DanielMaidman

Giraffe

2012-01-20T22:58:00.001-05:00

Sometimes, there is a giraffe.

A Giraffe, 2012, oil on canvas, 24"x18"

Superpowers

2012-01-17T14:04:00.011-05:00

Late last year, I showed some paintings with The Great Nude, a New York arts organization focused on a subject with regard to which I will give you three guesses, at the New York Contemporary Art Fair. I was fairly dismayed with how my paintings looked under the angled hard lights:

left to right: me, Cassandra, dismay-inducing presentation of painting

Why? Because they weren't varnished.

Varnishing is a process whereby a dry painting is coated with a layer of transparent medium. It has a couple benefits:

1. It protects the painting itself from dust, smoke, and naturally-occurring floating acid droplets.

2. It restores color saturation and value contrast. Oil paints are not unlike wet rocks - the wetness of the oil enriches the colors and darkens the darks. The oil, however, loses its wet-like qualities as the painting dries. Some of the oil sinks into the primer on the canvas. The rest polymerizes, altering its optical properties. Long story short, your gorgeously deep colors and blacks wind up faded and chalky, as mine looked at the art fair. Varnish acts like a permanent surface wetter. It makes the paintings look fresh even when dry.

While varnishing has been around for hundreds of years, and varnishes have evolved from their early "turn brittle and yellow and screw up the underlying painting" period, varnishing as a practice is not intuitively obvious like painting itself. You kind of need to learn how to do it.

As you may remember, I have never gone to art school, so among the many things most painters know which are a total mystery to me is the practice of varnishing. But after my dismal showing with The Great Nude, I decided - enough: I'm going to learn. I discussed the matter with co-exhibitor/surrealist Scott Goodwillie, who is a charismatic painter and awfully nice guy. He gave me some good tips. And I also looked at Sadie Jernigan Valeri's blog post on the topic, which, if you are starting out with varnishing, holy smokes, this is the blog post to read.

Armed with knowledge and varnish, I entered my studio. My heart was in my throat, because if you varnish your painting wrong, it can be next to impossible to fix it.

So I started on a crappy painting I had stopped halfway through because it was such a catastrophe. The varnishing went perfectly! And its promised properties materialized - the blacks went clean and black (the painting was monochrome). It looked like much less of a catastrophe with varnish.

The next day, I started varnishing the two paintings I had scheduled for another show, at 950 Hart Gallery in Bushwick. I was using a modified form of Valeri's prescription. And by modified, I mean sloppier. For instance, she recommends removing stray hairs from your wet varnish with a #1 filbert brush. This is a small brush which can be used to gently lift detritus without disturbing the varnish surface. Well, I find a fingertip will do the trick too, if you don't mind leaving a smudge and not getting the hair off your varnish.

Why yes, some of my paints are Wintons, why do you ask?

Anyhow, let me give you a rough idea of the effects of varnishing. Here's the unvarnished painting with a little puddle of varnish freshly poured on it. Notice the difference in the reds inside and outside the puddle:

The same painting I had shown at the art fair was showing at the 950 Hart show - selling confrontational nudes is hard, yo. Now look at the effects of that puddle as spread over part of the painting. You can see exactly where the varnish stops:

Here's a completely pointless diptych of me smoothing varnish using the Valeri-recommended foam brush. Because I like to take pictures of myself:

And here's a picture displaying the startling vividity that varnish produces in black areas of a painting:

When I got done, the painting not only looked better than it did dry, it looked better than it did when I was painting it. I generally work with a model on a painting once a week, to give the previous week's work time to dry. That way I don't get involved in any sticky areas where two painting sessions overlap. So I had *never* seen it all looking fresh at once.

Now, art is grounded in technique, but its substance is emotion. So how did this technique of "varnishing" make me feel? I tell you what, it made me feel like I had superpowers. You can keep your flying and your invisibility, your phasing and your magnetic eyeballs. I'll take the superpower of varnishing. It's awesome! Just look at these intimidatingly hip people, enthralled with my lovelily varnished painting at the 950 Hart opening, December 7, 2011:

No, it didn't sell there either. You want it, call me. It's nicely varnished.

Now, let's zoom back to an issue you might call the Achilles Heel of the Autodidact, which can be summed up this way: he's ignorant. Varnishing is a perfectly legitimate and extremely useful technique but, like the integral of the cosine and knotting a tie properly, it is not intuitive. It builds on generations of expertise. You're not going to just figure out how to do it right, or at all, on your own.

I am an autodidact, so I am highly vulnerable to the achilles heel. Don't trust my opinions because I can write. If you had had to generate the number of five-paragraph essays I had to generate in middle school, you'd be able to drop a thousand words on any old heap of cow flops too. The example of varnishing provides a vivid instance of my ignorance in action, but it is not the only example of it. The troubling part is that I don't know all the examples. This is a case of, to use Don Rumsfeld's underappreciated system of classification, unknown unknowns.

I was reflecting on my previous musings on Clyfford Still. They could be interpreted as unkind. I don't have a problem with that - I sincerely believe that his work is trash and that it reflects a sadistic streak a mile wide. Here's my problem: I haven't a clue why this opinion is not universal. I'm not saying that reading the body of criticism and theory attached to his atrocious paintings would either make me see that there's something to them, or decide that they are any good at all. But it troubles me that I don't know this stuff, and moreover, that I am recklessly using my voice, which I know sounds authoritative, to denigrate his crappy, crappy art.

I still think that one ought to be able to approach a painting clothed in nothing more than one's experience as a human being, and have that painting mean something, if it is a good painting.

But lots of thought has gone into painting from other perspectives, and I am relatively ignorant of it.

Having a will to self-improvement, here's my pledge to you: this year I'll make more of an effort to acquaint myself with the thinking that underlies post-war art. Even if it means actually parsing the obstreperous grammar of pill-popping French theorists.

Some of you will be thinking: finally. To you I say - shut up, OK?

Others of you will be thinking: why would you bother, Maidman? And to you I say - knowing more is almost always a good thing. If our hunches prove to have been correct, our study will allow us to snark about Still and his like from the more comfortable position of knowing the theoretical basis of the work. And if our hunches prove to have been wrong, then a little study will open vast new territories to us. That would be exciting.

I want to speak, but I want to speak responsibly. So it's a little remedial reading for me.

Best wishes, all.

He Deserved It

2012-01-14T09:23:00.010-05:00

Welcome to 2012. I haven't thought of any cool ideas to share with you yet, so I've been quiet. But I would like to draw your attention to this amusing news story:

"A 36-year-old woman is accused of causing $10,000 worth of damage to a $40 million painting after she punched, scratched and rubbed her behind against it before urinating on herself."

The painting in question was Clyfford Still's 1957-J No. 2. The museum was the new Clyfford Still Museum in Denver. Alcohol may have been involved in the incident. This is the painting:

This is the civic-minded young woman who tried to lift this curse from the world:

Carmen Tisch

Let me tell you something. I dislike a lot of painters, but I hate the holy fuck out of Clyfford Still. This is a fairly newly-minted hatred. It dates to February of last year, when I visited the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C. The Hirshhorn has several Stills, and viewing them was an experience akin, for me, to torture. I actually took a few pictures at the time, because I was so furious I wanted to write a blog post explaining my feelings. I never got around to it, but here are a couple pictures:

1962-D, as if the title matters

1960-R, like I care

To explain my beef with Cyfford Still, let me take you back to Austin, Texas, in early 1996. At the time, I was writing for the entertainment section of The Daily Texan, the student newspaper of UT-Austin. One thing that's interesting about this paper is that Berke Breathed got his start there, and if you go down to "the morgue" and dig up the papers published when he was a student, you can see his pre-Bloom County work, when he was doing stuff even more similar to Doonesbury.

Milo Bloom

Mike Doonesbury

Be that as it may, every music person in the entertainment section was into one brand of rock or another. So when Philip Glass was coming to town with his musical accompaniment to Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast, I landed the interview by default. I didn't know didley about Philip Glass, so I listened to some of his albums and tried to think up some interesting questions. And he gave some interesting answers. I paraphrase, since I don't feel like digging up the dictaphone tapes:

"Mr. Glass, it seems that apart from the pure structural rigor of your music, there is also a kind of emotional rigor, where specific emotions are evoked in specific sequence and intensity."

"Yes, absolutely, it's quite easy to identify the emotions associated with particular notes and series of notes, and then to structure the presence and repetition of those series to induce an emotional composition in the listener."

Well, that's quite fascinating, que non? Philip Glass sketches out here the power of the formal elements of aesthetic systems. They are powerful not only because of their formal structuring of the work, but because they carry emotional implications. The skillful deployment of the formal elements allows the subliminal coordination of the viewer response.

As you can imagine, I would localize the link between element and emotion at the level of the interaction between stimulus and neurology. I don't know much music theory, but circling back to the visual arts, the fact of the matter is that we are wired to respond strongly to sharp-edged high contrast, for instance, and to saturated color. Every artist knows this and uses it. Consider John Singer Sargent's El Jaleo - go to Boston and consider it in person if you can:

El Jaleo, John Singer Sargent, 1882, oil on canvas, 93 3/8 x 138 1/2 in.

Sargent places his highest contrast and sharpest edges in the dancer's dress. Your eye leaps there first. But he also wants to convey motion. So he places his point of highest color saturation in the red dress of the woman on the far right. By means of this trick, he produces a second focal point far from the center of the composition. He manipulates your brain into dragging your eye back and forth from center to right, right to center - suddenly a static, centered composition awakens into vibrating off-balance motion. The elements of design themselves induce a sensation of the dance and motion Sargent is seeking to convey.

This is an example of the civilized use of the formal elements of a medium to support the meaning of a particular piece.

Clyfford Still, conversely, partakes of the kind of infantile poo-poo play which characterizes American art after World War II. This strikes me as a period when painters affected a kind of cosmic ignorance and went around saying, "Holy shit! Did you know that if you put some yellow on a canvas it makes you feel happy when you look at it?"

Well, as a matter of fact, I did know that. Your point?

What Clyfford Still made paintings out of was the elements of design stripped of all content. His mature work is nothing but high-contrast sharp edges and saturated color patches. Unlike, for instance, Helen Frankenthaler, he focused on the most jarring arrangements of the elements - the utterly crude black/white contrast, and the hard reds and yellows. These elements do not serve any purpose beyond inducing their predictable neuro-emotional effects in the viewer.

Do you see my problem here? All serious painters understand that the emotional implications of the elements of design are tools which serve some purpose beyond demonstration of their existence. Still, on the other hand, made a career out of what amounts to a neurological experiment proving the hypothesis, "If I arrange elements A and B as follows, I can evoke responses X and Y in the test subject." And Still's taste in A and B ran to the harsh and painful.

You know what, Clyfford? Art isn't a science experiment, I'm not a test subject, and I'm not going to hang out with elements A and B unless you give me a good reason to do it.

Goya, Saturn Devouring His Children, 1819-23:

a good reason to hang out with a violent combination of

high-contrast black, orange, red, and white

But ascribing to Still the honesty of a scientist does him too much credit. Because this strutting around, saying, "Didja know yellow makes people happy?" - it was all a pose. Nobody, not even Jackson Pollock, is so stupid that these kinds of completely obvious linkages come as a surprise. Still isn't actually discovering anything new with his work. He's really more of a dentist who gets off on hurting his patients. He is a sadist in a lab coat.

So when I say, "He deserved it," I mean that you could hardly find an artist more deserving of having his work defaced. And in truly Dantean let-the-punishment-poetically-mirror-the-crime style, it is deliciously appropriate that Carmen Tisch rubbed her ass on his painting.

But I can't really condone this sort of behavior, for the same reason that it's a good idea to abide by the Geneva Conventions when you capture a lawful enemy combatant. You don't do it because the guy doesn't deserve to get slapped around, but so that your lawful enemy will treat your guys decently when they get captured. As long as we've defined Clyfford Still as a lawful artist, by doing things like building him his own goddamn museum, we ought to keep our hands off his execrable work so that his partisans will refrain from pissing on Rembrandts.

As usual, take everything I say with a wheelbarrow of salt. I tend to believe you ought to be able to get artwork by looking at it, and I tend to dismiss the dimensions of artwork that require specialized knowledge - be the artwork allegory or abstract. I've never read a word of theory or criticism of Clyfford Still.

And, of course, my opinion is liable to joltingly change without notice.

***

Now, let's move on to something nicer: my friend Kevin Mizner, a wonderful blogger and talented painter, has given me something called the Liebster Award:

This is an award that bloggers give to other blogs that they like, which have fewer than 200 followers. It is given with the instruction that the award be paid forward - that the recipient pass the award along to blogs they, in turn, like. I think that's how it works, anyway.

So with much gratitude to Kevin Mizner, let me pass the award forward to a few blogs of which I am particularly fond:

Christmascraftproject: This is my wife's laconic and hilarious blog on her crafting endeavors, which turn out to have both diverting technical details and wider implications for the art of living well.

Museworthy: This is Claudia's fabulous blog on modeling and art, one of the key inspirations for this blog and a continuing treasure of new thoughts and images. She's probably got more than 200 followers, but Wordpress doesn't make this clear.

Drawing Life: This is Fred Hatt's lavishly illustrated diary of his art and thinking on it. Like me, Fred spends a lot of time thinking about art, and he shares his insights beautifully.

Confessions of a Recovering Critic: This is RC Speck's excellent and highly idiosyncratic blog of cultural criticism. He turns his eye on many subjects, and thinks deeply and originally about each of them.

There are many other artists who post blogs of work I admire, but I am focusing here on people who have a lot to say about the work, which is a specific capability of the blog format. Thank you all for the magnificent advantage you've taken of this format.

Onward

2011-12-21T15:31:00.015-05:00

I don't know how you blog, but how I blog is, I keep a list of topics for future posts, and then I pretty much ignore the list and write up whatever is on my mind. So I'm going to follow this procedure right now, and skip a bunch of stuff I've been meaning to tell you about. Instead, let me tell you about one of my projects for next year (there are a few, but I'll tell you about some of the others later).

One of my many methods for cooking things up is to let partial concepts swirl in my mind, until they link up with other partials, and eventually there is a whole thing - a makable thing.

Let me lead you on a path through some partials, and we will see what it summed up to:

Partial 1: Hypercolor

This is a painting I did late in 2010. It currently lives at Hilliard Gallery in Missouri, whither I encourage you to run and buy it:

La Mémoire, 2010, oil on canvas, 18"x14"

"Sangre de dios, Maidman, this is not your usual style at all!" quoth you. True. Let me explain. Ordinarily, the way I paint something is I draw a fussy underdrawing, as you can see here, because I hate to try to put things in the right place at the same time that I'm dealing with color and value. Then, I choose an undercoat color which I spread over the canvas by means of some turpenoid and a cloth. Then I paint into this undercoat while it is wet.

In this instance, I did the underdrawing and the undercoat, then took a step back and said, "You know what, I like this a lot. I think I'll leave it like it is."

This idiom gnawed at me; I wanted to do more paintings in the same mode. In fact, I tried it twice, with distinctly mixed results:

The Prayer, 2010-11, oil on canvas, 14"x18"

Nursing, 2010, oil on canvas, 24"x18"

These are OK, I think, but what's missing from them is the accidental quality of the first one. I meant to do these as they are.

After the third one, I decided to leave it alone for a while, because clearly I had no idea what to do or how to do it. But something important about it struck me: it is the first idiom I've discovered in which I could consider doing a narrative painting, with a story and characters and everything. You can see this emerging in the third painting.

If you've been following my work, you may have noticed that I have been moving toward greater simplicity, and farther from narrative. I cannot support narrative, with sincerity, in my work - except in this idiom. In this one idiom, I can easily picture it.

Call the idiom hypercolor.

Partial 2: Frankenthaler

With hypercolor running in my mental background, my mind eventually drifted to one of the abstract expressionists I hate least, color field painter Helen Frankenthaler.

Helen Frankenthaler, Mountain Pool, 1963, acrylic on canvas, 48"x78"

It's not even so much that I dig Frankenthaler's work. I dig it in flashes, but mostly, I dig the idea of her work - the large, irregular zones of color, placed with an eye to the elements of design such that, somehow, they work.

(As an aside, I think this mode of appreciation of the work shades into what the conceptual artists get at, that the work itself is detritus, vanishable, a codec of an idea: the artist compresses the idea, and the viewer decompresses it, so that the true art exists in the mind on either side, and the quality of the work as a disposable transmission medium is foregrounded. I find the idea of Frankenthaler delicious, but the fact of Frankenthaler somewhat tedious. I cannot bind strongly to this mechanism, so in my own work, I will continue pursuing the painting in and of itself as the incarnation of a sensual phenomenon.)

Doing a little research now, I find that Frankenthaler's method of application is frequently the same as the one I stumbled on with the hypercolor partial - non-brush application of oil paint, heavily thinned with turpentine. Of course, she didn't prime her canvases, so they have a grossly finite lifespan. But still, I know where she's coming from in terms of the physical question of moving paint to surface.

What I learn from Frankenthaler is the possibility of integrating a large canvas area into a single composition using the general category of color shapes I ran into with the hypercolor paintings. Do you see why this is important? Consider Rauschenberg:

Robert Rauschenberg, Charlene, 1953-4 (4 panels, multiple materials, 89" x 112")

Rauschenberg also demonstrates that a large picture space can be compositionally unified, but he uses so many elements that the fact that he's not actually making a representational image reflects more that he's a prick than any formal consideration.

not a Rauschenberg, but not fundamentally different from a Rauschenberg either

Now consider Frankenthaler again:

Helen Frankenthaler, Flood, 1967, synthetic polymer on canvas, 124" x 140"

This painting is enormous, nor is it busy, but it holds together, and it holds together using an array of elements more in line with what I'm interested in.

So I added Frankenthalerian composition to hypercolor technique in the swirl of elements building toward a project in my mind.

Partial 3: Cassandra

I always try to match the project to the model, and the model to the project. And as this project germinated, it occurred to me that it suited Cassandra, an absolutely stellar model whom I've been drawing for a little more than ten years now. I used to draw her in Los Angeles, and we moved to New York around the same time, and I've drawn and painted her here. This is a painting of Cassandra:

Merops Iphikrates, 2009, oil on canvas, 60"x36"

This is another:

The Sister of the Storm, 2010, oil on canvas, 60"x36"

Something you would only vaguely figure out from looking at this work is that Cassandra is a dancer with a flair for costume...

...and a taste for the alchemical:

Cassandra's performances are riotously fun to attend, and painting her is one of the great pleasures of my life as an artist.

When I hit on making large paintings of Cassandra, using the hypercolor combination of refined underdrawings and washy color fields, and the Frankenthalerian integration of the picture space, I thought I had completed assembly of partials into a project, and I was excited to start...

But no ideas came to me. I doodled a couple possibilities, but "random naked chick + color" wasn't cutting it for me. Grumbling, I had to move the project from "active" back to "pending," and wait for further inspiration to strike.

Partial 4: Inanna

I'm not sure how this idea emerged. It's probably just a synthesis of a few things - that Cassandra casts a mythogenic field around her, that I'm interested in the harrowing in hell to begin with - but I eventually thought again about the Sumerian goddess Inanna, and from there came to the strange story of her descent into the underworld.

Inanna is a goddess of war and unlawful carnal knowledge. Also a virgin goddess. And one time she pulled a Prometheus and proliferated technology to the people of Uruk. Nobody's going to accuse the Sumerians of theological consistency.

Be that as it may, Inanna, for reasons not entirely explicit, decided to go down into the underworld and have it out with her older sister Ereshkigal, who ruled there.

It turned out hell had seven gates, at each of which a gatekeeper demanded one of Inanna's garments, which also functioned as instruments of her powers. You could call this part of the story The Deadliest Striptease. Inanna entered the underworld naked, which comports with my motto, "It is only naked you will enter into the house of the truth," as well as with Cassandra's talent for burlesque.

When Inanna met up with Ereshkigal, she died, and Ereshkigal hanged her on a hook. She hanged dead for three days before Father Enki's minions showed up, applied the life-giving plant and the life-giving water, and busted her on outta there.

Maybe she gained the power of life and death. It's not clear. Sumerians.

Now, this story motivates some nudes (you may have noticed I'm not averse to nudes). It provides a character Cassandra can play to a T, a narrative to match the hypercolor idiom, and a mythological context complimentary to the Frankenthaler landscape. But more than that, it is a story I find personally moving.

I do believe that we must all be harrowed in hell - that we are all Dante, and we will never leave our dark forest except if we go downward. I do believe that we must die and be born again. I believe we must stake our souls, going naked into the house of the truth, if we are to be saved. I believe we must abandon every hope, even the hope of salvation, before salvation will come down to us, and we will emerge glorious from our wretchedness. I believe we must do this again and again; that we will be weary, and will believe that we have done with it - and then the dilemma will re-emerge, and again, we will be forced either to become directionless grey ghosts, or to go down to the dark room, and the hook, and the hopelessness, before the life-giving plant and the life-giving water are bestowed.

This is a story I believe; it is a story I can tell.

So this was the final partial - now the project is ready to begin, telling this story, this way, in twelve or fifteen paintings. It will be one of my main pursuits in 2012.

I hope you all will find yourselves renewed in the new year.

The Aesthetics of Information

2011-12-11T09:33:00.020-05:00

So, my job involves a very strange set of science-related skills: I need to know a fair amount about every branch of science, I need to be able to communicate this knowledge in an easily-understood way, and, very importantly, I need to never (or almost never) make a mistake - I need a hair-trigger alarm for what I don't know.

What, you thought I made a living from art?

Ahahahahaha.

Ha ha ha.

Ho.

No, my friends, I most certainly do not make a living from art.

Be that as it may, my per se job provides an excellent opportunity for refining an understanding of the aesthetics of information. I don't literally know most of what I functionally know about science. Rather, I have a pretty good understanding of what scientific knowledge looks like. Each branch of science has its own texture. For instance, biology is the science equivalent of the English language - delightfully large in vocabulary and full of irregular verbs. It is a field composed as much of examples as of principles. Unless you are certain of some biology fact, you cannot assume it is true; the molecule that carries oxygen in humans is not the same as the one that carries it in horseshoe crabs.

Hemoglobin versus hemocyanin. Who knew, right?

In classical physics, on the other hand, you can re-derive a fact given a surprisingly limited number of principles. The kinetic energy of a falling brick is not noticeably different from the kinetic energy of a helium atom.

One wants a sense of the aesthetics of information, both to maximally extend what one knows, and to have a sharp sense of the boundaries of one's knowledge.

Now, how do you extend what you know to make almost completely reliable guesses about what you don't know? You take advantage of a grasp of the aesthetics of the body of information - and then you form an analogy. A does X, and B is like A with regard to the relevant factors, so B probably does something very like X in the same situation. Identifying the correct relevant factors is the key - that's a matter of aesthetics. One gains a sense of aesthetics by tasting a huge amount of information, even if much of it is eventually forgotten.

A basic example to illustrate the point: fluorine bonds with one atom of hydrogen. Bromine is in the same column on the periodic table as fluorine. Elements in the same column have similar properties, and columns toward the edges of the table (like that of fluorine and bromine on one side, and hydrogen on the other) don't have multiple bonding ratios. So probably bromine bonds with one atom of hydrogen as well.

Spoiler: it does.

This is analogical thought, and it is very powerful for extending your functional knowledge, as long as you keep in mind the difference between what you actually know and the considerable volume of smack you're claiming to know.

I personally suspect that it is also a characteristically Jewish way of thinking. There's a reason for this. Judaism, among its bewildering variety of definitions, is a system for living. This system for living is defined by an extensive written body of law. The law, however, cannot possibly be as detailed as the universe. In referring a potentially infinite variety of real-world situations to a finite body of law, it is necessary to extend what is known (the law) to what is unknown (how to behave in a given situation). This scaling-up of the law to match unanticipated situations occupies a great deal of classical Jewish scholarship, with extensive recorded disputes about the applicability of various points of given law to new situations.

Rabbis disputing until morning

Case in point: it is possible to derive the implicit anti-abortion position of Jewish law despite a lack (so far as I know) of a specific prohibition on abortion. How? Because the laws regarding murder specify that the murderer of a pregnant woman shall be tried for the murders of two people. This is analogical reasoning at work:

A (murderer of pregnant woman) does X (goes on trial for murdering two people).

B (abortion) is similar to A with regard to the relevant factors (termination of a fetus).

Therefore B does something like X (abortion constitutes murder of a human being).

Most contemporary Jews do not sit around arguing points of Talmud with one another. But I run across this kind of thinking disproportionately among Jews, and have therefore concluded that the pattern of thought persists in the culture even though the instigating practices have long since receded into the background.

It is interesting to note, as long as we're discussing the topic, that there are two other major modes of reasoning (that I've mused on, anyway). There is also:

Syllogistic reasoning, which derives new knowledge from the premise "All A are B," a much more demanding and rigorous approach than "A is like B."

Revelatory reasoning, which derives new knowledge from the premise, "Aha! A and B are the same!"

I can reason syllogistically when I can be bothered to put in the effort, and when I'm on fire, I can reason revelatorily. But I am primarily an analogical reasoner. My friend Chris is a syllogistic thinker, which means that winning an argument with him is a bitch, because of his tendency to point out that you're talking a considerable volume of smack. My wife Charlotte is also a syllogistic thinker. Chris's ancestors were Italians, and Charlotte's were Scots. So they gave us the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution, and therefore we'll let them off the hook for being such fussbudgets about strict proof.

Leah, subject of the Blue Leah paintings, is a typically well-educated secular Jew, whose ancestors no doubt came from the next ghetto over from mine in Ukraine. Leah reasons analogically.

Blue Leah #1, oil on canvas, 24"x36", 2011

Alley, subject of Her, is of Swedish descent, and reasons revelatorily.

Her, oil on canvas, 36"x36", 2010

I don't know if that has to do with her being Swedish or not. I don't know anything about Sweden except for that Liv Ullmann is a babe.

Liv Ullmann

Believe it or not, all of this has something to do with art. It has to do with the old problem confronted by everyone serious about figure drawing:

Should I draw what I see or should I draw what I know?

Arguments about this topic go all over the goddamn map, and frankly they're not very interesting, because the map isn't very big. But I think I can lay claim to a diverting wrinkle in it, so here we are.

As you possibly know by now, my own history with figure drawing divides roughly into an early craptastic period:

life drawing, 2001

And a later shockingly-awesome period:

life drawing, 2011

The border between these periods is 2001-3, during which time I was involved in cadaver dissection at Santa Monica College, under the guidance of Dr. Margarita Dell. It was a period of two years during which I spent as much as 40 hours a week drawing my own personal anatomical atlas:

you don't even want to know what that is

So you'd think that I would bloody well be on the side of the draw-what-you-know camp. But you'd be thinking wrong.

Here's an interesting twist: because I'm lazy as all hell, I didn't ever memorize the names of any structures. Not one muscle, not one bone. I see artists going around saying, "Yeah, and there's the iliac crest," and I'm like, "If you say so, dude."

We fix this kind of explicit detail in our minds with words. So if you asked me to draw you a diagram of the muscles of the body, I would have large regions known as "getting it wrong." Same deal with bones. No way could I draw you that mess of bones in the center of the foot, even though I picked them apart and drew them more than once:

So what did I learn from two years of formaldehyde headaches? I learned the aesthetics of anatomical information. The body is a chaotic grab-bag of things. There are two fundamental modes of making sense of it: explicitly learning all its structures, or looking at it long enough that you get it. I did neither. I retained the aesthetics of its structures, and I applied that knowledge to looking at it.

What does this buy me? I can't tell you where a muscle starts and stops. But I know the insertion of a muscle when I see it. I can't tell you the standard distribution of fat depths beneath the skin, but I can see the difference between muscle and fat. And I can't tell you all the points where bone typically stretches skin, but I know its shine when it's there, so I see its shape as well.

What I know is so partial that it is flexible. I don't have a systematic approach to the body - I am constantly thrown back on direct perception, as ignorant as a child. But I also have a sense of the aesthetics of the body. This helps structure my perceptions just enough to lead them to anatomical accuracy. Consider Leah's left shoulder in Blue Leah #5:

Now consider the same phenomenon from the perspective of explicit knowledge:

That bulge just to the right of Leah's armpit, catching a bit of light, is her teres major, overlaid with an adorable shot of yellow adipose tissue (fat). The region between the left dink and the right dink is her infraspinatus. We're not seeing the edge of her trapezius because it's relaxed and not as well developed as one expects in, say, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson. The next bright line we see, moving right, is the medial border of her scapula.

I didn't think of any of that stuff while I was painting it. I thought, "bright spot, dink 1, dink 2, shoulderblade."

I think it's very, very difficult to draw the body accurately on the basis of looking alone. On the other hand, I think it's next to impossible to draw the body realistically in the context of medical-grade anatomical knowledge. Why? Let me deploy another analogy.

Early in the history of Assyriology...

Assyriology is the one with the cuneiform tablets

...scholars drawing copies of tablets tended to draw what they saw very accurately. Why? They weren't so sure as they are now what was meaningful and what wasn't, so they instinctively took down everything so as not to miss something that might turn out to be important.

W. M. Flinders Petrie, published 1894

Try copying something in Chinese sometime, and you'll see what I mean.

Later, once cuneiform was better understood, typical renderings of tablets became more idealized:

Possibly Hans Güterbock, after 1960

By this point, scholars were drawing symbols, not things. They knew what was essential, and they threw away the non-meaningful idiosyncrasies of the tablets in front of them.

This is the danger of total anatomical knowledge. Once you learn what is "meaningful" anatomically, you automatically subtract what is accidental to the person actually in front of you. The living model becomes a story written in physiological letters, in the inflexible syntax of anatomy. Just ask Prud'hon:

Pierre-Paul Prud’hon, Study for La Source
c. 1801, Black and white chalk, 21 3/4 x 15 1/4 inches

And this is something I oppose (although I like Prud'hon quite a lot). My work looks much clumsier than the paintings of many of my classically-figurative contemporaries. The anatomy is accurate, but it is not a given. I want the sweat to show. When I build up to a figure, I don't want that figure to fall into place as if it were always so. I am not - just now - painting the Human who lives in the sky. I am painting the particular people in front of me.

I learned the aesthetics of information in this field by learning its knowledge and then forgetting much of it. This allowed the course I prefer - depending on the aesthetics of information to help me organize what I see. I didn't want pure empiricism to make me incapable, and I don't want knowledge to make me blind.

A WORD FROM THE ADVOCATUS DIABOLI:

As always, take this with a grain of salt. I am describing here the exact method I am using right now. And I have a tendency to think that every little thing I do is not only right, but inevitable. When I change methods tomorrow, I'm sure I'll have a clever reason for my new method being ever so perfect. So please, please remember that this is an advocacy for one of many valid procedures.

Heat of Battle

2011-11-30T13:02:00.005-05:00

Last time, we plunged headlong into a complicated discussion of subtle properties of Ingres drawings, and the subtle mechanisms they answer to in the brain.

Since then, I've had a chance to actually see a bunch of these drawings in person. I forgot, I live in New York. It turns out New York is the kind of place where you can drop by the Morgan Library and see a show of a dozen or so of their own Ingres drawings and a second show of drawings from the Louvre, including a bunch of other Ingres drawings, including this one:

It turns out the two figures are wedged together like that because each one was cut out from a larger piece of paper and then they were matted and framed together. By, I suppose, a goddamned idiot.

But I did not come here today to scoff at French curators with you. Non. Rather, I would like to discuss something else which this show brought vividly to mind. I think Stanislavski says it better than I can - in this scene, the drama student narrator of An Actor Prepares finally reaches the point of real acting:

My hand ceased wrapping the string around my fingers and I became inert.

'This is the very depth of the ocean,' explained Tortsov.

I do not know what happened from then on.

...

Tortsov explained: 'The coming of inspiration was only an accident. You cannot count on it. But you can rely on what actually did occur. The point is, inspiration did not come to you of its own accord. You called for it, by preparing the way for it. ... The satisfying conclusion that we can draw from today's lesson is that you now have the power to create favorable conditions for the birth of inspiration. Therefore put your thought on what arouses your inner motive forces, what makes for your inner creative mood. Think of your super-objective and the through line of action that leads to it. In short, have in your mind everything that can be consciously controlled and that will lead you to the subconscious. That is the best possible preparation for inspiration. But never try for a direct approach to inspiration for its own sake. It will result in physical contortion and the opposite of everything you desire.'

Konstantin Stanislavski, An Actor Prepares, pp. 291-2

Stanislavski is describing a transmogrification I have treated before: that the act of art-making cannot be perceived - the narrator "does not know what happened." It can be prepared for, yet when it arrives, consciousness as we normally think of it zeroes out. Skills deploy of their own accord if they have been acquired in advance. Talent stretches itself to its limit. But the will and the understanding are curiously absent.

What Stanislavski describes relates pretty closely to every single description of pitched battle I have ever encountered. (Let me clear up any confusion: I have acted. I have not been in battle. I am a bad actor. I imagine I would be a fairly bad soldier.)

As I understand it, and I am very open to correction here, there are three fundamental types of battle:

• the seige
• guerilla skirmishes
• the pitched battle

Pitched battles are the ones we generally think of when we think of war: symmetric set-piece encounters where enemy forces meet, on a field if one is available, and try to kill each other. The force left standing wins. Bloodshed is worst when neither side will yield. Both sides will go on butchering one another, from the tribal warfare of ancient Greece to the trenches of World War I (for more on this, see Victor Davis Hanson's marvelous The Western Way of War: Infantry Battle in Classical Greece)

Descriptions of pitched battle consistently invoke a condition in which the immediacy and dynamic multipolarity of incoming lethal force produce a constriction of the soldier's universe. Strategy and tactics erode, thinking erodes, all that remains is the exertion of countering force and a terrifying struggle to survive. The condition is similar to that of Stanislavski's actor - he is thrown back on training and character, and if he is to prevail, he had best hope these qualities, and luck, serve him well.

This strikes me as one reason that generals often sit on hills; so that they can think. The shape of pitched battle, and the guidance of its course, are overwhelmed in the midst of the fight.

This model of pitched battle is, oddly, rarely portrayed well in war movies. On the other hand, it is portrayed exceptionally well in virtually every zombie film - Field Marshal Moltke's comment that no plan survives contact with the enemy is faithfully rendered time and again when the walking dead are involved.

the enemy
(not pictured: the plan)

I, and most of you, have never experienced pitched battle, so essentially we don't know what we're talking about. But we have experienced a similarly universe-constricting condition, and that is illness. Do you remember, when you were sick, how your long-term plans, your overriding concerns, and your complex thoughts shimmered and dissolved, and you were reduced to - what is this smell - this heat - this dampness? What can I do to make this pain less?

There is an idea behind illness, but it is not apparent to the sick person. There is an idea behind pitched battle, but it is invisible to the soldier. The idea can be discovered, in the calm of cleanliness and quiet, and light and time, in the laboratory and the strategy tent. In the field, they are lost.

To bring this back around to Ingres, we have been studying him in the laboratory and the strategy tent. We have described his efforts and their effects from the perspective of utter premeditation and calculation. But picture-making, like acting, and battle, and disease, is a state not of thought, but of confrontation with force. It is categorically similar to battle: order emerges out of chaos, as a function of preparation and good fortune.

So what I learned - or, rather, remembered - confronting Ingres face-to-face, was that all these theoretical concerns are apart from the direct act of creation. Looking at Ingres drawings directly, you can see before you the struggle of their making: the curves traced out multiple times, uncertainly, as he gropes toward the shape he seeks; the abrupt dark checkmarks, overlying existing lines, where he decides a note of emphasis is required; the zigs and zags of a changing evaluation of how to confront the problem at hand.

Only in the faces does perfection annihilate all traces of its evolution. There are no errors in the faces, no dropped lines, no hesitations. Nor are there erasures. In person, you can duck to catch a raking light on the paper and study its texture. Erasure leaves alteration in the texture of the fibers of the paper. There are no erasures in the faces.

Even so, the experienced artist will recognize what he is seeing: a combination of profound talent, immense skill, and the forbearance to think through the placement of the preliminary marks, pencil hovering over the paper like a dowser's rod, before the fatal commitment proceeds. It is nearly superhuman - nearly, but not quite. I've done it. You've probably done it too. It is one of many tools; a tool on which Ingres relies heavily in his faces. The darkest lines in the faces occur near the end of the drawing process, once he is dead certain he's gotten their placement right. He builds up from light to dark, on a tightrope, avoiding error at each step, and finally gets his 100 in the class.

The moral of the story is that much of this blog approaches art from what might be called the wrong angle - we go into analysis quite a lot, teasing out the subtleties, the mechanisms, and the counterintuitive impacts of the mechanisms of picture-making. But this is not how I make work. Work is not made in the laboratory and the strategy tent. It is guided and understood from the hill, but it is made in the mud and the chaos and the heat of battle. This is important to remember.

Autofill

2011-11-25T10:29:00.012-05:00

You will perhaps remember that when we left off talking about Ingres, we were discussing the implication of form and volume in drawings of his like this one:

To continue, a little bit of neuroscience, courtesy of Dr. Margaret Livingstone.

In her marvelous book, Livingstone describes two evolutionarily distinct systems of visual processing in humans, which she calls Where and What. Where is a primitive system, shared with many mammals and tuned to movement and location. The younger What is a sophisticated system shared only with primates. It is responsible for object recognition and detail analysis.

What itself is subdivided into Form and Color (her casual names, it should be noted, do describe anatomically and functionally distinct structures).

Form is a high-resolution part of the system, using color differences and brightness differences to determine the shapes of objects. Color identifies the colors of objects, and it is surprisingly low-resolution.

As a matter of information processing efficiency, our brain basically produces a colorless high-resolution image, then smears some colors onto it, much like a painter proceeding from a well-defined grisaille underpainting to a hastily-completed color painting. This resolution difference has been exploited in video technology with the use of 4:1:1 color space. 4:1:1 is a data-compression system in which the brightness of each pixel of a frame is defined individually, but color is defined in blocks of four pixels:

4:1:1 saves a lot of space in a video signal, and interfaces perfectly satisfactorily with the lopsided resolutions of our Form and Color systems.

This simple general description unfolds, of course, to reveal all kinds of fascinating quirks. When we were talking about Ingres a few weeks ago, I made vague reference to how the heavy dependence on line makes unusually extensive use of "the information-completion procedures of the visual brain." By now, you should know that I don't especially like vague references. So I've been thinking about which exact procedures I'm alluding to, and this led me to re-consider one of the quirks of Form/Color integration in the evolved What system of the human brain.

In chapter 11 of her book, Livingstone gets into the nitty-gritty of how the separate information feeds from Form and Color are re-integrated to produce a coherent image in the mind. One of the topics that arises is color and edges. It turns out that part of the edge-detection machinery we discussed a while back results in our being strongly sensitive to colors at the boundaries between regions of unlike color, and weakly sensitive to colors in homogeneous color fields.

(As an aside, this gives us some insight into the sense of suggestion in Rothko paintings:

Mark Rothko, No. 14, 1960, oil on canvas, 114 1/2 in. x 105 5/8 in.

By producing nearly, but not quite, homogeneous color fields, he is producing the visual equivalent of a sound one cannot quite make out. He causes us to strain at the limits of our sensitivities, becoming awake to subtleties which we ordinarily fail to perceive. His fields begin to shimmer with suggestion, with the evolving interaction between true presence and phantoms.)

But back to the point - we are sensitive to colors at the edges, not the centers, because of the edge-detection machinery of our visual systems. Our brain compensates for this physiological deficiency with a truly ridiculous trick: Autofill (my own sarcastic term, not Livingtone's). We see, for instance, a red apple as totally colored in part because our brain, receiving a "red edge" signal, fills the interior with red:

You see how you kind of see the interior of the bottom apple as reddish? I don't mean full-on red. But it doesn't look like the same white as the background. And yet, it is. That's "the information-completion procedures of the visual brain" I was talking about last time. Wild, huh?

Livingstone, wise in the ways not only of neurons but of paintings, illustrates her point with this Cezanne painting, The Lime Kiln (1890-94):

Cezanne, it would appear, was the man at exploiting this particular visual system quirk. All artists hack the human visual system at one or more points of weakness. Cezanne enjoyed using Autofill. Consider his apples as well:

Cezanne, Still Life with Apples, 1890-94, oil on canvas, 18 1/8 x 21 5/8 in

Observe how he darkens the edges, and makes the colors more rich at the edges. This is not an outcome of the frontal lighting alone. It also answers to visual integration in the brain, producing a startlingly vivid sense of presence by reinforcing the mechanisms of the Form and Color systems.

The presence overwhelms that of more realistic depictions of fruit - Hockney points out the relative lack of vividity of Caravaggio's fruit:

Caravaggio, Basket of Fruit, 1597

Why? In part because Cezanne has amped up color and contrast. But also, because he is depicting not only what we see, but how we see it. We are observing not the external world, but the partly-garbled outcome of our means of perceiving the external world. The painting, in a sense, is already inside of us: what was inward has been made outward. He speaks to us, mind to mind, soul to soul. These apples are icons not only of matter, but of consciousness. I have discussed this concept with you before - a painting which is not biologically alive, but is in a metaphysical sense at the boundary of being a living thing. It is excavated from the depths of the mind, and shaped as it is by the processes of the brain, correlates with no thing in the physical world.

Now, I'd like to extend Livingstone's claim with a little experiment. Let's look at the same apple comparison with the color removed:

Huh, that worked. I just did this in Photoshop myself - you and I, my friends, are the laboratory for this experiment. You see how the interior of the bottom apple looks faintly darker than the background? Autofill is still working. If it's the same Autofill Livingstone describes, what this means is that the Color system doesn't depend on actual per se color to signal the mind to see a continuation of edge color. It just needs a value difference delineated by a sharp boundary on one side and a soft boundary on the other.

Now let's see what happens when I try this:

Yes! It works! OK, notice how the white region of the right half of the apple looks a little darker than that the of the left half? Almost as if a slice had been taken out of the left half, so that you were still seeing the apple's skin on the right, but the flesh of the apple on the left? Of course, all of that interior is exactly the same shade of white.

What we've done here is evoked a complex response on the part of Autofill. On the left, there is an edge, but no interior gradient shading to instruct the system to autofill the interior of the apple. On the right, the gradient shading does deliver the autofill-interior-of-apple instruction. Overall, we know the apple is one closed form. But our brains are treating it as having two different color regions, resulting in perception of two different interior brightnesses; even if we can't quite tell where the boundary lies, there is a distinction.

Forgive me if you've already deduced where I'm going with this. We are treating a simple example here, but an example with the markers I wanted to explore: a figure depicted on a white field by means of outlines of diverse qualities. Having demonstrated the principles involved in a simple system, we can extend the conclusion back up to the real system of interest:

Like Cezanne, Ingres has hacked Autofill. His variation of line is delivering a series of instructions to the Color system to observe value differences which are, for the most part, not actually depicted in the drawing. These value differences are interpreted by the mind as depictions of form. Ingres is using his mastery of line to trick the brain into seeing imaginary forms.

And that, my friends, is what makes Ingres a master and you and me a couple of shmucks with an art supply store discount card.

Let me add one more thing before signing off: I am not immune, as perhaps you are not immune, to the persistent worry that one can strip the mystery and beauty out of art by looking at some facet of it and finding out what it is and how it works. Reflecting on the matter, I have reached this formulation: that to know what it is and how it works is not the same as to know what it means, or why. We can - indeed, as working artists, to some extent we must - find out how to achieve the effects we intend. But to learn these things, even in the painfully analytic manner of this blog, has never breached, nor can ever breach, the muscular bond between the image in the eye and the sensation in the soul. Ingres, Cezanne, Rothko, and Caravaggio come through this examination intact, because when we look at them, we are not seeing with our analytic understanding alone. Indeed, for me, this additional element of knowing serves only to reinforce the impression - "How miraculous is their work, and how miraculous are we, to see things as we see them."

Claudia Does It Again

2011-11-10T10:50:00.004-05:00

I'm working on a typically over-ambitious bit of discussion of Cezanne in relation to the topics raised by Ingres in the last post. In the meantime, here's how Longfellow translates the opening of Dante's Inferno:

Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.

One time, that happened to Claudia. When she got out of the forest, she was an artist's model. As you might imagine, she did not art model with the idle fecklessness of somebody marginally supplementing their income, nor even with the cool professionalism of somebody taking pride in doing a job well. Claudia models with the zeal of somebody who has discovered what they are meant to do. She models like she means it.

Portrait of Claudia, graphite and white pencil on paper, 15"x11", 2010

This doesn't look exactly like her, but to me, it feels like her.

Being linguistically and analytically gifted as well, Claudia has a lot to say about the constellations of artists, models, and art she encounters in her charmed life. She writes the irresistibly charismatic Museworthy blog. Let me refer you there now, because she has done a typically generous and delightful thing: a virtual show of art by readers of her blog, including me. As ever, thank you for everything, Claudia...

Here's the post.

More soon.

How did he do that?

2011-10-30T13:35:00.015-04:00

Like me, you've probably stood in front of a drawing by Ingres, and thought, "How did he do that?"

How, Jean-Auguste-Dominique? How?

By "that," of course, I mean, "accomplish that strange graphical flatness without sacrificing a sense of volume and verisimilitude." This is what that trixy sonofabitch Ingres did that is so mystifying.

Consider his 1836 study of the rather anemic Madame Victor Baltard and her daughter Paule:

Look carefully at the face. There are few darks, very few. She is lit entirely; there are few halftones, and the only full shadows are cast shadows at the lower eyelid on the right, the bottom of the nose, and the lips. In short, she is the next thing to being a line drawing only, like the architectural detail on the left. Yet we have no trouble interpreting her as three-dimensional, fully formed.

This reads naturally, but in my experience it is a deeply unnatural way to draw, and never arises by accident. So how did Ingres pull it off?

The effect is even more pronounced in the bottom figure in his 1814 study for La Grand Odalisque:

Consider how much of the figure is blank paper! Ingres has somehow completely indicated the mass and form of a figure without drawing anything at all!

Well, perhaps you are lazy like me, and you have admired this effect in Ingres drawings and never gotten around to analyzing it enough to replicate the technique. That's a safe short-cut, until the day arrives when you suddenly wish to use the technique and don't have recourse to a book of Ingres. That fateful day arrived for me last Monday.

I was at Spring St., where the beautiful Claudia was modeling. Having been out of town or otherwise occupied quite a lot recently, my drawing was rusty, and I was not particularly pleased with most of what I was doing. For the final 40-minute pose of the evening, Claudia took a reclining pose. And I thought to myself, "Holy shit, it's Ingres lighting! I can do an Ingres drawing!" And a second later I mentally wailed, "But I never figured out how!" So I was in one of those delightful high-wire situations where you have to solve a complex problem on the fly to meet an opportunity which will never come around, in quite the form presented, ever again.

Re-deriving Ingres' pictorial principles as I drew, I came up with this:

Claudia, graphite and white pencil on paper, 15"x11", 2011

Let's leave aside for a moment any questions of quality and discuss this from a purely formal perspective, because I think I pretty much sorted out how Ingres was pulling it off. The system depends on a set of internal and external variables being set to values which complement each other - external variables being those pertaining to the subject, and internal those that pertain to the drawing technique itself.

EXTERNAL VARIABLES

1. The lighting must be frontal, so that the brightest planes are those perpendicular to the line from viewer to object. Planes advancing toward the viewer or receding from the viewer turn away from the light as well, resulting in darkening, as can be seen in the central foot in this drawing:

Study of Hands and Feet for "The Golden Age" (1862)

The front of the big toe, and the bottom of the gap between the big toe and the second toe are bright, but the facing sides of the big toe and second toe are dark, because they are turning away from the light. Similarly, the edges of the foot darken more than its frontal plane, as they too dip away from the viewer, and the source of light.

In fact, this lighting scenario produces something rarely seen in reality: an actual outline. Because views of rounded objects always terminate in edges turning away from the viewer, the dimming of turning planes results in a distinctly dark edge. Here reality merges with line drawing, and a scenario occurs in which an object can be drawn largely with contour lines and still retain realism.

2. However, the light must not be on exactly the same axis as the viewer - the viewer should not be sitting beside a spotlight. There must be an offset, producing mild shadowing on one side of the figure. The result of this effect is well-pronounced in this drawing:

Study of Seated Female Nude (1830)

In this instance, Ingres has placed the lighting to his left, producing halftones of recession on the left, but true cast shadows begin to emerge on the right.

This offset is not important pictorially, but rather cognitively. The eye is attracted to even lighting, but it slides off of pure even lighting: equal dimming on the left and right sides of the object makes the object unfocused. A weighting of the dimming to one side anchors the object, producing a greater impression of form. You will see this offset again and again in Ingres, and in the case of the Claudia drawing, the offset was as much as 50 degrees - but it still didn't read as true lighting from the side.

3. The primary object must be pale in color. This is lighting for marble, alabaster, and white people. Why? Because the technique depends on high contrast between the local color of the object and the half-tones, cast shadows, and edges.

Claudia's Armenian, with a kind of bronze skin tone and olive undertone, but for the purposes of making an Ingres drawing, she is of sufficient honkitude to work. Especially if you're drawing on tan paper, as I was. You can see in my drawing that much of the variation between brightest-brights and moderate brights results from variation in local color, not in lighting. Which is to say, her breasts and pubic bone are brighter than her belly, not because the light there was brighter, but because the skin there is lighter (Claudia, perhaps, spent a great deal of time gallavanting around Cape Cod in a bikini this summer). Accurate reflection of variations in local color is insanely difficult in monochromatic drawings of chiaroscuro lighting situations, but relatively simple to do when using Ingres lighting.

4. Soft light. It is important that the light softly model the object. Hard edges to shadowed areas are apart from the purpose here, as well as spotting of light around dimmer regions. The light should be broad and diffuse because, as will be explained below, the drawing technique itself heightens contrast.

INTERNAL VARIABLES

Constructing a situation in which it is possible to draw an Ingres-type drawing is insufficient to actually draw an Ingres-type drawing. You and I, walking into the studio at Spring St., would certainly have looked at Claudia in that pose and immediately thought, "Ingres." But an innocent bystander might well have missed the resemblance, and this would have been a valid interpretation of the scene. In fact, Claudia looked nothing like an Ingres drawing. As much as Ingres' drawing technique is grounded in a certain configuration of externals, it is also a wildly stylized technique. It only looks realistic. Let's consider some of the distortions involved in translating even a well-suited scene into an Ingres drawing:

1. Nonlinear gamma

Gamma, as used in visual technologies, is the name for a particular mathematical formulation of the relationship between original object brightness and representation of object brightness in the reproducing medium (computer monitor, movie screen, inkjet print, paper and pencil drawing). Here's a recent photograph of me in front of some building somewhere:

This image's gamma, represented here by Photoshop's CURVES tool, is linear - input brightness is strictly proportional with output brightness, producing an ordinary tonal range with lots of intermediates (greys, half-tones).

Now here's the same picture with a little gamma modification:

In this case, the gamma has been altered so that output brightness remains at zero for a few degrees of input brightness up from pure black. Likewise, output brightness goes to pure white before input brightness reaches there. So a lot of darkish regions have gone to black, and a lot of brightish regions have gone to white. Also, the graph curves, so that there is a rapid transition from black to white, with fewer intermediate values. But notice that the curve is not an even curve - it has a bulge in the top half of the graph. This bulge drags halftones toward lightness, and clusters them in the bright range.

You will notice that this image looks much more similar to an Ingres drawing than does the first version: it is composed of flat bright regions, falling off abruptly toward darkness, with little in the way of middle values.

It doesn't take Photoshop to accomplish this gamma distortion. All it takes is knowing what you're trying to accomplish (or, in my case, figuring it out quickly while sweating bullets at Spring St.). Consider the Claudia drawing again:

You think those shadows under her butt were that light in person? Fuck no. They were pretty dark. But the halftones were dragged toward brightness by the nonlinear gamma of the representation, and they wound up pretty light. On the other hand, the shadow beneath her neck was just a little darker - so it started to fall off the cliff of that steep curve toward really dark.

2. Finicky line

This technique lives and dies by line - choice of line, and quality of line. It is a simplifying technique, and the line must be consistent with that. Extraneous lines must be eliminated, and remaining lines must be traced out beautifully. Whether or not you think I hit any beautiful lines in this drawing, the principle stands: that because line is so important to the paradigm, the character of the line must be clear, specific, and well-executed for a drawing inside the paradigm to succeed. Of the 40 minutes I had for this pose, I spent about 12 on the lines alone, an unusually high proportion for me (I'm a partisan of the let's-wing-it faction of art).

3. Precision of form

Line must be executed brilliantly because it is so explicit in the Ingres drawing. Form must be executed brilliantly, paradoxically, because it is not. What I mean is, the tonal compression of this technique eliminates much of the information about form available to the eye through halftone rendition. This means that the Ingres drawing depends unusually heavily on the information-completion procedures of the visual brain. Therefore, the half-destroyed traces of form found in the drawing must correspond unusually precisely with those information-completion procedures in order to invoke them correctly. Practically speaking, it means that if you want to use the Ingres model to depict a figure, you have to really know the jesus out of your anatomy.

A failure to know the jesus out of anatomy is amply demonstrated by a different, and enormous, body of work. The Ingres technique is closely related to a second technique: pencil drawings by not-very-talented beginning artists copied from pictures in Playboy magazine. I'm not going to provide any examples here, because I'm not in the business of trashing innocent dilettantes, but Hef long ago figured out the same thing Ingres did: diffuse frontal lighting looks great on the figure. So when people who are clearly never going to be functional artists take it into their heads that they're going to draw nudes, and go to the obvious source for the non-serious art student, they stumble immediately on Ingres lighting. And invariably, they soon figure out to blend their tones by smearing their pencil marks with their thumbs. Also invariably, they incorrectly invoke the form-completion software of the brain, because they don't understand a thing about anatomy.

4. The well-placed dark point

Here we begin to depart from the representational altogether and enter into the purely compositional elements of the technique. Look at Ingres's 1815 drawing Lady Harriet Mary and Catherine Caroline Montagu:

This time around, consider the darkest points in the picture: the curves where the hats meet the (caucasian) girls' heads. A couple spots where the taller (blindingly white) girl's shawl meets her shoulders, the bow under the shorter (pigmentally challenged) girl's chin. And a few other points.

The function of these points is to organize and focus the composition, and round out its range of values from full white to full black. While these are necessary functions, it was not necessary that these particular points be chosen for the purpose. Any number of points could have served. Ingres chose these points for a reason described by art teachers as "wanting to lead the eye in a particular way, or emphasize certain structural features of the figures or narrative properties of the scene." I personally have never believed this kind of thing is so explicit for an artist, and prefer to phrase it that he chose these points because they felt right. Anyway, he had a lot of leeway with his choices. There is always a lot of leeway in this mode when choosing the needed points of maximum dark.

In the Claudia drawing, I placed my darkest darks where her raised near arm meets her side, at the deepest incurve of her waist, where her butt separates from a fold in the cloth underneath her - and on the lower curves of her farther breast and rib cage. Why up there? Who knows, it seemed like a good idea at the time.

5. Good sense

All this exposition has hopefully made a couple of things clear - a. that successful use of the Ingres technique depends on a higher skill level than most other branches of realist drawing, and b. that within the realm of realist drawing, it is perhaps the most subtly but radically expressionist of modes. Because it fools the eye into considering it realist, while partaking of such extreme stylization, it affords a very broad field for interpretation. Beyond all of the mechanical considerations covered above, and even beyond the semi-abstract consideration of the well-placed dark point, the technique depends on inspiration, on a well-formulated vision, on taste and style - on all the things that go to make up good sense. Consider again Ingres's more fully-rendered study for La Grande Odalisque:

It remains mostly white. But look at the majesty of curve, where he has found the outlines. Consider the eroticism of the selected shadows - her armpit, the lower curve of her breast, her butt, her thigh, the shadow of her arm, and the bases of her toes. Where Ingres's eye has snagged, your eye snags. Where he has adored a form, you will adore a form. What he craves, you too must crave. This image is not a representation of a thing that exists in the world. It is a conversation between Ingres and his model, and Ingres is doing most of the talking.

Now, I'd like to offer the usual caveat. I've talked up the skill involved in making an Ingres drawing, and I've talked some smack about people who do it wrong. I've offered a drawing of my own as an example of the technique. And the caveat is - I'm not making any claims of success. That's not for me to decide, and trust me, my judgment is harsher than yours anyway. I offered my drawing because this subject was on my mind while I drew it, and I learned as I drew, and I felt like I could illustrate many of the principles I'm discussing by reference to it. It is very possible for a picture to demonstrate a principle without also demonstrating it well. I'm still learning.

small neighbors/Microbiota

2011-10-26T18:12:00.016-04:00

The story of the microbe paintings and the show they're in starts with my friend Erika Johnson. Erika is one of three people I know who have what I think of as pure creativity. Let me explain what I mean. Here's a diagram of a snap-analysis misreading of creativity:

In this analysis, one starts down a specific well-defined road, and reaches the goal toward which the road leads. This is almost never true of actual creativity, and it's debatable whether its products are genuinely creative. I'm thinking of any number of quirky romantic comedies produced by mini-major studios in the 1990's.

My own experience of creativity is rather more like this:

In this version, I have a range of possible outcomes, any of which would work for me, and there is no road. Rather, there is a field. Many paths can be blazed through the field, so long as they result in an outcome in the desired range.

Now here's Erika's radical form of creativity, as I understand it:

This is creativity as pure play. There is a start point, a possible field, and no goal. There is only the act of following where the prior step has led. It is impossible for anyone, including Erika, to anticipate what she will wind up producing.

A few years ago, Erika learned how to reverse the lens on an ordinary webcam. This procedure turns the webcam into a video-enabled low resolution light microscope. So naturally, Erika obtained some local pond water and started looking at it through iPhoto:

She found it teaming with microbial life. In response, she made drawings, paintings, clay sculptures, zinc prints, and ultimately, a body of videos and still photographs. She eventually called this project small neighbors.

some of the enormous body of work constituting small neighbors

This is where I stumble into the picture. I saw an album of Erika's photographs of microbes on her Facebook profile:

At the time, I had been thinking about things I could paint that weren't naked women. Don't get me wrong, I remain a member in good standing of the naked-women fan club, Brooklyn chapter. But I was thinking that my artistic range was getting a little cramped. So when I saw these pictures, I immediately wanted to paint them.

Why? Well, they were representational, but only just. Within their loose representationalism, they were close to being pure studies in the elements of composition. Masterful studies. And they had soft edges. I'm interested in soft edges; I think the edges of many of my objects are too hard.

So I asked if I could paint some of Erika's photographs. And - what utter luck - it turned out she had been kind of hoping I would see her pictures and think of that idea. Her problem was that, being low-resolution, these images cannot be made large except by painting them. Painting is usually an information-subtractive process. In this case, it was an information-additive process. Also, she happened to like my work.

Here's some more utter luck: Erika already had a solo show of small neighbors scheduled at Brew House SPACE 101 Gallery in Pittsburgh, another one of those old industrial buildings that's been converted into a hip art zone. Erika, being completely generous, asked if I would participate in the show, converting it from small neighbors to small neighbors/Microbiota (adding my name for the series of paintings I had begun). I said, "Uh, yes."

That was around June. I've been painting microbes like crazy since then. My creativity, as I've been explaining, is much less free-form than Erika's. I'm not only comfortable working toward a goal-range, I can hardly work without one. So I brought a different methodology to my contribution than Erika brought to hers. Hers is an exploratory work of years. Mine is a sprint of months. I do work on a field, not a road, so I zigged, zagged, and reversed a few times. But I always sprinted.

Let me acquaint you with my unsuccessful attempts at reading Watership Down. As a child, I got through most of it several times; and each time, I would get to some point where I would say, "But they're rabbits. Who cares what happens to a bunch of rabbits?" And I never finished it.

I won't claim that I didn't have similar boggings down with the Microbiota paintings. I've already bitched about painting all the algae in this one:

Microbiota #7, oil on canvas, 48"x60", 2011

Unlike when I was a child, I am now able to say, "I knew why it mattered when I started, I'll know why it matters when I finish, and for now, even if I'm in the midst of it and I've forgotten what I'm doing, I have the faith; piertotum locomotor!" Art is inspiration, and the rest of it is will.

So I painted seven Microbiota paintings, completing the last one in just enough time that it didn't actually smear when I stuck it in an SUV and drove (well, Charlotte did most of the driving; driving in the northeast scares me) to Pittsburgh.

Thereat, we stayed with Erika and her girlfriend Lynn (a professor of rhetoric!) in their house, the kind of three-storey place you and I can't afford in New York. Erika had hung most of the show:

I helped with hanging the rest. It looked fantastic. And I understood my work in a way that I hadn't understood it before: as part of a continuum of pieces revolving around a theme, ranging from tiny pucks of incised clay to eMacs playing live video feeds of magnified water. It was a two-person show, but most collaborations, in my experience, have a lead collaborator. I am not the lead on small neighbors/Microbiota - my paintings took their proper place as seven of the objects arranged, carefully and ever playfully, in the mind of Erika.

As for the opening itself, it was on Saturday, October 15th, and it was really nice. Charlotte had a great time. My dad and his excellent girlfriend drove down from Toronto. The opening was enthusiastically attended by Erika's friends, as well as a pleasing number of black-clad art-opening attenders:

Erika demonstrated her microbe-observation apparatus and technique:

This was good. The work can be joyful, or not, but it is always hard. Showing it is one of the big rewards.

With lots of love and gratitude, Erika - thank you.

Every Single Time, It is a Struggle

2011-10-18T11:54:00.006-04:00

You have recently seen me box my own ears over the worrisome possibility that it is getting too easy for me to paint the things that I paint. Now I'd like to argue against myself again, by means of two examples.

Here is the current Blue Leah painting - one of two torsos I am planning for the series:

Blue Leah #5, oil on canvas, 48"x36", 2011 (work in progress)

I think this is going pretty well. During the last session, I painted the belly. I slouched toward this passage feeling fairly lowly about it, having in mind everything I had said about getting too good at what I prefer doing. If there's one thing I prefer doing, it's painting women's bellies. I love bellies. I've painted a lot of them (bellies, I mean, but women too, who have bellies). So I kind of felt like a complacent jackass, getting ready to paint this one.

But then I started, and all that self-disgust evaporated, because I came face-to-face with a fact I had forgotten since last time I painted a woman's belly: that painting bellies is as hard as fucking hell.

Every single time, it's that hard. It doesn't get easier. The belly is a large expanse of subtly varied structure, reflected in subtle shifts of light, shade, and color. Too much subtlety and you get mush - too little, and you get an anatomical cartoon. To paint a belly is to skate over a vast floe of difficult choices, each of which must be resolved correctly and in the moment to produce an overall sense of bellitude. I spent seven and a half hours painting this belly, from the bottom of the breasts down: three with Leah present, and another four and a half alone and tearing my hair out. Then I gave up.

Not long after I gave up, I looked at this belly again, and I thought, "This is a good belly." And I breathed a sigh of relief.

Every single time, it is a struggle.

Let me tell you about a different struggle I had recently. Here's a painting of some strands of algae, part of a group of paintings of microbes about which I'll tell you more very shortly:

Microbiota #7, oil on canvas, 48"x60", 2011

This is quite a large painting - 48"x60," in fact. Here it is in context, so you can get a sense of scale:

I spent several days painting those strands. I knew what the painting would look like when I got done - I think it looks cool. I think it is luminous and carries a feeling of translucence and aquatic clumping and drifting. But painting those strands of algae, while not technically difficult, was in the aggregate not unlike watching radar. It was brain-burningly repetitive and maddening. It gave rise to paranoia and despair. Sometimes you just force your way on through - for days and days.

Two struggles: to do it right, and to do it at all. I should worry less about complacency, and more about just doing the work. The work will take care of everything else.

Now, what about this group of paintings of microbes? As you may have guessed from the in-context photograph, it is part of a show, my first two-person show. I'll tell you the whole story in the next post.

What I Did On My Summer Vacation, Part III: An Appointment at Strandgade 30

2011-10-03T09:31:00.013-04:00

Let us continue with the theme of ambiguity. This is the last of my current cluster of thoughts on the four completed Blue Leah paintings. Careful examination of the prior posts will reveal that only three such paintings have been discussed. Here is the fourth:

Blue Leah #4, 2011, oil on canvas, 24"x36"

I hardly ever paint the back of the head, face-addict that I am. But the back of the head is expressive too. Its language may not have so many words as the front, but they are powerful words, and different from the words of the face.

I am gluttonous for contact. I like to establish a connection with the people around me. The vocabulary of the face on the theme of contact is larger than that of the back of the head.

The language of the back of the head tends toward lack of contact; a connection broken, or not yet established. It is a language of few words, but its words have multiple meanings. The back of the head, brought to the focus of a painting, carries ambiguity.

Pursuing the logic of rotation in my Blue Leah series, I came upon the back of the head, and decided to follow the logic here too. The ambiguous psychology of the faces in the paintings eclipsed all of the available certainties when she faced away from me. You know me - I'm something like a scientist. Like scientists, I want to know. It was not easy for me to decide to paint the back of Leah's head. There was something heartbreaking about it for me; a tragic sense, deriving from the idea that all time is time that can be spent getting to know. If we don't optimize our means of knowing, then the time we spend in this inferior state is time we don't get back. There are six hours of time lost in this painting, knowledge I will never again have time to uncover. Nobody will.

The goal of the back-of-the-head painting cannot be knowledge; it must be a willing entry into a state of unknowing, or of limited knowing. The enjoyment of, or benefiting from, this ambiguous state, this ignorant state, must be its own reward. There is no other meaningful door to the painting of the back of the head.

I did it, and I liked the result. Of course, I was reminded, shortly after the fact, of a painter I really like very much: Vilhelm Hammershøi. If Denmark can be said to have produced a Vermeer, if it even needed a Vermeer, then surely Hammershøi (1864-1916) is the Danish Vermeer. Consider what I have been claiming about contact, and lack of it, in these two paintings:

Vermeer's The Kitchen Maid, c. 1657, versus Hammershøi's Young Woman From Behind, 1903-4

The compositions, the range of colors, the angle and quality of light, all are nearly identical. In neither case is the figure explicitly aware of the viewer, or looking at the viewer. But Vermeer's kitchen maid belongs to us, and we to her. Such is the force of the human face. It binds us. By contrast, Hammershøi's young woman does not belong to us, and we might not belong to her.

Hammershøi made quite a career of painting women in rooms facing away from the viewer. We learn from the teachings of Wikipedia that a great many of these women are his wife Ida, painted at home, an apartment at Strandgade 30, Copenhagen. There seems to me a kind of scorchingly Scandinavian quality to this fact. If Vermeer represents a fulcrum between the warmth of the southern part of Europe and the chill of the north, Hammershøi uses Vermeerian artistic instruments to do for painting what Strindberg does for theater, Kierkegaard for philosophy and Bergman for film. He brings the cold: buttoned up in its presentation and anguished in its soul.

I've been wanting to talk with you about Hammershøi for a long time. I don't think I am Hammershøi at heart, but Hammershøi speaks to me. His speech is vivid and his message resonates. He is well worth some study. Consider another example of his work:

Strandgade 30

What I see here is a sense, not only of muteness, but of being trapped in a labyrinth. The labyrinth consists of those rooms within rooms, each tending toward darkness, each penetrated to some extent by a chilly daylight. The exterior is glimpsed, or unseen; going outside is no longer an option. Life is a matter of transit and rest between rooms, and contact between occupants is impossible. They share a domesticity but their distance is unbridgeable.

I think of Hammershøi's world as a completely determined world. The orchestration and depiction of elements is so meticulous that all parts of the image must be understood as meaningful. Nothing here happens by accident. The sitter is not turned away from us by accident, but rather by necessity. It is essential to her nature and her relation with the viewer. It is so essential that we cannot assume she has a front side. She is existentially turned away; she has no face, she cannot have a face. In this house of creaking floors and ticking clocks, perhaps of sounds of traffic coming muffled through the windows, she is a monster of solitude. Theseus and Minotaur alike have long since wandered off. We are alone with dust and floorwax and quiet.

I don't necessarily think you should take my word for this. But let me illustrate a little better what I mean by the essential turned-awayness of Ida Hammershøi. Here is a painting by contemporary painter Karen Kaapcke:

Emily, 12"x12", oil on board, date unknown

Kaapcke has a body of work devoted to the backs of heads. But consider here how contingent the back-of-headness is. The head is full of detail, motion, vitality. It is turned away, but this turn is a gesture; it could change at any time. This person has a face, we just can't see it at the moment.

Here is another Kaapcke:

Destiny, 12"x12", oil on linen, 2008

Again, we have a glimpse of an individual swimming in a world of chance and change. Look at the idiosyncrasy of the bumps on the skull, the vivid hard light. This is just the same as a portrait, only the person happens to have turned for a second as the viewer was stumbling in.

Now return to Hammershøi's stifling apartment at Strandgade 30:

Lady Reading in An Interior, date unknown

Ida is reading a newspaper now. Perhaps we want to say something to her, but she will not hear, and never turn. She cannot. And we cannot make her. There is nothing on the other side. She is settled, as still as a statue; the gestures of marriage have ossified, stiffening from total comfort into total alienation.

Later still, Hammershøi, perhaps himself the Minotaur, will seek Ida and fail to find her:

Sunshine in the Drawing Room, 1903

The room will be heavy with memory, but she will be nowhere to be found. He will roam the labyrinth in a panic:

White Doors, 1905

But her vanishing is as absolute as her turned-awayness. Once she is gone, she is always gone, has always been gone. The quiet pounds in his ears.

This is the important part: the quiet pounds in our ears as well. Hammershøi the man suffers intimations of grief, of distance, of longing, and of menace. Hammershøi the philosopher sees a metaphysical necessity in the sensations of the man. But Hammershøi the artist records and transmits this universe. He overwrites our own universe, he compels us, so long as we are trapped before his paintings, to participate in his loneliness.

This is a triumph of art as communication. I will not trouble you with any sentimentalisms about Hammershøi transcending his solitude by communicating it to us. There is no redeeming communication here, only the revelation of one of the thousand faces of the truth. Hammershøi remains alone, and through his masterful communication, we are now alone as well. His artwork is a trapdoor into his labyrinth.

It should come as no surprise, then, that if Kaapcke's contingency represents one end of the back-of-head spectrum, and Hammershøi's essentialism the other, I fall closer to Hammershøi than to Kaapcke. Of course I do; I do not paint that which might be otherwise, because I have no talent for perceiving alternatives. To perceive an alternative is to engage in hierarchical thought, and I do not think hierarchically. My hierarchical sense is flattened, I do not prioritize or sort. My eye consumes my mind; whatever is in front of me is all. In my universe, what is collapses into identity with what must be.

Reasoning thus on the back of the head, I see that what I've done with Blue Leah #4 is to artificially overlay a hierarchy on my simplistic value system. I favor faces because the maximum of ready information and connection lies in faces. The informational transaction between an external object and a viewer is one of the major loci of art. It is my native stomping ground.

Contrariwise, the detachment of the viewer - the self - from the external is another major locus. This is the art of self-travel, self-discovery (or at least, it is more directly so than externalized art). To explore this vast inland, the exterior world must often be dampened, as Hammershøi dampens; or replaced with semiotics, as the expressionists and symbolists replace. I have imposed hierarchy in this painting by dampening my connection with the exterior. Painting the back of the head does not, ultimately, result in a low-information image. It results in an image where the information is dug up from the viewer, not transmitted from the model. This is a harrowing and difficult sort of excavation, and it takes restraint and self-discipline even to ring the doorbell of Strandgade 30. But it is an appointment worth keeping.

Note: with many thanks to Karen Kaapcke for her kind permission to reproduce her beautiful paintings here. You can see more of her work here.

What I Did On My Summer Vacation, Part II: Zone of Rightness, Zone of Comfort

2011-09-19T17:45:00.009-04:00

Ambiguities abounded in the last post. It was unclear to what extent my current zero-background tendency is a philosophical conclusion, and to what extent it's a matter of fleeting preference. It was unclear whether monism is exciting or boring. It was unclear whether I am going through a period of creativity or depression.

This series of blue Leah paintings is very interesting to me, in that I know much less about it than I usually do about my work. I'd like to expand the region of ambiguity now.

You may recall that a little while back I wrote a long post about the violent conflict between paint as representation, and paint as paint. I didn't exactly advocate for this conflict, but I certainly described it in glowing terms. I have been told that this blog can be something like an art class. If that's true, it is worth continuing to remember that I am not the teacher here. I'm a student, and I'm learning from writing. So that post, about the wonders of brutal paint handling, was me learning, by writing, about a particular painting technique I am very envious of.

I don't mind confessing envy - I see paintings all the time which inspire the thought, "I wish I painted like that." I don't follow through on most of these thoughts, but I'll cop to having them. I am envious of the techniques of the painters I described in that post - Pacula, Monks, and Wright. Their techniques seem to me both intensely sensual, and philosophically profound.

When I was writing that post, I tried mucking around with thick paint a bit, in Deep Red #4:

Deep Red #4, 2011, oil on canvas, 18"x24"

I was kind of meh about it. It's not bad, but it's not a revelation either. And we're in the revelation business here.

Then I decided to go back to the way I do actually paint, the way I like to paint, for these blue Leah paintings. But something interesting happened along the way. Consider this, the face of Blue Leah #3:

Blue Leah #3, 2011, oil on canvas, 24"x36" (detail)

Much of the paint is smoothly handled. Not so smoothly handled as Ingres, but I do not prefer that particular extreme of smoothness:

The Virgin Adoring the Host, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, 1852

To me, Ingres often reads as too smooth, his figures over-rendered to a waxen lifelessness. Not in his best works, but in many of the rest of them. Not my path. Even the smoothest, alabasterest skin has roughnesses, discontinuities. The paint must represent or mimic these abruptnesses of the flesh, or the painted flesh will not represent or recall the true flesh. It will fail.

So - my flesh is generally smooth, but not utterly smooth; it is not smoother than its inspiration. And that's how I handled most of the skin on Leah's face.

But in the highlights, you can see that the paint is more jagged, more distinct.

detail, Blue Leah #3

This does not strictly represent reality. The real highlights on her skin were smoother. But the interaction of those highlights with the eye was not. The tiniest of motions causes even a medium-gloss surface to scintillate. The scintillation may be subliminal, but it is there. The light flickers. It doesn't flicker between light and dark, but it does flicker between light and other light. What I painted here was a simile for the scintillation of an observed reflective surface.

Stepping away from representation, however, we have in low-key form that fracturing of the representationalism of the paint, a muted repetition of that descent into the maelstrom, which I so extolled in the Rock and Roll post. If my example painters were Eurydice, who blazes trails, I was Orpheus, hurrying after.

I have always used this trick in highlights. So has everyone else. Consider, again, Greuze:

Study Head of a Woman, Jean-Baptiste Greuze

It is clear enough in the photo, and it is dead clear in person - the highlights of the cheek and nose are a high-relief froth of paint. The shadows are thin as tea. This principle is such a commonplace you can even learn it in art school: paint the highlights thickly, and the shadows thinly. It is an intuitive application of my personal element of design, information density. The eye perceives less information density in darks. Painting darks thinly mimics this natural cognition and heightens it in the painting.

So, yes, I've always done that. But I did it more in the Leah painting, and more boldly. It felt just right to me; I slipped into a zone of rightness. I was painting, and I was thinking, "I am painting, right now, precisely right."

I had a very good time doing that.

Here is the expanded zone of ambiguity about these paintings: Being me, I immediately began to wonder if my feeling of well-being and rightness were correct. There is a different zone that can trigger exactly the same sensation - the zone of comfort.

The zone of comfort is the region within which we do what we already know how to do, and moreover, what we know full well we know how to do. From the beginning until now, it has been a long struggle toward painting for me. When I first picked up brushes, I could scarcely figure out how to get this revolting dyed suspension from the brush onto the canvas. Later, I went through a long period of finding it faintly absurd that so much agonizing and argument has gone into the application of a viscous fluid to a flat surface, where it sits, with a slatternly mobility, until a ridiculous oxidation process gradually polymerizes it into something like permanence. Later still, I was able to make a picture with this archaic medium, and gradually refined my skills until I could do things that, to me, seemed marvelous. I am still refining my techniques, and I am still getting better at it.

But here I sat, confronting the blue Leahs, and thinking - do I like this because it is a summary of the skills I already have, generated from a region of comfort? Or do I like this because I have broken new ground, and am acting from a continuous performance high of athletic dexterity shockingly mastering the impossible?

Well, I don't know. It is very, very difficult to distinguish between these two sensations. There may be no perceptual difference between them at all. The difference emerges later: either you find that you have become better, that your artistic muscles, as it were, have firmed - or that you are already well along the road to complacency and corruption, having accidentally followed a fork which diverged, oh so slowly, from the true path.

I look at the blue Leahs, and I think: by my lights these are good paintings. But what kind of good paintings are they? Do they bode well or do they bode ill?

Time will tell.

Update 9-29-11

Here's a treat for you - artist and friend Fred Hatt has just been writing about nearly the same topic, in his usual thoughtful and engaged way, and illustrated as always with his beautiful work. It appears each of us was writing almost simultaneously, totally unaware that the topic was on the other's mind. This is always fun - the same theme refracted through two analyses.

What I Did On My Summer Vacation, Part I: Monism

2011-09-03T11:04:00.015-04:00

I'm sorry for the silence lately. I didn't have any thoughts that, at the time, could be well-organized into language. Plus I was busy.

This summer, I've been working on, among other things, a series of blue paintings of Leah. The first one was the subject of this post:

Blue Leah #1, oil on canvas, 24"x36", 2011

Once I had painted that, I wanted to continue with the general compositional idea and see what I could do with it. Solving a problem once is good; but in my experience, solving the same problem several times in a row often leads someplace interesting.

As I mentioned before, these paintings are noticeably larger than life sized. You lose a certain intimacy with oversized figures. Intimacy is up there with confrontation in my list of important modes of interaction between viewer and figure. But also up there is character, soul. And what I lost in intimacy at the large scale, I hoped I could make up for in soul. This, of course, you must decide for yourself. Here's the second in the series:

Blue Leah #2, oil on canvas, 24"x36", 2011

Many things are going on with me here. I am approaching an aesthetic crisis of the concept of the background. I put a lot of work into backgrounds, but I have never been in love with them - I have to force myself to conceptualize compositions with backgrounds. Sometimes my backgrounds are cool design ideas:

Red, oil on canvas, 60"x36", 2009

Other times they turn out to deeply influence the meaning of the painting:

Emma Twice, oil on canvas, 48"x48", 2009

I am not feeling the backgrounds right now. I'm sure I'll return to them. But lately, I have been preferring, rather than ginning up an interest I do not currently have, to confront the problem head-on. Being me, I've devoted some thought to what this disinterest means.

Here's what I think it means. I think I am going through a period of obsessively following a cognitive tendency of mine: to conceive of Being as a matter not of space, but of object. We've talked about this before. But lately it is more extreme - when I think of anything, I think of people and objects, and I think of them absolutely isolated from any coherent surrounding space. These are both recent paintings:

Deep Red #3, oil on canvas, 18"x24", 2011

Industrial Object #2, oil and silver leaf on panel, 36"x36", 2011

In one, the objects fill the space entirely. In the other, the object occurs in a metal-leafed non-space.

So I have been considering modes of no-background painting. This helped motivate the recent Hockney-inspired painting:

Self Portrait as Hockney with Piera as Peter in

David Hockney's "Model with Unfinished Self Portrait," 1977,

oil on canvas, 48"x36", 2011

The Leah paintings also represent steps in this direction, although they are not so radical as another painting I am working on, about which, more soon.

This foregrounding, to the exclusion of backgrounding, of the figure or object, strikes me as part-and-parcel of a kind of monism from which I have long suffered.

The Wikipedia definition of monism serves well enough in this context:

Monism is any philosophical view which holds that there is unity in a given field of inquiry. Accordingly, some philosophers may hold that the universe is one rather than dualistic or pluralistic.

I have a tendency to wish to drive the universe toward being all one thing. As if, if one could see and vivisect reality clearly enough, the differences would dissolve, and there would be one utter thing. I am a kind of itinerant unified field theorist, without the common decency to actually learn the physics. Less charitably, you could call me a dirty-hemmed mystic.

My intuitive monism has two faces. On the one hand, it can make everything as dusty as a geometry proof. And on the other, it can render any object to which it turns its eye into a talisman, imbued with mysterious and intense power.

Obviously, I vote for the latter. But the presence of the former indicates to me that my monism may be a symptom of depression. It is very annoying, being unable to distinguish whether you are experiencing your most acute insight, or simple depression. But there you have it. So long as I keep making paintings, I figure it all comes out for the best.

Perhaps you're having trouble following what I'm talking about, this idea of a monism of aesthetics. Consider, then, a couple of examples of people whose work goes the other way. Here we have Jan Steen:

The Egg Dance, Jan Steen, c. 1674

Steen was a Dutch painter whose paintings of chaotic and debauched household gatherings are so iconic to the Dutch that they, a very hygienic people, apparently insult one another with the snub, "You have a house like a Jan Steen." Steen's universe holds many things.

Here is contemporary painter John Wellington, a really nice guy whom you would be lucky to spend some time chatting about art with:

Red Buddha, John Wellington, 27"x24", oil on panel

Wellington's dazzling universe, like Steen's, is a universe of many things. One of my favorite filmmakers, Fellini, is a proliferating-things man:

still from Federico Fellini's Juliet of the Spirits, 1965

But my favorite filmmaker, Tarkovsky, is, like me, a monist:

still from Andrey Tarkovsky's Solaris, 1972

I am reminded of a self-disciplining line which repeatedly goes through the mind of an imprisoned character, in the novel Metropolis: "Stillness, silence, immobility." This line has never left me, because it is like me, in my monistic mood: citizen of a universe occupied by a single thing. A single thing, yes, and it cannot move, because motion occurs in space, and space arises when there are two things, not one. But in this single thing, all is subsumed, and the thing is all, and there is no sound or motion.

But if you will give me my one thing, and your own consciousness, then there are two things, nearly. And though the one thing does not properly move, it transits an event horizon and arrives on your doorstep with tremendous force, shattering force. In this monistic mood, I am not interested in delighting you with color and shape; I want your encounter with the paintings to take on the quality of blunt force trauma - to crack your head and let the Absolute rush in, as it has rushed in upon me.

Thus Leah:

Blue Leah #3, oil on canvas, 24"x36", 2011

Look, let me add another caveat here - I have been sitting in my studio, painting and thinking these thoughts, but I have been thinking these thoughts in a kind of confused and indeterminate way. I am leery of writing them down because words impose a rigorous analysis, and there is nothing like rigorous analysis for logically drawing out a latent extremism. Extremism often does not serve our goals; leaving things unsaid is important, it allows us to harvest the fruits of our thoughts without exhausting the soil. So as usual - a good deal of skepticism, please. This is not me. This is not a philosophy or a prescription, it is a simplified record of a mood.

More soon, much sooner than last time.

Da Vinci at DePaul

2011-08-12T11:36:00.019-04:00

Here's something I'm really proud of. This is a compilation of a series of posts I've written over the past few months for my actual professional blogging gig, at Artist Daily, the online presence of American Artist magazine. They reappear here by kind permission of the magazine.

I wrote about the role that Leonardo Da Vinci has played in my artistic development; some of these stories you may have read here before, in slightly different forms. Which versions are true? All of them, I think.

Unlike my usual use of the spastic theory of blog writing, these posts have been edited, by the marvelous Courtney Jordan. In a few places, I've gone back to my original text, but not many.

Apart from being proud to have had this block of writing posted at Artist Daily, I'm particularly thrilled that this is my first writing to make it onto class syllabi. My friend Kathleen Rooney, a wonderful poet and author, is teaching the compiled essay this winter quarter at DePaul, in her intermediate poetry class, and in the spring at Roosevelt, where she is writer-in-residence, in her graduate poetry workshop.

Here you go - you may notice the tone is slightly less profane than usual. Hopefully, it is a little more polished as well.

The Importance of Choosing a Master

Let's say you're Egon Schiele. You have a singular vision so original, so violently intense, that you can develop as an artist by feeding exclusively on your own inspiration. Your drive will crush every obstacle in your way - even feed on them, transforming your mistakes and flaws into revelations.

Self Portrait
Egon Schiele, 1912.

Now let's say you're you or me. We might be good or talented - maybe we'll even become great. But in order to get where we’re going, we have a body of technical skill that we need to add to our toolboxes. What should we do about that?

My first step was to choose a master. This master, preferably someone safely dead, will act as your pole star. This master will be someone not only of massive artistic accomplishment, but of formidable technical skill. By studying the master's work, you will find both inspiration in terms of what art can express, and insight into how art expresses it. Your master will have produced work of such technical sophistication that you can spend hours poring over his or her work, learning new lessons as your own skills advance enough to prepare you for further growth.

I chose Leonardo Da Vinci. In the next few posts, I will describe to you how and what I learned from my years of studying Da Vinci.

The Virgin and Child with St. Anne and St. John the Baptist
Leonardo da Vinci, c.1499-1500.

  But in the meantime, I want to share with you what I think is the most important reason to choose a master: you should always be thinking of an artist better than you. It is important in the process of becoming an artist to think that you are the best artist who has ever walked this humble Earth.

But it is just as important to think that you are nothing, that you are the lowest of the low. Very little inspires the will to improve like the company of someone who demonstrates that there is still room to improve. When you depend only on yourself, you depend on the inspiration of one person. When you have a master, you depend on the inspiration of two. A conversation is often a better place to learn new things than a monologue.

Learning the Lesson of Line Drawing

Choosing a master means taking a close look at great art and great artists, and learning the lessons they can teach you. But they can teach you only what you are ready to learn. When I began earnestly studying Da Vinci, what I was ready to see in his work was line; that was the lesson I was ready to learn.

For my part, I am in love with seeing, in love with truly and deeply looking at the thing - a figure, an object, a landscape - that I see before me. The world is a treasure chest of marvels, and I have always wanted to be able to make a picture of what I see, as I see it. There are great artists for whom accuracy of physical representation is not a key concern - Odillon Redon, Gustave Moreau, and Hieronymous Bosch, to name a few.

Odillon Redon's drawing
Cactus Man, 1881.

But that's not the direction that I'm pulled in and, because of the quirks of how my brain works, line is a particularly important tool for me in my ambition to draw as I see.

When I first started looking at Da Vinci's work, my own lines were chaotic. They didn’t go where I wanted them to go and they didn’t make a good picture of the thing I was seeing.

My life drawing from 2001.

In contrast with the clumsy lines in my figure drawing, Da Vinci’s lines glided over the edges of forms, gracefully defining and evoking them.

Leonardo Da Vinci's drawing
Head of an Angel, 1483.

I conceived a concept of the Perfect Line - a line neither too detailed nor too simple, the pure line of nature itself. This perfect line was so utterly matched to its subject that all trace of the artist vanished. And for me, Da Vinci had perfect line. It’s basically a mystical idea which, like the idea of the master, gives you a great thing to struggle toward.

But Da Vinci’s edges weren’t his only perfect lines. His hatching, so simple and evocative, told the story of light and dark inside his forms. Both the contours and the shading in his drawing of the head of an angel are effortless and natural.

Over time, I learned to draw better, maybe because I was making the effort. One of the main benefits of the entire project was that it inspired me to practice - to constantly practice.

My life drawing from 2011.

As you can see from the more recent drawing, I did eventually move my line closer to Da Vinci's. It became more subtle, fluid, and accurate. But it also became mine - in seeking to become like Da Vinci, I found that my practice allowed me to become myself.

How to Make Sense of All Those Bumps and Ridges

Back when I was struggling to pull my drawing abilities together, I realized that it didn't matter how good my line got if I couldn't tell what I was looking at. This came to a head when I was faced with the task of a figure drawing of the human body, specifically, the back.

If you've gone through life drawing, perhaps you know the problem: you're sitting in your workshop, a reasonably muscular man is posing, his back is turned to you, and... what is going on? What are all those bumps and ridges? How are you supposed to make sense of that complicated mess? You know there's an order, an underlying structure to it, but you simply cannot make it out.  

Fortunately for me, I knew how Da Vinci would solve this problem: he would draw from anatomical dissections. So that's exactly what I did. I was living in Los Angeles at the time, and Santa Monica Community College offered a gross anatomy course, with cadavers. I applied to take it as an artist, a first for them. They talked it over and allowed me to enroll. My professor was Dr. Margarita Dell, an incredibly generous teacher.

Drawing anatomy allowed Leonardo to understand
how the human body works in relation
to its appearance.

My initial plan was to draw only structures relevant to life drawing and to basically skip the organs. But the program was so fascinating that my one-semester course expanded into a two-year, 100-drawing project covering every part of the body I could think of.

When I began, my drawings were crude. I worked largely in line alone and wasn't sure how to visually recreate the look and feel of the skin, muscles, and bones that I was seeing.

This was how I tackled the muscles
of the thorax in 2001.

By the end of my body drawing project, I had not only developed an idiom for drawing muscles, but a deeper understanding of their nature: how they connected to bone, how they lay over each other, and how their fascia coverings affected their shapes.

This was how I was able to portray the muscles
of the face and neck in 2003.

Apart from the delight and learning I had throughout this project, I got the benefit I wanted—the musculature of the living human body became comprehensible to me. When I went into life drawing, I did not depend on my eye alone to comprehend what I saw. I had a broad view of the internal structures of the body in mind as well. I could finally see through the skin, to the underlying fat and muscle and bone, and how the interactions of these parts with mechanical and gravitational forces determined the body's visual appearance.

If you are engaged in a serious way with strictly representational life drawing, I cannot recommend gross anatomy highly enough. The simpler alternatives - textbooks, photographs, écorché courses, the "Body Works" exhibits - work as well. The key is to spend enough time in studying and copying these anatomical parts that the knowledge sinks in at a deep level and informs your eye without your command.

Painting Portraits with Personality, Mood, and Character

I've described the most important technical parts of my study of Da Vinci: line and anatomy. When I began to study how to paint, I opted not to follow his methods, so I haven't got anything to share with you about the famous sfumato, admirable though it is.

Let me explain something about how I learn about art; a quirk, perhaps, of being self-taught. I usually don't read books by or about my subject. I've read snippets of Da Vinci's notebooks, but haven't made anything like a complete study of them. I am only sketchily aware of his biography and his role in Western art. I like to learn by looking at things, and I think I've been served well so far by this practice, even if I have woeful gaps in my knowledge.

One of the most important things I learned from Da Vinci was in line with this practice of looking at things. It was simply this: his figures and portraits have so much soul. I have spent hours in the National Gallery in silent conversation with his bewitching Ginevra di Benci.

Portrait of Ginevra di Benci
Leonardo da Vinci, 1474-1476,
oil on wood, 16.5 x 14.5.

How long can you talk to a painting? It's a good question. I think it has to do with how much personality is present in the painting itself. Ginevra is multi-sided. She looks as if she has a personality, and moods, and thoughts. She appears complex and self-possessed. She serves a role in no story but her own, and she's not entirely interested in telling you what her story is. So my approach to this picture is a pilgrimage to her; it is not hers to me. This is a picture, but it is not a show.

Da Vinci's portrait paintings brim with substance and presence. Consider the angel Gabriel in the Louvre version of the Madonna of the Rocks (yes, that's the one Dan Brown thinks is spooky).

Madonna of the Rocks (detail)
Leonardo da Vinci, 1483-1486,
oil painting, 78.3 x 48.

This Gabriel is a trouble-maker. The lower lids of his eyes are clenched with fun, and his mouth is breaking into a smile. The eyes are looking at something specific that isn't in the painting. You, observing the painting, have caught part of an ongoing story, and the character of the participants is evident, but the story remains mysterious. There's something threatening about that smile, about the knowledge the angel has, which you do not have and cannot get. Again, we see a full, self-willed character, inviting us to sink into extended inquiry during our encounter with the painting.

What I learned from these studies is that for the pictures of people that I want to do, line, form, color, and light are not enough. They are the servants, not the master. They are what depicts, not what is depicted. What is depicted is the human presence. The success of the drawing or painting is to be measured in relation to the human presence, not the elements of visual design.

Young Mother by Daniel Maidman, 2011,
oil on canvas, 30 x 24.

I finished this painting just recently. The model's name is Piera. My paintings of Piera look a little Da Vinci-ish from the get-go because Piera herself looks a little Da Vinci-ish. In this painting, I wanted as much as possible to eliminate everything but Piera, the person. There are no clever ideas, no exciting bits of design. Just Piera.

I've been working with Piera for close to three years. If you're interested as I am in the humanity of your sitter, I believe it is important to work with models for a long time, to develop a textured sense of who they are. Piera had her first child a year ago, and she is very happy and very tired. All those things went into this painting, but they don't necessarily come back out of it. You might not know her story or anything about her. Would she still be interesting? Would you still stand a while with the painting because you want to get to know her better?

I don't know, but I'm trying.

Making Art According to Leonardo da Vinci's Motto

This is said to be Da Vinci's motto:

Ostinato Rigore

It translates to something like “persistent rigor.”

Charles Darwin changed the world. Somebody once remarked on his genius, and he shot back that he was no genius but rather, had put in the hours. From the outside, Darwin looks like a genius.

Few match, and none surpass, the genius of Da Vinci. But Da Vinci himself may not have seen it that way. In his very motto, Da Vinci reminds himself to put in the hours. We can learn from this another vital lesson. Yes, there is such a thing as talent. There are prodigies out there in the world. But the pencil and the brush hide continents of complexity. A prodigy may pick up either one and make a great thing the first time he or she tries. But to make a life of it – to produce a great body of work, perhaps to change the world as Darwin and Da Vinci did – takes persistent rigor.

Beauty and truth are fine things, and they live on a high mountain. Sometimes, in the dreams of talent and prodigy, we fly up and touch them. But it is only by climbing a little bit, every day, that we can hope to make a home with them, and share their company for an extended time. Some people are born with talent, but nobody is born with skill. Skill is the mastery of materials and techniques, and there is no way to get it except by practicing, by showing persistent rigor.

When you are at the point of tearing out your hair, remember: Da Vinci cautioned himself to practice too.

Left: Kem, detail, 2004, 48 x 24, oil on canvas. Right: Hands #1, 2011, 24 x 24, oil on canvas.

I am not claiming either painting is better, but without my figure drawing practice between 2004  and 2011 I couldn't have painted the newer painting.

Meet Your Master and Then Throw Him Away

Sad is the disciple who does not advance his master.
 --Leonardo da Vinci

Maybe you remember - in my earlier post when I recommended that you choose a master - I remarked that it was generally a good idea for the master you chose to be safely dead. There's a reason for that.

Any sufficiently accomplished living teacher puts his or her students in danger, of turning into slavish copyists of the teacher. Frank Lloyd Wright, for example, taught a generation of students - to design Frank Lloyd Wrights. They became convinced that there was one right way to make a house, and that it was the Frank Lloyd Wright house. Who they were as individual architects died. They became cultists. This was not necessarily Frank Lloyd Wright’s fault. Of course he thought he was right. The problem was that his living presence was overpowering.

Da Vinci says that to do right by your mentor or master you must "advance" him or her. The simple reading of this is, "become better than your master." And that would be good, but it is not always possible. Another interpretation is that you should move to a different place on the map from that of your master. Da Vinci, one of the greatest masters, is saying, "Learn everything you can from your master - but then abandon him. Become your own artist."

For this brush and ink drawing, I applied what I learned from
da Vinci, but moved in my own direction.

This is easier if your master is dead to begin with. A dead master's work is as complete as it will ever be. You are at liberty to peruse the entire body of work, to consider the words, to reflect on the painting or drawing ideas, to steep yourself in the philosophy of their approach to art. You can turn it all over in your mind, for years if you need it - as I needed it. And then, when you are done, there is nobody around to suggest, even subtly, that doing it your own way is doing it wrong.

Choose a master - master your master - and then throw away your master. You will need to depend on their inspiration when you are a student. When you are ready to depend on your own inspiration, when you have the tools you need to execute your vision in the world, then you have graduated, and you become your own master.

The Integrated Visual Field II: Readers School Me

2011-08-07T11:59:00.012-04:00

So one of the benefits of having engaged, thoughtful readers is that you learn things from them. Another benefit is that once in a while you get a free post out of the deal. I had two responses to the previous post that were so good I thought the post deserved a follow-up to share the responses. Here's Fred Hatt attacking the problem from a grounding in extensive thought on the topic, and much more research than I put in:

One of the things I love about Daniel Maidman’s blog is his consideration of scientific aspects of art, including the study of human perception, something I’ve been interested in for a long time. (Daniel’s posts on edge detection are particularly worth reading.) So I was honored when Daniel suggested expanding my comment on his recent post “The Integrated Visual Field” into a guest post.

This is basically a summary of what I’ve managed to learn, as an observational artist and as an interested amateur, about how human visual perception functions in drawing and painting from life. I’m not a professional scientist. If you are, and you find something inaccurate or misleading here, please offer a correction via comments.

The fovea is the area of the retina (the “sensor” in the eye) that has truly sharp vision:

eye with fovea indicated
SOURCE: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fovea_centralis

It only covers an angle of view of approximately one degree. This is described as the size of a quarter seen from four and a half feet away (on this website). Moving out from the fovea, retinal acuity (as well as color discrimination) drops off steadily and rapidly.

totally trippy render of relative acuity of fovea and surrounding areas
SOURCE: http://fredhatt.com/blog/2010/06/20/exercising-perception/

By the time it reaches the area of the blind spot, which is about 20 degrees off center, acuity (sharpness) is less than one-fifth of what it is at the fovea. So even at a distance of several feet, you're barely able to really take in a drawing in a glance. And in looking at a model, seeing details can make it hard to see the whole – you can’t see the forest for the trees.  I know of two techniques for overcoming this limitation of the eye, both commonly used among observational artists. The first is to defocus or squint the eyes. This actually disables foveal sharpness, which frees up the visual cortex to take in more information from the fuzzy peripheral vision, thus making it much easier to get an overall sense of large shapes – the whole drawing or the whole model.

The second technique is to keep the eyes moving. This is actually essential to the way the visual cortex works. Since the high-acuity area of the eye is so limited, the eyes naturally dart around like hummingbirds (saccadic movement), and the details that are picked up as the eyes move are assembled in the visual cortex as a kind of mosaic. In this way the visual cortex seems to have a much higher resolution than can be accounted for by the rods and cones of the retinas.
Saccadic eye movement is generally an unconscious process, but you can consciously try to keep your eyes moving as much as possible while drawing.

Fred Hatt, Leah 4, August 2011, aquarelle crayon on paper, 19 1/2″ x 25 1/2″

And if the glance also alternates frequently between the model and the drawing or painting, the subject and its copy are always being compared, the two perceptions mentally superimposed. If you observe artists drawing in a life drawing class, you are likely to notice that the more accomplished artists look back and forth between model and drawing much more than the beginners.

These techniques have their limitations, of course. The shift between near and far focusing, the angle of the drawing surface, and the dulling of perception that grows with familiarity can all cause distortions to enter into the work.

Most artists use some combination of darting eyes, squinty eyes, measuring (with pencil and thumb or with grid), optical aids, sight-size technique, canons of proportion, anatomical knowledge, perspective techniques, angular relationships, alignment with background elements, etc., whatever combination works for the individual artist and situation.

I think most artists have a scale that feels natural to them. Some like to draw small and others like to draw large. Going against one's natural scale is one of the best exercises you can do. I suspect these natural scales have as much to do with an artist's kinesthetic sense of hand and arm movments as they do with one's way of seeing.

Kinesthetic factors may enter into the experience Daniel had (described in “The Integrated Visual Field” post) of getting different results in drawing with the paper at differing distances. Maybe when you are seated and the paper is close to you, there is a much bigger difference in the feel of the hand moving at the top of the drawing board as compared to the bottom of it, whereas when the whole board is at arm's length, the movements of the arm and hand are more uniform. I think that could be a major factor.

Next we'll look at some thoughts from Steve Wright, elaborating on a perfectly obvious point which I completely overlooked, despite being well-acquainted with the phenomenon he describes. In some ways, I was overthinking the issue. As an aside, I often worry that my authoritative way of writing things urges you, reading this blog, to accept that what I say is true. Steve has a quality useful in dealing with me - he doesn't buy most of my bullshit. I encourage you to always consider for yourself whether you're convinced by what I have to say. Half the time, I'm not convinced myself. Regarding overthinking, I have a funny story for you after we read Steve's comments:

Well, it might be the case that distortion in drawing (or painting) comes from going outside an integrated visual field (which you say is a brain thing), but at least from my experience, drawing and seeing myself and classmates hit this problem over and over again, it can come down to a much simpler problem: perspective (an eye thing).

When you're drawing close to the paper, the farther up and down you draw, the more you you're drawing at an angle, so the space becomes condensed. I've done it thousands of times and know that's the reason - in fact that's why Kem's arm is so long: because when I'm looking down the paper at an angle and drawing, her arm looks properly proportioned. It's only when I stand back I see the arm is too long.

Like I said, I've probably done this, on purpose or by accident, every time I've gone to a session (especially since I like long format). In fact by the time I drew that drawing I knew what was going to happen and just did it on purpose for fun.

So mostly I think bad proportion (lack of talent notwithstanding) is from lack of standing back far enough - maybe because of the integrated field, but definitely because of perspective (in class we were taught to avoid this early on, hence we learned that good drawing involved your whole arm and body, not just your hand - people that just leaned on their drawing pad and myopically drew with little scratch marks from the wrist never had good proportion).

Also, I've learned (probably from laziness or boredom - I remember John [Steve's late teacher - ed.] tearing the edges of his paper once he had a drawing almost complete, just so he had to fight the composition more and make it more engaging to him) to track the proportion and dimensions of one form to the adjacent one; so I draw by starting with the hand, then the arm, then shoulder, head, etc. In theory I am able to keep the proportions fairly accurate throughout, but it's often more interesting to play with the proportion problems that result and let things happen that way. Instead of reproducing the body's composition, you're sort of inventing a new one. Schiele does that beautifully.

Schiele, in case you somehow forgot

It's the same thing as John tearing his paper - these things come out of boredom because you've just done something so often - so you start playing little games with yourself - you start to invent.

I happen to believe Hockney's theory. I see things in Ingres and Holbein paintings that, once you look at it that way, in my opinion couldn't have been done any other way. Hockney wrote he first thought about this when looking at a Warhol drawing he knew had been drawn from a projector - the lines were spontaneous yet looked like the artist knew exactly where to place them - they had a quality of knowing. When he looked at Ingres drawings, his lines had that same knowing quality.

Hockney versus Ingres, ripped off from:
http://www.gwennseemel.com/index.php/blog/comments/tracing/

It's a subtle thing only someone who's drawn all their life, and knows what kind of lines look like what, can see - I see what Hockney sees in those lines and am convinced they were done by projection of some sort. Many passages in Holbein paintings have distortions that look specifically like lens distortions and not just general inaccuracies. Just me though.

Holbein
Georg Gisze, a German merchant in London
1532, oil on wood, 38 x 33 3/4 in, Gemaldegalerie, Staatliche Museen, Berlin
I've highlighted in blue inconsistent perspectives on parallel lines in the cloth.

Thus Steve. He's right about the paper angle issue, and I'm half-convinced by the Hockney argument he cites. I just wish Hockney had, you know, some documentation. So, as regards paper-angle versus integrated visual field: this is strong evidence for overthinking. I'm not saying I'm wrong, but rather, that the phenomenon Fred mentions, and Steve elaborates on, is definitely true (I've noticed it myself) and weakens my argument. As usual, I am grateful for the things I learn from people who have read this blog. Thank you very much, Fred and Steve.

And the funny story about overthinking I promised you: My all-time champion bit of overthinking was in a midterm for a course I once took in Jewish intellectual history. The midterm included this assignment:

Identify three doctrinal factors which contributed to the split between Christianity and Judaism.

"Wow!" I thought. "That's a tough one!"

I mulled it over, and came up with:

- the dispute over the kosher laws
- the thing with the calender system
And one other totally trivial point which I can't remember now.

When I got my midterm back, the wry professor had given me full marks, and noted:

While these are correct, I would also have accepted such items as the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, and the resurrection.

The Integrated Visual Field

2011-07-28T10:02:00.012-04:00

OK, I've got one for you. I don't know if this is true, but I have a hunch that it is. Here's the idea:

1. Let's say you look at something. Of the visible field, your brain is only obtaining maximal information about a small area at the center of it. This part is true - I looked it up. A lot of the research, surprisingly but reasonably, derives from studies of automobile driver error. Here's a cool picture of the field of vision of the right eye, from here:

Note the macular area. This is described as the region of sharpest vision - you could say, of highest resolution sight. It's packed with receptors.

2. The macular area basically corresponds with the visual region I'm proposing, which I'd like to call the integrated visual field. Resolution is not the defining characteristic of the integrated visual field. Rather, it is the field in which the brain best comprehends data, allowing clarity in sense of proportion and of relation of objects to one another in space. Resolution is a question of information density; visual integration is a question of information parsing.

This applies in an interesting way to art. When you are drawing something, you can only properly represent proportions inside of the integrated visual field. The phenomenon exists between your eye and the subject, and more importantly, between your eye and the paper or canvas.

Now, as usual, I've tested proposition 2 at Maidman Laboratories (where results are neither verifiable nor reproducible). But I started pondering the idea recently, when I drew this:

This was a preparatory sketch for a painting. What's interesting about this sketch is that the proportions are very close to photographically exact, and yet the paper is 22"x15." Ordinarily, when I draw on paper this size, I make some kind of grotesque error of proportion, basing my work as I do on the shape procedure. Here's a recent drawing of Leah on paper of this size:

This drawing has some things to recommend it, but it has so many problems of strict representation that it's really more problem than representation. Her head is too small. Her left arm (our right) is too thick. She appears to be missing the upper part of her ribcage. There is very little left to do with this drawing except to pursue the Matisse path of heightening the problems and making something expressive out of them:

Henri Matisse, Large Reclining Nude/The Pink Nude, 1935

Oil on canvas, 26" x 36.5", The Baltimore Museum of Art

There was a difference in circumstance between my drawings 1 and 2. I was sitting when I did drawing 2 - the Leah drawing - with the paper taped to a board on my lap. To get the perspective I needed for drawing 1, I had to stand, and I put the paper on a table a little below waist level. I was at least a foot farther from the paper for drawing 1 than for drawing 2.

If, for the sake of argument, we accept my proposition, this difference in distance meant that the paper on which I drew drawing 1 (the male nude) was more entirely inside my integrated visual field than the paper on which I drew drawing 2 (the Leah picture).

That is very interesting.

I have no trouble drawing small faces and small figures with the paper on a board in my lap. Here's a 10-minute sketch, maybe five inches tall:

And here's a 20-minute sketch, also five or six inches tall:

The restricted size of the images means that they were inside my integrated visual field.

Now, if this concept is something like true, then it explains a lot of other phenomena in the arts. Here are a few:

1. Painters step back from their canvases. There are a lot of reasons to do this - to see how the brushstrokes look at the expected viewing distance, how the colors and values are working together. But I would contend that a major reason is to move the entire canvas into the integrated visual field. It's the only way to tell whether the figures make the sense intended - whether you're a proportionist like David or an expressionist like Matisse.

2. The sight-size method. This is a method at which I have always sniffed, being a snob and an ignorant one at that, which involves placing the paper or canvas on an easel at such a distance from the eye that the image can be made to appear exactly the same size as the subject:

Graphic source: http://www.atelierstockholm.se/index.asp?id=64&parentid=64&=1

It is associated with obsessive and quasi-mechanical measurement. There is no disputing, however, that it allows students to make extraordinarily accurate representations.

My suspicion is this - while the explicit methodology of the sight-size method involves finicky placement of subject and easel, and endless measurements, people aren't really computer programs and cannot resist some degree of natural visual processing. So the implicit power of the sight-size method is that it forces the entire drawing/painting surface into the integrated visual field of the artist. Therefore, much of the proclaimed benefit of the sight-size method, which is making largish pictures accurately, can be obtained, although more slowly, by just moving the drawing surface away from your eye.

3. The importance of analytic learning of proportions. This has been a big deal for, like, ever:

Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528)

from Four Books on Human Proportion

Why do artists do this? Well, not because it's so fucking interesting, let me tell you. The stated reason is a good reason - so good that it is sufficient: to understand, in an abstract and intellectual way, the very real complexities confronted by the artist when studying any given individual.

As you know, I spent a few years taking gross anatomy. And if there is one thing I learned from hacking up cadavers, it is that there is no overstating the value of attacking the specific with a strong understanding of the general. To know the general only is to know nothing, but to know the specific only is to understand nothing. Both are absolutely necessary and reinforce one another.

So the given reason for studying proportion explains its study. But let me slip a second reason in. The utility is not only in the artist-subject relation. It also resides in the artist-art relation. Which is to say, it lets the artist standing close to the canvas mimic the effects of the canvas appearing entirely inside the integrated visual field. If I can analytically say, "This part needs to be 3/5 the length of that part," I don't have to step back and make it intuitively so. I just have to measure it out properly and keep going, and the problem will take care of itself.

Careful comparison of this premise with my drawing of Leah above will reveal that I have not made any study of the rules of proportion whatsoever.

4. Hockney's problem. In his book Secret Knowledge, David Hockney proposes that artists have secretly been using the camera obscura and related optical techniques for centuries to produce accurate draughtsmanship. It's a fascinating and passionate book. Sadly, it relies on a weak and self-serving sense of historiography as, in fact, most conspiracy theories do. One of the more intriguing bits of internal evidence which Hockney cites is the tendency, in some paintings, to show slight shifts in perspective in different regions of the painting. He argues that these shifts reflect the small visual field resolvable by lens-based drawing techniques, requiring repeated shifts in lens placement, and thus perspective, to build up as a mosaic the overall visual field of the painting.

Well, Monsieur Hockney, perhaps you are right, but are looking at the wrong optical tool. The effect is only perceptible in paintings with high specificity of realistic detail. To paint that kind of detail, you have to get right up close to the canvas. And if you don't produce an analytic underdrawing using lines of perspective, then you're going to rely on a mosaic of regions of focus as you work your way over the surface of the painting, over multiple painting sessions. Any such mosaic, as my Leah drawing illustrates, will involve both perspective shifts and odd proportion issues at the boundaries between regions of stable visual integration (in my case: where the head-shoulder region meets the torso, where the length of the left arm - longer than my integrated visual field - is integrated with the width of the left arm, which lies within it, etc.).

I'm not claiming that I'm right and Hockney's wrong. I'm suggesting that Hockney's explanation is not the only available explanation, and that one consequence of the integrated visual field is an explanation of the phenomenon he cites without need for reference to external lens apparatus.

***

So there are a few examples for you. Let me sum up the principle by extending it: if this business about an integrated visual field is correct, then there is only one natural drawing size. The fact that drawings are different sizes occurs by two means: the variation of distance between the eye and the drawing surface, and technologies for artificial alteration of the drawing size, such as the grid, the study of proportion, and so on.

This is not to say that unnatural drawing sizes do not exist in art. Consider Stephen Wright at his most flamboyant:

Stephen Wright, Girl with Long Arm

If I'm correctly guessing what paper Steve's using here, this drawing is 90 inches tall. It is certainly not less than 45 inches tall. Steve is willfully putting himself closer to the model than his integrated visual field can handle, shattering the model into a series of regions of contradictory scale and spherical perspective. He's also willfully making the drawing bigger than his integrated visual field can handle, forcing his sense of proportion to slink off by itself and cry in a corner. The integration provided by the integrated visual field is the organic basis for our ability to freehand a drawing in mathematically correct perspective and anatomically faithful unity. Neither of these things interests Steve, so he devises methods to outwit his brain. He scales his draughtsmanship far outside his retinas' surface areas of integration, blasting apart euclidian space to evoke a subjective space approximated by the failure of the mind to unify the visual field.

That's my theory, anyway.

Web of Influences

2011-07-19T13:44:00.017-04:00

Let me flash back to my art school experience for a second - and by art school, I mean the cafe seating area of the Borders Books and Music at 3rd and La Cienega in Los Angeles. Between 2001 and 2006, I spent a lot of evenings there. Once each evening, there would be a car crash right outside the window, owing to the bizarrely poor design of the left turn off La Cienega toward the entrance of the Borders parking lot. Eventually somebody thought to install a traffic light.

I was looking at art books and figurative painting magazines, primarily American Artist (an outfit I blog for now, actually). What I was doing was emotionally extricating myself from my indoctrination in abstraction. It was a tremendous help to find that some contemporary artists were painting the figure, which was all I ever really wanted to do. Over time, I identified and began to follow a constellation of painters. One of them was Patricia Watwood.

Brooklyn Self Portrait, oil on canvas, 24"x20", 2003

Watwood's work was not flashy. Rather, like Truffaut as a filmmaker, she was quiet and gentle in her methods. Like Truffaut, she seemed interested in reaching a clear and sympathetic understanding of her people. The muted quality of her work seemed to me both introverted and generous, like a shy person who observes those around her with deep focus.

Flora, oil on canvas, 44"x26", 2000

I never hung out with artists in Los Angeles - I hung out with models. The models have their own cohesive social scene there, which exists partly independently of the artists they work with.

Later, I moved to New York and started hanging out with artists. Among the artists I eventually met was Patricia Watwood. I don't know her well, but I know her well enough to greet her at openings, and to have told her how much her work helped me when I was becoming self-aware as a serious figurative painter.

Quite independently from that, I began painting a model, Leah, who is really an amazing model.

Day, oil on canvas, 60"x40", 2009

Leah's skilled modeling, in combination with her curvy build, made me think that Patricia might find her inspiring - I had noticed that Patricia liked to paint curvy women. So I recommended them to one another, and it turned out to be a good match.

I was eager to see the work. I like to recommend models I work with to other painters. I'm crazy about my models, and I'm crazy about other painters. I want to share them with each other - I want to see what things they can give each other, that are different from the things the models and I can give one another. I want to see those marvelous paintings...

So I looked forward to Patricia's work with Leah. As we've discussed, I'm a form painter. Patricia's a color painter. To make flesh fleshy, she carefully mixes and juxtaposes colors. It's all Greek to me, but we happened to be working on profiles of Leah at about the same time. Here's mine:

Leah, oil on canvas, 24"x20", 2010

Here's hers:

Faith in the Wilderness, oil on canvas, 16"x20" oval, 2011

I liked Patricia's better. I have wanted to do a good profile of Leah for a long time, but I thought mine looked a little awkward. Only once I was done, and looked at Patricia's piece, did I realize what the problem was. There is a particular drama to Leah's profile, but the drama manifests best when the viewer is slightly below her. My viewpoint was slightly above her, giving the portrait a static quality I wasn't going for. It's a nice portrait, but there was something specific I wanted that isn't in it, and that exact thing was in Patricia's painting.

I'm not above a little theft. I flashed back to Picasso and Matisse riffing on one another's work all the time:

As I said, I don't have any sort of close relationship with Patricia, as Picasso and Matisse had with one another. But I didn't see any reason I couldn't paint a response to her painting. So source #1 for my next Leah painting was Patricia's Leah painting.

Here's my response - I finished this a couple weeks ago:

Blue Leah #1, oil on canvas, 24"x36", 2011

This painting started with Patricia's painting, but it didn't end there. Most of my paintings are a tangle of thoughts, inspirations, responses, and influences. This one is too. Here's source #2 for the painting - a portrait by John Singer Sargent which hangs on the wall of my office and which we've previously discussed here:

A Spanish Woman, oil on canvas, 22"x18", 1879-80

I can't get away from the eye that disappears into darkness.

But that's not all - I realized, not long after I figured out the pose for this painting, that I was unconsciously replicating a pose from one of my favorite paintings. Here's source #3 for the Leah painting:

This is Study Head of a Woman by Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1725-1805). It hangs to the right in the first room past the doors on the second floor of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City - the room with the big painting of Antoine and Marie-Anne Lavoisier facing you when you come in. When I first saw the Study Head, with its vivid expression and vigorous swirls of thick paint on the cheek, I got very excited to have discovered Greuze. A little research sadly revealed that this was basically the best thing the man ever painted. He mostly did treacly domestic scenes which appealed to the nauseating sentimentality of the pre-revolutionary French bourgeoisie. After the Revolution, if I'm remembering my Schama correctly, he painted treacly domestic scenes which appealed to the nauseating sentimentality of the revolutionary French bourgeoisie. So if I've got it right, one of his major accomplishments as a painter was knowing which way the wind was blowing. This makes him kind of like David, but without the fawning portraits of Napoleon.

Be that as it may, this one Greuze is deeply embedded in my pantheon of paintings, and obviously, on some level I had noted Leah's resemblance to Greuze's young woman, and mimicked his composition.

But there's still another influence to unravel from this painting - and that's the cover of a book of writings by Degas:

I've had this book around for quite a long time, without having gotten around to reading much of it. However, I am very taken with the cover. I really like those pinks and blues, and I have sometimes thought, "I'd like to make a painting in this spectrum."

The Leah painting depends almost entirely on white, pink, grey, blue, and black. Only one or two sessions in did I look at it and realize that I had finally gotten around to painting in that marvelous set of Degas colors I had so long admired.

And one last dual influence - Stephen Wright and Alyssa Monks. What?! say you. How? Well, look, sometimes people say that I am writing as if I'm teaching. If this is true, then I'm mostly teaching myself. I have all kinds of ideas juddering around my head, half-formed. When I write them out, I see what they are. And then I can learn from them. I've been considering Steve's and Ms. Monks's big heads for a while. This led me to want to experiment with the premise of a big head painting. Leah's head is not so big in this painting - but it's big for me, and it's bigger than her actual head. Here, this will give you a sense of the scale:

I kind of like how it all turned out.

So those are the influences. Let me recap them for you:

Patricia Watwood, via Borders Books and Music, 2006:

Creation, oil on canvas, 36"x28", 2006

Spain, 1880:

France, 18th century:

Steve Wright, LC With Silver Cross, The Valley, 2007 or so:

Alyssa Monks, Laughing Girl, New York, 2009:

Patricia Watwood, New York, 2011:

All coming together for me in Brooklyn, July 2011:

Of all the many people in this web of influences, I most owe thanks to Leah, for letting me study her, and to Patricia, for silently, generously, continuing to help show me how.

Negative Capability

2011-07-16T10:18:00.002-04:00

Taking a little breather from talking, strictly speaking, about painting - this week I read South African novelist J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace. I have read Coetzee before. Years ago, I read Waiting for the Barbarians. I found it so repellent I've been avoiding him ever since. But my friend R C Speck recommended Disgrace, and finding that I was between novels, and owned a copy, I took his advice.

Disgrace is significantly less violent than Waiting for the Barbarians, but no less intensely depressing. Spoilers follow for the rest of this paragraph. A mediocre literature professor and idle womanizer in contemporary South Africa seduces one of his students. He winds up dragged before the university's administration, scorns to defend himself, and is forced to resign. He spends some time on his hippie daughter's farm in the country, feeling old and unloved. He volunteers at an animal shelter, helping to kill dogs. His daughter is raped by a trio of black South Africans, an attack during which he himself is set on fire and suffers minor burns. The daughter refuses to report the crime. He argues with her about it. He goes back to his city for a while, and begins writing an opera about Byron. He returns to his daughter. She is pregnant. They continue to quarrel. The opera flags. He resumes killing dogs.

Coetzee, in my limited experience of his work, seems to be a poet of the unprotected outlands, of the place where the hopes of civilization go to be defeated, and die. The defeat he describes is not a matter of a conflict fought and lost, but rather a murky overwhelming of frames of reference, ending with the exemplars of civilization abandoning whatever principles they thought they subscribed to, and colluding in their own destruction.

Overlying this political dimension of his work is a kind of physical-ontological dimension, a sense of decay, of dissolution, of an unfeeling wilderness rich in entropy gradually encroaching on the withered remains of humanity. He describes age in such a way as to make one hope to die young.

Let me be frank with you. I hate J. M. Coetzee and I object to every single thing he stands for.

Now, ordinarily, that's enough for me. But this week, during my correspondence with Steve Wright, he made this remark:

Freud's work ... [is] physically fierce and churning like life ... while still representing life in an illustration way. That's why it's so much more powerful than just a rendering and hits you so hard as great art (I mean to me, art is about expressing the pathos of Life on all wavelengths as strongly to the viewer as you can).

I am generally diplomatic about dislikes I have for living artists, but I think you may have figured out by now that I hate Lucien Freud. How I hate that man's work! And in fact, I hate Lucien Freud in a way very similar to the way I hate J. M. Coetzee. Like Coetzee, Freud's emotional spectrum runs all the way from revulsion to despair. Freud's people, like Coetzee's people, are overrun by age, by slackness, by the degeneration of the organism into a mass of uncoordinated, rampaging, short-lived impulses (on the spiritual plane) and globules of fat (on the physical plane).

Freud and Coetzee seem to me to represent a civilization - European civilization - already well into its senility, its intellectual impoverishment, its final collapse and disappearance from the face of the Earth. They indulge in the perversities, the voluptuous fantasies, of a dying culture. They fetishize their enemies, they abase themselves, they scrounge around for any scrap of aspiration remaining and, when they find it, they shit on it. I once saw a wildcat in the zoo. The cat had lost its mind, and paced a circuit round its cage with unvarying fidelity, so that the circuit was worn bare of grass. Freud and Coetzee are like this cat; they have refined the madness of this cat into art.

As I say, ordinarily this is enough for me. You know my work by now; you know how I think. I do not feel the pressure of time and decay any less than you, but when I look outward, I see things that are not yet corrupted. When I look inward, I see things that are not only uncorrupted, but incorruptible. My eye goes to these things - to beauty of form, to love, to clarity. I think these are worthwhile things; I think they are real things. If, like Coetzee's people, the day comes that I am no longer graced to behold or express these things, the failure will be mine, not theirs; they will still inhere in the nature of being, even if they do not reside in me.

I am warlike by nature. When Freud sees decay, he embraces it. When Coetzee sees injustice, he submits to it. For my part, I think that there is much in the world that deserves a strong beating on the head with a stick; and if I, and what I am for, are to go down, I should prefer to go down doing grievous damage to whatever is against me, and what I am for.

But this is who I am personally. Now we are at the doorstep of a concept I raised once before, my friend R C Speck's idiosyncratic description of negative capability:

The capability of the person partaking of a work of art to suspend ordinary ethical judgments in contemplation of the characters, actions, and ideas depicted therein.

I thought I was very good at negative capability. But finishing Disgrace over a bagel this morning, and recalling Steve's comment about Freud, I realized that really, what I'm good at is berating other people to show negative capability. Ordinarily this happens in the context of these other people objecting to some bit of artwork that I like - Sargent's Madame X, in the case of the original post on the subject.

When the topic is work that I personally object to, my negative-capability-fu is actually very weak. For instance, I have never liked early Scorsese. I dismiss him and his disgusting characters as the "cinema of bad people doing bad things to each other" - and this has been enough for me to not have to think about them. Who really gives a damn about Travis Bickle?

The same issue applies to Freud and Coetzee. I have systematically substituted one scale of judgment - the scale of ethics - for the appropriate scale of judgment - the scale of quality. You ask me, "Do you agree with Freud and Coetzee?" I shout, "Hell no!" But then you ask me, as Steve and Speck ask me, "Do Freud and Coetzee make work that is good - that, in passages, is great?" Then I mumble, "Uh, yeah, yeah, sure." You say, "I can't hear you." I say, "Yes, dammit, they really are quite good, sometimes great."

Disgrace is a dazzling performance, packing a stunning amount of resonance into an absolute minimum of narrative, of language. Freud's paintings are incredible achievements - those built-up surfaces which are, actually, excavations, zones of finite breadth but unbounded depth of information.

I do not like their work; I do not accept their work. Their work is not even recognizable to me, except in the faintest echoes - it does not correspond with points in my own territory, as the work I like corresponds. But if I'm to be serious about this negative capability business - and I think I must be, if I am to be serious about art itself - then I must reluctantly expand myself to make room for them as well. The work matches, point for point, the demands of art, and worse, it has the bloody mark of the truth on its lintel.

Rock and Roll

2011-07-04T18:44:00.027-04:00

I'm going to have to back up - way up - to take a running leap at this topic.

In 1992, I arrived in Chapel Hill, North Carolina for college. Coming from Toronto, Chapel Hill seemed like a green paradise. It's a very inviting place to those not native to it. So inviting that, after college, there is a tradition of hanging out for a year or two while you sort out your life. There's no shortage of multi-bedroom rental houses and apartments near the university, perfect for the aimless, low-budget life of the post-collegiate.

Apart from being a green paradise, Chapel Hill, at least in the 90's, was a center of talent and innovation in rock. This center had a number of nuclei embedded in it. One of them was WXYC, the college radio station, staffed by an enormous crew of student and graduated DJ's enthusiastically one-upping each other in esoterica.

While Chapel Hill is an inviting place to stay, it is also understood that at a certain point it will make it clear to you that it is time to get off your ass. One of the little signals that Chapel Hill sends you to get your act together is that you wake up one day and most of your remaining friends are WXYC DJ's.

Eight people, including me, lived in the last house I lived in in Chapel Hill. The other seven were WXYC DJ's.

While it was apparent that I was now putting off adulthood, this was also the period during which I listened to the most, and the most diverse, rock I have ever heard. Moreover, I actually thought about it and discussed it with my WXYC friends. One of these friends was the very Ehren Gresehover who appeared previously in my post on wit.

One time, Ehren was playing a soundtrack album called Dutch Harbor: Where the Sea Breaks Its Back. I said, "Ehren, what's interesting to me about this is that you have a melody, a structure, struggling to come out, and it is nearly overwhelmed with noise and chaos, and the drama of the music is not the evolution of the structure, as it is in classical music, but the struggle between structure and chaos." Ehren managed to make an expression combining sincere excitement for me, and eye-rolling, and replied, "Dani, this struggle you are describing is the basis for much of the concept of rock and roll."

I had a rock critic friend as well, not affiliated with WXYC, who characterized my own native musical tastes as "harpsichords on the Moon." I ran my observation about rock by him, and he commented, "Yeah, plus dicksweat."

I think you can see what he meant without my having to get into a discursus on gender. Suffice it to say that the dicksweat parameter is chosen for pungency and does not exclude girls.

So let's summarize what our visit to the spring of 1998 teaches us about rock:

1. struggle between structure and chaos
2. dicksweat

This is a very idiosyncratic definition of rock, written by a guy who is mostly about classical music. It's probably wrong, but it's the one I'll use here.

Now we leap to 2011. I'd like to discuss three artists with you, whom I see as displaying these qualities of rock and roll: Alexandra Pacula, Alyssa Monks, and Stephen Wright. Many artists display rock and roll, but for reasons I'll explain, it's tough to see if you don't study the work in person - and I've had the good fortune to study the work of all three of these painters in person.

Let's begin:

Alexandra Pacula: The Samurai Brushstroke

Economy, oil on panel, 12"x18", 2010

This is a small painting, but she tends to work big:

Now, what's interesting about this work in terms of our purpose here? Alexandra's current idiom primarily involves nighttime cityscapes, represented as if seen through a jostled camera:

Enigmatic Symphony, oil on canvas, 28"x36", 2010

When a camera jostles during an exposure, every point source of light streaks in the same path, recording the motion of the camera. In choosing this idiom, Alexandra translates the light-streak into the brushstroke. This mechanism radically foregrounds the brushstroke itself:

detail, Ardent Phenomenon, oil on canvas, 90"x108"

These brushstrokes are all visible - remember, the paintings are enormous. Alexandra has described using an entire tube of paint on a single brushstroke, and one time she thought about buying a broom to use instead of a paintbrush.

The brushstrokes are so big and distinct, in fact, that they inevitably bring to mind the act of their creation. These are bold brushstrokes, slashing across the canvas. Each one records a motion of the hand and arm. Moreover, each one records the same motion of the hand and arm. A single misshapen brushstroke destroys the composition. So Alexandra constructs her paintings as a kind of high-stakes competition with herself: one false move, and the painting dies. Each move is a samurai brushstroke, a record of an intense physical discipline which allows her to replicate spontaneity again and again. And yet, each brushstroke is individually sincere and fully expressed: the spontaneity isn't mimed, it is real. How do you repeat spontaneity? I have no idea, but Alexandra has done it.

detail, Explosive Implosion, oil on canvas, 45"x42"

But let's zoom back for a second from the details:

Explosive Implosion, oil on canvas, 45"x42"

Notice another thing about this painting: the perspective works. The Z's of the light sources not only decrease in size with distance according to the ordinary rules of perspective, but they also distort, spreading as they approach the viewer, according to the rules of perspective unique to the distorting camera lens. I asked Alexandra one time how the hell she does this - underdrawings or what - and she said, "You know, I put down a few marks when I start, and then I just eyeball it."

The samurai brushstroke, the life-or-death brushstroke, repeats at the level of draughtsmanship as well. She can neither misshape, nor misplace, a single brushstroke without ruining the painting.

So what we have in Alexandra's paintings is a testimony of physicality, of the athletic application of paint to surface, and this high-impact paint and its history remain visible throughout her paint surfaces. And yet, the paintings all cohere into complex images when you stand back. This is very important - the paint both presents, as paint, and represents, as component of image.

You might argue that this is true of all paintings, but much of the history of painting until the Impressionists is a history of suppressing paint as paint, of forcing paint to ever more perfectly represent, and ever less visibly present.

Then the Impressionists and their eccentric ami Van Gogh come along, and there is a brief period of fluctuating relationships between representation and presentation. And then the post-war period rolls around, and Abstract Expressionism rears its ugly head. This is very important - AbEx foregrounds paint as paint and eliminates paint as representation.

AbEx is not rock and roll. Rock and roll, as we've defined it, is the struggle between structure and chaos. In our translation of this idea into painting, the structure is representation, and the chaos is presentation - paint as paint. Without the struggle, there is no rock. AbEx is noise, not rock. If David, say, is as close to pure structure as we can come - if you need a magnifying glass to see the paint-as-paint -

Then Pollock is pure chaos:

Neither one rocks.

There is no one formula for rock. There is only a terrain - a zone in which representation and presentation grapple with one another, and both remain visible in the final painting. Oh, and dicksweat: the artist has to walk the razor's edge, the path must crumble behind the artist, allowing no turning back.

In this sense, Alexandra rocks.

Alyssa Monks: The Thousandfold Path

Now we consider Alyssa Monks. For some time now, Ms. Monks (I don't know her so well as I know Alexandra, so I'm going to call her Ms. Monks) has focused on the female figure in showers, bathtubs, swimming pools, and undefined bodies of water. Here's an earlier piece from her more strictly shower-door/curtain-oriented period:

Press, 50"x42", oil on linen, 2008

Note, first of all, the size - at 4 feet 2 inches, her figure is significantly larger than life size. Like Alexandra, Ms. Monks works large. Note also the loving rendering of the condensation and runnels of water on the shower door. It's nearly photographic - and as she practiced, it got more so:

Window, 48"x36", oil on linen, 2009

Here the figure is even larger - that face is about 2 feet 6 inches - and the representation of condensation is more confident and bracing.

This work looks photorealist when you see it online, but in a fundamental way, it isn't. Let me show you what I saw when I saw the paintings in person. Here's another 2009 piece, Smirk:

Smirk, 48"x64", oil/linen, 2009

Now here's how that piece looks when you stand anywhere near it:

detail, Smirk

You can only see the photorealism from across the room (or online). If you get any closer than that, the painting explodes into a cacaphony of brushstrokes. As Ms. Monks has worked on this technique, she has figured out how to unblend her brushstrokes further, how to retain more savagery in the application, while still accomplishing the mirage of photorealism from a distance. Here she is this year:

Squid, 2011, 48"x32", oil/linen

Now here's what you see when you stand a normal distance from the painting:

detail, Squid

This is pretty badass. She's eliminated much of the blending of adjacent colors, letting fractured parts of the surface retain the character of the brushstrokes that created them. She's evoking the patches of oil on the surface of the water by painting light strokes, wet into wet.

The light strokes, wet into wet, represent a deep leap of faith, faith in skill. When you load a brush with paint and drag it across a wet surface, the brush transfers the paint to the surface at a rate determined by the speed, angle, and pressure of the brush and the relative viscosities of the paint on the brush and the surface. There tend to be irregular hitches to the rate of dispersal as the bodies of paint, meeting one another, stick and unstick. The stroke becomes dimmer as the brushload depletes. These little circles of oil remind me of nothing so much as the ensō, the classic zen calligraphic gesture:

Like the ensō, Ms. Monks's little circles are statements of conviction, of union between mind, brush, and paint. Like the ensō, they are uncorrectable. They record the moment of the painting and present it clearly to the viewer, and each one bears witness to whether or not Ms. Monks was the painter she sought to be at the moment she painted it (and generally speaking, as Eric Fischl has noted, she was).

Now, you could argue that it doesn't take any great leap of faith to make a little circle of paint, and you would be right. It's not the circle in and of itself in which most of the faith lies. The faith lies in the contention that each of these brutal little gestures will contribute, when they are all added together, to an image that is absolutely correct, photographically correct. Go back to the entire painting, and you will see that the color seems to vary smoothly and continuously over the surface. It does this, even though passage by passage, the paint is riotous and distinct.

Let's look at one last painting:

detail, Think, 2011, 24"x36", oil/panel

Look at how crude, how simple the paint appears. It is virtually bashed onto the canvas. Now zoom back to the entire painting:

Think

Again, the image coheres just so.

In Alexandra's paintings, there is a necessity of each brushstroke - the image can only become the image you see if each brushstroke is placed just as and where it is. This is Alexandra's solution to the confrontation of presentation and representation by the paint. In Ms. Monks's case, any of a thousand combinations of brushstrokes would do. Her blank canvas is the thousandfold path, and she navigates through it as she paints. The only constraint on her road is that it reach the destination - that pristine final wide-view image.

So we see in Alyssa Monks's work the qualities of rock and roll which I am raising here: the paint presents itself, yet represents an image. These two dimensions of the paint remain at war with each other in the final painting. On the dicksweat front: In a way completely different from that of Alexandra Pacula, Ms. Monks divides her circle of possibilities between a narrow slice of success and a thick wedge of failure, with no intermediate region. She aims for the narrow slice, and strikes it.

Stephen Wright: The Inside-Out World

As the longer-term readers know, I have been a fan and friend of Steve's for some years. His and Ms. Monks's paintings resemble each other, in a superficial way, far more than either one resembles Alexandra's. Both of them paint oversized figures, employ high-key flat photographic lighting, and apply their paint thickly. And there the resemblance ends.

Chair, Figure, and Lamp, 66"x30", oil on canvas

At this size, all you can see is the intense clarity of the image - the contrasts of light and dark, the vivid fleshiness not only of the woman, but of the chair, the cloth, and above all that gorgeous paper lantern, with its every ridge distinct and individual, its rip faithfully explored. This is the active physical landscape of the hungry eye, the eye that digs into every thing that can be seen, and concludes by throwing up its hands and saying, "It is not enough." We, looking at it, say, "How can this not be enough? This territory is so rich, so complex, its many parts so elegantly integrated - what is missing?" And the burning eye says, "I don't know - it is not enough - I'll try again."

In Steve Wright's paintings, there is always a combination of the plenty that is presented, and the wracking hunger for more.

Let's look at another painting of the same model:

Figure in Foreground, size unknown, but big

Now I happen to know this model, Jennifer, and I can fairly report that she is a good-looking individual. Here, she looks puffy, with uneven skin, sagging flesh, irregular pockets of fat. What has happened to her in Steve's representation?

Rock and roll, my friend, that is what has happened.

Let's look at the transformation on a microscopic level:

We return to one of our motifs here - the visible brushstroke. The paint is brushed on thickly, and neighboring brushstrokes are largely unblended. Steve's sense of color is very subtle - look at the range of pinks, reds, yellows, and greys on her chest - but he feels no need to make his color continuous. Consider this painting:

Portrait of Adrianne #2, Oil on Canvas, 66" x 44"

I happen to have had a chance to study this one in person at length. There are veins in her breasts. They are done in a light grey nearly the same value as the surrounding flesh. They were executed by dragging a brush with a little grey through the otherwise-complete flesh while it was wet, digging furrows into the paint; because the other astonishing thing about this painting is how incredibly thick the paint is. It rises out of the canvas, presenting an insistent tactile presence. Steve has explained that he has to use the heaviest canvas he can find, so it will be able to support the mass of paint he gloms onto it.

So we've answered part of our question - how did Jennifer get to look so blotchy? Because Steve made her that way. But why did Steve do that?

It is the ongoing hunger of sight. Steve's violent brushwork isn't an end in itself. It's a record of his radically personal hierarchy of the process of sight.

Generally speaking, we are taught to consider the value and detail of each part of an image in relation to the whole - this is why Ms. Monks's work looks photographic from a distance, because she has mastered relative value and detail. This is the hierarchy of natural visual cognition.

Steve has chosen a different hierarchy. He throws out verisimilitude of draughtsmanship and naturalism of local values. Instead, he follows where his eye finds the most interest, and he goes on painting the area he has focused on until he loses interest and moves on. So, finding the lines in Jennifer's forehead and cheeks interesting, he plays them up, much more than the scanning eye ordinarily would, until they stand out with grotesque specificity. His hierarchy is a hierarchy of interest. His surfaces are densely detailed because he finds most things interesting. His compositions tend to look as if they were seen through a fish-eye lens because he leans in toward his subjects to squint more closely at them.

This is the sort of procedure which makes most people say, "Well, maybe he doesn't know how to do it the normal way, which, after all, is pretty tough."

Consider this then:

Karen Jean 3, dimensions unknown, but, as usual, ridiculously large

Steve sometimes works in a more realist idiom. He just chooses not to most of the time.

John, dimensions unknown, blah blah blah

As with Alexandra and Ms. Monks, we have a situation in which the paint presents itself point-blank as paint, and simultaneously and intensely represents an image. Unlike the first two cases, though, Steve's technique leaves him free to paint and repaint parts of his surface. I've seen him seriously revise finished paintings. So if he can fix his mistakes, where's the dicksweat?

I'll tell you where. It ends in the physicality of the paint, but it doesn't originate there. Steve's visual distortions result from the nature of what he's doing: he's trying to objectify the subjective. His paintings, much more than is ordinary in figurative painting, are records not of the objects in front of him, but of his own state of sight, which is to say, of his state of mind and emotion.

American Goth

This is a painting of Kem, who is strikingly beautiful in person. So beautiful that when my wife Charlotte was reading Proust, she pictured Kem as Odette, which trumps you and your Angelina-Jolie-as-Odette every day of the week. And if you carefully read this painting, you will see that all of the outward structures which we take for beauty are intact: the fineness of bone, the definition in the features, the fragile grace. But they are animated by something different, something simian and heaving. There is an animalistic quality to this picture.

This subhuman intensity does not inhere in Kem. It does not inhere in Steve. It is a subjective state that flared into being in the moment of their interaction as they created this painting together. And the dicksweat parameter of Steve's work was his synthesis of the material, of the light and color and flesh, and the immaterial subjectivity which occurred in her and, more prominently, in him, as he painted this painting. This is a realm of acidic truth: difficult to spot, humiliating to enter, frightening to explore, and nearly impossible to communicate. Steve sets himself a hard challenge, and will not rest until he has met it, until he has turned the world inside out. His eye is constantly hungry because what he is seeking is invisible.

It has been said that Steve's work resembles Lucien Freud's work, which he had not seen when he developed his toolset. This comparison is true, and the mechanisms they deploy, both technically and emotionally, are surprisingly similar. But there is a difference which makes, to me, all the difference: Steve's work, for all its harshness, is animated by love, love of sight, of life, of his people and plants and chairs and cloth. Freud's is black with revulsion.

***

Rock and roll is not uncommon - I have chosen these three artists because I like their work and because I've seen it in person, and the paint qualities involved in rock and roll are essentially impossible to photograph. I could have written about Rembrandt or Tintoretto, Van Gogh or Manet, Fischl or Diebenkorn, Kiefer or Freud. Many painters show rock and roll.

What is the broader meaning of this peculiar quality? What is its significance?

I have a theory. My theory is that, as with almost every project human beings set themselves to, the project takes on human qualities. The created is the homunculus of the creator.

In the clash of paint as image, and paint as paint, we see a retelling of the mind-matter problem. We know for sure that matter is itself, is meat, muck, mud, dust. We also know for sure that matter is a vessel in which something immaterial is housed - the mind, seat of reason, of comprehension, of meaning. What we don't know is how these two qualities reconcile. There is a weak suture between them, a suture which has not stopped cascading sparks from the very beginning until now. The rock and roll quality of painting replicates this strange duality of matter and mind. There are unlimited modes of rock and roll painting because the rock and roll quality is located in the artist's individual revelation of the suture between mind and matter. The dicksweat arises because the stakes in the painting record the stakes in life: which is to say, if you seriously try to rock, then you have taken the vow not to bear false witness. So you're playing for your soul.

The Nose is the Spine of the Face

2011-06-29T18:03:00.009-04:00

When you set out to draw a figure, it's often useful to choose some kind of coat rack structure. This is the structure you sketch in first. You get it right, and then you hang all your other parts off of it like so many hats, coats, and umbrellas. With that first structure done correctly, everything else tends to fall into its right place.

This is one of many methods. Others include:

1. The general swipe, in a line or two, of an "arc of power" that defines the overall figure, and then building up structure and detail from there.

2. The reduction of the figure to a series of boxes, spheres, or egg-like things, and building and refining them toward specificity.

3. measuring out the proportions of the major structures and marking them with dots or a series of simplified straight lines, before developing subregions.

Those are all legitimate techniques, but I've never used any of them because they don't really correlate with how I think.

Apart from the coat rack procedure, my other major technique works only because of my peculiar visual processing: I will often draw the edge of any bit that particularly interests me, like the curve of the hip into the waist, and then spread out to adjacent structures, and eventually - ta da - the figure emerges. This is a variant of the "for the love of god don't do that" method they teach you not to do in drawing class - starting with the details and working up to the generalities.

Be that as it may, I'd like to talk about the coat rack procedure a little bit here. I use this a lot, particularly in views of the back. For instance, the wonderful Claudia was modeling at Spring Street last night. She was really inspired too. So here's a drawing from one of her 10-minute poses:

I think this is a fairly decent drawing for a 10-minute pose. Here's how I did it: I particularly liked her right hip in this pose, so I drew that first. Then I saw what size I had made it, moved my pencil over the correct relative width to her spine, and drew its curve. I made sure I got the spine right. From there, I was able to complete her right edge, put in her left edge, figure out where her butt and feet were, and I was done with the graphite part of the drawing. That took about 90 seconds. The other 8:30 of the pose I spent building up form with my white pencil. 8:30 is 510 seconds - a world of time.

This drawing depends primarily on the coat rack procedure, using the spine as the coat rack. The spine is an excellent coat rack. It's pretty obvious where it is. Its position defines the position of the body. As any solvent chiropractor will tell you, everything in the back is related to the spine one way or another. If you can get its length and curvature right, then you're a good way to getting the ribcage and pelvis in the right sizes and places, and the rest of the shooting match is just muscles, fat, and skin. A monkey could do the last bit, if that monkey had spent a few years really applying itself in life drawing workshops.

Well, sayeth you, what about the face?

That, my friend, is a very good question. As we've likely discussed somewhere, a different part of the brain is responsible for processing faces. This is most of the reason why some people who are great at faces suck at bodies, and vice versa. Depicting faces involves completely different processes from depicting all other objects, unless you violently suppress your facial-recognition center and treat the face like a non-face object. Some artists actually do this on purpose. Others, like Chuck Close, suffer from prosopagnosia, a condition which interferes with facial recognition:

huh

Let's assume that you're not going to choose, or be forced, to go the Oliver Sacks route, and that you're going to depict the face using your brain's functional facial-recognition apparatus.

Well, it's tough - you need to practice drawing portraits. A lot. It is as hard as fucking hell to capture not only structure (likeness), but mood, and not only mood, but character, and not only character, but soul - Mystery.

Thinking it over now, I realize I first devised that four-step ladder while trying, and failing, to draw faces when I was fifteen: structure, mood, character, soul.

Aaaaaanyway, just because you're using a different brain center to integrate and represent what you're seeing doesn't mean the same techniques don't apply. Despite the technique absolutely not working for me, I sometimes instinctively catch myself trying to use the egg-like-thing technique on faces:

I did not draw this.

It never works. Generally speaking, I use the coat rack procedure, depending on the nose to play the role the spine plays in the back. This isn't a bad choice, because the nose is in the middle of the face and if you can get it right, you can put the eyes, cheekbones, and mouth in the right places around it.

Or not. I get really mixed results. The face is a maze.

So this week, either I was on fire or I made one of those satisfying little jumps of progress. What happened was, on Monday, Vanessa was posing at Spring Street. I've tried to do portraits of Vanessa before, and it has never gone so well. Apart from that, I've been dissatisfied lately with the lack of specificity in the eyes in my portraits. So I was looking at a 40-minute pose from Vanessa with a good angle on her face, and I thought, "What the hell, I'll start with her eyes."

This is how it turned out:

Let me tell you something about this portrait. This portrait lacks certain qualities, but it looks exactly like Vanessa. Sometimes you get a likeness wrong, sometimes you get it right-enough, and sometimes you get it just so. This is a just-so case.

I didn't think anything of the starting with the eyes bit at the time. Never suffering from a shortage of self-regard, I figured I was just in the zone.

Then Claudia was at Spring Street on Tuesday, and I got another chance to do a portrait from a 40-minute pose. And I thought, "Well, starting with the eyes worked yesterday, I'll just try that again."

A fair proportion of the five readers of this blog actually know Claudia - this is pretty decent, right? It's not a perfect resemblance, but it's really not bad.

I refuse to believe I was in the zone for two days in a row. Neither Vanessa nor Claudia has an easy face to draw. (Is there such a thing as an easy face? Why yes there is.) I think this sudden increase in proficiency with faces is linked to starting with the eyes. For me at least, it looks like the eyes are a good coat rack.

Here are a couple reasons I think that:

1. There are two major keys to properly representing perspective in an upright face - the relative heights of the eyes, and the angle of the line where the lips meet, relative to the horizontal. In Vanessa's case, for instance, the eyes were at nearly the same height - the near one was a little higher, because her head was above mine:

Having gotten that right, the eyes dragged the rest of the face into proper perspective.

And for the record, the mouth is a crappy coat rack. Just look at any De Kooning painting.

2. There is a mistake I often make, which I think nearly everyone makes. This occurs in low-angle three-quarters views of the face, and it is this: the lower eyelid of the far eye tends to meet the nose way farther down the nose than you would think. Consider Claudia:

The eyelid hits the nose slightly below the bridge of the nose. Ordinarily, I would have crowded her eye upward, but because I was doing her eye first, I wasn't already invested in the length of the nose. So I got the eye right, and then I naturally got her nose length right. The reverse doesn't happen - at least not for me.

So that's the wildly esoteric thought process I wanted to share with you today. Why isn't this post called "Is the Nose the Spine of the Face?" or "The Eyes are the Spine of the Face"? Because those don't sound as cool, like maybe they could be the title of a Fassbinder film or something.

P.S. I know I have some comments to respond to from the last post. I haven't forgotten and I'm not ignoring you - those comments raise some really good points, and I haven't had a chance yet to write the serious response they merit.

White Canvas

2011-06-21T12:46:00.007-04:00

Bear with me for a moment while I criticize myself.

Here's some context: people sometimes see my paintings before they're finished. At this stage, the paintings will tend to have large areas of unpainted white canvas. These people I mention, seeing my paintings in this state, will often say, "Oh, it's done, stop there!"

Usually, I ignore them.

Sometimes, however, I have stopped a painting. This is my second serious painting, from 2005:

Melayn 1, 24"x18," oil on canvas, 2005

My plan was to paint in a restaurant, with other people at the table, and sconces on far walls. However, I hesitated, because I knew I didn't have the skill to do all that at the time. Years passed. I decided I liked the painting the way it was. Or, if you will, I chickened out. So I left it there.

Here's a painting from 2009:

Winter, 40"x30," oil on canvas, 2009

I emailed the painting in this state to my friend Stephen Wright, one of my favorite living painters, with an explanation of the snowy landscape I was planning for the background. Steve wrote back, virtually tearing out his hair, telling me to stop where I was. I usually listen to Steve, so I stopped where I was.

Now, this repeated experience led me to thinking about how to actually intend to leave some of the canvas white. I recently designed my first painting with this compositional element in mind in advance. There's a whole big story to do with this painting, but the white part of the canvas is the part that's apropos:

Self Portrait as Hockney with Piera as Peter in David Hockney's "Model with Unfinished Self Portrait," 1977, 48"x36," oil on canvas, 2011

Well, I guess the title gives away part of the story - this painting was inspired by David Hockney's painting - one of the first painters I studied as a child was David Hockney, and I remain a huge fan of his work:

Model with Unfinished Self Portrait, David Hockney, 1977

The point being, I actually designed my painting to have a lot of white canvas in it, using Hockney's compositional syntax as a kind of learning guide.

Does it work? Meh. I think it's OK. Not my best, not my worst. I like some stuff about it, but it doesn't, to me, have the unexpected excitement of Winter.

What's the moral of the story? It is this - white canvas is, for me at least, something that sneaks up on you. I don't think I can plan to rock the white canvas. I think the white canvas has to tap me on the shoulder and say, "Here I am." So the key to the white canvas isn't to seek it, but to notice it when it seeks you.

This is a very difficult thing, perhaps the most difficult: to remain perpetually awake - never to let your plan induce a mechanical or automatic state in your execution, but rather to be willing to abandon your plan at a moment's notice when a different path opens up. Who can countenance it? We are all creatures of laziness despite our most vigorous exertions. But it won't do; the plan has got to go.

I think this mode of successfully deploying the white canvas is innately linked to the quality the white canvas itself brings to the painting. The white canvas actually appears to be chaotic, to be nihilistic - it is the point where intention dissolves, where imposed meaning goes away. It is shocking in its blankness. A blank canvas alone is absurd, but a painting which has been abandoned is traumatic. The trauma cracks apart assumptions about the painting that was coming-to-be, it allows a synthesis between the intended component and the overwhelming of intention by events. The white does not work as part of a plan because its quality is apart-from-plan-ness. It is the testimony of continuing consciousness. It works only at war with the plan; to have a plan, and yet to embrace the white, is a quality I think of as rock and roll.

I have been thinking about this problem for a little while, and I have a few painters I'd like to discuss with you soon who have embraced the rock and roll in their own ways in representational painting. As Synamore notes, "rock and roll" will be a mathematically acceptable term if it is forthrightly and clearly defined. I'll do that when I get to talking about these painters.

In the meantime, please remember that my propositions are all provisional. I will likely disagree with myself later on, and you should salt me heavily as well.

Mystery and Enigma

2011-06-14T10:34:00.012-04:00

Do you remember what Lewis Carroll's Humpty Dumpty had to say to Alice about using words?

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”

I try not to unduly indulge in linguistic Humpty Dumpty-ism (whatever Jim in Alaska has to say), but I've got a case for you where I hope you'll forgive me for it. I'd like to take over the words mystery and enigma.

Here's what happened. I've had in mind for a long time the peculiar instance of Giorgione, a Renaissance painter who actually hung out with Da Vinci one time.

Giorgione's paintings are, to me, mysterious. Consider his Laura of 1506:

I don't know what she's doing. Is she opening her shirt? Closing it? Who is she looking at? What does she think of them? Is she looking at anyone at all? What is she thinking?

Look up the analysis of this painting if you like - nobody knows. It's a very perplexing painting.

Or take a gander at his painting The Tempest (1505):

What do we have here? A city in the background, wilderness and ruins in the foreground. There's a dandy with a big pole on the bottom left, standing near a fairly phallic couple of columns. The sky is covered in stormclouds, in the depths of which a weirdly semen-like or sperm-like bolt of lightning is, shall we say, squirming. Oh, and there's a nursing mother, who seems to have felt compelled to take off all of her clothes except a little white cloak. She is looking at us with a kind of a knowing look.

WHAT THE FUCK?

"Oh," sayeth you, "it's all sexual." Ya think? Really? I didn't catch that. Perhaps you'll allow me to ask you a question then. Here's my question: Granted that it's all sexual, in what universe does this configuration of sexual imagery make sense?

That's what I thought.

So here's a second completely indecipherable painting by our friend Giorgione. If you look this one up, I think you'll find that rather than admitting they have no clue, as in the case of the Laura, the wise men simply dance around the core problem of this painting by talking about other stuff.

Let me propose a third bizarre Giorgione painting:

This one is called, helpfully, Old Woman (1508). I've never seen another old woman painting like this one. This is not a portrait, it's a reverse-shot in a cinematic conversation. This old woman is mid-conversation. She's making a point. She's kind of not all there - you can virtually hear her croaking a semi-coherent comment. Separated from its natural sequence of filmed shots, the still frame is disconcerting, a study in the grasping disquiet of decrepitude.

So much for Giorgione. Let's jump to 1594, to the work of "unknown painter," who completed a painting called Portrait Presumed to be of Gabrielle d'Estrées and her sister the Duchess of Villars:

Sure, sure. Looks just like every other pair of sisters I've ever run into. You can see the family resemblance.

Now, the analysts offer us some commentary on how the one on the right - I forget if that's Gabrielle or the Duchess - is pregnant, so the ring symbolizes her marriage, and the purple nurple symbolizes lactation. Or something like that. Some sort of an explanation that completely settles the totally bizarre, inappropriate, and weird nature of every single thing about this painting. The spread-legged dude in the painting on the wall, the red woman doing some sort of embroidery in the background, the fraternal-twin-like naked sisters with their identical earrings and alien looks of calm and knowledge, the exaggeratedly refined daintiness of the arrangements of fingers, and, of course, the aforementioned nurpling.

So what am I getting at here? These four paintings, the three Giorgiones and the parable offered by Unknown, have a quality that I call mystery.

Mystery won't make so much sense until I cover enigma. Let's talk about some other paintings:

This is The Great Tower, a 1913 painting by Giorgio de Chirico. The great tower's more sociable little brother, the almost-as-great tower, puts in an appearance in his Italian Plaza from the same period:

De Chirico had a long career and painted many other sorts of paintings, but his cityscapes of the period between 1910 and 1920 are the paintings one mostly thinks of when de Chirico comes to mind. Because they're his best and most original work. They have a menacing, silent quality that is not entirely of this world.

De Chirico wasn't only a painter. He was also a crotchety egomaniac who thought he was the best painter ever, which puts him in the laudable company of George Bernard Shaw for unmerited self-evaluations. He wrote a fantastic surrealist novel, Hebdomeros, which I highly recommend. He took as his motto "Et Quid Amabo Nisi Quod Aenigma Est?" or "And what should I love if not the enigma?" One time, he wrote this:

One must picture everything in the world as an enigma, not only the great questions one has always asked oneself [...]. But rather to understand the enigma of things generally considered insignificant. To perceive the mystery of certain phenomena of feeling [...]. To live in the world as if in an immense museum of strangeness, full of curious many-colored toys which change their appearance, which, like little children we sometimes break to see how they are made on the inside, and, disappointed, realize they are empty.

(miraculously, I found this, the exact quotation I was looking for, at http://ashbery.blogspot.com/)

One is reminded of the book which the alien leaves behind in Voltaire's Micromegas (1752):

He promised to give them a rare book of philosophy, written in minute characters, for their special use, telling all that can be known of the ultimate essence of things, and he actually gave them the volume ere his departure. It was carried to Paris and laid before the Academy of Sciences; but when the old secretary came to open it, the pages were blank.

"Ah!" said he. "Just as I expected."

Had you going there, didn't I?

So - we have a second body of work, chiefly but not exclusively exemplified by De Chirico, which has a quality I want to call enigma.

What kind of a construction am I getting at for these two things, mystery and enigma? Well, I think they allow a useful distinction.

Mystery, as used here, is a quality of human situations and human character which one cannot get to the bottom of.

Enigma, on the other hand, is a quality of the world itself, particularly of metaphysics, which is ultimately illegible.

Mystery is the mystery of the soul. Giorgione constructs riddle-paintings, mystery-paintings, to show us the limits of our understanding of anyone else and even of ourselves.

Enigma is the enigma of being. De Chirico constructs enigma-paintings to show us that the world is a strange and alien place, an unmapped zone of threatening magic, which we only forgot was utterly incomprehensible because we got used to looking at it.

Here is something very important. I've said it before, but it's worth saying it again in this context: I write a lot - a great deal - about how to know better. How to know how the eye sees, how the brain sees - how to know how the heart feels, how the mind analyzes - how to handle paint, how to make an image. You would think I was pursuing total knowledge. In fact, I am pursuing total knowledge. But I do not think that if I ever get total knowledge, I will know everything. The point of total knowledge isn't to know everything. It is to separate every knowable thing about men and women from the Mystery, and to separate every knowable thing about the world from the Enigma.

It is no good to say, "This I do not understand, it is the Mystery." No, without total knowledge it is, at best, a mixture of the Confused and the Mysterious. Confusion comes cheap, it is a dime a dozen. Confusion is a matter of not knowing some things that can be found out. It has a solution. I'm not interested in problems with solutions - not the same way I'm interested in problems without solutions. The Mystery has no solution, but to approach near to the Mystery, to touch it and see its shape, you must pare away all confusions. Total knowledge is a means to glimpse true ignorance.

So - the point here is to localize and name two loci of true ignorance. True ignorance of humanity occurs when a disciplined perception bumps up against Mystery. True ignorance of the universe occurs when a disciplined perception bumps up against Enigma.

These, to me, are fundamentally important categories, latent in all paintings, foregrounded in some, worthwhile to consider every time you pick up a brush. The brush comes third. The person, place, and thing come second. The Mystery and the Enigma come first.

Let me leave you with a favorite painting - we've discussed it before - and it is saturated with both Mystery and Enigma:

Las Meninas
Diego Velazquez, 1656-7, oil on canvas

On Dignity

2011-06-07T11:11:00.012-04:00

Let me tell you what I was thinking about while I was working on the interminable background of a painting I just finished.

I was thinking about Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season 3, episode 9, "The Wish." This is how Buffy and her friends Xander and Willow ordinarily look:

This is how they wind up looking in "The Wish":

What happens is, arch-annoyance Cordelia wishes Buffy had never come to Sunnydale and screwed up her life. She happens to make this wish in earshot of a demon, Anyanka, who grants it. The alternate Sunnydale, not unlike the alternate Bedford Falls, is a vampire-ridden craphole. Xander and Willow are obnoxious vampires, Angel is a captive of a master vampire Buffy severely staked in the real world in season 1, and Buffy's paternal watcher Giles leads a small and outgunned group of vampire-hunters.

Over the course of the episode, Cordelia, Xander, Willow, Angel, and Buffy are all slaughtered. Giles, himself on the verge of being killed by Anyanka, figures out how to undo the curse and deprive her of her powers. Anyanka, realizing she faces demotion to merely human, tries to reason him out of smashing her magical amulet:

ANYANKA
Trusting fool! How do you know the
other world is any better than this?

GILES
(almost to himself)
Because it has to be.

The text cannot convey the pathos of Anthony Stewart Head's delivery of this line. Giles has lost everything, even his memory of life in the world as it was before Anyanka. His despair is total; he has reached the point of certainty that the world could not be worse than it is. And yet, he has faith - he makes the leap of faith that an action of unknown consequence could only work to the good. His faith is profound because it is impossible without his despair.

Thinking over this riveting scene, while painting an almost mind-boggling number of little vertical strokes of paint in nearly identical colors, I concluded that one thing we can learn from this scene is the real nature of dignity. Giles is dignified in this scene. He is never more dignified in all the time that we spend with him over the course of Buffy.

In what does his dignity consist? He has been completely humiliated. His struggle against evil has failed, his allies are dead or soon will be, vicious plans are triumphing in the world. And he himself is vested in his struggle, there is no difference between himself and his work. So he is defeated in a philosophical way, and he is defeated personally. In a minute or two, he also must be murdered. And even so - even so, at this farthest verge of failure, he cannot help but be who he is. He cannot help his faith that little choices can make the world better, and he cannot help committing his final act to this effort. It is possible to defeat him in the temporal world, but tested to the point of annihilation, it proves impossible to budge him from his virtue. This, I argue, is dignity.

I read an essay somewhere not long ago, arguing that the greatest tragedies - Oedipus, Lear - not only do involve kings, but must involve kings. Why? Because a tragedy is a story of a fall. And the greatest fall is possible only from the mightiest height. Only a king has the power to make his scope of decision tragically significant. A shopkeeper may have a tragic flaw, but he cannot provide a monumental tragedy, because the distance from his life, to the bottom of life, is too short. A tragedy demands a king.

I wish I could remember what the essay was. It's a very interesting idea, with much to recommend it, I think.

Paralleling this, I think that true dignity is possible only in the context of total humiliation. Dignity is generally taken to mean having done up one's buttons properly, and showing good posture. This is not dignity, it is the trappings of acting dignified. What is dignity? The dictionary gives us "the state or quality of being worthy of honor or respect, from Latin, dignus 'worthy'". What is worthy of honor or respect? Virtue. And when do we best know that virtue is true? When it is defeated, but not abandoned.

Dignity is a virtue of the desperate hour of the soul. Instances of dignity provide some of the most moving moments in literature and drama. Two examples come to mind: the conduct of Rieux throughout Camus's The Plague, which is my personal atlas of virtue. This is a complicated example and you would be best served to simply read the damn thing. It's short, but amazing.

The other example is a particular transformative scene in Roland Joffe's 1986 movie The Mission. Set in South America in the 1750's, the movie follows Rodrigo Mendoza, played by Robert De Niro. Mendoza is a self-indulgent mercenary and slaver. Horrified at his murder of his brother in a fit of passion, he comes to the Jesuits to do penance. He is assigned to haul an enormous load of supplies up a mountain to the camp of the Jesuits, who are living with an indigenous tribe. The difficulty of the effort is vividly physical in the film. When Mendoza reaches the top of the mountain, a member of the tribe cuts the ropes that bind Mendoza to his load:

The tribesman flings the load down into the abyss. Mendoza sinks to the ground and weeps. By the time he is done weeping, he is laughing.

This is the pivot of his transformation. He has been crushed under the burden of his evil, and when he reached the very bottom of it, he was saved from it. When everything else was lost, he discovered what remained: his humanity, his virtue, his redeemability. Thereafter, he cannot be swayed from his friendship with the tribe, who had been his prey as a slaver, and ultimately goes to war alongside them. Before this scene of weeping, this nadir, Mendoza was without dignity. He gains dignity when he loses the last of his hope. This transformation changes his life.

All this, I thought about while I was working on this painting:

Eliq, oil on canvas, 60"x36", 2011

This is a painting of my friend Angelique, an artist and model who lives in Nashville. She is the subject of much of her fabulous work:

Awakening Joy, Angelique Moselle Price, mixed media on birch wood, 44"x30"

Unusually, for me, I worked from a photograph - I don't live in Nashville. Angelique, who also calls herself Eliq, wanted me to paint a nude of her. I thought it over for a while, until I came up with a good idea:

Eve, Gustav Klimt, 1917-18

Sure, it's not my idea - but who can argue with Gustav Klimt? It takes a stouter heart than mine, anyway.

I sent the image to her, and she worked on it with her husband Chris, a photographer who is endlessly inspired by Angelique. They came up with a revised version, and sent it to me - and I got to thinking about what I could do with it that would be really interesting. Still reflecting on Klimt, I decided to apply the brushwork in his Judith I - or my interpretation of his brushwork anyway:

Judith I, Gustav Klimt, 1901

Now, all this stuff about dignity is only tangentially related to this painting. But it is not unrelated. I'm not sure if you noticed, but I paint a lot of nudes. We have a big hoo-ha in our culture about nudity, which is very long and very tedious to get into. The upshot is, there are questions of vulnerability, and exploitation, and who-has-the-power, that come up when you spit out your cheroot and say, "I'm gonna paint me a nude."

Ordinarily, I could give a damn about all that. Most of my nudes exist in a kind of null space, an absolute space where they're nude because they're not in the world: they're in a zone of true things where there's no such thing as clothing. That is, they are still inside the hard light and cold wind of Eden.

Not so Klimt. Klimt is not painting nudes; Klimt is painting naked women. If they're not reading as naked women to you, then by gum, Klimt is going to twist a chunk out of his beard at his failure to get it right:

fraaaaaaaak

I chose Klimt as inspiration for this painting because of the formal elements. But as I worked on the painting, I began to get the feeling that I had once again inadvertently stumbled on something thematically significant with a choice I thought was purely aesthetic.

Let me explain. Posing nude is a very broad activity. It does not have one meaning. There is a certain continuum among models. On one end are those for whom modeling is an outward activity, separate from themselves. These models are, strictly speaking, nude. Nudity is not transactional. It is a question of state, not of a relation between an observed and an observer.

At the other end of this continuum are models for whom modeling is an outward activity that is a reflection of an inward condition. These models are naked. Nakedness does not exist without being seen. It is a form of communication.

Only nudity can be imposed by external factors. Nakedness - the revelation of self - is something that models choose whether to bring to the table.

If you stare at any one thing long enough, your extended perception gives you an awareness of the subtleties of the thing. I stared a very long time at the photograph Chris took of Angelique. Angelique is not nude in this photograph, she is naked. There is something going on with her, and between the two of them, that moves her to be naked. She and Chris invited me to participate, in this painting, in a conversation that has been going on between the two of them for years.

Naked is vulnerable. And vulnerability is the prerequisite for humiliation. The invincible cannot be humiliated. The process of humiliation that reduces Giles, reduces Rieux, reduces Mendoza, is not true humiliation. It is a scouring that leaves behind the elements that are invincible, invulnerable, that cannot be humiliated. It is the presence of these elements that gives them dignity.

So too, when Angelique poses, she undergoes a process of scouring. She presents her vulnerability. My job is not to leave it there - not to leave her humiliated. Humiliation is not enough. It is the door, not the room. Therefore, the first part of my work on this painting is to muster the resolve to pass through the door of humiliation: I have spotlit her and labeled the painting with her self-chosen name, I have made her an advertisement for herself.

But I am also required to have the insight to enter into the room of dignity. To have dignity, and to encounter dignity, are two different things. That dictionary definition of dignity offers us "the state or quality of being worthy of honor or respect." The honor and respect are the things conferred by those encountering dignity. How do we honor and respect things? Well, in many ways, I guess. But the one I think about is that we name them. We say, "I name you - inward gaze. I name you - expanded ribcage. I name you - mighty abdomen. I name you - relaxed hand." We name every thing that can be named, and when we have got to the very edge of the namable, we say, "I see you, Mystery."

I will have more to say about what I mean by Mystery very soon.

In the meantime, let me conclude this way - my goal is always to show the complete human. This includes the weakness and the strength. I believe that almost all of us have dignity, in the end.

A Good Day

2011-05-28T13:39:00.007-04:00

There is no big idea to this post. This is just a description of how I came up with a painting and started it. I hope it's a little interesting.

This past Monday, I had a good day in the studio. I was starting a new painting of Piera, painting #17 of her in fact.

Sometimes you have OK days in the studio, sometimes you have really deeply lousy ones. Monday was a good day.

Here's what happened. There are different ways you can be in the zone. For me, there is being technically in the zone, where you pull off technical stunts of impressive dexterity; and there is being spiritually in the zone, where you get to the core of something to do with soul in your painting. You almost have to be technically in the zone to accomplish anything spiritually in the zone, but on a day when you're in both zones - or at least when I am - it's being spiritually in the zone that defines the day, because the spirit is more important than the tricks.

So I was starting painting #17. It's based on this drawing I did of Piera when she was pregnant:

Piera 2/22/2010, ball-point pen on paper, 15"x11"

She was seven months pregnant at the time, and just really feeling kinda worn out. I liked this drawing, which was awkward and clunky. I thought it had a lot of character - that she had a lot of character, and I adapted to meet it.

So two weeks ago I did a preparatory sketch for painting #17 based on the original drawing:

Preparatory sketch, graphite and white pencil on Rives BFK Tan paper, 22"x15"

This is how I always start a painting - it gives me time to evaluate the emotions my idea is bringing out, and whether or not the idea is any good. It also gives the model time to adjust the pose to match their own natural sense of position, which makes for a more organic unity in the eventual painting.

Then I agonized about what size to make the canvas - 30"x40"? This would result in a 9.5-inch face. It would be powerful, but not intimate. I'm not making a statement with this painting. I'm trying to put you in company with a person. I'm working on plenty of other paintings where the concept is more foregrounded (more on that soon) - this one is about character.

How about 28"x22"? A face about 5.7 inches tall. Intimate, but weak. Too weak. The viewer is too powerful.

Then I realized I had a 30"x24" lying around the studio. A face around 6.5 inches tall. Perfect.

So I did my usual finicky underdrawing on the 30"x24" canvas:

I try to take as much drawing out my painting process as I can with these underdrawings, but really, once I start painting, all bets are off, and the painting hardly ever winds up looking exactly like the underdrawing.

I wanted this painting to have mass, substance, presence - in short, I wanted it to have subsurface scattering. There's no way to do that but the long way around - layering paint over dry previous layers of paint.

I decided to start with a layer of Indian red (I kid you not) for the lights and burnt umber for the darks. Why? Because I know it works - I did it one time before. This is the Vadim painting where I used the same mix:

Vadim 1, oil on canvas, 20"x20", 2008

Only that's with all the layers in place. Here's how it looked before I painted in the lights - and the real darks (the version below actually still exists - I started over because I liked how the underpainting looked, and also three smart people in a row told me to stop where I was):

Vadim 0, oil on canvas, 20"x20", 2008

So I went into Monday's session with Piera having this plan in mind. And this is what I came up with:

Young Mother, sitting 1, 30"x24", oil on canvas

Now I really like that - I think the character and presence remain intact. I wanted her to be tired, and perceptive, and rich in mass, and slumped, and herself and nothing else. I think she's all of those things.

That was what made Monday a good day.

Wish me luck in not totally screwing it up as I go along. I'll share progress with you.

The End of the Beginning

2011-05-12T10:47:00.001-04:00

In this evolving inside-the-studio/outside-the-studio distinction, I feel we have spent a little too much time lately outside the studio, and I apologize for that. I will write more from inside the studio soon. But in the meantime, this being an art blog and all, let me draw your attention to the Second Battle of El Alamein. The "Battle of Egypt" was an 18-day confrontation during which Lieutenant-General Bernard Montgomery, leading the British Eighth Army, decisively routed Field Marshal Erwin Rommel and broke the back of the Axis's Afrika Korps.

Monty brings the pain, November 1942

The salient point in our context is that this first significant Allied* victory resulted in a speech from the irreplaceable Winston Churchill, during which he commented, "Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."

As you may know, I am a member of Saatchi Online, a site where an overwhelming number of artists post their work. I am lucky enough to have been selected from the talent pool there to show a painting at Gallery Mess, the restaurant of the Saatchi Gallery in London. This is the painting:

Hands #1, oil on canvas, 24"x24"

I am incredibly grateful to the people responsible for this decision at Saatchi Online and the Saatchi Gallery.

Many art people are better informed than I am - I am operating inside a complex system the elements and processes of which remain largely opaque to me. So any conclusions I reach about myself or anyone else are highly suspect. Nonetheless, I think I know enough to conclude that this Saatchi thing is rather a big deal - a big enough deal, that there is some chance Churchill's words apply. I have been working on my work in earnest for 13 years, and I continue to work on it today. As far as the second part goes, the part outside the studio - I hope that this is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

*Not Allied, British - thanks for the catch, Casey.

Jerry Saltz Kicks My Ass

2011-05-07T13:39:00.018-04:00

My friends, let us turn our attention to yet another facet of the interaction between you making art in your studio, and your art making its way in the world. Today we'll talk a little bit about criticism.

Perhaps you've heard of Jerry Saltz. If not, have a taste of his career, courtesy of Wikipedia:

Jerry Saltz (b. February 19, 1951) is an American art critic. Since 2006, he has been senior art critic and a columnist for New York magazine. Formerly the senior art critic for The Village Voice, Saltz has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Criticism three times. He was the sole advisor for the 1995 Whitney Biennial. Saltz has also served as a Visiting Critic at The School of Visual Arts, Columbia University, Yale University, and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the New York Studio Residency Program. He lives in New York City with his wife Roberta Smith, senior art critic for the New York Times.

Wow - pretty impressive, right? Which is why the English periodical ArtReview rated him as the 73rd most powerful person in the art world in their 2009 Power 100 list. This is what Jerry Saltz looks like:

left to right: Jerry Saltz, unidentified art enthusiast

This is his approximate rank relative to mine in the art world:

Something you would not necessarily guess about Mr. Saltz from this little summary is that he makes himself extraordinarily available for interaction on Facebook. He starts conversations and then, by god, participates in them. He can be hectoring, boisterous, overbearing, even bullying - but if you read a few of these conversations, you get the sense that he is not in it for the sycophancy. He's just honestly excited to trade thoughts on art and other topics with his thousands of Facebook friends.

Another thing to keep in mind about Jerry Saltz, in the context of this post, is that most of my art is really not congruent with his tastes in art, which skew distinctly more contemporary than my sensibility.

Be that as it may, I've been working on a few pieces lately which I thought might be closer to Saltz's sector than my usual work, so I figured I'd message some work to him for evaluation. He wrote back - and he's generously given me permission to share his comments here.

First I sent this message:

This is "Industrial Object #2," 36"x36", oil and silver leaf on panel. It's part of a series I'm working on - I'd be interested in anything you might have to say. I've got a tough ego; please don't feel obliged to say nice things.

All the best,

Daniel

A little while later he wrote back a single word:

Picabia

In case you're wondering, this is probably the type of work by Picabia he's talking about:

Machine Turn Quickly, Francis Picabia, 1916-8

Picabia wasn't actually on my mind, because I mostly know him from quotations by Tristan Tzara which I've gotten confused with quotations by Picabia. Actually, no one was on my mind when I devised that painting, but to the extent that I've admired machine art by anyone, it's Jim Dine:

totally bad ass pair of scissors, Jim Dine, probably sometime after 1970

Let me remind you of my approximate rank in the art world relative to Jerry Saltz:

I considered that, and then I wrote back:

Thanks - not bad company. Here's the first one from the series. Want me to send more as I complete them?

He wrote back:

Picabia IS great company; your paintings look good (the first more mysterious and therefore better than the 2nd), but I should NEVER be thinking of ANOTHER artist in front of your work MORE than I am thinking of YOUR work.

You HAVE to make this work more your own. I am not an artist. I do not know how you should go about this.

There's a moral to this story, and I'm getting to it. But first, let me explain to you that considerations of relative rank only go so far with me. If somebody is willing to have a conversation, I find that I'll wind up slipping into some kind of comfortability with that conversation relatively quickly, no matter who they are. So I sent a few more paintings to Saltz. Let me share these paintings with you, and Saltz's thoughts on them:

Saltz:

This one is just generic photo-realism with a little more fracture and brushiness. Somewhat sensationalistic. Somewhat sexy. Generic.

Saltz:

This one just looks like 1000 other realist somewhat surrealist nudes.

It seems utterly impersonal and without risk or originality.
You have good craft. Which is something.
The first one you sent me is still the one I like the most. Something to do with the whiteness, the unfinished field, the mystery of the shape or subject, the closeness of the values of gray to black...

None of this means that your work is no good. It only means I don't like your work.

Good luck.

Jerry

Shortly after, he added:

Make the drawings for the atlas your art.... let them become something, larger, more alive. (I did not look at any of these. I only looked at yr. bio and noticed the words "atlas of anatomy"...)
Atlas into art is a way to your obsession. Obsession is the skeleton key to art - NOT crafty. Craft leads to craft...

Not content with this ego-bruising series of responses, I went ahead and sent him these two:

He had this to say:

These works are not about anything.
They are as impersonal. They look very unoriginal.
This does not mean that your work is no good; it only means that I do not like your work.

Jerry

If you've been following my work at all systematically, you will notice that at this point I had sent to Jerry Saltz at least one example of each of the major threads of my current exploration - the machine paintings, the sex paintings (have we talked about those here?), the highly-rendered nudes, and the washy color paintings (I don't think we've talked about those either). And he took the time to test them against his own sense of art and aesthetics and let me know how they stood up for him.

How did all this make me feel? I'll level with you. It did not make me feel as good as a back rub from Nastassia Kinski. Here's the moral of the story - that doesn't matter. If you are making art in your studio, but you want your work to one day stand on its own in the world, then you have absolutely got to learn how to take criticism, even scathing criticism, and recognize that it is a net positive - that it is something you can learn from.

I'm not saying that all criticism is valid, fair, or moral. I know a couple artists who have had dealers rip into their work for extended periods just because the dealers were sadistic assholes who felt a need to let off some steam. That's invalid, unfair, and immoral criticism, and nobody should feel a need to put up with it.

But that's not the kind of criticism we're looking at here. This is criticism you can learn from, once you get a solid half nelson on your vanity. What did I learn?

Well, first of all, I definitely learned which future shows not to invite Jerry Saltz to.

But I also learned something important about my work itself. Once I had separated out the stuff that I'm unwilling to apply - the basic dislike for most of the idioms I'm working in, to which I intend to remain committed - there was one key observation which is well worth thinking over:

Your paintings look good... but I should NEVER be thinking of ANOTHER artist in front of your work MORE than I am thinking of YOUR work. You HAVE to make this work more your own.

I am aware of this issue. It goes back to the authenticity problem we discussed near the beginning of this blog. I admitted in that post, and I'll admit again, that many of my arguments against a radical personal style may be self-serving because, essentially, I haven't got a radical personal style. I tend to run with a gang of painters - semi-academic figurative painters - who have a huge doctrinal beef with the centrality of the distinctive personal style in the pantheon of artistic values. That allows me to frequently not think about the issue, but it doesn't make the issue go away.

The mighty artists really are recognizable from their works. I am not, yet. I don't think, without knowing the hell out of my work, you could walk into a room of paintings, point to one, and say, "There hangeth a Maidman."

I've probably said before that you can't force these things. You can, but then you wind up with a synthetic style, which definitionally excludes authenticity of vision, since all vision is sent chugging through a kind of image-processor to make it fit a mechanical picture schema.

There is only one path past the issue, and that's through it. The path through it as a matter simply of going on making art, and seeing what happens. You can guide your hand a little, but you can't think your way out of this particular problem.

What I learned from Saltz's criticism is that this issue is not my personal little secret. Even if he got the terms of reference, by my lights, thoroughly wrong, he grasped the fundamental issue. And this means that the fundamental issue will be clear to anyone with a sufficiently developed sense of taste.

This is not to say, as Saltz comments, that my work is no good. Heck, I think it's great. But it lacks a particular virtue which I will reluctantly concede is worth gaining. So his criticism points me toward something to think about quite seriously.

Back to the moralizing. Imagine for a moment that you're an artist who, like many artists, takes criticism really badly. Let me remind you again of my general art-world rank relative to Jerry Saltz:

Jerry Saltz just kicked my ass up and down the block. And I am very grateful for his generosity in turning his much-in-demand eye on my work long enough to genuinely see something about it. If I can do it, you can do it. Your vanity is your enemy. Your will to become better is your ally. Never be afraid.

Egyptian Space

2011-05-05T10:25:00.024-04:00

Can we talk for a minute about the representation of space in painting?

Actually, before I begin, let me admit that, as usual, I come to this topic armored with my obsidian ignorance, so please take any claims I make, or conclusions I reach, with a large tablespoonful of salt.

Anyway - the mainstream Chinese, Japanese, and Western traditions of space representation are all approximations of space as a coherent three-dimensional physical phenomenon:

Ni Zan (Chinese, 1301-1374), Landscape

Miyamato Musashi (Japanese, 1584-1645), Landscape

medieval European painting - sorry I don't have better information, I just really like this picture

The Chinese and Japanese system of aerial perspective was developed as an expressive end in itself. The Western aerial tradition struggled toward mathematical perspective, which, as we all know, they finally cracked during the Renaissance:

Raphael, School of Athens, 1510-11

The assumption has always been that the goal is a faithful depiction of the actual euclidian geometry of space in the Earth environment, and modern Western pictorial methods have both achieved this goal, and explored its available variations in creative and fascinating ways -

Euan Uglow, Girl Tree, 1989-91

Euan Uglow attempted a non-geometric rendering of shallow spaces based on an intuitive concept of pure optics which he nonetheless expressed in a mathematically precise manner.

Francis Bacon, Pope II, 1951

Francis Bacon became fascinated by the idea of space-as-concept, rendering spaces in wireframe in order to lay bare the intellectual content of our acculturated concept of three-dimensional space. He imposes the grid on an amorphous void, expressing his concept that order is a weak imposition of the mind on a chaotic and hostile universe. We see the same wireframe premise taken up, from a much more optimistic point of view, in Hockney:

David Hockney, Model With Unfinished Self-Portrait, 1977

Hockney later rebels against coherent three-dimensional space, but his shifting-perspective photographic collages are a reaction to Western space, and therefore represent a part of the paradigm, not an independent creation:

David Hockney, Kasmin, Los Angeles, 28th March, 1982, you guess the date

Hockney's photographs descend from the body of thought called Analytic Cubism, a corpus so complex and so peripheral to my theme that we will conspicuously fail to consider it here.

Escher generates imagery as a means of expressing mathematical concepts of space, and takes advantage of very sophisticated representations of space, such as the use of sinusoidal curves rather than straight lines to mimic the mapping of perspective over the field of a shifting glance:

M. C. Escher, Treppenhaus I, 1951

Be all that as it may, a single assumption underlies all of this work - that space in the image should reflect physical space in the scene depicted.

This is not the only way to represent space in an image.

Consider the fascinating case of ancient Egyptian wall painting:

This is from the Metropolitan Museum's set of reproductions of New Kingdom paintings. Several familiar features are visible in this image:

1. The mingling of text and figure.
2. The representation of rows of figures in a manner similar to a writing system.
3. The depiction of figures at a variety of scales.

The third statement interests me particularly. It could be argued that the bottom row of figures, separated by a line from the main scene, occupies a separate space and that the reduced scale is thus motivated by a difference in the space depicted.

But the small figure on the left offering an object to the large male central figure clearly occupies a single space with the main figure. So what does the inconsistency in size tell us? That the little figure is less important than the big figure.

In a physically realistic depiction of space, smallness of figure is proportional with distance from vantage point. In the Egyptian depiction of space, smallness of figure is proportional with lack of importance.

Combine this with the arrangement of figures in rows, like letters, and what kind of space are we looking at? Not a physical space, but a narrative space:

Egyptian pictorial space is a space determined not by physical reality, but by narration of events. Figures are grouped to depict processes, and the relative importance of objects and participants is indicated by scale. It is a powerful and strange space, using physicality not as an end in itself, but rather as a bare-bones means of expressing intellection.

Hybrid paradigms of narrative and physical space occur in Chinese, Japanese, and particularly Persian painting:

Persian illustration from manuscript of the Shahnameh

But the pure narrative space, totally divorced from physical context or consistency, is the realm of Egypt.

I have occasionally considered the applicability of this mode of spatial representation to my own work. In doing so, I have reflected on other modern-age artists who, intuitively or not, have worked in the realm of Egyptian space. The key example, when you think about it, is Keith Haring:

One of four bazillion Keith Haring pictures

Haring's work has the character not of a fully-formed image space, but of a semiotic map.

Another one

This mode is expressed, in looser form, in Basquiat's quasi-linguistic work as well:

Jean-Michel Basquiat, Self-Portrait, 1982

The linguistic thread is taken up again in the peyote-trip sequence in Beavis and Butthead Do America, which to me includes one of the most astounding bits of cinematic grammar of the past twenty years - the abrupt conversion of the picture frame from a perspectival "window" into a flat linguistic sheet:

Mike Judge, Beavis and Butthead Do America, 1996

For moving closer to a physically representational paradigm, while maintaining radical distortions based on intellectual emphasis, we have Matisse:

Henri Matisse, The Red Studio, 1911

And Van Gogh, particularly in his room at Arles:

Vincent Van Gogh, Room at Arles, 1888

But there is a limit to the possibility of the hybridization, as demonstrated by yet another accidentally bizarre Ingres painting:

Ingres, Jupiter and Thetis, 1811

In this painting, Ingres uses the concept (there's a cool word for it, which I forget) of representing the Big God as physically bigger than whoever else is in the room. At the same time, he uses his typically idealized high-gloss rendering of physical reality. To me, this combination doesn't really cohere into an organically unified work. The conceptual fracture makes it fascinating, but it doesn't yield a synthesis.

Why not? Let's go back to Egypt:

Consider the figures - perhaps the most famous aspect of Egyptian art. They are stylized, simplified, always seen from certain characteristic perspectives (profile head, frontal torso, profile legs), and repetitive. I would contend that for a picture to work, its degree of participation in narrative space must be accompanied by a parallel degree of divorce of represented objects from physical realism. Physical realism has its home in physically realistic space. In fact, one evokes the other - a law which Ingres tries, and fails, to break. To demonstrate the evocation, even when the element of space goes undepicted, consider the figures in the Elgin marbles. They are relatively naturalistic, and if you ask, "Where are they?" you will picture a physical space:

Elgin marbles - north frieze

Contrarily, true narrative space requires narrative physical elements. More simply, the figures in Egyptian paintings are not figures. They are letters.

So if I want to use Egyptian space, I have to come up with a mode of representing the figure which is consistent with the demands of the space. I actually did this accidentally in a few early life drawings:

Thirteen Pictures of Kem, 1/11/2002,
pencil and gouache on brown paper that proved sadly oil-stained
when I dredged it up from the deep archives, i.e. a plastic tub under the bed

These figures occupy a single scroll-like space, not only because of their arrangement on the paper, but because of their simplification into stylized forms.

Thanks for taking the time to consider these ideas with me.

Human Rhinovirus

2011-04-23T11:30:00.006-04:00

I have often thought that a truly representative film of a serious painter's life would be quite boring. In order to make great paintings, it is necessary to sit or stand quietly, and do the work. For every hour that Schiele spent hounded in court, or that Picasso spent having women throw crockery at him, or that Caravaggio spent knife-fighting with the Jets:

Caravaggio on a typical Thursday night

...for every hour of that business, there were probably a hundred of work in the studio which would be mind-numbingly dull to watch.

Generally speaking, I am a partisan of the level-headed-life school. I have known bohemians and hipsters, heroin girls and traveling rockers, lotharios and histrionic tyrants and cafe philosophers. All of them were leading interesting lives, and without exception, they failed to produce anything of note.

My own life is of little narrative interest. I have a telecommuting job that is not art, which pays most of my bills. I do it at a place and time of my choosing, although I always choose a coffee shop, and the morning. I spend some time on correspondence early in the afternoon. I go to the studio as frequently as I can, and I try to get home early enough to spend some time with Charlotte. We make an effort to see our friends. Until recently, we had a cat.

This is what you would call the modern form of a middle-class existence.

There is some poet, or something, whose name eludes me now, who advocates for this sort of existence, in order to provide a stable foundation upon which aesthetic flights of fancy can be built; that the energy for drama which resides in every human heart should be reserved for the work, not the life. I think this poet, or whoever he was, had it about right.

Also, consistently with my always-be-wrong approach, he had it wrong, and I bloody well have it wrong too. Somewhere, there is an optimum balance of drama and life, and it is not on the setting-your-watch-by-Immanuel-Kant's-afternoon-stroll end of the spectrum. It may be near it, but it is not there.

I was happily reminded of this by an incident earlier this week. A while back, I showed you this painting, Industrial Object #1:

Industrial Object #1, 36"x36", oil and silver leaf on canvas

Charlotte happens to be out of town right now, and I had been planning on painting Industrial Object #2 last week. Then I was colonized by our friend the cold virus:

This gave me aching joints, a facial headache from sinus pressure, a runny nose, a sore throat, nausea, chills, and dizziness. I decided to try the one-two of megadoses of vitamin C and sleeping in. Eleven hours of sleep later, I could still barely concentrate or summon the will to move. By 3 pm, I hadn't gotten out of bed. Being a good Protestant (I'm not actually a Protestant), I felt massively guilty at my lack of productivity. So I hauled myself up, put on some clothes, and walked the 1.1 miles from my apartment to my studio, very slowly. Then I walked up the four flights of stairs to my studio - also very slowly. I had a bitching headache by the time I got to the top. So I sat for a while in the comfy chair in my studio, feeling like maybe this was a stupid idea and I should go home and get back in bed.

Then I sat down in the uncomfy chair to paint, figuring that once I had a paint brush in my hand, I could settle into doing that, and get it done. I started working on Industrial Object #2, and had to fight the urge to stop as I tackled each new section. I was in a blurry wooze of sickness, but I managed to paint for 9 hours, and painted the entire thing:

Industrial Object #2, 36"x36", oil and silver leaf on panel

This wasn't smart and it certainly didn't make me get better faster. The painting itself is cruder than I might have done if I were on top of my game or weren't rushing it. But by god, I really like how it turned out, and I like that it was a stupid move to paint it when I did. It felt invigorating to carry on painting in the face of opposing force.

It is good to cheat circumstance sometimes, and to carry on melodramatically when you ought to stop. None of this should be taken into account in evaluating the work - the work is the work, it doesn't matter how it was made. Rather, it will make you a better artist - or at least, it will make me a better artist - to replicate on any available scale that elemental dying and being born again which characterizes the true artistic act.

It is in dying that the senses are heightened, that the irrelevancies are scoured away, that the final sums are tallied and the ledgers all thrown out. It is in the interval between dying and being born again that the soul, bared and permeable, is exposed to the fundaments of the universe, to the mighty forces that undergird existence itself. It is in being born again that a new world is made, unencumbered by the assumptions, inertia, and detritus that gradually ossified the old world. The new world is fresh, richly colored, and characterized by a continuous state of revelation and discovery.

The artist must, absolutely must, find some means of accessing this new world at regular intervals, or the work becomes stately and old, and soon dies.

A life of continuous adventure leaves no room or energy for the work. A life of Kantish regularity leaves no room for life. The optimum is somewhere in the middle path: a path that gives you substance yet allows your substance to crack often.

A virus gave me the opportunity to walk the middle path this week. All hail the virus.

Postscript: It should be noted, even so, that a movie of this entire episode would have consisted of a dude sitting in a chair, wiping his nose, drinking orange juice, and painting. Very boring.

Always Be Wrong

2011-04-19T14:54:00.007-04:00

Back to art.

A while ago, I wrote a long post that could be described as an extended justification of my aversion to the gestural sketch. And let me just say that by god, I was right.

But I was also wrong. And my being wrong in this instance demonstrates, to me at least, that it's important not only to always entertain the possibility of being wrong, but also to be actually wrong, as frequently as your schedule permits.

What happened was this. I was at Spring Street and Leah was modeling, and I decided to try and do the entire figure during the 1-minute and 2-minute poses. Usually, I select some extremely small part of the body and draw it in my usual finicky way for really short poses:

That's how I match my interest in detail with the time constraints. But during this one session with Leah, I felt like I should use the time the way normal people do:

And this was tremendously rewarding: models often take very interesting poses for the short ones - poses they couldn't hold for longer intervals. Ace model and blogger Claudia writes marvelously about it here. That's not all there was to it for me, though. I also had to do something that I don't usually do. Let me explain in terms of my favorite metaphor resource, calculus.

In calculus, the integral of a function is the area underneath the curve defined by the function. Let's look at it visually. You have a curve, that you call a function. The notation for this function is "f(x)." The use of "f" is arbitrary - it could be any letter:

graphic swiped from here

The integral of this function from point a to point b on the x-axis is the area that's shaded green. The integral is represented using the notation printed in the green area in the graphic. A whole big part of intro calculus is figuring out the values of integrals. This is called integration, and there are standard formulae for how to integrate a variety of functions.

The reason integration is a whole big part of intro calculus is that it's hard as hell to do. Sometimes you have to use tricks. One such trick is called integration by parts. Integration by parts is a trick you use when you run into a function you just can't integrate. So you chew on the function for a while, and you realize that this function is actually a product of two simpler functions. If you can integrate those simpler functions, you can apply a special "integration by parts" formula, and integrate your more complicated original function.

Get it?

You have to integrate f(x). But you can't. Then you notice that f(x) = g(x) x h(x). You can integrate g(x) and you can integrate h(x). Given that, you can use a formula that gives you the integral of f(x).

Life drawing, for me, is a process of integration by parts. I can't draw a whole body. Well, I'm lying. I can, but I don't like to. I'm lazy. I like to draw a knee, or a shoulder, or whatever. Those are my g(x) and h(x). So I integrate those parts, and then I use the integration by parts formula to make a whole picture - in this metaphor, f(x) is the function "the entire figure," and the integration by parts formula is "make the parts the right size and in the right place relative to one another."

So my 1-minute pose drawings are usually the raw product of an incomplete integration by parts - the drawings are integrated parts, but the entire function is not integrated.

And my 80-minute drawings, nice though they may be, are also integrated by parts. I have not gone directly for the entire area under the curve. I've just found it out by means of a bunch of tricky steps.

When I did those 1- and 2-minute drawings of Leah, I wasn't using my usual tricks. I was integrating f(x) directly. I did it again with her 5-minute poses:

Doing all of this was like getting a bucket of cold water to the face. It's good for you to get this kind of bucket of cold water to the face sometimes. It reminds you that you're not all that, that things can be tough and you don't know everything.

Also, it opens up new possibilities. For instance, the next week Natalya was modeling at Spring Street, and she did a really cool 10-minute pose. Ordinarily, I wouldn't have noticed the entire pose, because I'd have quickly scanned her for a 10-minute-drawing part, and zoned out on the rest. But because I had just been practicing seeing the entire figure all at once, I saw the whole pose and felt like I ought to draw it:

I like this so much I think I'll make a damn painting of it, that's what I think. So - I got a painting out of my exercise, and I also loosened up my attitude: I brought more life into my work.

In that earlier post, I was right that my brain naturally seizes on details, from which I build up an image. I was wrong that it's reasonable never to go against this tendency.

Why is it important to be wrong?

Let me quote for you a bit of monologue from one of my favorite films, Andrey Tarkovsky's Stalker. This monologue has walked beside me ever since I first heard it:

Let them be helpless like children, because weakness is a great thing, and strength is nothing. When a man is just born, he is weak and flexible. When he dies, he is hard and insensitive. When a tree is growing, it’s tender and pliant. But when it’s dry and hard, it dies. Hardness and strength are death’s companions. Pliancy and weakness are expressions of the freshness of being.

Always be wrong. You will become a better artist if you are wrong than if you are right.

An Object of Beauty

2011-04-10T21:32:00.010-04:00

Let's imagine, for a second, that you're an artist. You have decided to crawl out of the comparative paradise of your studio, where your only concern is to make your work, and enter the fallen world - the art world. There is only one fundamental reason you could have for doing this: to succeed.

What do you mean by success? Consider a few of the possibilities:

having a large number of people you do not know see your work
providing insight or pleasure to your viewers
producing work immediately recognized by many strangers as yours
changing the way art is made
maximizing sales frequency
maximizing sale price
placing your work somewhere that it won't wind up in an attic or a junk shop
getting on the cover of magazines that specialize in art
getting on the cover of magazines that do not specialize in art

The art world is a complex phenomenon, and some of these metrics of success conflict with others. And the list, obviously, is incomplete.

The art world can be attacked in many ways. However, it is a system, so for my part, I think of a successful attack as consisting in large part of the same tactic you would use to decode any system: information analysis.

My own analysis is painfully incomplete, but as I see it, the art world (at least in America) consists of several nodes of influence: artists, dealers, collectors, critics, the press, academe, and curators and their hosts - the museums and fairs. Translating this data set from a list to a network produces this outcome:

Where possible, I have grouped as neighbors those nodes which seem most reciprocal in activity. For instance, dealers go beside collectors because each feeds directly on the other through the reciprocal art/money transaction. However, all the nodes are connected and apply force to one another.

Let's go back to you, our hypothetical artist entering the art world. The network of entities seems to you incomprehensible, intimidating, and partly occluded. Understanding the artwork is manifestly a part, not the whole, of understanding the system, consisting as the system does in so many competing interests that only indirectly relate to the content of art.

A good thing to keep in mind, then, is that because this network consists of human beings, it is permeable. Moreover, its permeability is enhanced by the same problem that afflicts keeping a secret in any large group: the large number of individuals tends to include some who are leaky. So this network is not a circular fort. It is a very porous cell.

Here's a very brief summary of what I know about how to penetrate this permeable network:

1. Identify a node to which you have access - any access. If you have no access to any node, concentrate on improving your work until you do.

2. Get to know all of the individuals in this node that you can immediately reach. Learn their interests and biases, and clarify whether you have any complementary interests and biases.

3. If so, develop both your ability to communicate the complementary nature of your interests, and your ability to create and maintain a relationship.

4. Once the relationship is established, figure out the connections between your node and the broader network.

5. Move from one individual to the next, gradually weaving yourself into the wider entity.

That is really all there is to it. As far as I can tell, all progress in the art world, from the most lightning-flash overnight sensation to the slowest career process, from the most Borgia-like machination to the most intuitive flower-child meandering, includes some form of this sequence, executed in different ways, with different players, at different rates.

But keep in mind another consequence of the fact that this porous network consists of human beings - everything you do, you do to a human being. Therefore, you are constrained by morality. And even if you are personally amoral, the gallery assistant you screw today will one day be a museum director with the opportunity to screw you back. So keep the screwings to a minimum.

Now let me add a sixth procedure to my list:

6. Continue to collect information. Even if it has no apparent use, collect it. The entire system is your target, not any one part of it. Know as much of it as you can.

Which brings me to a very interesting book I read recently, on the general principle that I wanted to know more. The book, you may have guessed, is called An Object of Beauty, and Steve Martin wrote it.

Yes, that Steve Martin.

The book is about the art world, and technically, it's a novel. Happily, Mr. Martin isn't going to trouble himself too much with the whole "novel" part, using it to sex up a philosophical essay in the manner made famous by Voltaire and Robert M. Persig. There's a main character, named Lacey Yeager, who is a hot chick:

artist's rendering of Lacey Yeager

The decidedly mixed reviews of the book have frequently taken issue with her alleged lack of interiority, her only explicit narrative characteristics being raving ambition and hot foolings around. These reviewers are missing two things about Yeager: that she's a philosophical cypher, and that the actual narration of the book is essentially the content of her mind, which does nothing for nearly two decades but contemplate art and the art world. The whole book is interiority.

Mr. Martin tackles the art world itself from a similar angle to the one I am espousing here: information analysis. His approach is more sociological than mine. Specifically, he pursues the method of the longitudinal study. A latitudinal study compares a broad array of sociological objects over a short period of time. It's a panoramic snapshot. A longitudinal study selects a smaller number of objects from the available array and follows them over a long period. Their changes reflect and illustrate the subtle workings of the sociological system itself.

An Object of Beauty focuses on three elements in the art world: art, dealers, and collectors. Artists and critics make peripheral appearances, curators and academics hardly any at all. The time period is about 1993-2009.

We started this discussion by talking about leaving the studio, where one makes art, and entering the art world. For a lover of art, a parallel passage is possible. Yeager's passage - occurring not when she enters the art world but when she realizes where she is - gives the book its title:

If a picture had been on the market recently without a sale, she knew it would be less desirable. A deserted painting scared buyers. Why did no one want it? In the trade, it was known as being "burned." Once a picture was burned, the owner had to either drastically reduce the price or sit on it for another seven years until it faded from memory. When Lacey began these computations, her toe crossed ground from which it is difficult to return: she started converting objects of beauty into objects of value.

To me, there is something drily heartbreaking about this passage, in part because I have experienced it myself. Remember, I'm bent, if not hell-bent, on making art a career. This transmogrification, which destroys all, is part of the deal. The key is to split yourself into parts. One part never leaves the studio, and if possible, the other part never enters it. I would say I'm doing not badly, but if you are in a position similar to mine, it is worth making your own psychological accommodations, or you will lose your fucking soul.

Yeager makes accommodations, and while the narrative tragedy of the book is that she does not ultimately succeed in the art world, the thematic tragedy is that she doesn't really get to keep her soul either. The book is sprinkled with sharp passages describing art, but they give way under the pressure of art-dealing to a more completely objects-of-value outlook.

So much for the story. It's Yeager's story, not mine. The rest is delicious portraiture of people and transactions, extracted from all sorts of different nooks and crannies. Here a collector couple examines a Milton Avery painting -

this one, actually

- on sale at Sotheby's, where Yeager starts her career:

"Do you mind?" he said, indicating he would like to take the picture off the wall. He held up the picture and looked closely at it.

"He likes to hold pictures. I say why do you have to hold them?"

"She's right," Saul said amiably, "I don't know what it means, but I do it."

"You do it a lot," said Estelle.

His portrayals of cold people are cold, as in a scene of rivalry between two dealers over the attention of a collector who has invited them to dinner:

Gayle was more like a great basketball player than an art dealer: she unfailingly covered her man, making it impossible for Talley to throw him a pass. However, Talley knew that there would be a moment after dinner when Gayle would have to go vomit, leaving her man wide open.

But he is not inhuman, and neither are they:

He [Flores, the collector] once sneaked into a Manhattan art fair a day before it opened by disguising himself as a janitor in order to get first crack at the best in the show. But Talley thought Gayle had misjudged her man. Flores never thought of himself as a competitor; he just liked art.

The emotional nature of collecting is illustrated in interaction with the corrosion of Yeager's outlook:

...she realized, after sending Patrice Claire a check for eight thousand dollars in Paris, that she hated it [the painting]... This was an eight-thousand-dollar souvenir, the price tag on an exotic and egotistical moment far away. However, it was the most expensive thing she owned, so she hung it in a place of honor...

And the perspective sometimes zooms back to the explicitly systemic:

The collectors liked to meet museum people because one approving word from them about a single painting in a hallway could, by liberal extrapolation, validate an entire collection. Directors liked to meet collectors because maybe they would soon be dead and their collection would come to their museum.

Steve Martin is a collector, and he is at his most natural depicting the quirks and experiences of collectors. But he is at his best depicting dealers, because he's put so much work - observation, research, and imagination alike - into understanding them. His tone reads as detached delight, but once the dust settles, what remains is dismay.

The longitudinal approach yields a timeline of booms and crashes - the booming market of the 90's, the crash following 9/11, the boom, a different kind of boom, in the 00's, and the crash resulting from the general crash of 2008. The cast evolves, grows older, and prospers or fails over time. Each success and failure is a lesson - the book looks like a history, but it is itself a lesson, in the social ecology of a specific corner of the human enterprise.

Enough about it - An Object of Beauty embraces the double-sided nature of becoming engaged in a temporal way with art, so glorious in its interaction with the art itself, so stomach-turning in its politicking and predation - and the glorious part only makes the stomach-turning part more horrific. If you've made the dubious choice to enter into the art world, you ought to read it.

***

Reading back over this, it seems to me a very bleak description of a phenomenon. And it is bleak, but you should not be bleaked out if the issues involved apply to you. For one thing, there is a wonderful line of dialogue in a play by my friend, Mac Rogers (whose plays you should always go to if you can): "There is no 'shouldn't have to' in nature." And for another, we are still discussing human beings, doing the best they can to implement in the world a thing that is essentially immaterial. They fail and do petty and wretched things - the system itself can fail and be petty and wretched. But when engaged in it, you are always in companionship with human beings, with all the joys and complexities of that companionship. I experience kindness and generosity in the art world all the time - and they are not absent from An Object of Beauty either.

DanielMaidman

Giraffe

Superpowers

He Deserved It

Onward

The Aesthetics of Information

Heat of Battle

Autofill

Claudia Does It Again

How did he *do* that?

small neighbors/Microbiota

Every Single Time, It is a Struggle

What I Did On My Summer Vacation, Part III: An Appointment at Strandgade 30

What I Did On My Summer Vacation, Part II: Zone of Rightness, Zone of Comfort

What I Did On My Summer Vacation, Part I: Monism

Da Vinci at DePaul

The Integrated Visual Field II: Readers School Me

The Integrated Visual Field

Web of Influences

Negative Capability

Rock and Roll

The Nose is the Spine of the Face

White Canvas

Mystery and Enigma

On Dignity

A Good Day

The End of the Beginning

Jerry Saltz Kicks My Ass

Egyptian Space

Human Rhinovirus

Always Be Wrong

An Object of Beauty

How did he do that?