The power of uncertainty

I guess the most constant thing about pursuing art is the uncertainty of the whole affair.

Less about the Mark, More about the Tool

Two of my favorite things happen to coincide - those things would be tai chi, and painting. What? you say? How could an avant garde gent posessing a thoroughly modern savoire faire have such a traditional - indeed, a SCHOLARLY - take on the arts? After all, weren't the scholarly painters of China and Japan all about their wu-shu and their swords and cultivating and stuff through the brush? How can you claim such a - such an - OLD FASHIONED take on art making? Haven't you been reading art forum? CRAFT IS OBSOLETE! WE ARE ALL USING CAPITAL LETTERS NOW!
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Thank you art strawman for your opinion. Now that you have stated it so emphatically, let me destroy your logic with a well reasoned and personable rebuttal.
Wow, I got lost for a second.
In the previous post, I wrote at length about mark making in painting - expressing a taste for Velazquez - to summarize - earlier painters used detail to describe an object, as painting developed, painters allowed a mark to describe that same detail. Knowing, not scientifically certainly, that the eye loves to organize things into patterns and will fill in the detail. Hence a daub of burnt umber mixed with ultramarine blue placed just so can become the popes nostril.

Let me back this up and rearrange my thoughts for a second.

Drawing and painting are about arranging a series of marks on a surface to suggest something either representational or entirely abstract. They are about creating an order that the eyes arrange to suggest something - a story , an idea - you get the picture, right?
What is the difference between an art student's figure drawing and a figure drawing done by, oh, John singer Sargent?

The components of the two are the same - a pencil and paper. Both have the same tools at their disposal - the rules of figure drawing - measure, proportion, perspective - all are apparent in both images. What's makes the difference then between the students work (which is nice, btw, I'm not dissing it - just using it to draw a comparison) and the master's? I hate the word 'Talent' or 'Genius' - both words are so dismissive of work. Sargent started somewhere, and while he might have possessed a natural aptitude for the work, he did not start where the posted image starts - he had to work to get there. Get my point?
Experience is a fine word, but its really just a bucket for all the earned discrimination that goes into this kind of drawing.
I will say (since this is my pedastal, I get to!) that the difference between the two is the editorial quality that goes into each of the tools used.
We are tool using mammals, that's what National Geographic tells us. We like to break things with rocks and stab things with sticks. We have thumbs. Indeed, before we even pick up something external to us we need to consider our innate tools - hands and eyes.
It is through our eyes that we let the brain create context for the visual world. It is through our eyes first that we learn to discriminate line and color and drama.
Our hands, even devoid of pencil make gestures. Our hands, an extension of spineshoulderbicepforearm allow us to direct those gestures with finesse, outward. And I have to mention the connection to spine because an artist like Chuck Close does not have the articulated use of his hands, yet he paints. That mark has to be directed from somewhere. Okay - observation now out in the weeds, pulling it back...
We direct a gesture through our body onto an external surface - that gesture can be a light caress or a punch. That gesture can be made with a tool - a pencil, for instance onto a piece of paper for dramatic effect.
The difference between the student work and the master work is the ability to see and finesse that gesture for added resonance.
The students work is capable, but everything is done with the same weight on the stylus, and with the same vigor.
Look instead at the Sargent: the lines are simple and lyrical, tracing the contours of the body and allowing the weight of the line suggest body weight and shadow. the shadows themselves are applied with a minimum of editorial interference - there is not a lot of feeling out the shape before applying the final mark - instead the graphite is caressed onto the paper.
In short, the difference between the two is the ability to control a greater degree of mark making to get to the end product. It is at once an act of repetition, editiorial precision and artistic integrity. To put it blusterously. (the blogspot auto dictionary believes 'blusterously' is not a word. It's not. I just made it up!)
The art of drawing is about knowing how to use your body to control the tool for the greatest arrange of effects - which brings me back to taichi as a wonderful connecting tool.
In Zheng tai chi, the effort of practice is to use to the practice to get the body to relax deeply. The more relaxed the body, the greater the effect of the practice. Whether its integral to the practice or a side effect, you learn to connect your hands to your spine - to channel the movement of your hands first through your pelvic floor, up your spine, out your arms and through your fingertips. in a sense, you are learning by stroking the air how to apply different kinds of pressure - you're building sensitivity. This same sensitivity is applied through a tool external to your body, pencil, brush, sword, garden hoe, etc etc.
It's all context, I guess.

Skidmarks

Hi! Long time listener, 5th time caller. Just wanted to say that I really dig your show, man. I just wanted to say that those lousy Pelosicrats in Washington DC are giving his Magesty, Barry Soetero all the power he needs to turn us into a Socialist Terrorist Nation...

Oh man. I'm kidding. I have to stop reading the political blogs. The only thing new I've learned about politics in the last year is the word 'WHARGLEBARGLE" which refers directly to the contents of the first paragraph. WHARGLEBARGLE: Crazy-ass, unsupported by the facts, gibberish...

How does that relate to painting, my fine friends? AH. That is where the genuis of my brain comes into play; the mark. Art-making is about the mark. The translation of intention through a tool, made physical. The mark.

Because I started with a political theme, I am going to roughly keep to that theme for at least the next paragraph; I am going to make a contrarian statement. DiVinci was a great artist. A genius in every modern definition of geniosity, but he wasn't a great painter. And I don't think its because he lacked the intellectual or aesthetic tools. I think its because he lacked the vocabulary. The vocabulary of painting had not been developed yet for him to take advantage of.

This is not said in any way to diminish his works or his impact. I just don't think painting had developed to the level it would become in the following 100 years.

About 11-12 years ago (Oh man I'm old) I went to Paris for the first time. For 3 days running, I showed up at the Louvre first thing in the morning, ran straight to the Mona Lisa and studied it before all the yapes and gawkers came into the gallery. You can't see from pictures, and I think this is a key point, - you can't see from pictures, but there are passages in that painting that Leopnardo struggled with. The brushwork in the hands is - and here I am being all contrarian - awkward. Not that the shape of the hand is wrong - the scaffolding - the draping of the object is exact. These things indeed are the tools that DiVinci really brought to painting, but the brushwork - the way those ideas were applied doesn't stand up. I can list 100 other painters who would have done it better, in fewer strokes, than DiVinci ever could. See. It's the mark.

Fast forward 100 years. By the time we get to painters like el Greco, we really get a sense of the mark of the brush. In looking at el Greco, there is really that sense of intention - that each mark means something. The choices of composition, color and light are all laid out with the brush. So much so, that I believe the facility el Greco had with making marks with the brush allowed him to pursue his more visionary works. As his figures and landscapes and objects became less 'real' in terms of dimension, they were held together by the structure and intention of the application of paint.

Where this idea reaches a Zenith, for me, is the work of Velazquez. I think one could make the tenuous argument bridging the technical gap between Caravaggio and Velazquez, but Velazquez, to me, is the first major painter to really have that absolute facility of editing on the go, with paint.

Stick with me. Really, prior to Velazquez, paint was applied less discretely, in other words, the paint was most of the time mixed together on the canvas to achieve light and shadow. You even see it in the early work of Velazquez - where paint that is applied in one bold stroke, without blending, is usually done as a highlight. As Velazquez grew as a painter, we can start to see that he simply makes an edit to the canvas with his brush to imply light or shadow. The paint becomes less about blending and more about the calligraphic mark. Take for example: Pope Innocent. Look at the forehead on that guy. The highlights are all done with swift un-edited strokes of the brush. The painter is making choices before he applies the paint, then executes those choices with accuracy. There is no hesitation. The link between hand, mind and tool are absolutely in congress with one another. It really is astonishing.

I will stop here for now. The mark - how the mark is made - the intention of that application - has a long career in the arts. There is a lot to think about...

Landscapes, or how I went sleepy

I've been absent for a while from the desire to write about art. Mostly because I want to write about an idea that excites me. And mostly, I have been busy drawing and painting and fishing out problems that I then try to solve with pencil and brush. I have thought about writing about some of the things that bug me - and I think, after some careful consideration and a weekend painting mountains in Rocky Mountain National Forest, I can combine many ills into one post, thus cleansing my palate and admitting my sins.

I am not a good landscape painter. I'm really really bad in fact. Mostly, I am really really bad because I have never spent any time or energy doing it - I have never had the desire, truthfully.
This weekend, I had the opportunity to join my best friend, Ned Aldrich (www.edwardaldrich.com) for a jaunt to Rocky Mountain National to try my hand at landscape painting. I felt that I would probably do okay, considering I am a passable painter, familiar with the tools, and really, how hard or how different could it be than from painting pigeons?

First problem: The palette used. Ned supplied the paint, based on his own palette. I realized immediately that I use very little yellow in my work. I also only use veridian green for skies. In his case, he uses veridian for every green in the painting, mixing in other colors to suit his need. I found this initially confusing.

Second problem: The brushes supplied, while familiar to me (hogs hair filberts, and sable flats) were not the brushes I would use to make the marks I wanted to make.

Third problem: It was fricking cold.

On the first day, we started painting just after mid-day. I set up my french easel, chose a spot and went at it. I forgave myself for the mess I made of the first attempt - dialing in the materials and getting my eye used to my surroundings. I watched Ned for a while, just to steal some techniques. For the second painting, I attempted to ape his brush work and his palette, only to make another mess. This one looking like majestic ice cream.

The weather was cold, and it was windy, despite the sun. Ned and I split a pair of gloves, since he is right handed and I am left. Each taking a glove for our less dominant hand. My left hand still went numb. Ned continued to paint while I sat in the truck trying to get warm. He was on a roll. I chalked his desire to stay in the cold to his ability to actually paint in the cold. If I were having successes with the brush, I reasoned, I too would most likely be standing, shivering, and applying paint to canvas.

The next day was more of the same. Up at 6 am, painting first light by 6:30. I got in some decent colors mostly by virtue of my experience in painting clouds. I still wasn't putting anything down that was worth saving. I scrubbed off the paint on at least one painting, and ended up satisfying myself by just watching Ned paint.

It wasn't a failure of a trip. I did learn several things that were very craftsmanly. I learned a lot of concepts that I am still mulling over, and I learned a very important lesson.

The reason I don't paint landscapes is that there is nothing about them that speaks to me. There is nothing I want to capture. I do not see the landscape as a challenge that I wish to record. It all looks very very green to me. The problems inherent in landscape painting are not problems that interest me. When we went back to Ned's place after our two days in the mountains, I looked at books on the subject, and found that there was nothing exciting me about what I was looking at. It all just looked like paint being applied in a very craftsmanly way. Which is to say, it didn't look bad, but it didn't look like anything to me. It looked like a skill set that I would bore myself to tear to try to acquire. Which is interesting. I'm a painter, right? I should want to paint well, right? Why shouldn't I aspire to paint like these guys Ned was showing me?

Because their work is devoid of the kinds of content I find compelling. Being able to paint well is not enough to make me hold my breath. It's not about what the painter is wanting me to see - I need to see what else the painter wants me to see. Velazquez and his human details. Sargent and his worn shoes and scandelous makeup. The subtext that exists in the narrative is what interests me. The commentary on the human condition - the poetry of the work.

Just like virtuoso guitar playing makes me yawn when it has no soul, virtuoso painting solely for the effort makes my eyes glaze over. The technique is part of a language, I want the work to be more than a recital of the alphabet.

I hate Thomas Kincaide. He is a bad painter. His technical skills are lacking and he has made his stock and trade the palette he acquired while working for Walt Disney. The rich purple sitting next to the orange. The drama of dark and light values paired against one another. There is no investigation in his work. Only the effort to portray an America that Norman Rockwell would find to saccharine.

Mostly I hate him because of his poor brush skills. The precious hacking and slashing - the lack of brovura paint handling. The expedient and oblivious application of paint as he races to excrete another painting he can dedicate to a bland and indifferent god. it says a lot about organized religion that he is a multi-millionaire.

Don't get me wrong, I don't have a problem with G-O-D. I just have a problem with a god who can be marketed in the crassest of ways.

On Ingres. An Ingress?

For me, painting becomes a modern act through the works of Cezanne and Duchamp. Duchamp seems to lift some of his thoughts on art directly from Cezanne, but the two - for me - go hand-in-hand in shaping the way art is thought about now. We are still digesting Duchamp's ideas of what constitutes art - is art an idea or is art an object? Is an object presented as art, Art? Duchamp very much took art from a strictly ocular activity into an intellectual one - from strictly 'seeing' the work of art to thinking about the work of art. His work was all about the joke, the pun - the idea. While the history of art is all about presentation and allegory and story - Duchamp's work is all about the why of it. About how much idea can be packed into a piece - and how those ideas are unpacked. His work becomes referential. His work becomes not about the object, but about what the object points to. It is detached, it is the birth of semiotics.

While the language surrounding art surrounding Duchamp was all very high-minded - Vasari, Ruskin, etc, - Duchamp sought to reduce the debate on art to its lowest and dirtiest, at the same time elevating the idea of art to an entirely new and relevant conversation. When he drew the mustache on the Mona Lisa, he was not merely defacing a masterpiece in effigy, he was making a statement about the history of Western Art. By adding the initials LHOOQ to the postcard, he was not only saying 'Look' - look at this painting. Really look at it. Not your memory or your idea of it. The Mona Lisa got lost a long time ago in the very portent of what it is and what it represents. It is the one painting on which the history of western art hangs. When we see it in the gallery we do not look at it. He is not only exhorting us to actually look at the painting - not as Leonardo, not to accompany all the stories which surround, but to judge it for what it is - a painting. Further, there is that pun L-H-O-O-Q - Elle est chauld au coul. She has a hot ass. A vulgar joke that still points to the truth of the painting. For all of our staring - we do not know what this model looks like from behind. It is, after all, only a painting.

So why Ingres? Why after all those words spilt on Duchamp did I mention Ingres in the title?

Because I believe that, through a strange combination of instinct and aesthetic decision the seeds of modern art begin with Ingres.

Ingres, an artist laden down with the history of painting. Every major painting a portent calling back into the history of painting. Critics called his work too Gothic, for the strange length of torsoes, for his colors. I would call his choices more Mannerist than Gothic, but then, Mannerism had not been identified as a school until much later.

A student of Jacques Louis David, Ingres work was beholden to his teachers ideal of 'historic' painting. All of those leaden and posed and staged canvases depicting some important event in history. I have never been a fan of David's. His work to my eyes, while always technically accomplished, just bores the crap out of me. There is no tension. There is no real drama. They are staged plays. The faces show nothing more than the boredom of the models standing still, wearing a tunic or a piece of armor.

Make no mistake, many of Ingres major works contain the same lack of drama. Stiff exercises in formalism. But there is something Ingres had that his teacher never did; an aesthetic sense that drove him slightly mad. That, for all of his strict adherence to the history of painting and to history itself, he made some strikingly modern choices in composition - and I believe that those choices were based solely on the fact that Ingres could not leave certain things well enough alone. He had to make his compositions work. And we see that most in the work he cared about the least - the work that he did to keep bread on the table - hos portraits.

I think, simply because he did not care so much about these works, he allowed himself a little more freedom - he was not beholden to his teachers and to all of that heavy heavy history - instead he was an incredibly talented painter, painting. And - what we see in all of that luminescent paint - in all of that richly rendered cloth and skin, are bodies that could not walk - bodies that could not move for lack of symmetry.

We are always taught in Art History 101 this lesson about Ingres. With no explanation as to why he did it. I believe he did it solely to resolve the composition - to bring everything together visually. To allow the eye to wander relaxedly around the canvas. His portraits offer a resolution his historical canvases do not. And it is this personal choice - this abstraction that plants the seeds. This most academic of painters was a revolutionary only because of aesthetic itch.

Following artists fought different battles. As the Academy changed, and as art became more secular - became modern - a line can be traced from the way Ingres broke the figure to the way Cezanne tried to paint what he saw - not through the camera lens - not through the creation of the diorama - but what his eyes actually told him - the permission for Cezanne to do this is granted in the strange shoulders and long necks of Ingres subjects.

Thoughts on the Diorama

Okay - before discussing any artist in detail or any artistic statement specifically, I want to dispense with some ideas about pictoral space.

Without diving into any cultural/historical/psychological overview of the subject, I just want to acknowledge that the pictorial frame pre-Cezanne is essentially a diorama.

In other words, at its zenith - when the image is done as we see as faithful - 'stuff looks like stuff' - the image itself is a box containing everything it needs to tell a story. Everything is in superb focus and the eye can find many attractive things between the main subject and the simplest element. The way a painting works - and this is still a pre-Cezanne-ish idea - is that it is a self-contained unit - it is a collection of things. In essence all painting is still life.

There are a lot of profound ideas contained within the frame - line, shape and form. Energy, rhythm and order. Multi-point perspective. The use of color, hot or cool, to push and pull the eye, to create a certain drama. There is a craft - a language in this kind of painting that in itself tells a story - a story I don't really want to tell here, right now. I just want to say that pre-Cezanne, all painting is a diorama - which is to say - it is a collection of things.

It does not work the way the eye works. It works the way memory works. It is about creating a narrative - a point a to point z scenario. Something self contained, containing its own life.

The way the eye works, and I want to get into this a lot more - is that seeing is not just a sensory act, it is also a cognitive act. When we 'see' we not only apprehend the object, but that object must fit into a context, both personal and situational.

Yeah, yeah, that sounds like a bit of pot-smokerish gibberish - one atom in one fingernail could be the center of a whole other universe - yeah yeah yeah. But. There is no escaping that fact that sight as much as any other sense, if not maybe more so, because we are such a sight intensive culture at the moment, is ALL about context. But I don't want to get too deep into this - I just want to say that all painting, pre-Cezanne, is about creating a diorama.

See: At its best, it might look pretty, but in the end, it has little to do with anything actual. It is simply craft of surface and illusion.

This is, I guess, a scattershot way of getting to a simple timeline - one that I am obsessed with, and one that, frankly? Bothers me.

Pre-Cezanne painting is about constructing the pictoral space along architectural lines - everything you need to know is contained within the boundaries of the frame. Masacchio, and De Vinci pretty much defined the space, and a whole bunch of other amazing people refined that space. They were all excellent and painting and drawing things that we could recognize as things.

Post-Cezanne (and why is it that the water is so damned murky around Cezanne? I can tie Courbet and Ingres to Cezanne, dammit) Painting is a much more modern psychological game - it is not only about the way the eye sees, but about questioning what the eye sees.

Painting goes from surface to interior. It goes from solely an ocular activity to a more philosophical activity.

This is all jibber-jabber, but this is my jibber-jabber. I just want a space to write down all the crap I think about while I paint and draw and look.