The Ratjen Collection I: Repetitions

I went down to DC the other week, to deliver this painting to a collector couple whom I am very pleased to have have it:

Rachel at the Cafe, oil on canvas, 30"x24", 2010

While I was in DC, I figured I would go by the National Gallery and visit a few favorite paintings, including the very one which inspired the Rachel painting:

The Girl with the Red Hat, oil on panel, 9"x7 1/16", Johannes Vermeer, 1665/6

But once I got to the gallery, I was diverted from my plan by the current shows, particularly an exhibition with the following catchy title:

German Master Drawings from the Wolfgang Ratjen Collection, 1580-1900

This show is up until January 8. Let's take a look at some of the pieces in it now.

How? I'll tell you how. I wanted to write about a few of the drawings in the show, but it turned out they weren't available on the Web (and I didn't buy the pricey catalogue, so I couldn't scan them for you). But I did find thumbnails of the drawings in one place - the press section of the National Gallery itself. Here, they offered to email you large copies of the images, if you happened to be a press person covering the show. Well, this blog is public, right? And some people read it? So, O happy few, I made my case to the National Gallery and they, in turn, sent me all the pictures my little heart desired. Thus, we're having ourselves a virtual stroll courtesy of the National Gallery. But do me a favor and drop by there in person if you're in DC and you're so inclined. Perhaps you could also loudly talk, while there, about how awesome this blog is.

So - as ever, maybe you're an artist, and maybe you aren't. Artists walk through galleries in a different way from non-artists. They tend to have three primary types of experience: indifference, artistic inspiration, and technical revelation.

An artist undergoing indifference speeds through the show.

An artist undergoing artistic inspiration tends to stand or sit some distance back from a particular work, and stare at it rapt for a while. Also, they may cry. Male artists can do that without seeming unmanly, because artists are special.

An artist undergoing technical revelation tends to have his or her nose as close to the work as the guards will allow, squinting at the marvels of technique the work is revealing.

I had a technical revelation sort of an experience at the Ratjen show. It wasn't even particularly that the revelations were useful to me personally. They were just really interesting. So let's start:

Johann-Evangelist Holzer, German, 1709 - 1740

The Arts and Powers Pay Homage to Emperor Charles VI
1732 pen and brown ink with gray wash, heightened with white, and blue-gray oil paint on brown laid paper
Wolfgang Ratjen Collection, Patrons' Permanent Fund

(It is worth clicking on this thumbnail to see the much larger file - I've never figured out how to post larger pictures on the main blog page, and the conversation below won't make much sense if you don't take a good look at Holzer's drawing.)

What's so interesting about this picture? Remember, this show was in the manner of technical revelation, not artistic inspiration. We aren't going to talk about the grandeur of humanity or anything like that, much. No, what's interesting is those rectangular boards the Arts are holding. I found they produced a marvelous sense of fluttering movement. At first, I thought it was merely the intrusion of flattened geometric objects into the deep and organic pictorial space. Actually, I lied to you - I had ideas for paintings occurring to me the whole time. Imagine collapsing truncated octahedrons and cuboctahedrons littering a frantic image:

truncated octahedron

truncated cuboctahedron

Of course, you go too far with that, you're straying into Dali territory:

Been there. Done that.

So then I returned to this question - why did those boards produce such a sense of motion? And I remembered a sight I think many of our American readers are familiar with - that shifting plane of metallic titles during the fakey "entertainment news" they play before movie trailers at Regal theaters. Amazingly, this is the best image of it I could find on the Web:


This clarified the phenomenon for me: the sense of motion results from the following - we have a form simple enough (a rectangle) that the mind can produce an ultra-rapid rotation of it in three-dimensional space. That is, when we see this rectangle multiple times in the Holzer drawing, we almost instantaneously interpret it in reference to a single Rectangle which we have available in our minds. We do not interpret these multiple rectangles Holzer has drawn entirely as separate objects. Rather, part of our mind sees them as multiple views of a single object; an object moving in space and time. So the drawing contains a sense of motion and fluttering because we have an intuitive sense of a single item moving around in it.

Compare the rectangles with this medieval Mary painting:


To what extent are you thinking of those angels as distinct entities? They are also easily read as repetitions of a single entity, seen in different ways.

It is relatively easy for us to distinguish objects that look different from one another. If you have a banana, an orange, and an apple, you would say you have three fruits. But if you have three identical apples - you'll still say you have three fruits. But the distinction is not as deep. You will also have a gut sense that you have three of one fruit; that, in fact, you have one fruit only.

This is an uncanny concept. We know intellectually that distinct objects are separate objects which must be counted separately. But when they look the same, we cannot quite viscerally believe that we are not looking at a single object. This is the point at which our concept of number itself becomes indistinct. When the object is very simple, the uncanniness is quite obvious - the Holzer drawing flutters uncannily. But when the object is complex, the uncanniness is subtler. The uncanniness of repetition is something I am partial to myself:

Gemini, oil on canvas, 48"x48", 2008


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

I have more to say about other drawings in the Ratjen collection - we'll return to the topic over the course of the week.

There is Nothing You Can Offer Epictetus

Allow me to get all preachy for a minute - as if I weren't all preachy all the time. But artist Marina Ross had something interesting to say in the comment section on that post about scams. She was describing her own experience with a similar scam, and concluded thus:

they tend to target those they think are really desperate so try your best not to be

This reminded me of a few things. First of all, it reminded me of desperation. I've had experience with desperation as it pertains to many different things in life, but this being an art blog, let's talk about desperation and artists. In other words - let's talk again about something aside from art itself.

There are few things less charming than desperation. I've seen artists desperate to sell work. Any fool can sense desperation: the unctuousness, the obsequiousness, the anxiety to stay in the face of the collector, the constant direction of the collector's attention to the work, to this or that aspect of the work - the sweaty forehead and the shining eye, the smell of need. This is a profoundly uncharismatic position to find oneself in, a position depressing to collector and artist alike. It leads later to self-disgust, to self-recrimination. What it hardly ever leads to is a sale…

Proust reminds us that we tend to receive those things we want most once we no longer want them. Of course, he was talking about Odette and Albertine, but he might as well have been talking about art sales. I am in a lucky position, an extremely lucky position: I can paint what I like and treat fairly calmly with collectors, because I have never depended on selling art to make a living. I'm not independently wealthy, I just have the best day job ever (ninja assassin)(I'm not actually a ninja assassin, although that would be sweet).

In another way, I suppose you could say that I am unlucky, because I am not hungry for sales. Hunger is a very important force in art. Hunger gets you into shows, collections, and museums. But I think I am hungry enough for the important part - I am starving to be a good artist. And I will let the rest take care of itself. Personally, I find being broke kind of paralyzing.

Now, moving on from the specifics, I am also reminded of the story of Amyclas, as told by Lucan in the Pharsalia, an incredibly turgid epic he wrote about Julius Caesar from 61-65 AD. The Pharsalia is kind of a ripoff of the Aeneid, which in itself is a ripoff of the Odyssey. This makes the Pharsalia a photocopy of a photocopy, with all the problems that go along with that:

Great epic poet.

OK epic poet.

Really not very good epic poet.

But it does have this bit about Amyclas (book V). Caesar is wandering around a beach at night in lousy weather, trying to find a boat that will take him across a body of water. He notices the very boat beside a hovel, and knocks on the door:

Amyclas from his couch of soft seaweed
Arising, calls: 'What shipwrecked sailor seeks
My humble home? Who hopes for aid from me,
By fates adverse compelled?' He stirs the heap
Upon the hearth, until a tiny spark
Glows in the darkness, and throws wide the door.
Careless of war, he knew that civil strife
Stoops not to cottages. Oh! happy life
That poverty affords! great gift of heaven
Too little understood! what mansion wall,
What temple of the gods, would feel no fear
When Caesar called for entrance?

I first learned of this episode (and of the Pharsalia) from a reference in Dante's Paradiso (XI:67-9, if you must know). Apparently this story was a big deal in the middle ages, illustrating as it does the Christian principle of poverty. And what is the principle? That he from whom you can take nothing, need not fear you. Fear, in this sense, represents being compelled to stray from virtue. Caesar, who rules the world, can do nothing to compel Amyclas to depart from virtue, because he cannot take anything from Amyclas.

This is a powerful principle, but its true scope is clarified better by Epictetus. I had the great good fortune to run into Epictetus at an early enough age to be deeply influenced by his thinking. He was born a slave in Hierapolis, Phrygia (now, like so much else, a part of Turkey) around 55 AD, and eventually got his freedom. His thinking as a philosopher was strongly shaped by his experience of slavery. In fact, I would nominate him as a contender for all-time best generalization of one's personal condition into a universal principle.

Epictetus

Here's what Epictetus has to say about life, conveniently placed at the very beginning of the Enchiridion. I wouldn't try your patience with a long quotation if it weren't worth it:

Some things are in our control and others not. Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our own actions.

The things in our control are by nature free, unrestrained, unhindered; but those not in our control are weak, slavish, restrained, belonging to others. Remember, then, that if you suppose that things which are slavish by nature are also free, and that what belongs to others is your own, then you will be hindered. You will lament, you will be disturbed, and you will find fault both with gods and men. But if you suppose that only to be your own which is your own, and what belongs to others such as it really is, then no one will ever compel you or restrain you. Further, you will find fault with no one or accuse no one. You will do nothing against your will. No one will hurt you, you will have no enemies, and you will not be harmed.

Aiming therefore at such great things, remember that you must not allow yourself to be carried, even with a slight tendency, towards the attainment of lesser things. Instead, you must entirely quit some things and for the present postpone the rest. But if you would both have these great things, along with power and riches, then you will not gain even the latter, because you aim at the former too: but you will absolutely fail of the former, by which alone happiness and freedom are achieved.

Work, therefore to be able to say to every harsh appearance, "You are but an appearance, and not absolutely the thing you appear to be." And then examine it by those rules which you have, and first, and chiefly, by this: whether it concerns the things which are in our own control, or those which are not; and, if it concerns anything not in our control, be prepared to say that it is nothing to you.

Well, that's nice. He's a Stoic (incidentally, a stoa is a porch; the stoics originally sat around shooting the shit on the porch. Me and my buddies used to get high and do that in Carrboro, but nobody called us The Porchmen).

But consider this: Amyclas is fearless because nothing can be taken from him. Epictetus is at peace because he understands that not only can nothing be taken from him, but nothing can be given to him either. His poverty is not conditional, but definitional. What is his, must be his, has always been his, and will always be his. It is inalienable. What is not his he disciplines himself out of caring much for. It comes and goes, but he never considers it as belonging to him. Many of the things he considers not his are things with which it is difficult to part: life, limb, land. He is truly fearsome in what he doesn't consider his:

With regard to whatever objects give you delight, are useful, or are deeply loved, remember to tell yourself of what general nature they are, beginning from the most insignificant things. If, for example, you are fond of a specific ceramic cup, remind yourself that it is only ceramic cups in general of which you are fond. Then, if it breaks, you will not be disturbed. If you kiss your child, or your wife, say that you only kiss things which are human, and thus you will not be disturbed if either of them dies.

In practice, he fell a little short of this degree of detachment, abandoning his famed solitude in old age to adopt an adorable smudge-cheeked orphan and shack up with some dame.

Mrs. Epictetus

Epictetus Jr.

But as a model of living, his idea is compelling, and some several people do seem to reach it.

I have not reached it. However, among the many things flitting around my mind, there is always some measure of Epictetus' idea that we are slaves with regard to many things, and ought to cultivate the detachment of slaves. In this lies freedom - freedom from desperation, freedom to choose and act.

I think this is important for the artist as well. Your art belongs to you. It is inalienable - it runs deeper than Epictetan action because it is, in fact, who you are. But all else is not yours. Sales and lack of sales - recognition and lack of recognition - respect and a good name or their absence - mortality and immortality - these do not belong to you, and you do yourself no good in depending too much on how they turn out. So long as you retain your sense of possession of your art - possession in the sense that you possess your soul - then you have everything you need.

I apologize for the sermonizing; I am not trying to teach you, but rather, to teach myself.

Press

I'm lousy at a lot of things. But for some reason, I'm kind of good at getting into magazines. No idea why. Since October 2009, I think there's only been one month when you couldn't go to Barnes & Noble and pick up a magazine with something or other on me in it. So let me give you the December report:

1. The Artist's Magazine. I was a finalist in their figurative competition, so I got my name - woo hoo! - printed in their finalist list in the December issue.

2. ARTnews. This one I didn't get into through any virtue, talent, or skill of my own. Rather, the enormously generous Claudia directed one of their writers to me after being interviewed herself for an article on models and artists who work with models. The writer, Gail Gregg, also an artist, chatted with me for something like half an hour, and in a short article based on about 75 interviews, made room for me here:

Personal chemistry with the artist turns out to be critical to the success of a model—and to the work that emerges from a session. Many artists, such as Inka Essenhigh, say they prefer models who bring their own personalities—an “air of drama”—to a pose, rather than those who are more passive. Painter Natalie Frank seeks models who “have a kind of beauty that’s a little off, a complicated kind of beauty.” Pearlstein looks for those who are flexible enough to hold difficult poses day after day. And painter Daniel Maidman prefers models with “expressive faces and expressive bodies—which is not the same thing as beauty.”

This makes me very happy - there are lots of art magazines, but at least in the American market, three tower over the rest: ARTnews, Art in America, and Artforum. The article, called Nothing Like the Real Thing, is the first time I've been mentioned in any of 'em.

Why did Claudia think to refer the writer to me? Well, for one thing, she's super-nice. And also because, at the time, we were working on this, which I've shown you a couple times already:

Living Things Came From Her
60"x40", oil on canvas, 2010

Claudia has the expressive face and expressive body, but she happens to be beautiful as well.

I know you'll read this at some point, Claudia. You're the best. Thanks for everything.

Something Hinky

Perhaps I should work up a boilerplate text for the beginnings of posts apologizing for the long intervals between them. Save me some trouble - apologies as always for my extended silence. I've been busy...

This will be a brief and practical post. I have plans for some rambling and impractical posts though!

Down to business. Maybe you're a working artist. Maybe you're not. Get this: I was emailed by an art scammer. That's kind of like trying to scam a homeless dude, I think. Unless your name is Damien Hirst, odds are good that if you're an artist you're not exactly a high capital target.

High. Capital. Target.

Let me share with you the email I got from this misguided clown:

from Louis Hayne loiushaynes@yahoo.co.uk to date Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 7:00 PM subject Interest in your work signed-by gmail.com

Dear

I was going to come over to the United States for christmas holiday and was hoping i could purchase some of your work in person and as it is i do not think i will be coming to USA but am highly interested in purchasing some of your piece so am thinking the best thing to do is have you send me some images of the piece you have available or website to which i can see them and i select the one's that interest me and we can work out payment.I hope to read from you soon.

Regards

Louise

Well, let's just say that I don't have a strong instinct for thinking that people are lying. Because I am myself pretty godawful at lying, as any number of my ex-friends will tell you. So I kind of assume everyone's telling the truth. Obvious signs of questionable intent such as, oh, three spellings of the sender name, one of them imaginary and the others covering two genders, the lack of specific address to me, the undisclosed recipient "To" line - all of those failed to twig my scam alarm. I mean, I didn't get excited because I was like, "There's something kind of hinky about this." You know what set me off though? That horrible, horrible English. What kind of self-respecting, art-collecting Englishmanwoman would mangle our glorious language like that? The language of Shakespeare, of Chaucer, of Milton, of Dante*, of Cervantes†?

I wrote back and traded a few emails with this illiterate dipshit. Finally I concluded that this was not just kind of hinky, but severely hinky. I started googling art scams. I assumed that art scams consisted of amusing anecdotes involving Vermeer and the Nazis, and problematic Salvador Dali prints.

So I was a crook. Bite me.

But it turns out that there are actually some pretty standard scams involving the kind of contact I received. The mechanics are totally weird. Here's how I think works:

1. They send you a cashier's check for the work, and a sizable overpayment for shipping.
2. You deposit the check and it clears. You send the work and record the actual shipping cost.
3. You send them the difference between their shipping overpayment and the actual shipping cost, via Western Union, which makes it impossible to trace the recipient.
4. Some weeks later, your bank figures out the original cashier's check was fake and sends you a letter written in a distinctly cool tone. By then, you're out some artwork (which nobody but you cares about) and the shipping refund (which the scammer cares about).

Can you believe this? It's almost easier to just go ahead and get a job. To the extent I understand the procedure, I am in the debt of one Kathleen McMahon, a talented Californian painter, gallery owner, and, to the point, self-described anti-scam samurai. She runs a blog, Stop Art Scams, at which she documents and explains art scams. Particularly note her page explaining the mechanics of the scam. She was kind enough to consider my case; and she's posted the further emails of Loius from my little exchange with him/her. It's kind of embarrassing how many emails I traded with this douche, but I also think one ought not to hide embarrassing things. And hey - maybe if you're reading this, you won't get suckered like I was (I was only suckered out of a little bit of time, but time is the one thing we can't get back).

Incidentally, I noodled around in Gmail until I was able to find the raw text of the first email I received. It turned out it was received from homiemail-mx23.g.dreamhost.com, if you will, with a return path to a certain mackerelrodrigo@gmail.com.

Moral of story: no matter how pathetic you are, somebody more pathetic is out to pick your pocket.


*Technically, Dante did not write in English.
†Nor did Cervantes.

Before and After

A short post - what the hell?

Anyhow, I finished this painting, and I thought it might be interesting to compare the painting with the rough original thumbnail:


Some paintings stay closer to the thumbnail, some stray farther. In this case, the thumbnail was closely inspired by the personality of the model, the wonderful Claudia, and Claudia was able to hold a pose very close to the idea. So what do you know - it was consistent start to finish. I'm really happy with the final painting: Living Things Came From Her, oil on canvas, 60"x40".

As if you needed reminding, check out her blog, Museworthy. It's a terrific chronicle of a life spent participating in and thinking about art. It's a privilege to work with someone so excited about the work at hand...

Horsefeathers!

In which we find Maidman arguing, peculiarly, against himself.

So, many years ago, when I started dating my wonderful wife Charlotte, she said, "What do you want to do?" I said something along the lines of, "First I want to take over the world..." I lack many virtues, but ambition is not one of them.

Charlotte said, "Here's what I'm going to do for you. I'm going to set a bullshit alarm. And should you get successful, and you start doing some assholish thing, and it sets off my bullshit alarm, I will let you know."

Well, I can hardly be called successful, but Charlotte gave me a call yesterday and said, "OK, I read your last blog post, and it set off my bullshit alarm. Because really, what you're talking about here is a picture of a naked lady, and not an essay on intellectual history."

One would be wise to head Charlotte's hunches, on account of she is a smart cookie.

Nor was she alone in expressing this general idea. Because generously frequent commenters Ed and Fred, who I thought were my friends, had a few things to say.

Ed: "I love this painting, but you knew that. I love that you discover things about your paintings - and why you paint them the way you do - throughout the process. A lot of this is over my head and I'll have to read it a couple times more, but I wanted to chime in with congrats and to express my admiration for your painting and your ability and willingness to share your thoughts about it."

This translates from fake-humblespeak to: "I like that painting and the writing is interesting, but I'm not really buying your rationale."

Fred: "I kind of enjoy reading your thoughts about the dead end of reason and such, but when it comes right down to it you could forget about all that and I would still appreciate that you can paint a damn fine naked lady."

Fred is expressing an admirable willingness to shank your more unlikely ideas right in the gut, instead of sneaking up on you like Ed.

Well, I respect Charlotte, Ed, and Fred quite a lot, and I kind of set off my own bullshit alarm in the last post. Therefore, I thought it was worth going back and questioning exactly what I thought was true about that post. Because I do think it's true - but it might not be true in the sense of being literally correct, so much as being a legitimate but irrelevant way of thinking about the painting.

The problem here is the extent and nature of allegory in the visual arts.

Let me tell you an interesting story. I was tripping on LSD in Florida this one time -

Actually, let me tell you a different and completely unrelated interesting story first. Doctor Albert Hofmann, the poor sonofabitch who discovered LSD while trying to synthesize a fertility drug for Sandoz Laboratories (now Novartis) from the ergot fungus, got some of his discovery on his fingers in 1943 and experienced peculiar effects. Science being somewhat more free-wheeling back in the day than it is today, he decided to follow up on his observation by, you know, making more of the stuff and eating it.

This led to the famous "bicycle trip," so-named because he found, after eating some LSD, that maybe it would be a good idea to go home and go to bed. So he rode his bike home, and once there, was either looking at a book of abstract art, or thinking about abstract art (I forget which - he recounts this story in his memoir). And suddenly, he thought, "I get it! I get it!"

What this tells us is that every goofball on LSD who has ever claimed they suddenly got abstract art (including me) is following in the footsteps of the first acidhead, who experienced the same hackneyed thing the very first time he properly tried the substance.

This is not unlike Christopher Walken already playing a deranged lunatic in Annie Hall, at the very start of his career, before everyone was like, "Oh, you know, Christopher Walken - deranged lunatic."

This tells us something valuable, if only we could grasp it, about abstract art, and about Christopher Walken.

Ha-CHA!

- but back to my interesting story. I was on LSD this one time (an experience I recommend, but in the opposite of excess). And I was looking at this Man Ray photograph:

What I found myself thinking was this:

"At the base of her hair, her hair is separated into distinct clumps - this is the large number of analytic categories which philosophy and science present to us. They are orderly enough to be counted, identified, and understood. But as you pursue each one farther down its chain of logic and phenomenon, it separates into innumerable strands. Some of the strands mix with one another. And you finally get all the way to the bottom, where the fruits of reasoning are beyond analysis, beyond comprehension, and finally, beyond observation. This photograph could have been oriented the other way, so that we would see this falling from the top of the hairs to the bottom as a rising action. But Man Ray has positioned this woman with her face upside-down, and eyes closed, because he sees this progression of thought as a progression toward death. This image is a symbol of the blossoming of the seed of death that is concealed in the structure of reason."

That's what I thought.

A marvelous thing about LSD, you see, is that it collapses hierarchical thinking. Anything in front of you is the most fascinating thing ever; everything is important - it is all significant. It all carries symbolic significance. Thus, anything in front of you is connected to all other things you see and know. The drug triggers intensely metaphorical and cross-linked thinking, and eventually, it overwhelms your ability to process the thoughts tumbling across your mind.

Or it could just be me. Who knows? Perhaps it simply accentuates to the point of caricature certain tendencies one already has.

The point being, I tend to see images in symbolic terms anyway; and I am using the instance of this Man Ray photograph to help explain exactly what this symbolic thought means for me.

The fact remains, however, that if you don't happen to be under the influence of LSD right this minute, you likely are not experiencing spontaneous symbolic visual thinking.

So what are we to make of this in relation to the visual arts? Good question. Writing, overall, is more amenable to involved symbolic association than pictures, I think. Consider this passage from Moby Dick, where Melville is both mocking and taking advantage of the lateral jump of symbolic thought. His ship, the Pequod, has a tremendously heavy sperm whale head attached to one side and a right whale head attached to the other:

"As before, the Pequod steeply leaned over towards the sperm whale's head, now, by the counterpoise of both heads, she regained her even keel; though sorely strained, you may well believe. So, when on one side you hoist in Locke's head, you go over that way; but now, on the other side, hoist in Kant's and you come back again; but in very poor plight. Thus, some minds for ever keep trimming boat. Oh, ye foolish! throw all these thunder-heads overboard, and then you will float light and right."

It is a strange image - it might provoke you to laughter - but you can see what he's getting at. That's what makes it so wonderful, this creative leap he has made from the one to the other.

This kind of leap is natural to verbal expression, because words are the nest of reasoning and logic, including the intuitive and creative kinds.

In contrast, pictures involve direct perception. Direct perception is the home of linkage relative to cause-and-effect, not abstract theme. That is, it is easy for us to link a facial expression, to a cause:

Horror

It is easy for us to link a position of the body to an action extending in time before and after the immediate image, and the attendant emotions:

Giant psychopath eating person, Horror

But it is not so easy for us to grasp the symbolic meaning of a more abstract-analytic thematic scene, because it goes against how we visually process things:

What the fuck is going on here? Frankly, I don't have a clue.

Programmers call inelegant solutions to programming problems kludges. A kludge patches over an issue, just barely, but it's ugly. There is a kludge in the arts for the discord between the essentially literary nature of abstract-analytic symbolism, and the essentially concretized cause-and-effect nature of visual understanding. And that's attaching a symbolic image to a scene from a canonical book or story.

Now let's go back to this perplexing print:


It's a picture of the Judgment of Paris. Paris was a famously fair-minded (and studly) Trojan to whom Hera, Aphrodite, and Athena, for complicated and improbable reasons, presented themselves so that he could tell them which was the most beautiful (I'd have gone for Athena without thinking twice). This incident, including as it does three hot naked chicks posing before a dude, is currently running a close second to Susanna and the Elders for the Suspiciously Overused Literary Image award in art history.

But this print, dating to sometime between 1510 and 1520, engraved by Marcantonio Raimondi after a design by Raphael, does not include three chicks and a dude only. It includes Hermes - recognizable by his winged helmet and caduceus - Zeus, holding his characteristic thunderbolt - Artemis, in her funny moon-tiara - and so on. We can recognize all the figures in this painting, if we really want to (including which naked chick is supposed to be which goddess) because they all have an iconic image attached to them, each of which would have been familiar to educated contemporary viewers of the image.

This same mechanism is deployed in religious art:

St. Lucy, the one with the eyes on a plate

St. Agatha, the one with the boobs on a plate

St. Sebastian, the one with the arrows

Each of these saints has a story explaining the presence of these peculiar objects, which would have been known to the target viewers of the paintings. It has been argued, in fact, that this kind of iconism helped the Church to provide emotional resonance to Bible stories when preaching to the illiterate in the middle ages - the stories were known to the viewers, and the visual both reminded of the story, and packed the emotional wallop of the concretely visual.

This illustrates the second part of the symbolism-visual arts kludge: attaching an iconic object to a figure to place that figure in a shared narrative is only step 1. Step 2 is up to the genius of the artist - to allow us to understand the stated literary theme in a new way by providing the artist's own spin on the story.

Here is Caravaggio's Calling of St. Matthew:


In this work of sheer intimidating genius, we not only have Caravaggio deploying his cinematographic sense of light to illustrate the holiness of Christ, we have a new moral to the story. Which one is St. Matthew? Nobody knows. A vague gesture from Christ - a table of gamblers and crooks - a boy, two youths, a man, an elder - we don't know which one is St. Matthew. This table is all of humanity: gamblers and crooks, youth through old age - and any of them might be St. Matthew. Caravaggio takes this scene, familiar to his audience, and uses it to say: each of you could be St. Matthew. We are all fallen, all corrupt, and yet each of us is called. This is a mighty painting of the force of redemption.

But this entire genre of art, from the prancing-goddess school to the Christian allegory, depends on a shared knowledge of a common set of stories, and a shared willingness to suspend disbelief - to ignore the cognitive mismatch between visual knowledge and literary analysis. In this way, it's like accepting the absurdity of opera.

Now, this shared knowledge and shared consensus started to break down in the 19th century; to seriously break down, not just get tweaked at the edges by artistic smartasses.

Let's go back to the Raimondi print for a second:

Look in the lower right corner more carefully this time. Does that group of figures look familiar? You betcha.


Édouard Goddamned Manet, Le Déjeuner sur L'Herbe, 1863. This painting has taken on an art-historical iconographic importance all its own. This is the painting (along with the Olympia) where Manet leads artists in issuing a grand "Screw you" to allegorical painting, from which allegorical painting has never recovered.

Before Manet, everyone agreed that a female nude could legitimately and innocently be taken to mean all sorts of things apart from a naked lady. After Manet, a nude was necessarily a nude first, and all those other things second, and only half-heartedly, or smirkingly, or unconvincingly.

This represents, in one way, a masterstroke of progress: that women can no longer be taken as symbols first, but rather must first be understood as people, even if we mean people in a fairly exploitative sense.

In another way, it represents the decline of an entire mode of thinking: of seeing the world not as a concrete event only, but as a kind of chalice holding great and incorporeal themes, filled with meaning and significance beyond the physical.

Back to me.

Living, as I happen to do, after Manet, it is essentially impossible for me to show the innocence of a Raphael or a Raimondi. It is impossible for everyone; some artists are trying to paint in that mode, but it never quite works.

At the same time, it is essentially impossible for me not to think like Raphael and Raimondi. I am so constructed as to have a literary-analytic way of thinking, LSD or no LSD, which applies itself to my writing, my film work, and my painting alike.

I recognize and respect that the themes I discussed in the Alley painting do not necessarily inhere in the painting itself. They inhere in me, and inform how I paint the painting. They are what Stephen Wright and I agreed to call the ghosts of information: the invisible traces of intent and understanding which work (hopefully) to increase the density of meaning in a piece of art, but which cannot necessarily be explicitly derived from the art.

But let's step aside from this allegorical intent for a minute. I am, of course, a follower of the physicality of the flesh itself, in all of its glowing majesty. And there is a more minimal position on the significance of the flesh which I hope we can all agree on - a position derived from that awe-inspiring secular Bible, the works of Shakespeare:

What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason!
how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how
express and admirable! in action how like an angel!
in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the
world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me,
what is this quintessence of dust? man delights not
me: no, nor woman neither.

I differ from Hamlet in two regards - I am less frequently prone to the dark side of his analysis, the dust side. And I cannot hold with the distinction he makes between all the items on his list of glories, and women. His list applies to men; women are a second thing, undescribed. For my part, this list must apply to women, or it cannot apply to anyone.

The Dead End of Reason

So, I blew right past the first anniversary of this blog without noticing. Woo hoo! One year of posting not nearly enough!

OK, so I'm working on a painting. Here's the painting so far:

The model is Alley, about whom I've written before. The canvas you're looking at is 5 feet tall by 3 feet across, and it's actually the left half of a two-canvas painting. Alley appears in a reversed pose in the second canvas, also 5x3, and the two of her are holding hands.

I don't know about you, but I learn about my own paintings as I paint them. They generally start with the simplest thing - some kind of an image, even just a combination of colors, which has no concepts attached. I'll just be walking along, and this idea will pop into my head, and I'll like it enough to paint it.

So I had no idea what this Alley painting was about when I started it. But it's been showing itself to me as I painted. First, I found out why I thought to have Alley stand like that. Here's the reason:


That's Augustus St-Gaudens's Diana, originally designed for Stanford White's Madison Square Garden in Manhattan. I've seen it many times at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and had gotten its 19th-century classicism of figure stuck in my head. This classicism is different from actual Greek classical sculpture; there is something sleeker and thinner about it. The forms are less pronounced, certain facial characteristics (a more heart-shaped face, a narrower nose, eyes more widely spaced) are common to the genre but not to its Greek origin.

Alley, from the angle in my painting, looks like this angle on the Diana. Let's look at another angle so you can see how similarly their torsos are structured:

Well, OK. I learned that. So I started thinking about why, beyond the resemblance, this St-Gaudens image resonated with me. I placed the cultural context of the Diana against the lighting I chose for Alley's face. She has that proud pseudo-Greek forthright gaze, but her eye is sunk in darkness - she herself is lit, but she is looking into the dark.

To me, this second element completed the concept I was seeking. The painting is about the dead end of reason. The Diana represents for me the last great gasp of baroque classicism, of enlightenment idealism. Choking beneath the weeds of the modern, this sculpture was a final burst of decadent creativity from a dying worldview, a worldview based in the concept that rational analysis was a legitimate method, and the steadfast application of this method could reveal a truth, called The Truth. It was a worldview that was profoundly shadowless. Just as Socrates considers, and then dismisses, the very possibility of evil, so this rationalistic worldview did not accept that unreason might abide, might be built into the fabric of things. All present irrationalities were problems not yet solved.

This is a worldview with which I have a lot of sympathy, even though it was an attenuated and aestheticized echo of itself by the time St-Gaudens came along.

Now, this Alley I have groped my way into showing, is an Alley coming from the land of bright shadows, of form and optimism, but her eye is shadowed because she is looking into darkness. I might like to live in the aerodynamic world of St-Gaudens, but I cannot; I know what has happened since. So my variant on this goddess looks into the dark. She is standing at the very dead end of reason.

This is what the painting means to me now - sure. But the painting is less than half done. The second Alley faces the first one, and her face is lit. Perhaps I will find out that this is hopeful. But I think I will find out that it is uncanny. The two of them mirror one another, and they will stand (eventually) in an intricate, abandoned maze of arches and staircases. I think that I will find, in the end, that this is a painting about the fearfulness of analysis in a region that is beyond analysis. In this region, to persist in analysis is itself unreasonable. Reason, in this context, is like an unwelcome tumor. The brutal irrationality of the space refracts reason, producing two where there was one. Beauty, form, hope, humanity - all of them are unwelcome in the cold inhumanity of the seething, irreducible complexity of the uncharted maze.

It is just as likely, however, that I will conclude the painting means something else entirely. In the meantime, I am simply painting it.

UPDATE

I meant to include this link - it's a post describing a very similar process which my friend Kevin Mizner went through in a painting he's working on:

http://kmizner.blogspot.com/2010/10/is-and-about.html

I did think to write this post before reading his, but I would say I'm damn near ripping him off. The similarities and contrasts are worth a ponder if you're a painter yourself. He writes well about the evolution of his painting.

UPDATE 2

Much, much more on the rather dubious contentions made in this post, here.

Hidden

My paintings start out as rough thumbnails I draw in a sketchbook I carry around. For instance, this is the thumbnail for the painting of Claudia that I'm working on:

So where did this get drawn? Well, I can't usually get anything productive done at home, owing to a temperamental disorder of some sort, and I pretty much don't design paintings in the studio - I only paint there. So I need to sit someplace that I don't rent and control when I'm drawing these thumbnails. This raises a practical issue - where can you go and doodle a bunch of naked women and not cause trouble? Starbucks and Barnes&Noble are right out.

I have discovered a room. This room is above a deli somewhere in lower Manhattan. It is supposed to be used for Internet station rentals and eating food bought at the deli. But it is usually hot and dim in the room, and there is a horrible low-frequency vibration from the over-amped heating system. Also, it smells slightly of turned food. Hardly anyone knows the room exists, and people who do know of it don't seem to like it. I discovered it by accident myself. It's usually empty. This makes it perfect:

An empty public room to oneself on a high-traffic street in one of the most crowded cities I know, for the price of a box of apple juice. I'm not going to tell you where it is, because it's my room, and I want to keep it that way.

This is kind of a cutesy story that also illustrates something which may not have occurred to you, but which I feel duty-bound to point out. On this blog, I am excited to tell you about ideas I've had about art (and by art, of course I mean cognitive psychology, physics, and math). I am also covering a lot of the practical territory involved in actually making art. But there are some things I can't tell you. Art, after all, involves people, and politicking, and so forth. I have a lot of interesting thoughts about a lot of interesting topics, which it would simply be career-suicidal to share.

So please don't conclude that this blog is a complete coverage of its theme, especially if you are a working artist yourself. If you're an artist, you'll probably encounter some phenomena which seem curiously absent here. I'm not so much luckier or saintlier than you that I don't have to deal with those things. I do, and it's not so pretty, but that's part of the job. All I can say is that I try to deal with them from my usual position of doing my best to figure out the decent thing to do. This seems to work for me - I think it will work for you. I apologize that some of my observations remain hidden.

You Have a Right to Art

I don't mean you have a right to own art. That's between you, your accountant, and Larry Gagosian.

What I mean is you have a right to the legitimacy of your experience of art. Rights cannot be given, they can only be taken away. Anybody who tries to take away the validity of the feelings and insights you had in confrontation with a piece of art is trying to violate your right to art.

I've been thinking about this, because I associate with a lot of people who spend a lot of time thinking about the difference between good art and bad art; and I think a lot about it myself.

Let's consider two of the dimensions of art:

1. Art is struggling toward a maximum of quality. There are certain properties we can think of as characterizing art. We may not agree about their relevance or importance, but let me throw out a few of these properties, so you can get a sense of what I'm talking about. The incorporeal properties are things like theme, emotion, concept, philosophical insight. The corporeal properties are along the lines of color, value, composition, brushwork, and so forth.

2. Art is a forum of the spirit. Because of the intense human need to form symbolic representations of all kinds of experiences, art is important to the balance of the psyche. Art represents not just the forms of possible experience, but their meaning.

To use the ordinary cliché in cases like this, consider how much more than just a physical event is represented in the Lascaux cave paintings.

Art attends on that aspect of experiential processing which has to do with our conceptions of the spiritual aspect of ourselves, our fellows, and the world. When we come face-to-face with art, it may trigger what you could call an artistic experience, a breaking down of what we were and a replacement of it with something larger. During this experience, we undergo shattering, on a big or a little scale. It is a variant of that experience of death and rebirth which characterizes religious revelation.

It is clear that dimension 2 is not related to maximal quality as it relates to dimension 1. Maximal quality enters into the question, generally, like this: optimal corporeal qualities help to increase the probability of an artistic experience. Incorporeal qualities help to increase the probability of something constructive and positive being imparted to the viewer in the event of an artistic experience.

But neither optimization is necessary. An artistic experience can happen without the presence of either one. Consider the stories of two very good friends of mine. One of them, C, wandered into the Prado in Madrid, and found himself in front of Velazquez's Las Meninas:


Two days later he extricated himself. I've been to the Prado, and I've seen Las Meninas. I would walk into Thunderdome itself and argue that this is one of the best paintings ever painted. Leaving aside color, composition, and brushwork - this painting is terrifying. That famous aspect of the missing about it is palpable in person. It is like a ringing in your ears. There is a shuffling of cloth in the room depicted in the painting, and the piercing looks of the occupants. They are waiting expectantly - for you. They lay hold of you, and soon you find that it is you who are in that room, not them. You are in that room, and you will never leave it. This room holds in it compassion and sympathy, but cruelty and evil as well. Las Meninas is an entire universe, a mesmerizing universe you fall into and cannot escape. Your sense of possession of yourself dissolves in confrontation with this painting. Velazquez humbles you and remakes you.

On the other hand, I think of Auguste Renoir as possibly one of the bullshittiest douches ever to become a famous painter:

Just look at this fucking lazy, talentless dreck.

His insipidly vague brushwork, bland pastel colors, radically de-individualized faces, and incessant flogging of the same three or four passive nude female poses make him seem to me not even an artist, but basically a hack pornographer. I had the good fortune in Philadelphia not long ago to run into the one decent thing this overrated pandering schmuck ever accomplished:


Be that as it may, my other dear friend, R, is not an art guy. He doesn't get it and he's not much interested in it. One time I dragged him into an art museum and I lost track of him. Some 45 minutes later, I found him, to my horror, in front of a Renoir, lost in artistic experience. He explained to me that he was in love with this woman in the painting, he was awestruck and overpowered.

I was probably not too charitable with him, because I was making the same mistake that I, and my art friends, make all the time: confusing dimension 2 - the artistic experience - with dimension 1 - maximal quality. This is an error we are prone to make because we are all actively engaged in making art and trying to make it good. We tend to forget that good ain't the real question. The artistic experience is. Good is the servant of the experience.

All kinds of factions will try to delegitimize having the artistic experience in the context of art they don't like. Consider three major bogeymen of three major factions:

Norman, called Rockwell

Bougeureau, the sentimentalist

Jeff

It kills me to admit it, but I cannot argue against your right to have your world blown away by that fricking balloon dog. I can't even argue against your right to have a transcendent experience when you look at paintings by a certain crotchety northern European painter of persons wandering around/sitting morosely/dropping dead in bleak twilit landscapes. There was a good deal of back-and-forth about whether he's a great painter, in the comments to a certain post I wrote that still gets googled twice a day. Let me explain the parameters of this kind of argument.

This is an argument about taste. Taste, the way I think of it, is an issue of identifying and backing up arguments with regard to dimension 1 - maximal quality. To some extent, these arguments can be said to have a basis in objective truth. To some extent, they're necessarily subjective. The point of developing good taste is to surround oneself with worthwhile things, and to assure the greatest utility of artistic experiences when they happen. People who care deeply about art argue a lot about taste, and one reason they argue is so that when they show their non-art friends some art, the chances of those non-art friends having a really transformative artistic experience are increased.

But answering to good taste does not confer validity. Here's a picture that changed my life:

Da Vinci, Head of an Angel

To me, this is not only an image of beauty. It is also beautiful in itself, and more, it teaches us how to see beauty.

Here's a group of pictures that don't really do anything for me:

Rothko chapel

But when they enter that room, a lot of people have the exact experience that Rothko seems to have intended - they find themselves broken and made better. If you'd asked me two years ago if I'd ever be sitting around defending Rothko, I'd have said no. But I've been thinking over what happens to us when we look at art, and here I find myself.

Why make such a fuss about the legitimacy of any and all artistic experiences? Maybe it's not such a big deal. But I see a lot of bullying by all sides in the art world. The focus of this bullying is on the legitimacy of the opposing side's experience of the art they like.

Now I'm not here to defend people saying that something is better, and I'm not here to defend people feeling self-righteous about one painting or another. I will go at you tooth and claw on those topics if I disagree with you. But if you find yourself in front of a piece, and suddenly you are crying like a child because the thing that was weighing you down has fallen off from you, and you are suddenly remade fresh and new - then I will defend you, because you have partaken of the only real thing art, which is so useless and so expensive in so many ways, has to offer in the end. So I just wanted to make it clear that, as far as I'm concerned, you have a right to those feelings, and you have a right to ignore everyone who is telling you that you shouldn't have those feelings in confrontation with this particular thing.

Except in one case.


There are only five people in the history of art who had an authentic emotional and spiritual reaction to Jackson Pollock's work. Their names were Manny, Elmer, Flo, Davis, and Jack, and they lived in the East Village until June, 1962, when Frank Castle, AKA "The Punisher," hunted them down and killed them.

Frank Castle, AKA "The Punisher"

Since then, anyone coming up to you and claiming they have had their lives changed by Jackson Pollock is a poser and a low-down dirty liar.

The Inflection Point

I know, you were thinking, what this art blog needs is more math. Well, I've got ya covered. Let's talk about what I was thinking about during calculus class, when I should have been thinking about calculus.

A little terminology for you. This isn't tough stuff, trust me. You may think you're bad at math, but you're not. I'm not going to get into the underlying equations and whatnot, which, sure, that's tough. We're just going to look at the visual part here, which is the math equivalent of eating your pudding without eating your meat.

Here's a line (mathematicians call it "the graph of a function", not a "line"):

As you can see, on the left it is called decreasing, because as you travel right along the line, you also move down. On the right, it is called increasing, because as you travel right, you move up. The minimum is called a minimum because it's the lowest vertical point on the graph. It separates the decreasing and increasing regions.

Overall, this kind of line is called a convex function.

Now, let's look at another line:

This is called a concave function. Instead of having a minimum in the middle, it has a maximum.

Now, let's say you have a function with convex and concave regions:


That point in the middle where one kind of curve turns into another kind is called an inflection point.

That's all the terminology we need. Let's sum it up:


Perhaps you are objecting, Hey Maidman, that big middle part, the "increasing" part? What the hell is the difference between "convex" and "concave" in that part?

Good question. It took me ages to keep this straight in my head. To the left of the inflection point, it's "convex increasing." To the right it's "concave increasing." This is the difference between convex and concave:

If you draw a straight line between any two points in a convex function, that straight line will be above the curve. If you draw it between any two points in a concave function, the straight line will be below the curve.

I'm glad I could help you out there.

Anyway, what I was thinking in calculus class was this - that this is a good simple model of the complexity of lines in artwork. And this helped me to make quantitative sense of something I liked about Picasso - his marvelously complex and fluid line. I'm not going to show you a good Picasso, because that would be distracting. Let's look at a crappy Picasso - in fact, a dashed-off picture of an ass:


Really look at that outline on the right. It would have been so simple to produce a single curve, a unified sweep of the hand. But Picasso cannot do that; his hand has fidelity to his eye, and he represents the separation of anatomical structures. Or, in our current framework, he does this:

The single curve is represented by means of five and a half complete convex and concave regions separated by five inflection points.

Maybe you're wondering, Uh, wouldn't *anyone*'s art look like that if you were anal enough to analyze it that way? The answer is no. Let's look at a drawing we've studied before, by Matisse, whom I also like very much:


Look at the line of the right side of the back. You can do it mentally by now - one inflection point separating one convex region from one concave region. We both know backs are much more complicated than that. There is a huge distance between Matisse's complexity here and Picasso's complexity in a similarly simple drawing.

There are only three artists I think of as having "perfect line": Da Vinci, Ingres, and Picasso. When I bring up this bizarre classification, the idea of "the perfect line," people usually bring up their own favorite draughtsmen, and say, well, what about so-and-so?

I'm not discounting so-and-so. So-and-so is really very talented, and has a strong personal style and vision. All I'm saying is that I, personally, have a sense that there is some quality, unique to these three draughtsmen in the history of art. This decomposition of line into functional categories helps to narrow down what I'm talking about, but it does not define it. Math is only one facet of the perfect line - it's just the part I happen to be thinking about today. Let's look at a couple more drawings, both by super-talented and worthwhile artists. Here's a man sketched by Seurat:


Notice that upper arm. It is a single concave region. Its complexity comes not from shifts in convexity/concavity, but rather from a breaking of the curve into a number of short nearly straight line segments:


For me, this is not as satisfying a degree of complexity as we find in the Picasso.

Now let's look at Annibale Carracci:

Examining the same region of the arm as we did in the Seurat, we find five inflection points - the same number we saw in the Picasso, but in a much smaller length of line:


This, to my eye, is too dense - too much variation in this particular system of analysis. It may be accurate, but it is not perfect - it does not have that scent of truth that I see in the middle-ground of complexity taken by Da Vinci, Ingres, and Picasso. Is it fair that we looked at a soft female outline with Picasso and a muscly dude with Carracci? Absolutely not. Life isn't fair.

So this perfection I am describing, when analyzed through a strictly mathematical lens, can be described as having a quality of "some, but not too many, inflection points." Does this refined description define the perfect line? It still doesn't. I tend to think that it is undefinable.

Here's an aside - all this science and math I throw at art on this blog isn't an attempt to demystify art: it's an attempt to carve away ignorance, mostly my own. If ignorance is a state of lacking knowledge, and mystification is a state of beholding mystery - then I want to distinguish between the knowable and the unknowable. The science and math doesn't take away the mystery - it helps light our way to the boundary of the real mystery.

So our refined description of line doesn't tell us what the perfect line is, but it isn't useless either - it brings us closer to understanding a category for which neither a word nor a definition exists. That's not nothing.

What does it buy us? Well, I can tell you what it bought me. It was 1994 when I sat in calculus class, doodling the arm of the girl in front of me while thinking about the mathematical description of complex line.

In 1998, I started to draw seriously. And I marched in armed with this conception of the mechanical underpinning of the complex line. I would look at the edge of the model, and say, "Aha - here is a maximum! Here a minimum! Here is an inflection point, and this is the character of the curve between these two points."

This is something I did with metal-nib pen and an inkwell around that time (a very fun medium which I highly recommend):
I thought it was pretty neat. But I also thought I was able to make rapid progress, because I had this one useful way of looking at a complex phenomenon and breaking it down into simple enough phenomena that I could hope to grasp and represent each one with fidelity. Better still, perceiving the complicated, I could decide what to keep and what to throw away, consciously. I simplified nature by choice and not by being overwhelmed.

So - this is a system of analysis which is probably most useful to somebody with a bit of a geometer's edge, like me. But it demonstrates, I think, the general idea that deeply unromantic tools furnish the art student with the means to struggle toward those depictions of beauty and grace they may hope to reach.

Do I think this way anymore? Of course not. The entire tool has become automatized; it is a subliminal process which I don't need to consciously check on to benefit from. Stanislavsky says that the actor should learn all his fussy techniques, and get soaked in them to the bone, so that when he hits the stage, he can forget all of it, and simply act - but act in the context of continuing to be informed by the technique he has absorbed.

When I was absorbing these basic techniques, I called myself an art student. When I had them licked, I called myself an artist. I am still learning techniques, of course, but not the very foundational ones that you need in order to make a picture at all. This doesn't mean I know all of them - I'm excited to find other fundamental techniques I've overlooked. But, you know, at some point you have to either stop making pictures, or call yourself an artist, I guess. For me, learning those techniques was the dividing line.