Those Hideous Forms

Let's take a look at my hotel in Minneapolis last week:


Where was I staying, the Overlook? Not quite. But I would like to draw your attention to a certain shape on the hall carpets:


Here are similar shapes elsewhere in the pattern:


Can you bear another?


To you, these might appear to be innocent loops. To me, there is something utterly hideous about them. Something unnatural, gleaming with threat. A loop should be circular, or close to circular. These elongated loops - these are terrible shapes. I recognized them as soon as I looked at the carpet. I haven't thought much about the evil loop before, but it does appear elsewhere. Look at the blank heads of De Chirico's metaphysical mannequins in The Disquieting Muses:


It is the same elongated loop. And what is similar to a loop? A dome. Here is a natural dome, a good dome designed by Dr. William Thornton in accord with the good lord's own plan for domes:


Here is an elongated dome, a hideous dome:


Nice one, Michigan.

Since I saw that carpet in Minneapolis, I have been thinking about what I detest about this murderous shape. I phrased it like this - you take an ordinary human head. This head has a generally round shape. It is the throne of nature, of intelligence, of beauty. Stretch it out as De Chirico does, and empty it of features. It becomes an uncanny shadow of the natural, stripped of intelligence, outside the question of beauty. Is it empty? Perhaps it is empty of matter, or filled with a homogeneous stuff. But it retains a kind of muted awareness. A blinking, vague, malignant awareness. If you stumbled upon it in the day, it would seem inert, lifeless, pitiable. If you should meet it in the night, it might awaken and mutilate you. It is a horrible thing, this head, this long loop.

That's a description, but it's a description of how I feel about it. Outside of me, it makes little sense. Or rather, it makes sense, but it is not necessary; it does not inhere in the object. It inheres in my response to the object.

So what's the point of my describing my mania about this hideous form to you? Because it is a useful example of a fascinating topic. For each of us, the world is not evenly distributed. Some things provoke less response than pure reason implies they ought. Some things provoke as much response as they should - they provoke linear responses, in proportion with their nature. And some provoke utterly disproportionate responses, unique to the distortions of subjectivity and personality we bring to our perceptions.

This final category of thing, the thing that can provoke a disproportionate response, is terribly important to the artist. We cannot force our response to inhere in the object, not exactly. But we can seize hold of our response to the object, and consider it, and become acquainted with the intensity and texture of our response. And then we can seek to convey what we feel - either in a depiction of the object, or by willfully attaching the response to the depiction of another object convenient to the art piece in question.

This is a large part of the source of intensity in art. It is not linear alone; it depends on unreasonable intensity in ourselves. Art which draws on this intensity has that quality of the creative, the original, the strange, which we are searching for all the time. We must recognize our intensity where we find it, and make it a tool in our toolbox.

Today's Thought on Picasso

Extreme expressionistic stylization of visual phenomena is all well and good, but in order to depict the stylized figure, it is:

(a) necessary to develop an idiom of representation which is stylized in an artistically worthwhile way and
(b) necessary to develop an idiom of representation sufficiently unrealistic that its departures from reality do not read as mistakes.

Property (b) is absolutely vital. If you don't do it, it doesn't look stylized. It just looks like you can't draw. A critic once said of Gauguin that he simply didn't draw well enough.


I think this problem, insufficient and inconsistent stylization, is what made the idea occur to the critic.

Picasso is a master of this type of figural stylization, the "I meant to do that" effect.

On Undecidable Propositions

So... maybe I'm not as done talking about Professor Kuspit as, at first, I thought. I'm reading his book, The End of Art, which is very interesting. I'd like to discuss a point he raises, but given my absolutely crap track record for interpreting him correctly, let me say that any text not actually in quotation marks does not necessarily represent Kuspit's thinking. Even if I say it does. Just take it with a grain of salt, is all I'm saying.

Kuspit devotes a lot of time and energy to having it out with Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp, you may remember, is the fellow who gave us this:


That's the "readymade," the famous urinal converted - presto - into art on Duchamp's say-so. It's been all downhill for art since then, basically. Here's what caught my eye in Kuspit's discussion:

"Clearly the readymade has a double meaning. It is a conundrum, a Gordian knot that no intellectual sword can cut. Simultaneously an art and non-art object, the readymade has no fixed identity. Regarded as art, it spontaneously reverts to non-art. It collapses into banality the moment the spectator takes it seriously as art, and becomes serious art the moment the spectator dismisses it as a banal object. Just as the spectator critically reacts to it, thinking about and looking at it in a more creative way than he thinks about and looks at non-art objects, it becomes one of those non-art objects. The readymade always outsmarts the spectator, outwitting his interpretation of it ... it...remains indecipherable. It is absurd..."

(p. 23)

Now, there's nothing I like more than an ontologically ambiguous phenomenon! And who doesn't, really? Sometime, we'll talk about De Chirico. But not today.

Frankly, I had never given much thought to Duchamp's readymades before, because basically, it's a goddamn urinal, so who cares? I had never experienced this frisson of the irresolvable that Kuspit describes. But his description of this particular frisson was immediately familiar. He describes an object which, when contemplated, triggers an endless oscillation between two unstable states, the acceptance of either of which immediately causes a collapse of the state and a recoil to the opposed state. Why is that familiar? Because it is exactly the same frisson triggered by the following sentence:

This statement is a lie.

Think about it for a second, you'll see what I mean.

The urinal dates to 1917. The sentence comes to our attention in 1931. It is the plain-language example of Kurt Gödel's first incompleteness theorem. Imagine a theory, called T. A slightly less plain-language version of the statement is called "sentence G for the theory T," or the Gödel sentence:

G cannot be proved to be true within the theory T.

The incompleteness theorem is a devastating discovery which effectively ended a program, championed by Bertrand Russell, David Hilbert, and the adorable Gottlob Frege, to put mathematics on a really solid footing by finally demonstrating the completeness and consistency of certain absolutely necessary and fundamental mathematical propositions.

"Completeness" and "consistency" have special meanings here. A "complete" system is capable only of generating statements that can be proved or disproved inside the system. A "consistent" system is incapable of generating statements that can be both proved and disproved in the system. Got that?

1. Completeness: capable of generating only statements that can be either proved or disproved within the system

2. Consistent: incapable of generating statements that can be both proved and disproved within the system

For the system of fundamental mathematics to live up to the hopes of Russell, Hilbert, and Frege, it must be both complete and consistent. What Gödel does is to prove that *no* system capable of generating a theory of fundamental mathematics can be both complete and consistent. If it is complete, it is inconsistent. If it is consistent, it is incomplete.

Incidentally, you haven't missed how Gödel proves this, because I haven't described it here. It's fiendishly complicated and involves a lot of notation that you'd probably be happier not knowing. It's a short book, if you're really interested. A short book, but if you're anything like me, a long fricking read.

What's interesting for our purposes here is that Kuspit's description of his experience of looking at Duchamp's urinal is categorically identical with the experience of looking at the deadly Gödel sentence. Given that, let us entertain for a moment the possibility that the Duchamp urinal is a Gödel sentence. Wow! What would that mean?

It would mean that art, when looked at from a certain perspective, can be functionally considered to be a formal system of logic. It would mean that the urinal is a statement, consistent with the language of this system, which makes an assertion that is undecidable within the system.

Well, what is the character of this system? And what assertion is the urinal making?

A system is a set: it is a set of axioms and theorems. One really important property of sets is that they should define what they include and don't include. How is the set defined? This property, the formation of the boundary of the set, allows the analyst to distinguish between relevant and irrelevant phenomena when conducting an analysis of the set. For instance, "1 + 1 = 2" is an important member of the set of fundamental mathematics. "Meow" is not.

In the art context, defining the boundaries of the set amounts to answering the question: What is art?

Whoa! Holy shit! The big question!

What Duchamp has done, in proposing the urinal as a work of art by signing it, is to point out a contradiction implicit in the set of axioms which underlie the definition of art. Axioms are statements taken to be true (though not proven) at the base of a logical system. Good axiom selection involves picking axioms that generate a minimum number of inconsistent results (theorems).

Well, art has a little axiom problem with its boundary definition. Duchamp has figured out that we have at least two axioms determining the boundary of the set we call art:

Axiom 1: "Art" consists of that set of human-produced objects which use aesthetic means to produce some kind of enlightening transformation in the viewer.

Axiom 2: "Art" consists of that set of objects produced by people called "artists" who come up to you and tell you that the thing they just made is "art."

Feel free to re-interpret axiom 1 as you like, depending on your personal tastes. Axiom 2 you'd have a hard time arguing with in any consistent way.

Duchamp, noticing the not-necessarily-identical outputs of axiom 1 and axiom 2, has gone ahead and generated an object which, under axiom 1, is "not-art," and under axiom 2, is "art." Because both axioms are deeply and viscerally active to the modern art viewer, Duchamp's object produces a sense of rapid and unstable oscillation between art and non-art states, as described by Kuspit: it is a contradictory object, a basilisk, a Gödel sentence.

Any artist could have done this at any time, because this problem has always existed in art and is intuitively obvious to any working artist. But before Duchamp, there had kind of been a tacit agreement among artists not to be a total dick about it. Functionally speaking, the artists would exploit axiom 2, while ensuring that they did their best not to violate axiom 1.

Duchamp's innovation lies not in his insight, but in the audacity of his barbarity. Just because you're the first rapist doesn't mean nobody thought of committing rape before. They just had the sense not to do it. Duchamp's program is not constructive, in the sense of seeking to highlight logical problems in order to point a way toward resolving them, as best as possible. His program is destructive; he highlights problems in order to wreck trust in the relevant system. In so doing, he discredits everything previously generated by the system, and shuts down subsequent use of the system.

In a sense, it is a salutary effect, because it forces us from the age of naive art-making to the age of willful art-making, with regard to that aspect of art which corresponds with a logical system. You might call the urinal one of my prime numbers, even though it is not, in itself, productive. And you would do well not to forget this: art is not a logical system.

However, the logical system aspect of art is obviously an important part of it, and since the urinal, a good deal of speculation on the axiomatic problem - What is art? - has gone on. I myself am not particularly a philosophical purist, so I like Roger Kimball's rough-and-ready solution to the problem:

"...the real issue is not whether a given object or behavior qualifies as art but rather whether it should be regarded as good art. In other words, what we need is not definitional ostracism but informed and robust criticism."

(p. 53, Art's Prospect)

You see what he does here? He demotes Axiom 1 - the "aesthetics and transformation" axiom - from its status as a definer of boundaries. He leaves only axiom 2 to define the set of objects called "art." But having done so, he immediately re-applies axiom 1 as an axiom, not of definition, but of criticism.

That works for me, but I tell you what. I described this idea to my wife, Charlotte, who is nothing if not skeptical, and she said, "That's really begging the question, isn't it? I mean, if you want to focus on what good art is, you're presupposing an answer to the question of what art is, aren't you?"

More on Charlotte's opinions soon. In the meantime, here's a huge-ass painting I just finished that I am very happy with, because any time you get to use a lot of cobalt blue, you can't help walking away happy:

Rachel's Room
2010, oil on canvas, 72"x48"

Four

Now, among the many things I owe you, is an explanation of what I was doing at a talk given by Donald Kuspit. So at the risk of boring you with the details of my real-world life a little more, let me clear up what happened. I thought of a bit of a fun way to lead you through the story.

This is a good place to start:


What's that? That's the art magazine section at the Union Square Barnes & Noble on May 14, 2010. The numbered circles are art magazines in which I was currently featured: 1. International Artist, 2. American Art Collector, 3. Art+Auction, and 4. Modern Painters. I took the picture because "four" is a personal record.

Of most interest to us at the moment is #2, American Art Collector. What am I doing in there? Well, they like to print pictures of paintings that have sold because collectors spotted the artist in their pages. I happen to have just recently sold this painting:


I told you about this back in March. The collector, Howard Tullman, first saw me in American Art Collector. Who is Howard Tullman?

This guy:


We're standing in front of my painting The Shock. I'm the one of the left. Yeah, that's me. There are a lot of scorching hot artists out there. Sadly, I'm not one of them. What are you going to do? I'm pretty happy anyway.

Maidman, you ask, in what room are you standing with a collector from Chicago, and a framed painting of yours on the wall?

Funny you should ask. That's a large meeting room at the Roger Smith Hotel, in midtown Manhattan. The reason the three of us - me, Tullman, and the painting - are all together there is that that place was hosting The Great Nude Invitational Figurative Arts Fair (first annual):

Plus also, I smoke.

I participated in this fair, with two paintings, The Shock and the larger Red:


That's Red in the middle there, by the bartender, who was an incredibly nice guy. And while I'm at it, here's me outside the hotel with the model, Lillian (on the right), and another model, Claudia, whom I am looking forward to working with, and who writes a just wonderful blog on art and modeling, which I have recommended to you before:


Back to the point. One of the organizers of this fair is - well, let's call him Professor Kuspit. He is a professor, and I think Mr. doesn't really indicate the amount of substantial critical and analytic work he has generated over time. Which is a lot. My mom was reading him when she was getting her MFA.

Not to imply I have an MFA. I don't.

So this panel discussion of which I speak, which touched on matters of Mondrian and woman-hating, was part of the art fair. The panel included Professor Kuspit and Vincent Desiderio, who is quite an accomplished figurative painter and a friend of Kuspit's. Clearly very fond of one another, they have developed a smooth patter consisting of dropping nuts on each other. This is delightful to watch, because they fall into a classic comedic counterpoint: Kuspit plays the slow-speaking, thoughtful, kind of crotchety elder. Desiderio plays the hot-headed, impassioned youth. Both have a good sense of comic timing, in terms of pauses and in terms of when to let the personae drop. This dynamic led to the single funniest moment in the panel, when both deployed our old friend, wit, to reply instantly to a question:


So that's how I wound up attending a panel where Donald Kuspit was speaking. Next we'll get back to talking about art, and I promise "next" doesn't mean "when hell freezes over."

Mondrian

I just finished a painting which, by an amusing coincidence, is directly related to a talk I heard over the weekend by Donald Kuspit, an art historian, professor, and critic for ArtForum. Kuspit was advancing the thesis that abstraction in art is anti-feminine to its core. Proceeding from the predominance of representations of women in the earliest known art, and the continuous quest for integration of the parts (with women ever as the subjects) thereafter, he contends that the modern art movement, first with its fragmentation, and then with its complete abstraction, is in large part an anti-female movement.

Well, that's a lot to swallow, and I'm not entirely convinced, although the macho swagger we associate with Jackson Pollock and the "men's men" artists, certainly give it the intuitive ring of at least a half-truth.

Anyhow, Kuspit cited Piet Mondrian as evidence for his argument. The contention is that Mondrian's straight-line abstractions are not only implicitly misogynistic (women being associated with curves), but explicitly misogynistic in the stated aesthetics of Mondrian himself. A little googling has gotten me only this for textual support:

The New Plastic in Painting, a text published in the first issues of the journal De Stijl in 1917, defines "representation of any kind" as "predominantly female art." The historical dominance of representation is the expression in art of "oppression by the female, a legacy of the old mentality," which "in our time... stil weighs so heavily on life and on art that there is little room for male-female equilibrium." The way to the establishment of this equilibrium can be sown by "abstract-real" art (Mondrian's earlier term for his "neoplastic" art), where it is given form in particular by the relation between feminine horizontality and masculine verticality. The victory of the masculine principle of abstraction is evidenced by the disappearance of curves, with all lines "tensed," as Mondrian put it, by the dynamism of rational control.

Well, at least as much of that statement is interpretation by the authors of the passage (from Critical Terms for Art History, Robert S. Nelson, Richard Shiff) as it is old Piet himself. But assuming it to be correct for a moment, it seems to suggest that Kuspit, by focusing on the "masculinity" of the straight line, is elliding Mondrian's own proposition on the male-female duality of straight lines, depending on their vertical/horizontal orientation. In a sense, Mondrian has made two statements about whether or not straight lines are entirely masculine, and Kuspit is taking the less dualistic statement for the entirety of the argument.

But let's take Kuspit at his word, that the Mondrian pictorial system is anti-female. Well, that brings us to this painting I happen to have been working on, which I am calling Integrity, because, again, I suck at names. Here's the painting:

That would be a female model (Jordan), integrated into a single relaxed form so much as I and the wonderful Jordan were able, and painted in a manner I borrowed as much as possible from the great integrator, Da Vinci (I used the color scheme of the early Renaissance for the flesh, and the pictorial convention of the fresco for the emphatic outline). From its conception, I wanted this figure, with its organic irregularity and unity, to sit in front of a Mondrian. So I hunted around until I found this 1921 Mondrian here. I think it's called Untitled:

By means of simple photoshop tricks, I eliminated the colors and thinned the lines:

Then I rotated it until it I felt like it serendipitously matched the divisions of the figure:

Then I placed it into the painting:

So I happened to have foregrounded, in a way, the very point that Kuspit was making, by bringing the warm, integrated, organic, and feminine image into juxtaposed conflict with the cold linear Mondrian grid. What the effect of this conflict is in terms of the final painting, I cannot say - that's up to the viewer.

Maidman, you may be wondering, are you some kind of an intellectual?

No. I'm not anti-intellectual as regards my work, but I would say that I'm non-intellectual. What this means is that I am open to an intellectual interpretation of work, but my work does not arise from an intellectual mechanism. I didn't sit down and say, "Well, I'd like to explore the conflict between the masculinized modernist paradigm and the classical concept of the feminine." I drew Jordan at a life drawing workshop, and the painting just popped into my head. It seemed like it would be a good painting, so I painted it. That's more or less how all of my paintings happen.

But you could ask me the question, "Are you some kind of an intellectual?" from another angle. You could say, "Do you believe that paintings have intellectual content?"

I would say to you, sure they do. I will even go so far as to say that they are capable of having profound, complex, and even revelatory intellectual content. But I will not hold with the critics in contending that this content is particularly historically important. I think you're looking at a certain excitable revolutionary quality to the French with or without Liberty Leading the People:

And I think you're looking at The Terror with or without the Death of Marat:

I think paintings can illustrate the thought of the times, and prophesy the thought of the ages following. But I do not think that one woman more or fewer gotten beaten up, snubbed, or leered at based on Mondrian's frankly idiotic musings. People are people, and history has more important things to shape it than pictures. Pictures are one doorway to the transcendental, but the transcendental is hardly, to date, the prime motivating force of mankind.

No doubt I will find reason to argue against this position regarding the role of art at some later date.

A final note: Mondrian came to mind for this painting because I happen to like Mondrian. I've got a soft spot for Mondrian, Sol LeWitt, and all artistic geometers, because had I been one whit less interested in girls and more interested in number theory, I might have been a mathematician myself.

Next time I will explain what on earth I was doing at a talk by Donald Kuspit.

UPDATE: WHOOPS

If you've been following this blog, you know that I've navigated some pretty tricky reasoning based on involved neurological research. I try hard not to misunderstand or misrepresent the work of the scientists and scholars I cite.

Well, I sure did it here. Donald Kuspit clarifies that he did not say abstraction per se was anti-feminine. His point was in regard to Mondrian only, and based on the solid documentary evidence that Mondrian called the curved line female, and the straight line male, and then went right on ahead and did away with curved lines in his work.

With typical categorical abandon, I extended Kuspit's argument to cover the entire rest of abstract art. So, uh... just ignore this post. And many apologies to Mr. Kuspit.

The Prime Number Model of Progress in the Visual Arts

Well, this is going to be a philosophy-for-poets sort of a post.

Just so I myself don't forget, I'm working (not very fast) on 1. two more posts about edges and edge-detection, one of which is basically just a long reply to Chris's comment on the last post and 2. two more posts about the depiction of eyes. One requires some art-historical research, and the other requires finding a bunch of images that are tough to find.

Down to business. Consider this: we can't help agonizing about whether we are doing something "new" in art. Well, mostly, we're not. Imagine being the first guy to contrast blue and orange in a picture! Wow - that must have been one hell of a thing, and that guy was probably very pleased with his genius, and his friends probably bought him dinner until he got to be all insufferable about his own awesomeness. Then he had to top himself. So what does he do? Violet and yellow!

step to this

That guy's friends resign themselves to Mr. Artistic Genius having done it again. Nobody has ever thought of this before! And when they get tired of his attitude, what stunt does he pull next? He invents Christmas, that's what he does:

...and then he lives happily ever after, because who could hate Christmas?

But now all the juxtapositions of complementary colors have been discovered. Nobody will ever again be the first person to juxtapose the big six complementary colors. So art moves on. Some other new thing is required, if new things are what we seek.

In the history of art so far, there is a finite list of discoveries of absolutely fundamental new things. Complementary color. Value. Line. Shape. The figure. The still life. The landscape. Narrative scene-making. Perspective. Anatomy. Psychology.

Notice that these discoveries gradually become more complex. The simple ones come first, the tricky ones emerge once the simple ones are available and mastered.

Now let's look at prime numbers. For those of you who have forgotten, those are the integers evenly divisible only by 1 and themselves. Of the first 100 integers, 25 are prime numbers:

2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, 31, 37, 41, 43, 47, 53, 59, 61, 67, 71, 73, 79, 83, 89, 97

By gentleman's agreement, 1 is excluded from this list.

I am a dirty monotheist.

If you look closely, though, you'll notice that the density of prime numbers falls across this interval. Of the first ten integers, four are primes. Of the ten integers between 91 and 100, one is a prime. Two properties of the distribution of primes across the integers have been proven:

1. Primes are infinite in number.
2. Primes continue to get scarcer.

How to predict the locations of large primes in the vast universe of integers has occupied the brains of some unusually clever mathematicians, leading to formulations like this:

scary!

And this:

scarier!

And yet for all this cleverness, nobody has found a road map to the large and increasingly rare primes. Computers still find big ones, but even when they do, these elusive leviathans take a while to prove their bona fides. For instance, this is a prime number:

648621027630345·2²⁵³⁸²⁴-1

It is the second largest known Sophie Germain prime, discovered in 2009. All ye need to know, and this you figured out for yourself, is that it lacks the grace and intuitive clarity of your 3, your 5, or your 7.

You can see where I'm going with this. I'm proposing that new, genuinely new, things in art are like the primes. There were a lot of them at the beginning. But they get rarer over time; rarer, and less intuitively beautiful. We will never run out of them, but increasingly, it will take centuries, and then millenia, to discover them. After all, we cannot assign a computer to the problem of innovation in art, because art is an artifact of the interaction of the soul and the universe. Every new discovery will demand a larger number of artists broken on the wheel of fruitless effort. Not just lousy artists either; geniuses, who had they been lucky enough to be born earlier, would have discovered the juxtaposition of complementary colors.

This presents a quandary to the artist. What should he attempt to accomplish? We have discovered so many fundamental things about art, art-primes if you like, that each art-prime is like a village, or a city. Each has a community of artists devoted to it, who live in the comfort of its fire, which is not a new fire, but has neither ceased to shed heat and light. Moreover, there are roads between these art-prime cities, well-traveled roads of familiar composites. Just as 10 is the composite product of two primes, 2 and 5, so your average Matisse or Picasso is a composite of two art-primes, line and color.

It is enough to live on these cities and to travel these roads. Our current art culture places a very high value on discovery of new art-primes, but they are rarely to be had, and many loudly-hailed discoveries turn out to be composites, or nullities. Many artists set out on the path of discovery, but few are rewarded.

My belief, in fact, is that the next art-prime will be discovered by someone who isn't looking for it. That's how it goes in human affairs. Do you think Proust sat down and said, "I'm going to invent Proust On Time?" I don't think so. I think he had a good idea, maybe he thought it was even a new idea, but I don't think he thought it was a New Idea. So he started writing, and when he got done, he said, "Well, that's a hell of a thing." And then he died.

So it will go in the visual arts. Some hard-working resident of a city of the known will strike out in a slightly new direction; he will not conceive it as a totally new direction, just something a little different to try, to set himself apart from the crowd, or to respond to that inner drive which is how most people think of art. And when he gets done, he will have changed the world, and made it larger and more glorious. But his innovation will not be so clear and beautiful as the complementary colors. It will not have the intuitive unity of a 2; it will be the artistic equivalent of a large and incomprehensible Sophie Germain prime. It will take many years for other artists to understand what this one accidental innovator has accomplished.

Now that I've written it out, I suppose this is a very dark view of innovation in the visual arts. But we are not young, as artists, any longer. If we continue to pursue the visual arts, we will either grow more mature and more comprehensive, or we will find some unanticipated way to reset the clock and become like children again.

For my part, I have painted this, and it is getting a little bit of attention as part of an art fair I am participating in this week:

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

A note on methodology: one of the things I like most about science and math is that it provides just wonderful similes for things in the humanities. In this respect, science and math are like the Bible. What could more perfectly capture how it is tough to enter, and tough to leave, a close relationship, than the concept of the Coulomb barrier? At the same time, while such similes are marvelous, they should not be mistaken for metaphors or identities. One thing is not the other thing. I cannot abide people who think that quantum mechanics "proves" Zen buddhism. Some things are structurally similar to other things, so that if you understand the structure of one, you can understand what is meant by comparing it with the other. This is the full extent of what I mean when I say that progress in the visual arts is like the series of prime numbers.

Wit

First, let me apologize for being a lousy blogger.

Second, let me apologize for a post only tangentially related to art. But this seems important to me. Trust me, there's a point to this.

A little background: fans of the movie Alien tend to be fans of the movie Predator as well. Alien involves insectoid parasitic aliens which, on the whole, display the level of intelligence of a ferocious animal:

your basic alien

Predator involves vaguely rasta-looking crustacean-like aliens with a level of technology somewhat more advanced than that of humans. Unlike humans, the predators (or at least the ones we meet) all have an obsession with big-game hunting that makes Teddy Roosevelt look like Francis of Assisi. The big game in question is, naturally, humans:

My interests include Bob Marley, reasoning, and ripping the spines out of humans.

Now, fans of the aliens and the predators spent several decades hoping to finally see a movie where the predators fight the aliens. And this movie was released, to much hoopla in the relevant community, in 2004. In an unexpected twist, it was called Alien Versus Predator, or, for the reading-challenged, AVP:


Let me jump tracks a little bit. Last year, the Star Trek movies were "rebooted" with a movie called, oddly, Star Trek, but which might as well have been called Star Trek Begins. It was another origin story, following the familiar characters as young hotties in space-hero school and on their first mission. Anton Yelchin played Ensign Pavel Chekov:

the new guy is on the left

Yelchin is directed to really play up Chekov's Russian accent for laughs, which gives us words like Wictor, Wulcan, and inwisible throughout the movie.

All of this is set-up for a joke.

The other evening, I was hanging out with my friend Ehren Gresehover, who is by all accounts a pretty funny guy. We were talking about some educational organization called AWP. I asked him what AWP stands for. He scrunched up his face for a second, and then broke into a broad trouble-making grin and said, in his best Chekov accent, "Alien Wersus Predator."

I burst out laughing.

This joke was funny, but more apropos of my interest here, it was witty. I've been thinking a little bit about what I mean by that, by thinking of a comment as witty. As usual, I have done next to no reading on the topic (if there's one thing I can't stand reading, it's essays of the very genres I tend to write essays in myself - what could be more boring than people thinking things over?). My conclusion was this: wit depends on the following sequence of events:

1. A provoking stimulus is offered.
2. A wide-ranging, nearly instantaneous survey is made of connections of the stimulus to other applicable data.
3. A synthesis is performed involving at least two broadly disparate data points. The synthesis is offered in the form of the witty comment.

The synthesis has the quality not only of bringing two or more apparently-unrelated or obscurely-related data points into play, but of being a formulation which highlights the absurdity or incongruity of the synthesis itself. If possible, the synthesis also sheds unexpected light on the stimulus topic, so that at the same time as absurdity is deployed, so too does an insight emerge.

In about 0.78 seconds Ehren made the leap from AWP to the iconic letters AVP, and from there justified the substitution of the V with a W by means of reference to a second shared bit of geek movie history in the same pop-scifi genre; and spit out a formulation that mocked the excessive use of acronyms by bureaucratic organizations.

Wit is hard as hell. And perhaps the hardest thing about it is step 2. Wit is extremely time-dependent. You can't come up with a witty comment slowly. Part of what makes it witty is that it's fast. Oscar Wilde was said to be fast. Salman Rushdie is said to be fast. Ehren Gresehover is fast.

While a joke might make us laugh, wit tends to inspire awe, envy, and admiration. Why? Because the qualities it evinces are qualities which we already accept as strongly applicable to good thinking in general: an enormous storehouse of remembered information on many topics, the ability to access it, and the ability to make unexpected connections within it that synthesize a new and distinct information-entity that has an insight-value which did not exist in the raw background information. So wit, in a sense, is an index of mental virtue.

Wit is relevant to art because an examination of wit points up the structure of this underlying virtue. In art we are sometimes unconstrained by time. Oscar Wilde, after all, can compose The Importance of Being Earnest as slowly as he pleases. But the benefit of this lack of time-restriction is likely less important than you would think. Most of his best jokes in that play probably emerged as rapidly as he would have spoken them. Time allowed him to polish and to revise, but to create in the first place, he had to be in the witty zone - and you cannot get in that zone without being witty in the first place.

Nonetheless, time helps, especially if you're not particularly witty. Let me give you a full disclaimer: I'm not a very witty guy myself. But I am always chasing after the underlying mental virtues which wit brings to the fore. And this applies to my art as much as to anything else. I have made, and continue to make, a broad study of other paintings and drawings. I also watch people closely and try to remember the interesting or distinctive things they do. And a million other bits of data gathering...

The ardent painter will not study the techniques of painting alone. He or she will study the history of art, the history of literature, and life in general, and will train him or herself in memory and memory-access. He or she will practice synthesis. Without this multi-step skill, a painting can have deep emotion, it can have originality - but it cannot have a willfully dense idea-matrix.

Sometimes the idea-matrix opposes deep emotion. But wit is graceful, it looks effortless. This opposition, of idea to emotion, is a function of lack of skill. Ideally, one reaches to a state of integrating these elements without thinking about it because that is what a mastered skill is: you can stop thinking about it. When you essay an effort in the field, you just apply the mastered skill autonomically.

So I hope you can understand the applicability of wit to the problem of making art. Wit is a sign-post; it is a handy reference point. It reminds us of an important principle in becoming a kind of all-encompassing artist. We aren't functioning under the short deadline of wit. In fact, we have years if need be. But the skills that produce wit are the same skills that produce conceptually-dense painting. They are worth pursuing, I think.

Let's Talk About Necks

After all, one of our most faithful readers is a nosferatu anyway.

Before I get to necks directly, let me share with you a really smart thing my wife Charlotte once said to me. This was a few years ago, when I was deep in the midst of getting up and running with getting paintings to look like things at all. Think about what the beginning oil painter faces. On the one hand, there is the world. On the other hand, there is a viscous fluid to be applied to a surface, and then pushed around perhaps, by means of bundles of hair. And this ridiculous procedure is meant to produce a configuration of pigment which resembles something in the world! Outrageous! When I began, I thought of oil paints as being like the chariot of the sun: unimaginably powerful, and nearly impossible to control. And I still think of them like that. What sublime color and richness of tone! And what a nightmarish goal, to coordinate their willful movement into something with grace, with resemblance...

So anyhow, I was working on a painting, and I said something like, "I would like to get the hands right on this one." And clever Charlotte said, "What you should do is get everything right." And I said, "What means this - this strange idea of getting everything right?" And she said, "You can't settle for doing a good job in one spot, and letting the rest of it be a mess. Every part of it should work. It should be perfect."

Now, if Steve Wright is reading this, Steve, I know you hate the idea of "perfect." So you can just go ahead and substitute "works" for "perfect." It means the same thing in this context. At that time, I was accepting that parts of my paintings did not work:

The Burning of the City I, oil on canvas, 2005-6

And after that, I didn't. I redoubled my efforts and made sure that everything, to the greatest extent I could make it work, worked. Which brings us to necks.

Necks are up there with the muscles of the upper back and shoulders among the parts of the body with the most complex visible structures. The surface appearance of the neck is the outcome of several complicated layers of muscle, as well as fat, certain cartilaginous structures, the mind-bogglingly stupid hyoid bone, and not a few blood vessels.

These structures are complex, and worse, they are in constant flux. The multiple layers of small muscles move in response to breathing, jaw tension and movement, and the micro-positioning of the head; and these factors in turn vary not only because of issues of position, action, and fatigue, but because of emotions and thoughts. A person's neck, no less than their forehead, responds minutely to what they are feeling and thinking.

The upshot of this complexity is that a great many artists who are, overall, very good at depicting the human figure, just completely screw up the neck. And it's not necessarily an obvious problem; rather, they deploy a generic depiction which reads as "good enough" to the eye. But this is the "good enough" against which Charlotte warns. The complete figure in the painting should have a neck that is not just believable, but that is theirs, in all of its subtlety and emotive power (if you don't think you see necks as emotive, trust me, you do, you just don't register it consciously; it's one of those weird things that works like that).

Now, am I going to offer an example of this failure of the neck from some living painter who is considered good at figurative painting? Hell no. I'm a working artist - I might have to be friendly with these people later. I'll burn my bridges when I get to them.

Fortunately for us, I do have an example to share with you. I am happy to be friends with Sarah Boardman, a painter and adventurer living in Colorado. She has been doing some lovely black-and-white portraits lately which she generously offers as sacrificial lambs for this post. Here's the first portrait:

Grey Day Into Light, 2010

Now, this is a rapidly sketched-out piece that happened in a burst of inspiration. Every artist hopes for days like these, when you just move into the zone and the necessary thing pours out of you. The subtle emotion of the face, the distribution of tones across the canvas - all are beautiful. But take a look at that neck. The main structures are sketched in, but once you start to think about it, they're not really convincing. The head doesn't rest on them; they do not turn quite properly with the rotation of the head. The neck is in shadow, but that's no reason for the few visible details not to work. And these do not work. It drove Sarah nuts when she realized the flaw.

Displaying what I think is commendable discipline, Sarah didn't fix it: despite the neck, the painting works. Overworking a fundamental flaw would have ruined it, so she gritted her teeth and let it go. She moved on to this painting, executed in a similar state of carefree inevitability, of painting in the zone:

Ambiguity, 2010

You see that? Now the neck works. The folds caused by its rotation are present, the play of light across the laryngeal structures is accurate, and it contributes to our understanding of the person painted. How?

The neck is not tensed. So despite the ambivalence of the facial expression, we subliminally understand that the subject is not preparing for a fight-or-flight response. And this makes her vulnerable in a way that the face alone cannot convey. What we are allowed to see here is a private and solitary moment of doubt - or a moment of doubt in the company of somebody who is absolutely trusted; the expression makes the painting sincere - but the neck makes the painting intimate. That's what a neck that works can add to a painting.

Let's assume for a second that I've convinced you of the importance of a well-observed neck. So, you say, how am I supposed to learn this tao of necks? Well, there's never any magic trick, so I would answer, as ever, the hard way:

Superficial muscles of the neck


Deeper muscles of the neck

Those are studies I did from cadaver dissections. As with all of my anatomical work, I don't consciously think about this stuff every time I draw or paint a person. Rather, I have become intuitively familiar with the anatomy and with the typical behaviors of the anatomy, so that I can organize the chaos of sensory data into a coherent schema when I am working.

But structure alone is insufficient for a true rendering of the neck. Remember the other key component - the response of the neck to emotion and thought. There is only a hard way for learning to depict this as well: you just have to watch people intently for a long time, and really think about what you're seeing. And eventually, you'll learn. I'm not writing this from any sense of lofty accomplishment. I'm not done with this process of learning, I never can be. It's just that this method of careful and ongoing observation and practice is the only one I've ever stumbled on that has allowed me to make any progress at all...

But the first step is to become aware of the neck as a pivotal component of a good depiction of a person. That said, let's take a look at a few really impressive necks:

Caravaggio, of course. Here we have two emotionally impressive necks. Notice the striation of raised fibers at the base of Christ's neck. The muscles here (don't ask me the names; I never learn the names of anything) are tense. Because he's in an unnatural position and because he's in pain.

Expressing an entirely different emotion, the muscles in the neck of the flagellator on the left are also tensed. This is a response to the motion and tension of his jaw and shoulders - this pattern of tension is the tension of aggression. You might never think about these cords of muscle, standing out from the neck, but you will definitely integrate them into your understanding of the dynamics of the scene.

Now let's take a look at Parmigianino's Madonna of the Long Neck:

Awooga! That is a long neck! Notice that Parmigianino has balanced two opposed necessities in his depiction: forms are defined at the base, indicating that the neck is, indeed, supporting the head. And yet the upper part of the neck is more purely columnar, suggesting a state of muscular relaxation - of serenity. The unusual length is involved with Parmigianino's Mannerism, Mannerism being a school of art involving getting so awesome at anatomy that you can blatantly screw around with it and still make your figures work.

Go to Barnes and Noble

Hello, happy few! Let me share this with you:

Maidman, you say, what is this?

Allow me to answer in several parts:

Background: a quilted wall-hanging Charlotte made for me, using the loose "rooftop pattern" pioneered by the quilting savants of Gee's Bend.
Middle ground: me, painting.
Forward middle ground: a painting.
Foreground: Leah, the subject of a painting.
Context: printed in the "about the artist" section of my article in the April-May issue of International Artist.
Additional consideration: They put another picture of me working on the cover of the magazine.
Conclusion: Go to Barnes and Noble and buy yourself a copy.

My piece is on page 80. It's got a bunch of my paintings and some more of that deathless prose you've grown to tolerate. I hope you like it! And if you've got any questions or comments, don't hesitate to let me know and I'll try to answer.

Edges and Edge Detection Part 3: The Funny Pages

Well, it's been a while since we talked about lines and edges. The first two posts are here and here. But the discussion was not yet complete. Let's turn now to an incredibly rich resource for consideration of line and edges: comic books.

There are a few reasons the comics are such a fantastic resource. The obvious reason is that they generally consist of line drawings. So a distinct typology of styles has emerged, within which individual variations provide further material for thought. The less-obvious reason is this: when you look at a single picture, you can look at it for a while, and then you go away and look at something else. Sure, you can stick around for a long time, but usually you won't - although my friend Shawn apparently once spent a couple days with his jaw on the floor in front of Las Meninas, a thoroughly understandable response:


But that's an unusual case. Generally, you don't spend that long looking at a painting or a single drawing. But when you read a comic book, you have to spend a longer time with the visual idiom of the artist who did the drawings. And that lets you test the effect of their visual idiom on your brain - is it satisfying? Does it annoy? Only when serious time and energy demands are made on your attention can these qualities of experience emerge. And in turn, analyzing these qualities of experience can help to tell you how you understand line and edge.

By my lights, there is a broad divide in comic book drawings, between consistent-line-weight artists and variable-line-weight artists. On the consistent-line-weight side of the room we have Dave Gibbons, who drew Watchmen:


We also have the mighty Jean-Giraud Moebius:


I'm sorry, I can't resist - here's some more Moebius. You can't eat just one...


And increasingly over the course of his career, we have Jaime Hernandez:

I could include others - Adrian Tomine, François Schuiten, Milo Manara - but as you know by now, I am nothing if not obsessed with brevity.

These artists do vary their line weight sometimes, but it is always a considered process, a conscious and willed alteration of their natural inclination to use an unvarying line weight throughout their work. It does not emerge organically, but as an outcome of choice. Contrast them with such artists as Jaime's brother Gilbert:

If you haven't read the Hernandez Brothers (Love and Rockets), I cannot recommend them highly enough, by the way. Here's a little more Gilbert:
As you can see, his line weight is fluid - it varies throughout his images, spontaneously and intuitively reflecting the emphasis he sees at any given time. The same is true of R. Crumb's drawing, although within a narrower range:


More Crumb:

(An aside - those of you familiar with Crumb will know that he always crowds the hell out of his compositions. I see this overgrown horror vacui as a variant of the graphomaniac impulse which claimed his brother Charles:
But enough about that.)

Beyond other artists, however, we have the interesting case of Frank Miller. Miller is a strong follower of the expressionistic line. Sometimes he goes so far with it that he approaches the woodcut:

Other times he remains tighter, although still using wide line-weight variation within a single image:
Here's another panel from the same epic comic, The Dark Knight Returns, so you can get more of an idea of what I mean:
Because Miller's line is so organic and emotional, you can also tell when he just does not give a damn - particularly in DK2, the rather catastrophic sequel which, I assume, he was argued into doing by means of dumpsters full of cash:


Again, in a single panel, it's tough to get the feeling of it, but if you read the whole comic, you form a powerful impression of not trying hard.

Now, we've established that there exist in the comics two broad veins of line aesthetics: the line of unvarying weight, and the line of varying weight.

This in itself is interesting. But as I mentioned before, a topic of real utility to the artist is studying the brain's response to sustained exposure to each type of line. For my part, I have the following experience:

I find it incredibly irritating to read a long stretch of Watchmen. The writing is very good, and on first glance, the art is just delightful - so crisp, so clean, so clear. When I first read it, I was struck by the counter-intuitive experience of being frustrated with its look after enjoying it so much at first. To a lesser extent, this is true of the other uniform-line-weight artists I have mentioned, particularly Moebius, the other purist apart from Gibbons. No matter what narrative topic these artists treat, there is something airless to their drawings after a while, something without vitality.

On the other hand, the most visually comfortable experience I have ever had reading a comic book was Dark Knight Returns. There is a wild variation in line weight throughout the book, and yet on the whole, it seems to poise within a nearly perfect balance of control and chaos, clarity and occlusion. No other book of Miller's comes close - he rarely shows the discipline to keep his line as controlled as he does in Dark Knight - check Sin City or DK2 or even Ronin.

However, this comfort that I describe distinctly fails to apply to the other expressionists I have mentioned here. I find it really, really difficult to look at Crumb for any length of time. I find it easier to look at Jaime's thin-line drawings than Gilbert's variable-line drawings over the course of a story.

What gives?

Here's my theory. My theory is this. When the brain reduces the world to perceived line, it gives lines variable weights over the entire visual field. I'm sure Margaret Livingstone and her neuroscience cabal will, at some point, figure out a way to actually reproduce this line-reduced visual field.

So when you look at a drawing of uniform line-weight, it is unnatural. If you look at something drawn in this idiom for any length of time, it will produce fatigue, because your brain is looking for something that isn't there - the same way that looking at a computer monitor for a long time produces fatigue, because your brain is seeking image resolution that doesn't exist. It is difficult to become conscious of this fatigue directly, because a well-drawn single-weight line drawing has everything in the right place, as Gibbons and Moebius have everything in the right place. So your conscious marker for cognitive legitimacy is met. But your unconscious need for variability of line weight goes hungry.

The only chance you have of experiencing a "natural" - that is, cognitively accurate - line drawing is if the line drawing has variable weight. However, not all variable-weight line drawings are equal. Why not? Because the cognitive process has a set of rules for the weight it assigns to each line segment it uses in reducing the visual field to information.

What are the rules? I have no fucking clue. I will tell you this - in life drawing class, they nag you a lot to make the lines thicker where weight is resting on the edge (say, the underside line of the butt of someone sitting). So there's an idea - mass and line weight go together. I personally have always tended to ignore this rule, and I suspect that the real rules are much more complex.

My contention, then, is that once in a blue moon, a Frank Miller intuitively grasps something very like the brain's own native set of line-weight rules and produces a sustained passage, such as Dark Knight Returns, in which he matches those rules and produces a comic that is visually effortless to read. Well, visually effortless for me, anyway. Let's not forget that brains are different from one another.

On the other hand, a Crumb or a Gilbert is deploying a set of line-weight rules that goes contrary to the brain's (my brain's) sense of where line weight should go. And this produces a different sensation than the no-variation-line fatigue. It produces a kind of recoil, a sense not of the unnaturally affectless, but the anti-naturally perverse.

(Another aside: my comments on the interaction of line with the brain are not meant to be taken as "Miller good/Gibbon bad." Good and bad do not depend on conformity with certain cognitive properties of the human mind.)

So what's the point of all this? The point is that this thinking about line in comics gives us a wide-ranging insight into the qualities of line that help to define our work as artists. Do we want to produce the subliminal effects of the uniform line weight, the naturally variable line weight, or the unnaturally variable line weight? Before art is an art, art is a craft. And any good craftsman will tell you - know your tools and master your tools. So when we try to understand what line means, we are trying to master one of the main tools of art.

More soon - or more likely, not so soon.