Human Rhinovirus

I have often thought that a truly representative film of a serious painter's life would be quite boring. In order to make great paintings, it is necessary to sit or stand quietly, and do the work. For every hour that Schiele spent hounded in court, or that Picasso spent having women throw crockery at him, or that Caravaggio spent knife-fighting with the Jets:

Caravaggio on a typical Thursday night

...for every hour of that business, there were probably a hundred of work in the studio which would be mind-numbingly dull to watch.

Generally speaking, I am a partisan of the level-headed-life school. I have known bohemians and hipsters, heroin girls and traveling rockers, lotharios and histrionic tyrants and cafe philosophers. All of them were leading interesting lives, and without exception, they failed to produce anything of note.

My own life is of little narrative interest. I have a telecommuting job that is not art, which pays most of my bills. I do it at a place and time of my choosing, although I always choose a coffee shop, and the morning. I spend some time on correspondence early in the afternoon. I go to the studio as frequently as I can, and I try to get home early enough to spend some time with Charlotte. We make an effort to see our friends. Until recently, we had a cat.

This is what you would call the modern form of a middle-class existence.

There is some poet, or something, whose name eludes me now, who advocates for this sort of existence, in order to provide a stable foundation upon which aesthetic flights of fancy can be built; that the energy for drama which resides in every human heart should be reserved for the work, not the life. I think this poet, or whoever he was, had it about right.

Also, consistently with my always-be-wrong approach, he had it wrong, and I bloody well have it wrong too. Somewhere, there is an optimum balance of drama and life, and it is not on the setting-your-watch-by-Immanuel-Kant's-afternoon-stroll end of the spectrum. It may be near it, but it is not there.

I was happily reminded of this by an incident earlier this week. A while back, I showed you this painting, Industrial Object #1:

Industrial Object #1, 36"x36", oil and silver leaf on canvas

Charlotte happens to be out of town right now, and I had been planning on painting Industrial Object #2 last week. Then I was colonized by our friend the cold virus:


This gave me aching joints, a facial headache from sinus pressure, a runny nose, a sore throat, nausea, chills, and dizziness. I decided to try the one-two of megadoses of vitamin C and sleeping in. Eleven hours of sleep later, I could still barely concentrate or summon the will to move. By 3 pm, I hadn't gotten out of bed. Being a good Protestant (I'm not actually a Protestant), I felt massively guilty at my lack of productivity. So I hauled myself up, put on some clothes, and walked the 1.1 miles from my apartment to my studio, very slowly. Then I walked up the four flights of stairs to my studio - also very slowly. I had a bitching headache by the time I got to the top. So I sat for a while in the comfy chair in my studio, feeling like maybe this was a stupid idea and I should go home and get back in bed.

Then I sat down in the uncomfy chair to paint, figuring that once I had a paint brush in my hand, I could settle into doing that, and get it done. I started working on Industrial Object #2, and had to fight the urge to stop as I tackled each new section. I was in a blurry wooze of sickness, but I managed to paint for 9 hours, and painted the entire thing:

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

This wasn't smart and it certainly didn't make me get better faster. The painting itself is cruder than I might have done if I were on top of my game or weren't rushing it. But by god, I really like how it turned out, and I like that it was a stupid move to paint it when I did. It felt invigorating to carry on painting in the face of opposing force.

It is good to cheat circumstance sometimes, and to carry on melodramatically when you ought to stop. None of this should be taken into account in evaluating the work - the work is the work, it doesn't matter how it was made. Rather, it will make you a better artist - or at least, it will make me a better artist - to replicate on any available scale that elemental dying and being born again which characterizes the true artistic act.

It is in dying that the senses are heightened, that the irrelevancies are scoured away, that the final sums are tallied and the ledgers all thrown out. It is in the interval between dying and being born again that the soul, bared and permeable, is exposed to the fundaments of the universe, to the mighty forces that undergird existence itself. It is in being born again that a new world is made, unencumbered by the assumptions, inertia, and detritus that gradually ossified the old world. The new world is fresh, richly colored, and characterized by a continuous state of revelation and discovery.

The artist must, absolutely must, find some means of accessing this new world at regular intervals, or the work becomes stately and old, and soon dies.

A life of continuous adventure leaves no room or energy for the work. A life of Kantish regularity leaves no room for life. The optimum is somewhere in the middle path: a path that gives you substance yet allows your substance to crack often.

A virus gave me the opportunity to walk the middle path this week. All hail the virus.


Postscript: It should be noted, even so, that a movie of this entire episode would have consisted of a dude sitting in a chair, wiping his nose, drinking orange juice, and painting. Very boring.

Always Be Wrong

Back to art.

A while ago, I wrote a long post that could be described as an extended justification of my aversion to the gestural sketch. And let me just say that by god, I was right.

But I was also wrong. And my being wrong in this instance demonstrates, to me at least, that it's important not only to always entertain the possibility of being wrong, but also to be actually wrong, as frequently as your schedule permits.

What happened was this. I was at Spring Street and Leah was modeling, and I decided to try and do the entire figure during the 1-minute and 2-minute poses. Usually, I select some extremely small part of the body and draw it in my usual finicky way for really short poses:


That's how I match my interest in detail with the time constraints. But during this one session with Leah, I felt like I should use the time the way normal people do:


And this was tremendously rewarding: models often take very interesting poses for the short ones - poses they couldn't hold for longer intervals. Ace model and blogger Claudia writes marvelously about it here. That's not all there was to it for me, though. I also had to do something that I don't usually do. Let me explain in terms of my favorite metaphor resource, calculus.

In calculus, the integral of a function is the area underneath the curve defined by the function. Let's look at it visually. You have a curve, that you call a function. The notation for this function is "f(x)." The use of "f" is arbitrary - it could be any letter:

graphic swiped from here

The integral of this function from point a to point b on the x-axis is the area that's shaded green. The integral is represented using the notation printed in the green area in the graphic. A whole big part of intro calculus is figuring out the values of integrals. This is called integration, and there are standard formulae for how to integrate a variety of functions.

The reason integration is a whole big part of intro calculus is that it's hard as hell to do. Sometimes you have to use tricks. One such trick is called integration by parts. Integration by parts is a trick you use when you run into a function you just can't integrate. So you chew on the function for a while, and you realize that this function is actually a product of two simpler functions. If you can integrate those simpler functions, you can apply a special "integration by parts" formula, and integrate your more complicated original function.

Get it?

You have to integrate f(x). But you can't. Then you notice that f(x) = g(x) x h(x). You can integrate g(x) and you can integrate h(x). Given that, you can use a formula that gives you the integral of f(x).

Life drawing, for me, is a process of integration by parts. I can't draw a whole body. Well, I'm lying. I can, but I don't like to. I'm lazy. I like to draw a knee, or a shoulder, or whatever. Those are my g(x) and h(x). So I integrate those parts, and then I use the integration by parts formula to make a whole picture - in this metaphor, f(x) is the function "the entire figure," and the integration by parts formula is "make the parts the right size and in the right place relative to one another."

So my 1-minute pose drawings are usually the raw product of an incomplete integration by parts - the drawings are integrated parts, but the entire function is not integrated.

And my 80-minute drawings, nice though they may be, are also integrated by parts. I have not gone directly for the entire area under the curve. I've just found it out by means of a bunch of tricky steps.

When I did those 1- and 2-minute drawings of Leah, I wasn't using my usual tricks. I was integrating f(x) directly. I did it again with her 5-minute poses:


Doing all of this was like getting a bucket of cold water to the face. It's good for you to get this kind of bucket of cold water to the face sometimes. It reminds you that you're not all that, that things can be tough and you don't know everything.

Also, it opens up new possibilities. For instance, the next week Natalya was modeling at Spring Street, and she did a really cool 10-minute pose. Ordinarily, I wouldn't have noticed the entire pose, because I'd have quickly scanned her for a 10-minute-drawing part, and zoned out on the rest. But because I had just been practicing seeing the entire figure all at once, I saw the whole pose and felt like I ought to draw it:


I like this so much I think I'll make a damn painting of it, that's what I think. So - I got a painting out of my exercise, and I also loosened up my attitude: I brought more life into my work.

In that earlier post, I was right that my brain naturally seizes on details, from which I build up an image. I was wrong that it's reasonable never to go against this tendency.

Why is it important to be wrong?

Let me quote for you a bit of monologue from one of my favorite films, Andrey Tarkovsky's Stalker. This monologue has walked beside me ever since I first heard it:

Let them be helpless like children, because weakness is a great thing, and strength is nothing. When a man is just born, he is weak and flexible. When he dies, he is hard and insensitive. When a tree is growing, it’s tender and pliant. But when it’s dry and hard, it dies. Hardness and strength are death’s companions. Pliancy and weakness are expressions of the freshness of being.

Always be wrong. You will become a better artist if you are wrong than if you are right.

An Object of Beauty

Let's imagine, for a second, that you're an artist. You have decided to crawl out of the comparative paradise of your studio, where your only concern is to make your work, and enter the fallen world - the art world. There is only one fundamental reason you could have for doing this: to succeed.

What do you mean by success? Consider a few of the possibilities:

• having a large number of people you do not know see your work
• providing insight or pleasure to your viewers
• producing work immediately recognized by many strangers as yours
• changing the way art is made
• maximizing sales frequency
• maximizing sale price
• placing your work somewhere that it won't wind up in an attic or a junk shop
• getting on the cover of magazines that specialize in art
• getting on the cover of magazines that do not specialize in art

The art world is a complex phenomenon, and some of these metrics of success conflict with others. And the list, obviously, is incomplete.

The art world can be attacked in many ways. However, it is a system, so for my part, I think of a successful attack as consisting in large part of the same tactic you would use to decode any system: information analysis.

My own analysis is painfully incomplete, but as I see it, the art world (at least in America) consists of several nodes of influence: artists, dealers, collectors, critics, the press, academe, and curators and their hosts - the museums and fairs. Translating this data set from a list to a network produces this outcome:


Where possible, I have grouped as neighbors those nodes which seem most reciprocal in activity. For instance, dealers go beside collectors because each feeds directly on the other through the reciprocal art/money transaction. However, all the nodes are connected and apply force to one another.

Let's go back to you, our hypothetical artist entering the art world. The network of entities seems to you incomprehensible, intimidating, and partly occluded. Understanding the artwork is manifestly a part, not the whole, of understanding the system, consisting as the system does in so many competing interests that only indirectly relate to the content of art.

A good thing to keep in mind, then, is that because this network consists of human beings, it is permeable. Moreover, its permeability is enhanced by the same problem that afflicts keeping a secret in any large group: the large number of individuals tends to include some who are leaky. So this network is not a circular fort. It is a very porous cell.

Here's a very brief summary of what I know about how to penetrate this permeable network:

1. Identify a node to which you have access - any access. If you have no access to any node, concentrate on improving your work until you do.

2. Get to know all of the individuals in this node that you can immediately reach. Learn their interests and biases, and clarify whether you have any complementary interests and biases.

3. If so, develop both your ability to communicate the complementary nature of your interests, and your ability to create and maintain a relationship.

4. Once the relationship is established, figure out the connections between your node and the broader network.

5. Move from one individual to the next, gradually weaving yourself into the wider entity.

That is really all there is to it. As far as I can tell, all progress in the art world, from the most lightning-flash overnight sensation to the slowest career process, from the most Borgia-like machination to the most intuitive flower-child meandering, includes some form of this sequence, executed in different ways, with different players, at different rates.

But keep in mind another consequence of the fact that this porous network consists of human beings - everything you do, you do to a human being. Therefore, you are constrained by morality. And even if you are personally amoral, the gallery assistant you screw today will one day be a museum director with the opportunity to screw you back. So keep the screwings to a minimum.

Now let me add a sixth procedure to my list:

6. Continue to collect information. Even if it has no apparent use, collect it. The entire system is your target, not any one part of it. Know as much of it as you can.

Which brings me to a very interesting book I read recently, on the general principle that I wanted to know more. The book, you may have guessed, is called An Object of Beauty, and Steve Martin wrote it.

Yes, that Steve Martin.

The book is about the art world, and technically, it's a novel. Happily, Mr. Martin isn't going to trouble himself too much with the whole "novel" part, using it to sex up a philosophical essay in the manner made famous by Voltaire and Robert M. Persig. There's a main character, named Lacey Yeager, who is a hot chick:

artist's rendering of Lacey Yeager

The decidedly mixed reviews of the book have frequently taken issue with her alleged lack of interiority, her only explicit narrative characteristics being raving ambition and hot foolings around. These reviewers are missing two things about Yeager: that she's a philosophical cypher, and that the actual narration of the book is essentially the content of her mind, which does nothing for nearly two decades but contemplate art and the art world. The whole book is interiority.

Mr. Martin tackles the art world itself from a similar angle to the one I am espousing here: information analysis. His approach is more sociological than mine. Specifically, he pursues the method of the longitudinal study. A latitudinal study compares a broad array of sociological objects over a short period of time. It's a panoramic snapshot. A longitudinal study selects a smaller number of objects from the available array and follows them over a long period. Their changes reflect and illustrate the subtle workings of the sociological system itself.

An Object of Beauty focuses on three elements in the art world: art, dealers, and collectors. Artists and critics make peripheral appearances, curators and academics hardly any at all. The time period is about 1993-2009.

We started this discussion by talking about leaving the studio, where one makes art, and entering the art world. For a lover of art, a parallel passage is possible. Yeager's passage - occurring not when she enters the art world but when she realizes where she is - gives the book its title:

If a picture had been on the market recently without a sale, she knew it would be less desirable. A deserted painting scared buyers. Why did no one want it? In the trade, it was known as being "burned." Once a picture was burned, the owner had to either drastically reduce the price or sit on it for another seven years until it faded from memory. When Lacey began these computations, her toe crossed ground from which it is difficult to return: she started converting objects of beauty into objects of value.

To me, there is something drily heartbreaking about this passage, in part because I have experienced it myself. Remember, I'm bent, if not hell-bent, on making art a career. This transmogrification, which destroys all, is part of the deal. The key is to split yourself into parts. One part never leaves the studio, and if possible, the other part never enters it. I would say I'm doing not badly, but if you are in a position similar to mine, it is worth making your own psychological accommodations, or you will lose your fucking soul.

Yeager makes accommodations, and while the narrative tragedy of the book is that she does not ultimately succeed in the art world, the thematic tragedy is that she doesn't really get to keep her soul either. The book is sprinkled with sharp passages describing art, but they give way under the pressure of art-dealing to a more completely objects-of-value outlook.

So much for the story. It's Yeager's story, not mine. The rest is delicious portraiture of people and transactions, extracted from all sorts of different nooks and crannies. Here a collector couple examines a Milton Avery painting -

this one, actually

- on sale at Sotheby's, where Yeager starts her career:

"Do you mind?" he said, indicating he would like to take the picture off the wall. He held up the picture and looked closely at it.

"He likes to hold pictures. I say why do you have to hold them?"

"She's right," Saul said amiably, "I don't know what it means, but I do it."

"You do it a lot," said Estelle.

His portrayals of cold people are cold, as in a scene of rivalry between two dealers over the attention of a collector who has invited them to dinner:

Gayle was more like a great basketball player than an art dealer: she unfailingly covered her man, making it impossible for Talley to throw him a pass. However, Talley knew that there would be a moment after dinner when Gayle would have to go vomit, leaving her man wide open.

But he is not inhuman, and neither are they:

He [Flores, the collector] once sneaked into a Manhattan art fair a day before it opened by disguising himself as a janitor in order to get first crack at the best in the show. But Talley thought Gayle had misjudged her man. Flores never thought of himself as a competitor; he just liked art.

The emotional nature of collecting is illustrated in interaction with the corrosion of Yeager's outlook:

...she realized, after sending Patrice Claire a check for eight thousand dollars in Paris, that she hated it [the painting]... This was an eight-thousand-dollar souvenir, the price tag on an exotic and egotistical moment far away. However, it was the most expensive thing she owned, so she hung it in a place of honor...

And the perspective sometimes zooms back to the explicitly systemic:

The collectors liked to meet museum people because one approving word from them about a single painting in a hallway could, by liberal extrapolation, validate an entire collection. Directors liked to meet collectors because maybe they would soon be dead and their collection would come to their museum.

Steve Martin is a collector, and he is at his most natural depicting the quirks and experiences of collectors. But he is at his best depicting dealers, because he's put so much work - observation, research, and imagination alike - into understanding them. His tone reads as detached delight, but once the dust settles, what remains is dismay.

The longitudinal approach yields a timeline of booms and crashes - the booming market of the 90's, the crash following 9/11, the boom, a different kind of boom, in the 00's, and the crash resulting from the general crash of 2008. The cast evolves, grows older, and prospers or fails over time. Each success and failure is a lesson - the book looks like a history, but it is itself a lesson, in the social ecology of a specific corner of the human enterprise.

Enough about it - An Object of Beauty embraces the double-sided nature of becoming engaged in a temporal way with art, so glorious in its interaction with the art itself, so stomach-turning in its politicking and predation - and the glorious part only makes the stomach-turning part more horrific. If you've made the dubious choice to enter into the art world, you ought to read it.

***

Reading back over this, it seems to me a very bleak description of a phenomenon. And it is bleak, but you should not be bleaked out if the issues involved apply to you. For one thing, there is a wonderful line of dialogue in a play by my friend, Mac Rogers (whose plays you should always go to if you can): "There is no 'shouldn't have to' in nature." And for another, we are still discussing human beings, doing the best they can to implement in the world a thing that is essentially immaterial. They fail and do petty and wretched things - the system itself can fail and be petty and wretched. But when engaged in it, you are always in companionship with human beings, with all the joys and complexities of that companionship. I experience kindness and generosity in the art world all the time - and they are not absent from An Object of Beauty either.

Me an' Lorenzo

As some of you may know, I was lucky enough to do a lot of drawings of my model Piera during her pregnancy last year. My wife and I are good friends with Piera and her husband Emanuele. This is a painting of Piera, Emanuele, and their son Lorenzo when he was only a few weeks old:

One Family, oil on canvas, 20"x20"

This is a painting of Piera and Lorenzo, which I just found out got into a show called "On Being Human: Love, Faith, Shame, and Hope" at The Picture Art Foundation, which has a snazzy space at Cal State-Dominguez Hills:

Piera and Lorenzo, oil on canvas, 22"x28"

In the past nine months, we've gotten to know Lorenzo pretty well, and I've noticed that he has three things he is particularly interested in:

1. strong value contrasts
2. saturated colors
3. women

It just so happens these are three things I too am particularly interested in. This Lorenzo, I like him, he's a smart guy.

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.