A week of channeling other painters

In the end my paintings ended up mostly like me.

Home farm, by Carol L. Douglas

On Monday, I wrote about my WWCD experience, where I tried to channel Colin Page but ended up painting like a Fauve. I continued similar experiments all week, channeling different masters each day. In fact, the ‘What Would So-and-So’ riff was embedded so deeply that I made up one based on Kirk Larson: “WWKD? Never turn down a free bottle of water.”

Yesterday’s painting started off as riff on Paul Gauguin, whose Yellow Christ hangs in the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in my hometown of Buffalo. That made it a seminal influence on my young brain.

Swiss Chard and red umbrella, by Carol L. Douglas

I might have started with his color palette, but by the time I finished, the painting was pretty clearly my own. Perhaps that’s because brushwork and spatial design are more deeply embedded than color, which is relatively easy to manipulate. Or, it may be that I was concentrating on color first.

Why did I set out to do this? I had a conversation with Ken DeWaard this summer about trends in painting, particularly about high-key painting and whether an old dog like me can learn new tricks. (Since Ken just took the top prize at Cape Ann Plein Air, he doesn’t need to think about it.) I’ve been teaching about color harmonies, which put it in my mind. Also, it was a way to amp up my energy to finish the season well.

Marshaltown Inn, by Carol L. Douglas

But other than that, I had no great intellectual pretensions; it was a whim and I followed it. That’s one of the joys of being an artist; you don’t have to clear your brainstorm with a committee.

It was a valuable exercise, one that I’m going to subject my students to at the first opportunity. But it takes months for the results of a class or workshop to insinuate themselves into one’s painting style (which is one reason that people who only paint in class seldom make great progress). I won’t be able to tell you how it benefitted me until much later.

The Radnor Hunt, by Carol L.Douglas

Meanwhile, we’re done painting for Plein Air Brandywine Valley, and have a free morning before the opening reception. There are five painters here from Maine, and four of us are heading up to the Navy Shipyard in Philadelphia to paint boats. After that, we’ll get into the serious business of selling, but it’s our reward for working so hard.

Separating art from the artist

If you’re in a rut, move to Tahiti and take a string of child-mistresses. It worked for Gauguin.

Two Tahitian Women, 1899, Paul Gauguin, courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art 

Last year, the Metropolitan Museum took heat for a 1938 painting by Balthus, Thérese Dreaming. The painting is not overtly obscene, but Balthus had a sexual obsession with prepubescent girls. In light of that, Thérese’s panties are an art-history problem. Where should the line be drawn between censorship and veneration?

The Met also owns many paintings and prints by another Frenchman with a girl problem—Paul Gauguin. Excising Gauguin would be far more problematic. He profoundly influenced 20th century art.

Gauguin is most famous for traipsing off to Polynesia at the end of his colorful, fractious life. He wrote that he wanted to escape European civilization and ‘everything that is artificial and conventional,’ but his grand statements always had the whiff of dross about them. He had a family in Copenhagen whom he’d abandoned, and he expected to get rich in Tahiti.

Vahine no te tiare (Woman with a Flower), 1891, Paul Gauguin, courtesy Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek

He arrived in Papeete in 1891. Instead of nubile, naked Tahitian girls, he found church-going ladies in Victorian dress. Moreover, it was full of expatriates and colonists and was expensive. Disappointed, he moved to a bamboo hut in Papeari.

Gauguin’s first Tahitian portrait was Vahine no te tiare (Woman with a Flower), above. It’s neither exotic nor exploitative. Instead, it is investigatory. He studied her face, and he put her in the western dress that she really wore.

Back in Paris, Gauguin had read some Dutch texts written in the 1830s, about the Arioi. This was a Tahitian secret religious order. They practiced complete sexual freedom before marriage and aborted or murdered any babies that were conceived through these unions. They worshipped a war god named ‘Oro.

Te aa no areois (The Seed of the Areoi), 1892, Paul Gauguin, courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art

If this sounds like a Marvel comic book, you recognize the basic tone of 19^th century ethnographers. These stories were probably a farrago of lies, rumor and truth.

Gauguin was fascinated. He was free to invent the details, which meshed with his own self-promotional legend as a depraved sensualist and a martyr to his art.

Gauguin did twenty paintings and a dozen carvings over the following year. Nine were shown in Copenhagen. Gauguin was sufficiently optimistic to return home, although he was still broke. Moreover, he was already showing the signs of tertiary syphilis.

Paul Gauguin with his mistress Pahura (second from left) and another woman, who looks less than thrilled with his hand on her breast. Courtesy Daniel Blau.

Gauguin took three young native girls as vahines, or ‘wives’, during his Tahitian period. They were 13, 14, and 14 at the time. There’s no suggestion that they were unwilling.

He used them as models and to do the work of survival in a pre-industrial society. While Papeete was westernized, Papeari had no corner grocery store; its families fished, hunted and gathered breadfruit and bananas from the mountains.

But mostly, it was about sex. “He loved the whole idea of someone getting pregnant and showing the world that he still had it,” said art historian Nancy Mowll Mathews.

Gauguin returned to Paris in 1893, swanking around the Left Bank dressed in Polynesian costume and carrying on with a Malay teenager called Annah the Javanese. As usual, it rapidly went sour. He was broke and bitter. In 1895, artist Eugène Carrière bought him a cheap, one-way ticket back to Polynesia.

Self portrait, 1903, Paul Gauguin, courtesy Kunstmuseum Basel

Gauguin spent the next six years living an apparently comfortable life in and around Papeete. His vahine during this period was Pahura, who was age 14 when she moved into his house. Later, he would accuse her of thievery, and rail at the colonial police for not taking him seriously.

In 1901, Gauguin moved to the Marquesas, complaining that Papeete had become too westernized. There he built a house called Maison du Jouir. That’s hard to translate, but “Love Shack” probably comes closest. His health continued to deteriorate. He became a regular user of morphine and laudanum. His lost paradise was falling victim to time. 

His vahine, Vaeoho, seven months pregnant, went home to Hekeani to bear his last child. She didn’t return. By December, 1902, he could no longer paint. He was found dead on the morning of May 8, 1903, by a neighbor. Tioka confirmed his death in the traditional manner, by chewing on his head in an effort to revive him.

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.

Growing pain

The Yellow Christ, Paul Gauguin, 1889, is no longer the “art of the present” but it’s one of my favorites at the Albright-Knox. 

The Albright-Knox Art Gallery has announced that it plans an addition to its venerable space on Elmwood Avenue in the city of Buffalo. While it’s true that the current 19,000 square feet of floor space is crammed, one wonders—of course—who is going to pay for the addition.

The museum’s collection contains about 6,740 works, of which it can only exhibit about 200 at a time, according to Thomas R. Hyde, president of the museum’s board. “Campus development is no longer an option; it is a necessity,” he added. “We are, in many ways, a middleweight museum with a heavyweight collection.” And then he mentioned the cracks in the marble floors of the gallery’s original building.

(Veterans of capital campaigns will recognize that last gambit: throw in some deferred maintenance and people are supposed to stop kvetching about major changes.)

Side of Beef, Chaim Soutine, c. 1925, is another of my favorite Albright-Knox pieces.

Meanwhile, gallery director Janne Siren insists that plans are still in the ‘conversation’ phase. Having said that, the board has been rattling the can for expansion since publication of their 2001 strategic plan.  “Siren took over the directorship of the Buffalo gallery shortly after city fathers in Helsinki, Finland rejected a plan he had spearheaded to build a large Guggenheim museum there using public funding,” reported WGRZ radio.

In 2007 the Albright-Knox Art Gallery deaccessioned a Roman bronze sculpture that subsequently netted $28.6 million at Sotheby's. It was part of a larger deaccessioning of works that fell outside the ‘core mission’ of the gallery, which then-director Louis Grachos defined as “acquiring and exhibiting art of the present.” Alert Buffalonians immediately wondered what that meant for their own favorite works.

The deaccession vote was approved only on the contingency that the funds raised would be used to buy additional artwork. That meant that the money from the sale would be added to the paltry $22 million acquisitions endowment. (The overall endowment of the museum was then about $58 million.)

Being from Buffalo, I first visited the Albright-Knox while in diapers. Deaccessioning the Roman sculpture and clearing that exhibition space for other work was the right thing to do. But I share the Buffalo cynical mind, and I have my doubts about the viability of this project.

Buffalo is now half the size it was the year I was born, and there’s no sign that the population drain will abate any time soon. Clearly the board is counting on tourists to make up their numbers, and with the elegant expansion of the Burchfield-Penney Art Center across the street, an argument can be made that an arts corridor is possible on Elmwood Avenue.

La Maison de la Crau (The Old Mill), Vincent van Gogh, 1888, is another Albright-Knox piece that can no longer be termed ‘of the present.’ 

But that doesn’t address the question of how it will be paid for, or where the expansion will go. The Albright-Knox is landlocked, with Delaware Park at its front and Elmwood Avenue by its back door. Any kind of significant expansion would infringe on its parking lot, its neighbors, or the park.

1957-D No. 1, Clyfford Still, 1957. The Albright-Knox has a large collection of Still’s paintings. Last time I was there, I noticed how many 20th century paintings needed conservation. It’s not as sexy as expansion but still necessary. 

I await future developments with great interest.

Message me if you want information about next year’s classes and workshops.

Crazy artists

Pietà, (1498-99) Michelangelo. There’s been speculation that Michelangelo was somewhere on the autism spectrum. His hygiene was abysmal, he didn’t like talking to others, and he was monomaniacally focused on his work. And yet he exerted an unparalleled influence on western thinking, as a sculptor, painter, architect, poet, and engineer.

I meet myself in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders with tiresome regularity. The creative personality (and I’m no exception) is frequently impulsive, non-conformist, and motivated by what less-enlightened minds might call fantasy.

In the past, people actually understood that as a thinking pattern. Today, we define impulsivity and fantastical thinking as personality disorders. No child with this personality type will be allowed through school without being subjected to a program of therapy and drugs to ‘normalize’ him or her.

The Yellow Christ, 1889, Paul Gauguin.  Despite his success, Gauguin was certainly crazy by our standards, suffering from depression and alcoholism until he abandoned civilization for Tahiti, where he spent the last few years of his life painting in peace.

An exasperated educator once told my husband and me that they needed to prepare our kids for the “real world.” What does an educator know about reality? He works in a highly-regimented environment whose goals are not the goals of the larger world.

At the time, my husband was telecommuting with a Boston software start-up; I paint full time. Our “normal” wasn’t even in most people’s viewfinder. We didn’t have a typical life, but we certainly had a self-sufficient, productive and respectable one.

St. Catherine of Alexandria, 1595-1596, Caravaggio. Psychoanalyzing Caravaggio is a popular activity now, but there’s no doubt that even his contemporaries found him unsettling. The model for this painting was Fillide Melandroni, who posed for several works by Caravaggio. He tried to castrate her pimp, Tomassoni, and struck his femoral artery instead, killing him. Among the bully boys of 16^th century Rome, if a man insulted another man’s woman, the penalty was castration. It was an age of brawling, and any attempt to interpret it by our social code is bound to fail.

Our schools can’t cope with the creative kid who doesn’t fit into any mold. In the past, that child might have gone on to be a Bill Gates, Rachael Ray, or Ingvar Kamprad (founder of IKEA), but in the modern world, most avenues are closed to people without education.

Then there’s the question of what happens when something goes wrong. As a society, we have a knack for pathologizing absolutely normal human responses.

I have the personality of a terrier. I bite first and ask questions later; however, as with my dog, my instincts are usually spot-on. Like a watchdog, when things go wrong, I stay awake. Both times I have been sick, my first response was insomnia. That is commonly treated with antidepressants. I fell for that the first time, with awful results. This time, I’m recognizing my insomnia for what it is—a normal psychological reaction—and just enduring it.

Our ancestors used to formally identify the emotionally-bruised and set them apart so they didn’t have to experience the full thrust of human interaction. Nobody expected you to behave normally when you were traumatized, which in part obviated the need for antidepressants. Today we don’t even wear black to funerals; to wear it for a year after a loss is unthinkable. Yet, when one in ten Americans are taking antidepressants, one might conclude that unrecognized and unprocessed grief comes back to bite us.

Cats by Louis Wain. He spent time in an asylum, but his artistic skills never diminished. That indicates that whatever was going on, he wasn't schizophrenic. Today he wouldn't be considered mentally ill; he would be a star on social media, with its outsized interest in cats.

Similarly, there is a lot to make us anxious in the modern world. Every adolescent I’ve ever known has in some degree suffered from an anxiety disorder, because the natural state of the adolescent is anxiety. Much of this is emotional noise and just needs to be waited out. It’s helpful to point that out to a kid; it’s not as helpful to tell him that he’s fundamentally flawed and can only function with drugs.

More seriously, post-traumatic stress disorder is what happens when a healthy human mind is traumatized. How, then, is it an illness? Is it not in fact a normal response to an intolerable situation? If so, does it not make sense that the human mind also has an answer to it in its own depths? How useful is it to tell its sufferers that they’re somehow irretrievably broken, especially since there’s no good comprehensive treatment for PTSD?

In the past—ironically enough—the deeply traumatized individual might have been guided to write or paint or otherwise express his or her fears through creative expression. Too bad that we now want to just wipe that out with drugs.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!