchestra couldn't hear itself play and the dancers couldn't hear the orchestra. Stravinsky, who had fallen in love with his earth-shaking music of the spheres, could not understand why others were not hearing it as he heard it; distraught, he fled the theatre before the end.

Those who were hitting their neighbors over the head with canes, clearly did not believe that what they were hearing was ballet music as it should sound.

Just as the audience’s rejection of his work caused Stravinsky to flee the theater, so was artist Edouard Manet devastated by the harsh treatment—the jeering, anger, laughter and ridicule--that his paintings often received from audiences and critics at the Paris Salon. Why this intense reaction? What was he doing wrong? In receiving rejection, Manet was not alone. Most of those who would be known as the Impressionists were treated the same. Why?

The French art connoisseur, Theodore Duret (seen above), was overheard explaining to a young artist why his work was not being accepted in art’s established circles. He said:

There are two kinds of art, never forget this. There is art and there is official art. Just look at yourself. You are a nice young man, gentle and intelligent, but to be a representative of official art one must be a medium sized, slightly stout man, not too well dressed but dressed in the fashion of his class, and offering a respectful bow with it. If you look in a mirror, you can see that you would not do. So never say another word about official recognition. No, my dear young friend, there is art and there is official art, there always has been and there always will be.

Manet, if not stout, was, nevertheless, of the right social class. He was handsome and well-dressed, often wearing a top hat, frock coat, yellow suade gloves and carrying a walking stick. He could be charming. Nevertheless, to the guardians of “official art” it looked as though a respectful bow to the past was missing.

One connoisseur, who treasured classic art, reportedly said, “A good picture, like a good fiddle, should be brown.” And much art had been brown—in large part because the pigments available to painters had been earth tones, and because most artists began their work with very dark underpaintings and often completed their paintings with brownish transparent glazes.

Manet, by contrast, made no respectful bow in the direction of brown. He was so bold as to prefer light underpaintings and to begin using some of the new more colorful pigments that were invented in his time. His use of color was under control—it was not wildly flamboyant—but he did move beyond brown.

Manet also applied paint in ways that were different from the techniques that the jurors of the Salon preferred. Traditionally, dark passages in paintings were done thinly and transparently. Many artists still paint dark passages that way. But Manet sometimes applied dark paint thickly. More important was the fact that he allowed the texture of his paint strokes to be seen. Darlings of the Salon, like Ernest Mesissonier, whom I discussed last time, labored over their paintings for months and sometimes for years, smoothing everything out so that no brushstrokes could be detected. This was taken to be sophisticated. Manet's visible and energetic brushstrokes, by contrast, were considered by many to be brutish.

But what offended his critics most was not how Manet painted, but what he painted. The painting below, according to one critic, deserved only laughter and pity. Another considered it abominable. Another said that it exceeded the most ridiculous thing you could imagine. Why? Because Eva's posture was imperfect and her dress was not flattering. An extreme critic saw her as a vision of ugliness. A more sympathetic one saw her as "plain."

Portrait of Eva Gonzales by Edouard Manet

What the critics were saying is that Eva Gonzales was not ideal. That was the besetting sin that showed up in so many of Manet's paintings: he sought to portray the real, rather than the ideal. Classical art had to do with an ideal past portrayed in a stylized way. Manet sought to capture his everyday world in an honest way. He honored the past, in part, but he also welcomed the future. It was because of Manet's respectful bow to the future that the guardians of "official art" did their best to dismiss him.

The Salon: Part One

2011-08-01T09:56:00.000-07:00

Campagne de France by Ernest Meissonier, exhibited at the 1864 Salon

The Salon was a rare venue for artists to expose their wares to the public and--like Meissonier, its biggest star--to make their reputations. One of the greatest spectacles in Europe, it was an even more popular attraction, in terms of the crowds it drew, than public executions. In some years, as many as a million people visited the Salon during its six-week run.

-- Ross King

I just finished reading The Judgment of Paris: The Revolutionary Decade that Gave the World Impressionism by Ross King. Unlike others I have read, this book does not focus on the independent Impressionist exhibits that began in 1874, but, instead, presents in great detail the inner workings of “The Salon” – France’s annual art exhibit and Paris’s most important cultural event—in the preceding years, 1863 to 1874. The Salon was a huge exhibit with 1200 to 3000 works of art displayed out of the 5000 that were usually entered. Having one’s work accepted in the Salon was critical to an artist’s reputation and sales, while having work refused was taken as a harsh slap in the face. Ross King captures some of the excitement engendered by the Salon like this:

The deadline for submissions was the first of April, a month before the Salon was to open. Frenetic scenes always took place in the studios of Paris in the days preceding the deadline as artists worked desperately to put the finishing brushstrokes on their works, many of which arrived at the Palais de Champs-Elysees with the paint still wet to the touch. Transporting work to the hall, especially a piece of sculpture or a large canvas, posed logistical difficulties. The more affluent artists hired porters to convey them, while the rest were forced to do the job themselves, pushing handcarts and wheelbarrows through the streets. Masterpieces of painting and sculpture were thereby exposed to the elements, to the perils of cobblestones, and the curious glances of passersby, who occasionally witnessed amusing spectacles, such as the exertions of the Swiss sculptor James Pradier, who often gave his work finishing touches with a hammer and chisel while it was en route. Onlookers in 1855 would have witnessed the arresting sight of Jean-Leon Gerome’s, The Age of Augustus, a gargantuan painting thirty-three feet long by twenty-three feet high, making it’s stately progress through the streets.

I enjoy the mental image of thousands of artists clogging the streets as they sought to enter their work on time. When the artworks reached the large hall, the first step was to have them registered and measured. Then they were arranged around the walls of the Palais de Champs-Elysees in alphabetical order according to the artists’ surnames. Judging by a committee of eight to fifteen esteemed jurors began on the 2^nd of April. Ross says:

The process of judging was an arduous one. The jurors were obliged to tramp around the hall—and through the warren of upstairs rooms into which the overflow spilled—to view the works one at a time. Votes for or against a work were taken by a show of hands with the majority ruling. Canvasses receiving a unanimous favor from the jurors were awarded a “number one” ranking which gave them the privilege of hanging “on line” at the Salon, that is, at the ideal viewing height. Those turned down by the jury were carried away by white-coated attendants and then—most humiliatingly—stamped on the back with a red R that stood for refuse: “rejected.” This symbol was the kiss of death to a work, not only ruling it out of the Salon but also hampering any chance of its selling to a private buyer.

At the Salon in Paris it was often the case that eighty pieces were shown to the jurors every hour. Thus, paintings, which may have taken months or even years to complete, were typically accepted or rejected with less than a minute’s attention. Often, such judgments are made just as quickly today. In the flick of an eye, one’s work may be judged “In” or “Out.” Mercifully, the rejected works are not stamped with a large red “R,” so that a work refused in one show may be entered in another. I know one artist, Ray Hassard of Ohio, whose painting was rejected in a regional show, only to have that same painting given First Place in a more prestigious National Show a few weeks later. When seeing an exhibit, one can usually understand why most of the accepted works were accepted, although there are almost always some selections that strike one as, shall we say, “puzzling.” Happily, rejection from a show today is not so dire. Such competitions are no longer life and death matters. There will be many opportunities to live again.

Once one’s work was accepted into the Salon, however, there might still be dangers ahead. At the Salon, it was not only a question of what was selected but where it was put. Without a “Number One” rating your painting could be hung anywhere. Given the massive hall with extremely high ceilings and inconsistent light, one could hurry to the opening of the exhibit with elation, only to find that your work was hanging in such a high dark space that it was almost impossible to notice. Or you might find your painting in a prominent place, surrounded by dozens of viewers, only to find that they were not admiring what you had done, but were jeering and laughing, ridiculing your effort. And then there were the know-it-all critics who were more than willing to trash you and your work publicly, if it strayed the least bit from their idea of propriety.

I have long wondered why there was so much anger and ridicule heaped on the artists who were becoming Impressionists on those few occasions when their work was accepted at the Salon. The Judgment of Paris helped me to see what was going on beneath the surface. I want to write about that next time.

How Long Do People Look at Paintings?

2011-07-07T11:35:00.000-07:00

The basic fact about art is that you, the viewer, decide how much time you're going to give it. Other art forms give you no choice. A symphony is going to take up 40 minutes of your time; a film two hours; a play perhaps three or four hours. But you can choose whether to look at a painting for ten seconds or ten minutes.

- London’s Daily Mail, March 15, 2011

A few years ago, I worked for a time in an art gallery in Bloomington where I could observe how visitors responded to the paintings on the walls. Many paintings received barely a glance as viewers strolled past them. More fastidious viewers spent at least a few seconds turned toward each and every one. A few paintings seemed to draw viewers to them and were given more time, though rarely more than a minute. (The next time you stand before a painting, force yourself to look at it for more than a minute and you will realize how long that is.) I have no statistics to confirm my impression, but in that gallery, on the days I worked, paintings with bright colors and thick paint were given greater attention than paintings with muted colors and thin paint. You can decide whether that audience was more or less sophisticated in its taste than some.

A study more serious than mine was conducted at the Tate Museum in London earlier this year by reporters from The Daily Mail. The scope of their investigation was limited. They wanted to ascertain whether museum-goers there gave more attention to contemporary British art or to British art of the 18^th and 19^th Centuries. Their method and results were quickly summarized

We set up a simple test. We spent a day sitting in front of four classic paintings and the works of four famous contemporary British artists. We counted how many visitors stopped at each; for how long, on average, they spent looking at each work; what the longest examination was; and what sort of gallery visitor each work seemed to attract. Surprisingly, despite all the controversy, and the public promotion of new British artists, they did less well in this test than the 18th and 19th Century artists.

If you are interested in some raw data, people spent more than two minutes on average in front of William Hogarth's The Roast Beef Of Old England and some enthusiasts viewed a contemporary painting of a pickled sheep by Damien Hirst for up to four minutes.

Sensing that this was not the information I was seeking, I consulted an article in The Huffington Post by art critic and historian at the School of the Chicago Art Institute, James Elkins. His observations, like mine, were anecdotal. At the Art Institute he has seen viewers give paintings a passing glance or not look at them at all. On the opposite end of the spectrum, he cites a woman who returns to the museum three times a week on her lunch hour to view Young Woman at a Half-Opened Door by Rembrandt. She has been doing this for decades. Elkins concludes that she has looked at that painted for at least 3000 hours—the equivalent of a full-year of work, five days a week, from 9 to 5.

Young Woman at a Half-Opened Door by Rembrandt

To his own observations, Elkins adds conclusions from other studies:
There have been a number of surveys of how visitors interact with paintings in museums. One found that an average viewer goes up to a painting, looks at it for less than two seconds, reads the wall text for another 10 seconds, glances at the painting to verify something in the text, and moves on. Another survey concluded people looked for a median time of 17 seconds. The Louvre found that people looked at the Mona Lisa an average of 15 seconds.

My interest in other studies was now flagging. Foregoing further research, I decided to analyze my own viewing habits. What I found was this:

To many paintings I give a cursory glance. Given all the paintings in the world, something in me decides very quickly where I will spend my viewing time. Would I discover unsuspected visual riches were I to stop and linger before these? Possibly. But I am not yet driven to do so.

Where, then, do I spend my time? My extended viewing time is given to:

Paintings I have created myself, especially those I have chosen to place in our home. I look at some of them again and again. I am shameless in this. After a time, their origin no longer matters.

Paintings by others that I have purchased.

Paintings by artists I know personally, especially if I like them.

Paintings by recognized masters, whether I am initially drawn to them or not.

Paintings in a museum that I have returned to see again—old favorites that delight me more each time.

Paintings in museums geographically distant from where I live that I may never see again.

Master paintings that I am copying in order to learn.

Paintings very different from mine that are pushing an envelope.

Paintings that inexplicably capture my attention.

I am not certain of the order, but all of the above call forth lingering attentiveness in me.

For several months I have reflected on the question, “How long do people look at paintings?” Studies show that people look, if they look at all, from 0.1 seconds to a lifetime. My conclusion is that people look at paintings as long as they want to and can. If you are an artist, lucky are you if people want to look at yours.

Photo by Doug Runyan of viewers at the Brown County Art Gallery Summer Show Reception

Repetition

2011-06-28T06:45:00.000-07:00

It is essential to do the same subject over again,

ten times, fifty times, a hundred times.

-- Edgar Degas

It is interesting to me that in the field of fine art where originality and uniqueness are highly valued, repetition so often shows itself. This is certainly true in the work of Edgar Degas. In 1880, when Degas was in mid-career, Emile Zola, art critic as well as novelist, accused him of having “shut himself up in his specialties”—that is, of being imprisoned by a few favorite themes that he repeated, again and again. To those who know Degas’s work those specialties are familiar: horses and riders at the race track, women in a milliner’s shop, female nudes bathing and combing their hair, and, above all, ballet dancers on, off, and behind the stage.

Zola could have laid this charge at the feet of Paul Cezanne for whom Mont Saint-Victoire was an oft-repeated subject or at the feet of Claude Monet who painted haystacks, the Rouen Cathedral, London in fog, and water lilies, in series, again and again. It is likely because of these repetitions that major artists are known and remembered by us. Would Monet have worked himself into our consciousness with one water lily or one haystack? Probably not.

The current issue (July 2011) of Southwest Art features Indiana artist, C.W. Mundy, as the teacher, friend, and mentor of now nationally-known artists Todd Williams (see my post “Make Haste Slowly” of September 5, 2010), Barbara Flowers, and Brent Jensen. Each Mundy workshop for artists includes a section on “taking the piggy to market”—that is, how to make one’s work better known to galleries and collectors alike. One of the key strategies Mundy recommends is developing suites of paintings devoted to a particular subject and promoting these in beautifully printed brochures. The first time he tried it, Brent Jensen reports, “I sold all of my paintings” and two new galleries agreed to represent him.

Were Degas’s specialties, then, a marketing ploy? It is hard to say at this distance, but the hundreds and hundreds of drawings and paintings of the same familiar subjects suggest that more was going on. While other artists of his time also painted in series, in Degas: Beyond Impressionism, Richard Kendall insists:

There is no precedent for the pervasiveness of Degas’s later serial practice, which accounted in his last decades for the overwhelming majority of his pictures.

In his later years, rather than creating new and unique views of his subject, Degas created a succession of nearly identical variations of given images. These “families” of compositions could include as many as 20, 30 or 50 members. He began by laying tracing paper over the original image. This was a startling choice, for tracing paper is not an hospitable surface for the pastels and charcoal that he then used. I have tried to duplicate his process a time or two and the hard, polished surface of tracing paper is wholly unlike the abrasive papers that most pastel artists use today. It takes extra skill and effort to create layers of color that don’t dust off. But tracing paper did allow him to copy images over and over so he could correct and improve them. Mostly he explored variations of the color—sometimes working on traced images on five or six easels at a time, modifying them in succession, adding charcoal or new colors of pastel. What was he was searching for? Was this a quest for variety? For perfection? He seemed intent on wringing every possibility from each and every image. As Otto Rank has said, “Some artists pour themselves wholly into even small portions of their work.” Degas surely did.

I don’t know what “moral” to draw from this story, although I am fascinated by it. Do you find any message here? Whether artist or not, is there anything you have already done that you could improve by repeating it? Or, if you are an artist, what would emerge if you looked at past work, as Degas surely did, and asked, forty or fifty times, “What, if?”

So Near and Yet So Far

2011-06-08T15:31:00.000-07:00

The Belleli Family by Edgar Degas (1887)

“No art was ever less spontaneous than mine.”

- Edgar Degas

If Degas’ art was not spontaneous, that must mean that it was thoughtfully considered and carefully planned. One of his contemporaries described Degas as “an artist of rare intelligence, preoccupied with ideas.” Most artists are preoccupied with images. To be preoccupied with ideas is unusual and odd. This suggests that if things were there to be seen in Degas’ paintings, they were intended.

No painting by Degas was more deliberately constructed than his early masterpiece, “The Belleli Family,” above. I have seen pictures of this painting many times, but it took Werner Hoffman in his book Degas: A Dialogue of Difference to open my eyes to it. This “family portrait” was conceived over a period of ten years. Degas began with sketches of the children in 1858 and did not complete it until 1867. I thought that I knew this painting, but I had not looked closely enough. It would have helped me to know more about the Belleli family.

Pictured there are Degas’ Aunt Laura, who is pregnant, and his Uncle Gennaro, together with his young cousins, Giovanna and Giulia. Do you notice anything unusual in this family portrait? If this portrait were of your family, would you hang it in your living room or tuck it away in a seldom-opened closet?

It may help you to better see what is being portrayed if you know that Aunt Laura loathed her husband. During the years that nephew Edgar was doing his preliminary sketches, which he began when he was 24 years old, she repeatedly poured out her bitterness about her husband. She said that Gennaro was detestable, immensely disagreeable, boring, and dishonest. She did not like his looks. He did not have a suitable job. Living with him, she said, would lead her to an early grave.

There is no written record of how Uncle Gennaro felt about her.

If you were the artist and this was your commission, how would you portray the Belleli family? Degas chose to show the family members in close physical proximity with one another, but with great emotional distance between them. Aunt Laura is cold in her rigidity. Uncle Gennaro is hardly present, with his back to us, placed off to the side. The girls are not relating to each other but are looking in opposite directions. There is no eye contact between any of the four. I had been fooled in the past by the pleasantness of their surroundings. The home they lived in was lovely, but the quality of their relationships was not.

Separation between people who were physically close, Hoffman helped me to see, was a frequent theme in Degas’ work. Here are a few more images, without any comment. Now that you have this clue, what do you see? What is or isn't going on between those who are pictured here?

Viscount Lepic and His Daughters: Place do la Concorde (1875)

The Duchessa di Montejasi with Her Daughters (1876)

Absinthe-Drinkers (1876)

Waiting (1880)

Mary Cassatt was a friend of Degas and his colleague in the Impressionist movement. Their relationship was at times close and at other times distant. For a time they were inseparable, but then he pulled back. Here is an image very typical of her work.

Katherine Cassatt Reading to Her Grandchildren by Mary Cassatt

Here there is both proximity and connection. Two of the children are closely attending to their grandmother and the second daughter is focused on her brother. One senses immediately that this is not the Belleli family.

Edgar Degas and Mary Cassatt knew both closeness and distance in their relationships, but in Degas' life distance predominated. While Cassatt admired him, cared for him, and for a time was likely in love with him, she acknowledged that Degas "was dreadful in his relationships." Except for a housekeeper who lived many years with him, he lived and died alone.

There were some who felt that Mary Cassatt had put distance between herself and them, but, until their deaths, she lived most of her life in harmony with her parents and her sister Lydia and welcomed visits from her brothers and their families when they came to France. There was estrangement in her life, but closeness dominated.

Degas and Cassatt both painted what they felt most deeply. For Degas, that was the distance that so often invades even our closest relationships. For Cassatt, it was the abiding bond of human connection.

Postscript

In addition to the critical analyses of Degas’ work which fill this book and which I found fascinating, Degas: A Dialogue of Difference is the most beautiful book of Degas’ art that I have seen. It is elaborately illustrated. Published in the United Kingdom in 2007, this book is difficult to find in the United States, but a few copies appear to remain. I was fortunate to find it in my local library. You may want to check yours.

Sometimes You Must Change Your Life

2011-05-27T09:35:00.000-07:00

On the easel is my copy of "House in Winter" by T.C. Steele

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood...

-- Robert Frost

I once knew a man who liked to say, ”All we have to offer one another is our own nervous system.” I’m not exactly sure what he meant by that, but , at the time, I took it to mean that all we have to share with each other are our own peculiar responses to life—that is, life after it has passed through our unique filters, however warped or skewed they may be. Given the unimaginable complexity of a universe, the totality of which none of us can begin to comprehend, perhaps our job while here is to report to one another: “From my bunker, this is how reality looks and feels to me.”

We could all be enriched if we allowed reports of other’s experiences to round out our own. The danger, of course, is that instead of simply witnessing to what our nervous system perceives and doing our best to absorb what other nervous systems perceive, we often try to evangelize by saying, “This is the way I see life and this is the way you should see it too.” Sometimes we also add, “If you don’t see it my way, you should be ostracized or punished.” In some cultures, that punishment has been death.

These decades-old thoughts were rekindled this week while I was seeking, as a member of the Brown County Artists’ Association, to copy “masterworks” by Indiana artists of the early 20^th century. I was struggling with copying a painting by Will Vawter (1871-1941) when I found myself saying, “It is really hard to get inside another painter’s nervous system.”

Will Vawter at work

Vawter painted very colorfully and freely. His nervous system had to have been far more relaxed and imaginatively inventive than mine. When he was a chiId he must have colored outside the lines, while I dutifully stayed within them. In Brown County it is still anecdotally said of him that, while driving down the road, he sometimes cleaned his brushes on his car’s upholstery that was above his head. No wonder the wires in my brain were sparking: I was trying to claw my way toward a painting in which Will Vawter had soared. After painting, he sang on the way home, but I grumbled.

A Vawter landscape--not the one I have tried to copy

My second insight was that, for me, it is harder to get inside some painters' nervous systems than others. That thought arose when I realized that when copying “House in Winter” by T.C. Steele (at the top) a few days before, I had a much easier time getting inside his nervous system. That surprised me, for T.C. Steele was the dean of the Brown County painters—the most recognized, the most remembered, the one whose paintings bring the highest prices. Could he possibly be easier to duplicate?

My copy of Vawter would not be mistaken by anyone as being the real thing. My copy of T.C. Steele would fool no curator, collector, or auctioneer, but to the untrained eye at 30 feet, maybe. There is something in my nervous system as it now exists that has more in common with the art of T.C. Steele than with the art of Will Vawter. Here’s the rub. I’m starting to like the work of Will Vawter better. He is becoming an acquired taste. He was the freest of the Brown County painters, much the way Fern Coppedge was the freest and most imaginative of the Buck’s County group, and Walt Gonske today stands apart in our Southwest.

"First Snow in Taos" by Walt Gonske

It would seem that a choice is looming. Do I want to keep reinforcing the nervous system I already have that was first trained as an engineer and then as a pastor and theologian—a nervous system that worries about being both acceptable and right—or is it time to expand to include some Vawter-Coppedge-Gonske-like dimensions? Coloring way outside the lines sounds like fun, but seems a lot to ask at this stage of my unfolding. But, maybe, like a good tennis player, I can begin to play the edges.

"October on the Delaware" by Fern Coppedge

Next week I will go back to the Brown County Art Gallery and ask to have Will Vawter's "Spring Blossom Time" brought out from the vault again so that I can take another whack at it. It's a beautiful painting--almost an abstract when you try to paint it--but, if you step back, it's easy to see where he was. I make no promises, but if, next time, I capture some of his nervous system, I will post my copy of his painting here.

Postscript: June 3, 2011

I did go back to the Brown County Art Gallery today, as promised above. Last week's painting was dry so it was easy to make revisions and additions. Here's what I came up with this time in my attempt to copy Will Vawter's "Spring Blossom Time."

This was truly an exercise in painting "color notes" rather than objects--that is, just painting spots of color without worrying about what they represented. Tomorrow morning I will be painting outdoors at the Oliver Winery here in Bloomington. Let's see if I can see and paint the spots of color there without worrying about what is a rock and what is a tree.

An Unnatural Artist

2011-05-16T07:48:00.000-07:00

A recent pastel painting of mine.

How much or how little “natural” ability anyone has

is nearly impossible to gauge.

-- Betsy Lerner

Richard Gilbert’s blog, Narrative, recently led me to The Forest for the Trees: An Editor’s Advice to Writers by Betsy Lerner. I bought a used copy of the book for a friend and read it before passing it on. In the book Lerner gives would-be authors an insider’s look into the writing and publishing business. While I enjoyed this book and would recommend it to anyone hoping to become a professional writer, those fantasies of my becoming a writer that entertained and distracted me at mid-life were not awakened. While it is true that I enjoy making sentences, had I tried to earn my living as an author, I do not believe I would have survived.

One of the pre-requisites for becoming a successful author, Lerner seemed to be saying, is to desperately want it. She quotes author Lorrie Moore approvingly:

You should become a writer only if you have no choice. Writing has to be an obsession—it’s only for those who say, ‘I’m not going to do anything else.’

In a similar vein, Pablo Neruda said: “For me, writing is like breathing. I could not live without breathing and I could not live without writing.”

Lerner spoke of natural writers as being, not only those who want to write, but those who can’t stop doing it.

The natural writer is one who is always writing, if only in his head—sizing up the situation for material, collecting impressions. James Thurber confessed, “I never quite know when I’m not writing. Sometimes my wife comes up to me at a party and says, ‘Dammit, Thurber, stop writing.’ She usually catches me in the middle of a paragraph.

While I was reading about natural writers, I was, of course, wondering whether I am a natural artist.

Am I obsessed with painting? No, although I am very interested.

Am I always painting? For example, were I to meet you at a party, would I only be listening partly, while I painted your portrait in my mind and studied the way the light was hitting your cheek? Not always.

Is painting as essential to me as breathing? Would I stop living without it? Hopefully, not.

In these senses, I am quite obviously, an unnatural artist.

This book did cause me to ask whether there is anything in my life, other than breathing, that I am always doing. Is there anything that I am unable to do without? I encourage you to ask that question of yourself. You will understand yourself better, if you are able to answer it.

My own answer was not immediately obvious. At first, I could not see my forest for the trees. I could not pinpoint what I always do, because at the time, I was doing it. What I am almost always doing is thinking. I have at times been accused of that by others who found it annoying: “You are always thinking.” Busted. I am ready to confess. I am not a natural writer. I am not a natural painter. For good or ill, I am a natural thinker—that is to say, I am always paying as much attention to life as I can and I am swirling it around in my brain in the hope of making some sense of it. I am always trying to put life into words or pictures.

Thinking can get in the way of my painting, I know. I am not alone in this. Edgar Degas, for one, said, “There is nothing in my work that is spontaneous.” However, that seemed to work for him.

What I may be trying to say—to myself more than to you—is that it is OK for me to be an unnatural artist and that I do not have to be other than I am. It is OK if my primary vocation is paying attention to as much life as I can, to keep trying to make sense of it, and to do my best, whether in words or brushstrokes, to pass on what I see. In the end, it doesn’t matter whether I’m natural or unnatural, but that I keep digging, and keep paying attention, and keep creating as best I can.

Strategies for Future Flowering

2011-04-29T15:14:00.000-07:00

My copy of Portrait of a Tree by Water by V.J. Cariani

Recently a good friend recommended that I read “Late Bloomers,” an essay in Malcolm Gladwell’s book, What the Dog Saw. Was my friend, perchance, trying to give me hope of future flowering in this my 76^th year?

The gist of the essay is that there are two kinds of artists—those early bloomers who display unusual talent while they are young and those late bloomers whose more modest gifts are developed only by hard work and perseverance over a long period of time. For him, Picasso was the prototype of an early bloomer and Paul Cezanne was a much later one. Interestingly, according to Gladwell, early bloomers often do their best and most complex work in their younger years, while late bloomers tend to deepen and develop until the end.

Before Cezanne had fully developed, he asked his friend, Emile Zola, if he could accelerate his learning by moving from Aix to Paris. Zola answered:

Of course one can work here, as anywhere else, if one has the will. Paris offers, further, an advantage that you can’t find elsewhere: the museums in which you can study the old masters from 11 to 4. This is how you must divide your time. From 6 to 11 you go to a studio to paint from a live model; you have lunch, then from 12 to 4 you copy in the Louvre or the Luxembourg, whatever masterpiece you like. That will make up nine hours of work. I think that ought to be enough.

There, in a nutshell, is a two-pronged strategy for artistic growth: first, paint from life and, second, learn from the masters by copying their work. Among the contemporary artists I know, most would agree that painting from life—whether from a model or en plein air—is essential for artistic development. Far fewer seek to grow by copying the masters.

As I learn more about artists in prior times, I am learning how much accomplished artists leaned on those who had gone before them, not just when they were beginning to paint, but throughout their careers.

I am currently reading Vuillard, a large book published by the National Gallery of Art. There I learned that Edward Vuillard went to the Louvre every day to study the works of the masters. He carried a small notebook in which he took notes and sketched to help him assimilate what he was seeing. He also prided himself on being a flaneur, that is, a person who took long walks through Paris in order to experience it. As he walked, he carried and filled his notebook. In this way, Vuillard utilized the two-fold strategy: he learned from the masters and he learned from life.

Directly copying from masters was the primary way that beginning artists learned in the Middle Ages, usually working from patterns and model books. In the Renaissance, artists instead copied ancient Greek and Roman works. They also copied each other. Leonardo da Vinci copied Michelangelo, for example. In the 19^th Century, copying master paintings was considered an art form in its own right and many painters made their living by copying them. Eugene Delacroix, John Singer Sargent, Edgar Degas, Eduoard Manet, Berthe Morisot and Paul Cezanne were among those who copied paintings in the Louvre throughout their careers.

I have known much of this before, but I had not experienced it. I believe it was Peter Senge who said that we don’t know anything until we know it in our bodies. In recent weeks I have had my own taste of learning from masters.

I am a member of The Brown County Artists Association in Nashville, Indiana, which grew out of the art colony that was established there in the early 1900s. Our Association and the accompanying Brown County Art Gallery are celebrating their 85^th anniversary this year. In preparation for our Anniversary Celebration on July 9^th, our artists have the opportunity to copy any of the more than 200 early Brown County paintings that are stored there. I have copied three such paintings, so far, and plan to copy one a week for the next five weeks. I have been amazed by how enjoyable that is and how much I am learning. Tomorrow, I will also go on location to paint outdoors. Painting from life and learning from the masters, I am finally seeing for myself, are the two most effective paths to any future flowering.

My copy of Quiet Interlude by Will Vawter

Vincent: The Opera

2011-04-17T10:32:00.000-07:00

Self Portrait for Paul Gauguin by Vincent van Gogh

For this reason a man paints—to see the world that is in his mind.

-- Vincent van Gogh in Vincent

A world premier of the opera Vincent has been playing the past two weekends at nearby Indiana University. I attended the closing performance last night. Given my fascination with Van Gogh, my expectations were unrealistically high. Much was done well. I enjoyed the orchestral score, particularly, and the cast did its job. Nevertheless, even though I was seated in the center of the 10^th row, I found myself watching from a distance. The performance seemed too much a charade. Scenes were so condensed that characters and relationships did not develop. The story did not flow. Little of the opera moved me.

Audience response was so tepid during the performance that I was surprised by the enthusiastic response that built steadily following the final curtain. Were others moved more deeply than I or are shouting, whistling, standing and applauding what opera devotees feel required to do? Perhaps they were applauding the idea and the effort. I was able to do that. It was a huge undertaking.

Despite my disappointment, there was much food for thought—not only about Vincent, but about artists in any age.

The opera presented Vincent as driven and tormented by two themes. One, which was introduced in the first scene and repeated in the last, was:

For this reason a man paints—to see the world that is in his mind.

The second theme, spoken simplistically and often, was:

Nobody needs you, Vincent.

That harsh judgment was spoken by his father, his Uncle Cent who dismissed him from his art gallery, the elders in the Dutch Reformed Church within which he sought to serve as a preacher, the families in a bleak mining district in Belgium whom he could not help, various women to whom he was attracted, and Paul Gauguin who saw Vincent’s art as too violent and intense, lacking sophistication. Vincent wanted to be loved with his work widely accepted and yet, as he said, people kept leaving him. Only his brother Theo continued to care for him and believe in him.

The opera caused me to reflect upon those artists in any generation who are driven by these two conflicting themes—the desire to express faithfully the world as it exists in their own mind versus the desire to gain broad social acceptance. You see, don’t you, how much easier Vincent’s life would have been if he had wanted only to express his own vision or only to be accepted socially? Most audiences, in my experience, do not want art that expresses the vision of the world in the artist’s mind, but want the artist to express the vision of the world that is in their mind. There have been many tormented artists in history, and I submit to you that they were tormented because they were unable to do both. To avoid such torment, some chose to concentrate on pleasing others and lost touch with their own inner depths. They, too, endured suffering of a kind. Others stayed true to their inner depths and, as a result, did not receive the acceptance for which they longed. Ironically, the acceptance of art by the tortured often comes long after their lifetimes. These are the artists we remember and Vincent van Gogh was one of them.

With the Artist Added

2011-03-28T09:30:00.000-07:00

In Schooner Valley - Pastel - 9x12

Last Saturday, I drove to nearby Martinsville, Indiana, to enter three paintings in The Artesian, an annual art show that will open there on April 8^th. The smallest of the three paintings is shown above. Whether any of my paintings are accepted into the show will depend upon the show’s judge. I don’t know who the judge will be. Since it is impossible to predict the tastes of an unknown judge, one has the freedom to submit something that you yourself like. I’m OK with these paintings. Not thrilled, but OK. If I’d had some on hand that thrilled me, I would have entered them, but, more and more, I am seeing participation in such events as a value in itself. And, for some time, I have realized that my paintings become neither better nor worse when a judge gives them a thumbs down or a thumbs up. They have a life of their own and are whatever they are. I will enjoy seeing the show whether or not my work is in it. After all, I've already seen my work.

I arrived at the reception area a few hours after paintings could be delivered, so many paintings had already arrived and were leaning against the walls of the large gallery space. I took a quick tour of the room, briefly scanning the work that had been delivered. Two things struck me. First, even though almost all the paintings were representational—traditional landscapes, mostly—there was a good bit of variety between them. The artists who preceded me had not copied one another. Second, it was easy to pick out the paintings of the artists I knew. For example, a Larry Rudolech painting is a Larry Rudolech. A Chris Newlund is a Chris Newlund. No doubt about it. Their work is distinctive and something consistent shows through.

That started me wondering again about a painter’s style. About how it evolves and where it comes from.

Quite by chance, a few hours later, I read this passage from the 19^th Century nature writer, John Burroughs. He was discussing the artistry of bees.

Most persons think the bee gets honey from the flowers, but she does not: honey is a product of the bee; it is the nectar of the flowers with the bee added. What the bee gets from the flower is sweet water: this she puts through a process of her own and imparts to it her own quality; she reduces the water and adds to it a minute drop of formic acid. It is this drop of herself that gives the delicious sting to her sweet. The bee is therefore the type of the true poet, the true artist. Her product always reflects her environment, and it reflects something her environment knows not of.

Taking Burroughs seriously, I asked again, “Where does the style of an artist come from?”

Just as honey begins with the nectar that the bee finds in the flower, so a painter’s style begins with whatever sweetness the artist finds in life. To what is the artist’s eye drawn? What, in life, does the artist find beautiful or moving? Is it shapes, or values, or color? Natural or manmade objects of a certain kind? To what kinds of scenes does the artist return again and again? And what impact does the surrounding geography have on her or him?

Again, what in the cultural or artistic environment is influencing the artist? What artist's work out of the past is most meaningful to her or him? Is the artist part of a school or group that is shaping him? Who have her teachers been?

Or again, what medium is the artist using? Does she work primarily in oil, or watercolor, or casein, or pastel or gouache. Which medium feels most right to him? And how is the paint applied? With a painting knife more than with a brush? With large brushes more than with small brushes? What size canvas or other surface does the artist typically choose? Where does the artist prefer to work? In the studio or in the open air? And how fast does the artist work? Are paintings finished in one sitting or over several days, or several weeks, or even several months?

“Style” is not totally mysterious. The way an artist answers all the practical questions above will, over time, contribute mightily to the shaping of his or her style. Yet, there is a mysterious element of which even the artist may not be aware. Something of whom the artist most truly is keeps irrepressibly bubbling up. Not only does the bee impart something to the nectar "that her environment knows not of," but the bee also imparts to the nectar something that the bee herself knows not of. This, I believe, is also true of artists.

Foregrounds and Backgrounds

2011-03-13T10:51:00.000-07:00

The Gleaners by Jean-Francois Millet

What do you almost always notice? By contrast, what do you rarely experience or see? Human beings, far more than other animals, can adjust their sensory systems. We can tune in or tune out; we can heighten or depress our feelings; we can scan the horizon, move in for a close-up, or go into a trance-like soft focus. Despite this flexibility, the human brain has certain built-in biases. For example, when we are not thinking about it, our brain will always notice the foreground rather than the background. We miss a lot of reality because of this.

-From Getting There from Here, 1994

I wrote the above paragraph to begin a sermon that I preached years ago. It had sprung from the book, New World, New Mind, in which the authors had discussed the perceptive biases of the human brain. In addition to the fact that we are far more likely to notice the foreground rather than the background, I learned that we will naturally see what is moving before we notice what is standing still, what is changing before what is staying the same, and what is giving us pain before that which is giving us pleasure. It is only by decision that we can override these natural tendencies.

I was reminded of these biases, recently, when an art history book helped me to see one of my favorite paintings (The Gleaners by Jean-Francois Millet) in a new way. What is it about The Gleaners that pleases me so? I’m not sure I can say. My response is very subjective. Does, “I like the way it looks,” seem too unsophisticated? Maybe it’s the harmony between the two bent-over figures. Or, possibly, the way the muted tones throughout the painting cause the blue and red headdresses to stand out. Maybe it’s just that spot of red. All this is an attempt to find reasons for my delight. The truer truth is what I said at the beginning, “I like the way it looks.”

There are two things to notice here: first, I am stuck in the foreground and, second, I am evaluating the painting visually—that is, all I have cared about is how it looks and I haven’t begun to ask what the painting means. That changed when the book Jean-Francois Millet: Drawn into the Light caused me to transcend my brain’s bias and look into the background.

In the background, a work crew of men is heaping the harvest high in a large wagon and a number of towering haystacks. There we are seeing the plenty that will be enjoyed by the established class. That causes me to see the foreground differently. Now I see how bent over two of the woman are and how the third woman appears to be resting her back. The gleaners are peasants. I see how meager are their sheaves of grain compared to the tall stacks in the distance. I wonder how many hours they will necessarily work like this and how many children they will try to feed with the little grain that has been left behind. I realize that the beauty of this painting has kept me from seeing what is going on. For Millet, the wealth, the poverty, and the beauty were all going on. Millet spent twenty-five years developing this theme.

Gray and Brass by John Sloan

Consider this early 20^th Century example. John Sloan was a major figure in the Ash Can School which often depicted urban scenes in New York’s working class neighborhoods. When you look at his painting Gray and Brass what do you see? If one sticks with the foreground, one sees only a group of people out for an automobile ride and, visually, the painting is only mildly appealing. But what is going on in the background? According to Sloan, the people under the trees in the background are working class people, gawking at the difference between themselves and those whom Sloan called “the brass-trimmed, corpulent, overdressed, wealthy types ripe for caricature.” Motoring in 1907 was one of the most exclusive hobbies of the period. Cars cost four times the annual income of a skilled factory worker and ten times that of an unskilled worker. Much will be missed if we focus exclusively on the foreground and only ask , “How does this painting look?” and do not also ask, “What does this painting mean?”

There is not always new meaning in the background, but sometimes there is. Therefore, I will end close to where I began:

When we are not thinking about it, our brain will always notice the foreground rather than the background. We can miss a lot of reality and much meaning in life and in art because of this.

A Sag in the Middle

2011-03-03T07:50:00.000-08:00

Schooner Valley Farm - Oil - 16 x 20

Perchance as we grow old we cease to spring with spring

and are indifferent to the succession of years.

Woe to us when we cease to form new resolutions

at the opening of a new year.

- Henry David Thoreau

I find that as I approach my 75^th birthday in three weeks, I am less able to be indifferent to the “succession of my years” than I have been in years past. On many prior birthdays I was indifferent, taking the small step from 30 to 31, or 42 to 43, or 54 to 55 in stride, but it is hard not to notice and reflect when turning 75. In some ways the past 12 months have been difficult. My body is no longer as capable and obedient as it was just a year ago. I have long known that I was “growing older” and accepted that. This year I realized that I am aging. This is not a complaint. No new limitations overshadow my gratitude for still being here, but this milestone—having lived for three-quarters of a century—does raise the question, “What do I now intend?” Will there be new resolutions?

In recent weeks I have reflected on a sermon illustration I heard as a boy. Why this illustration struck me at age 11 or 12 and why I have remembered it all these years I cannot explain. This is what the visiting preacher, who was in his late sixties and retired, said:

Human life is like a string stretched between two chairs—

the sag is in the middle.

My painting has been sagging for more than a year—if not the paintings themselves, certainly my enjoyment in creating them. The excitement and enthusiasm with which I began six years ago have gradually diminished. I have scraped off too much of what I have painted and assigned too many paintings to the trash. At times I have wondered whether it makes sense to continue. I have thought about giving up my studio, which I rent, or trying to cut costs or downsize in other ways. Something, I have known, needs to change. Then, as this birthday drew near, I began to realize that what I have been experiencing in my art life is a sag in the middle.

A sag in the middle is a hopeful condition in that it need not go on forever. Renewed enthusiasm, joy and excitement are possible as one moves toward the end. I do not know how much longer I will be able to paint, but I want whatever time lies ahead to be more a season of harvesting than a time of plowing and planting; more a season of playfulness than a time of laboring; more a season of gratitude than a time of longing and wishing.

There is much about painting that I do not know and even more that I cannot do. I want to continue learning, if I am able, but I don’t want my next season to be a time of trying harder. If a resolution is needed at 75, mine is this: to relax into my work, as best I can, and to enjoy my art for whatever it is. I’m with Thoreau on this one: It is time “to spring with spring.”

When Trees Are Blue

2011-02-14T07:04:00.000-08:00

It takes but a little distance to make the hills

and even the meadows look blue today.

- Henry David Thoreau

Overlook (detail)

I had been painting for only a few months, when, six years ago, I enrolled in a plein air painting workshop on the banks of the Ohio River that was led by Colorado artist, Frank LaLumia, whom I had discovered through his book, Plein Air Painting in Watercolor and Oil. That week we were painting in oil.

For four days we painted a number of small (8x10) studies—two or three each day. Frank believed that, for the purposes of learning, several small paintings were better than a few larger, more finished ones. That was true for me. I would have learned less if I had spent hours fussing over a large painting, trying to make it better than it was.

A seminal moment in the workshop came when I was trying to paint a scene that included both sides of the river. When Frank checked on what I was doing, he looked at how I had painted the trees on the Kentucky side and said, “Those trees across the river are blue.” “No way,” I muttered. To me those trees were green--the way I'd painted them--but Frank insisted that they were blue. “I must be color blind,” I thought. “How will I ever learn to paint, if I can’t tell the difference between green and blue?”

I don’t know if Frank really saw blue—maybe he saw bluish green—but later I realized that he was trying to open my eyes to what artists call “atmospheric perspective.”

One of the major problems in landscape painting arises from the fact that the world we are trying to depict has depth and the surface we are painting on is flat. How, on a flat canvas, can we create the third dimension? How can we draw a viewer into our painting? How can we make things in the distance appear to recede, so that the Kentucky side of the river isn’t right there at the tip of our nose? One of the most important ways is “atmospheric perspective.”

When we look at anything in the distance, we are looking at it through layers of atmosphere (moisture and dust). When objects or planes recede into the distance, because of the atmosphere, their color becomes cooler. If you are not an artist, you probably don’t concern yourself with the temperature of colors, but artists must. Warm colors are those made up of yellows and reds. Cool colors are predominantly blue. And, all colors can be more or less cool. Green, for instance, can either be warm, if it leans toward the yellow side, or cool, if it leans toward the blue side. The warmth and coolness of colors matter because, in a painting, warm colors come forward and cool colors go back. What Frank wanted me to see was that the green trees right in front of me had more yellow in them than the trees across the river. He might also have mentioned that planes and objects in the distance are of lighter value (i.e., are less dark) than planes and objects in the foreground. Lightening the trees across the river, as well as cooling them, would have created distance and pushed those trees back.

Last week, I heard from Frank, again, and he offered this rule of thumb that summarizes his understanding of atmospheric perspective:

As objects recede in the distance,

dark objects appear lighter,

light objects appear darker,

and all objects appear cooler.

I tried to apply that rule in my painting Overlook, a slice of which is shown above. Notice that the foreground colors feature a warm, dark orange-red, putting that plane right in front of you. The green in the plane immediately behind has lots of yellow in it, which should keep it coming forward. The greens in succeeding layers have more red and less yellow, pushing them back. Yellow drops out of the next layer, entirely. From then on, there are purples and blues which, at the same time, are becoming lighter. If I have my colors and values right, this painting should suggest depth. Does it work for you?

This second image is from a painting that Frank sent. Notice how he has applied his own rule. What happens to the yellows, reds, greens and blues as they move into the distance?

At the top of this piece, Thoreau noticed how little distance it took to make the surrounding hills and meadows blue, but that was on one particular day. From day to day (and often from hour to hour) the amount of atmosphere and, hence, the amount of blueness in the distance varies. Recognizing this will give you something additional to notice in life, perhaps as you drive down a highway. Where do the yellows and reds end and where do the purples and blues begin? Such looking will help to sharpen your senses.

For more information about Frank LaLumia's paintings, workshops and book see www.LaLumia.com.

Japonisme

2011-02-01T00:55:00.000-08:00

In a way, all of my art is based on the Japanese.

-- Vincent van Gogh

Bridge in Rain (after Hiroshige) by Vincent Van Gogh

The most fascinating art book that I studied during 2010 was Japonisme: The Japanese Influence on Western Art Since 1858 by Siegfried Wichmann, which was first translated from German into English in 1981. Finding this book in my local library was like opening the treasure trove of a 19^th Century European art collector who loved all things Japanese. With 432 oversized pages, 1100 illustrations, and insightful commentary, this is an eye-opening book.

Japonisme begins in 1858 because that is the year that Commodore Perry opened Japan’s door to the world after an isolation that had lasted over 200 years. The arts and crafts that came pouring out of Japan at that time soon had an enormous influence on European and American art. Superb works by craftsmen in ceramics, metalwork, printmaking and painting took the West by storm. It was as though European windows, so long shuttered and curtained by heavy drapes, were thrown open and fresh air and light came streaming in.

Claude Monet, who collected Japanese prints all his life, later said of the transition:

We needed the arrival of the Japanese albums [of prints] in our midst, before anyone dared to sit down on a river bank, and juxtapose on a canvas a roof which was bright red, a wall which was white, a green poplar, a yellow road and blue water. Before the example given by the Japanese, this was impossible, the painter always lied and all one ever saw on a canvas were subdued colors, drowning in a half-tone.

Many artists were affected (among them Manet, Degas, Monet, Bonnard, Gauguin, Lautrec, Vallotton, and the Americans Mary Cassatt and James Whistler) but Vincent van Gogh’s work was dramatically transformed. Think of his dark early work in Holland, such as The Potato Eaters, and contrast it with the vibrancy of the later work in Provence. Vincent talked about the change in the light when he moved south, but it wasn’t the light only. From Arles, he exclaimed to Theo, “I am seeing like the Japanese.”

First, he began learning to draw like the Japanese. Again, remember his earlier efforts to learn drawing by copying artists such artists as Millet in dark brooding charcoal. The Japanese drew more freely with ink and a brush. “I envy the Japanese the extreme clearness which everything has in their work. Their work is as simple as breathing,” he wrote. Vincent and Theo owned many Japanese prints and it was by copying some of them—not with a brush but with a reed pen—that Vincent, having studied the Japanese system of lines and dots, began to draw in a new way. Soon he went beyond copying to incorporating Japanese methods while drawing his own scenes.

Provencal Orchard by Vincent van Gogh

Interestingly, the short pen strokes and dots that marked his drawings became his signature brush strokes. He was seeing, drawing and painting like the Japanese.

Peach Orchard by Vincent van Gogh

A greater explosion of style came because of his delight in the bright, flat areas of color that he found in the woodcuts. He laid “light and shadow” aside, worried little about modeling a third-dimension and concentrated on the color. Sometimes, when directly copying a Japanese print, he pushed beyond where they had gone and further intensified the color. All in all, his delight in Japanese art gave Vincent permission to paint in a new way—the way for which most of us remember him.

Postscript for Artists

Here are several characteristics of Japanese woodblock prints that encouraged new directions in European art

Clarity and power of design--more concerned to create a visual harmony than to copy nature.
Unusual and innovative perspective.
Severe cropping of images.
Simplified contours.
Vivid color.
Flat color.
Everyday life simply observed with no human activity off limits.
Color woven through the work, like colored threads through a tapestry.
Sophisticated understanding of nature and the gestures of everyday human movement.

These characteristics not only altered how the Impressionists painted, but what they painted.

What Does Love Have to Do with It?

2011-01-17T14:20:00.000-08:00

Woman with Red Hair by Amadeo Modigliani

My eyes were first opened to “fine art” when, as an aeronautical engineering student at the University of Michigan in the late 1950s, I discovered a portfolio of six prints by Amadeo Modigliani in a campus bookstore. I had no art background with which to evaluate those portraits. My response was entirely visceral. I simply knew that I liked them—a lot. I purchased the prints (one of which is shown above), had four framed, and carried them from place to place through the first decades of my adulthood, always enjoying them. I do not remember where I left them behind or why.

Recently I was reading an essay about Modigliani, written in 1981, by the British art critic, John Berger. There I was surprised to learn how popular Modigliani’s work was at that time. Berger wrote:

With Van Gogh, Modigliani is probably one of the most regarded of modern artists. I mean that literally: the most looked at by the most people. How many postcards of Modigliani at this moment on how many walls? He appeals particularly but not exclusively to the young.

Modigliani’s 20th Century popularity was not cultivated by curators or museums. Rather, he was acknowledged briefly by them and then, shortly after his death in 1920, was swept aside. His later popularity arose from the grassroots. Berger writes, “He may even be the only twentieth-century painter to have won, in this sense, an independent acknowledgement. “ The rest of the essay tries to answer, “Why was this so?”

After speaking of Modigliani’s distinctive colors, the simplifications of his compositions, the glow of his painted skin, and his ability to give his figures “the quality of presence,” Berger said that when Modigliani painted his best paintings—whether of a man or a woman—he was “in love.” His goal, according to Berger, was to present the person he was painting “as a loved one.”

I think I get that. To be “in love” with a subject does not mean wanting to possess it, but delighting in the way it is. That happens to me sometimes when I am drawing a portrait or a figure. The beauty and worth of a person comes shining through as I draw—not a beauty or worth that the world would necessarily value—but beauty that is just there, if you are open to it. Maybe you are seeing who they most truly are, or what they are struggling with, or what they have been through. Maybe it is their spiritual beauty that is being revealed. It’s hard to explain, but you have had moments like that, too, haven’t you?

On my best days I know that there is beauty and worth in everything and I marvel at what is before me, even if it is simply a leaf or a tree. I am reading a biography of James Whistler right now and I’m at the point where he is in London, still largely undiscovered, and he is drawn to the commercial docks in the dirtiest and most dangerous part of the city, but he finds it beautiful and rents a small room there and goes out to the docks each day to do etchings of what, for him, is delightful and pleasing. Was he not also “in love” with his subject.

If Berger is right and Modigliani did his best work when in love, would we not do our best work when in love, too—when delighting in our subject, and in our being there, and in the paint, and in the process? What does love have to do with it? If it is compelling paintings that we're after, love, I suspect, has a lot to do with it.

Painting in a Time of Silence

2011-01-04T15:36:00.000-08:00

Haystacks by Claude Monet

I find that if one addresses the public
and is greeted with silence and indifference,

then that is a failure.

- Claude Monet

I have been reading The Unknown Monet: Pastels and Drawings by James Ganz and Richard Kendall. I bought this book three years ago, shortly after it was published, and have just gotten around to it. Sometime soon, I want to reflect on the central theme of the book but for now want to comment on Monet’s conviction, stated above, that public indifference to one’s art is failure.

During his lifetime, Monet was, by far, the most commercially successful of the Impressionists. In the 1890s his annual income exceeded 100,000 francs, which was equivalent to $200,000 today. No wonder he had beautiful gardens! Contrast the public’s acceptance and buying of Monet’s work to the void in which Vincent van Gogh labored and the desperate round of calls to dealers and potential collectors frequently made by Camille Pissarro in the attempt to pay his rent or buy food for his family, while his wife waited at home seething about empty cupboards.

According to Ganz and Kendall, Monet’s success was due, in part, to the fact that he was a master of self-promotion. Monet played a significant role in constructing his own public image and was “as entrepreneurial in his relationships with journalists as he was with dealers and collectors.”

The quote at the top came from a letter to his dealer Paul Durand-Ruel when a major exhibition of Monet’s work was largely ignored upon opening in Paris in 1883. I found further comments by Monet to his dealer interesting.

This new and unfamiliar indifference has affected me deeply. When we were attacked and even vilified in the newspapers we could always comfort ourselves with the thought that it was all a measure of our worth since no one would have bothered about us if that wasn’t the case. So how should this silence be interpreted? You musn’t imagine that I want to see my name in the newspapers. I really am above all that and I couldn’t care in the least about what the press and so-called art critics think, since they rival each other in their stupidity. Indeed, it doesn’t affect the artistic side of things at all. I know my worth, and I am harder on myself than anyone else could be. But things have to be looked at from the commercial angle. And we’d be blind not to recognize that the exhibition was ill-prepared and poorly advertised. It is necessary at all costs to secure in advance the cooperation of the press, since even intelligent art-lovers are more or less responsive to the noise made by the newspapers.

This quote pushed several of my buttons and I could now ride off in a number of directions, but let me focus on the fact that even a painter as successful as Monet was deeply affected by public indifference. There are, I know, some painters whose works are sprinkled throughout the major magazines and are known nationally, and win major prizes, but they are such a small percentage of the thousands of painters who go to their studios day after day whose work is largely greeted by silence. Currently, there are many fine painters in Indiana—and, most certainly, across America—but for most of them sales are occasional, public mentions are few, and almost none are vilified, which for Monet was more life-giving than no response at all.

When one paints in a time of silence, the question, “Why am I still doing this?” often arises. If you paint day after day in relative obscurity, my hope for you in this New Year is that you will discover (or rediscover) reasons for painting that give you life, regardless of how any others respond. May you find the courage to continue and be sustained in your work.

Oppression and Expression

2010-12-14T05:56:00.000-08:00

Mountain Slope Over the Sea--Watercolor by Emile Nolde

“I had to paint"
-- Emil Nolde

A recent report in the New York Times caused me to recall Emil Nolde, a 20^th century German Expressionist. What the Times reported was that workers in Berlin, digging for a new railway station, recently found fragments of eleven sculptures that had been a part of the Third Reich’s “Exhibit of Degenerate Art.”

Shortly after the Berlin Olympic Games in 1936, Joseph Goebbels, the Reich Minister of Propaganda and a close associate of Hitler, issued standards that defined the kinds of art that would be acceptable in the Third Reich. In 1937, Goebbels ordered the confiscation of what he and Hitler considered “degenerate art” from Germany’s museums. 19,500 works were removed and 1052 had been painted by Emil Nolde. He had been much honored previously, but his Expressionist works offended the Fuhrer. Quang Ho quotes Hitler as having said, “If anyone paints the grass blue and the sky green, he should be castrated.”

Emil Nolde was not castrated physically, but he was castrated artistically. 48 of his paintings were included in the 650 works that comprised the special exhibit of confiscated art which opened in Munich and traveled to eleven other cities in Germany and Austria. (The sculptures recently found in Berlin are believed to have been a part of that exhibit.) Graffiti and hand written labels mocked the artists and denounced the works. Over three million visitors attended the exhibit, making it the most widely-viewed art exhibit the world had seen until that time.

Soon afterwards, galleries were forbidden from selling Nolde’s works. In 1941 he was ordered to present all his work of the past two years to the government for approval. None was ever returned. Next came the order forbidding Nolde from selling any of his work and, finally, he was ordered to cease painting altogether. This ban would be enforced by Gestapo surveillance.

One can only imagine the isolation, suffering and confusion that Nolde experienced at that time, but he soon decided to disobey the ban, surreptitiously. For sanity’s sake, he decided that he had to paint.

His solution was to paint in a small hidden room in his home in northern Germany, far from Berlin. He never used oil paints because their distinctive odor would give him away if visited by the Gestapo. Instead, he switched to watercolors exclusively and worked small. Many of what he called his “unpainted pictures” were no larger than the palm of his hand. He produced 1032 such watercolors during his exile. Many were colorful and bold expressions of his inner life and imagination. They would have curled Hitler’s toes.

After Germany’s defeat, Nolde used his small paintings as a basis for larger oils. More than 100 were painted until a fracture of his arm made painting impossible at age 84 in 1951. He died in 1954 with his honor and artistic influence restored.

Flowers by Emil Nolde

For a slide show of Nolde's imaginative landscapes, see:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJNG9Jij9UI&feature=related

Be sure to watch with a full screen.

Postscript for Artists

You may be interested in the methods Nolde used during that period and want to experiment with them, purely for the for the fun of it. These might be good exercises for loosening up at the beginning of each painting day.

Nolde worked on absorbent Japanese papers of which he had many kinds, both thick and thin. He cut out formats freehand with a scissors, without measuring them or using a straightedge. He wanted to play.

He prepared his colors in cups—sometimes a few, sometimes many—and jars of water were at hand. He used fine brushes and damaged brushes. He painted very wet. Each color had its own brush. Brushes were heavily loaded with color and he worked at great speed. Drips were allowed. If a color did not seem strong enough, he went back in again and again. Sometimes when the paper was dry he added paint to the reverse side, creating layers of color and a transparent effect.

He painted mostly flowers from his garden, landscapes from his imagination, and people from his dreams. I enjoy some of his work a lot; others, not so much. But I delight in the thought of this persecuted man daring to express himself freely in the midst of oppression—because he had to—for sanity’s sake.

Green Sea with Blue Cloud - Watercolor by Emil Nolde

Source: The description of Nolde's painting methods was gleaned from Emil Nolde: Unpainted Pictures by Hatje Cantz

Back to the Drawing Board

2010-11-27T12:55:00.000-08:00

My copy of "Large Tree" by Vincent van Gogh

I can’t overemphasize the importance of drawing. You can learn to draw and develop it if you’re persistent and practice. Don’t be like many amateurs who are so busy making pictures that they don’t go back to develop the basics that would enable them to make a better finished product.

-- Foster Caddell

Five months ago in this blog I quoted one of the sayings that fabled watercolor instructor Edgar Whitney often said to students who were discouraged by the level of their work.

Don’t demand of yourself a competence you have not earned.

I came across those words at a time when I was discouraged about the level of my work and they hit me right between the eyes. When my work isn’t going well, I am tempted to tell myself that I don’t have enough natural talent. That is a total dead-end. If too little talent is the issue, where could I possibly get more? What I heard Edgar Whitney saying to me was, “If you don’t like the level of your work, go earn some more competence.” That may sound harsh, but it was very freeing. Rather than bemoaning any lack of talent, during the last six months I have been trying to earn more competence. My strategy has been to work on one issue at a time, such as color mixing, value studies, composition and drawing. Right now I am concentrating on drawing.

According to one of my favorite artists, Quang Ho:

It’s impossible to be any kind of artist at all, unless you can draw. No matter how long you’ve been doing it, you can never be sufficiently fluent. You must continue to practice drawing the way a musician practices scales.

In search of a little more competence in drawing, I have been participating in a twelve week class taught by Gloria Fischer at the Indianapolis Art Center. In a preliminary way, let me say that this class has been lots of fun. I enjoyed doing art without any concern for a final product. Second, I realized again that drawing helps me to see. If my drawing is off, it’s because my seeing is off. One thing Gloria Fischer often (gently) helped me to realize was where my seeing was off.

The class was broken up into three four-week segments. The first four weeks were the least structured. Class members could go in any direction they chose. I spent two of those weeks copying works of old masters. The copy of Van Gogh’s reed pen drawing "Large Tree," above, was one. I found this particularly interesting because Van Gogh had been experimenting with a Japanese drawing technique at the time. Another attempt to copy a master was of Millet’s drawing “A Peasant at Rest.” My version is below

The second four sessions were spent drawing portraits from models. Here's one of my several portrait drawings.

During the last four weeks we did figure drawing—again from live models. Each week, we began with one and two minute poses to warm up. Here's a sample.

We then went on to 25 minute drawings. I found the longer drawings more difficult. Strangely, having more time causes me to tighten up. I did like the experimenting we did with “contour drawings” such as the one below. In a contour drawing, you are not drawing the person but outlines of the light as it falls on the person. And you try to keep your pen on the paper without lifting it, so as to do the drawing in one continuous line.

Looking back over the last five months, I have learned that any additional competence I gain will be earned a little at a time. Increased competence does not come to me in big leaps. Also, in seeking to gain competence, it helps to isolate some aspect of painting and concentrate on that for a while, rather than spending all one's time trying to make finished pictures.

P.S. Do You Want to Draw?
Over the past few years, several people have told me that they would like to learn to draw or paint. In each case I have encouraged them to begin, have pointed them toward resources and, in some cases, have shared art materials with them. Interestingly, I don’t know that any have acted on that desire by trying to study and learn alone. Another friend, who joined a similar class on her own initiative, began as an absolute beginner and was soon surprised by the results. Would you like to draw or paint? If you do, the best thing you can do is to take a class. Not only the instructor, but other class members and the very structure that is provided will help to accelerate your progress. I find that such a class gives traction to one's desire to draw or paint.

Let It Snow?

2010-11-12T15:20:00.000-08:00

Mountain Creek by Fern Coppedge

For the past several days here in Central Indiana we have enjoyed sunny skies and unusually warm temperatures even though we are well into November. Global warming aside, in the weeks ahead temperatures will fall. When the snow comes it will offer artists who paint outdoors new visual opportunities as well as challenges.

One of my favorite art books is Impressionists in Winter (available from Amazon, new at $30 or used from $9.98) that displays and discusses sixty-three winter paintings by Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley, Caillebotte and Gauguin as well as four major essays about their winter paintings. My favorite painting in the book is “The Magpie” by Claude Monet (seen below) painted by him in the winter of 1869. Monet and his family spent that winter on the Normandy coast where he found much inspiration. Writing to fellow painter Frederic Bazille, Monet said:

I go out into the country which is so beautiful here that I find the winter perhaps more agreeable than the summer, and naturally I am working all the time, and I believe that this year I am going to do some serious things.

“The Magpie” was likely one of those “serious things” and I found it to be stunningly beautiful when I saw it in the Musee d’Orsay a few years ago. Museum officials say that it is the most popular of the paintings in the museum, measured, I suspect, by the volume of visitors’ purchase of postcards.

The Magpie by Claude Monet

I featured “Mountain Creek” by Fern Coppedge at the top for two reasons. First, because as an American post-impressionist she was a dedicated plein air painter of winter scenes in Buck’s County, Pennsylvania. Second, even though Coppedge, who died in 1951, thought of herself as “a woman forgotten,” there appears to be renewed interest in her work. My blog entry about her last February has been viewed by three times more visitors than any other of my posts. Because of that interest, here is a bit more information about her.

Coppedge was the only woman landscape painter within the New Hope School and initially greater attention was focused on the males of the group—Edward Redfield, Daniel Garber, John Folinsbee, Henry Snell, Charles Rosen, William Lathrop, George Sotter and others. It has been suggested that Coppedge built her reputation as a painter of snow scenes as a way to distinguish herself from the men, but that is unlikely inasmuch as several of the men also painted in all kinds of weather, no matter how severe. It is more likely that she painted out-of-doors in winter because she enjoyed it and was stimulated by it. A catalogue from the Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, reports that she once sighed to a friend, “Spring seems to be here and not a single good snow all winter.” It is a rare outdoor painter who is saddened by the coming of spring.

These images from the same catalogue (Fern Coppedge: A Forgotten Woman, 1990) speak volumes:

Fern Coppedge was often seen about New Hope wearing her bearskin coat, a cap with earmuffs, and fur gloves as she tramped through the snow drifts in search of the perfect scene. One resident recalled seeing her paint in the middle of a blizzard “crouched in two feet of snow with the storm raging about her, fingers stiff from the icy blasts. Her canvas was lashed to a tree and at times it banged and fluttered like a sail.” The tranquility of these works belies the physical hardship she endured while painting them.

One wonders what the weather was like when she painted the tranquil scene below.

Old House, Point Pleasant by Fern Coppedge

I have painted a few winter scenes, but always from photos I have taken or from memory. That feels anemic when compared to Fern Coppedge trudging through snow drifts to find her subject. Will this be the winter when I take my paints and easel out into the snow?

Simplify

2010-10-29T16:22:00.000-07:00

Art should simplify.

--Willa Cather

Ann's Aspens by Ann Templeton

When Ann Templeton, whose painting is seen above, approaches the landscape, she aims for a degree of abstraction. “Don’t be afraid of that word,” she counsels her students, “for abstraction means nothing more than simplification.” For Ann, to abstract the landscape is to simplify it. She begins with the major shapes and only later decides how many details or how much “reality” she wants to add to it.

Hans Hoffman, a well-known artist and teacher in the 1950s and 60s who abstracted his paintings to a far greater degree than Templeton, taught a similar concept. For him,

To simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.

Indian Summer by Hans Hoffman

Comparing Hoffman’s Indian Summer with Templeton’s Ann’s Aspens makes it clear that artists often differ greatly in their understanding of what is “necessary.” Once an artist decides that she or he is not simply trying to “copy nature” but to respond to it, the door to his or her creativity can open widely. “Nature” becomes a jumping off place and a dialogue begins between what is seen and what is felt and imagined.

Vincent van Gogh talked about that dynamic interaction like this:

I devour nature ceaselessly. I exaggerate, sometimes I make changes in the subject, but still I don’t invent the whole picture. On the contrary, I find what’s already there. It’s a question of picking out what one wants from nature.

One might ask, “In painting the landscape can simplification be avoided?’ I think not, given the complexity of every scene. As many have said, “We can’t paint every leaf on every tree.” Nor can we reproduce all the variations of light that are before us by applying pigments made from the earth onto our canvas.

I like the way Diego Rivera, Mexico’s greatest 20th century artist, put it.

The painter can and must abstract from the many details in creating his painting. Every good painting is above all a work of abstraction. All good painters know this. But the painter cannot dispense with subjects altogether without his work suffering impoverishment.

Lately, before beginning to paint, I have been more conscientious about doing one, two or three different sketches of the scene, rather than jumping right in. More frequently I am asking, “What are the essentials here?” My paintings seem to work best when they are simple.

Agony without the Ecstasy

2010-10-02T18:25:00.000-07:00

Dancers in Pink by Edgar Degas

I would like to be rich enough to buy back all my pictures

and destroy them by pushing my foot through the canvas.

-- Edgar Degas

Perhaps Degas was having an unusually bad day when he expressed to a friend his desire to retrieve and destroy all his paintings. Hopefully, on better days, Degas was more able to enjoy and appreciate his work, although many artists have difficulty with that.

A dramatic example of artistic non-acceptance comes from the poet Rainier Maria Rilke’s small book, Letters on Cezanne, in which he describes Paul Cezanne’s creative process like this:

Only in his fortieth year, through his acquaintance with Pissarro, did Cezanne develop a taste for work. But then to such an extent that for the next thirty years he did nothing but work. Actually, without joy, it seems, in a constant rage, in conflict with every single one of his paintings, none of which seemed to achieve what he considered to be the most indispensable thing.

During the six years of my painting life, such struggles—not with canvas, brushes and paint alone, but primarily with self—have not been entirely unknown to me. I have excused myself by saying that I have a “harsh internal critic,” but Cezanne’s extreme example has helped me to see what a silly way that is to paint and live. In recent months I have stopped paying attention to my internal critic. It still snipes at me from time to time, but I’m not listening.

In his classic book, The Art Spirit, Robert Henri offers a far healthier and more rewarding way to approach one’s art. Central to Henri’s way of working was the decision not to attempt to measure up to an artistic standard of any kind, whether internal or external. He wrote:

Whatever there is in my work that may be really interesting to others, and surely what is interesting to me, is the result of the sometimes successful effort to free myself from any idea that what I produce must be art or must respond in any way to any standard.

By contrast, surely Cezanne had a standard that he felt he had to meet and was not meeting or he would not have tortured himself in the ways he did.

Henri went on to say that on his best days he did not worry whether his work was “old fashioned, new fashioned, or no fashioned at all.” What made his work worthwhile to himself and others, he said, was “because it was a great pleasure to make it.”

What a refreshing concept! At long last I am coming to see that nothing will improve my art more than my taking great pleasure in the making of it. Enjoyment is a choice.

Variety and Dominance

2010-09-16T07:05:00.000-07:00

My neighbor’s son, learning piano,

moves his fingers through the passages

a single note at a time, each lasting an equal interval,

each of them loud, distinct,

deliberate as a camel’s walk through sand.

- Jane Hirschfield in Justice without Passion

I have never lived next door to an adolescent learning to play the piano—his graceless music floating from his house to mine through open windows—but the lines above help me to imagine it. Can you hear him playing this way, too?

Notice that the poet doesn’t say that the boy is hitting wrong notes. He is hitting the right notes, apparently. The problem is how and when he is hitting them. There is no music because there is no variety and there is no dominance. He is hitting all the notes loud and distinct and there is an equal interval between them.

Variety and dominance are also issues in painting. Richard Schmid likes to say that painting requires no more than placing the right color in the right spot. That is a good starting point, but there is more to it than that. The spots of paint won’t work—the composition won’t sing—if all the spots are equal in intensity and there is an equal space between them.

Consider “Repetition,” the quick pastel sketch above that is a response to trees and rocks beside a stream in the Smoky Mountains. The “notes” of this composition—simple shapes, several straight lines, and a few curved ones—are within a beginner’s range. For there to be any music, the simple notes must be played with variety and dominance.

In the sketch, there are both vertical and horizontal lines, giving variety, but the vertical lines dominate. There are straight and curved lines, but the straight lines dominate. There are thin and thick lines and dark and light lines. The thick and dark lines dominate. Most of the sketch is of a greenish hue, but there are also some strokes of white and touches of purple. The white and purple give variety, but the green hues are dominant. When elements in a composition are not given equal treatment, the music has a chance to sing.

Artist Ann Templeton says, that, when composing and painting, she doesn’t want her painting to be “half.” She doesn’t want it to be half of anything: half dark and half light; half vertical and half horizontal; half warm and half cool; half intense and half muted; half orange and half blue; half linear and half curved; or with half soft edges and half hard edges. Nor should the basic shapes be of the same size. Shapes should be varied and one shape, larger than the rest, should dominate. Also, she is careful not to divide her canvas in half.

Ann Templeton, who cherishes variety, avoids “half” in all elements of her painting, because she knows that it is dominance that creates the unity and harmony of any composition.

As for the adolescent boy learning to play the piano, it is good that he is hitting the right notes. As his music floats through their windows, the boy’s neighbors will smile approvingly, when they hear that he is beginning to play some notes differently than others, with unequal volume and duration, and is varying the intervals in between. In music, as in art, the beauty begins when variety is present and dominance reigns.

Making Haste Slowly

2010-09-05T13:39:00.000-07:00

…life is always beautiful

and those who are beautiful never hurry.

-- ee cummings

Todd Williams painting at "The House of the Singing Winds"

There is something about painting out-of-doors that often causes me to hurry. I know painters who can paint rapidly and successfully on location, but I cannot. Still, with me, hurrying has been a bad habit that persists.

There are reasons to hurry. The major reason is the changing light. As the sun moves across the sky the scene you are painting can be radically transformed. That which was in light is now in shadow. Objects that were in shadow are now in light and therefore their color has changed. The clouds that were one of the reasons you chose to paint this scene are now gone. Shadows that cast an interesting pattern when you began have shifted. Will you “chase the light” or record a memory? All this is accentuated on a partly cloudy day in which the sun comes and goes, but not with regularity. It is said that when painting en plein air one has only two or three hours before the subject of your painting has completely changed. Moreover, there is a lot of complexity out there that forces many decisions in a short time. Thus, to my detriment, I often hurry.

However, thanks to a painting workshop I attended this past week, I am making progress with that.

The workshop took place in nearby Brown County, Indiana—the historic home of Hoosier Impressionism—and was led by Arkansas artist, Todd Williams. I attended a similar workshop with Todd a year ago. I enjoyed the workshop then, thought I’d learned a lot, and painted pretty well while I was there, but somehow let that learning slip away in the months following. This time, however, more messages seemed to get through and are sinking in more deeply.

There were ten participants in the workshop and I’m sure all went away with whatever insights were most needed by them, but my central learning is that it is possible for me to paint without hurrying. Todd Williams does not hurry. His approach is well thought out and deliberate, yet the finished painting exudes spontaneity. Simply watching him paint during two three hour sessions is what spoke most deeply to me. I have a video of that in my mind that I can recall whenever I begin to hurry.

There are several practical tactics that I am now employing to keep from hurrying.

Here are my new rules of thumb, several of which come directly from Todd: take several minutes to relax and enjoy the scene before I begin; decide what it is about this scene that attracted me and how I can best express that; arrange to paint in a sitting position which seems to slow me down; with a brush, do a careful drawing that locates the major shapes but don’t worry about details; think through the values that are in the scene and locate the darkest darks and lightest lights; work out color relationships on the palette, mixing colors I will need before picking up a painting knife or brush; don’t attempt to paint the painting all at once, but sneak up on it one section and one layer at a time; begin with the focal point and work outward; use tonal hues early and brighter colors later on; step back frequently to assess the painting and see what is needed; give myself time to clarify details in the final stages of the painting; and, if I find myself losing control because I am hurrying, count to ten before each stroke. That’s my new program. In a month or two I’ll let you know how it works.

In the photo above Todd is painting the home of T.C. Steele known as “The House of Singing Winds.” It is part of an Indiana State Historical site which is described at www.tcsteele.org. Below is the finished painting that Todd was beginning above. To view more of Todd’s work see www.toddwilliamsfineart.com.

Admire as Much as You Can

2010-08-21T17:01:00.000-07:00

The Gleaners by Jean Francois Millet

I don't know whether I have already written to you about it or not. but there has been a sale here of drawings by Millet. When I entered the hall where they were exhibited, I felt like saying,"Take off your shoes, for the place where you are standing

is Holy Ground.

-- Vincent van Gogh

My most vivid images of Vincent van Gogh come from the passionate, productive and colorful period when he lived alone in Provence, striding out into the countryside day after day, with easel and paints and yellow straw hat, to capture whatever was before him. There were, of course, the frequent letters from his brother Theo and the two disastrous months with Paul Gauguin in the yellow house in Arles, yet I see Van Gogh as socially and artistically isolated. Because his work was so unique, I also think of him as self-taught—as only minimally influenced by his contemporaries or by the artists who worked before him. Thus, I was surprised to find the following excerpt from one of Vincent’s letters that shows how aware and appreciative he was of what others had done.

After praising Millet, Jacque, Schreyer, Lambinet, and Frans Hals, Van Gogh continued:

The following are some of the painters I especially like: Scheffer, Delaroche, Hebert, Hamon, Leys, Tissot, Lagye, Boughton, Millais, Maris, De Groux, De Braekeleer, Jules Breton, Feyen-Perrin, Eugene Feyen, Brion, Juundt, George Saal, Israels, Anker, Knaus, Vautier, Jourdan, Compte-Calix, Rochussen, Meissonier, Madrazo, Ziem, Boudin, Gerome, Fromentin, Decamps, Bonington, Diaz, Th. Rosseau, Troyon, Dupre, Corot, Paul Huet, Jacque, Otto Weber, Daubigny, Bodner, Koekkoek, Schelfhout, Weissenbruch, Bernier, Emile Breton, Chenu, Ceasar de Cock, Mlle Collart, and last but not least Maris and Mauve. But I might go on like that for I don’t know how long. Then there are the old masters, and I am sure I have forgotten some of the best modern ones.

What an amazing list! It does not strike me as compiled by a painter who was artistically isolated.

Not only did Vincent enjoy the work of many others, but he learned a great deal from several of them—visiting museums whenever he could and studying black and white reproductions of their works and sometimes copying them.

The French artist Jean Francois Millet had the most influence on Van Gogh. Millet’s painting The Gleaners (shown above) was an inspiration to Van Gogh the moment he saw a copy of it, not only because of Millet’s style, but because he chose as his subject women who were poor outcasts scavenging for grain after the harvest was done. Millet’s work struck a deep chord within Vincent—a spiritual as well as artistic one. He furthered his own skills by carefully copying Millet’s drawings. Later, several of his paintings—especially those of a solitary sower—repeated themes he had previously seen in Millet’s work.

While in many ways van Gogh’s work was unique he recognized his debt to the past.

To Theo he said:

As far as I’m concerned, I apply myself to my canvasses with all my mind. I am trying to do as well as certain painters whom I have greatly admired and loved.

Elsewhere he urged his brother:

Admire as much as you can; most people do not admire enough.

Just Sitting

2010-08-07T15:38:00.000-07:00

Many of us, although alive, are not really alive,

because we are not able to touch life in the present moment.

- Thich Nhat Hahn

When my wife Dot and I visit family members in Mountain View, California, I make at least one trip to the East West Bookstore on Castro Street and spend time browsing in their Buddhist section. Following one such trip, Dot frowned when she saw that I had purchased a book, The Art of Just Sitting, edited by a Zen monk. I could tell by her expression that in her judgment I needed no further instruction in the art of just sitting. It turned out that she was right. Subtitled “Essential Writings on the Zen Practice of Shikantaza,” the book proved too complex for my tastes. “Just sitting,” I soon decided, was not something I needed to study, but something I needed to do.

When time allows (and these days it usually does), I “just sit” for about thirty minutes each morning, preferably outdoors, with my eyes and ears open. I usually have a vague sense of guilt about this, feeling that I would be a better person if I were doing something. Then, today, I read a passage from Walden by Henry David Thoreau in which he acknowledged his habit of just sitting. Here, with minor editing, is part of the passage in which he describes this.

Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in reverie, amidst the pines and hickories and sumacs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sang around or flitted noiselessly through the house, until by sun falling in at my west window, or the noise of some distant traveler’s wagon on the distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time. This was sheer idleness to my fellow-townsmen, no doubt, but those hours were not time subtracted from my life. Indeed, I grew in those seasons like corn in the night.

What an interesting assessment. Thoreau was active and industrious, but grew rapidly when just sitting.

What, you may be asking, does this have to do with painting or drawing? Frederick Franck who led seeing/drawing workshops for many years across the world, invited participants to sit quietly for several moments focused on whatever they were about to draw. He said:

In this twentieth century, to stop rushing around, to sit quietly on the grass, to switch off the world and come back to the earth, to allow the eye to see a willow, a bush, a cloud, a leaf, is an unforgettable experience.

Painting and drawing are, by their very nature, activities that slow us down. I am not thinking now of the pace of our painting. Painters will differ in this. But I am wondering what would result if we slowed the way we approach our painting. As an experiment, Kevin MacPhearson suggests that we go out-of-doors and silently absorb a scene for three hours, and then return to our studio to paint from memory. I am trying to work up to that. But, first, I want to experiment with “just sitting” before a scene for fifteen to thirty minutes before picking up a pencil or a brush. As poet Naomi Shihab Nye has said, “Life is so short, we must move very slowly.”

Work in Progress?

2010-07-06T13:52:00.000-07:00

                     On back roads you find people
                     who keep machinery alive. With a file,
                      a wrench, a hammer they scrape, twist
                      and pound until the old tractor wakes up
                       or the plow bites again into the ground.

                                              From “Fixers” by William Stafford

I’ve always admired “fixers,” but have not been one of them. Oh, in some areas of my life I am. I know, for example, how to improve a sentence, but the physical world responds less readily to my touch. That is why painting is sometimes a struggle for me. It requires more than seeing and thinking. There is also the critically important dimension of method and craft. Still, it isn’t only about craft—about how to mix a color or apply the paint. What sets fixers apart, when the machinery breaks down, is that they seem to know instinctively what to do. While I would just stare at a tired tractor or flail at an offending plow, they know what to pound, how to twist and where to scrape. The needed skill is not only in their hands but in their diagnosis.

I am trying to fix a painting, right now--the one seen above of a bluff near Lake Michigan outside Kewaunee, Wisconsin. Even though I have signed it, I don't like this painting the way it is. Something isn’t working. After an hour of fixing, it is not better but worse. I made the mistake of trying to fix it with my hands before I knew what to do in my head. My problem here is not one of technique, but confusion. I need to stop, step back, and look at my painting afresh.

I have a check list for times like this—a sequence of evaluations designed to help me see what isn’t working. The order is important: first shapes, then values, then colors, then edges. There are several questions to ask under each of these headings. And then there is the overarching question as to whether the shapes, values, color and edges combine to create a harmonious whole.

Examining these aspects in turn, the shapes and edges seem OK. The problem seems to be in the colors or maybe in the values, but I don’t yet see the solution. I am too close to this painting. I will set it aside for at least a week.

Then, again, there is what a friend of mine calls the "One Hundred Eighty Degree Solution" which involves reversing your field completely. In this case, that would mean allowing the painting to remain as it is--accepting it for what it is. That, too, can take time. Often several weeks or months must pass before I am able to see one of my paintings objectively, as though it were painted by another. It took me almost a year to see clearly the painting of a scene in France that I painted last summer. It felt too late, then, to make the needed changes. This time I will decide within two weeks.

Postscript

It has been said many times that it takes two people to complete a painting—one to paint it and a second to hit the first over the head when the painting is finished. After expressing my discontent with the painting above, I looked at it for two weeks and had almost decided to accept the painting as it was, but when a reader asked about my progress, I decided to consider changes once again.

The changes I made may not be seen easily in the before and after photos but I did make several.

First, I strengthened the darks at the bottom of the bushes to give more contrast. Then I added more yellow to the tree that is immediately to the right of the bluffs to bring it forward and added blue to the tree to the left of it to push it back and add distance. Finally, I gave more definition to the path in the foreground, but not in such a way that it would compete with the colors of the bluffs. For me, the most interesting part of the painting is where the color of the bluffs turns from warm to cool, as the bluffs turn away from the viewer.

I don’t know if the painting is now better, but it is a bit different and I am ready to let it go. I would rather look forward to the next painting than back to the previous one.

Bluffs Near Lake Michigan (Revised)

Seeing Whole

2010-06-27T09:39:00.000-07:00

In this summer season, I often begin my day on our patio where I can enjoy the gardens and the surrounding trees and listen carefully to the many birds that sing at that hour. In that quiet space I am also reading poetry. I must have at least two hundred books of poetry, collected over the years, that I have neglected lately. I have decided that I will now read several poems each morning. I may not be typical in this respect, but have noticed that I usually must read several poems before I find one that I truly like. Moreover, often it is just a few lines within a poem that speak to me, but those lines may significantly alter my perception of things. Such was the case with a few lines that I read this morning from Jane Hirschfield’s poem “May Rain.” Actually, I compressed and edited her lines, but these are the words that I found provocative and intriguing:

All I want of this ordinary earth
is to see as a green thing sees the sun,
with the undividing attention of blind love.

I was, of course, thinking about seeing as it relates to painting and liked the image of an artist turning toward whatever is before him the way a plant turns toward the sun. I thought of Vincent Van Gogh whom, I now realize, turned toward everything that way. Van Gogh not only painted sunflowers, but was himself as innocent and receptive as a sunflower when he turned toward all that gave life to him. Vincent opened himself to life the way a flower opens to the sun. He drank life in.

I initially misread the third line of poetry above. At first I thought that the poet wanted to see with the “undivided attention of blind love” the way a totally smitten man might look into the eyes of his new beloved—seeing her only. Not so. The poet wants to see in a way that is undividing.

Do you sense the difference? Life is a continuum in which everything is connected, but often our seeing divides. We categorize and label. We succumb to what Wolf Kahn calls “the tyranny of the separate,” mentally drawing a line around objects as though the sky has nothing to do with a tree, a bird or the sun.

Vietnamese artist, Quang Ho, whose instructional DVDs have been very helpful to me, sees painting that focuses on objects as the most primitive form of painting. Such painting he says “misses the whole show” which one can begin to experience when, instead of focusing on objects, one concentrates on the visual elements of line, shape, value, color, texture and edges. That is a step forward, but concentrating on the visual elements, however helpful to a painter, still divides the world before us. It is not seeing whole. It is not the same as seeing the way “a green thing does.”

With these thoughts as motivation, I turned to the scene before me and, instead of focusing on anything, I pretended that I was a sunflower and did my best, not to focus--not to to separate or divide--but to see what was before me whole. I was amazed by the difference it made to see whole. A new world was given me. I also understood that when you see with the undividing attention of blind love, you delight in everything as it cascades toward you.

Edgar Whitney

2010-06-10T15:08:00.000-07:00

In the middle decades of the 20th century Edgar Whitney, who died twenty-three years ago at age 96, was America’s watercolor instructor par excellence. He shaped thousands of watercolorists and helped give birth to another generation of fine teachers. Whitney was described as charismatic and outrageous. Students spoke of his workshops as awesome experiences, instilling both excitement and dread. Ron Ranson in Learn Watercolor the Edgar Whitney Way has described the apprehension with which newcomers often approached a workshop:

You’re a newcomer. There’s a strange tightness in the pit of your stomach—it can’t be fear, it must be nervousness and anticipation, after all you’ve paid good money to come here. For years you’ve heard about this man—he’s almost a legend in his lifetime, you’ve heard the stories about his workshops, his impatience with those he thinks inept—the tense atmosphere of his critiques—even his wild flirtations with the ladies; but overall is the enormously strong nationwide reputation this man has built up, of being able to influence and instruct painters by the pure force of his personality.

At the heart of his teaching were what he called “the elements and the principles of design” which he insisted are present in all good paintings. Whitney taught watercolor classes at night at the Pratt Institute and as far as I can tell he gleaned these design fundamentals from Maitland Graves, a professor down the hall, whose classic work, The Art of Color and Design, is still worthy of any artist’s attention.

Today the elements of design are well known. I have heard other artists speak of them as the visual vocabulary—they are the elements artists have to work with: line, value, color, texture, shape, size and direction. The principles of design according to Graves and Whitney are unity, conflict, dominance, repetition, alternation, balance, harmony and gradation. These might be thought of as artists’ strategies. Graves developed the theories and Whitney applied them energetically to watercolor, although given the complexities of Graves' theories this was no easy feat.

“The main difference between Ed Whitney and all other teachers was his complete dedication, verging on obsession, to the principles of design,” Ranson has written.

The harshness of Whitney’s critiques was legendary. Those whose work didn’t measure up were sometimes subjected to shouts of ridicule. A favorite taunt to those who were not progressing was, “You’re not stupid—either you’re scared, lazy or ignorant.” That was his way of saying that courage, effort, and learning could make a painter. He believed that painting could be taught.

Being called “scared, lazy, or ignorant” in public would be a bitter pill to swallow. I might have asked for my tuition back. Nevertheless, in the quiet of one’s room after the day was done, if one were not progressing, it might be appropriate to ask, “Which is it—fear, laziness or ignorance? Could it be all of the above?” After all, fear and laziness can be dealt with and ignorance can be overcome. It would be more effective to work on any or all of these, rather than licking your wounds and wishing you had “more talent.”

Recently, I have not been progressing in my own painting at the pace I would like. Had I dared to mention that to Ed Whitney he would have said:

Don’t demand of yourself a competence you have not earned.

Now that’s insightful. However dissatisfied I may be, my present level of painting accurately expresses the competence I have earned. If I want to paint better than I now am, I’d better earn more competence. I don't see myself as scared, lazy or ignorant, but I could, for sure, know more about painting than I do, so I am committing myself in these summer months to more disciplined learning. If you are a painter still wanting to improve, how might you increase your competence?

Painterly vs. Graphic

2010-05-30T15:10:00.000-07:00

Haystacks by Claude Monet

Recently I was asked, what is meant when a painting is called “painterly.” The fact that this question was asked by someone who has long been associated with art, suggested to me that this is something of a code word. Are not all paintings painterly?

As I thought about my friend’s question, I recalled that when I have heard the term “painterly” used, the painting being described tended to have thick paint, rather than thin. Shapes were not clearly defined or prominent and were more often textured rather than flat. Edges within the painting were often soft or lost, rather than hard or sharp. And the overall impression was that the painting was loose, rather than tight. The Monet painting above is what I have thought of as “painterly.”

The opposite of painterly might be called "graphic," where shapes are well defined, edges are crisp, texture is absent, and colors are flat. The painting below by Fairfield Porter falls into this category.

Island Farmhouse by Fairfield Porter

A little investigation sharpened my understanding of “painterly.” From several sources I learned that painterly paintings are ones in which brush strokes or knife strokes are easily seen—works in which the artist seeks to reveal, rather than obscure, the means by which the painting was made. This contrasts with works in times past in which painters worked hard to eliminate any visible brushstrokes by blending and smoothing strokes, as in the work of Ingres or Botticelli. Today, in paintings exemplified by Fairfield Porter, the graphic quality is characterized by bold color, strong shapes, and little, if any, modeling to suggest a third dimension.

Thus, I am once again reminded that there are many ways to paint. The most important question of any painting is not whether it is painterly, graphic, or something in between, as many paintings are, but whether it is artistic.

A painting is artistic when it is beautiful and satisfying to the senses. Some dictionaries add synonyms such as creative, elegant, graceful, harmonious, imaginative, poetic, sensitive, stimulating and tasteful. Those qualities can be true, or not true, of paintings that are painterly or paintings that are graphic. As artists, there are many possible paths open to us. Artist Ann Templeton has said, “We all struggle to find our own way and in the end that’s all there is. We are who we are and our work should bespeak who we are.” As collectors, we are also free to be drawn in either direction.

Moving On

2010-05-06T14:41:00.000-07:00

An artist must never stand still.

- Ludwig von Beethoven

We are not here to do what has already been done.
- Robert Henri

Thanks to our public library, recently I have been listening to Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas, a series of 24 lectures by Professor Robert Greenberg. My knowledge of classical music is limited and many of Greenberg’s observations are over my head. Nevertheless, I am absorbing what I can, am enjoying the musical excerpts that are included, and have also listened to several sonatas in their entirety while painting.

A major theme of the lectures is that, while Beethoven was very knowledgeable about the music that preceded him—especially the work of Mozart, Haydn and Bach—he went far beyond what his predecessors had done, first in small but later in revolutionary ways. Beethoven “reinvented himself” at least two times and it was in explaining his evolution that he said, “An artist must never stand still.”

In his book, Pastels, Wolf Kahn likewise insists that artists are meant to keep moving. For him, any picture that an artist paints is valuable only if it assists the artist “to go on to the next picture in a freer, larger way.” Kahn cites Michelangelo, Cezanne, Rembrandt, Renoir, and Bonnard as artists who continued to grow throughout their lifetimes, “painting their finest, most direct and most daring pictures in old age.” For Kahn, such artists show all of us that life can deepen over time.

For Beethoven, Kahn, and the other artists cited above, it would be a sad misuse of one’s artistic energies and gifts to use them in imitating others or in mirroring the conventions of the past. According to Kahn, we have an ever-present obligation to violate habit and to constantly question the tried and true. “We need to feel fresh and new,” Kahn says, “even when doing well known things—especially then.”

There are two ways to stand still, artistically. One way is to repeat the past; the other way is to keep repeating oneself. I have no desire to repeat myself or the past, but, for anyone, becoming new represents a significant challenge.

Beethoven had a strategy for stimulating his own innovations. Before he sought to move beyond the past in his major orchestral works, he explored new directions in the smaller, more intimate piano sonatas. This suggests that any artists who desire to move beyond their own conventions would do well to set aside one aspect of their work in which they allowed themselves to be more startlingly and refreshingly new. As with Beethoven, it is possible that a greater and broader revitalization would then ensue.

Painting from the Heart?

2010-04-09T08:58:00.000-07:00

At Rest by Douglas Runyan

I am acutely aware of fleeting time, and there arises within me

an imperative to paint from my heart alone.

--Richard Schmid

As an elementary age child, my classmates and I were sometimes asked to recite a poem or other passage of literature “by heart.” That may sound as though we were being asked to recite with deep feelings, but the phrase really meant to recite from memory. “By heart” was a euphemism for “without benefit of manuscript or notes.” When Richard Schmid talks about painting “from the heart” is that also a euphemism? What does it really mean to paint from the heart?

Recently I admitted to Indiana artist Douglas Runyan that often the road to my heart seems to run through my head. When I paint, I am usually thinking. In an email exchange, I asked Doug what “painting from the heart” means to him. The next day I received this generous reply:

I understand the dilemma of filtering things through your head first. I know I do that, too. When I'm painting, I'm always worried about the technical aspects of the painting. Sometimes I can't accomplish anything while painting because I keep hearing in my head the statements that an instructor or a friend has made about painting -- not something specific to me, just a general statement about painting (Things like "cool colors recede" or "values are the most important thing"). Maybe it's a curse from my training as a lawyer. I'm used to interpreting rules and applying them. You can't always do that and be creative at the same time. Nevertheless, I do feel like I always follow my heart in one way when I paint: the subject matter that I choose. I always paint in a representational manner and I always feel some sort of connection to any scene that I paint. I only paint from photographs I have taken or en plein air. I am inexplicably drawn to certain scenes and have no interest in others. It's more than just the search for beauty, although that's very important to me. There is an actual draw or a call from within me to certain items or views or colors. It can be to an arrangement of buildings or to the effect of light or just something I can't even pinpoint. It's as if God puts certain things in my path to attract my attention. I think when I recognize them I am somehow recognizing a connection between God and nature or God and the creations of man. It's a difficult thing to explain. I guess that's why I see my heart being involved instead of just my head.

What do you think?

Like Doug, I, too, feel my heart being involved in the selection of the scenes that I paint. And, when a scene beckons, it often is inexplicable—the shapes, the light, the colors, or the atmosphere jump out at me—it can be anything. But what about after we have begun painting? Does the heart have a role there, too?

I spent several hours on a small painting yesterday and I commissioned a small part of myself to notice what I was doing when I was painting. Yes, I was often thinking more than I was feeling; and I was remembering what various teachers have said; and I was recalling certain “rules” of painting and deciding whether or not I would obey them; and I was careful and thoughtful in the way I applied the paint; and I stepped back from time to time to assess what I had done and sometimes scraped it out and made adjustments or began again; and I wasn’t trying to paint like someone else, but in ways that made sense to me. And, perhaps, more than anything, I noticed that for several hours I was focused on what I was doing. I was fully engaged as a person. Those observations seemed to answer my question. This may not be what other artists mean, but, for me, engagement and utilization of the various aspects of one's being are what "from the heart" means. I will no longer worry about whether I am painting from the heart.

Richard Schmid's Landscapes

2010-03-04T15:37:00.000-08:00

I am acutely aware of fleeting time, and there arises within me

an imperative to paint from my heart alone.

--Richard Schmid

I recently received a copy of The Landscapes, which showcases approximately 250 landscape paintings by the contemporary artist, Richard Schmid. He is well-known to many representational painters through his instructional books and DVDs, but this is the first time that such a broad array of his landscape work has been collected. Schmid is equally accomplished as a portrait painter and it would not be surprising if a second volume, The Portraits, were published in a year or two.

Schmid is now 76 years old and has been painting since he was fourteen. His first painting in this book was created at age 26. Seeing earlier developmental work would have been interesting, but Schmid was in full stride as a painter at 26 and his work over the past fifty years has been remarkably beautiful and consistent. I am amazed that he reached such a high level of artistic competence so quickly and maintained it all these years. It should be further noted that Schmid has been very productive. He refers to these 250 paintings as “a small sampling” of his work.

I have been enjoying these paintings for several days and, as a painter with much to learn, I have been asking “What makes these works so special? What can I learn from them?” I am struck by four characteristics that are evident throughout the collection.

First, most of Schmid’s colors are muted. There is nothing garish here. Subtlety reigns. And there is much harmony between the colors. Almost no colors come straight from the tube.

Second, Schmid’s values tend to be close. If you took black and white photos of his paintings, the dominant contrasts would not be between blacks and whites, but between mid-value grays.

Third, his drawings are absolutely correct. There are a few sketches included beside the paintings which show what a skilled draftsman Schmid is. Quang Ho, another contemporary painter and teacher, says that inaccurate drawing is the biggest problem for most of his students. For Schmid drawing is a great strength.

Fourth, Schimd’s compositions are always well thought out. He does not paint unless he has a central area of focus in mind. He knows how to draw the viewer to that focal point and keeps all other elements subordinate. Most importantly, perhaps, he only paints when he sees something he loves.

Those are the elements I will seek to keep in mind as I continue my learning—muted colors, close values, correct drawing and thoughtful, loving compositions.

In the quote at the top of this entry, Schimd says that, being in his mid-seventies, his imperative now is to paint from his own heart alone. Looking at samples of his work from the past fifty years, it appears that he has always been painting from his own heart. I suspect that all painters long to paint from "their own heart alone." I know that I do. But Schmid helps me to see that the ability to do that requires much discipline and the robust development of many skills.

Fern I. Coppedge

2010-02-02T15:08:00.000-08:00

Road to Lumberville - Fern I. Coppedge - 1938

People used to think me queer when I was a little girl because I saw deep purples and reds and violets in a field of snow. I used to be hurt over it until I gave up trying to understand people and concentrated on my love and understanding of landscapes. Then it didn’t make any difference.

- Fern Coppedge

The art of Fern Coppedge (1883-1951) is the most playful and distinctive of the Pennsylvania Impressionists who lived and worked in the art colony surrounding the village of New Hope. Some critics have called Coppedge’s work semi-primitive because her colors were often outlandish, her shapes simplified, her priorities out of whack and her perspective askew. Curator Brian Peterson has said of her work:

Sometimes in a single painting there will be yellow, blue, pale green, turquoise, bright red, dark brown, purple, orange. And these colors usually are not laid on in subtle, delicate daubs. The whole side of a building might be bright green, while the house next door is dark blue, and just up the street the church is a loud yellow. In some of her boldest, most characteristic paintings, Coppedge even let go of the need for careful mixing and blending, instead loading her brush with pigment, as she said, “right from the tube.”

I wondered, when I first encountered her paintings, whether Fern Coppedge had been self-taught and was surprised to learn that she had received one of the finest art educations available, attending six art schools including the high-powered Art Institute of Chicago, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and New York’s Art Students League. Her teachers—among the best—were William Merritt Chase, Frank Vincent Dumond, John Carlson (whose book on landscape painting remains a Bible for plein air painters today), Daniel Garber and Henry Snell.

What happened? Did Fern absorb none of the traditional teachings these artists sought to pass on? Actually, if you look at her earliest works it is clear that she had learned. Her colors were skillfully mixed and muted, her perspective was true, and distant objects receded. She fit in quite well with the many. However, in the 1920s, following a trip to Italy where the colors thrilled the child that still lived within her, Fern Coppedge decided to paint, not what she had been taught, but what she felt. She did not overthrow all of her training, but from that point on never lost touch with her inner child. It took courage to paint as she did, for most of the critics and collectors around her preferred art that to Fern looked stuffy.

Are there any morals to this story?

Fern’s art suggests that in my own work I would do well to do my best to avoid “stuffy.” Can art even be art without at least a smidgen of innocence and playfulness? Dare I not now and then use paint “straight from the tube”? On the other hand, on the few occasions that I have tried to paint like a child, it hasn’t worked. Somehow the adult and child in an artist must work together. I think art is best when the artist’s inner child is evident, but not dominant. That’s what I will aim for.

(For more about Fern Coppedge, please see my "Let It Snow?" blog post on November 12, 2010.)

Why Paint?

2010-01-07T09:53:00.000-08:00

I have sometimes been asked, “Why do you paint?” On days when I am out in nature trying to capture the sights, sounds and smells of a new day on canvas, that is a silly question, for then I am saying to myself, “What a joy and a privilege it is to be out here doing this.” On other days when my painting is a disappointment and a struggle, “Why paint?” may become a more pressing question.

An early answer might be that I paint to keep my retirement from collapsing into wall-to-wall television, detective novels, or naps in my lounge chair. My wife, Dot, says that retirement is wonderful if you have a project and a plan. Art has become my project and my plan. I do something that is art related almost every day.

That’s surprising to me. For decades I wanted to be a writer more than anything. I did some writing in my work as a minister—writing sermons each week, writing one book on worship, and publishing two books of sermons—but eagerly looked forward to the time when writing would be my central focus. Nevertheless, by the time I retired I found myself growing tired of words.

Years ago I saw a woodcut by Robert Hodgill entitled “The Preacher.” It depicted a man with his mouth wide open and over his image was written “Words, words, words, words, words, words, words!,” the implication being that his words were hollow and that he was hiding the truth with his words. Through my forty-one years of writing, teaching and speaking I tried to use words responsibly, but when I retired I found that I had lost my need and desire to produce more of them. It was as though I had already said all I could or needed to say. I was ready for a season of life that was less verbal.

At a retirement party, the staff of the church I then served—North United Methodist Church in Indianapolis—presented me with a generous array of art supplies—oil paints and brushes. I had had an art period in the mid-1970s in which I did drawing and some printmaking, but I had never painted. I must have indicated an interest to someone or they would not have chosen this gift.

When I unwrapped those supplies and began to use them, I thought that art might be one of my retirement activities. I did not realized how much there was to learn, how limited were my natural gifts, and how challenging and demanding painting is. Yet, there was and is something freeing about the attempt to create art. It feels good, and possibly important to me personally, to labor to open up those artistic pathways in my brain that were alive and well when I was a child, but have long been clogged with words.

Why do you paint, if you do?

The Matter of Energy

2009-11-19T05:45:00.000-08:00

Red Poppy, Georgia O'Keefe, 1927

The love, joy and excitement that are put into a painting do not depart once a painter has finished the work. They are always there. If one looks at a good Wyeth, a good Homer, a good O’Keefe, a good Degas, a good Vermeer, and so forth, the energy is there.

- Stephen Quiller

I met Stephen Quiller five years ago when I attended three days of workshops in Raleigh, North Carolina, when I was just beginning to paint. I took seven three-hour workshops back-to-back in those three days, erroneously believing that I would be able to learn to paint in a rush. I did not know then how little I would be able to grasp, remember and assimilate at that early stage. Quiller’s seminar on composition was the highlight, but his most important contributions to me were contained in his two books on color theory (Color Choices, 1989, and Painter’s Guide to Color, 2000) which I purchased that week and have kept close at hand ever since.

Quiller works primarily in watercolor, acrylic, gouache, and casein and I do not. I paint with oils and pastels. Nevertheless, I delight in his paintings, his worldview and his books and, when I can, enjoy applying his methods and insights to my own work. Now I am reading his latest book, Watermedia Painting with Stephen Quiller, searching again for transferable attitudes and skills. That’s how I stumbled upon the quotation above and began to wonder about paintings as reservoirs for energy. Is energy necessary in a painting? What gives a painting energy?

Wolf Kahn insists that any painting that would depict the natural world must have energy. In Wolf Kahn Pastels he writes, “In nature energy is everywhere. An image without energy cannot truly represent nature.”

When painting, there are so many dimensions to consider: the subject, the dynamics of the composition, shapes, values, color, temperature, edges, texture, and the way we apply the paint. Must we also seek to infuse a painting with energy as a separate concern?

I think not. I suspect that energy happens or doesn’t happen as a result of everything else we do. Surely, it would not help to come to the final stage and say, “Now I’m going to give this painting some energy.” No, energy must be present throughout. Energy must be implicit.

There will be little energy if the subject itself does not inspire us. There will likely be more energy if we paint with love, joy and excitement, as Quiller suggests. I am enough of a mystic to believe that our emotions, when deep, can embed themselves in the paint. It also seems important that the unique personality of the artist be expressed. And, for there to be palpable energy, would not a degree of risk and boldness be required? Yet, more is needed, as Quiller makes clear elsewhere in his latest book:

The painting process has two parts. First and foremost is the creative, artistic inspiration. This is the raison d’etre for the work in progress. If the emotion runs strong, the painting can be powerful. The viewer will feel that love and energy radiating from the finished piece. However, to fully realize this expression the painter must be thoroughly versed in the second aspect of the painter’s craft. If the artist does not draw well, handle the brushes both knowledgeably and confidently, understand how the paper or other support works and responds to paint, knows how to mix color, and so forth, then the finished painting will look clumsy and indecisive. That is why knowing the complete craft of painting is essential for the finished work to be successful.

That is as far as I can go for now. There must be inspiration, competence, personality and courage if our paintings are to radiate energy and, as D.H. Lawrence would say, “ripple with life through the days.”

Painting at Gethsemani

2009-10-06T06:36:00.000-07:00

So much do I love this solitude that when I walk out along the road to the old barns that stand alone, far from the new buildings, delight begins to overpower me from head to foot and peace smiles even in the marrow of my bones.

- Thomas Merton

During the 1970s, the Trappist monk, Thomas Merton, then deceased, was a major spiritual influence in my life. I knew him only through his words and witness, having read and re-read his published journals, some of his poetry, and several of his books. I was drawn to the way his deep internal life was courageously connected to active concern for the world. He had been a strong advocate of racial justice and careful stewardship of the earth and had been strongly opposed to nuclear weapons and the Viet Nam War. At the time of his death in Bangkok in 1968 at age fifty-three, he was seeking to build bridges between religions of the East and West.

During the years when Thomas Merton was most present to me, I knew that he had lived in a monastery named the Abby at Gethsemani somewhere in the Kentucky countryside. I considered going there for a personal retreat, but never did. Nor did I take time to discover where Gethsemani actually was. Imagine, then, my surprise last weekend when my wife, Dot, and I traveled to Bardstown, Kentucky, for a three-day plein air painting event, A Brush with Bardstown. When I inquired about possible painting sites, I learned that the Abbey at Gethsemani was less than fifteen miles away. For me, our trip there was a mini-pilgrimage as well as an opportunity to paint.

At Gethsemani, I was drawn to the top of a hill that overlooked the monastery on one side and open farmland on the other. I chose the farmland as my subject, because it seems to me that Merton looked out from the monastery more than he looked into it. Surely, his love of nature and this countryside would have led him to stand at this same spot, overlooking these same fields.

Painting in the silence that afternoon was very much a meditative experience as I remembered Thomas Merton who was buried nearby beneath a small white cross, marveled at the circumstances that had finally brought me to Gethsemani, and pondered anew the unpredictable and mysterious ways that each of us wends our way through life.

Painting without Style?

2009-09-19T03:28:00.000-07:00

I recently read Exiled in Paris by James Campbell which tells the story of those writers, mostly from America, who sought voluntary exile in Paris during the 1950s in the hope of finding increased acceptance, creativity and freedom. Richard Wright and James Baldwin were, perhaps, the best known among them. However, one fact about the playwright (Waiting for Godot) and novelist (Molloy) Samuel Beckett especially interested me.

Beckett was from Ireland and English was his native language, but after being in Paris for a time he decided to write in French rather than English. He was, he said, “distracted by the ornamentation of English” and switched languages because he wanted his writing to be more plain and because “in French it is easier to write without style.”

What an unusual goal, I thought. Most writers want to write with style. Still, the concept intrigued me and I began to wonder what it would be like to paint “without style.” Could one do it? Would it be good to do it? How could one do it?

To stick with Beckett for a moment longer, the strategy which he used to write without style was to write passages over and over again “until only the writing remained.” His dislike of “ornamentation” is the clue. That suggests that he was seeking to rid his writing of anything extra, taking away whatever was not needed. That also interests me because in the few short paragraphs that I have written here, I have stopped several times to go back to delete words that no longer seemed necessary or to substitute a single word where I had initially used three. That causes me to remember something I once heard Saul Bellows say. Some writers, he said, are committed to “taking words out.” Other writers continue “putting words in.” Could that also be true of painters? Are some of us “taker outers” while others get more enjoyment from putting in?

After some thought, I’ve decided that painting “without style” would be to paint (to the extent one was able) without excess—without ornamentation, affectation, or imitation. It would be to paint as plainly as possible, until only the essential truth remained.

Pictures at an Exhibition

2009-09-09T10:59:00.000-07:00

I have attended many art openings but, until recently, never one of my own. Currently, thirty-four of my landscape paintings in oil and pastel and a few drawings and prints comprise a one-person show at the Indianapolis Art Center. It is my first such show and driving to the opening reception I wondered, “What will it be like when the pictures at the exhibition are my own?”

I arrived early while the gallery was empty. It was good to see the many pieces together in one place. There was a harmony between the paintings that I didn’t expect. To my eyes, at least, the varied pieces worked together.

That was surprising because I approach my paintings one at a time without trying to impose any consistent style. I have been told that my paintings sometimes look as though several artists created them and that has felt like a criticism, but from the beginning I have taken seriously Wolf Kahn’s warning about “not trying to forge a discernible style.” He prefers an internal development that works its way from the inside out over time. I might not be able to name them, but surveying this exhibit I saw that there are personal elements tying the works together. I will continue to respond to subjects one at a time and worry even less about forcing a style. Since “my style” is largely unconscious, it may be that others will recognize it before I do.

When the crowd arrived, the viewers’ reactions gave added perspective. In large measure I was able to predict which paintings viewers would prefer, but not always. Some paintings that were my favorites and which I thought might sell first have not yet sold, while the early sale of a few was unexpected. Some people were drawn to paintings that reminded them of a special place in their past or present life. In art, as in much else, do we tend to prefer the familiar to the unfamiliar? Watching and listening to guests, the subjectivity of personal choices was underlined. It would seem best to continue to paint without an imagined audience in mind.

One question that I was hoping the exhibit would answer is whether I should continue to paint in both oil and pastel. Would I make more progress by concentrating on one? The gallery goers gave little guidance here. A few said that they preferred the pastels but sales of oil and pastel paintings were almost equal. I have spent far more time and energy on oil painting, but progress with pastels has come more quickly. In the next several months I will try to give equal time and attention to pastels and then take a reading.

As I viewed the exhibit of my own work, I had the sense that it sums up the first phase of my painting life. I felt affirmed in what I have been doing, but also had the impression that something new is now needed. I will “Keep painting!”

The Painterly Voice

2009-09-03T12:36:00.001-07:00

My area of Indiana is very aware of the impressionist school that developed in the early 1900s in nearby Brown County. During the same period a similar movement, founded by William Lathrop, was taking place in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, in and around the town of New Hope. Pennsylvania Impressionism, edited by Brian Peterson, is big enough (338 pages) and well enough illustrated to serve as a “coffee table book” but also makes wonderful reading—especially the lengthy essay by Peterson on “The Painterly Voice.” Biographies and examples of the work of twenty-five artists are included. It is available online from the James A. Michener Museum for $59.95 or from Amazon Books, new at $32.97 or used for slightly less.

By “painterly voice” Peterson means more than “style” for an artist’s style can be manufactured, learned or imitated. He doesn’t quite define it, but seems to be pointing to a mysterious quality that arises from within a mature artist that eventually permeates all of his or her work—an expression of the artist’s unique character. In their early years artists may “try on other artists’ clothes,” absorbing their methods and images and then sloughing them off one-by-one until their own self gradually begins to reveal itself.

Peterson writes:

It’s as though there’s an incipient person present that wants to emerge, but the artist doesn’t know himself or herself well enough to see what’s genuine and what isn’t. The developing artist is gradually learning to listen to some mysterious interior guide that whispers, “Trust your instincts about what you like. If you connect with something, it’s probably telling you who you are, and who you’re not.”

Voice is not easily gained; it takes time. Voice is hard won; it cannot be taught. "Artists who desire it must find it for themselves." As they struggle with their work, artists may come with effort to discover and express their own truth—their own uniqueness—which can be sensed by others, but not imitated.

Painting and Seeing

2009-08-29T05:56:00.000-07:00

As I have been working absolutely alone for years, I imagine that, though I want to and can learn from others, and even adopt some technical things, I shall always see with my own eyes, and render things originally.

- Vincent Van Gogh

According to most art teachers, a big part of learning to paint is learning to see. If a person learns to see more accurately and more completely, he or she is likely to paint more convincingly.

The assumption underlying this maxim is that, without effort or training, many people do not see what’s in front of them. We tend to see what we think is out there. For example, believing that skies are blue and grass is green, that may be what we see, even when atmospheric or lighting conditions have turned the grass blue and the sky green. We know that trees in summer are green, but if we look carefully at a line of trees in the distance, we may find that they are purple or blue and not green. Likewise, if we pay attention, we will often find that the color of the sky at the horizon is quite different from the color of the sky directly overhead. Becoming aware of such subtleties requires attention and the more we notice, the more able we will be to paint realistically.

Vincent Van Gogh’s words above raise a different issue entirely. Because he was not surrounded by other artists, but mostly worked alone, he had not been taught by others how to see. That is a provocative insight. It suggests that artists do not learn to see by the careful observation of nature alone, but by the close observation of other artists’ paintings. That is why there is so much similarity between the works of artists within a given movement or group such as the French Impressionists, the Hudson River School or Indiana’s Hoosier Group. Such artists are influencing each other, not only in their painting, but in their seeing. Once a particular way of seeing becomes the collective norm, it is very difficult to see differently.

When one has been immersed in the art of many others, it is difficult to minimize external influences. Nevertheless, the example of Vincent Van Gogh challenges those who would be artists to see and paint with their own eyes.

What Are Pastels?

2009-05-15T19:15:00.000-07:00

For those unfamiliar with the medium, “pastels” are an artist grade version of the colored chalks with which you may have drawn on a sidewalk as a child. They are made of the same pure pigment with which oil paints are made and are just as permanent. In oil paints the pigments are mixed with linseed oil and remain soft. In pastels the pigments are mixed with a dry binder and are formed into sticks of varying degrees of hardness. The sticks are generally two to three inches long, although in use they are often broken into shorter pieces, as in the photo above.
Painting with pastels differs from painting with oil paints in several ways. Obviously, the method of application is different. Artists who use them generally enjoy the direct painting that is possible with pastels, which feels more immediate when your hand is holding the pigment and applying it to the surface without the need for a brush. While the end product may be sophisticated, working with pastels can feel as though you are a child with a many-colored box of crayons. For me, oil painting feels more serious and pastel painting tends to be more playful, although I am sure that artists differ on this.
Perhaps the biggest difference between painting with oils and pastels is the fact that with oil paints a few basic tube colors can be used to mix a wide variety of values and hues, while with pastels each color and value may require a separate stick. To a degree, colors can be mixed with pastels. Two colors can be blended by rubbing them together; or colors may be layered by lightly applying one color over another; or the artist can attempt to mix colors in the viewer’s eye by making small marks of different colors side by side in the manner of the French Impressionists. Nevertheless, most pastelists work with a large variety of values and hues at their fingertips.
That raises the question of “How many pastel sticks does it take to make a painting?” The answer is “a few” or “many” depending on the subject and the artist. On the high end, I read recently of an artist who reported having 10,000 pastels of differing hues, values and hardness to ensure that he would have just the right stick for every conceivable situation. That number struck me as excessive in that such a collection would cost $30,000 or more and the flat surface needed to display them would be larger than my entire studio. I like Susan Ogilvie’s take on the matter. With about 250 pastel pieces in her travel kit she said, “If I need more than these I have issues.” Nevertheless, another part of me sides with Ann Templeton who says, “I’d really like to have them all.”

Ahead of its Time

2009-04-29T19:17:00.000-07:00

Artist Ann Templeton tells her students that once a year they will produce a painting that is “five years ahead of its time.” The painting below is a case in point.

I painted the picture above from an old black and white snapshot exactly five years ago, before I knew much about painting or had had any lessons.

I painted the first version on a 16 x 20 inch canvas panel with oil paints that I had received as a gift. There was lots of foreground in the photo that I didn’t know how to handle. After several unsuccessful tries I took a box cutter and trimmed the painting to one-fourth of its original size, eliminating most of the troublesome foreground. Still dissatisfied, I tried to hide my amateurish ways by rubbing much of the dried painting with a stick of white pastel. It was better but not good and I tossed the painting into the back seat of my car where it lingered for several days. While there, the pastel was badly smeared by a jacket I had carelessly thrown on top of it. With a mess on my hands, I decided to clean the painting by running water from the kitchen sink over it. As the water began to wash the pastel away, a new image appeared—the one shown above. I had enough sense to quickly turn off the water, dry the painting in the sun, and put it in a frame. I still enjoy it today.

Was that painting in any way foretelling my future as an artist? Perhaps. It was in large part an accident, yet there have been many paintings between then and now that were not worthy when compared to my early attempt. Here’s another barn, painted five years later, that possibly measures up.

If you are an artist, I’ll add Ann Templeton’s postscript. Yes, every now and then you will produce a painting that is five years ahead of its time. The trick is in deciding which one. Daring to make that decision can guide your future development.

Painting Like a Child

2009-04-10T19:18:00.000-07:00

It takes a long time to learn to paint like a child.

- Pablo Picasso

I enjoy the story of the kindergartner who asked her mother “What do you do at the university?” “I teach adults to draw and paint,” she answered. Puzzled, the child asked, “Do they forget?” Yes, they do forget, most of them. It’s not that they forget the product of childhood drawing and painting, but the process. They forget the attitudes and inner qualities that generate paintings in childhood. How do children draw and paint? To learn that, you need only watch them. Here’s how one preschooler does it.

She draws with absorption and focus. When she draws, the project before her is her whole world. For those moments, it is what matters most of all.

She draws with purpose. To you, her drawing may look like scribbles, but there is meaning behind each stroke. She says of a yellow streak, “That is light from my flashlight bouncing down the stairs.”

She draws with spontaneity and freedom. There are no visible restraints. No inner critic is holding her back. Nor does she care what the neighbors think.

She draws with energy. Everything is intense. Everything is moving.

She draws with delight. This is not work. She enjoys what she is doing. It gives her energy and does not take energy away.

She draws with confidence. There is boldness. There is no fear.

Stepping back, I see that this child’s drawing and painting are born of enthusiasm and innocence. I do not paint as freely as she does, for adulthood has dampened my enthusiasms and eroded my innocence. But, seeing her freedom and her delight, I vow to try. Perhaps I can remember my own childhood painting a little at a time. Today I will seek to paint with increased energy. Tomorrow I will try to lay down my brushstrokes with more confidence.

Getting Started

2009-03-23T19:20:00.000-07:00

I am again reading Pastels by Wolf Kahn—a book I like very much. I do not aim to copy Kahn’s style, even though I enjoy his paintings a lot. However, I do try to learn from some of the observations and opinions that are sprinkled throughout this book. In future entries I’ll lift up other of his quotes that I find insightful, but for starters here’s one from early in the book:

I believe that every artist has one medium that determines the way he uses every other one. In Turner’s case, for example, the artist’s oil paintings aspire to the quality of watercolor. Daumier’s use of line and tone in every medium recalls the marks that a lithographic crayon makes on a stone. Van Gogh’s brush marks and palette-knife slashes are the colored equivalents of the lines a quill pen makes on paper. In my work, the determining medium is pastel.

I love Van Gogh’s paintings and have looked at many of them, but never noticed the similarities between his brush and pen strokes until Kahn pointed this out. Vincent began his art career by drawing—often with a quill pen. How natural, then, for him to approach a subject in the same way when using a brush. And, clearly, as Kahn acknowledges, his own oil paintings are heavily influenced by the ways in which he uses pastels.

If you paint in more than one medium, does Kahn’s observation apply to your work? Does one approach shape all that you do?

I have painted in oils for almost five years and with pastels for two. One might then expect my oils to be shaping my pastels, but that doesn’t appear to be so. Right now, my oils and pastels exhibit two distinct approaches. I have decided not to try to force a merger, but will continue down both roads and wait to see what occurs.