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.

Thinking about the Imagination

I recently found an enthusiastic buyer for an image that has found many admirers. It has reminded me that when you make images that relate to life, people will be attracted to them. The crazy art world appeals to ideas that people have about what art is "supposed" to be, but art that explores life (in contrast) takes its meaning from several places, all of which are authentic.

First it takes some of its meaning from life. If you observe the world, you discover the meanings that inhere in real things. So a still life of food has the meanings that food has -- nurture, pleasure, providence, sensuality (it depends upon the character of the image, does it not, what kind of feeling-tone will affix itself to the image). The second place where meaning enters is in the visual character of the thing, whether it is light or dark, richly colored or muted, crisply delineated or adumbrated, large or small, busy or simple, and so on. All the myriad qualities that can characterize something each bring forth different sensibilities. And the third place where meaning enters is from the spectator's personal associations with the image, the ways that it connects to an individual life -- perhaps quite arbitrarily -- whether it is the artist's life or somebody else's.

Art that does connect in this way really begins to have a life of its own. If in addition to all these things, the image is crafted with mastery -- well, maybe it becomes a great work of art.

We're recently experiencing a crisis in the real estate industry that has begun to spill over into related businesses. It's causing some uncertainly in the markets. I suppose that means that real art is a particularly good investment now. Of course, great art is always a good investment. People have trouble trying to sort out what "great art" is. (Hint: it's not the stuff you see in the trendy museums, the stuff you stand in front of, scratching your head wondering what it is).

If an image draws you in, if it is somehow incredibly beautiful, if it has meaning that deepens the more you think about it, if it is skillful and not ordinary, and yet can speak to ordinary life -- the chances are quite good that it's "the real deal," real art, maybe great art.

I'm certainly trying to make my pictures ones that collectors will profit by owning. When my work appreciates in value, it will benefit the collector and me together. But the first profit I wish to see from it is an increase in its meaningfulness.

Art ought to really matter. Real art does really matter. And that's what makes it real.

Official-dom

Officialdom verses how an artist really lives? Our whole edifice of contemporary art, all the rationalization that keeps the modern museums humming, the outlandish prices, the culture of hipness, the elitism, the mystique, all these things are founded upon a mistaken notion concerning 19th century French art.

As the myth goes, all the really important artists of the late 19th century (Monet, Manet, Degas, Van Gogh, et al) were misunderstood and unappreciated because they were ahead of their times. The official art of the era belonged to the Salon with its academic entrenched habits of thought and sight. And so far as that goes, it has its kernel of truth. From this premise arose the idea of the artist as the bête noire, and Picasso in the 20th century was to have epitomized the type: the artist genius who lives by his own rules. Fast forward a bit, through various mutations, and one arrives at the present dogma of the church of high art where it has become the stock notion that if art is "accessible" it cannot be very important. Hence, the viewer must be scratching his head wondering what the object is if it is to be genuine, "edgy," avant garde, etc.

The only problem with this notion is that it's wrong. Otherwise, it's grand. It just happens that the audience for the French Impressionists (as the first group of "bête noires" were called) was probably there all along. The paintings they made are ravishingly beautiful and full of touchstones to the art of predecesors. But the Salon had a political lock on the art market of the 19th century (though that was beginning to change even then as private dealers gained prominence).

The problem is that the intelligent, ordinary person whose experience of life and whose taste was being sought in these very humane pictures was not an audience that was easily captured. There was enormous variety in the kinds of art being produced, but there was only one official and lucrative outlet for making a career. And the niche market had not arrived in its full splendor, and the means of communicating to potential audiences was limited also.

But look at who loves French Impressionism now, and you get a glimpse of the natural audience for art. Just as ordinary people love the tenderness, the loveliness, the elegance of French painting, today's real life-affirming art appeals directly to people. Such an appeal has nothing to do with fashion. Indeed, art that deals in the real sensations of living goes contrary to the foppishness that characerizes elites today and in eras past. Real art appeals to the senses, to beauty, to memory, to intelligence, to curiosity -- all things that a person of sensibility possesses and uses to make judgments.

In Byzantium, during the Middle Ages, in the Renaissance, in China and elsewhere, art has appealed to intellect, to the senses, to the sense of divinity, to the narrative of mythologies or the Bible or other cosmologies. All these sources address a deep, living awareness in us. Real art always makes appeal to life. And ordinary people are more in touch with life than are people who move through their days as poseurs. Why should it be otherwise now?

Still, dogmas die hard. And money talks. And money and morality do not always go hand in hand. For the entirety of the 20th century the "isms" have had the day. Of course real artists made real art (one need only consider Matisse, Bonnard, and yes even Picasso, Edward Hopper, Richard Diebenkorn, Andrew Wyeth, numerous others).

A real artist living today has to be true to oneself. You have to make the things that your own life presses you to make and not cave into meaningless and ephermal trends. The Spanish Guitar Player at the top of the page was a drawing after a ceramic figure that I bought impulsively for my daughter when she was very little. It never became hers, it's always been mine. But somehow a certain magicalness of a ceramic guitar player with a few nicks here and there (I found it in a thrift store) enchanted me as something to transform in drawing. It was something I wanted my daughter to see. I don't know why. Just to see how someone made a ceramic image of a romantic idea, which I later turned into a different idea through drawing.

She is a real woman in the drawing, not a statue. And she is also lines, a figure composed of lines.

The Art of Collecting Art

Art collecting need not be as perilous as this [Pieter Bruegel, Blind leading the blind. 1568. Galleria Nazionale, Naples ] Though it could be. Depends upon what your goals are.

I recently saw an article on the subject in a recent Charlotte Observer. Also the internet is ripe with advice sites, here's one. I offer my own advice which is better advice than what you'll get from the others.

Buy what you like. And be careful what you like. If you like Ellsworth Kelly, try liking something else instead. Click to see why. Kelly's works sell for astronomical amounts and are bad investments, unless you are very rich and need a short-term alternative to currency for use in moving money around.

But if you love art, you should in general avoid Kelly and similar artists who do things you can easily do yourself. You can make your own Ellsworth Kelly; so if you like solid colors, you're wise to make your own Kelly. Then you can make it in any color and any size you please. You don't even have to call it a "Kelly." You can take all the credit for it yourself.

A corollary of this rule goes thusly, and we'll call it a first rule for collectors: "Don't believe everything people tell you." If the art work looks stupid, it probably is stupid.

If you are not sure how to recognize something stupid, ask an ordinary person. Do not ask anyone with a Ph.D in contemporary art history, especially if they spent a lot of money for their education. They have too much face to save and too much invested in defending the status quo.

More advice, next post.

Great ideas are bound to be Rediscovered

Picasso's Saltimbanques and Veneziano's St. John in the Desert have much in common given the spare settings of both, the classical sources both artists turn to for their idea of man, and the narrative about being an outsider that threads through both. Picasso's painting is very large. Veneziano's is very small. However, when we equalize them by reproducing them the same size, we can see how similar they are pictorially. Comparing the arrangement of each composition shows them using the space formally in similar ways, the colors are similar, even allowing for differences in size, the paint handling is similar. And they are very nearly the same format.

The spaces are different. We are much farther away from St. John than we are from the circus people. But if you focus your attention on forms, you'll note that various other things stand in compositionally for the places occupied by figures in Picasso. For instance, where the woman sits on the right hand side, we find a big rock in Veneziano. Where the tallest man is standing in Picasso, we have the largest of the mountains ascending in Veneziano. One for one are the boy in Picasso and the saint in Veneziano. Of course, one is a child and the other a man. But they are approximately the same height with respect to their settings.

Great minds run alike. Of course, Picasso stole from everybody. But he couldn't have known this painting. Hence, he even sometimes stole from works he didn't even know. And that just demonstrates his pictorial-scholarly acumen -- which was immense.

Getting Good Advice

When you know your craft well, when you've learned how to imitate nature thoroughly, the utmost goal for the painter is to envision the entire picture in one's head, having it "at a glance," as it were, so that he or she can begin to produce the image with warmth and as though the entire thing were unfolding at once and as one piece, as if all the parts had come together simultaneously. Then, I believe, the whole of the picture will be sensed as a unity. Herein lies the distinquishing feature of a master, and it's something that can only be acquired by constant reflection day and night, when once you have arrived at the point of creation. The great number of old, ancient works produced by a single person demonstrates that a certain moment truly arises when the artist of genius senses that he is being swept along by the force of his ideas -- each day -- as he does things that he never thought possible for him to do. Or her.

I feel like I'm that artist now. I make advances each day. Work has never come so readily and naturally to me before. Yet my paintings are by no means tossed off. Quite the contrary. I finish more than ever before, and do so more rapidly and effortlessly. My personality is such that I cannot imagine working in anything but a sincere way. To dash something off just for the money is impossible for me.

To hang tough despite all, never to work without the idea of pleasing yourself first -- and afterwards a few discerning friends -- this is what an artist MUST do. For art isn't a profession like other professions -- it's more like a calling, perhaps a divine calling. All the effort made in the spirit of courage has its fruit -- sooner or later. I'm going to have mine. After long days of quiet obscurity, a dawn will appear.

Looking Ahead

I was shopping for art supplies once with my eight-year old daughter in tow. She saw a "explorer" set: a plastic, see-through back pack with a pair of binoculars inside, a compass, a little notebook and a little "how to be an explorer" booklet. The whole thing costs about 16 bucks, and at the time I thought it was too expensive -- especially as I didn't expect the binoculars to work at all, and figured I would just be trading good money for cheap plastic. (And I'm a poor artist!)

She didn't take the news well. Indeed, she was heart-broken and decided to let most of my fellow shoppers share her grief. For a while we walked around the store; I tried to quiet her; I sought to have her understand something of the value of money, and so forth. It didn't work.

After I purchased my art supplies, we left. On the sidewalk, she was still despondent (loudly so). I really hated to see her so upset, especially since I began to see how the explorer kit seemed to really capture her imagination. So, I caved. And we went back into the store. I tried to bait and switch, to persuade her to choose what I considered a more worthy item. And she was almost willing to accept something else just to avoid leaving empty handed. But it was clear that the backpack was all-in-all.

I'm happy to report that I'm not a cruel parent. I finally caved completely and bought her the backpack.

A year later, I'm happy to report that the backpack and its plastic binoculars have been tools she frequently uses. They have accompanied us on many a nature walk around our favorite park. And one day, musing on the circumstances of their purchase, my daughter admonished me to note how much fun we both have had with this toy. And being fair-minded, I was willing to own my mistake.

But she really startled me with the observation she made next, for she told me that when we first set eyes on the binoculars, she "could see into the future and see the good that they (the binoculars) would do."

If any discouraged artists are reading this, take note. Out of the mouth of babes comes a whole bunch of wisdom sometimes! These plastic binoculars don't see as far out as a real pair, but my daughter had managed to look through them and see into a good future.

Art is like that too. The work you do today might not achieve the full acknowledgement you desire. It might not even meet your own standards if the standards are high. But the things you work at now teach and prepare you for the future. And the great art that artists quietly make today will find an authentic audience in the future.

Van Gogh suffered miserably for his art (more miserablly than the average, believe me!) but today is his day. About Van Gogh, one can truly apply what is usually a cliche -- he was ahead of his time.

Compare that with the wild success of today's hipster greats. Damien Hirst is not a keeper. I'm sorry all you investors out there. But Van Gogh was a true far-seeing, humane artist for the future. And his future is our now.

You have to study life in a genuine way if you hope to make an art that lasts. Gimmicks won't do it. But a genuine art sometimes has to wait a long time to find its natural audience, the one that really understands without having to be taught.

For the authentic artist, art is like a pair of kid's plastic binoculars through which you see into the future and see the good that they will do.