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...