Work

This post responds to some things that people have been saying to me and about me over the past few years; not you, longtime and much-neglected blog readers, but people on various social media.

Like many artists, I would be happiest if my work acted to encourage other artists. But this is not always the case. On Instagram or Facebook, sometimes I’ll post something that has turned out particularly well, and an artist will comment, “Oh, I’ll just give up now.” This is meant as a compliment, but it makes me feel terrible. I absolutely want to do good work, but my goal is not to suppress others.

There is a weaker form of this comment which offers more room for conversation - that is, for reversing the suppressive effect. This weaker form goes either, “You have so much talent,” or, “What you do is like magic” (they amount to the same thing really). Well! I can certainly argue against that: because I know exactly how much work has gone into producing every one of the pieces in question. I have been remiss, perhaps, in concealing the work. Let me illustrate. Here is a painting in progress of Leah. It is one of my favorite faces to date.

work in progress, oil on canvas, 40”x30”, detail

Pretty nice, right? It would take a lot of talent to paint that, and maybe some magic; maybe the god of painting would have to be smiling down on you that day. And I suppose all these things are true. But then again - what year is this, 2015? Let’s step back to 2001.

portrait study, oil on canvas, 12”x9”

Yes, that is also me; me at the very beginning of this long and arduous road. I had, at the time, been going to life drawing one or two times a week for about three years. I was starting to get interested in painting. So I bought 12”x9” canvas pads from the art supply store, and some brushes and turpentine, and some burnt sienna and flake white - I figured I would start with two colors and work my way up. I never took a class, and had no idea how to move paint onto a canvas. The first year or so was simply that: how do you pick paint up from your palette with a brush, and put that brush down on a canvas, and leave the paint there? It’s a complicated question. I went through a lot of trouble finding my first answer to it, and more trouble still finding the answers that suited me best.

The catastrophically bad study above was no fluke. Here’s another one from the same period.

portrait study, oil on canvas, 12”x9”

As you can see, I am clumsily attempting to paint brown over wet white, and white over wet brown. They do not want to be pressed heavily down on fluid surfaces, so they catch and stutter. I’ve figured out a couple of things, like blocking in the major shape of the back of the hair, and covering my mistakes on the picture-left edge of the cheek with a dark background. But my fixes are also failures. Because at the same time that I cannot paint, I cannot draw. I cannot paint, or draw, and so it could be said in some obscure but real sense that I cannot see. Although I cannot see, I can do what it takes to learn to see: I can think, and I can practice. Have one more mess from this early period.

portrait study, oil on canvas, 12”x9”

I swear to you I am not magic, and to the extent I have talent, I had to sweat for every inch of it that got dragged out of hiding.

There were three primary techniques I used to improve:

1. For drawing, I went to open life drawing workshops between once a week and three times a week for seventeen years.
2. For painting, I ultimately wound up spending hundreds of hours working privately with models from 2004 to the present.
3. For general anatomy, I spent two years drawing my own anatomical atlas based on human cadaver dissections which I attended or performed, at Santa Monica College.

There was surely a role for magic, but most of it was work. So I hope I can convince any of you artists who feel discouraged when you see what I can do - that you can do it too, but you must put in a great deal of work over a very long time; and even then, you will not be like me. I am not like the people I idolized when I began. You won’t be either. The reward of your work is that you will start to become yourself, which is better.

The Wasteland

Let me be candid with you. I don't really understand "The Wasteland." I have read it many times, though never in a rigorous way. Perhaps it all means something in particular, though it has the texture of an inspired thing, that is, a thing which arrives without having traveled. I don't mind not understanding it; I live in a world of mysterious colossi; my cultivated ignorance is a method of wonder.

Light on Water

Here is a photograph by Carolyn Marks Blackwood which I found moving and powerful.

Nautical Twilight, Carolyn Marks Blackwood, photograph, 40”x40”, 2012

So I’d like to explain to you some of what I saw.

Blackwood joins in here with the rich history of landscape painting. Landscape is not an easy genre: nature is unruly, and does not wish to order itself into compositions pleasing to our sense of proportion. It is thematically difficult as well. Why do we look at landscapes? Because they are beautiful? Some are, and beauty must surely be a part of it. But beauty, in its fiery and terrible sense, is difficult to keep straight in this context, in which so much treacly prettiness is possible. Let’s leave aside the troubled concept of beauty for now. I think there are three fundamental reasons we learn the difficult skill of seeing landscapes in art, and through art, in nature:

We see in them, as we see in still lives, the soulfulness of things. Soul is not visible to us in human life alone. It becomes visible, through long study, in a stone, a chair, a bowl. And similarly, the texture of light in the woods, the sweep of a valley and ridge of a mountain, make their inner lives clear to us if we gaze at them intently. We do this naturally at first, and when we have grown too old and jaded to see things clearly as they are, artists guide us in learning to do it again.

Second, the study of landscape - of nature - returns to us a sense of awe. It is dramatically and insistently larger than we are. One age after another has discovered for itself, as if for the first time, a sense of the sublime in nature. But surely this sense has persisted and refreshed itself since men first scanned distant horizons and stormy skies.

Finally, we study landscapes because of their narrative resonance. Relative to actual human experience, they are abstract and indirect. But as in the case of music, also abstract and indirect, we can make out in landscape the story of ourselves, of the ideas and emotions and transitions which give shape to our lives.

Blackwood is of a kind with the landscape painters in drawing out the soulfulness, the sublimity, and the humanlike in nature. She is not painting here, but she is scarcely taking a photograph either. The camera has a strong desire to see everything. Contrast that with how much is unseen in Blackwood’s image. The wavelets in the foreground are crisp and clear, but the woods on the far shore are murky, the treetops nearly blending into the overcast sky. The woods and sky are rendered with the simplified economy of painting, subtle gradients all that keep them from flattening into the merest shapes. Not only is key detail edited out of the image, the image, in a sense, is edited out as well. What natural phenomenon does this image depict? It depicts sunlight breaking through cloud, and falling on unquiet waters. So where is the sun? And where are its sparkles on the river? They are nowhere to be seen, because Blackwood has framed them out.

She has turned her camera aside from the direct prospect, leaving only the lesser glare upon the water, and the start of a numinous glow which animates the volume of storm-dampened air between us and the far shore.

Two different aspects of this picture recall to me two different painters. One is Bruegel, who hides Icarus in an insignificant corner of his broad landscape.

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, Pieter Bruegel, oil on canvas, 29”x44”, c. 1558

Here too there is a central story, shuffled off to the side, nearly to the point of its disappearance. Two modern poets gave voice to this chokingly painful eccentricity. William Carlos Williams reproduced the offhanded cruelty of it in his Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, describing the entire scene before remarking:

unsignificantly
off the coast
there was

a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning

While W. H. Auden, in his Musée des Beaux Arts, writes from the affronted perspective of a humanist who has not quite shaken off his expectation that tragedy should take center stage:

In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

Yes, this is what Blackwood performs as well: an essential turning away. Consider her standing on her cliff, surveying the Hudson River, the storm at its end, the sun returned and shining down on the waters. With the awful forbearance of the artist, who closes the gate on spectacle in favor of humble truth, she frames out the glories of the sky, allowing them to remain only as a suggestion, an implication, in a more austere and profound composition. The ripples on the water, the indistinct far shore, and a vast expanse of air beginning to fill with that numinous glow - these things, she teaches us, are enough and more than enough. More would be mawkish, whereas this fraction that remains already holds all the meaning the scene can offer.

The meaning, however, is not that of Bruegel. In this regard, she recalls to me the other painter, Caravaggio, who has never been surpassed in his identification of light with the spiritual. We cannot help but think of Caravaggio as feverish with desire for his salvation. We conceive him this way because the bare details of his criminal life tangle so wrenchingly with his desperate grasping after light in his work. He paints an enveloping, beckoning darkness, opposed only here and there by light, but he thirsts after this light, and the light fights an uncertain battle to save him from the terror of the void. In Caravaggio, as in Blackwood, the source of the light is unseen: Caravaggio does not depict what illuminates, but only what is illumined. Consider his The Calling of Saint Matthew:

The Calling of Saint Matthew, Caravaggio, oil on canvas, 127”x130”, 1599-1600

Here Christ summons Matthew with pointed finger, though which of the jumble of scoundrels is meant, Caravaggio does not make clear. Each of them turns at the sudden intrusion of light, as if the room had swum in dimness only a moment before. What calls these men, exactly? In bare narrative terms, it is Christ who calls them. But in the picture, it is the light. They were plunged in darkness, and now the possibility of light is offered to them. Christ is not the source of the light; if the light were a character, I suppose it would have to be the Holy Spirit, hiding offscreen right, resting its redemptive authority in Christ. The light occupies space in Caravaggio, as it does in Blackwood, sketching out its shape against the rear wall.

Blackwood’s light, its source and zone of greatest radiance offscreen, reminds me of Caravaggio’s light. It breaks upon a world indistinct and lost in gloom, with a terrific redemptive force. It falls on some but not all objects, suddenly and sharply defining those it touches. It fills volumes of space, as if the gasping world, crying out for it, inhaled it and was transformed. It portends an unbearable intensity, but its touch is gentle, as if it moderated itself to the infirmities of those it would save. Where there was darkness and fear and despair, it brings comfort and hope. The river ripples beneath its touch, tapping out a nearly musical rhythm, and the violent sky is soothed and brought to heel. The entire surface of the image shimmers with it; local colors and values are not those of the landscape alone, but of the landscape with a scrim of light laid semi-visibly atop it. The light is a second character, an active participant, a thing which cannot be touched but which is continuously present.

This density and profundity of meaning - a meaning which I needed from some art, any art - is what struck me so powerfully in Blackwood’s photograph. Photography, which mechanically compensates for the laziness of the eye with a miraculous clarity of unearned sight, breeds endless photographs. We are seized by an undertow of thoughtless photographs, photographs which, when beautiful, often fall into the category of that treacly prettiness we discussed before in landscapes. In contrast with these, Blackwood’s piece feels, to me, considered, digested, expressive. It transcends its medium, as all art must, to speak soul-to-soul. It is the mature product of a mindful eye and hand.

Carolyn Marks Blackwood online: http://www.vonlintel.com/Carolyn-Marks-Blackwood.html

This post is a continuation of my "single work appreciation day" series, of which other instances can be found in my Huffington Post archive. 

First Session

Here’s a clear instance of a phenomenon I keep noticing in my drawings. I was at Lisa Dinhofer’s life drawing workshop last night, where I drew a model I’d never drawn before, named Dea. I had an impression of great warmth from Dea, but I’d like to try to be specific about the nature of this impression. Dea has a mellifluous voice which reminds me of the voice of another model I know, Natalya, who is a very warm individual. So I tend to assume that anyone with a similar voice is similar in character. This is not so flawed an assumption as you would think. A voice is not shaped by lungs and vocal cords alone. Its actual sound reflects the use a person puts it to. Just as the same body can be indifferent or attractive, depending on the attitude of its owner, so a voice can merely have a nice sound, or sound warm, depending on character. I think there is a high probability that my first impression was right.

The phenomenon I wanted to discuss with you, though, is the transition from a first drawing to a second drawing. This workshop was a single pose, so I had time to draw the same pose twice. Here’s the face from effort #1:

Dea Sitting (detail), 2015, graphite and white pencil on Rives BFK Tan, 15”x11”

I will probably never again get her face this formally correct. We’ve talked in the past about the distinct character of the neurological apparatus responsible for processing faces. It is apart from the more general mechanisms of sight, and the figurative artist must treat it separately in order to bring it into conformity with representation. I have only partly got mine tamed. The density of my recognition of the person in the face precludes my ability to see the face as shapes and forms. I see faces intensely, but not quite formally. Except the first time. The first time I look at a model, they are not yet a person for me, and during a brief window, I can draw them from the cold perspective of sight alone. This is my first drawing of Leah’s face.

First Portrait of Leah, January 15, 2009, graphite and white pencil on Rives BFK Tan, 15”x11” (drawing much smaller)

It is more formally accurate than anything I have drawn of her since. Now here is a portrait of her which is one of my favorites.

Preparatory Sketch for Meiosis II, 2013, graphite and white pencil on Rives BFK Tan, 15”x11”

This also looks very much like Leah, but in a fundamental way it is less complete than the first rapid little sketch. It shows only one side of her character, as most psychological drawings must. There is no complete state of mind, so there is no complete drawing - except for the utterly physical drawing, the first drawing.

On the other hand, consider the entire drawing of Dea:

Dea Sitting, 2015, graphite and white pencil on Rives BFK Tan, 15”x11”

Her body appears stiff and stereotyped. It is precise as to structure, but without a feeling of mass and the internal tensions of the muscles as they contend with the varying densities and weights of flesh and bone. Also, the perspective on the left side of her rib cage is a little fucked up. This too is typical of my first drawings of models, and for the same reason: I have not yet integrated the model into pictorial person-ness.

This is a paradox. My failure to integrate allows me to make an accurate face, because I am representing forms only. But the same failure to integrate precludes my drawing a convincing body, again because I am representing forms only.

The presence of the body is much more strongly informed by the action of its interior. The face, for all of its animation, is a thin layer of soft tissue on top of a surface of inflexible bone. It is most technically accurate when it is depicted in terms of form.

So then, I finished this first drawing and moved on to a second. By now I had a sense of the pose and more of a sense of the person, and so I began to select and edit what was interesting, and doable in the 40 minutes I had left.

Portrait of Dea, 2015, graphite and white pencil on Rives BFK Tan, 15”x11”

This is more vivid and personal, and the marks have more vigor. A personality is much more present here. And yet it is already less complete. In a face through which one mood and thought flashed after another, I was able to catch only one state of being. That’s fine, knowledge itself is incomplete, especially knowledge of people. I just noticed that this transition, from the cause and outcome of drawing #1 and the cause and outcome of drawing #2, illustrated quite well the mechanics of getting to know a model, so I thought I’d share.