My first mentor, Seymour Leichman, said often, "The primary job of an artist is to engage the viewer." Seymour did not mean this business of engaging those outside oneself supersedes the most basic reason to make art, i.e. self inquisitory expression. He did mean failing to pull the eyeballs of viewers onto one's artwork results in the loss of another primary reason to make art: Communication with fellow human beings. Recently I have been preoccupied with finding forms and compositional space which runs true to me and my anima. To some degree, this preoccupation supplanted my developing my artistic persona. Well, Seymour says, You got to do both! This new painting is me trying to do just that, both! I am making a strong effort to be in touch with the most forceful manner to engage the viewer, while simultaneously expressing my instinctual, intuitive concerns. Early in his career Pablo Picasso learned the importance of captivating through presentation. Picasso's ability to engage the viewer had great power. This allowed him to take tremendous risks in his creation of form, and consequently in his compositional manner of story telling. Seymour Leichman may have said it, but Picasso knew it, and did it, better than any artist I know. Both Picasso and Leichman are now forever in my mind as I make my art. "Best is Show" does not simply mean well drawn and well composed. It has to grab viewers, pull them in, and make them want to be involved in one's personal quest. It is showmanship, plain and simple. It separates great art from the mediocre.
Winter is icummen in, Well, well, well. You figure it out. I will be back in two days to explain!!!!!!!
My return from New York City feels dramatic. I needed that! Balthus was not as exceptional as I believed prior to my seeing a lot of his works in one space ― Balthus labored through his paintings (although they have wonderful reductive form, light, and composition, they do not glow with inspiration). Vermeer's "Girl with a Pearl Earring" is a beautifully conceived face, but it fails as a total painting (the background has decayed toward black and sits like a dead plate behind the exceptional light and form of the girl's physiognomy and turban). And Magritte found image after fascinating image, but in the end he deadpans it all (the power of image is stronger than the power of inventive painting). And so it goes... I am as critical of my own work as the works of these painters from the past. I returned to the studio with a desire to pull together my various interests. I want to make my multiple driving forces work together in painting after painting, and drawing after drawing. I want my art to represent all I know and all the questions I ask. I need my art to be a conduit to revelation.
It may not be surprising to you, but it hit me hard. I used Pure Cadmium Orange, right out of the tube: no dilution, no addition of white or any other color! "Why", you may ask, "is this revolutionary?" Well, it hasn't happened before. I am a mixologist by nature. I am not saying this is the beginning of the downfall of mixology, but it is an important step. It will speed my problem solving. The hues on the man's head will not be found in pure, out of tube, paint. The myth goes that Vincent van Gogh discovered the same solution, then his work took off in new and more expressive directions (perhaps this happened to Vincent in 1888, the year his work matured to extreme expression → see his "Willows at Sunset" at the end of today's post. FYI: his famed "Starry Night" came in 1889).
The struggle to get it right is becoming extreme. Draw in, rub out, in and out; the same goes for paint or pencil. This is work compelled by failure. I am on a quest for purity and authenticity. There is a rightness felt by intuition that has been nurtured by experience. It is not that simple. It is not that easy. Experience is often misinterpreted, so intuition cannot be fully trusted. There must be (for lack of a better word) a heavenly base of knowing which I am striving to emulate. In my striving to match the heavenly authenticity I mirror a bit of it, but the mirror itself is dirty from the distractions of incorrect information built by years of seeing with limited human vision. This will continue because I cannot let go. I cannot let go because the more I do the more i glimpse truth and correctness. There are open spaces of clarity between the dirty smudges on the mirror. In those clean spaces a bit of true knowing is glimpsed. There is reward in seeing truly, a rush, an emotional high. This is addictive. Because I have seen glimpses of truth I have begun to believe I can know it all. This is foolish. Nevertheless the addiction is strong and bolstered by the reward of each authentic glimpse. I must continue.
How come you can't know it all at once? It seems to me that painting is a lot like writing a novel ― you can't know the outcome when you begin; upon initial inspiration you merely have a fundamental feeling for the characters. And so it goes.... Today I will alter this painting, now in its 17th state, once again. I feel like I know the nature of the situation better than yesterday, which was better than the day before. The unravel of knowing is occurring slowly, moving, as it is, from cryptic to authentic. When this painting is true to itself it will be finished.
I told you the painting I am returning to, over and over, is an important one. Now, so is the drawing. The daily work is unremitting because I am experiencing emotional reality more often than ever. It all feels new. I am constantly in surprise.
It isn't often that I leave the studio feeling satisfied with the stuff that just went down. Yesterday was one of those exceptional days. I am not writing about the quality of the work but the quality of the approach. Both the drawing and painting came together with my self-confident addition and subtraction as I sought internalized, intuitive solutions. This is the way art should be made.
When I was in Maine I visited the Portland Museum of Art and saw an exhibition of "The William S. Paley Collection" from the Museum of Modern Art (New York City). Most striking to me was a couple of sentences written by William Rubin in his discussion of Pablo Picasso's early painting, Boy Leading a Horse, 1905-06: "it also signaled...his increasing awareness of his own singular power and authority as a painter. Boy Leading a Horse, both as an image and painting—that is, in its subject matter as in its pictorial realization—is Picasso's monumental paean to the theme of mastery." I am feeling much the same with Untitled-08·29·2013. (below my work see image of Picasso's Boy Leading a Horse.) Painting-08·29·2013 will be more about painting and drawing, while all other allegiances will subjugate themselves to my act of making this a first-rate visual statement! You can see this happening in yesterday's drawing too. The hands are much to large for the man, and various other human body-parts are bent to the will of the composition, yet the forms, and the space they inhabit, work together, in unison, to make formal, emotional, and compostional sense. Last weekend I saw an excellent version of Picasso's wonderful 1934 print Minotauromachy at the Hood Museum of Art on the Dartmouth College campus. Picasso work, more than that of any other artist, hits me, over and over again, with the intelligent and emotional sensation forced upon the viewer by a multi-layered, multi-faceted composition. His are compositions NOT dominated by any one formal restriction. This force in perception is as much to do with the arrangement of forms as it is to the reference of forms to those which we call real. Reality is that which we perceive in our daily walks through life, and art is the lie that makes us perceive reality more clearly (to paraphrase Picasso). Viewing Picasso's Minotauromachy helped make my quest very clear.
Yes, I am back painting after a week away from it. Last weekend I was at a family gathering. My nephew reminded me of a drawing from my past. I revisited that drawing yesterday by undertaking the same subject matter. I feel yesterday's result pales compared to the original. It lacks the imaginative impulse which created the first version. Yesterday's version is well drawn, yet proves you can't go back to the past looking for present day inspiration. I am a different person now. If the two drawings were compared, past and present, they would be descriptive of me then versus me now.
I did not spend a lot of time painting, as yesterday's drawing is large and took several hours to complete. However, I re-established contact with where I am artistically. There will be more painting today. |
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April 2024
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