Drawing Like a Child

Piera is a model I've worked with for a few years - Lorenzo is her newborn son. I did a few drawings the other day of Piera breastfeeding Lorenzo.


Friend, artist, and blog reader Ed Felker compared them with a drawing I did last night:


He said something interesting about the newer portrait in comparison with the Piera drawings:

I like it more but probably for a weird reason. I can't imagine drawing - or seeing someone else drawing - the previous set. I like, and relate to, the bit of exploring that comes with this type of drawing, finding the line, moving it a bit, committing in some areas with a bolder, simpler stroke. I don't know, I just like the thought of all of it, the discovery of the shape through the feedback between your eyes and hands, and I like seeing the artifacts of that discovery in the faint lines you moved away from.

The difference Ed is describing is something that we could describe as the difference between adult drawing and childlike drawing. I use these terms in light of Picasso's famous comment, "As a child I drew like Raphael, it took the rest of my life to draw like a child." The reason I would call the Piera drawings childlike is because - to solve the mystery for you, Ed - I drew them as a child draws.


A child does not seek the right line, revising, expressing subtlety and differentiation, comparing the minutae of the drawing and the thing drawn. A child puts a line on the paper and moves on. To draw like a child is difficult to do, because it is scary to do. You must abandon your fear of error. There will certainly be errors.


To draw without hesitation is very hard to do. You must draw quickly, you must not go back, you must surf forward and then when you are done you must not fiddle around, but rather say, "Now it's done - next!"

When I draw this way, I reduce the number of lines I make on the paper. I also hold the pencil differently. I usually hold it softly and gently. When I draw this way, I hold the pencil the way a child holds a crayon, with a stiff and unfeeling hand, jamming it down onto the paper so that the point is rapidly worn away. But I draw each line more slowly, in the dull, deliberate way a child makes a straight line between two points.

I think that drawing this way is a good way to break up the choking ice floes of the visual mind. You work for ages to master a technique, and then you sink into the technique as you would sink into a large and comfortable chair; you can't get out of it, your ass goes to sleep, your blood begins to thicken and slow. It is good to strip yourself of everything you have, sometimes, and make do with little or nothing. When it works, you produce work that looks miraculous, that looks uncreated. When it doesn't work, you get a good slap in the face to remind you that most of what you do is trash anyway, no matter how much technique is backing it up.


I have several more posts to write on this and related subjects:

-the maximum surface area of the field of visual comprehension
-some thoughts on Hokusai, Matisse, and line, which thoughts I cannot remember just now, but I know I thought them
-the long-delayed Edges and Edge Detection, part IV
-the Piera Pregnancy Project

I'm just going to leave this little list here so that (a) I remember it and (b) if I don't get to it, you can remind me if you like.

UPDATE

I notice we have a few visitors from New Zealand. Thank you for reading, and I hope that if you have family or friends in the Christchurch area, they're doing alright.

Seeing and Being Seen

This blog is often fairly impersonal. I'm sure something of my personality comes through, but we're usually talking about art in a kind of a detached way. That's how an observer or an analyst can choose to look at art. But making art is a personal thing. Who you are as a human being becomes implicated in your work. You lose your ability to say, "This will be so - that will not be so." If, one day, somebody had to make a determination of who and what you were, your work could be fairly cited as evidence. I'd like to talk about a few tiny facets of that implication.

First of all, Claudia wrote a lovely post about working with me on her blog. I'm very proud to be featured over there - it's a wonderful blog by a person I like a whole lot. Check it out. She posted a really nice picture of the painting we're working on too...

Second thing, also about working with models. You are in the room to observe them. But they will observe you too, and your work. This can feel very much like being naked sometimes. In fact, I don't think it is possible to commit strongly to rendering what makes a model a living individual, without becoming vulnerable to the model catching sight of who you are.

Two examples, one of them one of the nicest things a model has ever said to me, and the other one of the kindest.

Model A: I was doing a preparatory sketch of her, seen from behind. She was trying to describe the drawing to a friend at a party we were both at later in the day. She said, "He drew in all the cellulite that I hate so much on my butt and the backs of my legs. But because he thinks it's beautiful, it looks beautiful in the drawing." I participate in this idea that the artist is trying to tell you that everything is beautiful. Hearing this evaluation, unprompted, from somebody, about a feature that people have a really hard time with in themselves - it made me very happy.

Model B: We were talking about an online quiz on personality type that I had taken, which had come back, "You're kind of a hardass." She said, "Well, you know, you come across very friendly, but there's barbed wire underneath." This is true. Not obvious, but true. And this model, who does not know me very well, had watched me closely enough to figure that out. To say so was the kind thing - we all want to be known. I am not afraid to be imperfect. I am afraid of creating an illusion of who I am so compelling that I become unknowable.

And finally, there is Claudia. The goodness of each person is different in kind. Claudia is generous. But there's generous, and there's generous. Some generosities are those that are offered when the giver has more than enough of whatever is needed. Other generosities are offered regardless. My wife, Charlotte, is generous in this second way. I don't know Claudia well enough to say, but I think she is generous this way too, generous by deep nature. You'd be lucky to work with her, and I'm honored to be on her blog. Thank you Claudia!

Gladioli

I have a little to say about these:

Violet Gladioli, oil on canvas, 36"x18"

I just spent about a week painting these gladioli. My wife Charlotte bought them when we were in Minneapolis (the place with the hideous carpets). They were so beautiful I took a picture and vowed to try to find the discipline to actually paint them. I surprised myself and did.

From the start, I wanted to use Schiele's approach, as in his painting of a sunflower:

It has two qualities that I like - an almost autistic sense of detail, and a white background which flattens the object and emphasizes its overall shape. You can do a lot worse than ripping off Schiele for your first flower painting...

But while we're talking about shape, let me explain something. When I was very little, some psychologist-type gave me an image a lot like this to copy:

I remember there was a piano with a dark glossy wooden surface in the room - it was at a party at somebody's house. The psychologist-type timed my reproduction of the image. Apparently the speed was off the charts. I came here not to brag, but to explain: I tried to explain to this individual that I had, in my opinion, cheated.

My idea of the "legitimate" mode of reproducing the image was to conceptualize it as representing a rope, and to understand and draw the rope, with its layering over and under itself. I didn't do that, since obviously time was an issue. So I devised a shortcut - I drew each closed shape, like this, for example:

Having reduced the problem to individual shapes, I could draw each one, keeping them more or less in proper relation with one another, and not bother with the higher-level integration of the image. The image integrated itself, as long as the sub-shapes were accurate.

A long time later, I was thinking about how I'm more of a form artist than a color artist. I think I've discussed that here, and its neurological underpinnings. I see things in terms of structure first, which is expressed in gradations of light and dark. It's a constant struggle for me to represent the colors of things.

So while I was thinking about this form/color issue, I remembered that celtic knot test from when I was little. Suddenly, I realized that form itself is a derivative expression of what kind of representationalist I am. I'm a *shape* representationalist.

That is, I am still deploying the same cheat today. On my first visual sweep and sketching-in of any object, I automatically break the object down into two-dimensional shapes, which I represent in more-or-less-accurate relation to one another. Then the image integrates itself.

For a long time, I had to struggle against a kind of fragmentation of the overall body in my depictions of complete figures. Each part would look fairly right, but when you looked at the body as a whole, it didn't quite fit together:

On the Stairs, oil on canvas, 36"x24", 2006

This is a weakness specific to my mode of breaking down and rebuilding a complex form for the purposes of depiction. I had to specifically tackle and overcome this weakness over time:

The Rest, oil on canvas, 48"x36", 2010

For the same reason, I have never had any interest in those 10-second "gestural drawings" that life-drawing teachers are always on about:

This was posted by an artist named Benza at: http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=2960.0

You can see why. This form of analysis is based on total integration of the figure into between one and four fundamental lines and curves. Teachers love this because it's "high energy" and also because it teaches you to do the broad forms first, and go to details later.

I naturally do details first, and broad forms later. One outcome is that I tend to get the broad forms wrong. But I've counter-trained myself to modify and get these forms good-enough:

I simply refuse to draw based on a fundamental cognition that is alien to how my visual analysis wants to operate.

What I am describing here is not meant to imply that this shape-analysis is right or wrong. It's right for me, because it's how I think. And it's valuable for me to know this about myself, because it allows me to understand what I'm doing, and some of my strengths and weaknesses, and some of the ways I can use both my strengths and weaknesses to generate interesting work:

Coming back to where we started, I hope it's clearer now why I would find the outline of the gladioli to be perhaps the most interesting thing about them:

I think the part of this that's useful for people who aren't me is that it's a good example of a question that's very handy to try to answer. No doubt each of you is an expert at something. And the question is this - what kind of expert are you? If you can identify the individual way that you are tackling your work in your field, you can understand how your cognitive and methodological quirks inform and deform your work, and you can understand and improve your work by recognizing the deep forces influencing its formation.

Practical notes: those last three drawings are from the Piera Pregnancy Project. I will have more to say about that soon.

And the nude on light brown paper - that will be showing with The Great Nude at the Governor's Island Art Fair, starting September 4. They were good enough to invite me to participate; I have four drawings there.

Have a great weekend, folks.

Sexual Dimorphism in Cop Cars

Sexual dimorphism, as the Encyclopedia Britannica would have it, is:

The differences in appearance between males and females of the same species, as in colour, shape, size, and structure, that are caused by the inheritance of one or the other sexual pattern in the genetic material.

The most common example of sexual dimorphism is, of course, that of the peacock and peahen:


Sexual dimorphism exists in humans as well:

But here, I would like to draw your attention to a less well-known instance of sexual dimorphism: that found in cop cars.

Like many other mammals and birds, the male cop car is larger, stronger, and more brightly colored than the female cop car. Cop cars are a social species, and the distribution of tasks in the species is segregated along sexual lines, reflecting functional differences resulting from their strong dimorphism. Male cop cars perform tasks involving intimidation, overwhelming force, and coordinated aggression on the part of multiple cars. Female cop cars perform "stealth tasks," in which camouflage, subtlety, and surprise are more important than the ability to physically overwhelm an opponent.

When the layperson pictures a cop car, he or she is generally thinking of a male cop car, as in the instance of peacocks and peahens. Even so, a significant difference between male cop car displays remains poorly understood by the general public:

The mating display is more varied in color and flash-pattern than the aggression display. Many people, stumbling on a male cop car performing a mating display, confuse it with an aggression display and react accordingly. This can rapidly turn an opportunity to witness a beautiful cop car mating ritual into an unfortunate interspecies confrontation.

A second confusion is also common: confusing an aggression display related to a "duel" between two would-be alpha bulls, for the predator-prey aggression display which cop cars perform for civilians. For safety's sake, when you see a male cop car performing a display, run through this mental checklist:

1. Are you sure this is an aggression display and not a mating display?

2. If it is an aggression display, is a second male cop car of comparable size and age present and also performing an aggression display?

3. If so, are the cars facing each other? In this case, you are almost certainly lucky enough to be witnessing a "duel" to determine leadership of a clan of cop cars. However, if the two cars are facing you, then they have probably identified you as the natural prey of the cop car.

Only when you have run through this checklist, and come to the certain conclusion that you have been targeted by one or more aggressive male cop cars, should you review the ordinary list of options available in such a situation:

1. Submission.
2. Flight.
3. Fighting the law.

You will want to make your selection based on the specifics of your situation.

The Endless Procession

Well, you've got my being cooped up waiting all day in the wifi-enabled jury room 2.60 of King's County Criminal Court to thank for this post not being delayed even more than it already is.

I don't know about you, but I am always worried about receiving too narrow a stream of information. When I started painting, I looked at Sargent a lot:


Then I needed more, so I settled on the Big Three, and studied them for many years:

Titian

Velazquez

Rubens

Titian - for beauty. Velazquez - for psychology and brushwork. Rubens - for energy and joie-de-vivre. No doubt I'll have more to write about them as this blog unfolds.

But even the wonderful worlds of these three painters were not enough. I needed to turn to more artists; voraciously more. I was forced to be catholic in my tastes. I started with a few artists I had once flirted with, and then avoided.

Pablo, bien sûr

Matisse

And I started catching up on what's going on in the world today. Let me say it plainly: abstract expressionism, and every single movement since then, have done nothing for me. But that doesn't mean I don't look at them. I need shock treatment - I need my boundaries to be attacked and breached all the time. I need to see what possible things other people have thought of...

Lately, I've been watching PBS's Art:21 a fair bit. This documentary series on contemporary artists in many ways encapsulates everything I hate about PBS: its would-be hipness, its snobbery convinced it is populism, its self-righteousness, its tedium, and all with a dash of sucking thrown in for good measure. But they do stumble on some good stuff sometimes - heck, it's a good premise - and I learn even from the bad parts. So I keep watching it.

I saw an episode the other evening which included a section on artist Allan McCollum. This was a fascinating look at a body of work that resonated very strongly with me, even though it's in a mode I do not identify with at all.

Let's look at one of his pieces a bit, and hear what he has to say about it. Then I'll explain what I'm on about:

Individual Works...series begun in 1987.

To produce the Individual Works hundreds of small shapes are casually collected from peoples' homes, supermarkets, hardware stores, and sometimes from the sidewalks: bottle-caps, jar-lids, drawer-pulls, salt-shakers, flashlights, measuring spoons, cosmetics containers, yogurt cups, earrings, push-buttons, candy-molds, garden-hose connectors, paper-weights, shade-pulls, Chinese tea-cups, cat toys, pencil sharpeners, etc. From this collection of shapes many rubber molds are produced from which replicas of these shapes can be hand-cast in plaster in large quantities, thus creating a vocabulary of shapes which can be combined to produce new shapes, and so forth. A simple numerical system is used during the production process to insure that no two finished Individual Works will ever be alike. Each unique Individual Work is hand-cast in gypsum, and hand-painted with an enamel paint. The Individual Works are usually gathered into collections of over 10,000 per collection.

Now, why is this so interesting to me? Let me tell you about a couple of dreams I had when I was very little.

In one dream, I was in a flat landscape. There was nothing superflat about it: it was a village, with trees, small hills, widely spaced houses on farms. Some of the ground had been replaced with checked red-and-white tablecloth fabric. There was a road through the town - it was a sunny day. What was flat about this landscape was that there were no mountains or oceans nearby. In fact, I was aware that this particular region retained this character - houses, streams, trees, thoroughfares, grass, tablecloth - for hundreds of thousands of miles. The extension of this landscape in space was unfathomably vast. It never strongly changed, but it never repeated either. Every point in this land was unique.

A second dream. There was a closet, with a number of shelves. Each shelf was stuffed with a variety of dolls: dolls of animals and people. If you closed this closet, and opened the door again, you would find that the dolls had been replaced with different dolls, arranged differently. A second closing and opening would produce a new set of changes - but the changes would be slightly less significant. Repeating the closing and opening action gradually reduced the changes until they were incredibly slight; a single arm of a single doll would have shifted slightly, perhaps, or a doll would rest at a mildly shifted angle. But the changes, while diminishing in degree, never ceased. There was no logical end-point to the closing and opening of this horrible door. You could keep producing changes, trivial changes growing more trivial, forever.

I have a deep and queasy connection with the concept of an unbounded set of objects which are all unique and yet have no meaningful differences. Consider the trilobites:


Or Stephen Wolfram's cellular automatic plane:


Or the monstrous invasive dream-parade in the movie Paprika:


Or my own fascination, documented here previously, with the sequence of the prime numbers. My friend and model Vadim, considering fashion magazines, once referred to the images they contain as "the endless procession of beautiful but meaningless forms." Perhaps I am not describing something like fashion here, but I like Vadim's phrasing very much - don't you? It is a wonderful phrasing.

It is this very topic, this hideous thing that has no start and no end, which is the subject of much of McCollum's work. In the Art:21 interview, he described his interest in using an industrial process to make unique objects. The objects should have the feel of industrial mass-production, and yet no two should be alike. To that end, he has contrived extremely clever techniques, culminating in a very ingenious computerized graphical procedure (basically sophisticated copy-pasting) which underlies his Shapes project. Here's a bit of what he writes about the project:

And here's a photograph of some of its horrifying scale:

Allan McCollum. The SHAPES Project, 2005/06. 7,056 SHAPES Monoprints, each unique. Framed digital prints, 4.25 x 5.5 inches each. Installation: Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York, 2006.

McCollum adds a clarification of the difference between the physical implementation of the project, and its vastly larger conceptual space:

The Shapes Project is a system to create a large quantity of unique shapes, one for every person on the planet when the world population peaks in the middle of the twenty-first century. To make certain that the system will be able to accommodate everyone, it has been organized to produce over 31,000,000,000 different Shapes.

There is a stark inhumanity and terror to McCollum's work. This is work that not only has no meaning; by mimicking many of the structures of meaning - variation, distinctness of shape - it tricks the mind into partaking of it from the perspective of meaning, which it perplexes, confounds, and ultimately undoes. It makes meaning appear meaningless. It renders thought and hope and humanity futile. It makes Sol Lewitt's comparatively finite combinatorial systems look downright quaint:

McCollum has figured out how to particularize a functionally unlimited space, and in so doing, to destroy the mind that attempts to take it seriously.

I think I've been speaking a lot of hyperbole here, and I'd like to back up for a second before I get to the moral of the story. What do I mean "destroy the mind"? What kind of a claim is this?

Well, let's consider a common feature of the Ptolemaic and Copernican universes for a minute.


Sure, they're at each others' throats about the Earth and the Sun, but they both agree that the imperfect world we see around us progresses outward in space toward perfection. This model, to the extent that it permits the infinite, sees stability in the infinite. Its infinite is infinite in extent, not detail.

This is not the universe we now conceive: a universe of varying background radiation, of galactic superclusters, of twisty little garlic knots of spacetime. This universe, too, may prove infinite in extension, although we don't think so. But if it is infinite, it is not uniform. It is thick with detail.

This detail, we abhor. We have a different and more subtle form of the stabilization feature of the Ptolemaic-Copernican infinite: the second law of thermodynamics.

Second Law of Thermodynamics: In any cyclic process the entropy will either increase or remain the same.

Entropy is disorder. The second law informs us that the universe as a whole is tending toward disorder. Total disorder is heat, aimless vibration, crap. The universe is tending toward crap. This crappiness does for time what Ptolemy and Copernicus do for space: without setting an outer boundary, it assures uniformity. It is infinite, but without detail.

The Stephen Wolfram referenced above, a very interesting guy, has referred to the second law as "the so-called second law of thermodynamics." This is kind of a funny line. Wolfram thinks that entropy is not necessarily as straightforward as all that. If you scroll back up and look at that weird triangle pattern, you can see where Wolfram is coming from. This pattern, which never repeats itself and never settles into a quiet uniformity, emerges from the repeated application of some very simple mathematical rules. Wolfram has used this type of rule-set to simulate all sorts of interesting things, such as the patterns on seashells. This work has convinced him, and he's not a stupid individual, that the universe itself is the outcome of some similar repeated execution of simple rules of the type he is studying.

Now, this is not worth much as science, so far, because it doesn't predict anything and can't be tested.

However, one feature of Wolfram's systems is that, while broad areas tend toward entropic crappiness over time, new nuggets of order spontaneously arise and spread out as well. So if the universe is a Wolfram system, then it is not tending toward total entropic disorder. Wolfram's derision about the second law results from his belief that we are extrapolating the law from a small scale, where it works, to the ultimate scale, where it fails.

A Wolfram universe is a universe of infinite extent and infinite variation. It is thick with detail from here to eternity. And this induces the same terror that I am seeing in McCollum's projects. I think I can explain this terror better, having presented the situation at a universal scope.

We are accustomed to thinking of all the things we see as having some meaning. A tree - this means something. A cat, a dog, a man, a woman, a child - all these mean things. A cloud, a brook, a house, a road. All of them are part of a world, sometimes gentle and sometimes rough, but always meaningful. Those parts that are not meaningful in themselves, are meaningful to us, as we behold and consider them.

But how many things can we consider? Ten? Twenty? A hundred - a thousand?

What if there were no end to these things, all of them having distinct and serious human import? Can we stand to admire the beauty of a million clouds? A billion rivers? A trillion men and women? But a trillion is hardly even the foothill of the infinite.

So we have learned to cope with the infinite - with the grains of sand, the waves of the sea, the stars of the sky - by means of the concept of repetition. Repetition collapses the infinite. One grain of sand may be said to be functionally just like the rest of them. The waves of the sea - alike. The stars - alike. We have bounded the infinite prospect with Ptolemy's EMPIREUM or Copernicus's STELLARUM FIXARUM SPHAERA IMMOBILIS. Perhaps we can about choke down infinity if it doesn't really mean anything.

But an infinity consisting of an infinite and non-repeating number of elements just like the elements we know and care about blows us apart. Not only is it impossible for the finite mind to comprehend it, but its very existence forces the finite mind to consider that everything it knows, being alike in kind with so much more that it cannot know, is in fact a useless fraction, a meaningless fraction.

We cannot abide a finite universe, and we cannot abide an infinite but meaningful universe. We need a finite number of meaningful elements and a vast and empty cold surrounding them, a cold we can safely ignore apart from your occasional moment of wonder or dread.

Wolfram's universe, McCollum's universe, by contrast, is a mind-splitting, soul-mocking, terrifying universe.

So why on earth do I like this man and his project, which combines fecundity and sterility in the most unholy of ways? For this very terror I have been trying to convey. It is a specific kind of terror, a very particular formulation of terror, and it has haunted me in the most personal and visceral way my entire life. By some weird chance, it has manifested itself to McCollum as well. For him, it does not seem terrifying. For me, it was so terrifying that I stopped thinking about it, and then forgot about it. Looking at McCollum's work was part of my artistic shock treatment. When I saw his work, I remembered this thing, my own personal terror. McCollum restored to me a part of myself that I had lost.

In many regards, life is a process of forgetting and loss. Art, on precisely the same topics, is often a process of remembering and restoration. In art, we are all moving toward being as whole as we were when we began. I needed something I was missing, and McCollum gave it back to me.

Proxy Light --> Proxy Knowledge

Here's a really specific topic that's probably of limited interest to the non-painter.

Before I get going, may I just add this? Теплые приветствия нашим русским читателям!

So anyway, I'm working on this painting in which the face probably shouldn't be lit. The composition really doesn't want the face lit. But I am unable to subordinate my fidelity to the model to fidelity to the painting. Plainly speaking, I hate to have a painting with the face unseen. That's why I do so little work with backs and butts; you have to produce a really twisty pose to have a face in a painting like that, and I don't have any ideas that motivate such twisty poses.

Anyhow, on this painting, the face doesn't want to be lit, and yet I'm lighting it anyway. I figured out a way to just barely light it - to have hardly any light on the eye - and yet to have the eye read clearly. Here's the outcome of the first session:


If you look closely, you'll see that the iris and pupil are not really painted at all. The entire region - the inner portion of the eye - merges into a single patch of uniform dark. What is lit is the white of the eye. That's the only part you can actually technically see. You think you can see the iris and pupil, but you can't; you simply know where they are. And you don't directly know where they are; you only know 1) where they could be and 2) where they aren't. Your mind puts those two pieces of information together and provides a complete model of the eye, even though the light is directed such that the relevant part of the eye is actually completely invisible. Confused about what I mean? Compare that eye with the similar eye placement in my recent painting The Lightning which, incidentally, is covered extensively in my article in this month's International Artist and you should run out and buy it:


In this painting, the light in the darks is much brighter, and you can see every part of the eye. In the new painting, I am using proxy lighting to produce proxy knowledge. By means of the thing that is lit, you are able to fill in what isn't lit. The dark part is lit by proxy light provided by your mind. Your direct knowledge yields proxy knowledge. I get to have it both ways - I can leave the eye unlit, as the physics of the composition wants, without hiding the eye, which is what I want.

I agonized about the eye a lot before I started painting, and had this little trick in mind in advance. Thinking it over later, I realized I had pulled a similar stunt a few years ago, in this painting, The Saint:


As you can see, I really punched the light in the lit part of the eye. I planned for the unnatural brightness in the white of the eye and the nose, making them part of an aesthetic mimicking the jagged unreality of medieval iconography. Why would I do that? Because I knew that my technique at the time wasn't strong enough for me to portray natural light levels as I saw them in front of me. I always try to adapt my aesthetic to match my technical limits, while pushing my technical limits a bit farther each time. Not a bad idea, I think - the best example of this that I can think of Kevin Smith's first movie, Clerks, which was very adeptly designed to match his ignorance of filmmaking at the time.

Thinking more about this very specific trick for a very specific lighting and facial-angle situation, I suddenly thought that I probably learned it from Sargent. Like many an aspiring contemporary figurative painter, I started out thinking I wanted to paint like Sargent. Since then, I've changed my mind, but I still admire Sargent a great deal, and I still study him. I have this painting of his on a corkboard above the desk in my office:


If you look, you'll see that he deploys this exact trick in his deeply underlit painting. He also gets to have his cake and eat it too. He preserves the profound chiaroscuro, he turns the face away from the light - and he doesn't lose the eye. His merest hint of the eye pushes it much farther than I have in either of the paintings I'm showing you here, but let's face it, he's still much better at painting than I am.

If you are a non-painter, and you've still made it this far, I think this can serve as a useful example of the mighty force of detail that the painter considers in producing an image. We're trained by photography to consider image-making effortless, but actually, every little thing you see on the canvas is the outcome of thought and decision. Perhaps these thoughts and decisions are not always analytic, the way I am describing them here - often, they are intuitive or unconscious - but they all result from grappling with the specifics of the situation and with the specific situation's relationship with recurring general issues. The question of how to convey information about an unlit object is a general issue, and this is a very detailed exposition of a particular solution to it in a particular set of circumstances. I think that climbing the mountain of these proliferating problems is a good part of the fun of painting.

Cadmium

There is a wonderful model named Stephanie who moved back to New Mexico over a year ago. Before she left, I prepared a painting of her for when she was gone: a reference drawing and a bunch of reference photographs. I do this for every painting, but usually I then paint from the actual model. This was not going to be possible with the last Stephanie painting.

I find it very difficult to paint without a model present - where's the fun in that? But I really liked this painting idea. Stephanie doesn't have an angry bone in her body, but I wanted the painting to be angry: almost impossible to look at. I had an idea for how to do that, too, and the idea was cadmium orange. Why cadmium orange? It's a hot color, and when used unwisely, an intense and ugly color. I had some idea of what it could do based on a portrait I painted when I was just starting out as a painter, in 2005:


I never painted the background, but I'm very fond of this painting, which was my second serious painting. The color in it is not unbearable - there is a cold light from the left which keeps it under control. But I used a lot of hot colors on the right, not really knowing what I was doing. I've thought about it since then, though, and what I wanted to do was a painting with only the hot colors on the right. A painting without relief from the hot colors. That was the idea for this Stephanie painting. Here's the palette I set up for it:


It's a simple palette, and I thought about it for a long time before I started the painting. It includes only naples yellow, cadmium yellow, cadmium orange, cadmium red, burnt sienna, burnt umber, and ivory black. There's no white, because white is too tempting - you can make anything brighter with some white, but it also cools the image down. It's a respite from the hot colors. And I debated long and hard about using black in the painting. Black also functions as a relative cool in a situation like the one I was setting up, and I didn't want to leave myself anywhere to turn when I inevitably sought to balance the colors in the painting. But I figured I could keep it under control.

Amusingly, what I ultimately wound up using for a cool was naples yellow. A cool yellow, relative to those fearful cadmium colors.

The painting was about fury, and the fury was in the image, but it was also in the color. Having a model present is like having a physical bedrock for your work. When you are wandering adrift in the nebulous region between your mind and your paint brush, you can look to the model, and the presence of the model will remind you what you're doing. A photograph is no substitute.

In this instance, the physical bedrock was the cadmium orange. It's simply unworkable, it's a horrible color. It's best used for little passages, like if someone is wearing a garish orange sash - that's a nice place to put some cadmium orange. I suppose you could mix cadmium orange into a perfectly acceptable flesh mix, but my goal was to deal with from-the-tube cadmium orange, the pure goblin. So I wrestled with cadmium orange the whole time, and that was the physicality underlying the making of the painting: the paint itself. I would shy away from using any more cadmium orange, and then I would force myself to cover a whole area with cadmium orange and then deal with it. If I found myself leaning on the comparatively civilized burnt sienna, I would immediately shift back to cadmium orange. Perhaps I got carried away, but I liked this experimental procedure.

I worked on the painting for four days, from start to finish. Four very long days - it's close to life-sized:

You Will Not Be Forgiven, 60"x36", oil on canvas, 2010

I don't know about you, but for my part, I have noticed that I am only permitted to do anything once. What I mean is this - I had an unusual degree of knowing in advance what the colors I chose for this painting would do. Usually, I don't know exactly where I'm going with any particular thing. It's better, for me, not to know: my best work rides along the very edge of failure. I struggle and sweat for all these skills, but the skills are best in the minute before I master them. Once I know how to control them totally, their use loses its intensity, it becomes complacent. With this painting, I threw everything I know about color at it, almost certain that it would work. It did work - it might not work for you, but it works for me in the sense that I asked the colors to do something, and they did precisely that. If I were to do that again, without introducing some element I do not know how to control, I think I would make a boring painting.

Since I finished this painting, I've started four new ones, with models thankfully present. I'm trying a new color theory for the flesh in the Claudia painting I talked about below. I'm trying to depict extreme light over-exposure with stylized hot midtones in a second painting. In a third, the entire figure is cool-color stylized midtones: I will have to go much farther with grays than I ever have. And in the fourth, I am painting everything in a completely lunatic greenish indigo, and working on distressing the image enough to make some parts of it unreadable. We'll see how that goes.

I think the key is this - to continue finding a way to be at the very start of things. It is at the end of things that we stiffen and become inflexible. Our masterful technique reads as dead. It is at the start that there is excitement, a sense of opportunity and possibility. There is inevitable awkwardness, but I have always thought that awkwardness was a reasonable price to pay for life.

Look, I'm no romantic about crudity. The more masterful you become, the more this mastery serves as a foundation for your sense of being at the beginning. It is a background noise, but a background noise that makes the painting, overall, well executed. The awkwardnesses rise to higher levels. But the awkwardnesses continue to serve as a talisman of vitality and the beginning. Without the mastery, the expression falters, and without the excitement of beginning, there is rarely anything to express.

Claudia

Well! Let me tell you a little bit about Claudia and then send you packing to her blog.

I just started working on my first painting with Claudia - she's a model I've drawn many times at Spring Street and gotten to know over the course of one delightful chat after another at various art events around town.

Modeling, as with so many other practices, involves elements both of talent and skill. Skills can be developed - professionalism, strength, endurance, good body-position memory, a knowledge of the types of poses that work with one's body and are interesting to the life drawing student. Talent is one of those things you are either lucky enough to have, or not. With regard to modeling, these involve creativity, passion, and a face and body that are suited to expressing emotions.

Claudia is a wonderful model: fortunate enough to be talented, and dedicated enough to have become skilled.

Apart from these, though - and this is very important when considering whether to work with a model privately - she is great fun to chat with. You spend a lot of time with a model when you paint or sculpt them, and it's not a bad idea to have an eye, in choosing models, toward people you think you might want to be friends with anyway. Claudia is one of those kinds of people.

But don't take my word for it. Almost uniquely, Claudia also keeps a massive and popular blog chronicling her life in art. She's a brisk and funny writer with insight into her work and excitement about art: all sorts of art, all the phases of making art, the history and gossip of art. Scroll around the blog if you have the time and inclination, and get a sense of what makes Claudia such an excellent person to spend time with:

MUSEWORTHY
http://artmodel.wordpress.com/

When I paint, I think of my work with models as "doing justice to," the rather harsh Greek phrasing of the matter. I hope to become good enough to do justice to the marvelous people I paint. I hope that my Claudia painting will do justice to Claudia.

Here's a mediocre drawing of her I did at a workshop not long ago. It's not much of a drawing, but I think it catches a little bit of her electric presence:

The Nerdrum Affair

Perhaps you remember that, a while back, I wrote that I was not in the business of trashing successful living artists. Because maybe I'd have to work with them later. Well, I've exhibited with one, and I'm about to talk some smack about him, because this was what he had to say:

There is no doubt about it: In the previous century Hitler was the greatest Artist, greater even than Picasso.

Who said that? Well, you might not have heard of him. He's a Scandinavian painter named Odd Nerdrum. As these things go, very successful - his paintings sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars a pop. Mine, ahem, do not. Nerdrum saw fit to post this little observation on his Facebook page, where he is in the habit of posting delphic epigrams once in a while. I was among the first to notice the post, so I had the opportunity to be an early commenter. Let's see what I had to say:

I'm sorry, I find this unbelievably offensive, and I will be deleting you from my friend list now. This kind of pathetic wit is harmless enough until you start treading on the dead bodies of my relatives. You can go to fucking hell.

So I crossed that rubicon, and I may as well elaborate a little bit on how, exactly, Nerdrum can go to fucking hell. I've been thinking it over.

Nerdrum's post has a plain-language meaning, and its plain language meaning is a praise of Hitler.

Nerdrum's post also has an ironic art-world-critical meaning, in which he is attacking the moribund state of art by saying that, if Picasso is your paragon of good art, then Hitler, in your aesthetic cosmology, is even better.

Nerdrum's post is further modified by a labored and, by my lights, dubious distinction he has been working on for years between what he calls Art, of which he disapproves (think: modernism and post-modernism), versus Kitsch, which is supposed to be the good stuff (think: Rubens, Velazquez, Titian, etc.).

The Hitler quip triggered a flurry of comments, about 180-200, before the brave Mr. Nerdrum deleted the post. Hearteningly, many of the comments were to the effect of Nerdrum being a prick. The rest were defences, mostly on the basis of contending that those opposed suffered either a lack of relevant information, or a lack of proper interpretation, or a lack of sense of humor. Two actual Nazis crawled out of Nerdrum's list of 5,000 friends to defend, not so much Nerdrum, as Hitler.

I am going to tell you happy few right now that you have enough information to formulate a valid opinion of Nerdrum's post. It is obviously an ironic comment on some particular of the state of art, art criticism, and the art world.

What is just as obvious is that, by collapsing the moral distinction between anything to do with bad art, and the most profound monstrosity of which humanity is capable, Nerdrum has betrayed an astonishingly flattened moral topography. Let's consider the comment in light of a few options with regard to its interpretation:

1. Its plain-language meaning is its true meaning: he's praising Hitler.
2. It's an ironic critique: he has the moral topography problem.
3. It's meant to provoke: he has the moral topography problem.
4. It's meant to "inspire thought and discussion": he has the moral topography problem.

There is no way around concluding that he is either a Hitlerite, or has a disturbingly casual indifference to, and incomprehension of, evil.

Imagine spending time with a madman. In every particular, he is quite ordinary. He is friendly, considerate, perfectly reasonable in his conversation. Walking along the street with this madman, you pass a random stranger, and, out of the blue, he says something about how funny it would be to do this stranger a grievous harm of a particularly inventive and gruesome type. He chuckles a little bit, then continues with the previous discussion. He continues to be friendly, considerate, and reasonable. But the comment cannot be unsaid. Now, you have become aware that he is a madman, and nothing else he ever says will make it possible to consider him sane.

Nerdrum is not a madman. Rather, he is evil. His Facebook post is akin to the chance utterance of the madman: to Nerdrum, it was an acceptable comment. Perhaps meant to provoke, perhaps meant to outrage the squares - but overall, acceptable. And this makes us aware of something about him which any subsequent apologies (and they have not been forthcoming) cannot undo.

In kind, it is similar to, if less audacious and original than, unlistenable German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen's public comment of September 16, 2001:

Well, what happened there is, of course—now all of you must adjust your brains—the biggest work of art there has ever been. The fact that spirits achieve with one act something which we in music could never dream of, that people practise ten years madly, fanatically for a concert. And then die. And that is the greatest work of art that exists for the whole Cosmos. Just imagine what happened there. There are people who are so concentrated on this single performance, and then five thousand people are driven to Resurrection. In one moment. I couldn't do that. Compared to that, we are nothing, as composers. [...] It is a crime, you know of course, because the people did not agree to it. They did not come to the "concert". That is obvious. And nobody had told them: "You could be killed in the process."

Nerdrum's supporters can, and have, argued that whereas Stockhausen was serious, Nerdrum was ironic. This is a distinction without a difference. The same moral flattening occurs in both instances, regardless of intent. It is not a comment you could think of without the moral flattening.

The moral flattening is not idiopathic. It is not the outcome of some lone lunacy. It is a symptom of a so-called artistic demeanor, a demeanor which considers the question of good and evil to be terribly passe, to have no claim on the artist's attention. It is a symptom of the decadence of culture. And in this respect, Nerdrum's comment was marvelously clarifying for me. Why?

Because I have spent years worrying about Nerdrum. I could never reach a conclusion about him. He has fabulous technique, and sometimes I am inclined to think of him as a legitimate artist. Other times, I am inclined to think of him as a fetishist whose work is best suited to the cover of Omni magazine. I have never been able to put my finger on what bothered me about his work, until now. Let's take a look at a few of his paintings:



In the last instance, you might recall my previous thoughts on mouths and eyes. The partial or total effacement of the eyes is a common motif in Nerdrum's portraits. He has a mouth fixation similar to that of De Kooning, who cut photographs of mouths out of magazines and stuck them directly on the canvas as a starting point for his faces. When he is not painting portraits, Nerdrum often paints hieratic figures in barren, threatening landscapes. Frequently, violence is implied or explicit:




...and for years, I have been unable to solve what it was about Nerdrum that was troubling me. Lately, I have fallen in with a crowd of painters who are huge fans of his. Many have studied with him, and many emulate the qualities of his paintings: the thick impasto, the mimicry, not so much of Rembrandt's technique, as of a romantic half-memory of Rembrandt's technique, the gauzy depiction of idealized faces, the hieratic figures, the threatening landscapes, the peculiar clouds, the funny hats. In fact, Nerdrum seems to be encouraging his students to paint ersatz Nerdrums: you can often recognize who has studied with him, as you can recognize the work of people who studied with Frank Lloyd Wright, because they all built ersatz Wrights.

Anyhow, Nedrum's comment finally clarified for me my problem with his work: flat moral affect. In depicting good and evil, he does not choose sides between them. He has a lurid fascination with brutality, but he does not define himself relative to it. Goya, whose work was more brutal, depicts horror, and is horrified. Nerdrum depicts horror, and is fascinated. In Nerdrum's universe, beauty is more important than virtue, and boredom is more repellent than evil.

My revulsion at this teaches me something about myself as an artist. It is often said that beauty and virtue are the same, or that the virtuous is beautiful. And this is often true. But when they diverge, I am obliged to choose virtue. I would rather be bored than wicked, and I would rather do right than be fascinating.

There is room in the world for wicked artists. Evil too must take an artistic form, from the perspective of evil, in order for us to complete our understanding of the dilemma of being human. Kundera has a wonderful quotation, which I am unable to find now, on the necessity of morally compromised writers, because otherwise history will be a tale told by choir-boys: a tale told from the perspective of moral innocence, which is to say, ignorance.

To be a successful evil artist, you must not only be good - you must be great. And you will still deserve the condemnation heaped upon you. But Odd Nerdrum is merely good.

Let's zoom back for a moment from the issue at hand, to the long-standing problem it exemplifies so well, to wit: what about this business of artists being assholes? What about that?

I have thought about that long and hard. After all, I'm an artist. Does this give me a right to treat people badly? Well, in my case, it would little serve my purposes as an artist, because the pictures I make come from love. So not being an asshole is very difficult for me as a practical career artist, but it is necessary in order to preserve the source of my inspiration. I am simply in love, in one way or another, with most of the people I know, and with my pictures, and with the people who sit for them. For me, a big part of love is a desire to know - not the good only, but the good and the bad, about that which is loved. And for people to be willing to show this to you, the good and the bad alike, again, the method of brutality is less effective than the method of adoration.

But leave aside the practical considerations. Many well-known artists and even great artists are notorious assholes. Caravaggio? Murderer - well, man-one, five to seven years, if this were Law and Order. Michelangelo? Grumpy as all hell, really stinky feet. Bernini? Had his girlfriend's face slashed. Picasso? Serial asshole to every woman he knew. The list goes on, and all the examples are more impressive than a shitty little Facebook post.

So what are we to make of the asshole problem, and of the link between artistry and assholery?

Here is my latest thinking on it. With regard to those who have already died, there is nothing we can do any longer. They lived; they died; they abused those around them and made what work they did. If the work is good - by all means, appreciate the work.

With regard to those who are living, absolutely - let them be assholes. But do not make a special exception for them because they are also artists. Treat them with the contempt you would treat any asshole. You don't get special dispensation to be an asshole because of what you can contribute to humanity. If it's really so important for you to be an asshole, for you to renounce your first citizenship, to the human race, then suffer the consequences. Nobody said it should be easy - it should be hard. There is no whining in art.

And if the work is good, then still appreciate the work, even the work by the living asshole. Just don't make it easy for the asshole to get away with being a jerk. Ostracize him. Humiliate him. Mock him. If he wants to make his own cost of producing art higher than it needs to be, make him pay every penny.

To go back from the general to the specific, I imagine some of my Nerdrum-following friends and acquaintances will, at some point, stumble on this post. Many of these friends are young; virtually all of them are extremely talented. This Nerdrumism of theirs appears to me to have the fanaticism of youth. It is in the nature of youth - I have suffered through this myself - to attach to heroes. Nerdrum has cultivated himself as a hero to many young artists. He has promulgated a system of virtues, many of which are legitimate virtues, and he has promulgated his own work as the ne plus ultra of quality and legitimacy. Part of becoming an adult is learning to recognize the faults of your heroes. It is learning to identify a set of principles which you can reliably advocate, and learning to separate those principles from men. It is a difficult and lonely process, setting your principles first and being skeptical even of them. Principles are fallible; our thinking is not perfect. But more fallible than principles are men, and sometimes even our heroes turn out to be cranky old Nazis.

UPDATE April 6, 2011

I notice this post is still getting a lot of traffic. I feel obliged to add that if anyone is thinking of using material from this post to prosecute Mr. Nerdrum under any ridiculous European hate speech laws, I will do everything I can to undermine the utility of my writing as evidence in the case.

Actus Purus

Or, the perfect actualization, called God.

This medieval Christian term seems to descend from Aristotle's conception of God. For Aristotle, that which exists has properties which can be divided into the actual, which is a realized and existing property of the thing, and the potential, a property of the thing which does not exist now but which may come to be. The potential is converted into the actual by means of an external cause. Aristotle, reasoning backward through the chain of effects and their causes, reaches to the first cause, the first mover, which he calls God. Because this mover is the first, it must be unchanged, unmoved, unaffected, by other causes. It has no potentiality - it is pure actuality.

There is an opposite quantity, called prima materia by the alchemists: the formless base of matter, all potential, no actualization.

Aristotle makes no claims, as far as I can tell, for the actual existence of prima materia, the way he does for actus purus. All things in the world, says Aristotle, are a little of both; and God is only one.

He has more to say about it, but let's not get into that. Instead, let's look at an image we've looked at a million times before, and see if we can't see something new in it:


First, let's think about it in terms of a literal application of this actus purus/prima materia dichotomy. Naturally, in a work of art you can't have a literal interpretation of very abstract philosophical ideas. But in this image, Michelangelo gives us a God in a state of very high motion - the cloth on his robes shows him moving, and he is surrounded by fluttering forms, a frenzy of motion. He stretches forward, he reaches toward Adam. His potential for motion is actualized, and his potential for action is actualized. He is an actus purus.

Adam, on the other hand, is barely risen above prima materia. His muscles do not tense in order to act - he takes no action. God's finger reaches actively, Adam's finger droops passively. Adam's forehead is smooth, God's is furrowed. God acts out of a block of complex forms, swooping cloth and angels; Adam sits on a vague landscape, formless colors suggesting the Earth.

This is one reading of this scene. Let's take another reading. God acts; Adam does not act. Who is the more powerful, in the psychological dynamics of this interaction? Adam lets God come to him; Adam, in his passivity, drives an active God into a maelstrom of passions. It is Adam who is the superior, and moreover, he is superior in the form we traditionally ascribe to the feminine: by merely showing himself, being himself, languidly, he inspires action in the masculine party.

But perhaps it is not fair to Michelangelo to describe him from a modern perspective like this. Let's rephrase the same thing in terms of the Aristotelian concepts. Who is the unmoved mover here? Again, it is Adam. In the narrative, God's touch will cause Adam to gain motion. But in the picture actually at hand, Adam does nothing for God, and God does everything for Adam. Adam causes God to move; God does not cause Adam to move. This is a scene of first things, and in any scene of first things, we find a first cause. Adam is the first cause; God's motions are that which is caused.

So - interesting, a little: a sphinx of an image, shimmering between one interpretation and another inside of a single set of concepts. Who is the first mover here? It depends on what you're looking for.

But one ought not to read too much into it. Michelangelo surely knew something of the Aristotelian concepts and their scholastic Christian interpretation. But he was an artist. He almost certaintly did not intellectually derive this image from a logical process; he probably had this image simply pop into his head, an intuitive outcome of everything he knew, and of his inspiration.

Why think about it in these terms at all then? Because it is very difficult to look at something familiar with new eyes. The Mona Lisa, the Sistine Ceiling - we are in danger of losing them, because of their familiarity. If we experiment with analyzing them from an alien perspective, legitimate or not, we can scrape the scales from our eyes and see them again in their dazzling originality. We can restore to them the shock of the new.

UPDATE

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