tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22933190735509471632024-03-18T03:49:04.528-04:00DanielMaidmanmaking art and thinking about artDanielhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15597234920324948705noreply@blogger.comBlogger230125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2293319073550947163.post-82679029297741355892017-11-21T09:50:00.002-05:002017-11-21T09:50:24.235-05:00Basta!A standard argument against representational painting in the modern age is that it has been superseded by photography. This argument is so intuitively appealing that we tend not to consider its conceptual basis.<br />
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The argument rests on two implicit assumptions:<br />
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1. Representational painting is not a goal. Improved representation is the goal.<br />
2. All technological progress toward a given goal constitutes improvement over previous technologies.<br />
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Let's not tackle these assumptions in terms of the desirability of technological progress per se. Rather, let's consider a simple human fact which we all know: sometimes you work very hard for something, but once you get it, you find you don't like it very much.<br />
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I believe that this has happened, at least for some people, with photography. Photography actively resists some of the merits we have come to depend upon from representational painting: profundity of observation (the ease of photography promotes facile observation, emphasizing superficial formal qualities), a sense of life which richly imbues the image (the mechanical nature of photography is poor at evoking the vitality of all things and places), density of concept (a photographer without a full production crew has difficulty staging a scene in order to layer conceptual implications into the composition itself), intentionality and meaningfulness of the work (photography has a strong bias toward noticing happenstance, rather than creation from an internal wellspring). Photography has many virtues, but they are not the same virtues as painting. <br />
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Representational painters are accustomed to cringing and special pleading when the fact of photography is triumphantly waved in their faces. I think they should set aside their defensiveness and forthrightly say, "Before the photograph, we thought we wanted simply to make the most physically accurate representation possible. Photography taught us that we were wrong. The painting technology which we thought of as an intermediate measure turned out to be the best measure for many of the qualities we sought. So we are going to acknowledge that once we accomplished our old goals, we didn't like them very much. We are going to change our understanding of what we want. We are going to go on painting."<br />
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This is legitimate.Danielhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15597234920324948705noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2293319073550947163.post-14011564004253286472017-05-18T23:19:00.000-04:002017-05-18T23:19:27.623-04:00Gratitude, part III haven't written "Gratitude, part I" yet. I've been meaning to for over a year. I guess I'm not the most grateful guy ever. But a new thought on the subject occurs to me, and I think I'll write it down before I lose interest.<br />
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Here goes - we've been together on this blog for a long, long time. If you've been reading from near the beginning, you know I started with no shows, no connections, no publications, and few prospects. I agonized about it a fair amount. You were with me when I first got published in <i>International Artist</i>, and when I had a painting displayed at Saatchi Gallery's restaurant in London - this one, still my most viral painting:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyF-xiilClzeqB5CXPplPowUko9oUcv4USCLO2d7c2npjzVxf3JQUTEWSWntL0tp0pf9eAGuwJrfRejkQDaoyNHyV9tZEotV0YlDsDfJofdh5hOjXfnQAdSL62hvFTmuhBYVGuUt3L_st4/s1600/MAIDMAN_Hands-%25231_24x24.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyF-xiilClzeqB5CXPplPowUko9oUcv4USCLO2d7c2npjzVxf3JQUTEWSWntL0tp0pf9eAGuwJrfRejkQDaoyNHyV9tZEotV0YlDsDfJofdh5hOjXfnQAdSL62hvFTmuhBYVGuUt3L_st4/s320/MAIDMAN_Hands-%25231_24x24.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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- and when I was approached by <i>The Huffington Post</i> to write for them - a change in my life which nearly made this blog extinct, and may still. All of these were markers on the road to my idea of success in a career as an artist. This is different from succeeding as an artist - we talked about my <a href="http://danielmaidman.blogspot.com/2012/02/vincent-and-theo.html">Vincent and Theo</a> distinction between art and career as well - but I have always been clear with you that I very much wanted a career as an artist.<br />
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This has been a long journey, and at this stage of it I have an impression of success on that career front. My work is in three museums, including <a href="https://catalog.loc.gov/vwebv/search?searchArg1=2016645527&argType1=phrase&searchCode1=K010&searchType=2&combine2=and&searchArg2=&argType2=all&searchCode2=GKEY&combine3=and&searchArg3=&argType3=all&searchCode3=GKEY&location=all&place=all&type=all&language=all&recCount=10">this one</a>, which brings me no end of satisfaction. I have been invited to guest lecture at institutions I respect. I need to keep a spreadsheet of shows which have invited me to participate, so that I remember to send work out on time. I find myself appearing in print without having expended any particular effort. People treat me as a successful artist. By my own initial metrics, I have succeeded in most respects and have good prospects of succeeding in those ways I haven't yet.<br />
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This continually registers as a surprise, because I do not feel particularly successful. I am as prone to envy, anxiety, doubt, and despair as I was before. I rarely feel the asphyxiating panic I did at the beginning, but I am a long way from comfort. This is probably good. Comfort, I think, is a career outcome which begins to interfere with the work. One must stay hungry.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijTk4MNGmJjjtw8o_OkGHAkHWQlCNmjrf9HMDfvJBkYK5ygEdqpakibLhf5NdGXsHYXsbpS_Arym6Q0ugWfI7xYRGh4bH3XWTxQoXPgtmoreX2mRd5wafA9aKqkS1eY7aKfuypTXmcgpp-/s1600/s-l1000.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijTk4MNGmJjjtw8o_OkGHAkHWQlCNmjrf9HMDfvJBkYK5ygEdqpakibLhf5NdGXsHYXsbpS_Arym6Q0ugWfI7xYRGh4bH3XWTxQoXPgtmoreX2mRd5wafA9aKqkS1eY7aKfuypTXmcgpp-/s320/s-l1000.jpg" width="192" /></a></div>
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This brings me to the topic of gratitude. I think gratitude has a dimension of responsibility. It begins as a spontaneous emotion or realization, but to have ethical value, it must end in behavior. I conceive of my gratitude as, in part, a debt. It is not only a debt to those who have done well by me. It is also a debt to those I have it in my power to assist. I went through too many years <a href="http://danielmaidman.blogspot.nl/2012/03/threepence.html">without a helping hand</a> extended to me in the arts. I remember it, and I know that all artists go through it.<br />
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So I consider part of the responsibility of my gratitude to be manufacturing opportunities for other artists. I keep track of hundreds of artists. I go out of my way to see the value in work. I am constantly seeking to match artists with situations that would benefit them and which are specifically suited to their work: shows, collectors, curators, press, whatever I can get my hands on. I write reviews as much as I can. There is no shortage of good work to promote.<br />
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I know that I fall short. There are more people out there than I have the time and means to help out. This gnaws at me all the time. I think I am writing this to let you know that I have not forgotten you. You must save yourself, and you must be the first advocate for your interests. Still, I am doing my best for you too. If I ever said a single kind thing about your work, I remember it. If I haven't helped you along it was because I haven't found a chance. You are on my mind and on my conscience.<br />
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I can only speak for myself, but my impression is that this is a good policy to maintain if you find yourself as fortunate as I have become. It helps keep the sugar from rotting your teeth.<br />
<br />Danielhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15597234920324948705noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2293319073550947163.post-52322873214599849272017-04-27T21:36:00.003-04:002017-04-27T21:36:35.263-04:00I do not regret no longer saying what I do not wish to sayI happened to be looking recently at quite an old drawing - from 2005. This is already a long time ago! Here is the drawing:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4893fYIoiw61G3IrOT9ouKyxXpF56RicMO4o9bus9KFpRnXqavLc3xID0QWjjcdCH1aejvO4H_YKQYUO3aThk3jLIuMBuqCKERxKMWQHiRGb0HlPXDmmUB_Tit6uusc1sya1566KY9XoM/s1600/Toni+complete.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4893fYIoiw61G3IrOT9ouKyxXpF56RicMO4o9bus9KFpRnXqavLc3xID0QWjjcdCH1aejvO4H_YKQYUO3aThk3jLIuMBuqCKERxKMWQHiRGb0HlPXDmmUB_Tit6uusc1sya1566KY9XoM/s320/Toni+complete.jpg" width="253" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Daniel Maidman, <i>Toni Seated</i> </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">2B pencil and white Prismacolor pencil on </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Rives BFK Tan Heavyweight Printmaking Paper, 22”x15”, 2005</span></div>
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By my standards at the time, it was a very good drawing. I am accustomed to thinking of my older work as not being as good as my newer work, but I think I am a little bit unfair to it. Some of it was good then, and remains good, and I shouldn’t be dismissive of it simply because I made it a long time ago and have spent all the time since then working on getting better.<br />
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Now here is a drawing I just made yesterday:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLEHCMaVnQub91Nj8F8YX-59QcGJ5TeBBZEmhjEXlOUgxAhvdPPpRMeQbNJCxVtJP2jYADXaFYa6MjmORt94LedE-BDKS0Z6Swiy0pAZYmmXzfskwU1xu98KeF9ODDcIVFcRY00k5IW8Tt/s1600/2017-04-26+Erica+02.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLEHCMaVnQub91Nj8F8YX-59QcGJ5TeBBZEmhjEXlOUgxAhvdPPpRMeQbNJCxVtJP2jYADXaFYa6MjmORt94LedE-BDKS0Z6Swiy0pAZYmmXzfskwU1xu98KeF9ODDcIVFcRY00k5IW8Tt/s320/2017-04-26+Erica+02.jpg" width="235" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Daniel Maidman, <i>Erica’s Back</i> </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">3B pencil and white Prismacolor pencil on </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Rives BFK Tan Heavyweight Printmaking Paper, 15”x11”, 2017</span></div>
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I like this drawing quite a lot. But look how much softer it is, how much less assertive about where things are and what they are like.<br />
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Leading up to that 2005 period, I spent so much time and energy learning exactly what things were in the world: each part of the body, in and of itself. Since then, I have worked hard to follow how the eye sees, how the mind understands, how much can be said with how little.<br />
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I worked so hard to learn to say everything. I remember my fear, in 2005, that the art of saying little would be like a self-imposed muteness, that letting the viewer fill things in for himself would leave me with a raging thirst to speak. But now I see that it does not make one parched. It involves the more subtle and profound ability to suggest things to the viewer without saying them word by word. One imagined but could hardly believe this ability to be real. And yet it is. I don’t want to say every little thing anymore, and I do not regret no longer saying what I do not wish to say.<br />
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There is a related phenomenon which I regret surprisingly much. I used to see things in terms of their surfaces. Let me give you a particularly embarrassing and primeval example so you understand how severely I had this problem. One evening in the fall of 1992 or 1993, I was walking along with some friends on Franklin Street, the main strip in Chapel Hill. There was a homeless guy sitting on the sidewalk in front of Nationsbank, playing a musical instrument, I forget which one. This homeless guy was not a young Byronic street musician. He was a ragged, stocky drunk in his fifties. But he played pretty well and some people had gathered around to listen. The musician finished his piece, and somebody threw some coins to his open case on the sidewalk, and missed, and I thought this was pretty funny. I was maybe 17. My friends shushed me. They were all caught up in a sentimental Moment, because they noticed something I hadn’t: that the guy who threw the coins was just as much a bum as the musician. So they were savoring the poignance of one guy with nothing being so moved by music as to give what little of the something he had to another guy with nothing.<br />
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My friends were being a little overwrought about it, but I also had a quite radical inability to look beyond the outright surfaces of things. A less extreme form of this persisted in me for many years, particularly as regards the still mysterious link between beauty and virtue.<br />
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Anyhow, I don’t seem to have much left of this problem. I have so little of it left that I hardly credit what things look like with conveying their meaning at all. I regret this. There is a fine sense of a complex and dynamic rightness, a spectacular and beautiful rightness, to be gotten from an innocent confusion of sunlight sparkling off of forms, with truth. And I have no more assurance that I understand things now than I did then. I certainly understand other things. But I miss understanding as I understood. Of course I can still access that mode of sight, but the passion has mostly gone out of it, and one does not do things one is not passionate about, or at least I don’t.Danielhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15597234920324948705noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2293319073550947163.post-46567610160454223272015-07-31T23:50:00.000-04:002015-07-31T23:50:50.236-04:00WorkThis 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. <br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpghcDqWQXqNjFfOdoGsRYxZ4T5l0cGMLVJ_-b4nwxnO8waQQ-90vghajdrBDSkdaoG8jvKXEhG_a6h49L82b33YjSRNnvk6fwsEjxp_4g5ISGDNaNrqZe2k7ftMX2tKQuAN2XJ5F0Kxuq/s1600/graphic+1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpghcDqWQXqNjFfOdoGsRYxZ4T5l0cGMLVJ_-b4nwxnO8waQQ-90vghajdrBDSkdaoG8jvKXEhG_a6h49L82b33YjSRNnvk6fwsEjxp_4g5ISGDNaNrqZe2k7ftMX2tKQuAN2XJ5F0Kxuq/s200/graphic+1.jpg" width="144" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">work in progress, oil on canvas, 40”x30”, detail</span></div>
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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.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0SlEeHZ-NV-ncXpeOzu9JGbjRXlROFi9ZNDqkV5Q03a1KsKjZko_NFD8LqH93W5Hq-evqc1m5LO6-dfOfphJ77tU60Vu3cERY7srxw9gRXTHV1wiJQq1sXNQsJkZf_DTFC4zsvVc3Rr7e/s1600/graphic+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0SlEeHZ-NV-ncXpeOzu9JGbjRXlROFi9ZNDqkV5Q03a1KsKjZko_NFD8LqH93W5Hq-evqc1m5LO6-dfOfphJ77tU60Vu3cERY7srxw9gRXTHV1wiJQq1sXNQsJkZf_DTFC4zsvVc3Rr7e/s200/graphic+2.jpg" width="150" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">portrait study, oil on canvas, 12”x9”</span></div>
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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.<br />
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The catastrophically bad study above was no fluke. Here’s another one from the same period.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibDBqUKdYEdj18J_ZsxNa4yLAJtrdAsC3mTZo5BXoI50BrmzzIIEp6Nbcwtt50Zy_SGKMqL6FpISy6d35SGNQJgD-F50UD2bd_aX2vfuFuucH3QHVLL71SCerxPjJNzKY9k4fP33Njdh5M/s1600/graphic+3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibDBqUKdYEdj18J_ZsxNa4yLAJtrdAsC3mTZo5BXoI50BrmzzIIEp6Nbcwtt50Zy_SGKMqL6FpISy6d35SGNQJgD-F50UD2bd_aX2vfuFuucH3QHVLL71SCerxPjJNzKY9k4fP33Njdh5M/s200/graphic+3.jpg" width="150" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">portrait study, oil on canvas, 12”x9”</span></div>
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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.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbGIdfrZ0Fo6bNhElhtH4J8OR0zzgtgXmfqWpTq4Wkxxj0rBYghyphenhyphenbvTLnJ1yr1iA9mo0PGNCdLZtflK6Qiom8h_jR6mKanGHbmUgHDuMFK4a2c78kd-do81XSnJmFnRHO-W5catmUILsEz/s1600/graphic+4.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbGIdfrZ0Fo6bNhElhtH4J8OR0zzgtgXmfqWpTq4Wkxxj0rBYghyphenhyphenbvTLnJ1yr1iA9mo0PGNCdLZtflK6Qiom8h_jR6mKanGHbmUgHDuMFK4a2c78kd-do81XSnJmFnRHO-W5catmUILsEz/s200/graphic+4.jpg" width="150" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">portrait study, oil on canvas, 12”x9”</span></div>
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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.<br />
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There were three primary techniques I used to improve:<br />
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1. For drawing, I went to open life drawing workshops between once a week and three times a week for seventeen years.<br />
2. For painting, I ultimately wound up spending hundreds of hours working privately with models from 2004 to the present.<br />
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.<br />
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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.Danielhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15597234920324948705noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2293319073550947163.post-9105984951488047552015-05-08T23:26:00.003-04:002015-05-08T23:26:41.899-04:00The WastelandLet 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.Danielhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15597234920324948705noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2293319073550947163.post-25284217344939604682015-04-14T01:45:00.001-04:002015-04-14T02:05:05.616-04:00Light on WaterHere is a photograph by <a href="http://www.cmblackwood.com/">Carolyn Marks Blackwood</a> which I found moving and powerful.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVy_efNihCTyhvRTOIqKIOPsweeeUqFCbR8OODiOHYcJaiKD9YwQw35mWZ-8seIUWTU1tYYBpvj6Z21FyhwgcrSKCvQs1hBvLrPaIOTg8-ixPPZcBhjLGKqN3SW5BenDKgwQmoWTBhZ_YM/s1600/graphic+1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVy_efNihCTyhvRTOIqKIOPsweeeUqFCbR8OODiOHYcJaiKD9YwQw35mWZ-8seIUWTU1tYYBpvj6Z21FyhwgcrSKCvQs1hBvLrPaIOTg8-ixPPZcBhjLGKqN3SW5BenDKgwQmoWTBhZ_YM/s1600/graphic+1.jpg" height="191" width="200" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>Nautical Twilight</i>, Carolyn Marks Blackwood, photograph, 40”x40”, 2012</span></div>
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So I’d like to explain to you some of what I saw.<br />
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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:<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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. <br />
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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.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>Landscape with the Fall of Icarus</i>, Pieter Bruegel, oil on canvas, 29”x44”, c. 1558</span></div>
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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 <i>Landscape with the Fall of Icarus</i>, describing the entire scene before remarking:<br />
<span style="color: #0b5394;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #0b5394;">unsignificantly</span><br />
<span style="color: #0b5394;">off the coast</span><br />
<span style="color: #0b5394;">there was</span><br />
<span style="color: #0b5394;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #0b5394;">a splash quite unnoticed</span><br />
<span style="color: #0b5394;">this was</span><br />
<span style="color: #0b5394;">Icarus drowning</span><br />
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While W. H. Auden, in his <i>Musée des Beaux Arts</i>, writes from the affronted perspective of a humanist who has not quite shaken off his expectation that tragedy should take center stage:<br />
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<span style="color: #0b5394;">In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away</span><br />
<span style="color: #0b5394;">Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may</span><br />
<span style="color: #0b5394;">Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,</span><br />
<span style="color: #0b5394;">But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone</span><br />
<span style="color: #0b5394;">As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green</span><br />
<span style="color: #0b5394;">Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen</span><br />
<span style="color: #0b5394;">Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,</span><br />
<span style="color: #0b5394;">Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on. </span><br />
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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. <br />
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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 <i>The Calling of Saint Matthew</i>:<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>The Calling of Saint Matthew</i>, Caravaggio, oil on canvas, 127”x130”, 1599-1600</span></div>
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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Carolyn Marks Blackwood online: <a href="http://www.vonlintel.com/Carolyn-Marks-Blackwood.html" target="_blank">http://www.vonlintel.com/<wbr></wbr>Carolyn-Marks-Blackwood.html</a><br />
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This post is a continuation of my "single work appreciation day" series, of which other instances can be found in my Huffington Post archive. Danielhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15597234920324948705noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2293319073550947163.post-60303403157122803222015-04-07T11:12:00.000-04:002015-04-07T11:12:37.970-04:00First SessionHere’s a clear instance of a phenomenon I keep noticing in my drawings. I was at <a href="http://www.lisadinhofer.com/">Lisa Dinhofer</a>’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.<br />
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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:<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>Dea Sitting</i> (detail), 2015, graphite and white pencil on Rives BFK Tan, 15”x11”</span></div>
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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.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>First Portrait of Leah, January 15, 2009</i>, graphite and white pencil on Rives BFK Tan, 15”x11” (drawing much smaller)</span></div>
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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.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>Preparatory Sketch for Meiosis II</i>, 2013, graphite and white pencil on Rives BFK Tan, 15”x11”</span></div>
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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.<br />
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On the other hand, consider the entire drawing of Dea:<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>Dea Sitting</i>, 2015, graphite and white pencil on Rives BFK Tan, 15”x11”</span></div>
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>Portrait of Dea</i>, 2015, graphite and white pencil on Rives BFK Tan, 15”x11”</span></div>
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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.Danielhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15597234920324948705noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2293319073550947163.post-16878064709311588812014-12-22T08:47:00.000-05:002014-12-23T08:06:54.271-05:00The Bright SilenceI have always had very good luck with artwork of Manou, a dancer who has, sadly, left New York. This is my first painting of her, which was purchased before anyone knew who I was for a very decent price by Chicago super-collector <a href="http://www.tullman.com/collection/detail.asp?artID=M&artist=Maidman&image=maidman_the_minoan.jpg">Howard Tullman</a>.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>The Minoan</i>, oil on canvas, 60”x36”, 2010</span></div>
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This is my second painting of her, which hung for a while at Charles Saatchi’s restaurant in London, and which has gone viral on Tumblr every few months since I painted it.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>Hands #1</i>, oil on canvas, 24”x24”, 2011</span></div>
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Manou turns up once in a while, and I work with her as much as I can when she does. On her most recent visit, I did a series of red line drawings of her on white paper.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>Red Manou Drawing #16</i>, pencil on paper, 15”x11”, 2014</span></div>
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Having only a few sessions together, I shot a bunch of reference pictures for work on my own later on. I’m by no means above doing this in such cases. After she’d jetted back to London, I studied what I’d shot and started drawing things I think I might like to do paintings of as some kind of a body of work.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>Manou Kneeling</i>, pencil on paper, 15”x11”, 2014 </span></div>
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This hypothetical group of paintings would be composed like the painting of her hands above - high key lighting, no deep darks, and a white background. And in fact I soon had an opportunity to test the concept. I was invited to show a piece in <a href="http://www.flowersgallery.com/exhibitions/flowers/2014/small-is-beautiful/"><i>Small is Beautiful</i></a>, the 40th annual small works show at Flowers Gallery (this year held at the Chelsea, New York branch). <br />
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The rule for this show was that the artwork must be no larger than 9”x7”. So I chose 8”x6” panels, and painted two compositions I had focused on from the body of available images (I was asked to provide a backup painting in case the first sold and walked out the door). Here is the first painting I did:<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>Manou Walks Away</i>, oil on panel, 8”x6”, 2014</span></div>
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This is the one that is currently hanging at Flowers Gallery, a subject we will cover in a future blog post. The second painting, the reserve, is a different take on Manou kneeling:<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>Manou Sits on Her Feet</i>, oil on panel, 8”x6”, 2014</span></div>
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Once I had painted these two paintings, I sat back and looked at them and thought about them. The more I thought, the more familiar they appeared. If you look at them again, you will see that these stark configurations of the human body against a zero-background take on a grammatic quality. They are like letters. For me, in fact, they are exactly that: letters. They are letters in the long human alphabet.<br />
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Our attention gusts backward now to how I thought when I was very little. The whole world, to me, was like these compositions: a glowing whiteness, out of which fragments of things, detailed and various, emerged and solidified. These centered objects came into view, and hovered in fascinating richness before the eye of my attention, and then receded. I am not a hierarchical thinker by nature. Whatever lies before me is the most fascinating thing in the world; all other things are beyond dull, they simply cease to exist.<br />
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And yet I was not entirely without hierarchy. I craved one thing before the eye of my attention beyond all others, and this was human being. I wished to see people in absolute clarity. I did it, too, but in a terribly incomplete way. I studied the acts of human beings from a purely physical perspective. The endless permutations of what the body could do made a visual impression on me. This impression vibrated with a numinous quality, and yet it was divorced from psychology, narrative, and anything we would call human meaning. It leapt directly from the physical to the divine, without a trace of the world of men and women in between. I myself suffered emotions, of empathy, of jealousy, of adoration, of desire. But these emotions were not linked to what is generally understood as the human condition. I was a follower of the collarbone, the scapula, the carotid pulse, the bunched bicep.<br />
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My experience of human beings hovered at their surface. It was like Aristotle’s reasoning on the concept of place in the fourth volume of the <i>Physics</i>. He wrestles with the question of whether the matter of which a thing is composed is its place, or whether perhaps the form of the thing is its place, before ultimately concluding that place is “the boundary of the containing body at which it is in contact with the contained body… place is thought to be a kind of surface, and as it were a vessel, i.e. a container of the thing.” (<i>Physics</i>, IV: 212, 6-29)<br />
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You can see here a formulation of a concept I have raised before, the mystery-in-broad-daylight. One may collect a virtually infinite amount of information, a total documentation of boundary or surface - the seemingness of things - without once progressing beyond it into matter - what they are. Comprehend, if you will, the silence and loneliness of such a conception of humanity. Madly searching, it sees all, and yet it remains essentially outside: an omniscient beetle, a flatlander. This was my primary experience of other human beings. It was sensual, crystalline in its brightness, and strictly inhumane.<br />
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Although this was my experience, it did not define the limit of my awareness. I was aware of my insufficiency, of my solitude, and I fought to expand the basic form of my perception. I held a firm belief that the long alphabet would someday sound itself out into words, that seas of meaning underlay that broad ocean of letters. Indeed, the very breadth of the ocean hinted at a nearly unendurable abundance of meaning, a fertility of meaning beyond all compare. One day I would penetrate that surface and drown joyfully in the matter of it.<br />
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All these things I recalled as I studied the two small paintings of Manou. I recalled them, and I realized I remain as much at the surface as I have ever been. Those of you who know me in person probably know me as gregarious, friendly, and extroverted. I am all of these things, but they are habits built upon an analytic substructure, and the substructure emerged from a decision - a decision to become human - followed by years of practice. Perhaps we all go through this. Perhaps I am unusual only in remembering it, and in recognizing my social nature as alien. Even I forget most of the time what parts of me are original, and what parts I chose and built. <br />
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These paintings, these two letters in the long alphabet, brought my original nature forcibly back to mind. What do these two letters mean? Nothing at all. They do not form a word. They are mute, and through them, I am mute. They hover at the very edge of the boundary of humanity, puzzling out and revealing all its formal beauty. But they are ultimately without any form of idea which could be called human.<br />
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Compared with other artists of my age and abilities, my work has always seemed relatively devoid of ideas. It is anchored in the sensual, in the surfaces of things. This is not to say that I am blind to what people think of as ideas, or that I do not appreciate them in the work of others. But my fundamental nature does not generate that kind of thing, and so, even in my most humanistic work, echoes of the bright and silent mystery remain. Neither, however, am I a follower of depiction. Others paint with more detail, more verisimilitude, and more rigor than I do. I once set myself in competition with these masters, but I do not any longer. The best I have to offer is not becoming the best at depicting. Rather, it is to become able to catch the beauty and longing of that bright silence. A long time ago, I received a wonderful compliment from an artist I admire very much. She said that she liked my anatomical drawings above others because they plumbed the depths of the dead, and yet were lyrical.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>Deeper Muscles of the Neck</i>, ink on paper, 14”x11”, 2002</span></div>
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I dare not say such a thing about myself, but I hope that there is indeed a specific quality of the lyrical - what a wonderful word - that is unique to me and which my endless practice has begun to allow me to convey.<br />
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Nothing is so categorical as this description might suggest. I was never autistic; my work is not about surfaces only; some of it contains narrative. But it is also true that if you work with enough models, you will encounter one who interfaces precisely with each of the phases of your consciousness, even the ones you’ve forgotten. Because Manou has been a disciplined dancer for a very, very long time, she has refined her own body into a seamlessly efficient and graceful machine. She partakes easily of purely formal gestures because they yield the letters of her native artistic medium.<br />
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Therefore my work with her leads me back to the bright primal silence, the land of cold wind, light, and color. It shows me where I began, a place that must be unburied in order to be known, a strange and lonely place which provided the awful, beautiful, meaningless alphabet in which I transcribe everything I say.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>Portrait of Manou</i>, pencil on paper, 15”x11”, 2014 </span></div>
Danielhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15597234920324948705noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2293319073550947163.post-50576738929708412392014-12-21T20:04:00.001-05:002014-12-21T20:04:54.087-05:00The Prince and I Sat Down Near the Window<span style="font-family: inherit;"><u><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">The Find</span></u>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">When I was little and I read
stories for young readers, the stories frequently emphasized that their
characters were going on an adventure. This seemed very exciting, and I hoped
that I too would get to go on an adventure someday. When I got older, I did not
see any adventures around me, and I was disappointed. But when I got a little
older than that, I realized that having an adventure is a matter of
perspective. If you recognize what you’re doing as an adventure, you will tend
to find that life is all adventures. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">I’d like to tell you about an
adventure along these lines that I wandered into last year. It’s been at the
back of my mind to tell it, and it involves extraordinary generosity on the
part of somebody else, so it needs telling. Here’s what happened.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">Spring Street Studio is my
usual life drawing workshop. It’s a basement room in Soho with a model stand
surrounded by chairs and tables. The walls are lined with bookcases. Often
there are papers scattered about, abandoned sketches or photocopies of artwork.
One day I found such a sheet of paper, a color copy of a painting. Glancing at
it, I saw that it was a fabulous painting of Leah, my favorite model.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">I love to see art that other
artists make working with models I know, and in this case, I felt a very
particular sting - the sting of seeing work better than yours based on <i>your
model.</i> But I didn’t recognize the hand. Whose was this? I picked up the
sheet and studied it - and realized that it was not a painting of Leah at all.
The model had a similar coloring and sense of pose. She had big breasts shaped
like Leah’s, and her belly folded when she sat the same way Leah’s folds. But
this model had a longer back and sharper features - she was somebody else. In
fact, the painting wasn’t even contemporary. It looked like an academic French
painting from the early to mid-19th century. Who painted this?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">Like a magpie, I made off
with the sheet of paper. I didn’t know how to identify the work, but I did have
an even more magpie idea: why not make off with the painting itself? That is,
restage it. It was a Leah kind of a pose. The artist was most likely dead. Why
not steal his composition and paint my own version with Leah? I filed it under
next-few-ideas-to-execute - then suddenly I found out whose painting it was.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><u><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">The Painter</span></u></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">Romanticizing the past is
nothing new. Rome has been the eternal city for a very long time. Between about
1800 and 1850, young French painters flocked to Italy to soak up classical art.
And not only classical art, but the landscapes which formed the backdrops of
its creation. Outside the city, painters made nearly mystical pilgrimages to
sketch hills and trees and ruins, blue skies and afternoon clouds. A genre of
French painting sprang up: beautiful Italian landscapes painted on little
canvases set up on folding travel-easels, painted in a few hours on day trips
to the countryside. Decades before the Impressionists arrived, students of the
Academy were already making swift records of the fleeting moods of weather, light,
and land.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">Jacques-Louis David, <i>Portrait
de Madame Récamier</i>, 1800, oil on canvas</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">Near the end of the previous
century, David had imposed a stern neoclassical ideal on French painting. A
single generation later, his student Ingres was already remodeling that ideal,
his painting slipping into a lifelong erotic reverie of proliferating nudes and
fluid, elongated lines. David’s sensibility was well suited to a national style
of painting. He survived the factionalism of his day, emerging as a favorite of
successive revolutionary forces and then of Napoleon. Ingres, so much more
idiosyncratic and personal in his work, was a more awkward fit with his
national role. He suffered a hot-and-cold relationship with the French art
world, acknowledged as a leading artist of the State, but never entirely
admired. In 1834, he retreated in a snit to Italy to direct the Académie de
France à Rome. The flow of young French painters with their classical
aspirations and portable easels washed up on the shores of his influence,
beholding the spectacle of his perpetually in-progress <i>Venus Anadyomene</i>
on their way out to take in the tumbled columns and the greenery.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">Jean Auguste Dominique
Ingres, <i>Venus Anadyomene</i>, 1825-50, oil on canvas</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">She instructed them in the
director’s strangely retro vision for contemporary classicism - body
lengthened, contrapposto exaggerated - Greco-Roman to be sure, but with a
French sexiness: a daringly affectionate nod to the vanished entitlements of
the ancien régime, a recapitulation of the middle class fantasy of aristocrats
engaged in baroque sexual games.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">In 1838, one of Ingres’s
students followed him from France to the Villa Medici, and in 1840, a second,
his best friend, followed. German-born Henri Lehmann was melancholy, even
depressive. His inclinations in his own art at the time were timid, his
ambition to become worthy of the tradition his training entrusted to him. His <i>ami</i>,
the French Théodore Chassériau, was more high-spirited, an adventurer who, as
Lehmann wrote to fellow intellectual (and probably also lover) the comtesse
d’Agoult, “on the third day after his arrival in Rome, drew the portrait of a
woman, whom in my heart I had coveted for years as the most desirable of
models.” Chassériau was that kind of a best friend.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">The two of them were largely
inseparable during the late summer and autumn of 1840. During their time apart,
Lehmann did finally get that model to sit for him, describing her in another
letter to the comtesse as one of the “four most beautiful girls that you could
have as a model in Rome.” It’s not clear exactly who this model is, but his
description suggests she’s a professional model and famous among artists. By
resemblance to other work, this makes it as likely as not that she’s Marietta,
who sat for Danish artist Constantin Hansen in 1839, and for French art titan
Camille Corot in 1843:</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span id="goog_2086618828"></span><span id="goog_2086618829"></span><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">Constantin Hansen, <i>Resting
Model</i>, 1839 (painted in Rome)</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">Camille Corot, <i>Roman
Odalisque (Marietta)</i>, 1843, oil on paper</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">I’d like to think it’s
Marietta, anyway. I think models get the short end of the stick, art
historically speaking, and I am always happy when the name and works of one can
be dragged back from the maw of forgetfulness and erasure. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">Lehmann used his sessions
with this overpoweringly beautiful model, Marietta or not, to flesh out a
painting idea he was mulling over. The painting started with these lines from
Victor Hugo’s 1831 poem <i>Les Feuilles d'automne</i>:</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">There, pensive willows that
weep on the shore,</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">And, like an indolent and naive
bather,</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">Allow the ends of their
tresses to soak in the water.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">Lehmann translated this image
into a group of nude women on the forested bank of a river - the central figure
taking her pose from the <i>Venus Anadyomene</i>, and the others grouped around
her, out-languiding each other. One of his first steps in producing the piece
was figuring out the right pose for each langorous nude river-lady. That’s what
the painting I saw at Spring Street was. It was a Lehmann study of maybe-Marietta
(clearly the Leah of Rome in the late 1830’s) in preparation for a bigger,
fancier painting.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><u><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">The Painting</span></u></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">Usually Lehmann made
preparatory sketches until he reached a design that satisfied him. Then he
would transfer this design to the canvas using the precision techniques of
squaring or tracing. He didn’t just do this for the big paintings. He did it
for little paintings of the size and ambition of the <i>Study of a Female Nude</i>
as well. But infrared reflectography of this painting reveals no evidence of
such a method of preparation. This absence tells us something about the
painting. It was probably done in a single sitting, maybe three hours or five,
with the model present. It’s a live painting.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">I am a careful and methodical
painter myself, and I use squaring to transfer designs to the canvas before I
begin. So I know what it means when you ditch this technique, because I’ve been
there. It means that your subject inspires you enough to give in to trust -
trust in your subject, trust in yourself - to work on the high wire, without a
net: the painting may fail, but if it does not, if it succeeds, then it will
pulse with life, the life of having been painted in a series of irreversible
choices, each choice awake, vivid, true. To regularly paint over a squared
design, and then to choose to paint like this, is to commit to inspiration or
death in the work, and nothing between. There is no more vivid testimony to
what maybe-Marietta inspired in Lehmann. She inspired him to be better than
himself. That’s what muses do.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">Henri Lehmann, <i>Study of a
Female Nude</i>, 1840, oil on canvas, 14” x 8.75”</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">There is lettering underneath
the tall, beautiful ass of maybe-Marietta. Like Marietta’s own presence in the
painting, it may or may not really be there. It seems to read “À Chas” - “To
Chas.” If that’s what it says, it would appear to be inscribed by Lehmann to his
best friend Chassériau. It would suggest Lehmann assigned the painting as a
gift, a gift recalling a moment in the friendship of two creative young men,
sharing an adventure together in a foreign land, both of them drunk on talent
and prone to intense emotions and sentiments, chasing after the same women - a
summertime gift.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">But it never made it to
Chassériau.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">When Lehmann had arrived in
Rome, he’d lined up a prestigious gig - a portrait of the wife of the French
ambassador to the Holy See. And he was working on securing another commission,
a portrait of the famously pious and controversial Abbé Lacordaire. At the time
he was painting his <i>Study of a Female Nude</i>, the Lacordaire job had
progressed to that stressful and ambiguous point where the client has indicated
that the answer is yes, but never in so many words. Nothing is in writing, no
money has changed hands, nobody has committed to anything. So you, the artist,
just have to smooth your way through a few more days, and if everyone keeps
having a good time at these afternoon get-togethers, soon enough a letter will
be sent round to establish dates for the sittings, and all concerned will act
as if <i>of course</i> it was always understood the commission would take
place…</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">Anyway, Chassériau stole both
jobs, the ambassador’s wife and the Abbé. End of friendship; gift rescinded.
Ingres had had about enough of Chassériau’s bullshit by then too, and cut him
off. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><u><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">The Curator</span></u></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">How do I know all of this?
Because of the way I found out whose painting that was in the color copy at
Spring Street. I was flipping, as one does, through the <i>Metropolitan Museum
of Art Bulletin</i>, volume 70, no. 3, winter 2013, and, astonishingly, came
across a picture of the same obscure painting. It was part of an article on
those landscapes the French art students were busy painting in Italy - it
turned out the Met owned a lot of the landscapes, and also that mesmerizing <i>Study
of a Female Nude</i> that wasn’t Leah after all. Here’s the cover of the article:</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhawNwxKgMDk4KeRD6oyRymd2WQY91jFNRMyuFliZcm1bHSBTN32hyphenhyphenx0TlY3aa2AW-oXj6fMhNI_FxLmfQWVXZIigAs_dShnYDr8VhG3_I2l5dUp7Xi2A6alX70QSsHyon_COqa4SAVOWZC/s1600/graphic+5.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhawNwxKgMDk4KeRD6oyRymd2WQY91jFNRMyuFliZcm1bHSBTN32hyphenhyphenx0TlY3aa2AW-oXj6fMhNI_FxLmfQWVXZIigAs_dShnYDr8VhG3_I2l5dUp7Xi2A6alX70QSsHyon_COqa4SAVOWZC/s1600/graphic+5.jpg" height="200" width="154" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">I don’t know how you do
things, but here’s how I do things. If I find something interesting like this,
and I have more questions, and the writer isn’t dead, then I’ll try to get in
touch with him or her, and ask what I want to ask. In this instance, I wanted
to learn more about the history of the painting, so I emailed the Met and asked
if I could get in touch with the guy who wrote the article - one Asher Ethan
Miller, assistant research curator, European paintings department. Lo and
behold, he got back to me.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">Over the phone, he sketched
out the story of the painting, setting it not only into its historical context,
but its personal context for him. He’s a little bit in love with this
particular painting, and its tiny little perch in the tumultuous emergence of
modern art. He’s in love with its subject, and its paint, and its canvas, and
the story it may or may not contain. He’s in love with the letters between
Lehmann and the comtesse. He <i>wants</i> that ambiguous inscription to read “À
Chas” - if it reads “À Chas,” then the copious correspondence of everyone
involved nails down the rest: which afternoon the model came by, which
afternoon Chassériau dropped in on Lacordaire and guiled away the portrait
commission, what day Lehmann meant to give his precious gift to his friend and
what day he found out the truth… and if the inscription does not read “À Chas,”
well, all these things happened, but they don’t make such a good story with a
little painting for a prize. Therefore Asher Ethan Miller has sat down, as
others have before him, with <i>Study of a Female Nude </i>or its infrared
reflectograms, under a magnifying glass or a microscope, puzzling out the tiny,
sloppily written letters that do or do not loop together to form “À Chas.”</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">Miller is the extraordinarily
generous individual I mentioned at the start. His generosity is the generosity
of the scholar-enthusiast, who wishes above all to share his excitement in his
subject. Such enthusiasts of esoteric, unknown, beautiful things can be found
everywhere, and wait only on the passerby who shows an interest, to offer
everything they have collected and safeguarded. Perhaps I am such an enthusiast
myself; if not, I ought to be. It is a good and pure way to love and to live.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">Not long after our call, I
found myself at the Met, invited to go over the records of the painting.
Perhaps you’ve been to the Met, and strolled its majestic halls and rooms, in
awe at this or that part of the collection. It turns out that this nearly
universal mode of appreciating the Met is much like reading only the
even-numbered pages in a book. There is at least one more Met in the same
building as the public one. It is a network of offices, hallways, and rooms in
which the scholarly staff goes about its quiet business. This space is not
separate from the space you and I know. It is interleaved with it: it
constitutes the odd-numbered pages. It is right there in plain view, accessed
by subdued and handleless doors you will never notice if you are not looking,
and cannot open without official assistance. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">A colleague of Miller’s
ushered me through the looking glass, and I found myself in a tall, simple room
dominated by a long wooden study table. Desks on the periphery held antiquated
computers, a bulletin board displayed several notices, and one side was devoted
to wire mesh racks, on which were hung for storage some minor, you know, <i>masterpieces</i>
of the Renaissance and the Baroque. A folder was pulled from a file cabinet for
me. Inside of this folder were hundreds of pages of information relating to <i>Study
of a Female Nude</i>. One such folder exists for every item in the Met’s vast
collection. I couldn’t photocopy any pages, but I could transcribe whatever I
liked onto my laptop. So I sat at the wooden table for some hours, grateful
once again for my desultory high school French, reading everything, from the
laments of Lehmann about his crappy finances (June 4, 1839: “What a misfortune
to be poor when one is an artist at heart.”)(true) down to the modern-day
logistics which led to Lehmann’s painting winding up at the Met, grouped with a
world-class collection of 19th century academic French landscape studies of Italy.
This nude is not really a 19th century academic French landscape study of
Italy, in any way at all, but it tends to get lumped in with them on account of
time, place, style, and some dabs of dark green paint in the background.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">A few weeks later, I visited
the Met one last time in connection with this adventure, and walked the
galleries with Asher Ethan Miller himself. He is a shy and well-dressed man, on
the young side of middle age and sturdy of build, with spectacles and sandy
hair and a quiet voice. He is plainly uncomfortable discussing anything with a
stranger but the artwork itself. This he rhapsodizes about with great fervor,
and great fidelity to responsible scholarship - much more responsible, I’m
afraid, than the soap opera I am spinning here. He demonstrated a dimension of
appreciation of the Met which had generally occurred to me, but which I had
never contemplated in a clear and specific way. Starting with the Lehmann, he led
me from painting to painting, across dozens of paintings, tying elements of
each to the next, drawing a map of influence, of common sensibility, of
dialogue and progression, of analogy and accidental and purposeful similarity,
so that as he skillfully pulled the ropes, it was as if the great and complex
tent of the nineteenth century before Impressionism rose again from the ground
and took shape before my eyes. The awesome, globe-spanning virtue of the Met is
that the relevant paintings were all there, all within a few rooms of one
another, on display and ready to unfold their stories.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><u><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">Magpie</span></u></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">I got down to work with Leah.
We were painting together each week anyway, and we took a break from our other
projects to paint this one. I started with a preparatory sketch; I wanted to
compare what Leah’s body naturally did, with what Lehmann depicted maybe-Marietta
doing. At this point, I realized something that should have been obvious: you
learn a masterwork from the inside by copying it.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">Here’s my sketch alongside
the Lehmann painting:</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhyVr-TTYc-fotrlIJQo8Y9vK0y6qfkSVikv7uEFHQYMTOXV_Ye27RPg8gEPnxY6hqXBgS6CbMLNXAgiAn1OelgdXet18qH5sTjMm5zaRocZRARbauDqhdTLkYFU1eKhiyN-sFMNGkmVIS/s1600/graphic+6c.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhyVr-TTYc-fotrlIJQo8Y9vK0y6qfkSVikv7uEFHQYMTOXV_Ye27RPg8gEPnxY6hqXBgS6CbMLNXAgiAn1OelgdXet18qH5sTjMm5zaRocZRARbauDqhdTLkYFU1eKhiyN-sFMNGkmVIS/s1600/graphic+6c.jpg" height="125" width="200" /></a></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">left: Daniel Maidman, <i>Preparatory
Sketch for Interlude I</i>, pencil on paper, 2013, 15”x11”</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">right: Lehmann, <i>Study of a
Female Nude</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">If you compare it with the
original, a few interesting points emerge. Leah’s head looks enormous compared
with maybe-Marietta’s, and her arm looks very long. I happen to know that I got
Leah’s proportions right, which means that Lehmann’s figure is something like
nine heads tall - unrealistic superhero proportions. Stated another way,
Lehmann’s figure’s head and limbs are normally sized, and her spine is
unnaturally long.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">Another observation about the
spine: Leah’s lower spine curves backward when she sits in the Lehmann pose.
Maybe-Marietta’s does not. Leah’s back bows out and to the left, while maybe-Marietta’s
rises straight up. I pondered this difference at length, and ultimately
realized I was seeing the same curve, with one key difference: Lehmann <i>rotated
his</i> <i>entire depiction</i> <i>clockwise</i>. For whatever reason, the
straight rise of the spine was tremendously important to him. So in my squared
underdrawing for the painting, I made the same rotation. In doing that, I ran
into the same problem Lehmann ran into - I lost track of where the figure’s
foot belonged. You can see my erasure here:</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">underdrawing (detail), <i>Interlude
I</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">And you can see it in
Lehmann. It turns out the foot is the one spot where you lose what you’re doing
when you rotate this pose. In a 2009 article about the painting, Miller wrote:</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">“The canvas was larger when
Lehmann first painted it: the left tacking edge is original, but the right and
bottom edges are fully painted, indicating that they were cut down, while the
top edge barely extends around the stretcher member. Other evidence that the
canvas was cut down is the model's truncated foot at lower right.”</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">- Asher Ethan Miller, </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">A Study by Henri Lehmann for
his Femmes près de l'eau</span></i><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">, Master Drawings, Vol. 47, No. 4, 2009</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">It’s truncated because he
fucked it up. The uncertainty about where her artificially-rotated leg stops is
visible in the final painting in no fewer than four attempts at placing it, and
it was probably more of a mess before he trimmed a few inches off the right
side of the canvas. I’d wager he left the leg unpainted in his painting not
only because it worked, but because the waist was the last juncture on her body
where he could stop without awkwardly calling attention to the never-resolved
problem with the foot. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">Following Miller’s note that the undercoat was sienna, I placed a
raw sienna undercoat on my canvas:</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">the undercoat in raw sienna
thinned with turpenoid</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">And I got to work with Leah, painting my own Lehmann. For the
painting, I asked Leah to hold the more difficult head position maybe-Marietta
held.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">As I painted, I began to understand the strange distortions in
Lehmann’s figure. Consider another painting:</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">Notice the accentuated line
of the back, the simplified forms, the three-quarters light which glows upon
the figure, giving her strong, drawing-like outlines. Notice the pastoral
wooded scene which rounds out the composition. This is an 1807 painting, <i>Half-figure
of a Bather</i>, by Lehmann’s teacher, Ingres. It is under the strange hand of
Ingres that the female figure softens and becomes supple, lengthening to a
dream-like eternity of back; it is in Ingres that we find the calligraphic
stroke of the spine, the thick dark hair, the glowing skin, and the unending
show/don’t-show tease of the half-hidden face and breast, which makes the
slight rear view so natural in his work.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">The oddities in the Lehmann
painting are nothing more than the adoption of the tics of the instructor in
the art of the pupil. Most pivotally so, perhaps, are the broad smooth cheek,
and the dark piercing eye. In their Ingrism, they tell us that Lehmann’s vision
at this early point in his development was so profoundly shaped by Ingres that when
he went looking for beauty, and found it, he saw it through his master’s eye.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><u><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">Lehmann the Man</span></u></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">My adventure with Lehmann
started with a monofocal interest in the startling resemblance of the single
painting to Leah. But it expanded over time because things are usually very
interesting if you follow where they go. I hope I’ve shared the fascinations of
Lehmann the artist and Lehmann the melodrama character. But there is another
Lehmann who speaks most to me, Lehmann the man, and it is in relation to this
final Lehmann that I ultimately did my work on the painting. Why restage an old
painting? Well for one thing it was easy. But as an artist, it was this - the
implication of Lehmann the man I saw in the painting, and unfolded in the
research - this was the Lehmann I wanted to converse with. Art lets us speak to
the dead; or rather, it lends a kind of ongoing life to the voice of those who
passed away long ago.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">Who is Lehmann the man, at
least as I understand him? Consider for a moment Lehmann’s portrait of the
comtesse d’Agoult’s primary lover, Franz Liszt (the comtesse was a famous
author and knew everybody).</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">Lehmann, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Portrait of Franz Liszt</i>, ca. 1839</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">This is quite different from
the <i>Study of a Female Nude</i>. It’s more hard-edged and glossy and
decisive. It is a paradoxically sharp expression of a soft thought; the soft
thought is Romantic melancholia. The sensitive hand, the hunched back, the
half-shadowed face, expressive mouth, heroically flared nostril, haunted eye,
and furrowed brow - all are marks of the torment of the awakened mind, as
conceived by the Romantics. Lehmann ascribes these markers to Liszt, playing up
Liszt’s artistic genius. But, of course, he is depicting himself, as artists
tend to do. In a letter dated September 19, 1840, he writes, “I absolutely
cannot take art seriously. I have read things about it so fictitious as to be
absurd… items of genuine human interest quickly lead me back down false paths.”</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">I find this very moving
because I share these same doubts. I wake up thinking about art, I think about
art all day long, and I go to bed thinking about art. But I often have trouble
taking it seriously. It seems insipid and futile - certainly beneath the
dignity of anyone with any self-respect. What does it amount to? We argue about
it, look at it, write big fancy words about it, and assign limitless depths to
its meaning. But in fact it is stupid pictures on cloth, boring and of little
use to anyone.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">I understand that my flashes
of indifference to art are symptomatic of a deeper indifference, a sense of the
entire Earth as a stark and nasty theater-set, large enough to support the
illusion of weather as it turns around its single large stage lamp; and beyond
the Earth, the universe itself as a cold and listless region, unanswerable in
its lack of purpose, true motion, or hope. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">These are not healthy
thoughts. They tend to tie a weight to the hand so heavy that the hand can
scarcely grasp the brush and make the mark. Therefore I do fight them. I have
fought them for years, and largely banished them. But they murmur beyond the
edge of things, and can sometimes be glimpsed through a gap in the drapes. I
have a, ha ha ha, <i>series of paintings</i> I am working on which confronts
the problem square. But I am also attracted to Lehmann’s sense of disgust with
art, a disgust which bleeds before he can stop it into a general contempt for
humanity.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">What is so attractive about
this? For one thing I identify with it. And for another, he doesn’t let it stop
him. Suffering from his doubts, he goes on. He makes things. He wishes to croak
out a final “no,” but instead resolves to say “yes.” So when I paint my version
of his painting, I am saying back to him, “I hear the no, and I say yes too.” </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">Lehmann sometimes found
consolation, as many do, in favorite authors. In the same 1840 letter, he
writes, “Victor Hugo, with the strong conviction and beautiful eloquence of his
[writing], revives me a bit, and to him I owe that slight effervescence that
still raises my spirits.” </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">Let me refresh your memory of
Victor Hugo with an extended excerpt from a dream he transcribed on November
14, 1842. It is not the writing Lehmann was speaking about. But it makes the
point.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">“I was at home, but in a home
which is not my own, and which I do not know. There were several large
reception-rooms, very handsome, and brilliantly lighted. It was evening - a
summer evening. I was in one of these rooms, near a table, with some friends,
who were my friends in the dream, but not one of whom I know in waking life. A
lively conversation was going on, accompanied by shouts of laughter. The
windows were all wide open. Suddenly I hear a noise behind me. I turn round,
and I see coming towards me, amid a group of strangers, the Duke of Orleans.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">“…The prince and I sat down
near the window, which looked out upon a splendid prospect. It was the interior
of a city. In my dream I perfectly recognized this city, but in reality it was
a place I have never seen.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">“Underneath the window
stretched for a long distance between two dark blocks of buildings a broad
stream, made resplendent in parts by the light of the moon. At the far end, in
the mist, towered the two pointed and enormous steeples of a strange sort of
cathedral; on the left, very near to the window, the eye looked in vain down a
little dark alley…</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">“The sky was of a tender blue
and a lovely softness. In one place some trees, barely visible, were wafted in
a genial wind. The stream rippled gently. The whole scene had an indescribable
air of calm. It seemed as though in this spot one could penetrate into the very
soul of things. I called the attention of the prince to the fineness of the
night, and I distinctly remember that I said these words to him: ‘You are a
prince; you will be taught to admire human politics; learn also to admire
Nature.’</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">“As I was speaking to the
Duke of Orleans I felt that my nose began to bleed… The blood which I felt
streaming down my mouth and cheeks was very dark and thick… At length I turned
to M. Blanqui and said, “You are a doctor; stop this bleeding, and tell me what
it means.” …I continued to converse with the prince, and the blood continued to
flow.”</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">- Victor Hugo, </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">pp. 49-51, <i>Things Seen and
Essays</i>, Wildside Press, <i>The Works of Victor Hugo</i>, Volume 14</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">This passage has a number of
qualities which bear upon the question of what Lehmann saw in Hugo. Note,
first, how full of life Hugo is, how he brims with it. This is not only a
detailed world finely observed, but one utterly invented inside the man. Being
a description of a dream, it consists more profoundly than other texts in his
own substance. One senses in it the larger-than-life quality which Hugo himself
had. He is a city and its surrounding countryside. The scale of his life is
greater than that of other men, his colors brighter, his thoughts more
insightful, his emotions nobler. And yet he never takes leave of a relaxed and
brotherly empathy. You understand in the passage that Hugo does not see himself
as larger than other men. He sees all men at his grand scale, and if they have
lost the knack for spotting it too - he can remind them, with a little helpful
advice.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">But he is not without his
shadow. He so overflows with life that he cannot contain it. He bleeds
terribly, blood covering his face. No doctor can help him. He perseveres,
carrying on regardless, his mighty organism replenishing as swiftly as it
sloughs off.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">It is this ferocious,
all-too-human vitality which revives Lehmann from his torpor, like an electric
shock to the sciatic nerve. Lehmann, in the depths of his melancholy, is only
the shadow. He is all nosebleed and no dream city. He is empty and dull; there
are no details in him. To become complete again, he turns to Hugo to be
reminded of the rest of life.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">He writes “in my heart I had
coveted [maybe-Marietta] for years as the most desirable of models” - but from
shyness, from lassitude, from inertia, he did nothing. It took the bristling
initiative of a Chassériau, the wild acquisitiveness of a Hugo, to prompt
Lehmann into action.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">For my part, I like
Chassériau very much. I think his awkwardly-drawn <i>Toilet of Esther</i> is a
sexier take on the <i>Venus Anadyomene</i> than either Ingres or Lehmann ever
produced. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjneLmVzCqyiERve0saHln43d_40QY4xe_bdXVebiyXwjdURLTJxb0OqRAWZGciHMnrypabsTGjt1id-Op546AHrhfa4Jls9sWytC6x_2nJ0M3bWpgEBZtjamY1fHhY5JE58XCCMrxZYH5q/s1600/graphic+11a.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjneLmVzCqyiERve0saHln43d_40QY4xe_bdXVebiyXwjdURLTJxb0OqRAWZGciHMnrypabsTGjt1id-Op546AHrhfa4Jls9sWytC6x_2nJ0M3bWpgEBZtjamY1fHhY5JE58XCCMrxZYH5q/s1600/graphic+11a.jpg" height="200" width="165" /></a></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">Théodore Chassériau, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Toilet of Esther</i>, 1841, oil on
canvas, 18”x14”</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">But I also like Lehmann, and
I like Hugo. I am all of them, and none of them. I have Chassériau’s lust but I
lack his animal impulsiveness and will to dominance. I am afflicted with
Lehmann’s sense of the curse of mere being, but I am not eclipsed by it. I am
not so livid as Hugo. I can see what might save a stranger, or think I do, but
I would not any longer grab him by the shoulders and roar salvation in his
face. I tried that, and it didn’t work.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">Each of these men had a will
to greatness, which he fulfilled or failed to fulfill in the measure of his own
capacity. I too have this will to greatness, but whether anything will come of
it, I can never know. Increasingly I measure it in terms of what I can give
away, and so the ambition consists in making fine things to pass along. This
may not be much of a measure, but it’s a work in progress, and has the virtue,
at long last, of making the process nearly as pleasing as the goal.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">Here is how my restaging of Lehmann’s painting finished up.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZ6YJ7aOLwCBdYaX0yQ8L0hzKgpa7iYdpjb5Vv-WwXswzd8jUER0eX4Vm9zRdLgBK9MThEPZEPBhcJM0JWxKIDmFtOZ1KssjeDtaoAP-Y-mspSJCGDZAZ9gNHMX0Q_StnhBWzrF6rpf5mP/s1600/graphic+12.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZ6YJ7aOLwCBdYaX0yQ8L0hzKgpa7iYdpjb5Vv-WwXswzd8jUER0eX4Vm9zRdLgBK9MThEPZEPBhcJM0JWxKIDmFtOZ1KssjeDtaoAP-Y-mspSJCGDZAZ9gNHMX0Q_StnhBWzrF6rpf5mP/s1600/graphic+12.JPG" height="200" width="160" /></a></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">Daniel Maidman, <i>Intermission
I – À Lehmann</i>, 2013, oil on linen, 20”x16”</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">I learned in it what I could from Lehmann, and from Ingres too, and
from maybe-Marietta, and from Leah; the eye of each of us stares back from the
painting, although only mine and Leah’s are living now.</span></span></div>
Danielhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15597234920324948705noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2293319073550947163.post-36114157454461617922014-11-26T18:20:00.000-05:002014-11-26T18:57:42.109-05:00ChaseI’m sure this quirk of mine is true for most artists - how could it be otherwise? It is this: I have a catalogue of elements from other art which persists in my mind, and which I seek to use in my own work. Or, rather, I don’t seek, usually. But when the opportunity presents of its own accord, I am eager to follow up.<br />
<br />
Consider this painting by William Merritt Chase:<br />
<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhILI8vw-LDzHh9WSY_X5diNYdUkEQXgLidMAWVkuFq4AOhM7BKny4SGcknClinUoWHZVAL_Xchvhrasqms8kwZM5iV2Ovc9C7CyzhV7Y41XRChFWW1OJBdUYNemAqysjedVPyONPNvR4CH/s1600/graphic+1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhILI8vw-LDzHh9WSY_X5diNYdUkEQXgLidMAWVkuFq4AOhM7BKny4SGcknClinUoWHZVAL_Xchvhrasqms8kwZM5iV2Ovc9C7CyzhV7Y41XRChFWW1OJBdUYNemAqysjedVPyONPNvR4CH/s1600/graphic+1.jpg" height="200" width="143" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">William Merritt Chase, <i>Back of a Nude</i>, 1888, oil on canvas, 18”x13”</span></div>
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It made a strong impression on me right away. What grabbed me was that gleaming highlight on her back. Her back is almost without anatomy, the merest of rounded forms, the spine only a hint of furrow. Everything is subsumed by that swoony gleam.<br />
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I conceived a craving to paint my own gleam like this. It became a long-term, nearly unconscious craving. It took care of itself in the back of my mind, with perhaps a hundred or five hundred or a thousand other bits and pieces of artwork I have admired.<br />
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In fact, I never thought it could be reproduced, because I didn’t expect to see so rounded a back as to support this gleam, and I have difficulty simplifying forms to produce theatrical effects. But then one day, not having pondered the Chase in years, Leah was in my studio, on a break, checking her text messages, and through some accidental confluence of light and angle and pose, the detail bleached right out of her, and that spectacular gleam swam into being. I said, “Stop! Right there!” I have worked very hard at responding more decisively to hunches and accidents.<br />
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Leah stopped, and I pulled out a little canvas, and I thought - <i>what color shall I start from? </i>And I answered: <i>raw sienna</i> - which, when spread thinly, produces that strange caramel yellow that I had forgotten anchors Chase’s painting. I spent the next hour or two finally fulfilling this one particular craving, to paint the smooth and gleaming back.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLhzL1qjech8uyU1d9M1U2vhQaYIiE92bELe-jjfnd0F6cVA_WmFZcob0y54fc7tlsIr5JVTSUzqepLaTpMR2prfel4iYrCULfTGGgSg8V6oR5CIE_v12UUZFDpX_NRLvOueOzmO8VAc4-/s1600/graphic+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLhzL1qjech8uyU1d9M1U2vhQaYIiE92bELe-jjfnd0F6cVA_WmFZcob0y54fc7tlsIr5JVTSUzqepLaTpMR2prfel4iYrCULfTGGgSg8V6oR5CIE_v12UUZFDpX_NRLvOueOzmO8VAc4-/s1600/graphic+2.jpg" height="200" width="156" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Daniel Maidman,<i> Leah Checking Her Text Messages</i>, 2014, oil on canvas, 14"x11"</span></div>
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More crudely sketched in, yes, and the regions of value less blended. But I am not Chase, and he is not me. I simply stole his beautiful idea. Now I have this painting on the wall of my office, where I enjoy it all the time. I have to imagine most artists are this kind of magpie.Danielhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15597234920324948705noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2293319073550947163.post-77409651465165045122014-10-09T00:57:00.001-04:002014-10-09T00:57:34.455-04:00Your Model Knows You Better Than You Know YourselfHere is the painting I am working on of Rachel just now.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjl4pShEupMMYjGAMDjjyxM2jkZ8XuT2taNduyfksM1cnf8OOBFtJqJeMqzlfnIqf0hDpXf2jD6wH24b964t5CLmJ1JKfD10VQjHZbI3LFRXqeF7OGh9FCZvGf2pCd3rvdpBZH7FY8UJBud/s1600/graphic+1.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjl4pShEupMMYjGAMDjjyxM2jkZ8XuT2taNduyfksM1cnf8OOBFtJqJeMqzlfnIqf0hDpXf2jD6wH24b964t5CLmJ1JKfD10VQjHZbI3LFRXqeF7OGh9FCZvGf2pCd3rvdpBZH7FY8UJBud/s1600/graphic+1.jpeg" height="200" width="153" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>The Athlete Wraps Her Ankle</i>, work in progress, oil on linen, 40”x30”</span></div>
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We were actually working out other poses for the painting, all of them seated. Seated, because Rachel’s ankle is injured and she can’t do a sustained standing pose just yet. So I was drawing other poses, and then she was wrapping her ankle, and I said, “Stop - that’s it.”<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>Preparatory Sketch for ‘The Athlete Wraps Her Ankle’</i>, pencil on paper, 15”x11”</span></div>
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As I was drawing, I realized it had triggered some memory in me - it took a little while to place it, but then I remembered.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>Boy with Thorn, Also Called Fedele, and Spinaro</i>, Roman Copy of a Greek Original</span></div>
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The next session, we got to work on the painting. I was using the impasto technique I’ve been teaching myself lately - first a heavy burlap-like canvas, and then the sculpted transparent oleopasto underlayer, and finally thick paint (for me) on top of that. And I was getting the same satisfyingly physical results I have gotten since I started.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">detail, <i>The Athlete Wraps Her Ankle</i>, work in progress (apologies for blurry cell phone picture)</span></div>
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At the end of the last session, I had a little time left over - not enough for the face, but more than one wants to waste. Rachel had a very clear tan line from a week in the Caribbean, so I figured we should do a drawing of that. I love tan lines in art, a thing I learned as a child from the dazzling, carefree, sunlit world of Hockney’s Beverly Hills, so similar in its drowsily sensual way to the unmarked glowing hours of Matisse’s afternoons in Nice.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIEe6EHTFe-byjPC27gVbWDiyj_7EkONEPu41uBo-603wPMID1T2FfSpi7P2PC0oUxBIPacVKLRCLZbsgdb86lCzKVUYT0YrW6MPJXJDqeXAQ65KHuweKE64nmlH0a4WSBryVpoJeurxYN/s1600/graphic+5.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIEe6EHTFe-byjPC27gVbWDiyj_7EkONEPu41uBo-603wPMID1T2FfSpi7P2PC0oUxBIPacVKLRCLZbsgdb86lCzKVUYT0YrW6MPJXJDqeXAQ65KHuweKE64nmlH0a4WSBryVpoJeurxYN/s1600/graphic+5.jpg" height="197" width="200" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">David Hockney, <i>Sunbather</i>, 1966</span></div>
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As I was getting ready to do my drawing, I explained to Rachel that I had recently switched from a 2b pencil to a softer 3b pencil, because I was finding I wanted to make my darks darker and heavier. And she said, “Oh, so it’s like your painting.” And I said, “What do you mean?” And she said, “You went from your thin, delicate surface to this thick paint in just the same way.”<br />
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I hadn’t thought of that. But of course it’s true.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>Rachel’s Tanline</i>, pencil on paper, 15”x11”</span></div>
Danielhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15597234920324948705noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2293319073550947163.post-74073013519436644092014-08-17T23:08:00.000-04:002014-08-17T23:08:25.688-04:00The HunterI’m working on painting in a different way right now, and I thought I’d tell you how it came about.<br /><br />I’ve long had a problem with the surfaces of my paintings. I like how they function as representation, but I don’t quite like them as physical objects. The paint is too thin. It has little or no tactile presence; it does not say “I am here” or “touch me.” This deficit has been a low-level background irritation for years. In the foreground, I worked on improving my techniques. But I had an anxiety about the lack of sensual presence of my work. It felt not quite real.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhe41i1bt2LWIvbTTJvgzrHMiDnEdvw-8A32uzvz6H_1lqOBPT9_ELNoEAITkH_brr7pHDGbXsc3J3rm1rOgreSu_mfrpvCGFCqlgTL2gKyKs_KIJEGMF0PAYNUKCDQKxmBFYRD4KT9tOt7/s1600/graphic+1.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhe41i1bt2LWIvbTTJvgzrHMiDnEdvw-8A32uzvz6H_1lqOBPT9_ELNoEAITkH_brr7pHDGbXsc3J3rm1rOgreSu_mfrpvCGFCqlgTL2gKyKs_KIJEGMF0PAYNUKCDQKxmBFYRD4KT9tOt7/s1600/graphic+1.JPG" height="200" width="200" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>Blue Leah #11</i>, 2012, oil on canvas, 24”x24”</span></div>
<br />This situation could have gone on indefinitely, but I encountered a startling chain of inspiring events. First is a precursor process: for the past year and a half, I have frequently drawn a model, Rachel, at Spring Street. Rachel is a dancer, and has a massive and powerful body, particularly her upper legs.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>Rachel Reclining</i>, 2013, pencil on paper, 15”x11”</span></div>
<br />I absolutely loved drawing Rachel, and decided to do a painting of her, the first full-length life-sized figure I had felt inspired to do in a long time. I pictured the painting as drawing on her overwhelming physical presence, and reflecting it with warm earth tones, a clay wall background, and a unified, classical pose. This was going to be the first of six paintings, which is why it’s called <i>The Hexagon 1a</i>.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyATjzvYfnKYWnHuv55-nXZMM7Nn3gIb80PHXzb3JbfrI4aDu5laybEDLkudCafErHzGXa8CCT5EkWq_pZEJobZ3z4Sc5p3Du4_H_xSRCWiDAByrG5omlJWQbLSbJDofDxE751aMft2yeG/s1600/graphic+3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyATjzvYfnKYWnHuv55-nXZMM7Nn3gIb80PHXzb3JbfrI4aDu5laybEDLkudCafErHzGXa8CCT5EkWq_pZEJobZ3z4Sc5p3Du4_H_xSRCWiDAByrG5omlJWQbLSbJDofDxE751aMft2yeG/s1600/graphic+3.jpg" height="200" width="133" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>The Hexagon 1a</i>, 2013, oil on canvas, 72”x48”</span></div>
<br />However, that same ethereal quality overcame the piece. This made me incredibly upset. I wanted it to feel corporeal, fleshly, real. But it felt like an image rather than a thing. Stung, I abandoned the project, and moved the dilemma of the weak surface closer to the front of my mind. No solution presented itself. Or, rather, the solution was always obvious but I could not accept it and focus on it yet.<br /><br />Around this time, or a little later, the Met had a show of Balthus paintings. Balthus is a really mixed bag; my favorite work in the show was the drawings of his cat Mitsou, allegedly made when he was 11. Given their pictorial maturity, and that his mother shepherded them to publication with her buddy Rainer Maria Rilke, I am inclined to suspect that they are her work, cleverly ascribed to him to boost their star quality. This, for instance, is a “self portrait” crying after Mitsou has run away, the last illustration in the sequence. If Balthus drew it, nothing he made before or after reached not only the degree, but the kind, of direct pathos and unflinching self-awareness displayed here.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLZDJLErNTL42xv-iDj1KOJJz2XMZO3_-buD_nQoLj1h3CpQUtFUXYQrlwKz9eI760PA8oqriInYB8f45v1AhDkisJIvijPQgvJ2sG5u3EnOkxg7ZK3ABpRLhALTf5JNzTAH1hyHtQl1Xt/s1600/graphic+4.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLZDJLErNTL42xv-iDj1KOJJz2XMZO3_-buD_nQoLj1h3CpQUtFUXYQrlwKz9eI760PA8oqriInYB8f45v1AhDkisJIvijPQgvJ2sG5u3EnOkxg7ZK3ABpRLhALTf5JNzTAH1hyHtQl1Xt/s1600/graphic+4.jpg" height="200" width="156" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Balthus, <i>Mitsou drawing #40</i>, 1919, black ink on paper, 6”x5”</span></div>
<br />That’s not really my point though. There was a painting in the show, <i>The Victim</i>, which, sadly, I could not photograph, and of which there is no good reproduction online. So here’s a bad one.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgeFBm7MHvCBb2876EQO-DXJDBrL2FQDyRs29A5L29qWTRXRQiZ21UEg_3Kg7J9_ROGTTCeOKAWh1kjF5XvDMqCtDEzMah8jWtiuTM-BEot37qKw9uzs382CAq2Okd6EoNfHlqErh1dMctk/s1600/graphic+5.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgeFBm7MHvCBb2876EQO-DXJDBrL2FQDyRs29A5L29qWTRXRQiZ21UEg_3Kg7J9_ROGTTCeOKAWh1kjF5XvDMqCtDEzMah8jWtiuTM-BEot37qKw9uzs382CAq2Okd6EoNfHlqErh1dMctk/s1600/graphic+5.jpg" height="118" width="200" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Balthus, <i>The Victim</i>, 1939-46, oil on canvas, 52”x86”</span></div>
<br />This is an enormous painting, the woman dauntingly and tantalizingly life-sized. What struck me was the paint toward the top of her belly, just below her rib cage. It is a thick impasto. It has a texture to it, and this texture is delicious. It is simply wonderful, possessing all the physical presence that I was craving in my own work. I became absorbed in this texture, soaking up everything I could about it.<br /><br />Although I could not photograph it, the texture was by no means unique, so I can show you what I’m talking about. This is from the forehead of a portrait by van Dyck, courtesy of this excellent blog post: <a href="http://www.studiorousar.com/2011/10/30/head-on-a-platter/">http://www.studiorousar.com/2011/10/30/head-on-a-platter/</a><br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Anthony van Dyck, <i>Portrait of Cornelis van der Geest</i> [detail], 1620, oil on oak, 15”x13”</span></div>
<br />Visible here are pale tendrils edged with darker regions. They look like waves frozen as they crested, and in a sense they are. Solids with this structure tend to be composed of long molecules. As they oxidize, they harden, but their length allows them to retain some of the dynamic-looking structure they had when they were whipped-up fluids. <br /><br />Oil paint is mainly a mixture of pigment and oil. Multiple websites on the kind of impasto we see in the van Dyck painting report that this particular texture results from lead white paint made with thickened or “bodied” oil - this means the oil has been exposed to light or heat to begin its oxidation process. Its small molecules have already begun to polymerize into larger molecules, the beginnings of the hard oil film of a dry painting. This makes the paint sticky and allows it to retain the sculptural qualities imposed on it by the painter’s brush. <br /><br />I stumbled out of the Balthus show, ears ringing as if I had been punched - this was what I needed to do! In a sense, I could only learn this from Balthus, and not from the Rembrandts displaying the same techniques only a few rooms away. Why? Because Balthus, when you get right down to it, is a mediocrity. He did one thing brilliantly, and that was to render himself like so much fat; he melted down his neurosis about young girls and made a crystalline observation of his own deformity. Apart from this single shining achievement, as much moral as artistic, he is an indifferent painter. And yet his impasto lends mass and dignity to the figures in which it appears. It makes something monumental out of the otherwise trivial.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Balthus, <i>The Room</i>, 1948</span></div>
<br />Balthus’s lousy painting clarifies the influence of the impasto, as if he were constructing a single-variable experiment. In Rembrandt, any of a thousand brilliant techniques, touches, and ideas could lead to the bedazzlement of the work. In Balthus, there is very little apart from the impasto. Its thundering impact clearly belongs to itself and nothing else. This is highly instructive.<br /><br />Therefore I stumbled out of the show, ears ringing. The way forward was challenging, but clear!<br /><br />Naturally, I went to the gift shop next, because that’s what you do before leaving an art museum. And here the final event in the inspiring chain took place. I came upon a sculpture reproduction from behind.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQiRotLqtOCgXku6wQZOsbtqJZVHB6Ynd1t8b18SkhQlIuLORmSCXAu_FYtMo04WwF7R7YiUOHZ9Xm1CjmkPOQg_JziQNdOuxJ05CFnVhpWtBouwvUurMJnETK0L4KiZyBfUaUv4dOgXme/s1600/graphic+8.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQiRotLqtOCgXku6wQZOsbtqJZVHB6Ynd1t8b18SkhQlIuLORmSCXAu_FYtMo04WwF7R7YiUOHZ9Xm1CjmkPOQg_JziQNdOuxJ05CFnVhpWtBouwvUurMJnETK0L4KiZyBfUaUv4dOgXme/s1600/graphic+8.jpg" height="200" width="145" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Jane Poupelet, <i>Woman at her Toilet</i>, 1909, bonded bronze reproduction (my photograph)</span></div>
<br />This graceful back, so streamlined and feminine, so powerful, was very like Rachel’s back. When I say that Rachel is massive, I don’t mean that she weighs a great deal. I mean that she has the aerodynamic might of art deco aesthetics. Her build seems designed by the same elegant hand that made the locomotives, the skyscrapers, the lights, and the bridges of the 1920’s. The heart of deco was simplified mass-production design, seeking to imbue everyday objects of the industrial age with a formal beauty affordable and appreciable to the common man. Deco was optimized for strength and mass, youthful and electric with hope. This sculpted back suggested all these things to me, and suggesting them, recalled Rachel’s back.<br /><br />Abruptly, the circuit closed. My long-standing interest in impasto meshed with my interest in finding a suitable way to paint Rachel. From being two things, they became one thing.<br /><br />I knew what to do next, but I didn’t know how to do it. I took to Facebook to ask around about impasto techniques. This generated a bewildering profusion of suggestions, but I went with <a href="http://dorianvallejo.com/">Dorian Vallejo</a>’s recommendation of Oleopasto - a modern thickener, analogous to bodied oil. It turned out to be similar, in practice, to fast-drying vaseline.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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It took some wrestling to get it to work at all: I describe the process in detail in the current issue of <a href="https://international-artist.com/"><i>International Artist</i></a>, and will post the article here once the issue goes off the newsstands.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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On top of that, though, I wanted to replicate something else I noticed in the Balthus - the burlap-like heavy weave of the canvas. I think of this as “macho canvas” and have noticed a number of contemporary painters, whom I think of as macho painters, using this kind of canvas. It lends an air of Authority to the work, and I have been a bit scornful of it in the past because I really didn’t think these painters had earned the stentorian tone of Authority. However, I needed all the ammunition I could get to accomplish two goals, one negative and one positive:<br /><br />The positive goal was to further texture the hashed-up sensual surface I was working toward.<br /><br />The negative goal was to disrupt my anticipated tendency to go back to smooth, blended, thin brushwork. I wanted to enlist anything I could to keep that from happening.<br /><br />So I got over my thing about the heavy canvas and found some. I started alone, as I often do when using a radically new process with which I am likely to fail embarrassingly and expensively. I painted a small painting from a reference picture of Rachel’s back I had taken for some other work we were doing together. I used my knuckle-dragging, ball-scratching canvas, and plenty of Oleopasto and broken brushwork.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1d5_orUDvsNaCZuhyo0oCO0zdZiLZ7Vk0vqUPkXEtEAAW8WnRBqD0M4foVriYPKnh0ImG6dlgk62WAzqRMNbBKJRViuvH7z9tnQMOEWLKXWAEKwmjmMf8UzH8ctytCWvQR6AGxPATP5ZA/s1600/graphic+11.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1d5_orUDvsNaCZuhyo0oCO0zdZiLZ7Vk0vqUPkXEtEAAW8WnRBqD0M4foVriYPKnh0ImG6dlgk62WAzqRMNbBKJRViuvH7z9tnQMOEWLKXWAEKwmjmMf8UzH8ctytCWvQR6AGxPATP5ZA/s1600/graphic+11.jpg" height="200" width="150" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>Rachel’s Back</i>, 2014, oil on linen, 24”x18”</span></div>
<br />Now, I don’t think this is bad at all (happily, it was not-bad enough to make it into the highly competitive annual <a href="http://www.manifestgallery.org/about/schedule.html">show of nudes</a> at <a href="http://www.manifestgallery.org/">MANIFEST</a>, an arts organization in Cincinnati which I admire very much). Here’s what I think works: it has the very quality I was seeking. It has body. Take this section of the right shoulder.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>Rachel’s Back</i> [detail], 2014, oil on linen, 24”x18”</span></div>
<br />The canvas imposes a deep set of bumps and valleys, and on top of it the Oleopasto layer ridges the surface, and the paint proper adds a final layer of textured directionality. The paint physically comes forward from the canvas. It has sensual presence. For all that, it seems like a first effort to me; in tackling the new territory, my other skills were thrown years backward. Here’s the Rachel painting I did immediately before this one. It’s the same size as <i>Rachel’s Back</i>.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRepYWl1tP6SA3kL_6G-uo9PyCz7CeWLhVNGJ_8sW_FAReVjsFFMOcOO3C96Ui5apeA3l6SwszvraGEn0nAERrFYLwagcYA-PjupBN4uD45bgqubTR8LpztpkuZlE9gUkDiKeNgk7VN1Im/s1600/graphic+13.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRepYWl1tP6SA3kL_6G-uo9PyCz7CeWLhVNGJ_8sW_FAReVjsFFMOcOO3C96Ui5apeA3l6SwszvraGEn0nAERrFYLwagcYA-PjupBN4uD45bgqubTR8LpztpkuZlE9gUkDiKeNgk7VN1Im/s1600/graphic+13.jpg" height="200" width="150" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>Rachel and the Colors</i>, 2014, oil on panel, 24”x18”</span></div>
<br />Compare the fluidity of anatomy and pose in <i>Rachel and the Colors</i> and <i>Rachel’s Back</i>. In <i>Rachel’s Back</i>, I cleverly concealed my clunky draughtsmanship with a centered and monumental figure - nobody expects dynamism from that sort of figure - see Balthus’s <i>The Room</i> above. The anatomy is simplified and unsubtle, and the crudity of the form seems to me to act against the complexity of emotion I usually see in my work. I sacrificed a great deal to reach that force of surface, that sense of thing instead of image. But I am hoping, with practice, to claw my way back to much of the rest of my vocabulary as well.<br /><br />This first attempt was not the back painting of Rachel that I meant, that illuminating morning at the Met.<br /><br />So I practiced. I painted a few more paintings, with mixed results. And finally, having forgotten the original inspiration, I came on my own to the same figure I saw in the gift shop. Noodling around with ideas for paintings of Rachel, I had her sit curled up and I drew this:<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>Preparatory Sketch for a Painting of Rachel</i>, 2014, pencil on paper, 15”x11”</span></div>
<br />This was a brutally difficult drawing to do. I could not get the relative heights of her back and her butt right. I kept screwing around with the basic drawing, making myself crazy. And all this time I did not think about the sculpture in the Met at all. A true theft should be unconscious, don’t you think? If it isn’t, how are you supposed to take ownership of the stolen work?<br /><br />Anyhow, I was going to paint something else, but at the last minute, I decided to paint this instead. I had finally found a stable source for pre-stretched pre-primed burlap canvases: the <a href="http://www.jerrysartarama.com/discount-art-supplies/canvas-and-boards/stretched-canvas/odessa-professional-russian-style-stretched-linen-canvas/large-extra-bold.htm">Odessa</a> line from Jerry’s Artarama (although given that it’s Ukrainian, who knows how long it’ll be around).<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I laid out the image on a 40”x30” canvas, making it dauntingly life sized. Then in two very, very fast sessions, I painted the whole fucking thing.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>Large Portrait of Rachel’s Back</i>, 2014, oil on linen, 40”x30”</span></div>
<br />That, amici, is exactly the painting I meant. Once it was done, the charm lifted from my eyes and I realized I had painted the thing I saw when, ears ringing, I stumbled out of the Balthus show.<br /><br />So - what do you do from there? I suppose you continue building, and that building never stops. I decided to paint a companion to this one, making use of these tools to express something more involved - not better necessarily, but harder to do. Here are the preparatory sketches, which I liked very much. The figure seemed to me to take on a rhythmic sequence of lights and darks, while the face expressed very much of the shining humanity which makes faces, in their endless uniquenesses, fascinating to me after all this time.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>Preparatory Sketches for a Painting of Rachel</i>, 2014, both pencil on paper, 15”x11”</span></div>
<br />I whipped out another 40”x30” swaggering Ukrainian gangster of a canvas, and got to work. Again, it was a two-session painting - six hours working live with Rachel, maybe another four messing around on the canvas without her present. I didn’t know what to call it, but that question answered itself. Rachel is going through one of those cursed corridors we all must weather eventually: one after another, people important to her are dying young. It is a terrible thing to endure, and terrible to observe from outside. She is having the worst hard time. On the day that we did the face, she was coming fresh from finding out about another death. Her conversation and her gaze kept drifting into her grief. Instead of asking her to present a different face or hiding from it in the work, I tried to paint how she was then. So I called it <i>Rachel Grieving</i>.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>Rachel Grieving</i>, 2014, oil on linen, 40”x30”</span></div>
<br />Stepping back from its dramaturgical meaning to its formal properties, I maintained the rhythm of light and dark while focusing the light along a central axis, from the highlights on her legs up to her face. I used the texture of the Oleopasto and the overlying impasto to convey presence and mass, in her powerful legs and mighty ribcage. This is not so fluid and graceful as the portrait of her back, but to me it still has that thingness I am always chasing.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>Rachel Grieving</i> [detail], 2014, oil on linen, 40”x30”</span></div>
<br />The paint is thickly built here, and the drawing is simple and inaccurate. That’s alright. I don’t need the thing to be sophisticated or clean. I will go on suffering pangs of envy when I see artists doing that, but in this particular instance I chose not to attempt it, and I have to live both with what that loses me and what it gains me. The loss is an appearance of clumsiness and lack of facility. But I think that the crude work gains me a certain emotional force I could not personally otherwise access. Her eyes glisten as they slide away from us. Her mouth pushes forward slightly, and her lips are a thin tense line. This to me is a picture of a person suffering, and it is neither more nor less than what it needs to be. I asked for Rachel’s permission to make this so much about her awful passage, and she gave me her permission. She was glad, it turns out, to have a memorial of it. I would perhaps be a better artist if I took without asking, but I do not have the stomach to be better at that price. And I can get most of what I want without becoming a bully or an outlaw.<br /><br />Next time we get together I’d like to talk with you about Stephen Wright’s very sensible objections to what I am doing with my so-called impasto, and my response to that. But for now, I’d like to talk again about something that has come up throughout the history of this blog, and that is the question of assertion. As you know by now, I believe that art must not come humbly up to you, begging to explain itself. It must assert itself, often recklessly and without explanation, nearly to the point of assault.<br /><br />Two instances of assertion link themselves for me now in a way that they have not in the past. Both have made a strong impression on me. First, Marsden Hartley’s <i>Madawaska—Acadian Light-Heavy</i>, a large oil painting I saw at the <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/70028?search_no=4&index=5">Art Institute in Chicago</a> not long ago:<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Marsden Hartley, <i>Madawaska—Acadian Light-Heavy</i>, 1940, oil on hardboard, 40”x30”</span></div>
<br />The edge of light on his left arm (picture right) is what struck me. It is such a ridiculous pictorial streak of light, slightly plausible but really just there to make that arm stand out from the dimness. It originates in a purely utilitarian purpose, and it is transparent about this purpose. This very transparency turns it into art. It is a naked assertion of the power of the artist. It demands respect because it does not justify its presence on any aesthetic grounds at all; this, paradoxically, is what makes it an unanswerably self-sufficient aesthetic mark. The <i>utilitarian</i>, filtered through the intentionality of art, attains the enigma of the <i>arbitrary</i>. There is a good chance that the most profound images are arbitrary. Looking backward, one finds that no road leads to them. They simply are.<br /><br />This same exact edge of light, transformed from the utilitarian to the arbitrary, made a lasting impression on me many years before - in 1999, in fact. It was a particular shot in the <i>The Matrix</i>, a shot which is never far from my mind.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgm5yqRCA9VAsnOgcr1Hkm2LdyZwl5zKoRPPxUcK1KBbF61lBdgtuUTdHgmlhjK3UClJzW24-RE_Gai7MpwcA6WMQjBbQXryhU23WldDIoXY7fvL7mZ7bZCZ2JadAzHy2S-iIqClFz744VW/s1600/graphic+21.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgm5yqRCA9VAsnOgcr1Hkm2LdyZwl5zKoRPPxUcK1KBbF61lBdgtuUTdHgmlhjK3UClJzW24-RE_Gai7MpwcA6WMQjBbQXryhU23WldDIoXY7fvL7mZ7bZCZ2JadAzHy2S-iIqClFz744VW/s1600/graphic+21.jpg" height="82" width="200" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">The Wachowskis, <i>The Matrix</i> [still], 1999, motion picture</span></div>
<br />I direct you here to the edge of blue light on Morpheus’s jawline picture right. This is a movie. That didn’t just happen. The cinematographer, Bill Pope, decided to separate the shadowed side of Morpheus’s face from the equally dark background, so he put up a light to edge his jawline. In itself, this is not so surprising. It’s a classic technique dating to the earliest days of studio-shot Hollywood movies. It’s called a kicker. What makes this particular kicker so special is how understated it is. It’s barely there, and yet it is there enough. It trusts itself to be no more nor less than is absolutely necessary. This little tiny kicker is a poem in the plainly visible but little appreciated language of cinematography. It forms its own island of the aesthetic in the multi-channel maelstrom that is any movie. In its dimension, it makes the same leap from the utilitarian to the arbitrary as Hartley’s rim-lit arm, and for the same reason: strength of assertion.<br /><br />These two images swam back into my mind, and linked for the first time, as I was painting the large painting of Rachel’s back. Her dark hair was threatening to vanish into the dark background. I didn’t want that, and I thought, “What the hell, I’ll put in a rim light.”<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgvStlic3zSW21VrFdRCJo3tHe2q5lJjwMpnQgEXcWBYyNvHdO_FOX_11MV_A2WozQonLOw-d91m5dDGepHmeQBXXyGi-veEQXkbTNCfZbSKe5ZjTAmKEvoCRvLdMKuf7T7w1Lvp9ROrxP/s1600/graphic+22.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgvStlic3zSW21VrFdRCJo3tHe2q5lJjwMpnQgEXcWBYyNvHdO_FOX_11MV_A2WozQonLOw-d91m5dDGepHmeQBXXyGi-veEQXkbTNCfZbSKe5ZjTAmKEvoCRvLdMKuf7T7w1Lvp9ROrxP/s1600/graphic+22.jpg" height="200" width="148" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>Large Portrait of Rachel’s Back</i> [detail], 2014, oil on linen, 40”x30”</span></div>
<br />There is no physical justification for that rim light at all, and no particular reason you should notice it. It is nothing much for you. But for me, it was a tiny marker on the path to assertion. I have been many things in relation to art in my evolution as an artist: lover and beloved, disciple, analyst, supplicant, celebrant, receiver of visions. But in relation to art as assertion, I am a predatory closed loop. I am and always have been a hunter hunting myself.Danielhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15597234920324948705noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2293319073550947163.post-59366561746506134832014-06-16T09:59:00.003-04:002014-06-16T09:59:29.845-04:00Jerry RepliesPerhaps some of you were wondering what happened with Jerry Saltz after that post. He replied.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYrGSR9ibOf3E2AbgU5FT0JURTutkXCKCy4hg4954DDDyiC4uxKqvpZqGDsoaYhm35JCAXj2zKumpdgKq1NABsFKjJ9uM9gOF1AwSoMoBBENvNV4O-VAHUmKd5PlPVgrE06HhYuYxm82Ug/s1600/graphic+12.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYrGSR9ibOf3E2AbgU5FT0JURTutkXCKCy4hg4954DDDyiC4uxKqvpZqGDsoaYhm35JCAXj2zKumpdgKq1NABsFKjJ9uM9gOF1AwSoMoBBENvNV4O-VAHUmKd5PlPVgrE06HhYuYxm82Ug/s1600/graphic+12.jpg" height="41" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}" data-reactid=".21a.1:3:1:$comment713760261998613_715123718528934:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body"><span class="UFICommentBody" data-reactid=".21a.1:3:1:$comment713760261998613_715123718528934:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0"><span data-reactid=".21a.1:3:1:$comment713760261998613_715123718528934:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$0:0">Dear Daniel Maidman;</span><br data-reactid=".21a.1:3:1:$comment713760261998613_715123718528934:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$1:0" /><br data-reactid=".21a.1:3:1:$comment713760261998613_715123718528934:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$3:0" /><span data-reactid=".21a.1:3:1:$comment713760261998613_715123718528934:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$4:0">Thank you for sending me your “Dear Jerry; Notes on Life Drawing.” </span><br data-reactid=".21a.1:3:1:$comment713760261998613_715123718528934:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$5:0" /><br data-reactid=".21a.1:3:1:$comment713760261998613_715123718528934:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$7:0" /><span data-reactid=".21a.1:3:1:$comment713760261998613_715123718528934:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$8:0">Thank
you for giving my few-lines of Facebook comment so much serious
thought. I am touched. And not surprised knowing you the way I do. I
respect your seriousness and diligence about art. </span><br data-reactid=".21a.1:3:1:$comment713760261998613_715123718528934:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$9:0" /><br data-reactid=".21a.1:3:1:$comment713760261998613_715123718528934:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$11:0" /><span data-reactid=".21a.1:3:1:$comment713760261998613_715123718528934:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$12:0">You write that I have “an enormous framework of doctrines within which (your) work makes sense.”</span><br data-reactid=".21a.1:3:1:$comment713760261998613_715123718528934:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$13:0" /><span data-reactid=".21a.1:3:1:$comment713760261998613_715123718528934:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$14:0">I
suppose so; I love art. I don’t love your drawings. (Just as you have
made clear on numerous occasions that you don't like what I have have
written about artists.) </span><br data-reactid=".21a.1:3:1:$comment713760261998613_715123718528934:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$15:0" /><br data-reactid=".21a.1:3:1:$comment713760261998613_715123718528934:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$17:0" /><span data-reactid=".21a.1:3:1:$comment713760261998613_715123718528934:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$18:0">I’m
sure your whole diagram about “art drive” and “sex drive” and “prior
erotic force” makes sense as a theory to you. I found it tedious.
Whatever theory works for you is good by me. (Probably if I had to
reduce mine to a formula like that it would make no sense to anyone.)</span><br data-reactid=".21a.1:3:1:$comment713760261998613_715123718528934:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$19:0" /><br data-reactid=".21a.1:3:1:$comment713760261998613_715123718528934:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$21:0" /><span data-reactid=".21a.1:3:1:$comment713760261998613_715123718528934:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$22:0">You use the painter Jenny Morgan in your argument about your work. </span><br data-reactid=".21a.1:3:1:$comment713760261998613_715123718528934:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$23:0" /><span data-reactid=".21a.1:3:1:$comment713760261998613_715123718528934:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$24:0">I
like her work very much; I have since she was a Graduate Student at
SVA. I see nothing whatsoever in common between your work and hers.
(Less now that you have written about your work.)</span><br data-reactid=".21a.1:3:1:$comment713760261998613_715123718528934:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$25:0" /><br data-reactid=".21a.1:3:1:$comment713760261998613_715123718528934:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$27:0" /><span data-reactid=".21a.1:3:1:$comment713760261998613_715123718528934:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$28:0">You write that me not liking your work is “a failure in” me. I have many failings; my failings “contain multitudes.” </span><br data-reactid=".21a.1:3:1:$comment713760261998613_715123718528934:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$29:0" /><br data-reactid=".21a.1:3:1:$comment713760261998613_715123718528934:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$31:0" /><span data-reactid=".21a.1:3:1:$comment713760261998613_715123718528934:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$32:0">You write and I subjected your work to “categorical dismissal.” </span><br data-reactid=".21a.1:3:1:$comment713760261998613_715123718528934:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$33:0" /><span data-reactid=".21a.1:3:1:$comment713760261998613_715123718528934:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$34:0">It
may have seemed that way to you in the comment I quickly wrote on your
fb. But I love a lot of highly-skilled academic figuration and “life
Drawing.” Contemporary and otherwise. Of course.</span><br data-reactid=".21a.1:3:1:$comment713760261998613_715123718528934:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$35:0" /><br data-reactid=".21a.1:3:1:$comment713760261998613_715123718528934:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$37:0" /><span data-reactid=".21a.1:3:1:$comment713760261998613_715123718528934:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$38:0">I’m just not that into your work. </span><br data-reactid=".21a.1:3:1:$comment713760261998613_715123718528934:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$39:0" /><span data-reactid=".21a.1:3:1:$comment713760261998613_715123718528934:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$40:0">If
you deem that as a failure on my part, fine by me. Your work leaves me
cold and strikes me as typical life-drawing with nothing else to
recommend it. If that’s my fault, fine. </span><br data-reactid=".21a.1:3:1:$comment713760261998613_715123718528934:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$41:0" /><br data-reactid=".21a.1:3:1:$comment713760261998613_715123718528934:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$43:0" /><span data-reactid=".21a.1:3:1:$comment713760261998613_715123718528934:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$44:0">You write that I should “transcend” my taste.</span><br data-reactid=".21a.1:3:1:$comment713760261998613_715123718528934:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$45:0" /><span data-reactid=".21a.1:3:1:$comment713760261998613_715123718528934:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$46:0">Art makes me do that every day. </span><br data-reactid=".21a.1:3:1:$comment713760261998613_715123718528934:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$47:0" /><span data-reactid=".21a.1:3:1:$comment713760261998613_715123718528934:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$48:0">Just
not your art. (And I have given it years; this isn’t a “kneejerk”
“categorical” dismissal.” I’d like to think that I’m at least more
giving than that.)</span><br data-reactid=".21a.1:3:1:$comment713760261998613_715123718528934:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$49:0" /><br data-reactid=".21a.1:3:1:$comment713760261998613_715123718528934:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$51:0" /><span data-reactid=".21a.1:3:1:$comment713760261998613_715123718528934:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$52:0">You write that I should “drive my taste beyond my inclinations.”</span><br data-reactid=".21a.1:3:1:$comment713760261998613_715123718528934:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$53:0" /><span data-reactid=".21a.1:3:1:$comment713760261998613_715123718528934:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$54:0">Art
makes me do that every day. Every day. You can’t believe the sort of
art that I like that horrifies me that I like. (How do you think that I
felt when I thought about George Bush’s self-portrait in the shower or
bathtub “I’d buy those at a yard sale”?)</span><br data-reactid=".21a.1:3:1:$comment713760261998613_715123718528934:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$55:0" /><br data-reactid=".21a.1:3:1:$comment713760261998613_715123718528934:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$57:0" /><span data-reactid=".21a.1:3:1:$comment713760261998613_715123718528934:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$58:0">You write that your “way of making art is not a threat” to me. </span><br data-reactid=".21a.1:3:1:$comment713760261998613_715123718528934:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$59:0" /><span data-reactid=".21a.1:3:1:$comment713760261998613_715123718528934:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$60:0">Of course it isn’t. Ways of making art don’t threaten. </span><br data-reactid=".21a.1:3:1:$comment713760261998613_715123718528934:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$61:0" /><br data-reactid=".21a.1:3:1:$comment713760261998613_715123718528934:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$63:0" /><span data-reactid=".21a.1:3:1:$comment713760261998613_715123718528934:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$64:0">You write that you are not my “enemy.”</span><br data-reactid=".21a.1:3:1:$comment713760261998613_715123718528934:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$65:0" /><span data-reactid=".21a.1:3:1:$comment713760261998613_715123718528934:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$66:0">I am not yours, either. </span><br data-reactid=".21a.1:3:1:$comment713760261998613_715123718528934:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$67:0" /><br data-reactid=".21a.1:3:1:$comment713760261998613_715123718528934:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$69:0" /><span data-reactid=".21a.1:3:1:$comment713760261998613_715123718528934:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$70:0">You
write that you want to teach me to draw the way you draw. (You mention
that it is great as a heterosexual man to be around these naked women.) </span><br data-reactid=".21a.1:3:1:$comment713760261998613_715123718528934:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$71:0" /><span data-reactid=".21a.1:3:1:$comment713760261998613_715123718528934:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$72:0">That is a very very generous, sweet offer, Daniel. I am genuinely touched. Really. </span><br data-reactid=".21a.1:3:1:$comment713760261998613_715123718528934:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$73:0" /><span data-reactid=".21a.1:3:1:$comment713760261998613_715123718528934:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$74:0">Alas,
you are right in saying, however, that I would respond by saying that I
have no time. I don’t. Weekly critics only wish they had that kind of
time. </span><br data-reactid=".21a.1:3:1:$comment713760261998613_715123718528934:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$75:0" /><br data-reactid=".21a.1:3:1:$comment713760261998613_715123718528934:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$77:0" /><span data-reactid=".21a.1:3:1:$comment713760261998613_715123718528934:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$78:0">Finally,
Daniel, if I did have time to take you up on this extraordinary offer
(especially considering the level of skill which I still think that you
are mastering and have mastered), I would not want to learn to draw the
way that you draw. I would not want to learn the ways that you translate
the three-dimensional world into a two-dimensional one; the ways that
you consider space and perspective and possess and surface or color or
line. And more. </span><br data-reactid=".21a.1:3:1:$comment713760261998613_715123718528934:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$79:0" /><br data-reactid=".21a.1:3:1:$comment713760261998613_715123718528934:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$81:0" /><span data-reactid=".21a.1:3:1:$comment713760261998613_715123718528934:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$82:0">Again,
I love a lot of academic figuration and so-called “life-drawing.” Just
not yours, is all. (And I’ve given it a lot of time.)</span><br data-reactid=".21a.1:3:1:$comment713760261998613_715123718528934:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$83:0" /><br data-reactid=".21a.1:3:1:$comment713760261998613_715123718528934:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$85:0" /><span data-reactid=".21a.1:3:1:$comment713760261998613_715123718528934:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$86:0">Thank
you again for taking the time and thought to write your statement. I
saw that a large community of like-minded artists felt rallied to your
call. I love that. I love people who use their energy that way rather
than simply criticizing how others use their energies. </span><br data-reactid=".21a.1:3:1:$comment713760261998613_715123718528934:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$87:0" /><br data-reactid=".21a.1:3:1:$comment713760261998613_715123718528934:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$89:0" /><span data-reactid=".21a.1:3:1:$comment713760261998613_715123718528934:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$90:0">Now we both really have to get back to our real work. Thank you so much again.</span></span></span><br />
<span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}" data-reactid=".21a.1:3:1:$comment713760261998613_715123718528934:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body"><span class="UFICommentBody" data-reactid=".21a.1:3:1:$comment713760261998613_715123718528934:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0"><span data-reactid=".21a.1:3:1:$comment713760261998613_715123718528934:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$90:0"> </span><br data-reactid=".21a.1:3:1:$comment713760261998613_715123718528934:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$91:0" /><span data-reactid=".21a.1:3:1:$comment713760261998613_715123718528934:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$92:0">Jerry Saltz</span></span></span> <br />
<br />Danielhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15597234920324948705noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2293319073550947163.post-24084619942580661132014-06-16T09:58:00.001-04:002014-06-16T09:58:17.379-04:00Dear Jerry: Notes on Life DrawingThis post appeared at <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/daniel-maidman/dear-jerry-notes-on-life-_b_5453722.html"><i>Huffington</i></a> on June 5, where it is now my most popular post yet, at 2,600+ "like"s. This startled me, since it is a 4,500-word monstrosity of a piece. I meant to repost it here, and I'm finally getting around to it.<br />
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<u>The Gift-Challenge</u><br />
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“Life drawing” is an accepted term for making drawings from direct observation of (often nude) models. In any major American city, you can find uninstructed, open-to-the-public life drawing workshops without too much effort. You show up with your pencil and your sketchbook, you pay your fifteen dollars, and you draw for three hours.<br />
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I am self-taught as a figurative painter, and the major means of my self-teaching has been such life drawing workshops, first in Los Angeles and then in New York. I have been attending them, on average, twice a week, since 1998. Going by the boxes I keep them in, the drawings I have produced in that time would be around 75 inches tall if stacked atop one another - taller than I am.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Daniel Maidman, <i>Preparatory Sketch for Meiosis VI</i>, pencil on paper, 15”x11”, 2014</span></div>
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As some of you know, I scan and post most of my life drawings to Facebook. In my current folder, “Selected Drawings: 2014,” I received the following comment a few days ago:<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"> Facebook comment, May 31, 2014</span></div>
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Jerry Saltz is the senior art critic at <i>New York Magazine</i>. We know one another <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/daniel-maidman/how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying_b_1344773.html">a bit</a>. On the face of it, his comment is pretty harsh and dismissive. That’s not the whole picture though. Saltz is compulsively extroverted over social media, but his seeming omnipresence doesn’t mean he has infinite time. More people want Saltz to pay attention to more art than any one person can look at. So it’s very flattering when he turns up to admit in public that he’s been thinking about your work. By his standards, this is a fairly long comment. All of that factors into its meaning.<br />
<br />
What I read in it is that Jerry has been looking at my drawings over time, and mulling them over. He has an enormous framework of doctrines within which my work makes no sense, and yet he finds he either can’t, or won’t, ignore what I’m doing. In one sense, he is asking me to defend my work. But in another sense he is asking me to make my work available to him too. I would never say no to either request. The first makes us both stronger, and the second makes us both richer.<br />
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As it happens, I use Jerry as a handy stand-in for a set of concepts about art largely opposed to my own. As he likes me, so I like him. I don’t need to agree with somebody to like them and consider what they have to say. He’s pretty sharp, so when I’m figuring out in my mind how to describe what I do, I sometimes find it helpful to phrase it in terms of a response to Jerry’s doubts. I had been planning this essay anyway. It’s gratifying, though, to be replying to the actual Saltz, and not a fantasy stand-in.<br />
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I’m going to answer Jerry’s questions by backing way up and taking a running leap at the subject.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Daniel Maidman, <i>Magic Reclining, Foreshortened</i>, pencil on paper, 15”x11”, 2013</span></div>
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<u>Why We Life Draw: The Prior Erotic Force</u><br />
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The day after a bachelor party some years ago, I snarled to a buddy of mine, “That’s the last time I go to a strip club.” He said, “What’s your problem with strip clubs?” I said, “I think they’re tawdry and depressing, and overall, they’re just not my favorite venue for hanging out with naked women.” Pause. I looked over. A little vein was throbbing in his forehead. I said, “What?” He said, “Most of us don’t have a variety of venues where we hang out with naked women we’re not dating.” [Julia, this was, of course, Jonathan]<br />
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This is a funny instance of the question one gets asked repeatedly about life drawing: aren’t you really just using this as an excuse to hang out with naked women?<br />
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I’ve given this question a lot of thought, and here’s what I think. I think that in a sense, yes, we are. Non-life-drawers often assume that life drawing involves a sideways translation of one impulse into another impulse:<br />
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But this assumption is flawed. I read the sex drive as a powerful force, but a specific one. I think it is one channel into which a much more profound and general force can be diverted, which I label the prior erotic force: erotic, because it is the force of the life-drive itself, and prior, because it comes before all other forces. The sex process and the art process bear certain structural similarities, not because one is a simulacrum of the other, but because both have a common origin.<br />
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A naked woman in the context of the art drive - and, if the artist is a straight male, and serious, a naked man - becomes the subject of an erotic craving, but that craving is not sexual. It is artistic. (1) It has to do not with physical reward, but with the enlightenment that we crave in knowledge of one another as human beings with human forms. The persistence of the figure in art from the first known art objects, down through the present, answers neither to sex nor to chance, but to spiritual necessity. We need to know one another, by means of sight. This will not become obsolete or irrelevant until the brain leaves behind its facial and body recognition circuitry (2), and the soul its desire for companionship and possession.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"> Daniel Maidman, <i>Leah Seated, Facing Away</i>, pencil on paper, 15”x11”, 2014</span></div>
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<u>Excellence in Seeing: Life Drawing as <i>Technê</i></u><br />
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In modern English, we would tend to draw a distinction between talent and skill. To illustrate the linked concepts, let’s consider a clear instance of excellence in both, like superstar athlete Michael Jordan. It is Air Jordan’s <i>talent</i> that gives him the potential to become one of the greatest ninjas of his or any age. But it is only through years of training in <i>ninjutsu</i>, such as by climbing mountains, collecting rare flowers, drinking hallucinogenic tea, and leaping from tree stump to tree stump while fighting multiple warriors with a stick, that he actualizes his talent by means of an acquired set of <i>skills</i>.<br />
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This model of talent, which is inborn, and skill, which comes from training and experience, is useful in many contexts, but I think it doesn’t quite serve our purposes here. Since we’re talking about philosophy things, it seems sensible to turn to the Greeks for terminology. I’d like to re-introduce a Greek concept similar to skill, but not quite the same - <i>technê</i>. (3)<br />
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The Greek <i>technê</i> varies in meaning over time, but it seems to keep two essential components: a. it involves skilled action, and b. the action is performed in the context of a mindfulness in regard to the purpose of the action, which resides outside the action itself. <i>Technê</i> is the workingman’s <i>poiesis</i>.<br />
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Aristotle distinguishes <i>technê</i> from virtue (<i>aretê</i>) in that the merit of <i>aretê</i> does not lie in some exterior object. Virtuous people display <i>aretê</i> by choice and character, and its end lies in itself and in their virtue of character. The account of life drawing above, as an activity rewarding in itself because of its relation to the prior erotic force, is an account of life drawing as <i>aretê</i>. Many people with no further ambitions as artists partake of life drawing for this reason alone. It makes their lives better. It makes them happy.<br />
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But life drawing for the professional artist also has the character of a <i>technê</i>. Its end lies not only in itself, but in that which is produced. There are two things produced, only one of which is obvious: the drawing. Of course these artists want to make beautiful drawings from their time in life drawing. We can argue beauty another time - for now, let’s say that each artist approaches the <i>technê</i> of life drawing with some exterior goal in mind, defined as beautiful/true/accurate/what-have-you (4), by the artist, and the artist strives toward this kind of beauty. The senses of beauty are as varied as the artists who approach the work. And the sense of beauty evolves over time in each artist as he or she discovers themselves through the work.<br />
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The less obvious end produced by life drawing as a <i>technê</i> is “excellence in seeing.” A moving quotation from Ruskin has been wending its way through the representational art community lately. He describes excellence in seeing very well.<br />
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<span style="color: #351c75;">Let two persons go out for a walk; the one a good sketcher, the other having no taste of the kind. Let them go down a green lane. There will be a great difference in the scene as perceived by the two individuals. The one will see a lane and trees; he will perceive the trees to be green, though he will think nothing about it; he will see that the sun shines, and that it has a cheerful effect; and that’s all! But what will the sketcher see? His eye is accustomed to search into the cause of beauty, and penetrate the minutest parts of loveliness. He looks up, and observes how the showery and subdivided sunshine comes sprinkled down among the gleaming leaves overhead, till the air is filled with the emerald light. He will see here and there a bough emerging from the veil of leaves, he will see the jewel brightness of the emerald moss and the variegated and fantastic lichens, white and blue, purple and red, all mellowed and mingled into a single garment of beauty. Then come the cavernous trunks and the twisted roots that grasp with their snake-like coils at the steep bank, whose turfy slope is inlaid with flowers of a thousand dyes. Is not this worth seeing? Yet if you are not a sketcher you will pass along the green lane, and when you come home again, have nothing to say or to think about it, but that you went down such and such a lane.</span> (5)<br />
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Note how eroticized his description of nature is - channeling the prior erotic force, as he does, not into figure drawing, but nature drawing - and also his implication that excellence of seeing helps to remedy an overly logocentric outlook: the sketcher has experienced the place, but his friend knows only its name.<br />
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The <i>technê</i> of life drawing, then, consists in becoming excellent with regard to the ability to make a fine drawing, and the ability to see finely. These are not prerequisites for all kinds of art, but they are for certain kinds of art. New York artist <a href="http://jennymorganart.com/">Jenny Morgan</a> has this to say about life drawing: “I have a strong background in life drawing and painting. I have wavered in my practice the last few years, but I think of my life drawing experience every time I draw out my figures on canvas.” Consider a couple of her life drawings, unpublished before the piece in <i>Huffington</i>:<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Jenny Morgan, <i>untitled life drawings</i>, pencil on paper, 2006</span></div>
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She follows certain classic strategies here for comprehension of the figure. On the left, you can see how she started with light lines down the structural centers of the torso, arms, and legs. Additionally, she marked the frontward tilt of the top plane of the pelvis. With these spatial markers laid in, she went on to loosely outline the body around them, confident that she would have the proportions and positions about right while depicting the body as a single cohesive unit.<br />
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She pursues the same strategy in the figure on the right. She starts with the angle of the spine, the key curves of the ribcage in perspective around it, and the core lines of the legs. She uses here another nearly-universal life drawing strategy: for the mass of the pelvis and butt, she sketches out an ovoid, lightly defining a general mass before elaborating it with the darker outlines of the hips.<br />
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She summarizes the work thus: “I never get super detailed or in depth with my sessions - I've always enjoyed the freedom of fast, loose studies.” It is this practice of life drawing which gave her the technê required to express her particular form of towering creativity, as she does here:<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"> Jenny Morgan, <i>You to Me</i>, oil on canvas, 92” x 78”, 2013</span></div>
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Her vision as an artist involves a conflict between image and its erasure. She localizes the conflict in the figure, but her sense of erasure is not universal across the image, as in the case of Richter. Rather, it has a psychosexual topography: the face tends to fade, while hair and nipples and hands retain detail. This complex effect is impossible, in the form unique to Morgan, without the viewer unquestioningly “buying” her figures. Her seemingly effortless, fluid figuration results from the <i>technê</i> she has developed in life drawing and other art-auxiliary practices.<br />
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To restate from this specific instance, to the general principle: Practice in life drawing provides the necessary <i>technê</i> for the full-flowered <i>poiesis</i> of art-making itself. If <i>poiesis</i> is the making of a new thing in the world, a microscopic recapitulation of the creation of the universe, then life drawing and related species of practice provide the artist-demiurge with the mighty powers required by the task.<br />
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<u>What About the Viewer?</u><br />
<br />
OK, great. But why should anyone actually look at a life drawing?<br />
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Let’s consider again the example of Michael Jordan. Say he’s in his dojo in the morning, practicing his <i>dakentaijutsu</i> with a sparring partner, or even just running the Eight Gates on a mannequin. His Airness must practice daily in order to keep sharp. Because of the supreme development of his bushido, his form takes on a grace of its own, quite apart from any utility it might have in fighting the criminal element. Thus a viewer could well take joy simply in the spectacle of the focused practice of this master.<br />
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We turn our gaze from Jordan to his spectator. What capacity in the spectator provides him or her with the ability to take joy in the spectacle of Jordan’s practice? There must be two possibilities at least. Either the spectator can take joy in beautiful things in and of themselves, for no reason further than excellence of form relative to the aesthetics of the medium, be it a well-made table, a beautifully-played bit of music, or a display of gymnastic prowess - or the spectator takes joy in the excellence of the constituent parts of more elevated things: that is, while Jordan is merely practicing, the excellence of his practice serves as a constituent part of his more elevated goal (striking fear into the hearts of the criminal element).<br />
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Very much of a similar thing applies to the viewer of a life drawing - and I know this, because I have spoken with my collectors about it. In some cases, they merely like beautiful things, and what strikes me as beautiful in my pursuit of life drawing strikes them as beautiful in their appreciation of it. In other cases, they value the life drawings as building-blocks from which more fully-fledged art is constructed. These people appreciate the fruit of <i>technê</i> inasmuch as it is a portent and kernel of the fruit of <i>poiesis</i>.<br />
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And, because little in life is really so categorically clean, once in a while a life drawing transcends its nature and takes on the qualities of art <i>per se</i>. And that is a fine thing too.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"> Daniel Maidman, <i>Preparatory Sketch for Blue Leah #2</i>, pencil on paper, 15”x22”, 2011</span></div>
<span style="font-size: x-small;"> </span><br />
<u>To Answer Your Questions, Jerry </u><br />
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Running leap: done!<br />
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Having built up a context for this conversation, I can now address your note properly:<br />
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>Your skill is extraordinary.<br />
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Thank you!<br />
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>I ask this 100% sincerely. <br />
>Is this 'art' though?<br />
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It is not art, and not not-art. It is the product of <i>technê</i>. Without it, much that you see as art could not exist; and yet it is also worthwhile in itself.<br />
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>Isn't it just so-called academic figuration?<br />
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This is really the crux, isn’t it? That “just” tips your hand. If I say “yes,” then you dismiss it, because you dismiss academic figuration categorically - you’ve set it up as existing in opposition to ‘art.’ But if I say “no,” then I have to explain why not, and implicitly sanction the categorical dismissal. I’m not in the market for either of these options.<br />
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This happens not to be academic figuration, because I see academic figuration as pursuing a convergent goal: that is, the perfected course of academic study would lead all students, presented with the same visual field and the same assignment of a fully-rendered drawing, to make approximately the same representation. This would demonstrate successful acquisition of a certain skill-set. And I think that this extraordinarily challenging skill-set is worth acquiring. It is a model of total skill as yielding total freedom. This Earth-shaking skill-set is so profound, in fact, that its apotheosis is not yet born. Bouguereau was the Isaiah of academic art, one might say, or its John the Baptist. We are still waiting on its Christ.<br />
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But it is not for me, and that’s not what I’m doing.<br />
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I’m part of a completely chaotic and un-self-aware faction of divergent life-drawers; our work tends to become more distinct over time. But these distinctnesses, like all distinctnesses within a genus, are available only in the context of some knowledge of the genus. One cannot distinguish Handel from Mozart on day one, nor the Ramones from the Sex Pistols.<br />
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>I do not question your ability, desire, etc.<br />
>I really like you too.<br />
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Let me point out here that one of the great rewards of my life as an artist in New York has been the opportunity to get to know you a bit, and to expand the boundaries of my tolerance by challenging it with your opinions. I do not always, or even often, agree with you, but you have done so much to expand the art available to me, and I am profoundly grateful for that.<br />
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>But when I look at this something inside of me dies.<br />
<br />
However: this response is not legitimate. It is a failure in you, and it should raise all of your red flags. There is no room in a serious appreciation of art for categorical dismissal, because all categories simply represent sets of aesthetic rules and references. That is, all categories are languages. The language is not the text. A worthwhile text may be written in any language. It is acceptable for a tourist or a layman to ignore a text because they dislike the sound of a language - but it is not acceptable for a serious thinker -<br />
<br />
>Again, I do not say this with any meanness or with intent to insult.<br />
<br />
- sure, sure - I’m thick-skinned too; no worries -<br />
<br />
>This is only about MY tatse, my eye. <br />
>Many will just say my tatse is in my ass & I have no idea about art. <br />
>They could be right.<br />
<br />
- and my feeling is that you are, or try to be, a serious thinker about art. You have a responsibility to transcend your taste, to drive your taste beyond your inclinations. A tourist or a layman does not have such a responsibility, but you went out seeking authority as a critic, and you earned it. That authority comes with responsibilities, and one of them is to figure out <i>what it is</i> about the things you don’t, by inclination, like.<br />
<br />
Now, that said, I think that when you turned up at my drawing folder out of the blue, and left your comment, you were actually working on this very project. I believe that the boundaries of your taste are no longer sufficient for your comfort, and that you are trying to grow, just as I am trying to grow. Contrast two statements of yours. Here’s you in 2005<br />
:<br />
“…to me ‘de-skilled’ means unlearning other people’s ideas of what skill is and inventing your own. All great artists (schooled or not) are essentially self-taught and are ‘de-skilling’ like crazy. I don’t look for skill in art; I look for originality, surprise, obsession, energy and something visionary. Skill only means technical proficiency. Real skill has to do with being flexible and creative. … I’m interested in people who rethink skill, who redefine or re-imagine it: an engineer, say, who builds rockets from rocks.” (6)<br />
<br />
And here’s you at the end of last year:<br />
<br />
“Call me conservative, but it's also time for grad programs to stress courses in craft and various skills — from blacksmithing to animal tracking, if these are things students need to learn for the visions they want to pursue.” (7)<br />
<br />
This reads to me as an evolution in thinking. The evolution is toward an acceptance that it is not necessary every single time to re-invent the wheel or to go back to the stone age and make a rocket from rocks - an acceptance that for many kinds of art, <i>technê</i> is the scaffold on which originality and vision are built.<br />
<br />
Consider, though, a second thing: even in December of 2013, you cannot quite bring yourself to write down what crafts and skills you really mean. You choose awkward and unlikely skills, feigning random selection off the top of your head. But there are already schools for blacksmithing and animal tracking, and they’re not offering MFA’s in fine art. The skills you cannot bear to name are drawing, painting, and sculpture.<br />
<br />
Now it is June of 2014, and we have not traded ideas in a while, but I come to find you are looking at my drawings, and considering them, and trying to make heads or tails of what I’m doing and why it makes you feel as it does. This strikes me as another step in your evolution. I think, just as I have moved toward seeing art your way since we first met, you have been moving toward seeing it my way as well.<br />
<br />
Your way is not a threat to my way. There is room enough in me for both. My way is not a threat to your way either. There is room in you, too, for rockets made from rocks, and rockets made from steel; I am not your enemy.<br />
<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"> Daniel Maidman, <i>Drawing of Kuan #5</i>, pencil on paper, 15”x11”, 2014</span></div>
<br />
<u>Counter-Gift-Challenge</u><br />
<br />
I have tried to accept your gift here, and meet your challenge: to explain myself, and in explaining, make my ethos more available to you as well. I have no idea how far I’ve gotten but, like you, I am 100% sincere.<br />
<br />
Now let me return the favor, and offer you a gift-challenge in return. Come sit with me once a week, for five weeks, for three hours at a time. We will hire a model, and life draw for two hours, with an hour mixed in for talking it over. I will teach you. I won’t teach you a lot, because I’m no kind of a teacher. But I can articulate one or two things, and help you try out doing what I do. I will, of course, be very interested to learn from you in the course of this as well. And we will both learn from our models.<br />
<br />
A few conditions go along with this offer:<br />
<br />
1. You’ve got to complete all five weeks. <br />
2. You have to write a bit about your experience. <br />
3. You have to show the drawings you make.<br />
<br />
Let me address your objections as best I can anticipate them:<br />
<br />
<i>You’re chained to your desk</i> - I know. But this is important, Jerry. Seeing art, knowing art, and loving art are terribly important to you. This is an opportunity you haven’t had in a long time, not only to expand the range of your taste, but the fineness of your eye. The hand profoundly trains the eye, and the hand goes with technê. Working as I work will refresh and deepen your eye. With your hand still stinging from its exercise, you will bring new insight to all the art you look at. You will see new subtleties of form, new potentialities. Everything will be renewed. That is worth the price in time. This is an adventure.<br />
<br />
<i>Your writing schedule is full.</i> Fine - cram it in around the corners somewhere. This is a fun idea. Jerry Saltz, his sketchbook, his figurative painter <i>semblable/frère</i>, some naked people, and a world of concepts to grapple with. It’s a good story. It’s your kind of stunt. Write rough sketches each week: notes on what you see and do, and feel and learn. Embrace that your outlook is changing. Repudiate nothing but accept everything.<br />
<br />
<i>You are a critic and you do not show your art.</i> Let me add to this - your drawings will most likely be terrible, from a technical perspective. You will be tempted to label the deformities of their technique as examples of personal creativity and expression. But just this once, you should not do that. You should say, proudly, “These drawings are terrible! I tried to do a particular thing with them, and I failed!” This is the magnificence of <i>aretê</i> in life drawing, of self-rewarding virtue. You are not here to do a good job - you are only here to try, and to learn from your trying. What glory is this? It is an opportunity to learn as a child learns, without preconception, without expectation, without fear.<br />
<br />
<i>- you do not show your art. </i>Make yourself radically vulnerable. Nobody needs you to be good at it in any sense. The validity of your criticism does not rest on your prowess as an artist or a technician. I cannot stress enough how liberating it is to welcome humiliation. It will resound through the rest of your life. It will shake loose your sense of how things must be. Opportunity will flower everywhere.<br />
<br />
Besides, you can totally auction off the work and give the money to an art scholarship.<br />
<br />
Please let me give this back to you. You have walked over to me. I am walking back over to you. Let’s walk together a little ways.<br />
<br />
All best wishes,<br />
<br />
Daniel Maidman<br />
<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"> Daniel Maidman, <i>Preparatory Sketches for Meiosis III and IV</i>, pencil on paper, each approx. 15”x11”, 2013</span></div>
<br />
—<br />
<br />
ENDNOTES:<br />
<br />
(1) For an account of my subjective experience of this phenomenon, see <a href="http://danielmaidman.blogspot.com/2009/11/rivers-of-light-and-oceans-of-light.html">here</a>. <br />
(2) For an introduction to the neurological basis of the phenomena described, see Dr. Margaret Livingstone’s faculty page <a href="http://dms.hms.harvard.edu/neuroscience/fac/livingstone.php">here</a> and buy her amazing book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Vision-Art-The-Biology-Seeing/dp/0810995549">here</a>. <br />
(3) I rely in the material that follows on the excellent discussion of <i>epistêmê</i> and <i>technê</i> <a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/episteme-techne/">here</a>.<br />
(4) What I really mean is my idiolectic term ‘kalos,’ discussed <a href="http://danielmaidman.blogspot.com/2014/04/breaking-fast.html">here</a>. <br />
(5) From “The Elements of Drawing, in Three Letters to Beginners by John Ruskin” as quoted <a href="http://www.philosophersmail.com/virtues/why-you-should-stop-taking-pictures-on-your-phone-and-learn-to-draw/">here</a>. <br />
(6) <a href="http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/writing_wrongs/%E2%80%A8">http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/writing_wrongs/ </a><br />
(7) <a href="http://www.vulture.com/2013/12/saltz-on-the-trouble-with-the-mfa.html">http://www.vulture.com/2013/12/saltz-on-the-trouble-with-the-mfa.html</a>Danielhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15597234920324948705noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2293319073550947163.post-6635399715946874592014-04-21T10:54:00.000-04:002014-04-21T23:13:21.342-04:00Two HandsIf there is one thing I fear as an artist, it is facility. I fear becoming good at it. I fear that all of my work at improving my skills will result, not in an enhanced ability to observe and to express - that is, in greater wakefulness - but in the other outcome: the ability to pass-work-off, to suffer the senses and mind to deaden and slumber while the work chugs on, acceptably, with <i>facility</i>.<br />
<br />
The problem of facility came to mind the other evening at Spring St., drawing Rachel’s hand. During a twenty-minute pose, she did a marvelous thing with her hand, and I decided to draw it, and I found myself thinking, “Lord, let me not be good at this.” And, happy outcome - I was not good at it. My drawing was aligned with one of the two major alternatives to facility, to the merely good at it, which have long occupied settled places in my intellectual pantheon. These alternatives sprang into clarity for me when I read (very little bits of) Vasari’s <i>Lives of the Artists</i>, in which he expresses something we all sense intuitively.<br />
<br />
Introducing Da Vinci, Vasari writes:<br />
<br />
<span style="color: #351c75;">In the normal course of events many men and women are born with various remarkable qualities and talents; but occasionally, in a way that transcends nature, a single person is marvelously endowed by heaven with beauty, grace, and talent in such abundance that he leaves other men far behind, all his actions seem inspired, and indeed everything he does clearly comes from God rather than from human art. </span><br />
<br />
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<br />
And indeed, this is the very thing we sense about Da Vinci - there is a nearly uncanny perfection to his drawing. Most of the time, the uncanniness is muted because the perfection is married to an intense and lyrical compassion.<br />
<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">this is, incidentally, my favorite drawing in human history</span></div>
<br />
And yet, the mask of compassion sometimes slips, and we remember that we are seeing a record of the gaze of an angel; and that angels have their own agendas, not entirely congruent with those of men.<br />
<br />
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<br />
Then the uncanniness returns. We see that he adopts a merciful gaze because he wishes by nature to be merciful, but that mercy is not always available under the strictures of his alien agenda. We see that should the mercy in which he cloaks and dims himself depart, we would be exposed to the awful, all-piercing light in which he sees <i>everything</i>: a glittering, inhuman brilliance, a light so hard that it not only illuminates but destroys. It is the light of the spirit. Matter cannot survive it.<br />
<br />
This is what Vasari’s introduction clarified for me, and I carry in one hand this model of desirable drawing - not that one should draw well, but that one should draw perfectly. One’s hand should trace out curves that are like the song of the heavenly host. The drawing should be possessed of a shattering beauty, a categorical rightness which exists on the far side of a chasm. There is no from-here-to-there; there is only error, and Truth. This Da Vincian drawing I am always seeking exists in the realm of the Truth.<br />
<br />
So that was the sort of drawing I managed to pull off in response to Rachel’s marvelous action with her hand.<br />
<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Daniel Maidman, <i>Rachel’s Left Hand, April 14, 2014</i>, pencil on Rives BFK Tan</span></div>
<br />
Am I saying I drew that as well as Da Vinci would have? No. You will never, ever catch me saying I drew anything as well as Da Vinci. What I am saying is that I made the categorical leap which is the prerequisite of drawing as well as Da Vinci. I crossed the chasm, <i>I drew better than I can draw</i>. I cannot draw a hand this well. I shook off my limited self, and the shapes that existed in Rachel’s hand drew themselves through my own hand, and that was how that drawing came to be. Many artists report a sense of possession. I think many different demons may possess an artist. Da Vinci was possessed by the demon of right line. I have sought this demon myself, and sometimes it visits with me. For me, there is an unearthly perfection in this drawing of Rachel’s hand which makes me weep in gratitude for having had the opportunity to have it pass through me.<br />
<br />
That is the first of the two hands I wanted to discuss with you today.<br />
<br />
Now we turn to another passage in Vasari, without which the passage about Da Vinci can be only imperfectly understood. Vasari introduces Michelangelo thus:<br />
<br />
<span style="color: #351c75;">Meanwhile, the benign ruler of heaven graciously … decided to send into the world an artist who would be skilled in each and every craft… Moreover, he determined to give this artist the knowledge of true moral philosophy and the gift of poetic expression, so that everyone might admire and follow him as their perfect exemplar in life, work, and behavior and in every endeavor, and he would be acclaimed as divine. … his mind and hands were destined to fashion sublime and magnificent works of art.</span><br />
<br />
This description superficially resembles the encomium to Da Vinci. But a review unfolds a fundamentally different evaluation. While Vasari describes Michelangelo as heaven-sent, he describes Da Vinci as heaven itself. Da Vinci’s work “comes from God” while Michelangelo’s is fashioned by “his mind and hands.” Michelangelo represents the “perfect exemplar” of humanity, “acclaimed” as divine - while Da Vinci “transcends nature,” and is in fact divine. This distinction has consequences. Da Vinci “leaves other men far behind,” but Michelangelo inspires men to “admire and follow.” Why? Because Da Vinci is a minor divinity. His presence suppresses and scorches. Men look at his work and despair in their own. But Michelangelo is human: clearly, achingly, sweatingly human. His work is obviously human. It is the greatest work of a man, not the least work of a god. Thus it inspires those who see it: it tells them that they too could do so well.<br />
<br />
This passage clarified something I understood intuitively about Michelangelo. Look at his work.<br />
<br />
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<br />
This drawing has always looked inspiringly and endearingly imperfect to me. The concept of light fails, as it does in most of Michelangelo’s work - he was interested in form itself, and indifferent to light. And yet the representation of the back muscles is overdone - he fails at form too. The outline shudders forward, searching for the next structure. There is altogether too much of everything. It is a human drawing, riven everywhere with ignorance, doubt, and the possibility of failure.<br />
<br />
But it is great.<br />
<br />
The next night, I went back to Spring St. and drew Boris, a very charming Russian model with a big head and a small muscular body. During a forty-minute pose, he too did something marvelous with his hand. I recognized it instantly as a hand pose I cannot draw. I know what I can draw and can’t draw. The problem wasn’t that I couldn’t draw the <i>drawing</i> I might want to draw, as with Rachel - the problem was that I couldn’t draw the <i>observation</i> I might want to draw. So I went ahead and tried.<br />
<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Daniel Maidman, <i>Boris’s Left Hand, April 15, 2014</i>, pencil on Rives BFK Tan</span></div>
<br />
I fought for every inch of this drawing. Each bone of the fingers was a struggle, the structure and foreshortening of the body of the hand was a struggle. How to shape his arm was a bitch. The lighting on the fourth and fifth fingers is not different enough from that on the second and third to reflect the difference in their angles. The width of the thumb is subtly incorrect in a way I could never quite pin down. Some drawings convince because they are right; this one convinces because nothing in it is wrong enough to make it fall over.<br />
<br />
And yet, when I finished it I recognized that I had one of my better drawings in front of me. This drawing is along the Michelangelo axis of quality. Again, you will never, ever, evereverever catch me saying I can step to Michelangelo. But you will catch me saying that what makes this drawing interesting or worthwhile is one of the things that grabs you about much of his work, that you can tell it didn’t come easy. The sweat is fossilized right into it, alongside everything that worked. The sweat undermines the things that work, or makes them tense. You can see how close the entire thing is to failure. It grunts and heaves and earns its successes. They aren’t handed out by seraphim.<br />
<br />
—<br />
<br />
When I bring up this kind of analysis in conversation with reasonably well-educated artists, they feel obliged to generate examples of each principle which are more appropriate. So let me stipulate, in constructing this system, that better examples than Da Vinci and Michelangelo for the two opposed poles could be found. For me, though, it will always be Da Vinci and Michelangelo, because I first sensed these principles in them, and first had these principles eloquently drawn out by Vasari using them as the instances.<br />
<br />
Now, where did we start? We started with facility, with being merely good at drawing. It is something I despise and fear. I hope the two alternative means of making good drawings I’ve been discussing help to illustrate the sense in which one can seek to draw well, and yet revile facility. I want to draw with the calm and unfailing perfection of an angel, or with the straining fallibility of the best of mortals. Both kinds of creature are awake. It is the wakefulness that is important, and the mindless automatism that is the enemy.Danielhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15597234920324948705noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2293319073550947163.post-77181732170538856932014-04-05T10:40:00.000-04:002014-04-05T10:43:11.319-04:00Breaking the FastFor personal reasons, which if you know them I’d appreciate your not mentioning, I have been prevented from going to life drawing, or in fact from drawing and painting at all, for the past five weeks.<br />
<br />
Throughout this time I have been curating artwork for an issue of <a href="http://www.poetsandartists.com/substance-curated-issue/"><i>Poets/Artists</i> magazine</a> which will come out in June, and for the content of which I am, by generous invitation, entirely responsible. To this end, I have gone through thousands of images of work by hundreds of artists. Many of them do things I don’t do; others do things I can’t; and still others do things that I also do, but I don’t do them as well.<br />
<br />
This industrial-scale procedure has given me occasion to reflect on just what exactly I’m up to. This was an interesting and involved process, but the upshot of it was that my well-known ego of steel ensured that my self-esteem as an artist remained at its ordinary high level.<br />
<br />
However, I could not help succumbing to a more localized neurosis: the creeping fear that because I <i>wasn’t</i> making art, I <i>couldn’t</i> make art. What if I were finished? What if I were, from here on out, nothing but a secondary participant in art - not a maker, but a writer-about and a compiler-of? What if my hiatus had frozen my hand, withered my vision, and turned me into a hanger-on, a parasite? Art writing is a primary occupation for some people, a core inspiration, but for me it has always been peripheral. So this fear was a grave fear.<br />
<br />
Then finally, this past Monday, I managed to break the fast: I got back to Spring Street to draw. Apart from the fear of paralysis, I had a fear of ordinary rustiness. At the level of technical demand I place on myself, drawing is something like playing an instrument or athletic performance. It requires constant attendance, or it begins to decay. My perpetual life-drawing is much like practicing scales in this sense, or whatever ice skaters do to stay good at ice skating.<br />
<br />
Returning to my seat, setting out my paper, picking up my pencils, and then looking up and <i>seeing the model</i> was, it turned out, like being exposed to overwhelming symphonic sound. It was like morning; it brought tears to my eyes. I was carried away on a tide of the rightness of it. The model was Sarah, who is a wonderful, beautiful model. She is small and curvy and a nearly glistening white. She has the kind of <i>0.85 x human surface area </i>aerodynamic classicism one sees in Prud’hon’s models. She enjoys modeling and is therefore energetic of pose, while being gifted with a vast creativity regarding interesting possible poses. Here is an older drawing of her - a 20-minute pose, and not so great a drawing, because the pose was so delightful I decided to draw as much of it as I could, just to remember it - it is in my very small stack of “never sell this” drawings:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7AQ65WvgaZxtggsIgWD66YyNMVKYzlOVtSaWiHB57rsm3ZvZ-wH-Q_DsVVdrgZib1Qt4lTZg7Q-B-b0RSgypPoWMMaxaYGDkhpSgDFK-Y3n4WaWe1EKaAGmvtMsA9aVJdZtBRfSKXuLa4/s3200/graphic+1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7AQ65WvgaZxtggsIgWD66YyNMVKYzlOVtSaWiHB57rsm3ZvZ-wH-Q_DsVVdrgZib1Qt4lTZg7Q-B-b0RSgypPoWMMaxaYGDkhpSgDFK-Y3n4WaWe1EKaAGmvtMsA9aVJdZtBRfSKXuLa4/s3200/graphic+1.jpg" height="200" width="148" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Daniel Maidman, <i>Sarah, 20 Minute Pose</i>, January 6, 2014, pencil on Rives BFK Tan, 15”x11”</span></div>
<br />
This kind of sense of overall composition of the body is what makes some models very popular.<br />
<br />
Drawing Sarah again on Monday, the kalotropic side of my mind took over. It is a strong side. I am intensely kalotropic. <i>Kalotropism</i> is a word I made up many years ago - “turning toward <i>kalos</i>” or “<i>kalos</i> follower.” <i>Kalos</i> is the Greek word for beauty, but it is not exactly like our contemporary conception of beauty. We think of beauty now as something like candy: it comes to us and caters to our desire for sweetness. It is just another form of indulgence, starting in the world and ending in our appetites. The <i>kalos</i>, contrariwise, summons <i>you</i> to <i>it</i>: it attracts, and requires discipline, and awakens the virtues. To see it, one must achieve clear sight - and clear sight leads to lucid thought - and lucid thought leads to right action. The <i>kalos</i> yields pleasure as much as does the beautiful, but pleasure is not its utter end as it is for the beautiful. It is an end, but it is also a tool of education. One does not receive the pleasure of the <i>kalos</i> without putting in the effort which the <i>kalos</i> seeks to inspire.<br />
<br />
Sarah is, in herself, beautiful; but, as happens for all true models, the elevation and lighting of the model stand, and the tone of the room convened to draw, transform her beauty and replace it with <i>kalos</i>. Sitting and drawing her, I was overwhelmed, as I said. I was shocked into one of the states most becoming and natural to humans, the state of praise. To seek to draw well is to praise, it is to say, “The world is marvelous, and I acknowledge its marvels. I rise to meet creation, and to praise and serve so well as I can. This is why I pursue excellence: from a sense of justice. I wish to do right by the miracles that abound. I have a role to play - to join the chorus of praise - and in order to do good, I must become great.”<br />
<br />
This state of mind carries implications for art criticism. The soul is larger than the world; it has many seasons. I have exerted myself constantly to include as many of them as I can in my criticism. I failed before, but I have not failed again. I made myself learn to see the many kinds of work that come from the many seasons of the soul. And I will say this - any criticism that does not make room for the <i>kalos</i>, for the rightness of beauty that is without flaw or deformation, any criticism that says the age of the <i>kalos</i> ended with the Venus de Milo and the Nike of Samothrace, and the adoring eye that opened with Vermeer closed for good, and good riddance, with Sargent - any such criticism, is a crippled and deficient criticism. It may have much to offer, but it is incomplete, and must not be trusted for a model of all that can and ought to be.<br />
<br />
Thus did I draw, and this was the first thing that I drew - a one-minute pose, Sarah’s back:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrj_SO9yrlONjmIL42eciU47-f-sp4ccnWDE2iRsmKLay7qz181KRL0ZrG4CS-aWeChDKJ3bQS3PmWTem0IlgAN-okKzAw7exzBLKZvYxf6vwJcEgEr3wejnWqSQbizQ7IYitlALoyVBFB/s3200/graphic+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrj_SO9yrlONjmIL42eciU47-f-sp4ccnWDE2iRsmKLay7qz181KRL0ZrG4CS-aWeChDKJ3bQS3PmWTem0IlgAN-okKzAw7exzBLKZvYxf6vwJcEgEr3wejnWqSQbizQ7IYitlALoyVBFB/s3200/graphic+2.jpg" height="200" width="200" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Daniel Maidman, <i>Sarah (detail: one-minute pose)</i>, March 31, 2014, pencil on Rives BFK Tan, 15”x11”</span></div>
<br />
I was transported. I was not rusty, really, at all. I was a little different, but it is good to be a little different. One day I may be a lot different. For now, I was after a long wandering returned to myself. I had missed being me. I was suffused with so thoroughgoing a sense of being on the right track that a thing ran through my mind, a kind of unwilled mantra which always drifts across my mind when I’ve got it right -<br />
<br />
<span style="color: #351c75;">Deceive me who may, no one will ever be able to bring it about that I am not, so long as I remain conscious that I am; nor cause it one day to be true that I have never been, for it is true now that I am.</span><br />
<br />
This is, of course, Rene Descartes. It is from the third meditation - he is in the midst of deriving what he can from what he is certain that he knows, a strange and wonderful project. Here is the remainder of that first sheet of drawings, 10 one-minute poses and 10 two-minute poses:<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Daniel Maidman, <i>Sarah, Ones and Twos</i>, March 31, 2014, pencil on Rives BFK Tan, 15”x11”</span></div>
<br />
Well, things went really well from there. I don’t know how you draw, but how I draw is, when somebody does something I like enough, I try to learn how to do it too, so that I can use it if the need arises. How do I know I like it enough? Because I can’t resist trying to learn how to do it too. This has happened with regard to three properties of life drawing over the past few years:<br />
<br />
1. From Odd Nerdrum and his students, the<span style="font-size: x-small;"> <span style="font-size: small;">recurrent</span></span> interest in light fall-off outside of a narrowly spotted area (look, I have problems with the guy, but I don’t dismiss anything that I can learn from). This is a fascinating manifestation of the phenomenon of light and dark, transferred from Rembrandt’s depiction of spotlit regions of architectural spaces to the more obsessive spotlighting of parts of individual bodies - but once you start looking for it in real life, you see it everywhere, especially under small-diameter artificial lights, like for instance the scoops that light the model at Spring.<br />
<br />
2. From Sabin Howard, a renewed interest in the intellectual construction of the body - the body that emerges out of reason and knowledge, so intensely conceived as to supersede the observed body. This is an ideology I cannot subscribe to entirely, and yet its influence has zoomed me back a bit from the purely empirical approach I had been taking, and invited me to think about the total structure I am observing in the course of attempting to depict it.<br />
<br />
3. From so many people - Dorian Vallejo, Elana Hagler, Christopher Pugliese, John Currin - a different renewed interest, in the line, that wonderful, living, vibrant line, which can on its own define a form and which spreads joy wherever it wends. I’ve fallen back in love with the line.<br />
<br />
So, like a magpie, I have adapted elements of these, and all of them come into play in my sheet of tens and twenties from the workshop:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqHTXTfjFCvTJqZaBJz7K-dSw3sA6NCFilZU46HyjM3M55e88JgeGFRJ8OT_d5QrAnVct7s3P2YtnajxNFqf_1bApvelD6PTPzHkI7S3bZt5_in3yZz714ztYH0JD_1uvVMsqhIxfZMw3d/s3200/graphic+4.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqHTXTfjFCvTJqZaBJz7K-dSw3sA6NCFilZU46HyjM3M55e88JgeGFRJ8OT_d5QrAnVct7s3P2YtnajxNFqf_1bApvelD6PTPzHkI7S3bZt5_in3yZz714ztYH0JD_1uvVMsqhIxfZMw3d/s3200/graphic+4.jpg" height="200" width="149" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Daniel Maidman, <i>Sarah, Two Tens and a Twenty</i>, March 31, 2014, pencil on Rives BFK Tan, 15”x11”</span></div>
<br />
From there, a bit of really good fortune - Sarah happened to take a pose functionally almost identical with one of my favorite Balthus’s at the recent show at the Met. Here’s the Balthus:<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Balthus, <i>The Victim</i>, 1939-46, oil on canvas</span></div>
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The reasons this made such an impression on me cannot be clear in this image of the painting, but it opened a broad new avenue for my work which I am excited to explore in the year or two ahead. I will explain about all that as it proceeds. But in the meantime, it was very pleasing to run across so similar a pose, because it refreshed my memory of the Balthus and was, in itself, good to draw:<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Daniel Maidman, <i>Sarah Reclining</i>, March 31, 2014, pencil on Rives BFK Tan, 15”x11”</span></div>
<br />
And, finally, the other nice thing about this pose was that generally speaking, if a model does a reclining pose for the first of the two final forty-minute poses, they will, through some sense of “doing a good job,” do a sitting or standing pose for the other. As often as not, I will then get a good angle from which to draw a face.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Daniel Maidman, <i>Portrait of Sarah</i>, March 31, 2014, pencil on Rives BFK Tan, 15”x11”</span></div>
<br />
For all the flaws of my work here, I think you can see from it that one would really <i>want</i> to do a drawing of Sarah’s face.<br />
<br />
I was so excited to tell you right away about this entire chain of ideas and drawings. But at the end of the evening, in the bathroom, I checked Facebook on my phone, and found out that while I was drawing, and thinking all these happy thoughts, Melissa Carroll died.<br />
<br />
I could not collect myself enough to leave the bathroom for a while, and I spent the next day writing the previous post and getting it up on <i>Huffington</i>. I often do not trust my own writing. It has become too easy for me to write vividly and persuasively. Usually this facility is a joy, but sometimes it makes me suspect I am full of shit. It would be so easy to lie to you! But I did not want any trace of the possible lie - even the unthinking,
unnoticed lie - to infect what I had to say about Melissa, so I made the
writing very hard on myself.<br />
<br />
That delayed this post.Danielhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15597234920324948705noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2293319073550947163.post-12012970098289723492014-04-04T08:49:00.002-04:002014-04-05T11:00:32.387-04:00As Light Is Said To DoA light has gone away. The painter Melissa Carroll died March 31,
2014. She had Ewing's sarcoma, a vicious cancer that jumped to new parts
of her body even as her doctors got its existing sites under control.
Melissa was 31.<br />
<br />
I <a href="http://danielmaidman.blogspot.com/2013/08/i-saw-death.html" target="_hplink">wrote about</a> her show "Recurrence" at <a href="http://www.andrearosengallery.com/exhibitions/melissa-carroll_2013-08-22" target="_hplink">Andrea Rosen Gallery 2</a>
last year, and I'd like to share some more thoughts about her work and
life with you today. I did not know her well. I only met her five times.
This is a photograph of the first -- a show we were both in at <a href="http://gitanarosa.com/" target="_hplink">Gitana Rosa Gallery</a>,
in Brooklyn, in 2010. She stands in profile foreground left. Her
painting is on the back wall, and mine is on the left. The cancer was
already in her foot, I think, but nobody knew.<br />
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<br />
I followed her <a href="http://www.melissacarroll.com/" target="_hplink">work</a> from then on, and when she got sick, I followed <a href="http://www.paintingcancer.com/" target="_hplink">that too</a>.
We corresponded a bit. I was blown away by "Recurrence," her body of
work depicting herself and her friends at various stages in their
struggle with cancer. I wrote at the time, and I'll repeat now, that she
made the kind of breakthrough in "Recurrence" that artists ordinarily
take another 10 or 15 years of practice, experiments, and creative leaps
to achieve: she went from flexing her talent and following the work of
others, to creating her own unique and mature art. She didn't have any
time to waste. The second time I met her was at the opening of the show,
in 2013.<br />
<br />
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<br />
You
can see me sweating; the room was packed and horribly hot. There were
many beautiful people I didn't know, and many who knew Melissa and had
more claim on her attention than I did. Salman Rushdie was there; the
remarkable Ricardo Kugelmas, her friend and guardian angel in the art
world, was there. I met her mother, Cecelia, who was as simultaneously
proud and frightened as you would imagine. I didn't know what to say to
Melissa, and she didn't know what to say to me. I think we were mutually
happy to see one another. I didn't appreciate how tremendous a special
effect her attendance at that opening was. They let her out of chemo for
the week, and she was wired to half a dozen hidden devices and drips
the entire evening, enabling her to stand, and talk, and withstand the
pain.<br />
<br />
The third time I met her I ran into her on the street in
Williamsburg. She was back from her hospital universe, walking around
and enjoying a pleasant Brooklyn afternoon. The fourth time I met her
was at a craft fair. These two chance meetings are small demonstrations
of a characteristic of hers -- to the extent she could go on living
life, she did. She went to India. She fired a rifle. She had adventures.<br />
<br />
The
last time I met her I went by her apartment in Greenpoint to take some
pictures of her for a portrait. I like to paint my creative friends, and
I wanted to paint her. I was glad to see her. As usual, we struggled to
make conversation. We were all right in writing but did not know one
another well in person. She showed me what she was working on, and some
of the keepsakes of her travels. I took a few pictures and made my
goodbyes. I never saw her again.<br />
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<br />
This
was in December. Sometime after that, she made her final breakthrough
as an artist, and that's what I really want to talk with you about
today. We're here to consider her last three paintings (that I know of),
and to mull them over in light of two categories of art: final bodies
of work, and late bodies of work. All sufficiently late work is final,
but not all final work is late -- Egon Schiele, for instance, had no
idea he was going to drop dead from the flu at 28. He was just starting
to get the body he craved into his dessicated oil paint surfaces.
Whether this would have been better or worse than his early work, we
can't say. It was promising, but it was cut short. It was final work,
but not late work.<br />
<br />
<center>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIfneUHD5Yjnjcw5bb5umXu9e-7okr9Lnp9E-zOuSDeni2s_zL_9h3a4cctlSXhVlVGy-MyoZn7OG3KNTspx6t6FDXEHERySMqZiD1oInebx8CkdArBDBu16Rz0jxy2dFmRBOir2yXMopF/s3200/graphic+4.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIfneUHD5Yjnjcw5bb5umXu9e-7okr9Lnp9E-zOuSDeni2s_zL_9h3a4cctlSXhVlVGy-MyoZn7OG3KNTspx6t6FDXEHERySMqZiD1oInebx8CkdArBDBu16Rz0jxy2dFmRBOir2yXMopF/s3200/graphic+4.jpg" height="185" width="200" /></a><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Egon Schiele, <i>The Family</i>, 1918, 60"x64", oil on canvas</span></center>
<br />
Contrarily, consider Titian, 1490-1576. He began as a master of clarity, color,
movement, and the dramas of men and gods. Here is a late self-portrait,
painted between 1565 and 1570.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Titian, <i>Self Portrait</i>, c. 1565-70, 34"x26", oil on canvas</span></center>
<center>
</center>
<br />
It
partakes of one of the great privileges of age: cutting through the
bullshit. The hand grows weak, eyesight fails. He paints simply,
painting only what is needed, but that part that is needed, he paints
with force and confidence. Considerations of being in and out of the
zone are far behind him. He has fused entirely with his identity as a
painter. He is always in the zone. He brings to mind the famous
quotation from Hokusai, which I have had occasion to repeat on this blog before:<br />
<blockquote>
<span style="color: #351c75;">From the age of 6 I had a mania for drawing the shapes of things.
When I was 50 I had published a universe of designs. But all I have done
before the the age of 70 is not worth bothering with. At 75 I'll have
learned something of the pattern of nature, of animals, of plants, of
trees, birds, fish and insects. When I am 80 you will see real progress.
At 90 I shall have cut my way deeply into the mystery of life itself.
At 100, I shall be a marvelous artist. At 110, everything I create - a
dot, a line - will jump to life as never before. To all of you who are
going to live as long as I do, I promise to keep my word. I am writing
this in my old age. I used to call myself Hokusai, but today I sign
myself 'The Old Man Mad About Drawing.'</span></blockquote>
Or let us turn to Picasso, who drew this less than a year before the end of his very long life:<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Pablo Picasso, <i>Self Portrait Facing Death</i>, 1972, 26"x20", pencil and crayon on paper</span></center>
<center>
</center>
<br />
Picasso
draws here his own unweaving. His face grows gaunt and stubbled, his
eyes frightened and unfocused. A triangular wound opens his cheek on the
left, and his blood pours out unchecked, the last blood he will ever
have, leaving his skin cadaverous and greenish-grey. He is at the end of
the long corridor, staring at the black wall at last. There is no way
through it, it is the end. He addresses death and fear of death here,
and not just any death, but his own. This is what we mean by late work.<br />
<br />
Carroll painted this in 2013 for "Recurrence," depicting her own illness:<br />
<center style="margin: 0px auto; width: 427px;">
<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGGHHKDV4sj1M4IldExH9JFuZTTzx6L7LS73elY1Te6hGxMkrroJzpQsSYFnUri85DbpC1H_fSRC4OTqhrnW_GJiaXVPopKfVq5KggSUIbSlZ2293DqXZoHGraDueeBkIx6uzDEMTX3pgr/s3200/graphic+7.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGGHHKDV4sj1M4IldExH9JFuZTTzx6L7LS73elY1Te6hGxMkrroJzpQsSYFnUri85DbpC1H_fSRC4OTqhrnW_GJiaXVPopKfVq5KggSUIbSlZ2293DqXZoHGraDueeBkIx6uzDEMTX3pgr/s3200/graphic+7.jpg" height="200" width="150" /></a></div>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Melissa Carroll, <i>Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired</i>, 2013,15"x11", watercolor on paper</span></center>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"> </span></center>
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It
is one of the pieces that struck me so strongly at the time. It still
does. In this same pictorial paradigm, she groped toward a model of
hopefulness in <i>What Would I Do Without You</i>:<br />
<center style="margin: 0px auto; width: 401px;">
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Melissa Carroll, <i>What Would I Do Without You</i>, 2013,15"x11", watercolor on paper</span></center>
<center>
</center>
<br />
This is middle-period work.<br />
<br />
Here
is something Carroll painted in March. As I said, to my knowledge it is
one of her last three paintings. I don't know its size or title, or if
it even has one. It is watercolor on paper, the only paint nontoxic
enough for her to use:<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Melissa Carroll, 2014</span></center>
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</center>
<br />
The
figure is submerged here in a vaginal sequence of arcs of bloody
energy, nearly vanishing, as the image nearly vanishes. As in the case
of the aged Titian, the hand and eye weaken, and the interest in effects
evaporates. There are only resources to paint what is needed, and the
wisdom and insight to use the resources correctly. As with Picasso,
there is almost no image, and death is the subject.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Melissa Carroll, 2014</span></center>
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</center>
<br />
Carroll
draws close here to the very heart of things. Her vision of human being
dissolves into a vivid and vital universe which precedes and follows
and surrounds it. In the hand of this awakened reality, what is
important about a life, any life, persists, because it is only borrowed a
little while from an eternal and active wonder. She reaches here, in
her own way, the same conclusion Harold Brodkey reached when he too
neared the end of his illness: "It is death that goes down to the center
of the earth, the great burial church the earth is, and then to the
curved ends of the universe, as light is said to do."<br />
<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Melissa Carroll, 2014</span></center>
<center>
</center>
<br />
This
is not only final work, it is late work. It is late work because she
knew she was dying. Schiele was around her age, but he thought he had
all the time in the world. Carroll knew her time was almost up, and this
turned her thoughts not only to the subject of death, but her hand and
eye and vision to the mastery needed to complete her work. Her life was
short, but her work is not incomplete. She made the complete cycle of
work of an organism designed to persist only 31 years. We are not
missing the rest of her work, because that would have been the work of a
fundamentally different Carroll. This is all of the work of the Carroll
that was.<br />
<br />
I knew her. Not as much as I would have liked, but more
than most, and I count myself lucky for it. She looked like just
another talented Brooklyn hipster when I met her. It would have taken
her much longer to mature if her body hadn't betrayed her. Her disease
gave her a binary choice: go over it or go under. She chose to go over
it. The cancer kept getting taller, and she got taller to match it.<br />
<br />
She
was loved by her family and friends, and inspired in words and deeds
many people who were suffering as she suffered. She lived fully. She
became unbending of will and great of heart. She made the life she had
make sense, but that speaks for her, not for me. For my part, I am so
sad that she's gone.<br />
<br />
--<br />
<br />
All Melissa Carroll paintings courtesy of the artist and her family<br />
Schiele and Titian via <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page" target="_hplink">wikimedia commons</a>, Picasso via <a href="http://artchive.com/" target="_hplink">artchive.com</a>Danielhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15597234920324948705noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2293319073550947163.post-73461396662029516932014-03-12T14:09:00.001-04:002014-03-12T14:09:24.116-04:00Another Solution to the Problem of the HeadMany problems have more than one solution, and not just more than one workable solution, but more than one optimum solution. This means that one may prefer one solution over another, but that no defense can be made of the preferred solution such that the disfavored one is reasonably eliminated. Certainly this scenario pervades the broad and unevenly lit universe of making art.<br />
<br />
Case in point: ways to represent the head. I just worked up a pretty appealing argument for one means of representing the head. It happens to be a means I myself have worked on for many years. But it’s not the only way to do it.<br />
<br />
As you may have noticed, I do a lot of work with Leah, a model who is, relative to me and a fair number of other artists, muse-grade. I ordinarily draw and paint her head at various points in the structural/emotional paradigm I was working up last time. Here, for instance, is the preparatory sketch for my painting <i>Blue Leah #2</i>:<br />
<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Daniel Maidman, <i>Preparatory Sketch for Blue Leah #2</i>, pencil on paper, 15”x22”, 2012</span></div>
<br />
It leans on the emotional, sacrificing some structural accuracy for the sake of mood, while still maintaining approximate fidelity to form. That sounds awfully clinical, like I go in the studio, set a few dials to the desired values, and hit EXECUTE. The act of drawing wasn’t like that at all - this is just how it came out.<br />
<br />
Here, on the other hand, is the preparatory sketch for a version of <i>Blue Leah #3</i> which I later abandoned:<br />
<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Daniel Maidman, <i>Preparatory Sketch #1 for Blue Leah #3</i>, pencil on paper, 15”x22”, 2012</span></div>
<br />
This happened to come out much more technically: sometimes you start a drawing, and you realize you are getting everything in the right place, and you excitedly ride that wave as far as it will carry you - it is very rewarding to draw without mistakes. That’s what I did here. The elements of personality and mood are still present, but they are subordinate to right form, right shadow shape, right highlight position, absolute line…<br />
<br />
Different though these drawings are, they still represent two points in the same continuum. Consider now a third drawing of Leah - this is a preparatory sketch for <i>Meiosis #2</i> (we’ve discussed it before):<br />
<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Daniel Maidman, <i>Preparatory Sketch for Meiosis #2: Head</i>, pencil on paper, 15”x11”, 2013</span></div>
<br />
This conforms with something we’ve discussed in the remote past, which I call my natural line. I am always not using it very much because it is so reminiscent of Matisse and Picasso, who got there first, and I am always vowing to use it more, because it is genuinely mine and I like it.<br />
<br />
Because I do not practice with it very much, I can really only access it around models I have worked with so much that I have the sense of them in my hand and heart; it is a blindfolded true line, if you like. To my eye, it is outside the architectonics-of-the-head paradigm altogether. Certainly there is something right about it, but that rightness is no longer empirical or derived from an analytical model deeply compatible with the empirical. You can’t shade one of these the way you shade an ordinary drawing, or it turns into crap:<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Daniel Maidman, <i>Preparatory Sketch for Meiosis #2: Body</i>, pencil on paper, 15”x11”, 2013</span></div>
<br />
That turning-into-crapness yields an important clue, that this mode of linemaking exists outside the classical accounting of observed form.<br />
<br />
So anyway, I decided I wanted a more worked-up take on the version of Leah’s face I drew in my natural line. I wanted to make a painting of it. How? How? How? Well - it’s eventually a question of diving in and seeing what happens. So I drew something very like it onto a canvas and got Leah to come in and we sat down and banged out a painting in three hours.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjY3vnfq5wYT4X2bezoD7VFbyldookTXQG7zgezZ0tjBf_0xVCjwyfppp0m4B94b9SZx5ziQ-m0Q4haILs4I8wz9UAsBwOv_YmKBx_f7NJG11nfWe1zccsI-EgGfkMNc5dFAsFrusT1GhJz/s1600/graphic+5.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjY3vnfq5wYT4X2bezoD7VFbyldookTXQG7zgezZ0tjBf_0xVCjwyfppp0m4B94b9SZx5ziQ-m0Q4haILs4I8wz9UAsBwOv_YmKBx_f7NJG11nfWe1zccsI-EgGfkMNc5dFAsFrusT1GhJz/s1600/graphic+5.jpg" height="200" width="160" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Daniel Maidman, <i>Leah</i>, oil on linen, 20”x16”, 2014</span></div>
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A few thoughts on this painting. First of all, it doesn’t look like my ordinary work. The values are much less contrasty and more clustered toward middle grey. I have preserved the centrality of line. There is no real three-dimensionality to the forms. It doesn’t really look real.<br />
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And yet it has other qualities which I have pursued a long time and feel like I caught here, a bit, at last. Leah appears not in her guise as a highly particularized set of forms, but as a day-to-day person; we don’t see her forms more astutely than we do those of people we run into in normal life. That backgrounding of form provides space for aspects of personality I can’t catch in my more developed work - the casual facets of personality: a turn, an interested glance, the intake of breath, a fleeting thought. I asked her to put her shirt back on because I realized I wasn’t painting an Eternal Nude, but a civilian. This is how you paint a friend. It comes closer to what we like about Hals - Hals is the master of the brief and the transitional. That’s why art history puts up with his sloppy, half-assed brushwork. Those awful marks are the byproducts of the only means of catching spontaneous liveliness: painting fast and not trying to get it right.<br />
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I liked this pretty well when I got done, and I like it more now. It’s been growing on me, in a friendly way. <br />
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I hope this works for you as an example of another optimal solution to a problem. I sometimes worry that the breadth of my techniques (not that broad, but not monopolar either) will make my body of work seem uncommitted. But it’s not that; it’s that life is very various, and I want to make room in my own life and work to say “yes” to as much of it as possible.Danielhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15597234920324948705noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2293319073550947163.post-47931840130364165012014-03-07T15:19:00.000-05:002014-03-07T15:19:01.162-05:00The Architectonics of the Head<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I posted the following portrait of Rachel on Facebook a few weeks ago. Rachel is a model I have drawn frequently at Spring Street over the past couple of years, and about whom I will have much more to say down the road.<br />
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<center>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXE_jcufwKFUyjIBcsqUCh8DuZx2EB0o_D-ebuN6B1tHJRk9ucDUya8XL1dCJ3KI4YagFYaOXyFORZOyL-K2dRJhhfDCFufdklFtBEZiALUbImAzmRfmTMCQ2zstAOBIIXFmiXiyq3k2yG/s1600/graphic+1.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXE_jcufwKFUyjIBcsqUCh8DuZx2EB0o_D-ebuN6B1tHJRk9ucDUya8XL1dCJ3KI4YagFYaOXyFORZOyL-K2dRJhhfDCFufdklFtBEZiALUbImAzmRfmTMCQ2zstAOBIIXFmiXiyq3k2yG/s1600/graphic+1.jpg" height="200" width="150" /></a></center>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Daniel Maidman, <i>Melancholy Portrait of Rachel</i>, graphite and white pencil on Rives BFK Tan, 15"x11”, 2014</span></div>
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I had my doubts about this drawing, but there was a unity to it which is something I’ve been working on. Artist <a href="http://www.josephpodlesnik.com/" target="_blank">Joseph Podlesnik</a> commented, “Finesse and control, not an errant mark - like building a house of cards, placing one element carefully before the next, ensuring the former supports what follows... yes?”<br />
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Podlesnik himself knows what the hell he’s talking about in terms of the unity of organic forms.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0C1438SBLdtN2CEbEQSS89d1sKMpK5XU030pFch4z-6ZDT0UlgwQfMFt2wPkSNG3cXlIBP4MKnwkgU5WE371YendTr4SLrycvXkaif0ElRsEOHEo5q35PaT-n2o1JyTGUFhgJZg6nBWDr/s1600/graphic+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0C1438SBLdtN2CEbEQSS89d1sKMpK5XU030pFch4z-6ZDT0UlgwQfMFt2wPkSNG3cXlIBP4MKnwkgU5WE371YendTr4SLrycvXkaif0ElRsEOHEo5q35PaT-n2o1JyTGUFhgJZg6nBWDr/s1600/graphic+2.jpg" height="97" width="200" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Joseph Podlesnik, <i>Untitled</i>, pastel on paper, 12.25”x7.5”, 2014</span></div>
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I promised to follow up on his analysis (which is what I’m doing here), because it answered closely to something which has been much on my mind for maybe the past year or so. I can’t find a record of the instigating incident, which was also a Facebook thing. Somebody somewhere posted this closeup of the face in the painting <i>Ramsay MacDonald</i> by British (and, pleasingly, Jewish) painter Solomon Joseph Solomon:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVm008B_2hJTs4CClUQVlXqySVcW-wqKUsSPkfUG9L9lytFvB9Jicp9bwSyWID8FjXLszQXfwoSdA1LSYKCA3kOQjYH3mC799kEoqg8RIROfqsifHdehhdTvLH7_utxV6yHdj9jNcpW71K/s1600/graphic+3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVm008B_2hJTs4CClUQVlXqySVcW-wqKUsSPkfUG9L9lytFvB9Jicp9bwSyWID8FjXLszQXfwoSdA1LSYKCA3kOQjYH3mC799kEoqg8RIROfqsifHdehhdTvLH7_utxV6yHdj9jNcpW71K/s1600/graphic+3.jpg" height="200" width="163" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Solomon Joseph Solomon, <i>Ramsay MacDonald</i> (detail), oil on canvas, 35.5”x28.5”, 1911</span></div>
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Solomon is a hero of the current crop of neo-academic painters. Whoever posted this closeup remarked on Solomon’s amazing grasp of the architecture of the head. Sometimes in life a single turn of phrase will change some fundamental thing for you, and for me, this concept of “the architecture of the head” was one such phrase. I rephrased it for myself to “the architectonics of the head” - the <i>system</i> of the architecture, over and above the specifics of the particular architecture.<br />
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What I mean is this. The remark, in either form, elevates the given head from simply a nicely-done head, to a comprehensible head. One can understand what makes it work so well: every element, from the distribution of values over the surfaces, to the varying yellows and pinks, to the placement of the parts in correct perspective, answers flawlessly to the geometry and structural unity of a convex bony object wrapped in a little meat and skin. The lack of error to this head gives it its sense of rightness. Encountering this head, the eye unclenches, because it senses it will not have to paper over any differences between what is presented and what was meant.<br />
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This conceptualization of the topic as a matter of architectonics was new to me. I was familiar with the ideas of knowing the structure of the skull, and the proportions of the face, and so forth, before. But I had never integrated the diverse implicated topics into a single concept, called architectonics, which subsumed all the relevant sub-topics. All the parts fell into place: they became a single thing. There was one head-ness to the head.<br />
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This sudden sense of the parts falling into place effected a quiet revolution for me. I had been self-consciously avoiding heads based on “what I know” - I follow this avoidance in general, but especially for heads. I don’t want to draw first what I “know” is there, and then see if I can shoehorn the specifics of the model into place once I’ve answered to the strictures of knowledge. So I build up heads from features, making sure each feature has its right shape, and doing my best to get the features to sit in the right places relative to one another. This method is prone to mishap, but it encourages me to focus on personality and emotion in the faces of the people I am looking at, and that is my highest priority.<br />
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Indulging in that sense of superiority which I, for one, cannot quite overcome, I have been faintly dismissive toward the knowledge-oriented drawers of heads. Those <i>aesthetes</i>, I allowed myself to think, were really drawing concepts, and not people. And most of the time, this may be true. It is not easy to draw either a concept or a person. But I think there are two things a fair-minded observer would have to concede about Solomon’s <i>MacDonald</i>: that indeed it does have an amazing grasp of the architectonics of the head - and that it is rich in character, mood, and presence. That is, it neatly leaps over the dichotomy which I was proposing, of the head from architectonic and humanist perspectives.<br />
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At the right time, all it takes to make progress is the recognition that progress is possible. I bumped up against the Solomon and the description at the right time. Thenceforth, I found that I could approach the head as Solomon did: from both an analytic (architectonic) and an empirical (humanist) perspective. <br />
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Actually, let me not make so audacious a claim. Let me say that knowing it was possible, I could no longer not try. I finally had enough knowledge and experience on both sides of the divide that I was comfortable simultaneously throwing both methodologies into the effort. I could see the unified skull beneath the flesh, and I could also see the complex configuration of tensions and relaxations of the muscles of the face, which gives faces their emotions and characters.<br />
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So when Podlesnik says, “Finesse and control, not an errant mark - like building a house of cards, placing one element carefully before the next, ensuring the former supports what follows... yes?” what I read is, “I understand what you have been trying to do, and it worked.”<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXE_jcufwKFUyjIBcsqUCh8DuZx2EB0o_D-ebuN6B1tHJRk9ucDUya8XL1dCJ3KI4YagFYaOXyFORZOyL-K2dRJhhfDCFufdklFtBEZiALUbImAzmRfmTMCQ2zstAOBIIXFmiXiyq3k2yG/s1600/graphic+1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXE_jcufwKFUyjIBcsqUCh8DuZx2EB0o_D-ebuN6B1tHJRk9ucDUya8XL1dCJ3KI4YagFYaOXyFORZOyL-K2dRJhhfDCFufdklFtBEZiALUbImAzmRfmTMCQ2zstAOBIIXFmiXiyq3k2yG/s1600/graphic+1.jpg" height="200" width="150" /></a></div>
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Looking at it again, you can see the Solomon to this face, can’t you? It is not as good a picture, but Rachel happened to take the same pose, under the same lighting, at the same angle relative to me. Or close enough. The two instances partway fused.<br />
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Under more generous conditions - that is, in paint and with all the time in the world - I continued to deploy the model of the architectonics of the head, emphasizing and eliding detail to accomplish individuality and unity in a portrait I was working on of my friend <a href="http://www.rupadasgupta.com/" target="_blank">Rupa DasGupta</a>. <br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZlm1gFcfsbXxoOzu_J5SrwnWIGbFAzyEMqp06xqwK6T2YKDYnmsSzp_jmrxjlwIaZOEZYn7yNcdM22vPJf_sTMs_ObeJeG5GPfEJdevXWYW3FlkhaoBgTpPBjYmIw_3-XU9FRoRfsA8Zg/s1600/graphic+4.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZlm1gFcfsbXxoOzu_J5SrwnWIGbFAzyEMqp06xqwK6T2YKDYnmsSzp_jmrxjlwIaZOEZYn7yNcdM22vPJf_sTMs_ObeJeG5GPfEJdevXWYW3FlkhaoBgTpPBjYmIw_3-XU9FRoRfsA8Zg/s1600/graphic+4.jpg" height="200" width="160" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Daniel Maidman, <i>Rupa</i>, oil on linen, 20”x16”, 2014</span></div>
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<i>Eliding detail?</i> you ask. Yes, in one very particular way - I brightened the side of her nose, so that the upward planes of her cheeks and nose appeared more fused into a single structural unit. They don’t actually look like this - but it’s how the eye understands them. This kind of selective de-emphasis can only fail to interfere with the personhood of the model if you’re coming at the problem from both sides. Thus, you see me here applying to their fullest the principles I learned from my own practice, and from this Facebook poster whose name currently eludes me, and from Solomon Joseph Solomon.Danielhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15597234920324948705noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2293319073550947163.post-60687966132758753172014-03-04T15:09:00.005-05:002014-03-04T15:09:56.090-05:00I'll Stand With ChaosLet’s pretend I didn’t just ignore you for a couple months. Of course, what we feared has come to pass - <i>Huffington</i> both drained the energy I pour into this blog, and changed the tenor of my writing. Perhaps this is alright; one might propose that when I started with you, I was in training, and my training yielded its results, and now most of my writing is of a different character, for a broader and more professional context. Perhaps. But I don’t like to think that what I am doing here is not an end in itself. I like to spend time with you here, and to ruminate in a leisurely way on my work and the work I am looking at. Everything just seems so much more busy these days. Let’s say, then, that life is more busy, and leave it at that. To the topic at hand.<br />
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I was on the subway the other day, looking at some ads which a little googling suggests are ubiquitous in the United States right now - the ads themselves are Google ads, for a service called Google Play, which I’m going to guess has something to do with streaming music. Here’s one I pulled off the web.<br />
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<center a="" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgV-6BFp5FVRJ8toq6T1koeAAf0slBXw7lTsRhukSr3G1WTKox7LiBb7LhGa82Fp68JXOOg1xhVPdLgF2Dbh9k3x2PaZYN6Vr-JfrnUSimyb7DbStL1v0GTePiIZPU5lU2DFWAYRD6nSWPo/s1600/graphic+1.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;">
<img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgV-6BFp5FVRJ8toq6T1koeAAf0slBXw7lTsRhukSr3G1WTKox7LiBb7LhGa82Fp68JXOOg1xhVPdLgF2Dbh9k3x2PaZYN6Vr-JfrnUSimyb7DbStL1v0GTePiIZPU5lU2DFWAYRD6nSWPo/s1600/graphic+1.jpg" height="112" width="200" /></center>
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I found myself resenting these ads even more than I resent most Google ads. I was looking at them, thinking about their design; about how Google likes to throw resources at everything it does. I pictured focus groups and psychometricians generating viewer response scores on sets of icon juxtapositions, and a designated Clever Artist coming up with the quarter-turn white highlight on the speaker cones, leaving an implied sans-serif G in the negative space; and Swiss designers in lab coats carefully rotating elements by pre-specified scientific increments in Adobe Illustrator, displayed on enormous flatscreens at the ends of flexible chrome arms in surgically clean white rooms.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0Yz7cvsp8SwDc7sKQp6Dfqgwr4FcZJhvjXAxSteIkp-ZFBtmsw21aCaBUKQY-40MxgdQoF35F90QFF9LKDDvtGzgC7oD9uWpS8ZyFDLmGywHW807bJSuGpX7nynoV6qoS62wv_1eOOrvv/s1600/graphic+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0Yz7cvsp8SwDc7sKQp6Dfqgwr4FcZJhvjXAxSteIkp-ZFBtmsw21aCaBUKQY-40MxgdQoF35F90QFF9LKDDvtGzgC7oD9uWpS8ZyFDLmGywHW807bJSuGpX7nynoV6qoS62wv_1eOOrvv/s1600/graphic+2.jpg" height="83" width="200" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Google HQ</span></div>
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I pictured this entire antiseptic apparatus of advertising throwing the enormity of its muscle into generating these images and making them perfect.<br />
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But you know what? They still kind of suck. They suck a lot. They are terrible ads. They stand in relation to good ads as PC design stands in relation to Apple design. The only reason to register their presence at all is that you cannot avoid them.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNPaY9RQhgFF3OTnHDZSnET2qCwsmsMnAfrJIZrRuB9vMRGzKU04xNjnQ9MPw7rgOK-d03ccHyVQeU-yM6RDX4j9bVtDM8EWT2os8BvtO9YxxUUuISHoah1shOHY9cXwngr0rytHgtcKV8/s1600/graphic+3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNPaY9RQhgFF3OTnHDZSnET2qCwsmsMnAfrJIZrRuB9vMRGzKU04xNjnQ9MPw7rgOK-d03ccHyVQeU-yM6RDX4j9bVtDM8EWT2os8BvtO9YxxUUuISHoah1shOHY9cXwngr0rytHgtcKV8/s1600/graphic+3.jpg" height="146" width="200" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">via <a href="http://www.dailybillboardblog.com/2013/11/google-play-unlimited-music-special.html">http://www.dailybillboardblog.com/2013/11/google-play-unlimited-music-special.html</a></span></div>
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This is an important lesson in what makes good art. Google has undoubtedly thrown a generous budget at their big ad campaign. But they threw it in the wrong direction. Good art is not a question of money, scientists, experts, and committees. Quantitative validation of your output does not make it functional. Art is a system so tremendously multivariate that it cannot yet be regularized by means of rational protocols. Like Asimov’s hypothesis about extremely advanced technologies, it is indistinguishable from magic.<br />
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The practical outcome of this non-reduceability property is that any miserable art student with a No. 2 pencil has in his or her hand a tool as powerful for the creation of good art as does Google with its well-paid army of image engineers; more powerful, perhaps, because Google makes the mistake of thinking that quality control controls quality, and the art student lacks the resources to indulge in this corporate delusion.<br />
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When Google gets it right, if it ever does, it will be because they got their hands on the right single person with a great idea, and then got out of the way. They will get it right the same way the humblest of artists does, not by throwing money at the problem but through inspiration.<br />
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There is no means of controlling the system through which good and bad art are generated. It takes the fiery form of democracy explained, not particularly surprisingly if you consider their overall body of work, in Pixar’s 2007 movie <i>Ratatouille</i>: <br />
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<span style="color: #351c75;">In the past, I have made no secret of my disdain for Chef Gusteau's famous motto, “Anyone can cook." But I realize, only now do I truly understand what he meant. Not everyone can become a great artist; but a great artist <i>can</i> come from <i>anywhere</i>.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7LraAdCGcMOMFr-wQTV41y0OE63RLxvXDv6wG11r5cC1RLk4WejT7zOWdTGL-_s3PMt0xiBQISoUHtOr2dauy58QORbQrCZalIbjEcxW2i-3tGUAg02UQbhVvmF5WYJDBBUL7P5QwALFV/s1600/graphic+4.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7LraAdCGcMOMFr-wQTV41y0OE63RLxvXDv6wG11r5cC1RLk4WejT7zOWdTGL-_s3PMt0xiBQISoUHtOr2dauy58QORbQrCZalIbjEcxW2i-3tGUAg02UQbhVvmF5WYJDBBUL7P5QwALFV/s1600/graphic+4.jpg" height="84" width="200" /></a></div>
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Pixar never dolls up the brutally exclusionary nature of art. Some artists can become great and others never will. But they consistently combine this elitist insight with its egalitarian complement - that who can become great and who cannot is a wild process answerable to no budget, aristocracy, inheritance, education, authority, or even justice. Art stalks where it likes and strikes whom it will. From a mortal perspective, it appears to be chaotic.<br />
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The presumption involved in Google’s lacking Pixar’s wisdom regarding the creation of personal artwork in a corporate environment - and further, Google’s abysmal bad taste in going wide with their dull, mediocre campaign -<br />
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- was what stirred my resentment. But ultimately, their money can only buy them ubiquity. In taking their stand, they defeat themselves. This is true of all art institutions reliant on something apart from the art itself for their claims to art status, by which I mean museums, galleries, graduate schools, the press, the academics, the collectors, and anyone else with authority who might want art to be orderly and predictable. <br />
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I myself am some of these institutions, and I interact with the rest. I would never dismiss the best among them. These best understand that they are subordinate to art, and that art is untamable. There is not yet a complete theory of art, and it is not demonstrated that it will become possible to form a complete theory of art in the future. There is only good art, bad art, learning to see and respect the difference and, for artists, chasing like demons after quality. <br />
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I emerged gladdened from the subway, having been reminded of the radical democracy of art, which is functionally identical with chaos. I’ll stand with chaos.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">That last line sounds very dramatic, but in fact it is not a brave act in any way, and I wouldn't want to imply that it was. </span>Danielhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15597234920324948705noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2293319073550947163.post-50652528328701100472013-12-31T15:16:00.002-05:002013-12-31T16:00:53.667-05:00Superman Vs. Edgar Allan PoeThis will probably work better if you click on the first image, then go through them in sequence via the little graphics menu at the bottom of the screen. Don't even scroll down in this view.<br />
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Happy new year, youse.<br />
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Danielhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15597234920324948705noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2293319073550947163.post-29421840283384921102013-12-31T11:19:00.000-05:002013-12-31T11:19:43.748-05:00Art and Artists III: Forms of Beauty<u>The Blind Prophet</u><br />
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Let me conclude this sequence of posts with a slightly more detailed examination of what it means to an artist - in this case me - to be able to follow in real time the work of another artist - in this case, sculptor <a href="http://www.sabinhoward.com/" target="_blank">Sabin Howard</a>.<br />
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Howard lives and works somewhere in New York, but most of my fairly minimal interaction with him is over Facebook. Lately, he has been working on some remarkable drawings. Here is the first one he posted:<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Sabin Howard, <i>Untitled Study</i>, 2013, 18"x14", pencil on paper</span></center>
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Before we get down to analysis here, let me explain that I had an immediate and visceral reaction to this drawing. I thought, "Oh, I <i>love</i> this." Sometimes you fall in love with drawings; I fell in love with this.<br />
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Now that we've got the intensity of my reaction clear, I can attempt to dissect its cause. But I can make you no promises. The analysis is after-the-fact.<br />
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The first thing, which is evident to any artist with experience in figure drawing and which Howard confirms when asked, is that there was no model for this drawing. It is a construction: Howard constructed it based on his knowledge of anatomy, and the theory of the body he has derived from that knowledge. As he puts it, "I wanted to do more experimentation with the conceptualization of the body in geometric terms, how all the parts fit together. There is a lot about the architecture of the figure being the skeleton. And the musculature being the spinning organic element. As a sculptor I am an architect working with organic form."<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Sabin Howard, <i>Untitled Study</i>, 2013, 18"x14", pencil on paper</span></div>
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That kind of offhand remark can only occur in the context of a wide, deep knowledge of the body as a machine. This mode of knowing characterized a sect of artists over many centuries, from Michelangelo to John Tenniel. It is pursued internally out of a thirst for absolute understanding, for a sense of the body that does not leave any part <i>about right</i>, but rather <i>utterly right</i>, exact as to itself. This pursuit replaces the real bodies of real people with a set of Forms derived in the mind: the body as parsed and created in the mind, cleaned of its inconsistencies and variations, made perfect and harshly true. It is only in this mode of art-making that the artist becomes really god-like, in the sense of creating a world. The artist becomes a calipers-god, working from first principles all the way up to something with a complexity like life, but a life owing nothing to nature, and everything to mindfulness.<br />
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Such a pursuit etches its nature into the aesthetics of its creations. There is a sense of glaring reason to the work, a pitiless, shadowless brilliance. In <i>The Secret History</i>, Donna Tartt does some writing which has stuck with me on the Greek mindset. Discussing words for "fire," her narrator says:<br />
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<span style="color: #351c75;">"I can only say that an <i>incendium</i> is in its nature entirely different from the <i>feu</i> with which a Frenchman lights his cigarette, and both are very different from the stark, inhuman <i>pur</i> that the Greeks knew, the <i>pur</i> that roared from the towers of Ilion or leapt and screamed on that desolate, windy beach, from the funeral pyre of Patroklos."<br /><br />"Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it."</span><br />
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Yes, that is it. The form of beauty Howard pursues is the Greek beauty, awful, unmerciful, scouring. There is no more hiding from the crushing demands of virtue or from the stark final nature of things in his conception of the figure. Howard is, after a manner of speaking, a servant of Apollo, and not just any servant. He is trying to become Tiresias; he scarcely requires eyes to see what he sees.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Sabin Howard, <i>Untitled Study</i>, 2013, 18"x14", pencil on paper</span></div>
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This is not the only thing we need, but if we do not have this, we might as well have nothing.<br />
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Now, this is not how I myself ordinarily draw. My fundamental means of drawing is not knowledge but sight, specifically sight of shapes. I've written about my native mode of visual cognition <a href="http://danielmaidman.blogspot.com/2010/08/gladioli.html" target="_blank">here</a>. For all that, the mind has difficulty integrating pure shape into unified human forms. So I got around the problem by taking gross anatomy - I hacked up cadavers for a couple years, and drew my own anatomical atlas.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Daniel Maidman, <i>Front and Back Views of the Spine</i>, 2002, 14"x11", pen on paper</span></div>
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This emphasis on explicit knowledge of anatomy allowed me to introduce a convincing internal structure into my figures, but I never sought to foreground the practice. For Howard, the body in itself, as a noble machine interfacing with a world of forces, is a topic of obsession. For me, the body was always a secondary concern, beautiful but mainly as the repository of the invisible person. It's the sheet the ghost wears so you can see it.<br />
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My approach is not better than his; his approach is not better than mine. There is room enough in the world for both of us, and I think there is need enough in the soul for both of us too. <br />
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Be that as it may, when you look at art that moves you profoundly, it rubs off on you a bit. So the next time I had a long pose to draw, this was what I drew:<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Daniel Maidman, <i>Aubrey's Torso</i>, 2013, 15"x11", pencil on paper</span></div>
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It's not really a Howard drawing, but it owes something to Howard. It is a more complete section of the body, more unified in its conception, than I usually bother with. I emphasized putting every part in, and getting every part right. And I did have to do a good deal of construction - as people who have drawn Aubrey know, she has hair down to her waist. During this pose, her hair was in front of her, on her left, blocking a hefty swath of my view. So I had to make up a lot of the right side of the drawing, based on glimpses, symmetry, and general knowledge.<br />
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After that, the effect of looking at Howard's work persisted, right through an event important to me for other reasons. What happened was, I had a chance to work with Piera again. <br />
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<u>The Hope of Eternal Return</u><br />
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Over time, I think we tend to notice that life involves a lot of loss. You choose some way to live, you live that way for a while, and then you lose whatever it was. This is a constantly renewed process, and whatever the rewards of new things, the pain of loss persists. Rarely does life permit return.<br />
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I have had five primary muses in my life as an artist, and Piera is the fourth. My wife and I became close friends with her and her husband Emanuele, <a href="http://www.emanuelesi.com/" target="_blank">also an artist</a>. Making people feel loved is a talent, or maybe a state of character. Whatever it is, I know of nobody in whom it is more inborn than Piera. My first painting of her was also my first painting as a technically well-developed painter:<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Daniel Maidman, <i>Piera</i>, 2008, 28"x22", oil on canvas</span></div>
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But Piera has no time for modeling anymore; she and Emanuele had a baby a few years ago, and he is the focus of their lives. Over Christmas, though, owing to a combination of vacation overlaps, Piera had a few hours to come model for me. I elected to do preparatory sketches for paintings.<br />
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Well, it turns out that Piera actually looks a bit Howardish herself these days. When I first met her in 2007, she was strong but curvy. Almost seven years later, she still has the curvy skeletal architecture, but she's worked off a lot of the flesh that used to overlie it. She's wiry now, the kind of wiry that will be formally beautiful all the way to 70 or 80 years, like Saint Jerome. The first drawing I did of her reflected this combination of her revised anatomy and my exposure to Howard's work:<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Daniel Maidman, <i>Preparatory Sketch for a Painting of Piera I</i>, 2013, 15"x11", pencil on paper</span></div>
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I like this very much; I liked that, like cigarette carcinogens, superpowers can be absorbed second-hand. It is good to draw the complete human machine sometimes, in its naked excellence. However, in my second drawing, my natural tendencies reasserted themselves. <br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Daniel Maidman, <i>Preparatory Sketch for a Painting of Piera II</i>, 2013, 15"x11", pencil on paper</span></div>
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Here I followed shape at the expense of proportion. There are no lines of perspective, there is no telling if I got it right or wrong. There may well be no right or wrong to this. It is as irregular as French in comparison with the martial Greek of the first one. It doesn't even especially look like Piera. And yet to me, it very much feels like her. It feels like her personality and mood; it is the Piera we both recognized when we considered it after the sitting. This is the landscape of my native sense of beauty.<br />
<br />
Drawing Piera again, I felt a happiness unique to the restoration of some way of living we had loved, and lost. People, places, practices, things - all of them are ways of living, and we do not own any of them. I had the good fortune to live my life as an artist in the company of Piera for some years. Later, I lost her. I moved on, and I was happy, but time itself is an affront to my sensibilities, and I never stopped grieving for this absent part of my life. Then she came back to work with me again, and I felt right with myself and the world. This was the happiness of restoration.<br />
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There is no moral to this winding anecdote. Sabin Howard, in my opinion, has made a breakthrough in these drawings in his passionate pursuit of a particular fundamental form of beauty. If I were not me, as an artist, I might well want to be him. I have a different form of beauty which is natural to me. I am seeking to become excellent in mine as he is in his. I become richer seeing what he does, and I hope you become richer considering this account.<br />
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<u>Next</u><br />
<br />
This is what my life is like as an artist, making art and writing about art, among artists. Many of the best I know are kind. I often write about friends, but I do not write well of them because they are friends. Rather, I sought to become friends with them because I first knew and admired their work.<br />
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Of course I want to be the best artist in the world. All artists must. But that's for later. For now, I do not even want to be the best artist in the room. I want to be an artist worth considering in a room with many splendid artists.<br />
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I worked hard as hell to get good enough even to gain entry to that room, and I think I have gotten through the door. I remain in New York so that this concept of a room will find embodiment, sometimes, in actual rooms, where I will actually run into people like Steven Assael and Dorian Vallejo, Claudia Hajian and Fred Hatt, Michelle Doll and Lisa Lebofsky and Bonnie DeWitt, Jean-Pierre Roy and Noah Becker, and Sabin Howard; and many more besides.<br />
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This is the best picture I can draw for you of my part of the art scene in New York at the end of 2013. In the next year, I hope to go on working hard, receiving inspiration sometimes, seeing work, talking with artists, self-promoting as I can, and trying not to turn into a dick.<br />
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My wish for you is that you will have something worthy of passion in your life; that you will have scope to work on becoming excellent at it; and that you will not be alone in your passion, but will be welcomed in the company of others who share in it. If you've already got those things, I hope you won't forget that they represent a wealth beyond measure.<br />
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As usual, I am seeking to instruct myself first, but if I'm saying anything useful for you, I'm glad for that as well.Danielhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15597234920324948705noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2293319073550947163.post-7172011040149482872013-12-30T07:36:00.000-05:002013-12-30T09:22:17.128-05:00Art and Artists II: The Angel of the Lower East Side<u>Deck the Walls</u><br />
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Last time, I told you about a chain of events triggered by running into artist Dorian Vallejo at Steven Assael's drawing show at Forum Gallery. Today I'd like to continue my incomplete portrait of the art scene in New York at the end of 2013 - incomplete even as to my own little corner of it. But still, better than no account at all.<br />
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The holidays were nearly upon us, and I went to the New York Academy of Art's Christmas party, called Deck the Walls (because they have art by students and faculty on the walls). I've gotten invited to these things a few years in a row now. I think they invite people who donate art to their fundraiser auctions, which I do, because I like the art that Academy graduates are making, so whatever they're teaching over there, I'd like them to continue to have a chance to teach it.<br />
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The parties happen in the main room of their building on Franklin Street, in Tribeca, and are invariably packed and difficult to navigate. What I like to do is alternate between finding somebody I know and talking with them, and finding the bartender and obtaining a drink. At this particular party, I mostly spoke with two people I'm very happy to know.<br />
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One is <a href="http://michelledoll.com/" target="_blank">Michelle Doll</a>. For my money, Doll has John Shaft beat on keeping it together: she got an MFA from the Academy, paints beautifully, and dresses fabulously. She's done all this while raising her son alone. Like Dorian Vallejo, and Claudia Hajian, she is an incredibly sweet individual. Here's one of her paintings:<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Michelle Doll, <i>Mother and Child (EE1)</i>, 2013, 30" x 20", oil on panel</span></center>
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Considering it again, it's a thing apart from the rendering I saw the first time that speaks to me now. This time, it's the warm-toned abrasions or marks on the surface. These run through the work, indiscriminate of the object they overlie. They serve to unify the composition formally, and thus the mother and child thematically. They are the undertow that sweeps the two of them in together, preserving them during this interval as one flesh.<br />
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The other person I spoke with quite a bit was <a href="http://www.lisalebofsky.com/" target="_blank">Lisa Lebofsky</a>. Lebofsky is a painter who has done something I've considered but never done, for all that I would like to and admire her having pulled it off. I am, like her, attracted to the colder regions of the Earth. Unlike me, she went deep into the lethal, endless cold, and dragged images out of that beautiful, hostile land for her art:<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Lisa Lebofsky, <i>Antarctic Islands and Glacier</i>, 2012, 25" x 40", oil on aluminum</span></div>
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I am awed by this. <br />
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I don't know Lebofsky well, actually, and a lot of our conversation involved getting into sync. Neither of us could remember whether, or how many times, we'd met. She knows my writing and painting, and I know her work - in fact, I've been in her studio. As for hanging out, though, it was unclear.<br />
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I've been in her studio because a friend of hers showed it off to me. I guess we kind of broke in, you're not really supposed to go in somebody's studio when they're not around. Lebofsky's friend is <a href="http://www.bonniedewitt.dphoto.com/" target="_blank">Bonnie DeWitt</a>, whom I think of as the angel of the Lower East Side.<br />
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DeWitt is a painter and the director of the oddly-located <a href="http://krainegallery.com/" target="_blank">Kraine Gallery</a>. As a painter, she has a cheerfully perverse sensibility, like an early Renaissance narrative painter, or a German fairy-tale writer:<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Bonnie DeWitt, <i>Horse Massacre</i>, 2010, 32"x40", gouache on paper</span></div>
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I actually don't know her artwork extensively: she has foregrounded her curation in my encounters with her. DeWitt is a tiny little twinkly pixie with red hair and a black leather jacket, Faye Dunaway cheekbones and a startlingly deep, dry voice. If you've looked at network maps at all, you'll have seen the famous nodes – points with large numbers of network connections. In social networks, these nodes are people whom everyone knows, even though the members of this "everyone" may not know one another. DeWitt is a natural node. She knows and adores all the artists in a certain sector, and is reciprocally known and adored.<br />
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When I think of punk rock, I think of DeWitt. I think very highly of punk rock, but I should emphasize that my actual contact with it in the world is minimal. I have constructed my own punk rock in my head, taking some of the trappings of the real thing and fashioning the thing I deduced and needed. My personal punk rock is a combination of intense oneselfness, combined with a fuck-you attitude toward authority, and a bracingly nihilistic edge, a sense that it would be better for it all to burn down rather than to keep on going as it is. In this sense, DeWitt is punk rock.<br />
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She approximately haunts the Lower East Side, in which I include the East Village. Much of this zone is still poor enough for artists to inhabit, and it is infested with studios and little galleries, including my own, <a href="http://daciagallery.com/" target="_blank">Dacia Gallery</a>. Many of these artists are the outcasts of the art world - they are the high-rendering figurative painters. Ranging from the deeply expressionist to the tightly academic, these painters grapple in their work with the same contemporary cultural issues as more mainstream art world players. But because of their helpless and unswayable adherence to representation in their work, they have been consigned to the ecological niche that gave rise to punk rock (well, punk rock as I imagine it) in the first place: financially hobbled and socially outcast. <br />
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In such conditions, a punk attitude naturally results. Among the artists I've met in this neighborhood, there is a warren-like, off-grid feeling of community, and an edge of point-blank starvation, and above all a totally natural sense of selfhood. These are people who cannot be other than themselves, and they've got their poverty, and the indifference or scorn of the mainstream, to prove it. To this talented, alienated cohort, DeWitt addresses an attitude of boundless, broad-winged love; and to the rest of the world, the flaming sword. <br />
<br />
Hence, the angel of the Lower East Side.<br />
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<u>The Bottom of Chrystie Street</u><br />
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Sadly, DeWitt wasn't at Deck the Walls, and not only was it sad in the sense that I didn't get to see her, but also because they had free drinks, and DeWitt can drink like a fish. I had a fair amount to drink myself, but I had a second thing I needed to get to the same evening, so I ventured out into the winter cold in my suit jacket (who wants to take a coat and carry it all evening?). I had to get to <a href="http://www.thelodgegallery.com/" target="_blank">The Lodge Gallery</a>, on Chrystie Street, to see a drawing in "TGF Sports," a group show. The drawing was by the marvelous <a href="http://www.jean-pierreroy.com/Jean-PierreRoy.com.html" target="_blank">Jean-Pierre Roy</a>. <br />
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Chrystie is a ways east of the Academy, so I had some walking to do. Unlike driving drunk, it seems you can mostly only hurt yourself by walking drunk. So I feel little compunction about praising the practice. I like walking around Manhattan very much, and I especially like walking around Manhattan while tipsy, and if possible, alone, at night, underdressed, in the winter. The textures of surfaces seem coarser, the lights more colorful, the towers more majestic. Individual people are more distinct from one another, and store windows endlessly fascinating. The light spirit of New York, of plans and their fruition - the glamor of the city - shimmers on everything under these conditions. One feels a feeling of being at the start of things, of excitement and high hopes.<br />
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In such an open mood, you discover new things. What I discovered is that at least some of those peculiarly cheap Chinese bus lines one hears so much about have their depots at the bottom of Chrystie Street. Did you know that? I didn't know that. I could have hightailed it down to Raleigh that night, although I didn't.<br />
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My advice about getting blitzed and strolling around a city at night might not be good advice for you. You might not be a 6'1" man. Or, you might not have the good fortune to react to moderate inebriation by experiencing a sense of universal affection and goodwill.<br />
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I made it to The Lodge, and saw Roy's spellbinding drawing, one of his highly detailed envisionings of himself occupying dreamily unlikely situations; in this instance, a quotation from <i>Rambo III</i> - two of Roy, bandanna'd, playing the Afghan sport of buzkashi, which is like polo but with a headless goat, <span class="st"><i>bien sûr</i></span>.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Jean-Pierre Roy, <i>May god deliver us from the venom of the cobra, the teeth of the tiger and from 80's American cinema</i>, 2013, 22"x30", graphite on paper</span></div>
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I only saw Roy for a minute, which is too bad, because I like him very much. He's one of the few people I know who makes me feel a little short and insubstantial. He is an enormous bear of a man, sincere and outgoing, enthusiastic about his teaching and painstaking in his strange, ambitious work.<br />
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Instead, I spent most of my time at the opening chatting with <a href="http://noahbeckerart.com/" target="_blank">Noah Becker</a>. Becker and I have been interviewing one another at <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/daniel-maidman/q0-daniel-maidman-and-noa_b_3375866.html" target="_blank"><i>Huffington</i></a>. We are both figurative painters, but our approaches are very different.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Noah Becker, <i>Self Portrait #2</i>, 2012, 24"x30", oil on canvas</span></div>
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In reproduction, Becker's work is nearly inscrutable - flat of affect, icily <i>moderne</i>, stripped of context and implication. He founded <a href="http://whitehotmagazine.com/" target="_blank">Whitehot Magazine</a> and plays jazz saxophone. His answers to interview questions are frustratingly tangential. As one feels in encountering an image of his work, I felt I could deduce almost nothing about him personally. He seemed intimidatingly cool. Before I met him, I was a little frightened of meeting him. <br />
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I first saw his work in person at his solo show at The Lodge. It turns out that his paint, like mine, is thinly applied. There are hesitations and lacunae in it. You can see through it in passages to the faint ink scribbles of his underdrawings. The colors, which seem so blank on a screen, vary subtly in the flesh, a variation which betrays a diffident affection for paint and for sight.<br />
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Similarly, he is himself more rounded and human in person. To my enormous relief, it turned out that when I met him, I liked him, and the reverse seemed true as well. His encyclopedic interest and knowledge of art and the art world is modified by a quirkiness and self-doubt which make it possible to converse with him.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">The Lodge Gallery, the night in question. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Left to right: Noah Becker, me (photograph by Jason Patrick Voegele)</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Fascinating historical note: it was this picture which convinced me </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">to keep my hair buzzed to no more than 1/4" in length from now on.</span></div>
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I have nothing interesting to report about our conversation at the Lodge. It was mostly in regards to the ins and outs of e-publishing. He wanted to hear about the technical factors I experienced e-publishing the first novella-sized chunk of <a href="http://railroadtozanzibar.com/" target="_blank"><i>Railroad to Zanzibar</i></a>, my epic historical fantasy novel.<br />
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Which, incidentally, is now permanently linked through the graphic on the right side of this blog. It's 99c and I think you ought to <a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00H7EG6ZU" target="_blank">order a copy</a>, because I have put so much effort into writing divertingly on art for you all this time and you'd like to support me, right? - and also it's the start of an amazing story, in my humble opinion. <br />
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More next time, and for once, what I mean is "tomorrow."Danielhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15597234920324948705noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2293319073550947163.post-46624741304417462632013-12-29T09:06:00.000-05:002013-12-29T10:42:51.055-05:00Art and Artists I: A Spanish WomanNote: Longtime readers of this blog will notice here certain assumptions about what you do and don't know, that are inconsistent with the history of the blog. That's because this piece is, guess what, designed for the less-longtime <i>Huffington</i> readership. They haven't posted it yet, and this is one of three I'd like up before the end of the year. So I'm posting it here to stick to my schedule in at least one forum. The tone, however, is more of here than there. I'm interested in telling in these posts some stories of my experience of art and artists, and not just the stories of artwork.<br />
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<u>Sargent</u><br />
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I wrote a few weeks ago about <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/daniel-maidman/drawing-as-monastic-pract_b_4338146.html" target="_hplink">Steven Assael's work at Forum Gallery</a>. But I didn't give you any context for my experience of seeing the work. What happened was that I went to the opening. Naturally I ran into several artists I knew; one of them was <a href="http://dorianvallejo.com/" target="_hplink">Dorian Vallejo</a>.<br />
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Dorian Vallejo, untitled drawing, 2009</span></center>
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Vallejo does a lot of kinds of work, but I mostly know his drawings, which share an elegant, light-footed sense of line and a sweet-natured sexiness with Gustav Klimt's drawings. I have heard that Klimt had several models in his studio at a time. This story goes that he would ask his models just to wander around, and when he saw one do something interesting, he'd ask her to hold for a bit. Similarly, Robert Henri talks about preserving the original impulse or insight throughout the representation of a figure. Vallejo's loose, graceful drawings seem to reflect a similar procedure. Discussing the drawing above, he wrote, "The drawing you picked was a quick one done while sketching with several friends. Often when I draw with friends I allow whatever is happening with the model to suggest a direction for the drawing. Referencing Steve [Assael], one of his points of instruction was to be mindful of maintaining the initial spark of enthusiasm and spontaneity throughout a drawing."<br />
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Dorian Vallejo, untitled drawing, 2013</span></center>
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Vallejo himself is one of the nicest guys you could hope to meet. You can tell right away, it radiates off him. Plus he <a href="http://dorianvallejo.com/about/" target="_hplink">looks like Superman's shy brother</a>.<br />
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At Assael's opening, Vallejo was carrying a Strand bag and he was pleased to show me what was in it. Not a book from the Strand, naturally, but a book he had been given at a place called <a href="http://www.mnafineart.com/" target="_hplink">Michael Altman Fine Art</a>. Altman is a dealer who keeps a place of business in a nice townhouse on east 70th Street, and the first floor was hosting a show of watercolors, drawings, and oil paintings by John Singer Sargent. This was on my list of things to see, along with Balthus at the Met, Vermeer at the Frick, Hammershøi at Scandinavia House, and Magritte at MoMA. Vallejo bumped Sargent to the top of my list by noting that a. the show was closing shortly, and b. they were giving out free beautiful hardbacks of the show. You go where the free art books are. So I went.<br />
<br />
At the townhouse on east 70th Street, I had several beautifully appointed living rooms and parlors of the most dazzling John Singer Sargent work mostly to myself. But I didn't see the free Sargent books anywhere, so I asked the guy at the desk. It turned out they'd given away nearly a thousand, and were nearly out, and were hiding the rest. He gave me one, and I returned to the thing that was most interesting to me - a little portrait of a Spanish woman from 1879-80. This was the most interesting to me because I've had a copy of it hanging on a bulletin board for eight years:<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">
my bulletin board</span></center>
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This study is one of my favorite minor paintings. There is something about the way her eyes vanish into darkness that has always grabbed me. I have linked it in my mind with heroic resolve. To the left, there is light, and to the right, necessity. She turns to the right, to get done what needs doing. I have repeatedly incorporated the power of this choice, epitomized in this image, into my own work:<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Daniel Maidman, left to right: </span>
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>The Sicilian Expedition</i> (detail), 2010, 60"x40", oil on canvas</span>
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>The Black and White War</i> (detail), 2011, 60"x72", oil on canvas</span></center>
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I never particularly thought about seeing this painting in person. But now here I was, and it was a physical thing, quite small and in a fancy frame, on a wall in front of me. It was at this point that I realized I'd simply been looking at a very dark print of it. You can *totally fucking see* her eyes. Sargent's darks are not especially dark in this particular painting.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">John Singer Sargent, <i>A Spanish Woman</i>, 1879-80, 22"x18", oil on canvas</span></center>
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Whoopsie. I tried to figure out what this meant for me. I guess it doesn't mean very much. The power of the image remains the same, but the image does not originate in the Sargent painting. Sargent is not mine; he was, and remains, his own man. Well.<br />
<br />
I asked the desk guy if I could stand around a while and do a drawing of this painting, and he said sure, why not, so I did. For about an hour or so, I got to commune with Sargent and his paint, and the thoughts and character of his Spanish woman. Elderly art enthusiasts came and went; upstairs I could hear Altman (I assume it was Altman) on the phone, working out the sale of a painting. The desk guy and the door guy, both young, were friendly and light-handed in their hosting of the scene. Here's what I drew:<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">
Daniel Maidman, <i>Copy of 'A Spanish Woman'</i>, 2013, 15"x11", pencil on paper</span></center>
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<u>Museworthy</u><br />
<br />
My encounter with the Sargent, and the divergence between my idea of the thing and the thing itself, left me with a contact high for a few days. It was more electrical than chemical in character. I buzzed, with ideas and impulses.<br />
<br />
At about this time, I was trying to figure out what to do for Claudia Hajian's year-end art show. Many of those who life draw in New York will know Hajian; she is one of the great art models of the city. She is beautiful, but more importantly, she is striking. Her sense of the pose is wide-ranging and dynamic. One learns very rapidly from drawing her, and it is easy to learn. Hajian used to be a history teacher. Seeking a change in her life, she tried modeling for art classes. It was love at first sight, and she has never looked back. Fairly unusually among models, she also writes extensively, on modeling, art, and music, at her very popular <a href="http://artmodel.wordpress.com/" target="_hplink">Museworthy</a> blog. She's erudite, funny, and generous, qualities which have kept her blog fresh over many years. Her writing is some of the key material I studied when I began to write about art myself.<br />
<br />
At Museworthy, Hajian was hosting a year-end art show. She posted four photographs our artist friend <a href="http://fredhatt.com/" target="_hplink">Fred Hatt</a> took of her, and invited her readers to make what work from it they would. She would post it all. Hatt himself contributed a portrait, one of his high-energy, high-chroma pieces. He has spent many years figuring out how to prioritize depicting what his subjects <i>are</i> like very, very slightly more than what they <i>look</i> like.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Fred Hatt's interpretations of Claudia: photograph versus drawing (aquarelle crayon on paper) </span></div>
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For my part, I was still buzzing from my Sargent encounter. I turned my mind to a particular Degas painting. I am virtually certain the reproduction I know of this painting has little to do with the original, because it's a very contrasty book-cover reproduction. I have the book in my studio:
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What I like about this is the hard way the explicit outlines butt up against the rendering of light and volume in the interior shapes. And he just doesn't bother with the bits that aren't interesting to him. Knowing when to stop is important.<br />
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I've been thinking about this painting for a long time. The low-stress environment of working alone on a small painting from a photograph seemed like a good time to test out the principles I was admiring in the Degas. So I put some blue, some brown, and some white on my palette, washed some burnt umber onto a canvas, and let 'er rip. An hour and a half later - oh, I'm sorry, <i>38 years and an hour and a half later</i> - I was done:<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Daniel Maidman, <i>Study of Claudia</i>, 2013, 24"x18", oil on canvas</span></center>
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I really like this quite a lot. I like the outlines, and the forms, and the way the incompleteness is organic to painting, but maintains that most desirable phantom, the energy of drawing. I think I'm going to do some more with these principles at some point. Better still, Claudia liked it. It's included in her art-show post <a href="http://artmodel.wordpress.com/2013/12/15/the-2013-museworthy-art-show/" target="_hplink">here</a>.<br />
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All these things took place because I ran into Dorian Vallejo at Steven Assael's opening at Forum Gallery. And that took place because I impoverish myself to live in New York, where this kind of thing just happens.<br />
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---<br />
<br />
ALL ARTWORK COURTESY OF THE ARTISTS<br />
DORIAN VALLEJO ONLINE: <a href="http://dorianvallejo.com/" target="_hplink">http://dorianvallejo.com/</a><br />
CLAUDIA HAJIAN'S BLOG: <a href="http://artmodel.wordpress.com/">http://artmodel.wordpress.com/</a> <br />
FRED HATT ONLINE: <a href="http://fredhatt.com/">http://fredhatt.com/</a><br />
<br />
SARGENT: <a href="http://www.wikipaintings.org/en/john-singer-sargent/a-spanish-woman" target="_hplink">http://www.wikipaintings.org/en/john-singer-sargent/a-spanish-woman</a>Danielhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15597234920324948705noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2293319073550947163.post-61938655035751501792013-12-22T12:36:00.000-05:002013-12-22T12:36:04.250-05:00A Jewel With a Universe In ItLaxness in blog maintenance continues. I am finding that <i>Huffington</i> captures a great deal of my writing time, and not only my writing time, but my mode of writing. On the one hand, I like to exercise my perception and analysis in discussing the art I am looking at, which is my focus over there. On the other hand, I think I could stand to talk about myself more.<br />
<br />
Be that as it may, I am going to repost here some writing from over there. I may post more, if time permits, but at the very least I want to post this piece below. Why? Because it is about <a href="http://dinabrodsky.com/" target="_blank">Dina Brodsky</a>, and Dina Brodsky is an artist who has believed in my writing for longer than my writing has been in any way prominent. She has always wanted me to turn the eye of my writing toward her work, and while this is not uncommon, she preferred this blog to <i>Huffington</i> because it is mine, and <i>Huffington</i> is not. That's very unusual, and very touching.<br />
<br />
If I didn't like her work, and have something that I thought was interesting to say about it, all the touchingness in the world wouldn't have gotten me to write about it. But I do like her work, and I always have - I think it's excellent work. And I've been pondering what to say about it as long as I've known it. When I finally figured that out, I completely ignored her wishes about where to publish. I wanted to offer my thoughts from the tall platform, especially since it was about a show which is up right now, but not for much longer. Given limited time for uploading a post, <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/daniel-maidman/dina-brodskys-lonely-univ_b_4468672.html" target="_blank">I posted it to <i>Huffington</i> first</a>. But now that I have a minute, I'll finally honor her wishes, and post it here too.<br />
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<br />
I have been wanting to write about Dina Brodsky forever. But I'm glad it
took me a while to get down to it, because in the meantime I read
Walter Benjamin's 1936 essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction." I know every other art enthusiast has already read it.
What can I say? I'm slow.<br />
<br />
Benjamin gives me some of the tools I need to describe what makes
Brodsky's art special. But before we talk about what makes her art
special, let's talk about what makes her art good.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><em>Insomnia</em>, oil on mylar</span></center>
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Brodsky has several favorite subjects, and she has developed her
exploration of them to a high level of skill and atmosphere. My favorite
of her subjects is the abandoned interior. As we see in <i>Insomnia</i>, she
works in the regions of unease (as in the crumpled sheets), and the
uncannily subjective (as in the steep drop-off of light from foreground
to background), and finally, outright menace (as in the looming dark of
the wall).<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><em>Demolition Spyhole #2</em>, oil on mylar</span></center>
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There is something of the interior spaces of Hammershøi to her work,
but where Hammershøi mixed domestic comfort with faint anxiety, Brodsky
catches that balance much farther on its way toward apocalypse: the
comfort is gone, the anxiety is alarming, and the spaces themselves are
undergoing collapse.<br />
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Venturing out from the ruins of the interior, Brodsky seeks and finds cities to match: <br />
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<em><span style="font-size: x-small;"><em>888 Newark Avenue</em>, </span></em><span style="font-size: x-small;">oil on mylar</span><br />
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There is something dreadfully lonely to her cityscapes. It is not only
because they lack people, but because they lack people in places where
we have a right to expect people to be found. It is not impossible that
one might come upon so solitary a scene, but it is unlikely; if
sustained, disturbing.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><em>Glen Street Station</em>, oil on mylar</span></center>
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These paintings strike me as being paintings of after-the-fact, of
missed opportunity. People were here: they did build these buildings.
And they only left recently: the lights are still on. And yet now they
are gone, and they are not coming back. No human voice will speak again.<br />
This seems to me the theme of Brodsky's recent work. The overpowering
and slightly unnatural sense of isolation is what I think makes it
good. All of these pieces are on display in the show "Desert Places,"
through January 3rd in Somerville, Massachusetts, at the Mµseum, about
which more below.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">installation view, "Desert Places," Mµseum</span></center>
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</center>
Now that we've discussed the content of Brodsky's work and what makes
it good, I'd like to get back to Walter Benjamin, and what makes
Brodsky's work special.<br />
<br />
In "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Benjamin
performs some very interesting analysis of the impact of mechanical
reproduction on certain qualities he sees in art, namely "authenticity"
and "aura":<br />
<blockquote>
<span style="color: #351c75;">Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is
lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique
existence at the place where it happens to be. ... The authenticity of a
thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning,
ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history
which it has experienced.</span></blockquote>
Against this force of authenticity, Benjamin sets mechanical reproduction:<br />
<blockquote>
<span style="color: #351c75;">Confronted with its manual reproduction, which was usually
branded as a forgery, the original preserved all its authority; not so
vis a vis technical reproduction. ... it enables the original to meet
the beholder halfway, be it in the form of a photograph or a phonograph
record. ... The situations into which the product of mechanical
reproduction can be brought may not touch the actual work of art, yet
the quality of its presence is always depreciated. ... that which
withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of
art. ... By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of
copies for a unique existence.</span></blockquote>
He is, incidentally, describing here the classic drainage of the
force of the Mona Lisa by the time you get around to visiting the
Louvre. But what is the broader significance of the decline of aura?<br />
<blockquote>
<span style="color: #351c75;">The uniqueness of a work of art is inseparable from its
being imbedded in the fabric of tradition. ... We know that the earliest
art works originated in the service of a ritual - first the magical,
then the religious kind. It is significant that the existence of the
work of art with reference to its aura is never entirely separated from
its ritual function. ... for the first time in world history, mechanical
reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical
dependence on ritual.</span></blockquote>
Benjamin fleshes out a bifurcation of art itself:<br />
<blockquote>
<span style="color: #351c75;">Two polar types stand out: with one, the accent is on the
cult value; with the other, on the exhibition value of the work. ... The
elk portrayed by the man of the Stone Age on the walls of his cave was
an instrument of magic. He did expose it to his fellow men, but in the
main it was meant for the spirits. ... With the emancipation of the
various art practices from ritual go increasing opportunities for the
exhibition of their products. ... With the different methods of
technical reproduction of a work of art, its fitness for exhibition
increased to such an extent that the quantitative shift between its two
poles turned into a qualitative transformation of its nature. ...<em> To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility.</em></span></blockquote>
And finally we get to what makes Dina Brodsky's work so interesting.
It is not reproducible, and it can scarcely be shown. The pictures of
her work above are not so much misleading as simply untrue. Consider
again the installation view at the oddly-named Mµseum:<br />
<center>
<br /></center>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgg0YqC4DabV2d8S7-LJIOpwkKCM1ha0QievWMgw_VgQCRXbQQ1VWId32cakhMFPX_1BKiQUimWsZXbd5zTvoMMu4g79cCOzP7iXrmajXbeo3zaU7X5d2NGdqVUeraK8_xy0a8v0rQn9OzP/s1600/graphic+5.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="106" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgg0YqC4DabV2d8S7-LJIOpwkKCM1ha0QievWMgw_VgQCRXbQQ1VWId32cakhMFPX_1BKiQUimWsZXbd5zTvoMMu4g79cCOzP7iXrmajXbeo3zaU7X5d2NGdqVUeraK8_xy0a8v0rQn9OzP/s200/graphic+5.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
<center>
<br /></center>
Now let's zoom back to an uncropped view of the same installation:<br />
<center>
<br /></center>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj99g0bQj5pigAW3gcBImHucqW3mxQbhwNDpUNQJUpBS1Jn8KWzguJ2xgOP9sNS_mRKD_ZW1rvAzNW9X_LVaXVLEnl7u40wT7HwuLgt34bv4ywuVMOsGPtbHNsvHuKmMZZCuphbeJN0YQaw/s1600/graphic+6.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="150" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj99g0bQj5pigAW3gcBImHucqW3mxQbhwNDpUNQJUpBS1Jn8KWzguJ2xgOP9sNS_mRKD_ZW1rvAzNW9X_LVaXVLEnl7u40wT7HwuLgt34bv4ywuVMOsGPtbHNsvHuKmMZZCuphbeJN0YQaw/s200/graphic+6.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
<center>
<br /></center>
Wait - is that a <em>dollhouse</em>? Why yes, yes it is. The µ in Mµseum is <em>mu</em>, the Greek letter used by scientists for "micro-." Here's the opening of Brodsky's show, on October 19th:<br />
<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPLTGuCrf4LAdsmWitnWsd1hxPQejU72v2T2pBY1aQyDjyOiqed2-VWtXzfYvU_13cdLIEoOUmYMjuwF-rlHnkf-mWUS9-3qK1O-o3fwQC7BprrA_a2ck2Z0Xz8EFq6f3T0bJ5VdQlCLs9/s1600/graphic+7.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="150" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPLTGuCrf4LAdsmWitnWsd1hxPQejU72v2T2pBY1aQyDjyOiqed2-VWtXzfYvU_13cdLIEoOUmYMjuwF-rlHnkf-mWUS9-3qK1O-o3fwQC7BprrA_a2ck2Z0Xz8EFq6f3T0bJ5VdQlCLs9/s200/graphic+7.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
<center>
<br /></center>
You can just about make out the entire Mµseum in the background,
southeast of the Tropicana sign. It is a box nailed to a wall, its
address given as "72½ Union Square, Somerville, MA (between the Subway
and The Independent)."<br />
<br />
It is no longer unusual to meet artists who paint as if it were 1640,
or 1830, or 1900. These contemporary artists have mastered, and carry
on, various extraordinarily difficult painting traditions as if the time
since their original decline had not elapsed. Brodsky has innovated a
different, more radical rejectionism. She rejects modernity not as a set
of techniques, but as a concept. Her rejectionism is philosophical in
nature, unseeable, categorical. Feeling out her way back to Benjamin's
first pole of art, the cult value, she makes things which are perversely
unshowable. "Perversely," you say? Well, call it integrity. She is not
indifferent to galleries, money, and fame, and she's got them, a little.
She could have more, but her integrity makes her care about other
things. Her work is unknown virtually by design. And yet, almost
everyone who knows her work is dazzled by it. Take a look at another
one:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjE0wjvIYVQBgW_I5x3sr271ZOIAyENgtiDy40jIPiHFbeIshhzNdLrrrqkfjNbjbfsCva4EOATR98uaAgfuMa5HTNJ7CSibsChpaZ2YLyD_2zBYDiA-T7NIP8OUTx8d8qLNFqKYcvNTn20/s1600/graphic+8.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjE0wjvIYVQBgW_I5x3sr271ZOIAyENgtiDy40jIPiHFbeIshhzNdLrrrqkfjNbjbfsCva4EOATR98uaAgfuMa5HTNJ7CSibsChpaZ2YLyD_2zBYDiA-T7NIP8OUTx8d8qLNFqKYcvNTn20/s200/graphic+8.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
<center>
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><em>Hour of the Rabbit</em>, oil on mylar</span></center>
<center>
</center>
Like all the other pieces shown here, it is oil on mylar, and the
mylar is a 2-inch circle. I suspect she gets her circles from Canal
Plastics, one of my favorite stores in New York. What you're seeing here
doesn't really convey the utterly bizarre impression her work makes,
because it has a bulletproof aura: mechanical reproduction does not
"depreciate" it, it simply bounces off of it.<br />
<br />
What I mean by this is that the dazzlement her work produces is not a
special effect. Its mere size and virtuosity do not produce its
impression. And yet its size and virtuosity are fundamental to its
impression. It is the combination of the size, the virtuosity, and the <em>art</em>
that does it. These are full-fledged pieces of artwork, speaking to the
human condition, and they would work at a more orthodox 36" diameter.
At a 2" diameter, however, they cross over from the age of reproduction
to the age of magic.<br />
<br />
I do not think we need to think of this necessarily in terms of the
cult. The tone with which Benjamin uses the term makes me suspect that
his socialist materialism is causing him to deride spiritual things. And
yet what he speaks of as the cult, is a concrete apparatus for
addressing ongoing spiritual needs; we need them as much as did those
men of the Stone Age. Elsewhere, Benjamin describes "the increasing
formation of masses," and talks about artwork in reproduction as being
well suited to the mass man. In this he is correct. But we still have
those persistent spiritual needs, and one of them is solitude.<br />
<br />
We need to stand alone in an empty world, distractions banished,
noise silenced; we need to stand alone and encounter ourselves. The age
of the mass threatens always to make us strangers to ourselves, and we
need time alone to recognize ourselves again.<br />
<br />
Non-reproducible art is necessarily a solitary experience. One cannot
look at Brodsky's work on a computer screen in company of the Web, or
even in a gallery with a crowd. One must approach it alone, and to see
it clearly one must hold it in one's hand, like a little treasure, a
jewel with a universe in it. This is a solitary approach to the work,
and the work rewards it by reflecting that solitude back, by providing
breathing space for the time alone.<br />
<br />
The work is elitist in the ordinary sense that few people can own it,
and in the unusual sense that few people can even see it, not properly.
It admits of no posters, iPhone cases, or screen savers. It can
scarcely fit in a book. Photographs make her dainty technique look
clunky. Brodsky's gifts, in short, cannot be given to all. They are not
mass gifts. But then again, probably most people do not want them.<br />
<br />
I want them, though, and I want to tell you about them, because I
hope you'll go seeking what I saw in them. You can visit Somerville and
go by the Mµseum, surely a worthy junior sibling of Los Angeles's
magnificently eccentric Museum of Jurassic Technology. If you are in New
York, perhaps you can keep an eye out for shows Brodsky participates in
here.<br />
<br />
But if you cannot do these things, how wonderful and strange is it
that we have here paintings that we cannot see, that we so compellingly
cannot see that instead, we sit together and tell a story about them?
This is the kind of cult they invoke; you and I are both lucky to be
spending a little while inside their circle of magic.<br />
<br />
---<br />
<br />
All images courtesy of the Mµseum<br />
Dina Brodsky online: <a href="http://dinabrodsky.com/" target="_hplink">http://dinabrodsky.com/</a><br />
Mµseum online: <a href="http://tinymuseum.org/" target="_hplink">http://tinymuseum.org/</a><br />
"<a href="http://tinymuseum.org/exhibitions/desert-places/" target="_hplink">Desert Places</a>" at the Mµseum, 72½ Union Square, Somerville, MA 02144 (between the Subway and The Independent), 24/7 until January 3rd, 2014Danielhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15597234920324948705noreply@blogger.com0