Sometimes you think there is a revolt that makes sense, and all that has come before is questionable. Today is that sometimes. Today, perhaps, the British people feel the same as I. The vote for Brexit has won! But that has nothing to do with me, except as a marker. It marks today, because today is important. I see a bit more clearly today than I did two days ago. Nothing here is perfect, nor is anything completely satisfactory. I do believe the step I took yesterday is more credibly my step. I am leaving my influences behind. I am slowly, ever so slowly, becoming my own man, my own artist.
Coincidently, yesterday I have found a better way to use my new camera. Yesterday's photos of my work are clearer than the day's before. I forced the lens to a smaller opening, f/13. I also used an auto countdown to take the photo hands free. If you exam today's reproductions, compare them to any that have come before, you will see clearer details. For me, clarity and insight, apparently, has affected more than just my art. This was a week of self-intimacy. Everything I did led to self-acceptance. This can be seen in drawing after drawing. Even the newest painting forced me to accept my basic impulses and interests. I write "even the new painting" because when one looks at this painting my insight is not obvious. What you don't see is how its failure, particularly in the background's lack of rapport with the foreground forms, hit me like a hammer on the intellect. It screams, "This ain't right!" So the obvious problem is me versus the structure with which I must work. The actual structure is two-dimensional, but the visually, emotive structure I place on the 2D paper or canvas is invigorated by its three-dimensionality. I have pointed out in this week's posts, as I referenced Masters like Cezanne and Monet, that I am not alone with this dichotomy. There are models out there, created through lifetimes of work. This brings me squarely into my self-importance. It is important that I pursue this problem which I have begun to address. It is important because it has become incontrovertible that this is the manner I must use to express who I am, the way I see, the way I feel. Yesterday's drawing took another jab at it. I felt exhausted by the end of my studio session, which tells me this has been a week of enervating insights. I am proud, but not happy or satisfied. I have faced the challenge, accepted it as true. There is a vast amount of work to be done!
J.M.W. Turner, "Rain Steam and Speed", 1844 and "Intestinal Forms", 1990, both oil on canvas One hundred and forty-six years separate J.M.W. Turner's painting, "Rain Steam and Speed", from my painting, "Intestinal Forms". Despite the chronological distance between the two, I find similarity in the attitude in which they were created. Turner became more and more himself as he aged ("Rain Steam and Speed" is considered a "late" Turner, produced in 1844 when Turner was 69 years old). During my time away from making art I have been contemplating the manner in which I make art. Turner became himself by realizing, on canvas and paper, his deeply discerned intuitive knowing. I sometimes veer away from my own deeply intuitive knowing. I get distracted by searching for more knowledge. This quest for the ephemeral must end. When I return to painting I will follow the complexity of my internalized expressive self and make the art I was born and bred to make. This will be nurture and nature coming together, unified in my art. I admire Turner for accomplishing this in his lifetime. Other painters have also achieved this lofty success. Here I name a few other artists who I see as having succeeded: Willem de Kooning, Henri Matisse, Richard Diebenkorn, Alberto Giacometti, and James Ensor. These five are the ones that immediately come to mind, but of course there are others. The five I have named, along with J.M.W. Turner, are most on my mind as I seek my own redemption from the failure I witness when I seek knowledge, rather than perform my knowing.
Before I go, let me show you one of my favorite paintings by J.M.W. Turner, "Burning of the Houses of Parliament", 1834. This painting is also considered a "late" work of Turner's. "Burning of the Houses of Parliament" is much less abstract than "Rain Steam and Speed", and it was painted 10 years before "Rain Steam and Speed". I did not count the marks, 1, 2, 3... a million. But I do know that it took the entire studio session to make today's drawing. Yes, this blog post is different. I am posting on the day of the drawing, not the day after. This new methodology feels right. I had hoped to get to painting but it did not happen. I had the energy to stick with solving the nitty gritty problems of this drawing as I encountered all kinds of strangeness. Getting out to studio immediately after the acts of waking and nourishment is energizing. The limit to my work is the limit of my ideas. That is exactly the description that defines today's drawing.
Every day, when I rise from sleep, I realize the amount of work facing me. I must encourage myself to have courage. This is work. No matter how much I wish it were easy, insights do not come easy. Inspired as I am to seek and find, I must do the work. I want to know and see more quickly; there is never enough time and energy in my day. This is a long haul job. The most important insight occurring now, as I work, is the discovery of contrast as an animator of form and composition. The drawings and the painting shown today are from two days ago. The first drawing of January 28th is at the bottom. It carries through ideas insightfully discovered the day before. It is in the second drawing (the portrait head), however, that I played better with contrast. After the drawings, I went to painting. The green around those receding blocks was darkened. This higher contrast causes the painting to pop better than before. The painting is now on its way to completion. Happily, an effective increase in my artistic arsenal is readily seen.
A Note on Reproduction: The last few drawings have been on rough, slightly yellow, paper. In the portrait head you can see the yellow, but in the drawing of the abstract form (#1, bottom of page) all color was removed because a weird optical effect occurred which caused low value colors on its ground — it is reproduced in gray scale. Untitled Drawings-01·27·2015, Nos. 1, 2, 3, pencil on paper, 11X14 inches Please look at everything! Yesterday was a wondrous and eventful day in the studio. The middle section of my studio-time was give to the portrait drawing shown below. It was a revelation in the making — it was controlled expression! I sustained sensitivity and feeling throughout its creation. In the past I had not been able to maintain expressive energy throughout the making of a drawing as complex as this one. If anything sums up yesterday's insight it is this: the use of contrast to animate forms. This is most apparent in the portrait drawing. It followed me into the painting. However, after finishing Drawing #4, my remaining time in the studio was limited. This insight did not have enough time to be fully expressed in the painting.
I have made things more difficult for myself. I feel nervous and in a hurry, yet unable to rush. The nuances are insistent. My painting is calling for extreme attention to details. For instance, the blocks near the center of painting lack adequate contrast (light versus dark). Today's reproduction of painting Untitled Painting-01·06·2015, and all my reproductions, are imperfect. The more I attend to nuance the further the reproductions remove themselves from reality. Here is another "for instance": the background's rhythmic undulation of flatly drawn, mountain like peaks, moves from Pure Cadmium Orange on the left to Pure Cadmium Red Medium on the right, yet you can not see this in today's reproduction. I tried to get it right, but the complexity of the all the nuances present in this painting forced me to compromise to get this reproduction as close to authenticity as it now appears. There is no full success in reproducing art works on the web or on paper! I am struggling to be open and free, but time is limited and insights are unlimited. What to do? I choose to struggle on. Untitled Drawings-01·25·2015, Nos. 1, 2, 3, pencil on paper, 11X14 inches
Insight: My recent work is not about a figurative style being replaced by an abstract style. It is about APPROACH. Yes, that is APPROACH in ALL CAPITALS and in BOLD! I am not about to give up all that I know. I am moving someplace, but it is not about loss or forgetting. It is about discovery and acceptance. The reference to the heart in yesterday's drawing is important. That heart cries out my acceptance of visually known forms. In addition to the heart, the space in yesterday's drawing is not abstract. The drips of Jackson Pollack's work are abstract. Jackson Pollack was vastly limited by his choice of means. He, in the end, performed more as an invalid than as an artist seeking a grand manner of communicating with his viewers. There is little sophistication in Pollack'e oeuvre. Where I go from this moment will be lost and found in the studio, and not in my verbalization of the process. Verbalization is a result of experience and not a precursor of discovery. From the Dictionary: Today's title is less reality than a query. It is very confusing to be an artist. It's like diving blind into a quarry pond, dark and deep with no sunshine to illuminate its depth. The safety of the dive is in question. Picasso said it well: "Painting is a blind man's profession. He paints not what he sees, but what he feels, what he tells himself about what he has seen." I am becoming permeated with this reality. The only way forward is to give into knowledge deeper and smarter than anything I consciously know. I am allowing myself to be taken over by forces I do not understand. I am a prisoner of the internalization of all I have seen. Woe is me!
Today I continue to complain about the limitations of time and energy, thus the title. Perhaps I complain too much, and inappropriately. After all, I am human, and I can only understand at the rate at which I can lay down paint or pencil. That's what I'm complaining about! My ability to make marks on paper and canvas feels so very slow, and limited by my insufficient energy. My major limitation is the slowness of insight. Insight in art-making is not momentary. An image must appear before I can react to it. It is, in the reaction, that I have insight.
My current insight is my reaction to the lack of contrast in the backgrounds of the side panels, versus the central panel, in Untitled Triptych-08·13·2014. Today I will deal with that! I can see, in my mind's eye, blotches of yellow, like the specular highlights of Vermeer (some art historians call these pointillés). Yesterday's drawing is a good one. |
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May 2024
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