My Problem With Landscapes

I recently painted this cityscape:

Jade Street, oil on canvas, 30"x24"

This took a long time to paint, by my standards - days and days. By the end, I was so close to it that I had trouble stepping back to evaluate whether it was any good. It was very difficult to paint, and I had lots of time to think about why it should be so difficult. It wasn't an issue of detail alone - give me a good hand or nose, and I don't mind an obstreperous amount of detail. But forcing myself to sit down for a day of painting light on fire escapes was like pulling teeth (good teeth, not rotten loose ones).

I developed a theory, which I'll share with you, but in advance, I should warn you that I also developed a simpler second theory, which will make you laugh. I'll get to that at the end.

So my first theory, the complicated one, was as follows. Let's start with some observations that our friends Mr. Turner and Mr. Dickens inspire in our friend Mr. Ruskin:

In his American Notes, I remember Dickens notices the same truth, describing himself as lying drowsily on the barge deck, looking not at, but through the sky. And if you look intensely at the pure blue of a serene sky, you will see that there is a variety and fulness in its very repose. It is not a flat dead colour, but a deep, quivering, transparent body of penetrable air, in which you trace or imagine short falling spots of deceiving light, and dim shades, faint veiled vestiges of dark vapour; and it is this trembling transparency which our great modern master [Turner] has especially aimed at and given. His blue is never laid on in smooth coats, but in breaking, mingling, melting hues, a quarter of an inch of which, cut off from all the rest of the picture, is still spacious, still infinite and immeasurable in depth.

- John Ruskin, Of Modern Painters, I (1843)

J. M. W. Turner, Norham Castle, Sunrise, 1845

What is particularly important here - absolutely key, in fact - is that distinction that Ruskin uses Dickens to make, between looking at and looking through. In order to paint space properly, one must paint through depths upon depths. The eye cannot be allowed to stop upon a thing, without considering the thing as part of a continuum of space before it and beyond it. That continuous space must be allowed to override the thing suspended in it. The thing is less important, the space more important. The thing serves only to modulate and evoke the space.

In practice, some of what this means is a willingness to paint not a representation of objects, but a transcription of retinal impressions. This premise - to paint a pattern of colors striking the back of the eyeball - was heightened to explicit exaggeration among the impressionists, of course:

Claude Monet, Waterloo Bridge, London, circa 1903

But even without the radical steps the impressionists took, the successful landscape has always been a matter of subsuming objects in an overall concept of space. Before the innovation of the retinal method, painters used a different trick: heightened coordination of the elements of design to produce an impression of volume. Consider this:

Jan Vermeer, View of Delft, circa 1660-1661
p.s. i've been there, and it looks like that

Here, Vermeer has coordinated dazzling contrasts of value and saturation in order to describe a cool bright afternoon. Without that shadowed cloud at the top of the composition, the composition fails:


It becomes flat, overbright. But with that dark cloud, the composition is suffused with sunlight - only the brightness of the sun can produce that shadowed cloud, and by reference to the shadow, we understand the brightness. The image does not read as being so bright as the trimmed version - but in our minds, we understand a greater brightness. This is a function of the artful manipulation of the elements of design.

Returning to the impression of volume - that dark cloud moves the composition from in front of the viewer, to in front of and over - the clouds extend into a foreground not limited by the picture frame. The composition reaches up into height and forward into the viewing space.

As in the cases of Ruskin and Turner, and of the impressionists, the importance of any particular object is subordinate to the importance of the contribution of the object to the creation of the space. This, to me, is what makes a landscape work.

It is, unfortunately, exactly the opposite of how I see.

By nature, I look at, not into. I am object-oriented and, for me, the visual field begins and nearly ends with objects. This cognitive trait was much more obvious in my early paintings, before I figured out how to get it under control:

Sitting, oil on canvas, 36"x24", 2005

That's near the beginning of my painting adventure. Consider me one year later, with much better control over the paint, but still only dimly aware of the exclusive object-orientation of my natural mode of seeing:

Crouching Nude, oil on canvas, 48"x24", 2006

Now let's jump to 2010:

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

That's me huffing and puffing as hard as I can to put my figure into a plausible space, and it's one of the most successful instances of it to date. But for all the softening of the forms, you can still see that each object is specific and discrete - they are objects related plausibly in a geometrical space, not objects subsumed into the gestalt of a unified space.

In my drawings, I still usually indulge my object-orientation completely, isolating my figures from any occupied space at all:

Maya, pencil on paper, 15"x11", 2010

Well, that's me, and I can live with that - I'm still working on it, and I'm fortunate enough that my inspiration doesn't run in the direction of expressing itself through space. I have other loci of expression that interest me more.

But I would like to paint a nice landscape now and then, and this is where I run into trouble. Let's go back to the cityscape:


Now you can see that, even if your first glance gave you an impression of a coherent scene, from my perspective, it is an agglomeration of details. I have flat affect of the detail sensibility - the details are arranged in depth, but they are treated without a hierarchy of relative importance. They are a heap of details, organized in such a way as to produce an impression of space. The details retain primacy, not the space.

I am not arguing that my painting is a bad painting. It is possible to make successful landscapes within this paradigm. Consider Georgia O'Keeffe:

Georgia O'Keeffe, Radiator Building, Night, New York, 1927

O'Keeffe is a totally object-oriented painter, and this orientation doesn't cease when she turns her attention from objects to spaces.

Consider also Edward Hopper:

Edward Hopper, Early Sunday Morning, 1930

Hopper comes close to space-orientation over object-orientation, but he remains, for me, on the object end of the representational range. When people consider the silence and stasis of his paintings, they often discuss his vivid colors, his isolated figures, and the lack of moving objects in his scenes. I would argue that his distinctive silence and stasis, so full of menace and loneliness, owe just as much to a kind of airless isolation of his scenes into objects, with all the unnatural clarity that comes from the technique. He shares this property with some of the Ashcan school:

George Bellows, Men of the Docks, 1912

By means of this we see that from the early to middle part of the 20th century, the most memorable American landscape painting operated within the conceptualization of the object, as opposed to that of the space. I think this results from at least two major factors:

1. The impact of modern architecture and industry on the understanding of space. Whereas nature, ancient cities, and classical architecture tend toward such a high density of detail that they produce continuous variation of the visual field, the modern skyscraper and tenement, and the implements of modern industry, tend toward the straight line and the discrete visual unit. This produces an overall bias toward the object and the geometrical space over the unified space.

2. A kind of willful pictorial naivete animates these works for me: a self-conscious expression of the outsider quality of art from colonies struggling to maintain a painting culture after their separation from the motherland tradition. This tendency was unselfconscious in the older, and truly godawful, American colonial painting, but as America worked to define itself apart from Europe in the twentieth century, pre-abstract artists turned toward whatever tools were handy, and this outsider quality was one of them.

For my part, I would not mind painting in this idiom (and I'm not suggesting that I've matched O'Keeffe, Hopper, and Bellows - far from it), only I am constrained to do so by my current shortcomings. It is not a choice, but a limit. I don't mind making art bounded by my limits, but I do mind not broadening my limits once I recognize them.

Let me offer you a little more from Mr. Ruskin:

Now what I particularly wish to insist upon, is the state of vision in which all the details of an object are seen, and yet seen in such confusion and disorder that we cannot in the least tell what they are, or what they mean. It is not mist between us and the object, still less is it shade, still less is it want of character; it is a confusion, a mystery, an interfering of undecided lines with each other, not a diminution of their number; window and door, architrave and frieze, all are there: it is no cold and vacant mass, it is full and rich and abundant, and yet you cannot see a single form so as to know what it is.

- John Ruskin, Of Modern Painters, I (1843)

It is this indistinct pregnancy which I cannot quite let go enough to produce. When I have talked about painting the ambiguities of things in other posts, I have meant seeing things clearly enough to find that they were ambiguous in and of themselves, and learning to paint that ambiguity. I never advocated for the defeat, the inevitable defeat, of the attempt at sight - ambiguity from a flaw in the perception, not a quality in the perceived. Ruskin says:

You always see something, but you never see all.

And it is this which, despite its transparent truthfulness, I cannot cease to war with. I want absolute sight.

You know where you go if you completely indulge the will to absolute sight? Terrible, terrible trompe l'oeil painting: painting with a degree of detail far beyond anything that mimics a natural mode of visual cognition. I would rather be a good artist than give free rein to any of my quirks. So I have trained myself to let go, to some extent, in my figures, but I have not yet broadened the scope, as it needs broadening, to handle landscapes.

I finished this painting a few days ago. We've been following its progress for a while on this blog:

The Black and White War, 60"x72" on two canvases

As you can see, the figures are geometrically emplaced in a scene. However, knowing my oddity of spatial representation, I accounted for my kind of looney disconnect of objects from one another in the total design of the painting. It's supposed to be weird. On the other hand, I got a very pleasant bonus in the course of painting that endless background:

detail

Those are the farther arches seen under the arm of the figure on the right.They are satisfyingly blurred, to me. They have the blur of objects seen clearly, and yet from far away; objects approaching Ruskin's disorder.

So there's hope.

Now, that was my first theory of what my problem is with landscapes.

Let me tell you my second theory, which occurred to me the other day while I was planning out this post.

My second theory is that I'm not very good at landscapes because I don't look at landscapes or make pictures of them very much.

This second theory could also explain all the evidence - all that complicated stuff I was just talking about could be true, and yet it could all be just a function of the fact that I haven't practiced learning to see landscapes as I have practiced learning to see people and things.

As usual, I expect it's a bit of both.

A little endnote here: The image of The Black and White War was originally inspired by a very broad reading of the phrase "the Eight-by-Eight War," in China Mieville's novel Un Lun Dun. This is a war which is known to have happened, but nobody remembers who won it. The only survivors are a white bishop and a red-black bishop, who are also still waiting on word of the outcome. Mieville is a sort of fantastical modern Dickens, a master of the depiction of cities. He is dark and industrial in sensibility, and his stories are set in densely detailed alternatives to our ordinary world. I highly recommend giving him a read.

UPDATE 3-22-11

Something that was so obvious I completely forgot to mention it - the painting Jade Street is based on a photograph taken by my friend Jade, who is a really talented photographer. I almost never see a photograph that I feel so intensely about that I have a need to paint it - but as soon as I saw those looming, threatening clouds in Jade's photograph, I felt an overpowering urge to paint them, and the rest of the scene they were a part of. So I asked if she'd send me a high-resolution version and give me her permission to paint it, and she very generously did both. I ought to warn you that if any of you buys this painting, a percentage of the proceeds are going to go straight to the Save the Jade Foundation.

Industrial Object #1

One of the little perks of being a painter is that, when gift-giving occasions arise and all else fails, you can paint something for a present. I try to gear my present paintings to the interests of the person getting them. For instance, my wife enjoys knitting and quilting, and she's also a big fan of graceful industrial design (the business with the minimal curves again). This means that she's very fond of her antique Singer sewing machine. Therefore, for Christmas, I decided to do a painting of the machine. Here's what I came up with:

Singer, 36"x12," oil on canvas, 2010

I'm not sure how it is with you, but I find that selling paintings of nudes falls somewhere between dragon-slayingly difficult and black-hole-escapingly impossible. This problem can lead to pants-shitsingly bad finances. So one of my little habits is to notice when I paint a non-nude and don't have a totally miserable time doing it. Because there are lots of subjects people do want on their wall, apart from landscapes (which are very difficult for me for reasons I'll be explaining in an upcoming post). When I stumble on something that isn't a naked woman that I actually enjoy making a representation of, I pay attention. If I feel like I can keep integrity while pursuing the subject - if I discover that the subject can be genuinely inspiring - then I'll keep at it. My aversion to hackery is stronger than my need to sell paintings.

In the case of this Christmas painting, I found that my life-long affection for heavy industrial parts translated into, perhaps unsurprisingly, pleasure in painting heavy industrial parts. So I decided to see where I could go with that. Here's my first effort devoted consciously to the subject:

Industrial Object #1, 36"x36," 2011

What's that substance in the background? That's silver leaf. Silver leaf is an ultra-thin, ultra-light form of flattened silver. Putting silver leaf on a canvas will make you tear your hair out, because if there's one thing silver leaf doesn't want to do, it's whatever it is you want it to do. Fortunately, I had advice from a really talented artist and overall nice guy, Brad Kunkle, who is incredibly good with metal leaf. Follow that link - you won't be disappointed.

I was pleased with the result of this first effort. I wanted it to be partway to abstraction, a question of shape and texture as much as it is one of object. I also wanted it to be cold, menacing, cruel even. I think it's that as well - it is large in person, and not very scrutable.

So I'm going to do some more of them, and see how that goes.

While I'm working on that, perhaps you'd like to go check out the April 2011 issue of Poets/Artists, a very cool online art magazine which has included work by a lot of artists I admire. I've been lobbying to get into it for a while, and the editor, Didi Menendez, decided to run an article on me in the new issue. This rad picture of me is on page 5:

your humble correspondent, posing like he was a badass or something

And the article is on pages 67-70. Industrial Object #1 is on page 70. Hard copies can be ordered here, if you need a hard copy for some reason.

Oh, and as long as I'm busy tooting my own horn, if you're in Kansas City, MO, you might want to drop by Hilliard Gallery. My painting You Will Not Be Forgiven is in a group show of figurative paintings there.

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

If you are running a dryer, and open it, a sock will very likely come flying out. As usual, I have lots of ideas chasing themselves around my head, and I hope I'll get a chance to present you some more socks soon.

A Wee Bit More on Foreshortening

You remember how, recently, I was claiming that foreshortening is all in your head? Not long after that, I drew a drawing that illustrated, for me anyway, that very point:

Alley, 2011, pencil on paper, 15"x11"

There are two ways you would ordinarily think to describe Alley's face in this drawing - either as "viewed from a low angle" or "foreshortened." Now, why would you think it was foreshortened? Functionally speaking, the head is like a sphere. And as I explained in the earlier post ad nauseam, a sphere is just as foreshortened from any angle as from any other angle. You think of the head as foreshortened because the plane you are most used to seeing face-on - the actual plane of the face - is seen in foreshortened perspective. The classification "foreshortened" is, in this instance, demonstrably arbitrary: it distinguishes between a familiar perspective and an unfamiliar perspective, on an object which has no fundamental topological distinction between the two perspectives.

Let's turn to Rabbi Nachman of Bratslov (1772-1810) for the moral of this story:

"The whole world is a very narrow bridge, and the most important thing, is not to be afraid at all."

Oh, there's another moral to the story - I nearly forgot. This same drawing is included here; that's my first blog post at artistdaily.com, the online presence of American Artist magazine. If you're enjoying this blog, you might want to check in with me over there sometimes too. The posts will be just like these ones, except for they'll be much briefer, more technical, and won't include any swearing. So actually, they'll be nothing like these posts. Except for, ahem, the authorial voice. Woo hoo, authorial voice! Anyhoo, I'm psyched.

Thoughts on Beauty V: Beauty in Art

My friends, it has been a while (I've been dreadfully busy), but we have finally come to a place where we can claim that this line of reasoning has something to do with art.

I have a friend, R.C. Speck, who is dazzlingly smart. I don't just mean that he can analyze complex systems quickly, although he can. He has that other quality which I think completes the concept of intelligence: he is creative. He comes at problems from angles you would never have thought of if you were plodding along by logic alone.

He said something to me once that made a big impression on me. I just recently asked him if this thing he said was his - he says he thinks it isn't. But he can't remember where he got it. This is what he said:

"Every trivial truth has an opposite that is false. Every great truth has an opposite that is also true."

This is a very mystical sort of a thing to say, and I have never tried it out empirically. But it has, to me, the ring of the truth. And it is very perplexing - it is more useful to me as an unsolved problem, to think about, than it is as a solved problem, to shelve with the other solved problems. I suppose that makes it a koan.

We will get back to Mr. Speck's koan in a little bit.

So far, we have discussed the experience of beauty, and the two major types of beauty, functional beauty and the beauty of the immaterial. There is much more that could be said - but I haven't got it in me to say it; all I've got left is to consider how these little concepts apply in a practical way to art.

Therefore, let me state the totally obvious: if you want to think about beauty as being found in things of high functional-aesthetic value, and high soulfulness, then you will naturally have art that, in evoking beauty, evokes the one, or the other, or both.

For my part, I consider the distinction between these two types of art as being a distinction between art of trivial beauty and art of great beauty.

Here we come to the ugly business of examples. Ugly, because I know my key example for trivial beauty is near and dear to at least a few of you. Let me take a moment to tell you a funny anecdote about the shooting of 300, a film described as "kind of like Herodotus, except the Persians didn't actually have orcs." If you've seen this movie, you may remember that there were some impressive abs on display:

As was previously mentioned, this is Sparta.

These abs resulted from a grueling workout regime instituted by the director, Zack Snyder. Since the regime was so grueling and all, Zack Snyder, in the time-honored manner of good generals, followed it himself. Thus, he could say to his abmen, "Your abs will not suffer in any way I am unwilling that my own abs should suffer."

Now, we're not here to develop our abs, but I want you to know - when I let loose on my example of trivial beauty in art, I have chosen it because it's near and dear to me as well. I'm going out of my way to assault something which I know I love, as you love it, so that you will not think I am simply casting aspersions on art I don't like to begin with.

That said, it's art nouveau.

I have devoted years of my life to art nouveau - I once shot a short film, Venus, which took massive labor (mostly on my part) to render in an entirely art-nouveau style:





For research, I filled a shelf with books on art nouveau and related topics and studied them:


I'm no trifler with art nouveau. But when I think of art that is trivial in its beauty, I think of the endless sumptuous curves of art nouveau:

The Horta House, Brussels

I think of the harmonious colors of art nouveau:

The Met's Tiffany window

And most of all, I think of the overly perfected figures, and treacly emotionality, of the prince and avatar of art nouveau, the incomparable Alphonse Mucha:


Let's get back to Mr. Speck's koan. Under the distinction he draws, the trivial truth has an opposite that is false. And this applies to the beauty of art nouveau. Art nouveau depends for its impact on perfection - a perfection I myself failed to meet with Venus. No curve, no feature, no coordination of the elements can be out of place under the art nouveau system, because the entire edifice fails if any part does not stand. It reverts from magnificent beauty straight to absurdity and pretense, and from there, to ugliness. It is a brittle and specific beauty.

Well, you argue, it is primarily a decorative art; in most cases, function is its very purpose. True - but art nouveau descends largely from the pre-raphaelites, I think it's fair to say.

William Holman Hunt, The Lady of Shalott, c. 1888-1905

Dante Gabriel Rosetti, Proserpine, 1874

John William Waterhouse, Narcissus and Echo, 1903

This movement, begun in the second half of the nineteenth century and ending more or less in 1914 or 1915, as art nouveau itself ended, could be called the fine arts branch of the nouveau aesthetic. It too depends on a nearly obsessive coordination of pictorial elements, stylized depictions of plants, and above all, beautiful people in far-away fairylands expressing their beautiful feelings in beautiful gestures and looks of dismay, transport, or anger.

It's all surface, it's all beautiful, and it all points to the neurotically aestheticized emotions of a decadent culture in a state of crippling decline that ultimately machine-gunned itself into oblivion in the bloody trenches of World War I.

Which is not to say that this work is not cheering to the senses and does not give many people, myself included, much pleasure.

But it is dangerous, dangerous stuff. It asks you to substitute a handful of jewels for your sense of humanity.

Let's turn to some artwork which I think of as beautiful with regard to soulfulness.

Rembrandt, Hendrickje Bathing in a River, 1654

It is so casual, so simple. The robe sketched in, the elements imperfectly arranged around her, the colors stingy, the body carelessly erotic - sexy if that's what you're thinking about; not, if not - and that face, intent, beautiful but ordinary, lit poorly, touched by grace. Where art nouveau has perfected nature to match artfulness, Rembrandt has made art imperfect to match nature.

When I was talking about Spielberg's holy grail last time we met, I was aware that I could be accused of aestheticizing the commonplace, in the same way that Tolkein, for instance, hearkens back to an idealized primeval England while conveniently neglecting the part about pneumonia, starvation, and dying during childbirth. This is a risk, when you discuss the aesthetics of the truthful. It is a risk inherent in the analysis itself. It is best simply to be truthful, and let the dusty academics talk about the aesthetics. So I am playing a double game here: on the one hand, I am an active artist who is trying to make art from a position of truthfulness, as Rembrandt has done, and on the other hand, I am a dusty academic, writing up my analysis of it for you right here. This blog has always been risky for me as an artist - but I am not an artist alone, and I find I have a need to write as well.

Enough about that. Now, when we considered "the opposite of art nouveau" to test Mr. Speck's koan, we considered art nouveau with the elements all screwed up. That seemed like a fair opposite to me; the elements are what makes art nouveau art nouveau. What makes this Rembrandt itself? The person, I would say. The work is subsumed in the vision of the person, the emotion he brings to the person and the emotion she brings to her experience of her life. She is submerged in her world, young and beautiful with regard to form and innocently intent on her action; he is in love with her. What is the opposite of this?

Self-portrait, 1669

He is set apart from any world. He is old, and ugly with regard to form. He is no innocent and takes no action. He is ambivalent about himself - ambivalent to the point of revulsion. This withered Rembrandt is the opposite of adorable Hendrickje. And this picture is as rich in the soulful sort of beauty as the first one. Here Rembrandt has reversed one great truth and found another.

Oh, and you were wondering about the works that have soulful beauty and beauty with regard to form? Sure, let me give you one.

Titian, Venus with a Mirror, 1555

This is one of my favorite paintings in the whole entire world. It's at the National Gallery in Washington, DC, if you want to go take a look for yourself.

So that's what I've got, for now. I know I am far outside the bounds of responsible speculation here, let alone scientific reliability. But this is where my thought leads me - I hope it is at least diverting.

Thoughts on Beauty IV: Beauty as Pertains to the Immaterial

Last time I made a substantive contribution to this discussion, I went on for a while about the beauty of objects with regard to their functionality.

This time, I'd like to discuss beauty as it pertains to soul. But before I get to that, let me add two things:

1. That Saatchi gambit? Totally didn't work. Bummer, right? Thanks for trying though.

2. Many of you have written very thoughtful comments, and I haven't replied to a one of them in a few days. I've just been really busy - family in town, and then me out of town visiting family. I'm off to the Hirshhorn this afternoon, actually, because I'm in Washington, writing to you from a Starbucks in Dupont Circle. But I will get to the comments as soon as I can, and I really appreciate the consideration you are giving this discussion.

OK, so - beauty as it pertains to the immaterial, or for convenience, the soul.

This is the most human form of beauty, and it is visible in those things which are either human, or reflect human action, or are easily anthropomorphized as the outcome of a human-like will. We understand them by reference to ourselves.

Let me give you a good example of the distinction between the beauty of functionality and the beauty of the immaterial. It happens to come from the movie Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. In this movie, Indiana Jones is searching for the cup Jesus drank from at the last supper. I get where he's coming from, I checked behind the sofa for it one time myself.

After much ado, Indy gets to a room guarded by an immortal knight of some sort:

immortal knight of some sort

Indy knows the cup is in the room. Unfortunately, the room is full of cups:

room fulla cups

And they are all really gorgeous cups - big gaudy cups, made of precious metals and gemstones, shiny, well-crafted, and so forth. Now, Indy's plan is to drink from Jesus's cup, because it'll make him immortal. On the downside, if he drinks from the wrong cup, he will rapidly die a growdy death:

stupid Nazi drinks from wrong cup

Stupid Nazi!

So Indy's really got to drink from the right cup.

He looks around the room for a while, and then he spots it - half-hidden on one shelf is a small cup, a humble cup, wretched even. Dull, corroded, spotted, uneven. This is the cup.


Well, this scene is a dramatization of the difference between the beauty of function and the beauty of soulfulness (another example of Steven Spielberg's sterling instinct for stagecraft and viewer prodding). The fact is, both types of cup, the humble and the gaudy, are perfectly well adapted to their basic function - holding liquid. The gaudy cups have some other functions as well: showing off wealth, showing off magnificence of curve, pushing all your buttons for intensity of color and value contrast. But the dull cup is the more beautiful with regard to what we learn about humanity from it. It is made by a hand, with the imperfections of the hand, without much in the way of wealth but with a simple honesty of form. It is not a vainglorious cup, but it is a very moving cup. It is a cup good enough for a savior born in a manger.

Things that are beautiful due to soulfulness have this quality about them. They betray a richness and honesty of emotion, of vitality, of the specificity of character both of the individual who made them and of humanity as a genus. They do not so much appeal to our appreciation of the outward things, the graceful curve and right color, so much as they appeal to our memory of interaction with one another, of emotions we have felt, of our sense of appreciation of each other as conscious beings. They have a quality of voice, of a conversation we have carried on and still carry on.

I submit to you that the beauty of a partly cloudy day, apart from the palpable elements that push our neurological buttons (intensity of light and color) has beauty of soul because it is so marvelously idiosyncratic, so individual, irreplaceably individual. Consider Vermeer's depiction of an afternoon in the View of Delft, 1660-1661:


We cannot get enough of that. It partakes of the miracle of an afternoon categorically the same as any afternoon, and yet in itself, so unique, so particular, that we cannot help having a feeling - ranging from a vague twinge to a fervent belief - that the hand of Someone essentially like ourselves, subject to changing thoughts and emotions, even to whimsy, is hard at work in a workshop somewhere, making afternoons for us to enjoy.

The weather is beautiful, because the world is nearly human in its weather.

Landscapes are beautiful, because they are submerged in the same nutty, human-like individuality:

Claude Monet, Landscape at Rouelles, 1858

When we see the weather, or a landscape, we have a feeling that we live in a world that is animated in a very human way. Or rather, that being human is a discrete small part of a vast continuity which is also, in a profound way, human-like. We rest in the palm of a god who makes sense.

Similarly, we have an experience of beauty when we encounter solid objects made satisfyingly and simply:


They encourage us to recall modesty and industry, to savor our deep inclination to believe that just enough, is all that we need to be happy. They sanctify the tiniest of moments, the most trivial of activities, with a kind of clarity, of joy in the merest instances of doing and of being. This kind of beauty, and the experience it arouses, has little or nothing to do with the beauty of the ideal curve, of the magnificent adaptation. It is the beauty of the kitchen and the yard.

Apart from weather, landscapes, and tools, the beauty of soul is manifest, of course, in the human body. But not in the entire body equally: it is most manifest in the face. As we have discussed previously, we have a separate set of visual processors in the brain tuned specifically to faces. This is important - it tells us that our cognition of the face is separate from our cognition of the body.

What this implies is that we may, quite easily, be prioritizing different modes of beauty when we turn our attention to bodies, and then to faces. My own suspicion is that we prioritize for beauty of function when we consider the body, and beauty of soul when we consider the face. Consider how high a value we put on symmetry of body, and how we recoil from it in the face.

Let me give you a couple of examples of objection to assymetry in the body. First, there is the silent-movie trope of the villainous thug with the single club foot or short leg. And then there is something I get all the time in my paintings: nobody ever comments on an asymmetrical face, but if I show a model with breasts slightly different in size or shape, most people notice immediately, and some object. This is not a reasonable objection. A huge proportion of women have asymmetrical breasts. The objection drives me up the wall. The wall, I tell you.

But the issue arises in the priority system of the mind: symmetrical, functional aesthetics for bodies, asymmetrical, soulful aesthetics for faces. Which is not to say that the aesthetics of function - the curve, the clarity - do not apply to faces. Rather, in faces, the two values are more equally important than they are in most other objects, in determining a perception of beauty.

Look here - many people would be willing to concede that Greta Garbo is a beautiful woman:


But she is by no means a woman of symmetrical features. We have a correspondence in her sculpted crookedness with the asymmetrical aesthetics of soulfulness.

Let me come back to our friend Farrah Fawcett:


Her body is optimized for function, along the lines of the athlete. Her face corresponds with functional aesthetics as well, but it is also optimized for soul: within an overall functional structure, her eyes and mouth are disproportionately large and high in value contrast, allowing emotion to read extremely easily.

I once wrote a post about my favorite sculpture, Rodin's bust of Camille Claudel:


He actually made a more finished sculpture based on this study, called, modestly enough, La France:

But I prefer the Camille Claudel. The simplicity of this sculpture, its offhand, slightly damaged quality, seems to me to betray more of the hand of the sculptor, to be more consistent with the deep melancholy of that beautiful face, so utterly human and soulful.

Yes, there is neurological programming involved in our appreciation of face and body, much more than I've covered here. This entire model of beauty is riven through with places where meaning bumps up against biology, and we are prone to mistaking biological responses for meaningful conclusions. But some part of this outline, I think, also corresponds with a truth.

We'll keep trying.

Vote for Me.

Since I'm still busier than you want to know, let's take a little break from the thoughts on beauty. This is Charles Saatchi:


This is Charles Saatchi's wife:


This is the cover of a book about a show of the Young British Artists, a gang that Saatchi helped shepherd to success. Saatchi is a very successful adman who has become a superstar collector:


This is Charles Saatchi's gallery:


And this is the piece I've entered in a relatively, but not entirely, pointless competition hosted by Charles Saatchi on his website:

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

I know some of you are members of Charles Saatchi's website. So do me a favor, OK? Go over there and vote for my piece. Here's a link:

http://www.saatchionline.com/showdown/match/showdown/3/artist/86403/art/375575

Incidentally, Charles Saatchi is an Iraqi Jew, which I think contributes in no small part to his being freaking hilarious. He has two books out of answers to interview questions, both of which I recommend:

My Name is Charles Saatchi and I am an Artoholic

and

Question

These are seriously funny books.

Here's that voting link again. Please go vote for me:

http://www.saatchionline.com/showdown/match/showdown/3/artist/86403/art/375575

Thanks - and more on beauty soon.