My latest painting

30 x 40, oil on canvas, SOLD

How does one begin?

I have been thinking about teaching lately -- thinking about what should be taught. One finds plenty of books in the stores. They typically show a series of steps, a series of ideas represented in different stages of a picture. The books are okay, as far as they go, in giving someone who has never thought about drawing a way of starting. However, they have the great disadvantage of starting one in the path of convention, of teaching people to see a subject in terms of predetermined ideas. In sharp contrast to that, a real picture deals with ideas in some kind of hidden order of attention and meaning. Your eye goes to this place or that for sometimes mysterious reasons.
In real life, pictures can also sometimes stop abruptly. One has lost the idea, or become temporarily derailed. It is not a matter of not knowing how to draw, but of not knowing what to draw. Sometimes the unfinish of the image is more evocative than adding to it would be. Sometimes a painting has to ripen slowly, or to age like a wine. You set it aside and let it stand as an object of meditation. It's like a dream that has been interrupted.
An image can go through stages that have nothing to do with convention. There is no proper way to draw a thing because there is no proper way to think about it or experience it. The life in the image has to be lived in the mind of the artist first if it is ever to live in the mind and heart of the spectator.

Intuition

I've learned over the years to trust my artistic instincts, and I find that sometimes I'm "composing" things when I least expect it -- as when I rearrange pictures in the studio as part of an effort to "clean up" or to organize work or because I'm looking for something. I often find that the pictures I place next to each other, however casually and with no evident purpose, often times reveals formal relationships between images that I had failed to notice.
In the picture above I put some canvases that I meant to work on out where I could see them. The still life of flowers was already leaning against the wall. It was with a little double-take that I noticed that the features of the landscape are very similar to the forms of the cloth in the still life and to its out of focus design. The comparison is perhaps more interesting for the fact that the landscape is based on a drawing of Van Gogh's which I decided to make into a painting.
Sometimes it seems as if I am just painting one picture, it appears in many forms, but it's the same picture underneath the various manifestations.
Well, something like that probably is happening. The "picture" I'm painting is the structure of my own thoughts.
Delacroix said so wisely that the artist paints the self. It is not narcissism to do so, but necessity.

Especially when it's your kid

It's always wonderful discovering a new instance of bold drawing. It's especially wonderful when the example comes from my kid. The drawing illustrated here arose from a process that I've observed before in my daughter: she sees a subject that is "too hard," "too complicated." In her simplication of the "hard" subject, she discovers a beautiful and elegant economy of means.
It's a wonderful lesson. Learn to think like a child. See the world anew.

Asparagus and Carrots

Here's a novel way to measure your ingredients!

Il faut refaire la meme chose dix fois, cents fois

["You must redraw the same thing, ten times, a hundred times." -- Edgar Degas]

It's not so much that one makes a bad drawing. The problem is that one fails to make hundreds of bad drawings -- in order to understand the thing and to find the good drawing.

Wandering the Museum

I spent a hour or so wandering the National Gallery of Art. Wanted to reconnect with some pictures I hadn't seen in a while. I've written about the plague of hipness and its detrimental effect on modern art at some length already in previous posts. So it was with some irony that I noticed a book on the new books table of NGA's bookstore called The Birth of the Cool. Yes, well, I suppose that proves my point.
But if hipness is the illness, what then is the cure?
I looked at many things, a very odd assortment -- Dutch 17th century paintings generally, including a new acquisition by Salomon Van Ruisdael, and "Mary Queen of Heaven" by the Master of the Saint Lucy Altarpiece, some French 19th century landscapes by academic painters, and a whole mish mash generally.
But I stopped among the Degas sculptures and drew horses briefly, using the only thing I had, a ball point pen. As I was drawing, I was struggling a little with being able to see (my contacts were not good drawing eye wear), but I focused on what I was seeing in the sculptures by asking myself this question: "What was Degas looking at or remembering when he made these sculptures of horses?" So I let myself get lost in the forms and just doodled the ideas that I had, my ideas, as I looked. I was, in other words, trying to "draw from life" while drawing from his sculpture of, his idea of, a horse. The drawing at the top of the post is one of Degas's off-hand horse drawings, and below it is one of the drawings I made today while looking at his sculpture.
I was thinking with the pen in my hand

Refreshment

This is a sketch for a painting I'm thinking about. Cannot begin to explain what it is about it that fills me so with joy. And even the sketch -- I cannot expect it to affect others as it affects me -- but it's spare lines set my thoughts into the most happy direction.
Real art grows out of someone's actual life. Why? Because life is wonderful.

What's in a name?

In the previous post, I lampoon and lament the National Gallery of Art's recent acquisition of a "Donald Judd." Since, as I posit, Judd's box is not art, why even care?
Unfortunately, as an artist I have to care. The canonization of junk has hurt artists enormously. Real artists -- at least people of genuine talent who might become real artists -- are discouraged by trends like this. It's hard to do the hard work of learning when your whole enterprise is trashed by the very people that one would have hoped to have champion it. Many artists I know whose own art-making could not be further in spirit from the inane, hipsterism that surrounds curators like NGA's Jeffrey Weiss, will nevertheless pay lip service to "contemporary art." They seem to feel that they must go along with the trends since to do otherwise is to earn the deepest cut of all, the charge of being "traditional."
Oh how things have changed since Rubens was in charge.
But Van Gogh (who had done a stint as an art dealer long before having made art himself) correctly identified the false pattern of making artists into "names." And what was just the 19th century's version of branding has become full blown insanity today -- because in the case of things like Donald Judd's boxes, the objects really don't matter at all. It is all about "names." Why Judd instead of somebody else? Why not? When there is no purpose, it hardly matters where the magic wand lands.
However, real art does still exist. It has gone underground in the sense that you do not find it in the well appointed and expensive modern museums (with some rare exceptions). Where is it then? Who knows? In somebody's house. In a private collection gathered by someone of taste who lives quietly enjoying his or her objects.
It is somewhere but we don't quite know where. But one knows that it is there because art has always been there. The impulse to make images is a deep and true component of the human spirit, and the images that comprise the best art are made by people of genuine talent (this should come as no surprise) and the imagery will speak to the real minds and hearts of ordinary human beings. Why? Because the real spectator like the real artist is an intelligent, thoughtful and emotionally responsive human being.
The hipster elitism of the official art world exists to satisfy the vanity of its participants (who evidently wouldn't recognize real art if it came up and bit them). But the officialdom will pass away. This has happened before too.
Remember Govaert Flinck? You don't? He was the guy who beat out Rembrandt in the Amsterdam City Hall art contest. Flinck was a damn sight more interesting than Judd, though!
This too will pass.
Contemporary art should mean that which is made in the present time. That it refers to a very narrow style of art for the consumption of the foppish class ought to tell us something. That the great number of people buying Winsor Newton colors are out there doing something. It will be for our descendants to find out.
Alas!
[At the top of the post: Govaert Flinck]

Much Ado About Nothing

The National Gallery finally got a "Donald Judd" for their collection, an event that someone at NGA thinks is newsworthy. The truly newsworthy part is something that NGA will never willingly reveal: how much the object cost.
The problem with Donald Judd is so convoluted that it cannot really be explained in a short essay. Well, it could be explained, but not without putting a reader into deep, near comatose sleep.
The problem is that, well, quite obviously, the object in question is not really a work of art. The reason why a plain wooden platform, painted red, sitting in the middle of a room should be mistaken by anyone for art is the thing that would require the thousand word somnabulistic history, and it would conclude with a moral that no normal person needs.
However, I'll attempt the brief Cliff Notes version and try to make it as painless as possible.
Once upon a time, a long time ago, someone noticed that art changes in big waves: the Middle Ages gives way to the Renaissance, which passes away before the Baroque, and each wave after wave reveals a society transformed. Or at least that's what art historians created in their narratives, a picture of change, organized as the historian understands it. Over time, bookish people, began to suppose that life actually transpired in the clean categories which the historian created to shape his story and at that point the distinction between "history" and "reality" got a little bit fuzzy (for the bookish).
They pretend and seem really to believe that "movements" took place where by one premier artist influenced all the artists around him until soon everybody began painting in a brand new way. Sometimes, of course, something like this does actually happen. But all along, while various people are imitating the grand Poobah, a very much larger number of other artists blissfully go on doing whatever they damn well please. And it has been ever thus.
But since art historians started writing art history and organizing it into neat little packages, the idea struck their colleagues in the "contemporary" art department that they could not only characterize what was happening in the exciting world of great art, they could make it up themselves -- they could coronate the various artists and pronounce which ones are "important" and "matter" and which ones piss them off and hence don't matter.
Fast forward. Somebody somewhere decided that Donald Judd, who designed boxes which were assembled by anonymous others, was the new golden boy. His "style" was minimalism, a "movement" that pushed art to the limits of meaning by making just about nothing into art. First one simplifies and afterwards one stupifies. Poof! "Minimalism" is born.
Quite recently, after Mr. Judd's rather convenient death, minimalism has vaulted into the prime place of 21st century movements.
What? You haven't heard? Well, if you don't know about this, consider it evidence that you probably have a life.
What you wouldn't want to know about this, though, even from the perspective of the delights of having a life, is how much it costs. All the money that the National Gallery wasted on this triangular red box might have been spent on real art.
You know what real art is, don't you? The kind that doesn't need the seven paragraphs of explanation.
Still, aren't you glad to know that plexiglass became Judd's "signature" medium? Kind of the way that, for some people, beer is their signature food. One could wish that the Trustees were about three sheets to the wind when they signed off on this one.

Reverie

I have been in a reverie these past several days, one made richer by drawing. It provokes all these feelings, seeing the beautiful blue and pearl of the Chinese vase, the exquisite character of the lines that curve round its edges. I understand better some aspect of Degas whose pictures often seize upon evocative fragments. You find these fragments through drawing because drawing is simple and intense and uncluttered by problems and distractions of technique. It's more just pure looking, watching with a pencil. I can see how a composite approach to a still life can become essential, though drawing the complex arrangement of things is desirable too.
However you can get at something first by just doing the effect of light curling round a single object and its unitary surface. As complex as exploring another planet is seeing these intense and particular effects of vision.
Just the space between one edge of the rim and another ought to matter -- in a real still life -- and the space in between them.

My still life

What does it mean? What do I want?
A table to eat at. Quiet, gentler schedules, less worry, fewer people around ranting their rant (thinking here particularly of the political realm). Also marmelade with a lovely picture on the pearlescent jar, good nuitrition, exercise, places to walk later on. Patterns on the table cloth, distortions seen through the glass surfaces, interesting shadows cast by objects, and no one telling me that real art is "edgy" unless they're talking about the edges of the picture, or the table's edges, the one in the picture, that is.

Still Life

My own life has stilled somewhat in a magical way. I have been drawing still life objects, taking them one by one, getting ready to revive an idea that I first began many, many years ago. And it strikes me that still life is a good metaphor for art, is also a form of pure painting, for one chooses and arranges things, solely for their appearances and their meanings. One doesn't necessarily grasp at first what the meanings of the things are -- meaning sneaks in unrecognized, hidden inside appearance. Sometimes after long years one begins to understand why the objects were chosen.
Then too the organization of the objects in the still life matters. It also adds much to what the things mean, and this "organization" is similarly encrypted.
From these things comes beauties, fragments, spaces between spaces (filled with mysteries), distortions, pure shapes, colors that are like deep, concise thougths. Perchance the painting will seem to capture light and air, will have stilled time, caused a mood to arise, memories to gather -- not the artists' memories only, but those of so many unknown and unknowable others. And if these things succeed the painting will have connected one to oneself and made us feel alive.

Wonderful Drawing Website

I recently discovered a wonderful website on drawing, "Draw Anyway." It's author is currently on sabbatical, but there's plenty of old posts to browse through. She offers lots of advice about confidence and finding ideas. And she puts art to all kinds of uses, such as designing a birthday cake.
The drawing of tins comes from her site, from this page.
The various cans are a little clumsy and askew in an essential way. Imagine how it would look if all the cans were drawn in accurate perspective. I'm quite sure, that all things being equal, it would still be lovely. But these cans as they are have personalities. They are more than just cans. They are more like a company of cans, or a coterie of cans -- conversing.