Memoirs of a Common Man
One day you wake,
your head has flipped.
You’ve joined the ranks
of subtractive people.
a new day is stuck
to the limitless line
of days, when young
someday, one day
you find, a new day
is one more gone.
A paradox?
A paradox,
A most ingenious paradox!
We’ve quips and quibbles heard in flocks,
But none to beat this paradox!
A paradox,
a paradox,
A most ingenious paradox.
Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha,
This paradox.
Pirates of Penzance
Gilbert and Sullivan
Creating art is not your everyday affair. You have to take it seriously or you produce garbage. But on the other hand if you treat your latest creation as a holy relic you will also produce crappola. So your work has to have all your attention and be the most important thing in front of you and at the same time you have to be willing jump in and change it all around or even tear it up, casually, if it is going wrong.
You have to be honest with every brushstroke. Some look great but are wrong for the painting. So in spite of the individual beauty of a brushstroke you have to remove it to be honest to the whole.
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When we begin the process to create a new painting we sometimes have the illusion an idea could be expressed in many ways. And of course, in reality, this is true. However, as the painting develops it becomes clear that there is only one way it wants to be. So maybe there are endless possiblilites but at any one point a painting just has to be as it is. This is one reason why it is crucial to fix errors as the arise, because all work that follows will be built on what is there….and if it is wrong, well, you see the point…
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This is actually an older painting from quite a few years back. I stumbled over it in some files and thought I would post it.
Art Book, watercolor/drybrush
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We too often seem to think of the art world as an evolutionary process…one phase evolving into the more advanced phase. The problem with this idea is that it leads to pinnacles, which by their very nature are dead ends. In hindsight the route from Giotto to Bougereau may seem like a period of growth toward one perfect polishing of knowledge and centuries of combined rendering skills. This attitude can lead to envy of those times gone by when apparent perfection reigned.
In truth I think the art world is more a series of reactions. One group or age or artist reacting to the work of another group or age or artist. No one in the Renaissance was thinking “oh if I work hard, I can contribute to the pool of knowledge that will eventually produce the great polished Art of the 19th century.”
Art is not a Galileo to moon walk type of growth. Well, to a certain extent this is the inevitable process for short phases..one teacher passing on skills to the next. However, every great artist needs to have his skills in hand while he is alive, preferably early, to make a contribution…to make great art.
So the Donatello’s and Botticelli’s may have looked back to ancient Greece for inspiration but not in the sense of, “damn, the art of our age is primitive, let’s see if we can copy the greeks.” No, it was with the full fervent passion of creativity and hunger to use some of that cool Greek stuff and, damn, do it even better.
I guess what I am saying is that Rembrandt wasn’t trying to help in the grand artists evolution. He grabbed the skills around him, bounced off Caravaggio, and then settled down to make art, one painting at a time.
Bernini was carving away yelling at the top of his lungs, “you think Michael was good? Check this out, whooohoo, makes Michey’s stuff look like, well, like rocks.”
But then you get artists trying to stick with Bernini, making stone look like soft flesh and leafs all over again. Grand illusions. Man, how do you top it? Can’t, so let’s just do more and more stuff like it.
But then along comes a Rodin who says, “yah, yah look I can do that…I did it on the cheap to decorate people’s gardens.. Look this is real emotion in sculpture…not about illusion of surface…but EMOTION from the core.”
Reactions, not evolution. Some reactions are reacting with, some against. But reactions are good. Sometimes artists react to inventions or changes in materials. When paint companies start inventing new colors for us…what are we supposed to do, say, “no those aren’t the proper art colors used by the great masters before.” Hell no, we are supposed to do the same as the early renaissance artist when he woke up to greco roman stuff kicking around. “Hot damn this stuff is cool. How can I use it.”
One of the key lessons of the 20th century art has been that paint is beautiful. And this was one of the major slaps in the face of 19th salon art that subjugated paint to illusion.
We had a while glorying in the paint surface. Cool. But that got old too. So now pictures are back but what to do with them?
Where do we go now? Painting is dead they say. Is it? No. Painting is fine and healthy, just waiting for someone to do something with it. There just isn’t one definitive style right now. We live in a scattered, hectic and eclectic age and our art reflects that.
You can hit a good gallery district and see good abstracts next to good figurative work next to good mannerist work next to…well you get the idea. There isn’t one over powering form of painting that is defining us….or reflecting us. That leaves realist artists defensive being mere retro artists…and abstract artists defensive about not having super human rendering skills.
Turn back the clock?
Nah, just grab as many tools and skills around us as we can find and let’s have a blast making stuff. Who cares what comes out as long as it looks good and blows someone’s socks off. That’s art.
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A couple of studies for a new painting in the works. This is one from my backstage/theatrical series. The backstage environment is such an intriguing space.
Some paintings or pieces of art are snapshots–one thought, one impression, one gesture, that you want to capture, bam, on a page. I think this is where the monotypes come from. They are things I see, in my head or out, that just want to be on paper, solidified to be seen.
Some ideas are more short stories or novels (yes, I know I am mixing my metaphors here). Stories with starts and finishes and plot lines. These are crafted over time, lots of studies, comp sketches, developed to make a canvas tell the story well, with color, structure, figures, mood, gesture—all the tools a picture artist uses to create a compelling world within a frame.
And to continue the hacking apart of any metaphor consistency, some paintings, I am coming to realize, are more tone poems, needing to be paintings tht evoke a mood but perhaps do not evolve around just one plot.. These ideas just will not be contained within one illusionist framed world. A ‘realistic’ or ‘naturalistic’ painting, after all, creates an illusion of a single world contained within the canvas frame. It may be a real world impression or a complete fantasy, however, to maintain the illusion of ‘reality’ the space within the canvas edge has to be consistent…any breaks in the style of the illusion and the magic world falls….becomes paint. Consistency of space is the conscience on the shoulder of every ‘realistic’ artist. “Hey, buddy, that doesn’t really work, does it? That line flattens out her head, doesn’t look real.”
This is nothing new. Western art woke up to this breaking of illusionary space and in the 20th century used it to great and wonderful ends, glorying in the wonders of paint in itself…no longer a tool or means to and end but beautiful in its own surface.
All well and good. But some of us still want narrative in art and we resort to creating a believable space. There are endless, ‘realistic’ styles which our eyes are willing to accept as true. If we are true to our style we can create believable space and tell good and great stories. Break that style consistency and the space illusion breaks as well.
So back to the tone poem idea. I have some ideas that have been kicking around in my head and in drawing pads for, well, some for many years. These ideas simply won’t be contained within one imagined world. I have tried…and the results end up trashed. I think these ideas need to be several spaces combined. What do I mean? Paint wise I am not sure–that will show up with the canvases.
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This painting was inspired by the rooftop gardens at my gallery in Rockland. A beautiful space, the Muir Gardens. But really that was only a launch of an idea. These sculptures are only ‘real’ within this painting. They all are parts in a story. Players on this stage, if you will, acting out a cycle of a life.
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Here is the painting Dark Waters as it has evolved since it came back to the studio.
you can see part of the evolution in two previous posts:
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