A Giraffe, 2012, oil on canvas, 24"x18"
Styles Court, Styles St. Mary, Essex
2 days ago
Friday, January 20, 2012
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
Superpowers
Late last year, I showed some paintings with The Great Nude, a New York arts organization focused on a subject with regard to which I will give you three guesses, at the New York Contemporary Art Fair. I was fairly dismayed with how my paintings looked under the angled hard lights:
Why? Because they weren't varnished.
Varnishing is a process whereby a dry painting is coated with a layer of transparent medium. It has a couple benefits:
1. It protects the painting itself from dust, smoke, and naturally-occurring floating acid droplets.
2. It restores color saturation and value contrast. Oil paints are not unlike wet rocks - the wetness of the oil enriches the colors and darkens the darks. The oil, however, loses its wet-like qualities as the painting dries. Some of the oil sinks into the primer on the canvas. The rest polymerizes, altering its optical properties. Long story short, your gorgeously deep colors and blacks wind up faded and chalky, as mine looked at the art fair. Varnish acts like a permanent surface wetter. It makes the paintings look fresh even when dry.
While varnishing has been around for hundreds of years, and varnishes have evolved from their early "turn brittle and yellow and screw up the underlying painting" period, varnishing as a practice is not intuitively obvious like painting itself. You kind of need to learn how to do it.
As you may remember, I have never gone to art school, so among the many things most painters know which are a total mystery to me is the practice of varnishing. But after my dismal showing with The Great Nude, I decided - enough: I'm going to learn. I discussed the matter with co-exhibitor/surrealist Scott Goodwillie, who is a charismatic painter and awfully nice guy. He gave me some good tips. And I also looked at Sadie Jernigan Valeri's blog post on the topic, which, if you are starting out with varnishing, holy smokes, this is the blog post to read.
Armed with knowledge and varnish, I entered my studio. My heart was in my throat, because if you varnish your painting wrong, it can be next to impossible to fix it.
So I started on a crappy painting I had stopped halfway through because it was such a catastrophe. The varnishing went perfectly! And its promised properties materialized - the blacks went clean and black (the painting was monochrome). It looked like much less of a catastrophe with varnish.
The next day, I started varnishing the two paintings I had scheduled for another show, at 950 Hart Gallery in Bushwick. I was using a modified form of Valeri's prescription. And by modified, I mean sloppier. For instance, she recommends removing stray hairs from your wet varnish with a #1 filbert brush. This is a small brush which can be used to gently lift detritus without disturbing the varnish surface. Well, I find a fingertip will do the trick too, if you don't mind leaving a smudge and not getting the hair off your varnish.
Why yes, some of my paints are Wintons, why do you ask?
Anyhow, let me give you a rough idea of the effects of varnishing. Here's the unvarnished painting with a little puddle of varnish freshly poured on it. Notice the difference in the reds inside and outside the puddle:
The same painting I had shown at the art fair was showing at the 950 Hart show - selling confrontational nudes is hard, yo. Now look at the effects of that puddle as spread over part of the painting. You can see exactly where the varnish stops:
Here's a completely pointless diptych of me smoothing varnish using the Valeri-recommended foam brush. Because I like to take pictures of myself:
And here's a picture displaying the startling vividity that varnish produces in black areas of a painting:
When I got done, the painting not only looked better than it did dry, it looked better than it did when I was painting it. I generally work with a model on a painting once a week, to give the previous week's work time to dry. That way I don't get involved in any sticky areas where two painting sessions overlap. So I had *never* seen it all looking fresh at once.
Now, art is grounded in technique, but its substance is emotion. So how did this technique of "varnishing" make me feel? I tell you what, it made me feel like I had superpowers. You can keep your flying and your invisibility, your phasing and your magnetic eyeballs. I'll take the superpower of varnishing. It's awesome! Just look at these intimidatingly hip people, enthralled with my lovelily varnished painting at the 950 Hart opening, December 7, 2011:
Now, let's zoom back to an issue you might call the Achilles Heel of the Autodidact, which can be summed up this way: he's ignorant. Varnishing is a perfectly legitimate and extremely useful technique but, like the integral of the cosine and knotting a tie properly, it is not intuitive. It builds on generations of expertise. You're not going to just figure out how to do it right, or at all, on your own.
I am an autodidact, so I am highly vulnerable to the achilles heel. Don't trust my opinions because I can write. If you had had to generate the number of five-paragraph essays I had to generate in middle school, you'd be able to drop a thousand words on any old heap of cow flops too. The example of varnishing provides a vivid instance of my ignorance in action, but it is not the only example of it. The troubling part is that I don't know all the examples. This is a case of, to use Don Rumsfeld's underappreciated system of classification, unknown unknowns.
I was reflecting on my previous musings on Clyfford Still. They could be interpreted as unkind. I don't have a problem with that - I sincerely believe that his work is trash and that it reflects a sadistic streak a mile wide. Here's my problem: I haven't a clue why this opinion is not universal. I'm not saying that reading the body of criticism and theory attached to his atrocious paintings would either make me see that there's something to them, or decide that they are any good at all. But it troubles me that I don't know this stuff, and moreover, that I am recklessly using my voice, which I know sounds authoritative, to denigrate his crappy, crappy art.
I still think that one ought to be able to approach a painting clothed in nothing more than one's experience as a human being, and have that painting mean something, if it is a good painting.
But lots of thought has gone into painting from other perspectives, and I am relatively ignorant of it.
Having a will to self-improvement, here's my pledge to you: this year I'll make more of an effort to acquaint myself with the thinking that underlies post-war art. Even if it means actually parsing the obstreperous grammar of pill-popping French theorists.
Some of you will be thinking: finally. To you I say - shut up, OK?
Others of you will be thinking: why would you bother, Maidman? And to you I say - knowing more is almost always a good thing. If our hunches prove to have been correct, our study will allow us to snark about Still and his like from the more comfortable position of knowing the theoretical basis of the work. And if our hunches prove to have been wrong, then a little study will open vast new territories to us. That would be exciting.
I want to speak, but I want to speak responsibly. So it's a little remedial reading for me.
Best wishes, all.
left to right: me, Cassandra, dismay-inducing presentation of painting
Why? Because they weren't varnished.
Varnishing is a process whereby a dry painting is coated with a layer of transparent medium. It has a couple benefits:
1. It protects the painting itself from dust, smoke, and naturally-occurring floating acid droplets.
2. It restores color saturation and value contrast. Oil paints are not unlike wet rocks - the wetness of the oil enriches the colors and darkens the darks. The oil, however, loses its wet-like qualities as the painting dries. Some of the oil sinks into the primer on the canvas. The rest polymerizes, altering its optical properties. Long story short, your gorgeously deep colors and blacks wind up faded and chalky, as mine looked at the art fair. Varnish acts like a permanent surface wetter. It makes the paintings look fresh even when dry.
While varnishing has been around for hundreds of years, and varnishes have evolved from their early "turn brittle and yellow and screw up the underlying painting" period, varnishing as a practice is not intuitively obvious like painting itself. You kind of need to learn how to do it.
As you may remember, I have never gone to art school, so among the many things most painters know which are a total mystery to me is the practice of varnishing. But after my dismal showing with The Great Nude, I decided - enough: I'm going to learn. I discussed the matter with co-exhibitor/surrealist Scott Goodwillie, who is a charismatic painter and awfully nice guy. He gave me some good tips. And I also looked at Sadie Jernigan Valeri's blog post on the topic, which, if you are starting out with varnishing, holy smokes, this is the blog post to read.
Armed with knowledge and varnish, I entered my studio. My heart was in my throat, because if you varnish your painting wrong, it can be next to impossible to fix it.
So I started on a crappy painting I had stopped halfway through because it was such a catastrophe. The varnishing went perfectly! And its promised properties materialized - the blacks went clean and black (the painting was monochrome). It looked like much less of a catastrophe with varnish.
The next day, I started varnishing the two paintings I had scheduled for another show, at 950 Hart Gallery in Bushwick. I was using a modified form of Valeri's prescription. And by modified, I mean sloppier. For instance, she recommends removing stray hairs from your wet varnish with a #1 filbert brush. This is a small brush which can be used to gently lift detritus without disturbing the varnish surface. Well, I find a fingertip will do the trick too, if you don't mind leaving a smudge and not getting the hair off your varnish.
Why yes, some of my paints are Wintons, why do you ask?
Anyhow, let me give you a rough idea of the effects of varnishing. Here's the unvarnished painting with a little puddle of varnish freshly poured on it. Notice the difference in the reds inside and outside the puddle:
The same painting I had shown at the art fair was showing at the 950 Hart show - selling confrontational nudes is hard, yo. Now look at the effects of that puddle as spread over part of the painting. You can see exactly where the varnish stops:
Here's a completely pointless diptych of me smoothing varnish using the Valeri-recommended foam brush. Because I like to take pictures of myself:
And here's a picture displaying the startling vividity that varnish produces in black areas of a painting:
When I got done, the painting not only looked better than it did dry, it looked better than it did when I was painting it. I generally work with a model on a painting once a week, to give the previous week's work time to dry. That way I don't get involved in any sticky areas where two painting sessions overlap. So I had *never* seen it all looking fresh at once.
Now, art is grounded in technique, but its substance is emotion. So how did this technique of "varnishing" make me feel? I tell you what, it made me feel like I had superpowers. You can keep your flying and your invisibility, your phasing and your magnetic eyeballs. I'll take the superpower of varnishing. It's awesome! Just look at these intimidatingly hip people, enthralled with my lovelily varnished painting at the 950 Hart opening, December 7, 2011:
No, it didn't sell there either. You want it, call me. It's nicely varnished.
Now, let's zoom back to an issue you might call the Achilles Heel of the Autodidact, which can be summed up this way: he's ignorant. Varnishing is a perfectly legitimate and extremely useful technique but, like the integral of the cosine and knotting a tie properly, it is not intuitive. It builds on generations of expertise. You're not going to just figure out how to do it right, or at all, on your own.
I am an autodidact, so I am highly vulnerable to the achilles heel. Don't trust my opinions because I can write. If you had had to generate the number of five-paragraph essays I had to generate in middle school, you'd be able to drop a thousand words on any old heap of cow flops too. The example of varnishing provides a vivid instance of my ignorance in action, but it is not the only example of it. The troubling part is that I don't know all the examples. This is a case of, to use Don Rumsfeld's underappreciated system of classification, unknown unknowns.
I was reflecting on my previous musings on Clyfford Still. They could be interpreted as unkind. I don't have a problem with that - I sincerely believe that his work is trash and that it reflects a sadistic streak a mile wide. Here's my problem: I haven't a clue why this opinion is not universal. I'm not saying that reading the body of criticism and theory attached to his atrocious paintings would either make me see that there's something to them, or decide that they are any good at all. But it troubles me that I don't know this stuff, and moreover, that I am recklessly using my voice, which I know sounds authoritative, to denigrate his crappy, crappy art.
I still think that one ought to be able to approach a painting clothed in nothing more than one's experience as a human being, and have that painting mean something, if it is a good painting.
But lots of thought has gone into painting from other perspectives, and I am relatively ignorant of it.
Having a will to self-improvement, here's my pledge to you: this year I'll make more of an effort to acquaint myself with the thinking that underlies post-war art. Even if it means actually parsing the obstreperous grammar of pill-popping French theorists.
Some of you will be thinking: finally. To you I say - shut up, OK?
Others of you will be thinking: why would you bother, Maidman? And to you I say - knowing more is almost always a good thing. If our hunches prove to have been correct, our study will allow us to snark about Still and his like from the more comfortable position of knowing the theoretical basis of the work. And if our hunches prove to have been wrong, then a little study will open vast new territories to us. That would be exciting.
I want to speak, but I want to speak responsibly. So it's a little remedial reading for me.
Best wishes, all.
Saturday, January 14, 2012
He Deserved It
Welcome to 2012. I haven't thought of any cool ideas to share with you yet, so I've been quiet. But I would like to draw your attention to this amusing news story:
"A 36-year-old woman is accused of causing $10,000 worth of damage to a $40 million painting after she punched, scratched and rubbed her behind against it before urinating on herself."
The painting in question was Clyfford Still's 1957-J No. 2. The museum was the new Clyfford Still Museum in Denver. Alcohol may have been involved in the incident. This is the painting:
This is the civic-minded young woman who tried to lift this curse from the world:
Carmen Tisch
Let me tell you something. I dislike a lot of painters, but I hate the holy fuck out of Clyfford Still. This is a fairly newly-minted hatred. It dates to February of last year, when I visited the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C. The Hirshhorn has several Stills, and viewing them was an experience akin, for me, to torture. I actually took a few pictures at the time, because I was so furious I wanted to write a blog post explaining my feelings. I never got around to it, but here are a couple pictures:
1962-D, as if the title matters
1960-R, like I care
To explain my beef with Cyfford Still, let me take you back to Austin, Texas, in early 1996. At the time, I was writing for the entertainment section of The Daily Texan, the student newspaper of UT-Austin. One thing that's interesting about this paper is that Berke Breathed got his start there, and if you go down to "the morgue" and dig up the papers published when he was a student, you can see his pre-Bloom County work, when he was doing stuff even more similar to Doonesbury.
Milo Bloom
Mike Doonesbury
Be that as it may, every music person in the entertainment section was into one brand of rock or another. So when Philip Glass was coming to town with his musical accompaniment to Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast, I landed the interview by default. I didn't know didley about Philip Glass, so I listened to some of his albums and tried to think up some interesting questions. And he gave some interesting answers. I paraphrase, since I don't feel like digging up the dictaphone tapes:
"Mr. Glass, it seems that apart from the pure structural rigor of your music, there is also a kind of emotional rigor, where specific emotions are evoked in specific sequence and intensity."
"Yes, absolutely, it's quite easy to identify the emotions associated with particular notes and series of notes, and then to structure the presence and repetition of those series to induce an emotional composition in the listener."
Well, that's quite fascinating, que non? Philip Glass sketches out here the power of the formal elements of aesthetic systems. They are powerful not only because of their formal structuring of the work, but because they carry emotional implications. The skillful deployment of the formal elements allows the subliminal coordination of the viewer response.
As you can imagine, I would localize the link between element and emotion at the level of the interaction between stimulus and neurology. I don't know much music theory, but circling back to the visual arts, the fact of the matter is that we are wired to respond strongly to sharp-edged high contrast, for instance, and to saturated color. Every artist knows this and uses it. Consider John Singer Sargent's El Jaleo - go to Boston and consider it in person if you can:
El Jaleo, John Singer Sargent, 1882, oil on canvas, 93 3/8 x 138 1/2 in.
This is an example of the civilized use of the formal elements of a medium to support the meaning of a particular piece.
Clyfford Still, conversely, partakes of the kind of infantile poo-poo play which characterizes American art after World War II. This strikes me as a period when painters affected a kind of cosmic ignorance and went around saying, "Holy shit! Did you know that if you put some yellow on a canvas it makes you feel happy when you look at it?"
Well, as a matter of fact, I did know that. Your point?
What Clyfford Still made paintings out of was the elements of design stripped of all content. His mature work is nothing but high-contrast sharp edges and saturated color patches. Unlike, for instance, Helen Frankenthaler, he focused on the most jarring arrangements of the elements - the utterly crude black/white contrast, and the hard reds and yellows. These elements do not serve any purpose beyond inducing their predictable neuro-emotional effects in the viewer.
Do you see my problem here? All serious painters understand that the emotional implications of the elements of design are tools which serve some purpose beyond demonstration of their existence. Still, on the other hand, made a career out of what amounts to a neurological experiment proving the hypothesis, "If I arrange elements A and B as follows, I can evoke responses X and Y in the test subject." And Still's taste in A and B ran to the harsh and painful.
You know what, Clyfford? Art isn't a science experiment, I'm not a test subject, and I'm not going to hang out with elements A and B unless you give me a good reason to do it.
Goya, Saturn Devouring His Children, 1819-23:
a good reason to hang out with a violent combination of
high-contrast black, orange, red, and white
But ascribing to Still the honesty of a scientist does him too much credit. Because this strutting around, saying, "Didja know yellow makes people happy?" - it was all a pose. Nobody, not even Jackson Pollock, is so stupid that these kinds of completely obvious linkages come as a surprise. Still isn't actually discovering anything new with his work. He's really more of a dentist who gets off on hurting his patients. He is a sadist in a lab coat.
So when I say, "He deserved it," I mean that you could hardly find an artist more deserving of having his work defaced. And in truly Dantean let-the-punishment-poetically-mirror-the-crime style, it is deliciously appropriate that Carmen Tisch rubbed her ass on his painting.
But I can't really condone this sort of behavior, for the same reason that it's a good idea to abide by the Geneva Conventions when you capture a lawful enemy combatant. You don't do it because the guy doesn't deserve to get slapped around, but so that your lawful enemy will treat your guys decently when they get captured. As long as we've defined Clyfford Still as a lawful artist, by doing things like building him his own goddamn museum, we ought to keep our hands off his execrable work so that his partisans will refrain from pissing on Rembrandts.
As usual, take everything I say with a wheelbarrow of salt. I tend to believe you ought to be able to get artwork by looking at it, and I tend to dismiss the dimensions of artwork that require specialized knowledge - be the artwork allegory or abstract. I've never read a word of theory or criticism of Clyfford Still.
And, of course, my opinion is liable to joltingly change without notice.
***
Now, let's move on to something nicer: my friend Kevin Mizner, a wonderful blogger and talented painter, has given me something called the Liebster Award:
So with much gratitude to Kevin Mizner, let me pass the award forward to a few blogs of which I am particularly fond:
Christmascraftproject: This is my wife's laconic and hilarious blog on her crafting endeavors, which turn out to have both diverting technical details and wider implications for the art of living well.
Museworthy: This is Claudia's fabulous blog on modeling and art, one of the key inspirations for this blog and a continuing treasure of new thoughts and images. She's probably got more than 200 followers, but Wordpress doesn't make this clear.
Drawing Life: This is Fred Hatt's lavishly illustrated diary of his art and thinking on it. Like me, Fred spends a lot of time thinking about art, and he shares his insights beautifully.
Confessions of a Recovering Critic: This is RC Speck's excellent and highly idiosyncratic blog of cultural criticism. He turns his eye on many subjects, and thinks deeply and originally about each of them.
There are many other artists who post blogs of work I admire, but I am focusing here on people who have a lot to say about the work, which is a specific capability of the blog format. Thank you all for the magnificent advantage you've taken of this format.
***
Now, let's move on to something nicer: my friend Kevin Mizner, a wonderful blogger and talented painter, has given me something called the Liebster Award:
This is an award that bloggers give to other blogs that they like, which have fewer than 200 followers. It is given with the instruction that the award be paid forward - that the recipient pass the award along to blogs they, in turn, like. I think that's how it works, anyway.
So with much gratitude to Kevin Mizner, let me pass the award forward to a few blogs of which I am particularly fond:
Christmascraftproject: This is my wife's laconic and hilarious blog on her crafting endeavors, which turn out to have both diverting technical details and wider implications for the art of living well.
Museworthy: This is Claudia's fabulous blog on modeling and art, one of the key inspirations for this blog and a continuing treasure of new thoughts and images. She's probably got more than 200 followers, but Wordpress doesn't make this clear.
Drawing Life: This is Fred Hatt's lavishly illustrated diary of his art and thinking on it. Like me, Fred spends a lot of time thinking about art, and he shares his insights beautifully.
Confessions of a Recovering Critic: This is RC Speck's excellent and highly idiosyncratic blog of cultural criticism. He turns his eye on many subjects, and thinks deeply and originally about each of them.
There are many other artists who post blogs of work I admire, but I am focusing here on people who have a lot to say about the work, which is a specific capability of the blog format. Thank you all for the magnificent advantage you've taken of this format.
Wednesday, December 21, 2011
Onward
I don't know how you blog, but how I blog is, I keep a list of topics for future posts, and then I pretty much ignore the list and write up whatever is on my mind. So I'm going to follow this procedure right now, and skip a bunch of stuff I've been meaning to tell you about. Instead, let me tell you about one of my projects for next year (there are a few, but I'll tell you about some of the others later).
One of my many methods for cooking things up is to let partial concepts swirl in my mind, until they link up with other partials, and eventually there is a whole thing - a makable thing.
Let me lead you on a path through some partials, and we will see what it summed up to:
Partial 1: Hypercolor
This is a painting I did late in 2010. It currently lives at Hilliard Gallery in Missouri, whither I encourage you to run and buy it:
"Sangre de dios, Maidman, this is not your usual style at all!" quoth you. True. Let me explain. Ordinarily, the way I paint something is I draw a fussy underdrawing, as you can see here, because I hate to try to put things in the right place at the same time that I'm dealing with color and value. Then, I choose an undercoat color which I spread over the canvas by means of some turpenoid and a cloth. Then I paint into this undercoat while it is wet.
In this instance, I did the underdrawing and the undercoat, then took a step back and said, "You know what, I like this a lot. I think I'll leave it like it is."
This idiom gnawed at me; I wanted to do more paintings in the same mode. In fact, I tried it twice, with distinctly mixed results:
These are OK, I think, but what's missing from them is the accidental quality of the first one. I meant to do these as they are.
After the third one, I decided to leave it alone for a while, because clearly I had no idea what to do or how to do it. But something important about it struck me: it is the first idiom I've discovered in which I could consider doing a narrative painting, with a story and characters and everything. You can see this emerging in the third painting.
If you've been following my work, you may have noticed that I have been moving toward greater simplicity, and farther from narrative. I cannot support narrative, with sincerity, in my work - except in this idiom. In this one idiom, I can easily picture it.
Call the idiom hypercolor.
Partial 2: Frankenthaler
With hypercolor running in my mental background, my mind eventually drifted to one of the abstract expressionists I hate least, color field painter Helen Frankenthaler.
It's not even so much that I dig Frankenthaler's work. I dig it in flashes, but mostly, I dig the idea of her work - the large, irregular zones of color, placed with an eye to the elements of design such that, somehow, they work.
(As an aside, I think this mode of appreciation of the work shades into what the conceptual artists get at, that the work itself is detritus, vanishable, a codec of an idea: the artist compresses the idea, and the viewer decompresses it, so that the true art exists in the mind on either side, and the quality of the work as a disposable transmission medium is foregrounded. I find the idea of Frankenthaler delicious, but the fact of Frankenthaler somewhat tedious. I cannot bind strongly to this mechanism, so in my own work, I will continue pursuing the painting in and of itself as the incarnation of a sensual phenomenon.)
Doing a little research now, I find that Frankenthaler's method of application is frequently the same as the one I stumbled on with the hypercolor partial - non-brush application of oil paint, heavily thinned with turpentine. Of course, she didn't prime her canvases, so they have a grossly finite lifespan. But still, I know where she's coming from in terms of the physical question of moving paint to surface.
What I learn from Frankenthaler is the possibility of integrating a large canvas area into a single composition using the general category of color shapes I ran into with the hypercolor paintings. Do you see why this is important? Consider Rauschenberg:
Rauschenberg also demonstrates that a large picture space can be compositionally unified, but he uses so many elements that the fact that he's not actually making a representational image reflects more that he's a prick than any formal consideration.
Now consider Frankenthaler again:
This painting is enormous, nor is it busy, but it holds together, and it holds together using an array of elements more in line with what I'm interested in.
So I added Frankenthalerian composition to hypercolor technique in the swirl of elements building toward a project in my mind.
Partial 3: Cassandra
I always try to match the project to the model, and the model to the project. And as this project germinated, it occurred to me that it suited Cassandra, an absolutely stellar model whom I've been drawing for a little more than ten years now. I used to draw her in Los Angeles, and we moved to New York around the same time, and I've drawn and painted her here. This is a painting of Cassandra:
This is another:
Something you would only vaguely figure out from looking at this work is that Cassandra is a dancer with a flair for costume...
...and a taste for the alchemical:
Cassandra's performances are riotously fun to attend, and painting her is one of the great pleasures of my life as an artist.
When I hit on making large paintings of Cassandra, using the hypercolor combination of refined underdrawings and washy color fields, and the Frankenthalerian integration of the picture space, I thought I had completed assembly of partials into a project, and I was excited to start...
But no ideas came to me. I doodled a couple possibilities, but "random naked chick + color" wasn't cutting it for me. Grumbling, I had to move the project from "active" back to "pending," and wait for further inspiration to strike.
Partial 4: Inanna
I'm not sure how this idea emerged. It's probably just a synthesis of a few things - that Cassandra casts a mythogenic field around her, that I'm interested in the harrowing in hell to begin with - but I eventually thought again about the Sumerian goddess Inanna, and from there came to the strange story of her descent into the underworld.
Inanna is a goddess of war and unlawful carnal knowledge. Also a virgin goddess. And one time she pulled a Prometheus and proliferated technology to the people of Uruk. Nobody's going to accuse the Sumerians of theological consistency.
Be that as it may, Inanna, for reasons not entirely explicit, decided to go down into the underworld and have it out with her older sister Ereshkigal, who ruled there.
It turned out hell had seven gates, at each of which a gatekeeper demanded one of Inanna's garments, which also functioned as instruments of her powers. You could call this part of the story The Deadliest Striptease. Inanna entered the underworld naked, which comports with my motto, "It is only naked you will enter into the house of the truth," as well as with Cassandra's talent for burlesque.
When Inanna met up with Ereshkigal, she died, and Ereshkigal hanged her on a hook. She hanged dead for three days before Father Enki's minions showed up, applied the life-giving plant and the life-giving water, and busted her on outta there.
Maybe she gained the power of life and death. It's not clear. Sumerians.
Now, this story motivates some nudes (you may have noticed I'm not averse to nudes). It provides a character Cassandra can play to a T, a narrative to match the hypercolor idiom, and a mythological context complimentary to the Frankenthaler landscape. But more than that, it is a story I find personally moving.
I do believe that we must all be harrowed in hell - that we are all Dante, and we will never leave our dark forest except if we go downward. I do believe that we must die and be born again. I believe we must stake our souls, going naked into the house of the truth, if we are to be saved. I believe we must abandon every hope, even the hope of salvation, before salvation will come down to us, and we will emerge glorious from our wretchedness. I believe we must do this again and again; that we will be weary, and will believe that we have done with it - and then the dilemma will re-emerge, and again, we will be forced either to become directionless grey ghosts, or to go down to the dark room, and the hook, and the hopelessness, before the life-giving plant and the life-giving water are bestowed.
This is a story I believe; it is a story I can tell.
So this was the final partial - now the project is ready to begin, telling this story, this way, in twelve or fifteen paintings. It will be one of my main pursuits in 2012.
I hope you all will find yourselves renewed in the new year.
One of my many methods for cooking things up is to let partial concepts swirl in my mind, until they link up with other partials, and eventually there is a whole thing - a makable thing.
Let me lead you on a path through some partials, and we will see what it summed up to:
Partial 1: Hypercolor
This is a painting I did late in 2010. It currently lives at Hilliard Gallery in Missouri, whither I encourage you to run and buy it:
La Mémoire, 2010, oil on canvas, 18"x14"
"Sangre de dios, Maidman, this is not your usual style at all!" quoth you. True. Let me explain. Ordinarily, the way I paint something is I draw a fussy underdrawing, as you can see here, because I hate to try to put things in the right place at the same time that I'm dealing with color and value. Then, I choose an undercoat color which I spread over the canvas by means of some turpenoid and a cloth. Then I paint into this undercoat while it is wet.
In this instance, I did the underdrawing and the undercoat, then took a step back and said, "You know what, I like this a lot. I think I'll leave it like it is."
This idiom gnawed at me; I wanted to do more paintings in the same mode. In fact, I tried it twice, with distinctly mixed results:
The Prayer, 2010-11, oil on canvas, 14"x18"
Nursing, 2010, oil on canvas, 24"x18"
These are OK, I think, but what's missing from them is the accidental quality of the first one. I meant to do these as they are.
After the third one, I decided to leave it alone for a while, because clearly I had no idea what to do or how to do it. But something important about it struck me: it is the first idiom I've discovered in which I could consider doing a narrative painting, with a story and characters and everything. You can see this emerging in the third painting.
If you've been following my work, you may have noticed that I have been moving toward greater simplicity, and farther from narrative. I cannot support narrative, with sincerity, in my work - except in this idiom. In this one idiom, I can easily picture it.
Call the idiom hypercolor.
Partial 2: Frankenthaler
With hypercolor running in my mental background, my mind eventually drifted to one of the abstract expressionists I hate least, color field painter Helen Frankenthaler.
Helen Frankenthaler, Mountain Pool, 1963, acrylic on canvas, 48"x78"
It's not even so much that I dig Frankenthaler's work. I dig it in flashes, but mostly, I dig the idea of her work - the large, irregular zones of color, placed with an eye to the elements of design such that, somehow, they work.
(As an aside, I think this mode of appreciation of the work shades into what the conceptual artists get at, that the work itself is detritus, vanishable, a codec of an idea: the artist compresses the idea, and the viewer decompresses it, so that the true art exists in the mind on either side, and the quality of the work as a disposable transmission medium is foregrounded. I find the idea of Frankenthaler delicious, but the fact of Frankenthaler somewhat tedious. I cannot bind strongly to this mechanism, so in my own work, I will continue pursuing the painting in and of itself as the incarnation of a sensual phenomenon.)
Doing a little research now, I find that Frankenthaler's method of application is frequently the same as the one I stumbled on with the hypercolor partial - non-brush application of oil paint, heavily thinned with turpentine. Of course, she didn't prime her canvases, so they have a grossly finite lifespan. But still, I know where she's coming from in terms of the physical question of moving paint to surface.
What I learn from Frankenthaler is the possibility of integrating a large canvas area into a single composition using the general category of color shapes I ran into with the hypercolor paintings. Do you see why this is important? Consider Rauschenberg:
Robert Rauschenberg, Charlene, 1953-4 (4 panels, multiple materials, 89" x 112")
Rauschenberg also demonstrates that a large picture space can be compositionally unified, but he uses so many elements that the fact that he's not actually making a representational image reflects more that he's a prick than any formal consideration.
not a Rauschenberg, but not fundamentally different from a Rauschenberg either
Now consider Frankenthaler again:
Helen Frankenthaler, Flood, 1967, synthetic polymer on canvas, 124" x 140"
This painting is enormous, nor is it busy, but it holds together, and it holds together using an array of elements more in line with what I'm interested in.
So I added Frankenthalerian composition to hypercolor technique in the swirl of elements building toward a project in my mind.
Partial 3: Cassandra
I always try to match the project to the model, and the model to the project. And as this project germinated, it occurred to me that it suited Cassandra, an absolutely stellar model whom I've been drawing for a little more than ten years now. I used to draw her in Los Angeles, and we moved to New York around the same time, and I've drawn and painted her here. This is a painting of Cassandra:
Merops Iphikrates, 2009, oil on canvas, 60"x36"
This is another:
The Sister of the Storm, 2010, oil on canvas, 60"x36"
Something you would only vaguely figure out from looking at this work is that Cassandra is a dancer with a flair for costume...
...and a taste for the alchemical:
Cassandra's performances are riotously fun to attend, and painting her is one of the great pleasures of my life as an artist.
When I hit on making large paintings of Cassandra, using the hypercolor combination of refined underdrawings and washy color fields, and the Frankenthalerian integration of the picture space, I thought I had completed assembly of partials into a project, and I was excited to start...
But no ideas came to me. I doodled a couple possibilities, but "random naked chick + color" wasn't cutting it for me. Grumbling, I had to move the project from "active" back to "pending," and wait for further inspiration to strike.
Partial 4: Inanna
I'm not sure how this idea emerged. It's probably just a synthesis of a few things - that Cassandra casts a mythogenic field around her, that I'm interested in the harrowing in hell to begin with - but I eventually thought again about the Sumerian goddess Inanna, and from there came to the strange story of her descent into the underworld.
Inanna is a goddess of war and unlawful carnal knowledge. Also a virgin goddess. And one time she pulled a Prometheus and proliferated technology to the people of Uruk. Nobody's going to accuse the Sumerians of theological consistency.
Be that as it may, Inanna, for reasons not entirely explicit, decided to go down into the underworld and have it out with her older sister Ereshkigal, who ruled there.
It turned out hell had seven gates, at each of which a gatekeeper demanded one of Inanna's garments, which also functioned as instruments of her powers. You could call this part of the story The Deadliest Striptease. Inanna entered the underworld naked, which comports with my motto, "It is only naked you will enter into the house of the truth," as well as with Cassandra's talent for burlesque.
When Inanna met up with Ereshkigal, she died, and Ereshkigal hanged her on a hook. She hanged dead for three days before Father Enki's minions showed up, applied the life-giving plant and the life-giving water, and busted her on outta there.
Maybe she gained the power of life and death. It's not clear. Sumerians.
Now, this story motivates some nudes (you may have noticed I'm not averse to nudes). It provides a character Cassandra can play to a T, a narrative to match the hypercolor idiom, and a mythological context complimentary to the Frankenthaler landscape. But more than that, it is a story I find personally moving.
I do believe that we must all be harrowed in hell - that we are all Dante, and we will never leave our dark forest except if we go downward. I do believe that we must die and be born again. I believe we must stake our souls, going naked into the house of the truth, if we are to be saved. I believe we must abandon every hope, even the hope of salvation, before salvation will come down to us, and we will emerge glorious from our wretchedness. I believe we must do this again and again; that we will be weary, and will believe that we have done with it - and then the dilemma will re-emerge, and again, we will be forced either to become directionless grey ghosts, or to go down to the dark room, and the hook, and the hopelessness, before the life-giving plant and the life-giving water are bestowed.
This is a story I believe; it is a story I can tell.
So this was the final partial - now the project is ready to begin, telling this story, this way, in twelve or fifteen paintings. It will be one of my main pursuits in 2012.
I hope you all will find yourselves renewed in the new year.
Sunday, December 11, 2011
The Aesthetics of Information
So, my job involves a very strange set of science-related skills: I need to know a fair amount about every branch of science, I need to be able to communicate this knowledge in an easily-understood way, and, very importantly, I need to never (or almost never) make a mistake - I need a hair-trigger alarm for what I don't know.
What, you thought I made a living from art?
Ahahahahaha.
Ha ha ha.
Ho.
No, my friends, I most certainly do not make a living from art.
Be that as it may, my per se job provides an excellent opportunity for refining an understanding of the aesthetics of information. I don't literally know most of what I functionally know about science. Rather, I have a pretty good understanding of what scientific knowledge looks like. Each branch of science has its own texture. For instance, biology is the science equivalent of the English language - delightfully large in vocabulary and full of irregular verbs. It is a field composed as much of examples as of principles. Unless you are certain of some biology fact, you cannot assume it is true; the molecule that carries oxygen in humans is not the same as the one that carries it in horseshoe crabs.
In classical physics, on the other hand, you can re-derive a fact given a surprisingly limited number of principles. The kinetic energy of a falling brick is not noticeably different from the kinetic energy of a helium atom.
One wants a sense of the aesthetics of information, both to maximally extend what one knows, and to have a sharp sense of the boundaries of one's knowledge.
Now, how do you extend what you know to make almost completely reliable guesses about what you don't know? You take advantage of a grasp of the aesthetics of the body of information - and then you form an analogy. A does X, and B is like A with regard to the relevant factors, so B probably does something very like X in the same situation. Identifying the correct relevant factors is the key - that's a matter of aesthetics. One gains a sense of aesthetics by tasting a huge amount of information, even if much of it is eventually forgotten.
A basic example to illustrate the point: fluorine bonds with one atom of hydrogen. Bromine is in the same column on the periodic table as fluorine. Elements in the same column have similar properties, and columns toward the edges of the table (like that of fluorine and bromine on one side, and hydrogen on the other) don't have multiple bonding ratios. So probably bromine bonds with one atom of hydrogen as well.
This is analogical thought, and it is very powerful for extending your functional knowledge, as long as you keep in mind the difference between what you actually know and the considerable volume of smack you're claiming to know.
I personally suspect that it is also a characteristically Jewish way of thinking. There's a reason for this. Judaism, among its bewildering variety of definitions, is a system for living. This system for living is defined by an extensive written body of law. The law, however, cannot possibly be as detailed as the universe. In referring a potentially infinite variety of real-world situations to a finite body of law, it is necessary to extend what is known (the law) to what is unknown (how to behave in a given situation). This scaling-up of the law to match unanticipated situations occupies a great deal of classical Jewish scholarship, with extensive recorded disputes about the applicability of various points of given law to new situations.
Case in point: it is possible to derive the implicit anti-abortion position of Jewish law despite a lack (so far as I know) of a specific prohibition on abortion. How? Because the laws regarding murder specify that the murderer of a pregnant woman shall be tried for the murders of two people. This is analogical reasoning at work:
A (murderer of pregnant woman) does X (goes on trial for murdering two people).
B (abortion) is similar to A with regard to the relevant factors (termination of a fetus).
Therefore B does something like X (abortion constitutes murder of a human being).
Most contemporary Jews do not sit around arguing points of Talmud with one another. But I run across this kind of thinking disproportionately among Jews, and have therefore concluded that the pattern of thought persists in the culture even though the instigating practices have long since receded into the background.
It is interesting to note, as long as we're discussing the topic, that there are two other major modes of reasoning (that I've mused on, anyway). There is also:
Syllogistic reasoning, which derives new knowledge from the premise "All A are B," a much more demanding and rigorous approach than "A is like B."
Revelatory reasoning, which derives new knowledge from the premise, "Aha! A and B are the same!"
I can reason syllogistically when I can be bothered to put in the effort, and when I'm on fire, I can reason revelatorily. But I am primarily an analogical reasoner. My friend Chris is a syllogistic thinker, which means that winning an argument with him is a bitch, because of his tendency to point out that you're talking a considerable volume of smack. My wife Charlotte is also a syllogistic thinker. Chris's ancestors were Italians, and Charlotte's were Scots. So they gave us the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution, and therefore we'll let them off the hook for being such fussbudgets about strict proof.
Leah, subject of the Blue Leah paintings, is a typically well-educated secular Jew, whose ancestors no doubt came from the next ghetto over from mine in Ukraine. Leah reasons analogically.
Alley, subject of Her, is of Swedish descent, and reasons revelatorily.
I don't know if that has to do with her being Swedish or not. I don't know anything about Sweden except for that Liv Ullmann is a babe.
Believe it or not, all of this has something to do with art. It has to do with the old problem confronted by everyone serious about figure drawing:
Should I draw what I see or should I draw what I know?
Arguments about this topic go all over the goddamn map, and frankly they're not very interesting, because the map isn't very big. But I think I can lay claim to a diverting wrinkle in it, so here we are.
As you possibly know by now, my own history with figure drawing divides roughly into an early craptastic period:
And a later shockingly-awesome period:
The border between these periods is 2001-3, during which time I was involved in cadaver dissection at Santa Monica College, under the guidance of Dr. Margarita Dell. It was a period of two years during which I spent as much as 40 hours a week drawing my own personal anatomical atlas:
So you'd think that I would bloody well be on the side of the draw-what-you-know camp. But you'd be thinking wrong.
Here's an interesting twist: because I'm lazy as all hell, I didn't ever memorize the names of any structures. Not one muscle, not one bone. I see artists going around saying, "Yeah, and there's the iliac crest," and I'm like, "If you say so, dude."
We fix this kind of explicit detail in our minds with words. So if you asked me to draw you a diagram of the muscles of the body, I would have large regions known as "getting it wrong." Same deal with bones. No way could I draw you that mess of bones in the center of the foot, even though I picked them apart and drew them more than once:
So what did I learn from two years of formaldehyde headaches? I learned the aesthetics of anatomical information. The body is a chaotic grab-bag of things. There are two fundamental modes of making sense of it: explicitly learning all its structures, or looking at it long enough that you get it. I did neither. I retained the aesthetics of its structures, and I applied that knowledge to looking at it.
What does this buy me? I can't tell you where a muscle starts and stops. But I know the insertion of a muscle when I see it. I can't tell you the standard distribution of fat depths beneath the skin, but I can see the difference between muscle and fat. And I can't tell you all the points where bone typically stretches skin, but I know its shine when it's there, so I see its shape as well.
What I know is so partial that it is flexible. I don't have a systematic approach to the body - I am constantly thrown back on direct perception, as ignorant as a child. But I also have a sense of the aesthetics of the body. This helps structure my perceptions just enough to lead them to anatomical accuracy. Consider Leah's left shoulder in Blue Leah #5:
Now consider the same phenomenon from the perspective of explicit knowledge:
That bulge just to the right of Leah's armpit, catching a bit of light, is her teres major, overlaid with an adorable shot of yellow adipose tissue (fat). The region between the left dink and the right dink is her infraspinatus. We're not seeing the edge of her trapezius because it's relaxed and not as well developed as one expects in, say, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson. The next bright line we see, moving right, is the medial border of her scapula.
I didn't think of any of that stuff while I was painting it. I thought, "bright spot, dink 1, dink 2, shoulderblade."
I think it's very, very difficult to draw the body accurately on the basis of looking alone. On the other hand, I think it's next to impossible to draw the body realistically in the context of medical-grade anatomical knowledge. Why? Let me deploy another analogy.
Early in the history of Assyriology...
...scholars drawing copies of tablets tended to draw what they saw very accurately. Why? They weren't so sure as they are now what was meaningful and what wasn't, so they instinctively took down everything so as not to miss something that might turn out to be important.
Try copying something in Chinese sometime, and you'll see what I mean.
Later, once cuneiform was better understood, typical renderings of tablets became more idealized:
By this point, scholars were drawing symbols, not things. They knew what was essential, and they threw away the non-meaningful idiosyncrasies of the tablets in front of them.
This is the danger of total anatomical knowledge. Once you learn what is "meaningful" anatomically, you automatically subtract what is accidental to the person actually in front of you. The living model becomes a story written in physiological letters, in the inflexible syntax of anatomy. Just ask Prud'hon:
And this is something I oppose (although I like Prud'hon quite a lot). My work looks much clumsier than the paintings of many of my classically-figurative contemporaries. The anatomy is accurate, but it is not a given. I want the sweat to show. When I build up to a figure, I don't want that figure to fall into place as if it were always so. I am not - just now - painting the Human who lives in the sky. I am painting the particular people in front of me.
I learned the aesthetics of information in this field by learning its knowledge and then forgetting much of it. This allowed the course I prefer - depending on the aesthetics of information to help me organize what I see. I didn't want pure empiricism to make me incapable, and I don't want knowledge to make me blind.
A WORD FROM THE ADVOCATUS DIABOLI:
As always, take this with a grain of salt. I am describing here the exact method I am using right now. And I have a tendency to think that every little thing I do is not only right, but inevitable. When I change methods tomorrow, I'm sure I'll have a clever reason for my new method being ever so perfect. So please, please remember that this is an advocacy for one of many valid procedures.
What, you thought I made a living from art?
Ahahahahaha.
Ha ha ha.
Ho.
No, my friends, I most certainly do not make a living from art.
Be that as it may, my per se job provides an excellent opportunity for refining an understanding of the aesthetics of information. I don't literally know most of what I functionally know about science. Rather, I have a pretty good understanding of what scientific knowledge looks like. Each branch of science has its own texture. For instance, biology is the science equivalent of the English language - delightfully large in vocabulary and full of irregular verbs. It is a field composed as much of examples as of principles. Unless you are certain of some biology fact, you cannot assume it is true; the molecule that carries oxygen in humans is not the same as the one that carries it in horseshoe crabs.
Hemoglobin versus hemocyanin. Who knew, right?
In classical physics, on the other hand, you can re-derive a fact given a surprisingly limited number of principles. The kinetic energy of a falling brick is not noticeably different from the kinetic energy of a helium atom.
One wants a sense of the aesthetics of information, both to maximally extend what one knows, and to have a sharp sense of the boundaries of one's knowledge.
Now, how do you extend what you know to make almost completely reliable guesses about what you don't know? You take advantage of a grasp of the aesthetics of the body of information - and then you form an analogy. A does X, and B is like A with regard to the relevant factors, so B probably does something very like X in the same situation. Identifying the correct relevant factors is the key - that's a matter of aesthetics. One gains a sense of aesthetics by tasting a huge amount of information, even if much of it is eventually forgotten.
A basic example to illustrate the point: fluorine bonds with one atom of hydrogen. Bromine is in the same column on the periodic table as fluorine. Elements in the same column have similar properties, and columns toward the edges of the table (like that of fluorine and bromine on one side, and hydrogen on the other) don't have multiple bonding ratios. So probably bromine bonds with one atom of hydrogen as well.
Spoiler: it does.
This is analogical thought, and it is very powerful for extending your functional knowledge, as long as you keep in mind the difference between what you actually know and the considerable volume of smack you're claiming to know.
I personally suspect that it is also a characteristically Jewish way of thinking. There's a reason for this. Judaism, among its bewildering variety of definitions, is a system for living. This system for living is defined by an extensive written body of law. The law, however, cannot possibly be as detailed as the universe. In referring a potentially infinite variety of real-world situations to a finite body of law, it is necessary to extend what is known (the law) to what is unknown (how to behave in a given situation). This scaling-up of the law to match unanticipated situations occupies a great deal of classical Jewish scholarship, with extensive recorded disputes about the applicability of various points of given law to new situations.
Rabbis disputing until morning
Case in point: it is possible to derive the implicit anti-abortion position of Jewish law despite a lack (so far as I know) of a specific prohibition on abortion. How? Because the laws regarding murder specify that the murderer of a pregnant woman shall be tried for the murders of two people. This is analogical reasoning at work:
A (murderer of pregnant woman) does X (goes on trial for murdering two people).
B (abortion) is similar to A with regard to the relevant factors (termination of a fetus).
Therefore B does something like X (abortion constitutes murder of a human being).
Most contemporary Jews do not sit around arguing points of Talmud with one another. But I run across this kind of thinking disproportionately among Jews, and have therefore concluded that the pattern of thought persists in the culture even though the instigating practices have long since receded into the background.
It is interesting to note, as long as we're discussing the topic, that there are two other major modes of reasoning (that I've mused on, anyway). There is also:
Syllogistic reasoning, which derives new knowledge from the premise "All A are B," a much more demanding and rigorous approach than "A is like B."
Revelatory reasoning, which derives new knowledge from the premise, "Aha! A and B are the same!"
I can reason syllogistically when I can be bothered to put in the effort, and when I'm on fire, I can reason revelatorily. But I am primarily an analogical reasoner. My friend Chris is a syllogistic thinker, which means that winning an argument with him is a bitch, because of his tendency to point out that you're talking a considerable volume of smack. My wife Charlotte is also a syllogistic thinker. Chris's ancestors were Italians, and Charlotte's were Scots. So they gave us the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution, and therefore we'll let them off the hook for being such fussbudgets about strict proof.
Leah, subject of the Blue Leah paintings, is a typically well-educated secular Jew, whose ancestors no doubt came from the next ghetto over from mine in Ukraine. Leah reasons analogically.
Blue Leah #1, oil on canvas, 24"x36", 2011
Alley, subject of Her, is of Swedish descent, and reasons revelatorily.
Her, oil on canvas, 36"x36", 2010
I don't know if that has to do with her being Swedish or not. I don't know anything about Sweden except for that Liv Ullmann is a babe.
Liv Ullmann
Believe it or not, all of this has something to do with art. It has to do with the old problem confronted by everyone serious about figure drawing:
Should I draw what I see or should I draw what I know?
Arguments about this topic go all over the goddamn map, and frankly they're not very interesting, because the map isn't very big. But I think I can lay claim to a diverting wrinkle in it, so here we are.
As you possibly know by now, my own history with figure drawing divides roughly into an early craptastic period:
life drawing, 2001
And a later shockingly-awesome period:
life drawing, 2011
The border between these periods is 2001-3, during which time I was involved in cadaver dissection at Santa Monica College, under the guidance of Dr. Margarita Dell. It was a period of two years during which I spent as much as 40 hours a week drawing my own personal anatomical atlas:
you don't even want to know what that is
So you'd think that I would bloody well be on the side of the draw-what-you-know camp. But you'd be thinking wrong.
Here's an interesting twist: because I'm lazy as all hell, I didn't ever memorize the names of any structures. Not one muscle, not one bone. I see artists going around saying, "Yeah, and there's the iliac crest," and I'm like, "If you say so, dude."
We fix this kind of explicit detail in our minds with words. So if you asked me to draw you a diagram of the muscles of the body, I would have large regions known as "getting it wrong." Same deal with bones. No way could I draw you that mess of bones in the center of the foot, even though I picked them apart and drew them more than once:
So what did I learn from two years of formaldehyde headaches? I learned the aesthetics of anatomical information. The body is a chaotic grab-bag of things. There are two fundamental modes of making sense of it: explicitly learning all its structures, or looking at it long enough that you get it. I did neither. I retained the aesthetics of its structures, and I applied that knowledge to looking at it.
What does this buy me? I can't tell you where a muscle starts and stops. But I know the insertion of a muscle when I see it. I can't tell you the standard distribution of fat depths beneath the skin, but I can see the difference between muscle and fat. And I can't tell you all the points where bone typically stretches skin, but I know its shine when it's there, so I see its shape as well.
What I know is so partial that it is flexible. I don't have a systematic approach to the body - I am constantly thrown back on direct perception, as ignorant as a child. But I also have a sense of the aesthetics of the body. This helps structure my perceptions just enough to lead them to anatomical accuracy. Consider Leah's left shoulder in Blue Leah #5:
Now consider the same phenomenon from the perspective of explicit knowledge:
That bulge just to the right of Leah's armpit, catching a bit of light, is her teres major, overlaid with an adorable shot of yellow adipose tissue (fat). The region between the left dink and the right dink is her infraspinatus. We're not seeing the edge of her trapezius because it's relaxed and not as well developed as one expects in, say, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson. The next bright line we see, moving right, is the medial border of her scapula.
I didn't think of any of that stuff while I was painting it. I thought, "bright spot, dink 1, dink 2, shoulderblade."
I think it's very, very difficult to draw the body accurately on the basis of looking alone. On the other hand, I think it's next to impossible to draw the body realistically in the context of medical-grade anatomical knowledge. Why? Let me deploy another analogy.
Early in the history of Assyriology...
Assyriology is the one with the cuneiform tablets
...scholars drawing copies of tablets tended to draw what they saw very accurately. Why? They weren't so sure as they are now what was meaningful and what wasn't, so they instinctively took down everything so as not to miss something that might turn out to be important.
W. M. Flinders Petrie, published 1894
Try copying something in Chinese sometime, and you'll see what I mean.
Later, once cuneiform was better understood, typical renderings of tablets became more idealized:
Possibly Hans Güterbock, after 1960
By this point, scholars were drawing symbols, not things. They knew what was essential, and they threw away the non-meaningful idiosyncrasies of the tablets in front of them.
This is the danger of total anatomical knowledge. Once you learn what is "meaningful" anatomically, you automatically subtract what is accidental to the person actually in front of you. The living model becomes a story written in physiological letters, in the inflexible syntax of anatomy. Just ask Prud'hon:
Pierre-Paul Prud’hon, Study for La Source
c. 1801, Black and white chalk, 21 3/4 x 15 1/4 inches
c. 1801, Black and white chalk, 21 3/4 x 15 1/4 inches
And this is something I oppose (although I like Prud'hon quite a lot). My work looks much clumsier than the paintings of many of my classically-figurative contemporaries. The anatomy is accurate, but it is not a given. I want the sweat to show. When I build up to a figure, I don't want that figure to fall into place as if it were always so. I am not - just now - painting the Human who lives in the sky. I am painting the particular people in front of me.
I learned the aesthetics of information in this field by learning its knowledge and then forgetting much of it. This allowed the course I prefer - depending on the aesthetics of information to help me organize what I see. I didn't want pure empiricism to make me incapable, and I don't want knowledge to make me blind.
A WORD FROM THE ADVOCATUS DIABOLI:
As always, take this with a grain of salt. I am describing here the exact method I am using right now. And I have a tendency to think that every little thing I do is not only right, but inevitable. When I change methods tomorrow, I'm sure I'll have a clever reason for my new method being ever so perfect. So please, please remember that this is an advocacy for one of many valid procedures.
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
Heat of Battle
Last time, we plunged headlong into a complicated discussion of subtle properties of Ingres drawings, and the subtle mechanisms they answer to in the brain.
Since then, I've had a chance to actually see a bunch of these drawings in person. I forgot, I live in New York. It turns out New York is the kind of place where you can drop by the Morgan Library and see a show of a dozen or so of their own Ingres drawings and a second show of drawings from the Louvre, including a bunch of other Ingres drawings, including this one:
It turns out the two figures are wedged together like that because each one was cut out from a larger piece of paper and then they were matted and framed together. By, I suppose, a goddamned idiot.
But I did not come here today to scoff at French curators with you. Non. Rather, I would like to discuss something else which this show brought vividly to mind. I think Stanislavski says it better than I can - in this scene, the drama student narrator of An Actor Prepares finally reaches the point of real acting:
My hand ceased wrapping the string around my fingers and I became inert.
'This is the very depth of the ocean,' explained Tortsov.
I do not know what happened from then on.
...
Tortsov explained: 'The coming of inspiration was only an accident. You cannot count on it. But you can rely on what actually did occur. The point is, inspiration did not come to you of its own accord. You called for it, by preparing the way for it. ... The satisfying conclusion that we can draw from today's lesson is that you now have the power to create favorable conditions for the birth of inspiration. Therefore put your thought on what arouses your inner motive forces, what makes for your inner creative mood. Think of your super-objective and the through line of action that leads to it. In short, have in your mind everything that can be consciously controlled and that will lead you to the subconscious. That is the best possible preparation for inspiration. But never try for a direct approach to inspiration for its own sake. It will result in physical contortion and the opposite of everything you desire.'
Konstantin Stanislavski, An Actor Prepares, pp. 291-2
Stanislavski is describing a transmogrification I have treated before: that the act of art-making cannot be perceived - the narrator "does not know what happened." It can be prepared for, yet when it arrives, consciousness as we normally think of it zeroes out. Skills deploy of their own accord if they have been acquired in advance. Talent stretches itself to its limit. But the will and the understanding are curiously absent.
What Stanislavski describes relates pretty closely to every single description of pitched battle I have ever encountered. (Let me clear up any confusion: I have acted. I have not been in battle. I am a bad actor. I imagine I would be a fairly bad soldier.)
As I understand it, and I am very open to correction here, there are three fundamental types of battle:
• the seige
• guerilla skirmishes
• the pitched battle
Pitched battles are the ones we generally think of when we think of war: symmetric set-piece encounters where enemy forces meet, on a field if one is available, and try to kill each other. The force left standing wins. Bloodshed is worst when neither side will yield. Both sides will go on butchering one another, from the tribal warfare of ancient Greece to the trenches of World War I (for more on this, see Victor Davis Hanson's marvelous The Western Way of War: Infantry Battle in Classical Greece)
Descriptions of pitched battle consistently invoke a condition in which the immediacy and dynamic multipolarity of incoming lethal force produce a constriction of the soldier's universe. Strategy and tactics erode, thinking erodes, all that remains is the exertion of countering force and a terrifying struggle to survive. The condition is similar to that of Stanislavski's actor - he is thrown back on training and character, and if he is to prevail, he had best hope these qualities, and luck, serve him well.
This strikes me as one reason that generals often sit on hills; so that they can think. The shape of pitched battle, and the guidance of its course, are overwhelmed in the midst of the fight.
This model of pitched battle is, oddly, rarely portrayed well in war movies. On the other hand, it is portrayed exceptionally well in virtually every zombie film - Field Marshal Moltke's comment that no plan survives contact with the enemy is faithfully rendered time and again when the walking dead are involved.
I, and most of you, have never experienced pitched battle, so essentially we don't know what we're talking about. But we have experienced a similarly universe-constricting condition, and that is illness. Do you remember, when you were sick, how your long-term plans, your overriding concerns, and your complex thoughts shimmered and dissolved, and you were reduced to - what is this smell - this heat - this dampness? What can I do to make this pain less?
There is an idea behind illness, but it is not apparent to the sick person. There is an idea behind pitched battle, but it is invisible to the soldier. The idea can be discovered, in the calm of cleanliness and quiet, and light and time, in the laboratory and the strategy tent. In the field, they are lost.
To bring this back around to Ingres, we have been studying him in the laboratory and the strategy tent. We have described his efforts and their effects from the perspective of utter premeditation and calculation. But picture-making, like acting, and battle, and disease, is a state not of thought, but of confrontation with force. It is categorically similar to battle: order emerges out of chaos, as a function of preparation and good fortune.
So what I learned - or, rather, remembered - confronting Ingres face-to-face, was that all these theoretical concerns are apart from the direct act of creation. Looking at Ingres drawings directly, you can see before you the struggle of their making: the curves traced out multiple times, uncertainly, as he gropes toward the shape he seeks; the abrupt dark checkmarks, overlying existing lines, where he decides a note of emphasis is required; the zigs and zags of a changing evaluation of how to confront the problem at hand.
Only in the faces does perfection annihilate all traces of its evolution. There are no errors in the faces, no dropped lines, no hesitations. Nor are there erasures. In person, you can duck to catch a raking light on the paper and study its texture. Erasure leaves alteration in the texture of the fibers of the paper. There are no erasures in the faces.
Even so, the experienced artist will recognize what he is seeing: a combination of profound talent, immense skill, and the forbearance to think through the placement of the preliminary marks, pencil hovering over the paper like a dowser's rod, before the fatal commitment proceeds. It is nearly superhuman - nearly, but not quite. I've done it. You've probably done it too. It is one of many tools; a tool on which Ingres relies heavily in his faces. The darkest lines in the faces occur near the end of the drawing process, once he is dead certain he's gotten their placement right. He builds up from light to dark, on a tightrope, avoiding error at each step, and finally gets his 100 in the class.
The moral of the story is that much of this blog approaches art from what might be called the wrong angle - we go into analysis quite a lot, teasing out the subtleties, the mechanisms, and the counterintuitive impacts of the mechanisms of picture-making. But this is not how I make work. Work is not made in the laboratory and the strategy tent. It is guided and understood from the hill, but it is made in the mud and the chaos and the heat of battle. This is important to remember.
Since then, I've had a chance to actually see a bunch of these drawings in person. I forgot, I live in New York. It turns out New York is the kind of place where you can drop by the Morgan Library and see a show of a dozen or so of their own Ingres drawings and a second show of drawings from the Louvre, including a bunch of other Ingres drawings, including this one:
It turns out the two figures are wedged together like that because each one was cut out from a larger piece of paper and then they were matted and framed together. By, I suppose, a goddamned idiot.
But I did not come here today to scoff at French curators with you. Non. Rather, I would like to discuss something else which this show brought vividly to mind. I think Stanislavski says it better than I can - in this scene, the drama student narrator of An Actor Prepares finally reaches the point of real acting:
My hand ceased wrapping the string around my fingers and I became inert.
'This is the very depth of the ocean,' explained Tortsov.
I do not know what happened from then on.
...
Tortsov explained: 'The coming of inspiration was only an accident. You cannot count on it. But you can rely on what actually did occur. The point is, inspiration did not come to you of its own accord. You called for it, by preparing the way for it. ... The satisfying conclusion that we can draw from today's lesson is that you now have the power to create favorable conditions for the birth of inspiration. Therefore put your thought on what arouses your inner motive forces, what makes for your inner creative mood. Think of your super-objective and the through line of action that leads to it. In short, have in your mind everything that can be consciously controlled and that will lead you to the subconscious. That is the best possible preparation for inspiration. But never try for a direct approach to inspiration for its own sake. It will result in physical contortion and the opposite of everything you desire.'
Konstantin Stanislavski, An Actor Prepares, pp. 291-2
Stanislavski is describing a transmogrification I have treated before: that the act of art-making cannot be perceived - the narrator "does not know what happened." It can be prepared for, yet when it arrives, consciousness as we normally think of it zeroes out. Skills deploy of their own accord if they have been acquired in advance. Talent stretches itself to its limit. But the will and the understanding are curiously absent.
What Stanislavski describes relates pretty closely to every single description of pitched battle I have ever encountered. (Let me clear up any confusion: I have acted. I have not been in battle. I am a bad actor. I imagine I would be a fairly bad soldier.)
As I understand it, and I am very open to correction here, there are three fundamental types of battle:
• the seige
• guerilla skirmishes
• the pitched battle
Pitched battles are the ones we generally think of when we think of war: symmetric set-piece encounters where enemy forces meet, on a field if one is available, and try to kill each other. The force left standing wins. Bloodshed is worst when neither side will yield. Both sides will go on butchering one another, from the tribal warfare of ancient Greece to the trenches of World War I (for more on this, see Victor Davis Hanson's marvelous The Western Way of War: Infantry Battle in Classical Greece)
Descriptions of pitched battle consistently invoke a condition in which the immediacy and dynamic multipolarity of incoming lethal force produce a constriction of the soldier's universe. Strategy and tactics erode, thinking erodes, all that remains is the exertion of countering force and a terrifying struggle to survive. The condition is similar to that of Stanislavski's actor - he is thrown back on training and character, and if he is to prevail, he had best hope these qualities, and luck, serve him well.
This strikes me as one reason that generals often sit on hills; so that they can think. The shape of pitched battle, and the guidance of its course, are overwhelmed in the midst of the fight.
This model of pitched battle is, oddly, rarely portrayed well in war movies. On the other hand, it is portrayed exceptionally well in virtually every zombie film - Field Marshal Moltke's comment that no plan survives contact with the enemy is faithfully rendered time and again when the walking dead are involved.
the enemy
(not pictured: the plan)
(not pictured: the plan)
I, and most of you, have never experienced pitched battle, so essentially we don't know what we're talking about. But we have experienced a similarly universe-constricting condition, and that is illness. Do you remember, when you were sick, how your long-term plans, your overriding concerns, and your complex thoughts shimmered and dissolved, and you were reduced to - what is this smell - this heat - this dampness? What can I do to make this pain less?
There is an idea behind illness, but it is not apparent to the sick person. There is an idea behind pitched battle, but it is invisible to the soldier. The idea can be discovered, in the calm of cleanliness and quiet, and light and time, in the laboratory and the strategy tent. In the field, they are lost.
To bring this back around to Ingres, we have been studying him in the laboratory and the strategy tent. We have described his efforts and their effects from the perspective of utter premeditation and calculation. But picture-making, like acting, and battle, and disease, is a state not of thought, but of confrontation with force. It is categorically similar to battle: order emerges out of chaos, as a function of preparation and good fortune.
So what I learned - or, rather, remembered - confronting Ingres face-to-face, was that all these theoretical concerns are apart from the direct act of creation. Looking at Ingres drawings directly, you can see before you the struggle of their making: the curves traced out multiple times, uncertainly, as he gropes toward the shape he seeks; the abrupt dark checkmarks, overlying existing lines, where he decides a note of emphasis is required; the zigs and zags of a changing evaluation of how to confront the problem at hand.
Only in the faces does perfection annihilate all traces of its evolution. There are no errors in the faces, no dropped lines, no hesitations. Nor are there erasures. In person, you can duck to catch a raking light on the paper and study its texture. Erasure leaves alteration in the texture of the fibers of the paper. There are no erasures in the faces.
Even so, the experienced artist will recognize what he is seeing: a combination of profound talent, immense skill, and the forbearance to think through the placement of the preliminary marks, pencil hovering over the paper like a dowser's rod, before the fatal commitment proceeds. It is nearly superhuman - nearly, but not quite. I've done it. You've probably done it too. It is one of many tools; a tool on which Ingres relies heavily in his faces. The darkest lines in the faces occur near the end of the drawing process, once he is dead certain he's gotten their placement right. He builds up from light to dark, on a tightrope, avoiding error at each step, and finally gets his 100 in the class.
The moral of the story is that much of this blog approaches art from what might be called the wrong angle - we go into analysis quite a lot, teasing out the subtleties, the mechanisms, and the counterintuitive impacts of the mechanisms of picture-making. But this is not how I make work. Work is not made in the laboratory and the strategy tent. It is guided and understood from the hill, but it is made in the mud and the chaos and the heat of battle. This is important to remember.
Friday, November 25, 2011
Autofill
You will perhaps remember that when we left off talking about Ingres, we were discussing the implication of form and volume in drawings of his like this one:
To continue, a little bit of neuroscience, courtesy of Dr. Margaret Livingstone.
In her marvelous book, Livingstone describes two evolutionarily distinct systems of visual processing in humans, which she calls Where and What. Where is a primitive system, shared with many mammals and tuned to movement and location. The younger What is a sophisticated system shared only with primates. It is responsible for object recognition and detail analysis.
What itself is subdivided into Form and Color (her casual names, it should be noted, do describe anatomically and functionally distinct structures).
Form is a high-resolution part of the system, using color differences and brightness differences to determine the shapes of objects. Color identifies the colors of objects, and it is surprisingly low-resolution.
As a matter of information processing efficiency, our brain basically produces a colorless high-resolution image, then smears some colors onto it, much like a painter proceeding from a well-defined grisaille underpainting to a hastily-completed color painting. This resolution difference has been exploited in video technology with the use of 4:1:1 color space. 4:1:1 is a data-compression system in which the brightness of each pixel of a frame is defined individually, but color is defined in blocks of four pixels:
4:1:1 saves a lot of space in a video signal, and interfaces perfectly satisfactorily with the lopsided resolutions of our Form and Color systems.
This simple general description unfolds, of course, to reveal all kinds of fascinating quirks. When we were talking about Ingres a few weeks ago, I made vague reference to how the heavy dependence on line makes unusually extensive use of "the information-completion procedures of the visual brain." By now, you should know that I don't especially like vague references. So I've been thinking about which exact procedures I'm alluding to, and this led me to re-consider one of the quirks of Form/Color integration in the evolved What system of the human brain.
In chapter 11 of her book, Livingstone gets into the nitty-gritty of how the separate information feeds from Form and Color are re-integrated to produce a coherent image in the mind. One of the topics that arises is color and edges. It turns out that part of the edge-detection machinery we discussed a while back results in our being strongly sensitive to colors at the boundaries between regions of unlike color, and weakly sensitive to colors in homogeneous color fields.
(As an aside, this gives us some insight into the sense of suggestion in Rothko paintings:
By producing nearly, but not quite, homogeneous color fields, he is producing the visual equivalent of a sound one cannot quite make out. He causes us to strain at the limits of our sensitivities, becoming awake to subtleties which we ordinarily fail to perceive. His fields begin to shimmer with suggestion, with the evolving interaction between true presence and phantoms.)
But back to the point - we are sensitive to colors at the edges, not the centers, because of the edge-detection machinery of our visual systems. Our brain compensates for this physiological deficiency with a truly ridiculous trick: Autofill (my own sarcastic term, not Livingtone's). We see, for instance, a red apple as totally colored in part because our brain, receiving a "red edge" signal, fills the interior with red:
You see how you kind of see the interior of the bottom apple as reddish? I don't mean full-on red. But it doesn't look like the same white as the background. And yet, it is. That's "the information-completion procedures of the visual brain" I was talking about last time. Wild, huh?
Livingstone, wise in the ways not only of neurons but of paintings, illustrates her point with this Cezanne painting, The Lime Kiln (1890-94):
Cezanne, it would appear, was the man at exploiting this particular visual system quirk. All artists hack the human visual system at one or more points of weakness. Cezanne enjoyed using Autofill. Consider his apples as well:
Observe how he darkens the edges, and makes the colors more rich at the edges. This is not an outcome of the frontal lighting alone. It also answers to visual integration in the brain, producing a startlingly vivid sense of presence by reinforcing the mechanisms of the Form and Color systems.
The presence overwhelms that of more realistic depictions of fruit - Hockney points out the relative lack of vividity of Caravaggio's fruit:
Why? In part because Cezanne has amped up color and contrast. But also, because he is depicting not only what we see, but how we see it. We are observing not the external world, but the partly-garbled outcome of our means of perceiving the external world. The painting, in a sense, is already inside of us: what was inward has been made outward. He speaks to us, mind to mind, soul to soul. These apples are icons not only of matter, but of consciousness. I have discussed this concept with you before - a painting which is not biologically alive, but is in a metaphysical sense at the boundary of being a living thing. It is excavated from the depths of the mind, and shaped as it is by the processes of the brain, correlates with no thing in the physical world.
Now, I'd like to extend Livingstone's claim with a little experiment. Let's look at the same apple comparison with the color removed:
Huh, that worked. I just did this in Photoshop myself - you and I, my friends, are the laboratory for this experiment. You see how the interior of the bottom apple looks faintly darker than the background? Autofill is still working. If it's the same Autofill Livingstone describes, what this means is that the Color system doesn't depend on actual per se color to signal the mind to see a continuation of edge color. It just needs a value difference delineated by a sharp boundary on one side and a soft boundary on the other.
Now let's see what happens when I try this:
Yes! It works! OK, notice how the white region of the right half of the apple looks a little darker than that the of the left half? Almost as if a slice had been taken out of the left half, so that you were still seeing the apple's skin on the right, but the flesh of the apple on the left? Of course, all of that interior is exactly the same shade of white.
What we've done here is evoked a complex response on the part of Autofill. On the left, there is an edge, but no interior gradient shading to instruct the system to autofill the interior of the apple. On the right, the gradient shading does deliver the autofill-interior-of-apple instruction. Overall, we know the apple is one closed form. But our brains are treating it as having two different color regions, resulting in perception of two different interior brightnesses; even if we can't quite tell where the boundary lies, there is a distinction.
Forgive me if you've already deduced where I'm going with this. We are treating a simple example here, but an example with the markers I wanted to explore: a figure depicted on a white field by means of outlines of diverse qualities. Having demonstrated the principles involved in a simple system, we can extend the conclusion back up to the real system of interest:
Like Cezanne, Ingres has hacked Autofill. His variation of line is delivering a series of instructions to the Color system to observe value differences which are, for the most part, not actually depicted in the drawing. These value differences are interpreted by the mind as depictions of form. Ingres is using his mastery of line to trick the brain into seeing imaginary forms.
And that, my friends, is what makes Ingres a master and you and me a couple of shmucks with an art supply store discount card.
Let me add one more thing before signing off: I am not immune, as perhaps you are not immune, to the persistent worry that one can strip the mystery and beauty out of art by looking at some facet of it and finding out what it is and how it works. Reflecting on the matter, I have reached this formulation: that to know what it is and how it works is not the same as to know what it means, or why. We can - indeed, as working artists, to some extent we must - find out how to achieve the effects we intend. But to learn these things, even in the painfully analytic manner of this blog, has never breached, nor can ever breach, the muscular bond between the image in the eye and the sensation in the soul. Ingres, Cezanne, Rothko, and Caravaggio come through this examination intact, because when we look at them, we are not seeing with our analytic understanding alone. Indeed, for me, this additional element of knowing serves only to reinforce the impression - "How miraculous is their work, and how miraculous are we, to see things as we see them."
To continue, a little bit of neuroscience, courtesy of Dr. Margaret Livingstone.
In her marvelous book, Livingstone describes two evolutionarily distinct systems of visual processing in humans, which she calls Where and What. Where is a primitive system, shared with many mammals and tuned to movement and location. The younger What is a sophisticated system shared only with primates. It is responsible for object recognition and detail analysis.
What itself is subdivided into Form and Color (her casual names, it should be noted, do describe anatomically and functionally distinct structures).
Form is a high-resolution part of the system, using color differences and brightness differences to determine the shapes of objects. Color identifies the colors of objects, and it is surprisingly low-resolution.As a matter of information processing efficiency, our brain basically produces a colorless high-resolution image, then smears some colors onto it, much like a painter proceeding from a well-defined grisaille underpainting to a hastily-completed color painting. This resolution difference has been exploited in video technology with the use of 4:1:1 color space. 4:1:1 is a data-compression system in which the brightness of each pixel of a frame is defined individually, but color is defined in blocks of four pixels:
4:1:1 saves a lot of space in a video signal, and interfaces perfectly satisfactorily with the lopsided resolutions of our Form and Color systems.This simple general description unfolds, of course, to reveal all kinds of fascinating quirks. When we were talking about Ingres a few weeks ago, I made vague reference to how the heavy dependence on line makes unusually extensive use of "the information-completion procedures of the visual brain." By now, you should know that I don't especially like vague references. So I've been thinking about which exact procedures I'm alluding to, and this led me to re-consider one of the quirks of Form/Color integration in the evolved What system of the human brain.
In chapter 11 of her book, Livingstone gets into the nitty-gritty of how the separate information feeds from Form and Color are re-integrated to produce a coherent image in the mind. One of the topics that arises is color and edges. It turns out that part of the edge-detection machinery we discussed a while back results in our being strongly sensitive to colors at the boundaries between regions of unlike color, and weakly sensitive to colors in homogeneous color fields.
(As an aside, this gives us some insight into the sense of suggestion in Rothko paintings:
Mark Rothko, No. 14, 1960, oil on canvas, 114 1/2 in. x 105 5/8 in.
By producing nearly, but not quite, homogeneous color fields, he is producing the visual equivalent of a sound one cannot quite make out. He causes us to strain at the limits of our sensitivities, becoming awake to subtleties which we ordinarily fail to perceive. His fields begin to shimmer with suggestion, with the evolving interaction between true presence and phantoms.)
But back to the point - we are sensitive to colors at the edges, not the centers, because of the edge-detection machinery of our visual systems. Our brain compensates for this physiological deficiency with a truly ridiculous trick: Autofill (my own sarcastic term, not Livingtone's). We see, for instance, a red apple as totally colored in part because our brain, receiving a "red edge" signal, fills the interior with red:
You see how you kind of see the interior of the bottom apple as reddish? I don't mean full-on red. But it doesn't look like the same white as the background. And yet, it is. That's "the information-completion procedures of the visual brain" I was talking about last time. Wild, huh?Livingstone, wise in the ways not only of neurons but of paintings, illustrates her point with this Cezanne painting, The Lime Kiln (1890-94):
Cezanne, it would appear, was the man at exploiting this particular visual system quirk. All artists hack the human visual system at one or more points of weakness. Cezanne enjoyed using Autofill. Consider his apples as well:
Cezanne, Still Life with Apples, 1890-94, oil on canvas, 18 1/8 x 21 5/8 in
Observe how he darkens the edges, and makes the colors more rich at the edges. This is not an outcome of the frontal lighting alone. It also answers to visual integration in the brain, producing a startlingly vivid sense of presence by reinforcing the mechanisms of the Form and Color systems.
The presence overwhelms that of more realistic depictions of fruit - Hockney points out the relative lack of vividity of Caravaggio's fruit:
Caravaggio, Basket of Fruit, 1597
Why? In part because Cezanne has amped up color and contrast. But also, because he is depicting not only what we see, but how we see it. We are observing not the external world, but the partly-garbled outcome of our means of perceiving the external world. The painting, in a sense, is already inside of us: what was inward has been made outward. He speaks to us, mind to mind, soul to soul. These apples are icons not only of matter, but of consciousness. I have discussed this concept with you before - a painting which is not biologically alive, but is in a metaphysical sense at the boundary of being a living thing. It is excavated from the depths of the mind, and shaped as it is by the processes of the brain, correlates with no thing in the physical world.
Now, I'd like to extend Livingstone's claim with a little experiment. Let's look at the same apple comparison with the color removed:
Huh, that worked. I just did this in Photoshop myself - you and I, my friends, are the laboratory for this experiment. You see how the interior of the bottom apple looks faintly darker than the background? Autofill is still working. If it's the same Autofill Livingstone describes, what this means is that the Color system doesn't depend on actual per se color to signal the mind to see a continuation of edge color. It just needs a value difference delineated by a sharp boundary on one side and a soft boundary on the other.Now let's see what happens when I try this:
Yes! It works! OK, notice how the white region of the right half of the apple looks a little darker than that the of the left half? Almost as if a slice had been taken out of the left half, so that you were still seeing the apple's skin on the right, but the flesh of the apple on the left? Of course, all of that interior is exactly the same shade of white.What we've done here is evoked a complex response on the part of Autofill. On the left, there is an edge, but no interior gradient shading to instruct the system to autofill the interior of the apple. On the right, the gradient shading does deliver the autofill-interior-of-apple instruction. Overall, we know the apple is one closed form. But our brains are treating it as having two different color regions, resulting in perception of two different interior brightnesses; even if we can't quite tell where the boundary lies, there is a distinction.
Forgive me if you've already deduced where I'm going with this. We are treating a simple example here, but an example with the markers I wanted to explore: a figure depicted on a white field by means of outlines of diverse qualities. Having demonstrated the principles involved in a simple system, we can extend the conclusion back up to the real system of interest:
Like Cezanne, Ingres has hacked Autofill. His variation of line is delivering a series of instructions to the Color system to observe value differences which are, for the most part, not actually depicted in the drawing. These value differences are interpreted by the mind as depictions of form. Ingres is using his mastery of line to trick the brain into seeing imaginary forms.
And that, my friends, is what makes Ingres a master and you and me a couple of shmucks with an art supply store discount card.
Let me add one more thing before signing off: I am not immune, as perhaps you are not immune, to the persistent worry that one can strip the mystery and beauty out of art by looking at some facet of it and finding out what it is and how it works. Reflecting on the matter, I have reached this formulation: that to know what it is and how it works is not the same as to know what it means, or why. We can - indeed, as working artists, to some extent we must - find out how to achieve the effects we intend. But to learn these things, even in the painfully analytic manner of this blog, has never breached, nor can ever breach, the muscular bond between the image in the eye and the sensation in the soul. Ingres, Cezanne, Rothko, and Caravaggio come through this examination intact, because when we look at them, we are not seeing with our analytic understanding alone. Indeed, for me, this additional element of knowing serves only to reinforce the impression - "How miraculous is their work, and how miraculous are we, to see things as we see them."
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