Captain of your own ship

Is your painting led by your subconscious or your analytical brain? Both are important.

Christmas Eve, by Carol L. Douglas

Rebecca is a friend and very-occasional student. Yesterday she lamented that an object in a painting had changed size as she worked on it.  “Maybe it's fine to look at, but it really bothers me about my skillset, that I can't keep things proportional,” she said. From a distance of more than 2000 miles, it was easy for me to see that she had overwritten her underpainting as she proceeded.

Perhaps a more detailed drawing to start would give her some lines to color in, I suggested.

“I’m trying so hard not to go there right now, but point taken. I definitely did give up on drawing the truck, as it was getting truly awful, and just left it for the paint to make sense of,” she responded.

School bus, by Carol L. Douglas

I understand this problem; it’s why my sail in my current nocturne keeps kissing the edge of the canvas even as I use a ruler to try to force it across the edge. That, too, started life as a very loose exercise; heck, the boat has already been three different places on the canvas.

Either we draw carefully and discipline our hands to our brain, or we let our subconscious rip and deal with what it hands out. Clearly Rebecca’s subconscious mind thought smaller was better for that truck. Looking at it in relation to its setting, I think her subconscious mind was being more artistic than the bald truth of her reference photo. By making the truck smaller, the painting had room to state a universal revelation: the sea is so great and my boat is so small.

The subconscious has been a big deal in painting ever since the Surrealists became interested in the probing of Sigmund Freud and his fellow psychoanalysts. The Surrealists were not just interested in exploring the relationship between the conscious and self-conscious; they wanted to see rationalism overthrown, both personally and socially. They believed that art that comes from our subconscious is more powerful and authentic than the products of our conscious, analytical, minds.

Christmas night, by Carol L. Douglas

That made them try all kinds of games to draw the subconscious to the fore: automatic writing, dream interpretation, free association, and a kicky 1920s parlor game called Exquisite Corpse. But the subconscious is designed to run in the background. The Surrealists who continue to have the greatest influence today are those who also spent the time to analytically master their craft: Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy, Salvador Dalí, and Alberto Giacometti.

Perhaps the greatest artist to marry subconscious imagery to painting was Marc Chagall. His was a world of ghostly floating figures, scale inversions, transparent wombs, and animal/human hybrids. They are not his individual dreams, but the collective imagery of a people. Chagall painted through the bitterest years for European Jews in modern times, but his canvases are not terribly frightening. He didn’t give in to night terrors.

A demo painting for the Bangor Art Society.

The problem with our inner mind is that most of us don’t like it that much. That’s why we’re constantly trying to blot out our brushwork and trying to school our shapes into photographic conventionality.

I sometimes amuse myself by painting landscape from abstraction, which is a loose form of automatic writing. In fact, all of the paintings illustrating this post were done with no reference. It’s a rebellion against literalism, an attempt to push my analytical mind back a bit before it crowds my soul out entirely.

Reflections of a recovering coffee addict

Love may be an addiction, but it’s at the heart of everything we do. Happy Valentine’s Day!

Birthday, 1915, Marc Chagall, courtesy Museum of Modern Art

Yesterday I quit drinking coffee. This wasn’t my choice; it was on the advice of my medical professional. He’s loads of fun; this regimen also precludes alcohol, sugar, wheat and dairy. None of those other things caused me a moment’s trouble, but the coffee? I’ve been drinking it since I was nine years old. I like the taste, the smell, the buzz. Coffee is a very mild stimulant, I thought, and dropping it out of my diet should be no big deal.

Wrong. I have withdrawal symptoms in spades: headache, tremors, and the need to sleep forever. I looked out at the snow piling up in the driveway, said a bleary “fuggetaboutit” and cancelled my appointment for the afternoon.

Two Lovers Beneath an Umbrella in the Snow, color woodblock print, c. 1767, Suzuki Harunobu, courtesy Art Institute of Chicago

Clearly, coffee is a much bigger player in my biochemistry than I thought. It’s clearly a physical addiction, but it’s one I’ve never paid attention to. That got me wondering what other habits are running in the background, messing with the fine-tuning of my operating system.

When I’m on the road, I can be outside in the field painting by the time the sun clears the trees. My blog is written, I’m showered, my lunch—such as it is—is made, and my gear is set up. Why, then, does it take me until late morning to get into my studio at home? I’m not lazy; in fact, I’m pretty darned disciplined.

The Cradle, 1872, Berthe Morisot, courtesy Musée d'Orsay

It’s this infernal machine I’m holding in my hands. Much of what it shoots at me is chaff, but some things are important. Is there a way to quit my computer like I quit coffee? I don’t think so.

“Back when I first decided to become a painter, of my ‘art’ time, I spent 80% of it painting and 20% on marketing. Now, a couple of decades later, I spend 20% on painting and 80% on marketing,” lamented Michael Chesley Johnson yesterday. I feel his pain.

That’s not all I do on this machine. I use my computer to ‘talk’ to my friends, read the news, and keep in contact with my adult kids and grandkids. But those are things I enjoy. Relationship is programmed into our minds; our systems rise to it like fish to a lure.

On the other hand, that’s what I said about coffee.

The Resurrection, Cookham, 1924–7, Sir Stanley Spencer, courtesy the Tate

Next week, I’m going to gum up my productivity still farther, by having my grandchildren here for the week. We’ll go see if Little Bear is still sleeping, take a twirl or two on our skates, and visit the beach. All painting will be with tempera on a very short easel.

Love may be an addiction, but it’s the heart of living. Happy Valentine’s Day!

Monday Morning Art School: the basic elements of design

Design elements are there whether you’re conscious of them or not. Learn to use them.

I and the Village, 1911, Marc Chagall, courtesy MOMA. In this painting, line is a dominant design element, articulating the relationship between man, beast and place.

Line

In math, a line is straight, has no thickness and extends in both directions through space. Sometimes that’s what we mean by a line in art—for example, a horizon line.

More typically in art, a line is just a path through space. Wherever you have an edge, you also have a line. However, lines also refer to mark-making, so in that sense they can be fat, thin, punctuated, tapering, diffident, bold or whispering.

Diagonals and curves tend to keep us more engaged than unbroken verticals, as they’re more difficult for the eye to ‘solve.’

Interior of the Laurenskerk in Rotterdam, 1664-66, Cornelis de Man, courtesy Mauritshuis. The illusion of three-dimensional form is created with drawing and value.

Shape and form

Shape and form define objects in space. Shapes have two dimensions–height and width–and are usually bounded by lines. Forms are three-dimensional. The artist’s dilemma is to give the illusion of three-dimensional form in a two-dimensional painting.

Ploughing in the Nivernais, 1849, Rosa Bonheur, courtesy Musée d'Orsay. The vast sky and field create as much narrative as do the team of oxen.

Space

Space is, in the real world, three-dimensional. In art, the term refers to a sense of depth, or the artist’s use of the area within the picture plane. The illusion of three-dimensional space is created with perspective drawing, atmospherics, positioning, size, and defining volume through modeling.

Sometimes we refer to negative and positive space, which means the division between the primary object(s) and what we perceive as the background. Positive and negative space were a very big deal in much twentieth-century design, which often used the vast emptiness of the page as a counterweight to the primary object.

The Crucifixion of Saint Peter, 1601, Caravaggio, courtesy Cerasi Chapel. Chiaroscuro relies primarily on value to drive the eye.

Color

Color has three essential characteristics:

• Hue—where it falls on the color wheel (red, blue, etc.),
• Chroma—how brilliant or dull it is,
• Value—how light or dark it is.

Color is also described as ‘warm’ or ‘cool,’ but these are useful artistic conventions and not measurable as fact.

Historically, value did much of the heavy lifting in painting. The Impressionists began using hue and chroma to define volume, and that is essentially how most alla prima painters work today.

Portrait of the Baronness James de Rothschild, 1848, by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, private collection. We see satin, lace, tulle, feathers and jewels primarily due to Ingres' exquisite control of reflected light.

Texture

Texture refers to the surface quality of an object. Paintings have implied texture, conveyed by color, line and brushwork. They also have real texture in the form of smooth or impasto surfaces.

Your assignment is to take one of your own paintings and subject it to formal analysis. Consider each of these elements of design in turn. How are you using them? How could you use them better?

Party dogs

What is art? That’s something nobody can agree on.

Great Danes and Doberman Pinschers talk about what they plan to wear to my daughter's wedding.

Last night I assembled an august panel of artists to help me with a project. Barb is a printmaker with an art degree from University of Maine. Sandy is a gallerist with degrees from Pratt and Hunter College. Together, we dressed 42 dogs in wedding finery. (As so often happens in sweatshops, I ‘forgot’ to pay them.)

“Is this art?” I asked two other artist friends.

“It’s like asking if a soy product in the shape of a chicken leg is food,” said one. “Technically, yes, but it’s bad food.”

“I guess the individual sculptures are art,” hedged the other, who then raised the question of whether they’re craft or even, just possibly, crap.

Two coats of silver and three of glitter... good taste, by the way, is repressive at times.

‘Artistry’ is easier to define than art itself. That means the skill necessary to produce a work of the imagination. But what defines the product of the imagination as art rather than engineering or craft?

Ars longa, vita brevis, wrote Hippocrates. He probably meant that it takes a long time to acquire and perfect artistry, but that the practitioner has only a short lifespan in which to practice. We repeat it, instead, to mean, “art lasts forever, but life is short.” That is, of course, a modern conceit. The ancients understood that “what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.” (2 Cor. 4:18)

Barb felt that a DeWalt glue gun was not the tool for the job.

Plato said that art is always a copy of a copy, an imitation of reality. This leads us from the truth and to illusion, making art inherently dangerous. (Rich words from a philosopher!) Elsewhere, he hinted that the artist, by divine inspiration, makes a better copy of truth than may be found in everyday experience. This makes artists prophets of sorts.

A lot of artists have had a go at defining art. Many are coy, like Marc Chagall, who said that “Art is the unceasing effort to compete with the beauty of flowers–and never succeeding.”

Even in non-traditional art, imitation is a recurring theme. “Art is either a plagiarist or a revolutionary,” said Paul Gauguin. What makes an Andy Warhol painting of soup cans different from the soup cans themselves? Intent and meaning. Pablo Picasso said that art is a lie that makes us see the truth.

In some way, art is the taking of an idea and making it manifest. Otherwise, it’s just a fleeting thought.

Sandy and I sewed their garments, Barb dressed them.

People frequently debate the line between art and craft. Art is useless in practical terms; it exists solely to drive emotion and thought. Fine craft does that and more. It must serve a practical purpose along with being beautiful. Since I didn’t drill their noses out to hold flowers, my party dogs fall on the side of art. 

Neither fine art nor fine craft are mass-produced, however. That is manufacturing. Those brass birds from Home Goods, as inscrutable as their meaning and purpose might be, qualify as neither art nor craft.

“The craftsman knows what he wants to make before he makes it. The making of a work of art… is a strange and risky business in which the maker never knows quite what he is making until he makes it, wrote R.G. Collingwood in The Principles of Art. That sounds very nice, until I think of dye-master Jane Bartlett throwing pots of color into the snow to see what shows up. Her textiles end up as clothing, but her process is wildly unpredictable.

She's Not There (yet)

Extreme old age seems liberating for many artists, who are finally able to take risks they couldn’t contemplate when they were younger.

Drunkenness of Noah, 1515, Giovanni Bellini (then 85)

The Duke of Edinburgh recently announced that he will be retiring soon after his 96th birthday. Either he has remarkable genes or his expectations are radically different from the gaffers I know. Most people are anxious to quit working as soon as they can. 

On the other hand, artists, like royalty, are bound by noblesse oblige. In other words, we must act in a way that conforms to our position and reputation. But how long can we keep it up?

Last night I toddled over to Northampton, MA to see the final show of the 1960s British rock band, the Zombies. They played their 1968 album Odessey and Oracle from start to finish one last time, after which they’re all moving on to something else.

Toward Another Light, 1985, Marc Chagall (then 97)

This was not a PBS special reunion band, where they prop up one aging member of a long-gone band and pad him with a backing orchestra. All four surviving players were present. Of these, Rod Argent, Hugh Grundy and Colin Blunstone turn 72 this year. Chris White is 74. Jim Rodford, who plays with them now, is 76.

They continue to play to the highest standard of musicianship, a standard that most young artists will never achieve, let alone maintain.

On the day before he died at the age of 97, Marc Chagall produced his last work, a lithograph entitled Toward Another Light. A portrait of his younger self with his late wife Bella is handing him a bouquet, while the Angel of Death waits to receive him. That's what you might call a strong finish.

Cover of Jazz, 1947, by Henri Matisse, 1947. Matisse was bedridden after abdominal cancer at age 72. He turned to cutting colored paper. Jazz was completed when he was 74.

A striking number of artists have been highly productive late into old age, including Giovanni Bellini (who died at 86), Michelangelo (89), Titian (86 or 88), Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, (86), Claude Monet (86), Henri Matisse (84), Joan Miró (90), Pablo Picasso (91), and Georgia O’Keeffe (98).

Faith Ringgold, who is now 86, drew the connection between visual arts and musicianship in an ArtNews interview in 2013. “You’ve got to do just like the musicians do, you’ve got to practice every day,” she said. “I plan to do that for the rest of my life, practice every day.”

Google's 12th Birthday, 2010 Wayne Thiebaud (then 89)

Wayne Thiebaud, who will be an eye-watering 97 this year, pointed out the relationship between physical well-being and creative control.  “The plumb line in the body gives us a sense of things like grace or awkwardness or tension.”

Extreme old age seems liberating for many artists, who are finally able to take risks they couldn’t contemplate when they were younger.

“Working becomes your own little Eden,” Thiebaud said. “You make this little spot for yourself. You don’t have to succeed. You don’t have to be famous. You don’t have to be obligated to anything except that development of the self.”